The blaring strains of Aretha Franklin were not the first sounds to come from the gray clock radio, so when the girl rolled over and hit the snooze button (for what felt like the first, but was actually the fourth, time) she found herself to be running late. Mornings were never her best time.
“Shit. Shitshitshitshitshit.” The blankets were kicked off haphazardly and within seconds she stood before the bathroom mirror brushing unruly waves off her face, fastening them with an oversized clip into a sloppy twist. “Presentable,” she muttered, splashing cold water on her face while trying to remember what clean clothes she had in her closet. Today was laundry day. Pickings were slim.
“How scummy can I be?” She whispered to herself, looking down at her pajamas while loading up her toothbrush with Crest. Gray sweatpants and a Harvard sweatshirt. Shrugging, she decided that it would have to do, and began her search for clean socks while brushing her teeth.
“Whatefug. Noceenfocks?” she muttered angrily around her toothbrush, returning to the sink to rinse her mouth out. Just as she was replacing the purple Reach brush in the cup next to the sink, inspiration struck. What’s the point of having a roommate if you can’t bum clothes off of her?
She left the bathroom again, grabbing her bookbag as she walked through the tiny living room and burst into the second bedroom. “Socks, socks, socks . . .” she sang to herself in a tuneless melody while rummaging through the top drawer of the room’s dresser. “Eureka,” she announced, pulling out a pair of white crew socks.
“Maria?”
It took quite a bit of effort to keep from falling over at the voice; putting on socks standing up is a precarious operation to begin with, so sudden starts could be dangerous. “Jesus,” she exclaimed, hopping up and down till she had secured the left sock, then spun to see where the voice had come from. “Liz! You gave me a heart attack. What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” Liz asked, confused, as if the question was a ridiculous one.
“Yeah, what are you doing here?” Maria began balancing on one foot while trying to get her right sock on, hopping towards the bed Liz rested on. “Today’s Friday, you’re usually long gone before I get up -- some kind of microbiology research thing if memory serves, Miss Smarty Pants who never cuts out of anything without a gaping flesh wound.”
Liz continued to stare at her even more blankly, as if Maria were speaking a foreign language.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” She was finally standing on both feet, and focused all of her attention on her friend. “Are you okay?”
“Today, Maria,” Liz responded, and then waited for a response that didn’t come. “Today is the anniversary.”
“What anniv-” Her question was answered before the word left her lips. She slapped a hand over her mouth as her eyes widened in shock -- the anniversary. THE anniversary. The one that could never, would never be forgotten.
And she nearly had.
She fell back onto the bed, her eyes searching Liz’s out. “I would have remembered. I would have. I wouldn’t forget,” she said, trying to convince herself.
“I know,” Liz said, reaching out to pull her friend into an embrace. “I know you wouldn’t, you couldn’t. It’s okay, Maria.
“We’ll always remember.”
It had happened, she remembered, on a Thursday.
She had been angry, she remembered, to have to miss an all-new episode of ER because Tammy the hypochondriac had called in sick yet again. But then Liz had shown up in the middle of her shift to help out, and it had been going all right. She had been griping all night that the reason the place seemed so dead was because everyone in their right mind was home finding out what was going to happen with Dr. Carter this week.
They had laughed, she remembered, about everything and nothing, just as best friends so often do. About the 14-year-old customer who had asked Liz for her number since he had lost his. About the fact that when a Backstreet Boys song came on the radio, they both realized they knew every single word. About other things, and about nothing at all.
He had been out of breath, she remembered, when he came. She had been doubled over in laughter and gripping a broom when she heard the tinkle of the bell above the door.
She had looked up, she remembered, and his eyes had been enough to stop her breath instantly.
Liz, she remembered, spoke first. “Alex? Are you all right?”
His answer, she remembered, was long in coming, and the pause made her fear all the worse. He steadied himself on the back of one of the front booths and seemed utterly lost, as if after urgently seeking his destination he now found himself without a next step. Eventually, he spoke, in a voice that seemed utterly detached from the tale he was telling.
The Jeep, she remembered, hadn’t been speeding. From what they could tell, it wasn’t their fault. It was a tractor trailer, it seemed, with a driver who had swerved to avoid something, they weren’t sure what. It had been carrying gasoline, they said, and had jackknifed suddenly, giving the driver of the Jeep no time to respond.
It had happened, she remembered, instantaneously. They never felt a thing. The impact was immediate, the death was kind, they had said. They were gone.
The broom, she remembered, hit the ground before she did, with a resounding crack. And then the world disappeared.
She awoke with the familiar headache that always accompanied crying herself to sleep, a dull pain that instead of focusing on one area of her head, like her tension headaches did, tended to instill its quiet misery into every corner of her mind. The light coming through the windows spoke of late afternoon, and Maria realized that she must have been lying there for hours. “Liz?”
“In here,” the familiar voice responded from the living room. Maria swung her legs over the edge of the bed and padded towards the couch Liz was sitting cross-legged on. Her head was tilted forwards, causing her dark brown hair to fall in front of her face like a veil, shielding her face from view. It was a tactic she used often when upset, largely unconsciously. She looked up when Maria reached the end of the couch and tucked her hair behind her right ear, revealing the tear-tracks on her face.
“Oh, Lizzie,” Maria whispered, climbing onto the couch next to Liz and gathering her into a hug, rubbing her shoulder while she cried. Soon Liz sat up, wiping her eyes and picking up something lying on the couch next to her. “I know it’s stupid, but I couldn’t help it. I tell myself to either throw it away or send it back to Roswell, but I can’t let go of it.”
Maria took the well-worn copy of their high school yearbook out of her hands and bit her lip. “I understand, Lizzie.” She began to flip through the pages, suddenly marveling at the emptiness and vapidity held in its pages. “My God, look at them. All so clueless, so naive. Worrying about things like shoes and lipstick. I wonder if some of them never make it beyond that . . .” Her voice drifted off as she flipped through the pages, one after another filled with football stars and cheerleaders, drama club members and basketball players. The candid pages all filled with the same people over and over, the self-designated “popular” ones who knew so little and pretended to know so much.
And then she found it. It wasn’t hard to; the binding had cracked so that the book would naturally open to page 62. By all accounts the picture shouldn’t be in there, least of all as a full half-page shot. None of them were particularly popular, excepting Isabel, and even she had fallen a few notches since she had drifted away from the “in” crowd and towards their small crew over the years. By Senior year they had become what one saw on the page, a group of six souls set apart from the rest, needing no others.
The yearbook had come out, she remembered, on a Friday. She had stuffed it into her bookbag and forgotten about it almost instantly, finding its triviality annoying. Who cared who was picked Most Likely To Succeed? They were gone, and that was all that mattered.
She had found the picture, she remembered, quite by accident. Her bookbag and its contents had remained forgotten in the corner of her room until that Sunday, when she had opened it to get her Calculus book. Strangely enough, she found that the patterns of derivatives and integrations calming now, and it was the only homework she really kept up with.
The yearbook, she remembered, had laid alongside the gray calculus book in her bag, and her hand had reached for it without thinking. She was almost certain her had heart stopped when she came upon the picture. All of them together, something that would never be again. They would never all be together again.
She hadn’t cried, she remembered, before that. She had been empty, void, dead inside. It worried her that she didn’t cry. It worried her mom, her friends, everyone that she didn’t cry. Liz had cried, as had Alex, and her mother and everyone else -- people who barely knew them in life but mourned them in death -- but she simply couldn’t summon tears. She had drawn away from them, from everyone, going through the motions of life and feeling nothing. Alex called daily, Liz nearly hourly, but she either avoided their calls or exchanged mere pleasantries before begging off.
The tears had come then, she remembered, and they had come both hard and fast. The sobs seemed to steal all the air from her lungs, making her wonder if one could suffocate from tears. She began the fall into grief, and it terrified her.
Liz had recognized her voice, she remembered, despite the fact that she wasn’t able to get many words out on the phone. She and Alex had been there within minutes that felt like hours, and had held her while she cried.
Liz and Alex had cried too, she remembered, and she had realized for the first time that she wasn’t alone. They had lost as much as she had. Her soulmate was gone, yes, but these two still remained, kindred spirits who shared her pain.
Liz, she remembered, had spoken first. She coughed and dried her tears, but when she spoke her voice was still thick with them. Her eyes seemed desperate, as if she was about to ask for something that she couldn’t live without. “I need you,” she had said, “both of you. No one else understands what happened, no one else knows how much it hurts. I need to know that I’ll never lose you, that we’ll always be together. I need you guys to remind me of how wonderful they were, remind me of all the adventures we had, remind me of everything I’m afraid I’ll forget. I can’t forget, and the only way I can be sure I won’t is if I have you guys.”
Alex, she remembered, had reached out and grasped Liz’s hand in his. “You’ll always have me, Liz.”
She had spoken next, she remembered, grabbing Liz’s and Alex’s free hands in her own. “Me too, Liz. We’ll always have each other.”
“Maria? You all right?”
“Huh?” Maria shook herself out of her reverie and turned to her best friend. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. I was just remembering the day I found this,” she said, pointing to the picture.
Liz nodded and grasped Maria’s hand. “I remember that day.”
“A hard one to forget,” she responded, looking back at the yearbook. “Do you remember this day?”
Liz ran a finger over the picture, shaking her head. “No, I don’t. I wish I did.”
“Me too.”
They hadn’t known the picture was being taken, which probably made it all the better. The six of them, together, on a rare day of peace and normality. Alex had his guitar out, his eyes closed and his lips pursed over-dramatically as if singing with great emotion, with Isabel sitting next to him, wearing a smile that was about to turn into laughter. Max and Liz were seated next to each other with books in their laps, Liz describing something to Max, one hand raised in the air as if to draw a picture and the other one captured in his. And Michael sitting against a tree, staring out into nothingness, Maria’s head in his lap, his fingers running through her hair, both wearing quiet smiles.
Maria unclipped her hair and ran a hand through it, closing her eyes. Sometimes she could almost remember the way his hands felt, the way his fingers touched. Always almost, always not quite. Never the same.
“He loved you so much.”
Maria’s eyes snapped open and locked on Liz’s, then looked away.
“He did. He used to watch you when you weren’t looking. It seemed like his eyes were going to burn right through you, like he had so much passion for you he could barely hold it back. Even when you weren’t together, it was still there. It always amazed me. It was like he burned for you or something, like he had been looking for something for his entire life, and had finally found it -- you.”
“She’s right.” Alex said, shaking water from his hair and shrugging his windbreaker off, kicking the apartment door shut behind him. “It’s raining cats and dogs out there, as my mother would say. Anyway, Maria, Liz is right. Michael loved you, Max loved Liz, and Isabel loved me. And now we’re sad loveless sacks left to rot in misery as we attempt, but fail, to move on with our lives. Did I miss anything?”
“Alex, how dare you trod on the beauty of our Kodak moment?”
“Ha-ha, DeLuca. Anyway, let the emotional upheaval begin. Or, let me guess, you started without me?”
“Sorry, Alex. Tried to wait, but it’s hard to schedule emotional breakdowns,” Maria responded.
“Okay, I’ll forgive you. This time,” he said, shaking a finger at them, and then came to kneel in front of the pair. “Seriously, though. How are you guys doing? You okay?”
Maria and Liz glanced at each other before Maria spoke. “We’re all right. Had a couple sob fests, but trust me, there’ll be more. You didn’t miss much. We’re okay.”
Alex nodded, satisfied. “Good. I’m sorry I wasn’t here before. I woke up and just had to get out of the house, felt like I was suffocating. Anyway, I saw a lot of the city.” His voice carried a forced light-heartedness with the last comment. He paused, and continued, subdued again. “It’s funny, I still find myself marking things for Isabel. It’s not like before, you know, when it first happened, when I’d forget she was gone. I’d see something great and think, ‘Man, I’ve gotta tell Izzy about that when I get home’ only to realize that I couldn’t. I still see things, though, and want to show her. Like today I saw this absolutely beautiful painting, and I just wished she was there to look at it with me.” His eyes were distant, lost, and his face looked tired. Maria wondered if he had slept at all.
“A lot of times at school I’ll wish Max was there with me. And not just because I want him there to be with me, to talk with, though I do wish for that every moment of every day. A lot of times it’s just because I’ll look around and think of all that Max could have done, all that he could have been. He was so brilliant, he could have changed the world -- cured cancer, or ALS. He could have done so much,” Liz said, shaking her head in anger.
“Max probably would have changed the world,” Maria said. “Just like you’re going to, Liz. Michael, though . . . who knows what Michael would’ve done. Would he have ended up in the state penitentiary?” She asked, raising one hand palm up, and then raising the other, continued, “Or in the state Senate? I guess that’s what really bothers me. It would’ve been nice to find out, you know? To find out along with him.”
There was a long silence as the three friends lost themselves in their thoughts. After a few minutes, Alex spoke up. “Well, I’d like to introspect some more, but I’m ravenous.”
“That’s something we can fix,” Liz said with a wan smile, hauling herself up off the couch and into the kitchen, her two friends on her heels.
She had first visited the cemetery alone, she remembered, on a Tuesday. The names had been placed alongside each other, which satisfied her -- Michael belonged with them. Jim and Diane Evans had bought the two spots under the name Evans years before, expecting it to be for them, but instead found themselves using them for the names of their two children. There was something simply and powerfully wrong with that -- her mother had said that over and over when she first heard the news. No parent should have to bury a child.
The third name, she remembered, had also been paid for by the Evanses. Otherwise no one knew where Michael would have ended up; ever since the incident with his last foster father, he had belonged to no one in name.
The headstone, she remembered, was white marble. The names stood out in stark contrast, bold black letters on the pale surface, cutting into the stone. Maxwell Evans. Isabel Evans. Michael Guerin.
The finality of it, she remembered, had been terrifying.
The ground, she remembered, had been undisturbed. The grass still lay flat, no mounds of dirt marred its evenness. For, truth be told, there was very little to be buried after the accident. Ashes and dust and little more. The logical part of her mind had tried to tell her that it was probably the best way, since it left no evidence of The Truth they had hidden for so long. They had been cremated, their dust scattered over the desert that they had emerged from all those years before. All trace of them gone.
She had wondered, she remembered, why she had been drawn to the cemetery. But something had drawn her there. Perhaps it was the need to see the finality of the names etched on the stone. Perhaps it was simply the need to be somewhere quiet and alone.
Regardless, she remembered, she had found herself there on a warm early-May day, a day of clear blue skies and gentle breezes. A beautiful day.
She had sat, she remembered, Indian-style before the stone, her hand tracing out the letters in his name, tears running unchecked down her cheeks. Not caring. His name. Where had he gotten his name? He didn’t even know, truth be told. No family bestowed it on him, as the Evanses had on Isabel and Max, but instead a harried Social Services worker tired of scrambling for ways to refer to him. No thought given, no care.
No nicknames, she remembered, never any nicknames. Always Michael. Never Mike. Never with a family kind enough or long enough for a loving nickname to be bestowed. And never able to get close enough to people to have it shortened. Maxwell was Max, Isabel became Izzy when relaxed, Alexander would never answer to anything but Alex, Elizabeth always insisted on Liz, and even she of the short name was almost always called “DeLuca” by Alex instead of Maria. Michael never got a nickname.
Hank, she remembered, had called him Mickey on occasion, but never out of affection or kindness. Instead, sarcasm and disdain. Not fun and laughs, instead pain and anger. Not support, instead ridicule. Not safety but danger.
She cried, she remembered, for a long time. For her love that had lived a life so full of darkness and so empty of light. Who had had a life ended before it could discover that life could, and should, exist the other way around -- light instead of darkness, happiness instead of sorrow, contentedness instead of fear.
And, she remembered, for herself.
“Yo, could you pass the salt?” Maria asked around a mouthful of food, reaching across the table towards Liz.
“Yo? What are you, trapped in 1989?” Liz asked, handing her the salt shaker while picking up her slice of pizza. “I still find it gross that you put salt on pizza.”
“Yeah, Maria, I’m a guy and I even find that pretty nasty.”
Maria smirked at Alex and sprinkled salt on her slice. “I can’t help it, it’s in the genes. My mom does it, my Aunt Kate does it, I do it. I know, all this sodium’ll kick me in the butt later on, but hey -- I’m 19 years old, I don’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. I think I’m allowed a little excess salt intake.”
“True,” Alex said, reaching for another slice.
“Speaking of nasty, pig-boy, what is that, slice number seven?”
“Hey, I’m a growing boy!”
“Newsflash, buddy -- puberty stops somewhere before your 19th birthday.”
“Whatever. Anyway, I skipped breakfast. And lunch. This is like all my day’s meals packed into one convenient pizza package.”
Maria smiled at that. “That’s a way to go.”
Pizza was a standing tradition in the Parker-DeLuca-Whitman household. It was their ultimate comfort food, called into service whenever any of them had a bad or tiring day. The delivery guy knew them well, the pizza place always knew their order when they gave their phone number, and more often than not they would find a free order of breadsticks with their order. Tony knew how to take care of his best customers.
Afterwards, Liz and Maria would break out ice cream while Alex settled in with a bag of Doritos, all three crashing on the living room couch where they would settle in for a night in front of the TV. Often fights broke out, tussles over the remote that caused even the mild-mannered Liz Parker to break out language that would make a sailor blush.
“What’ll it be, Liz?” Maria asked, poking her head in the freezer. “Mint Chocolate Chunk or Peanut Butter Cup?”
Liz paused to consider her decision. “I vote for both.”
“Hey, I’m all over that,” Maria answered, grabbing the two pints out of the freezer and elbowing the door shut behind her. “Spoons?”
“Covered.” Liz held up two and headed out of the kitchen.
“Is it on yet?” Maria called as she opened the refrigerator, searching for something to drink.
“Almost, the pregame show’s just wrapping up,” Alex’s voice answered.
“Cool . . .” She grabbed a half-empty bottle of Saratoga water from the fridge, kicked it shut, and scurried over to the couch, tossing herself down between Alex and Liz.
“You know, you guys should buy stock in Ben & Jerry’s,” Alex said. “Your purchases alone must have made revenue go up remarkably during the past year.”
“Ha-ha Alex,” Maria responded, a smile softening her sarcastic tone. “Shut up and watch the game.”
“Yes ma’am.”
They moved in, she remembered, on a Saturday. They were away from home -- really away from home -- for the first time in their lives. Thousands of miles separated them from the world they knew, the world they had grown so accustomed to that they forgot any other kind existed. And she, for one, was glad.
The air, she remembered, had been heavy, and hot in a way that Roswell rarely experienced. It wasn’t the dry, arid heat of the New Mexico desert, but rather the wet, oppressive one of the Northeastern Summer. She liked the distinction.
To them, she remembered, Boston had seemed the natural solution. She and the other five had applied to a number of schools, and by the time of the accident nothing had been decided. It was a topic no one had wanted to discuss, the possibility of being separated by higher education. The possibility of being separated at all.
Their avoidance, she remembered, had been moot, since discussion or no discussion, on a cruel April night they were separated. Not by college but by death, the most permanent division. The six became three, half torn away so harshly that the remaining ones felt pieces of themselves had been taken with them.
Roswell, she remembered, had been so full of memories that she felt she was suffocating from them. Every street held a memory, every block a recollection. Some happy, some sad, all coming with a pain so sharp she could almost taste it. She had to leave.
Alex and Liz, she remembered, had felt the same. Getting away. All she wanted, all they wanted was to get away, hoping that in some way that by leaving Roswell they would be leaving part of their pain behind.
Alex, she remembered, had had connections. His father, a respected professor, had pulled strings for the three at their respective colleges -- Liz’s Harvard, Alex’s MIT, and Maria’s BU -- and had somehow managed to finagle them out of dorm life. An apartment was found, a small one with three bedrooms, which came at a ridiculous price, but the three would have given anything to ensure that they would remain together.
Together, she remembered, had been their mantra. We’ll be together. We’ll be far away from home, but we’ll be together. We’ll be lost in an unfamiliar city, but we’ll be together. We’ll know no one, we’ll be confused, we’ll be lonely, but we’ll be together.
They had moved in, she remembered, rather quickly, and had instantly loved the place. The bedrooms were insanely small, the water pressure sucked, and God knew who had lived in the furniture before them, but they were together. And nothing about the apartment, the building, the streets, or the city were anything like Roswell, New Mexico. The golds, tans, and oranges of their home was replaced by the greens, grays, and browns of their new city. Nothing to remind them of home. Or their loss.
Nothing, she remembered, but each other. Every time Liz realized that days had passed without a real, true Alex Whitman smile, she was reminded of the way, before the accident, his spirit had seemed indestructible. Every time Maria heard the sharp edges of bitterness and anger in Liz’s voice, she remembered how unfathomable they would have been to her before the accident. And every time Alex saw Maria retreat into her mind, her eyes blank, lips quiet and face still, he remembered the vivaciousness that Maria had displayed since the moment he met her until that cool April night.
She missed, she remembered, everything. Michael, of course. He was her heart, and with him gone she felt eerily hollow. Max and Isabel too, though. She missed the way Max’s jokes would be so subtle sometimes that it would take her a few seconds to realize they had been jokes, and then only because his eyes would meet hers and twinkle slightly. She missed the way Isabel would occasionally reach out and straighten a wrinkle or change a makeup shade for her without being asked to, simply because it was the easiest way for her to reach out in friendship.
She missed, she remembered, the feeling of purpose. She missed knowing that her life wasn’t just like any other teenager’s. She missed knowing that she was part of something important enough that the government kept tabs, she missed knowing that her world was bigger than most other people’s, that she knew and understood more than most people did about the world they lived in. Their sudden death had made it seem almost as if it had never happened. Her world had been thrown off its axis for the first time early in her sophomore year, when she learned about them, and had been thrown off its axis again years later when they disappeared into the night. The suddenness of the loss had been jarring, as if she had been thrown from some imagined life into a real one, or perhaps the other way around. She couldn’t be sure anymore. She was lost. She knew it, and she suspected that her mother could see it too, so she tried to hide it as much as possible, with limited success. Forced smiles and laughs and jokes replaced real ones. She missed knowing what real felt like.
Completely fake, she remembered, was how she had felt on that first night. Their parents had come with them to Boston to help them move in, and she had spent the whole day acting Happy and Excited, like she just couldn't wait to Move On, and that she did appreciate what an important First Step college was towards that end. When the door had swung shut behind the last of them she had let out a long sigh and finally let the facade fall.
Liz and Alex, she remembered, had done the same, both collapsed on opposite ends of the puke-green overstuffed couch that, despite its extreme ugliness, was their favorite piece of furniture already. They had looked as lost as she felt, neither making eye contact with each other or herself. Staring out with vacant eyes while they became lost in the memories they had traveled so far to avoid.
She had been the one, she remembered, to turn on the TV that night. It sat on a cheap faux-wood stand that looked like it was about to tip over, the other piece of furniture that compromised their living room set. She had sat on the couch between the two of them, not knowing what to do next.
She had thought, she remembered, that had her life been a movie, this would be the time for the Big Talk where they shared their deepest and truest feelings. As she sat there, though, between the two people she was closest to in the world, the idea of even beginning that conversation was impossible. The words didn’t need to be spoken, at least not yet, not now. They understood without trying, shared without speaking, bound by their loss.
The TV, she remembered, had flickered to life revealing Fenway park and their Red Sox. Instantly it felt right to her. "Let's watch this," she had said, turning alternately to her two friends and nodding slightly. It was another thing of Boston and not Roswell, baseball and the home team.
Maria was the only one awake when the game finished. The home team had won, triumphantly, and many were wondering if this would finally be the year when the curse would be broken. She hoped so. They were, after all, her team. Boston was home now. She had to remember that.
Liz and Alex had passed out sometime after the seventh inning stretch, and she carefully pulled herself up from the couch so as not to disturb them. Sleep was a precious commodity on nights like this one.
It felt odd to be doing mundane things like rinsing out ice cream cartons or washing off spoons. Ever since the accident part of her had expected the rest of the world to come to a halt, for the world’s very existence to change since hers had so drastically. For the world to stop or, at least, slow down. But the world did, after all, keep moving. People had told her that it was important, that it was what let people heal. But on days like this one, where the loss felt somehow closer and more real, it was simply annoying.
She shut off the water and put the cartons in the recycling bag, the spoons back in the drawer, and stared out into the night though the tiny kitchen window’s dirty pane and rusty screen. Where had they come from?
She thought it somewhat fitting that she couldn’t see the stars. The rain of the late afternoon had stopped early enough to make the game possible, but the clouds had lingered so that all light from the sky was blocked. Another barrier between them.
Had it been cloudy a year ago? She couldn’t remember, and that made her mad. It made her mad that she couldn’t remember exactly what the last thing he had said to her had been. It made her mad that they hadn’t kissed goodbye that day because they were too rushed. It made her mad that her mind hadn’t realized then that it was the last time.
She had known he was leaving, that they were leaving, someday. For a while, and in a while, but never unexpectedly and never for forever. There was supposed to be a goodbye. And there was supposed to be a return. Because part of her knew that he loved her as much as she loved him. She would never willingly leave him for forever, so she knew he wouldn’t either. Part of her knew that even if he didn’t.
He was supposed to come back. And he was supposed to say goodbye. And somehow she had been cheated out of both.
She hit her hand on the yellowed kitchen counter, the pain from her fist somewhat comforting as she felt tears gathering in her eyes. It wasn’t fair, that was what it came down to. It wasn’t fair, life wasn’t fair, and it made her mad. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, that was what it came down to too. It wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, and it made her mad.
If she had known, she would have made sure she told him she loved him that night. If she had known, she could have said goodbye. It pained her to know that she should have done it all and more, and that now she had no way to remedy the mistake.
She closed her eyes and concentrated. She believed in another existence, one beyond this one. She believed that you went somewhere when you died, that you didn’t simply cease to exist. She hoped desperately that she was right. She concentrated hard and thought all the things she had failed to tell him -- I’m sorry that I wasn’t always nice to you, I’m sorry that I lost my temper, I’m sorry that I made fun of your hair, I’m sorry that I gave you a hard time when I should have let things go, I’m sorry that I didn’t realize that we didn’t have forever, I never would have left you, I would have forgiven you anything, I love you more than I can say, I miss you more than I can believe, please let me know that you hear me and that you’re okay.
She waited, just as she had many nights before, her eyes scrunched shut as she unconsciously held her breath. Nothing. Again, nothing. Every time only nothingness would answer her and still at odd moments she felt herself compelled to try. She opened her eyes slowly and the rest of the world returned. She heard the rush of cars and the drone of the post-game show, she saw the grayness of the night and the blueness of the light from the TV.
She let out the breath she had been holding and suddenly realized she was tired. Bone-tired, as her grandmother would say. She rubbed her eyes, which had stopped leaking tears, and marveled at how exhausting emotions could be and at how quickly the exhaustion took hold of the body.
She shut off the overhead light in the kitchen after doing a tally of the apartment -- deadbolt in place, lights off, oven off, windows locked. She padded into the living room and leaned over to turn off the TV.
“Maria.”
Her head snapped around at the voice and met the sleepy eyes of Alex. “Hey,” she responded. “Didn’t mean to wake you up, I was just going to bed.”
“It’s all right,” he said, shifting the afghan covering him in a sleepy invitation, falling back to sleep almost instantly.
She paused slightly and studied her friends in the flickering light of the TV screen. They looked their age when they were sleeping. When awake, they looked older, especially when compared to the carefree teenagers and young adults that populated their college campuses. The hardness of their expressions was gone in their sleep; the now ever-present subtle tightness of Alex’s jaw vanished, and the stiffness of Liz’s carriage disappeared. They looked young, peaceful, free -- things that they would never be again in the waking world. It pained her to recognize these things in her friends, to see the physical marks of their loss. It sometimes seemed more than she could bear to see the heavy burden of her pain mirrored in them.
She loved them, she realized, with a power that scared her. It scared her because it made the prospect of losing them all the more terrifying. When the other three had died, there had been two roads to take -- one of friendship and one of isolation. Though she had instantly recognized the safety of a lonely life, she had found the path impossible to follow. She had chosen the riskier one, the one of love and loss.
It was worth it, though. She knew it. She felt within her the rightness of it. She remembered learning somewhere that true friends were missing pieces of yourself that had somehow gotten lost in the shuffle, and that finding them was finding yourself. That was why the loss of the other three had been so shattering, she suspected. For when the six were together, they were complete. They were each other’s missing pieces, and now three of those pieces were gone forever. She lost a part of herself to the void, she felt a sense of incompleteness that didn’t seem like it would ever fade. It scared her. And being with Liz and Alex seemed to be the only thing that dulled that fear within her.
She shut off the TV and crept over to the couch. Alex and Liz were on opposite ends, both resting their head on an armrest, an overstuffed cushion between them. Alex had moved so that most of the green afghan rested on the cushion next to him, and Liz had her own blanket wrapped snugly around herself. Had she ever told them that she loved them? The real, true, “I love you” of deepest friendship that she knew she felt? She couldn’t remember, and that made her sad. She stood between them, and leant down alternately to them, whispering into their ears the three words. Other people, she knew, would have waited for the morning, for a better time. She knew better.
She gently lifted the afghan and sat on the couch, twisting her body so that her head rested in Liz’s lap and her feet in Alex’s. It was more comfortable than she expected it to be, but still she knew that she was bound to wake up with a painfully stiff neck and back the next day. But for the moment it felt just right.
She felt sleep approaching and welcomed it, lulled by the sound of her friends’ gentle breathing. Maybe she would dream of him. She felt the subtle feeling of falling that was the last step before the world disappeared completely. She welcomed the blackness that surrounded her. Maybe this would be the night he would be there, imagined or real, maybe this would be the night she would be able to say I love you and say goodbye . . .
END