Darkness swept over me.
My last thought was that Kyle was dead. Kyle was dead. He saved me, and now he’s dead. Sobs echoed, echoed, wrenched from a ruined heart.
Chapter 5: Liquid Heartbreak
Two days later
I swept the last lock of hair back and fixed it into place with the bobby pin. I barely recognized myself in the mirror. I was pale, ghost-white with dark rims under my eyes. My eyes looked back at me from the mirror, pale blue like the sky and just as empty.
“Nell?” My mother’s voice came from behind me, soft, hesitant. Her hand closed around my arm. I didn’t pull away. “It’s time to go, honey.”
I blinked hard, blinked back the nothing. I felt nothing. I felt no tears. I was empty inside, because empty was better than agony. I nodded and turned on my heel to sweep past my mother, ignoring the bolt of pain when my cast bumped the doorframe. My dad was holding the front door open, eyes watching me carefully, as if I might explode, or crumble.
Either was possible. But it wouldn’t happen, because you had to feel for that. And I didn’t feel. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing was best.
I descended the steps, clicked across the blacktop driveway to my Dad’s boxy Mercedes SUV. I slid into the back seat, drew the buckle across my torso and waited in the silence. I saw my mother stop in the doorway facing my father, watched them exchange worried glances at me. After a moment, my dad locked the front door and they both got into the car. We drove away in silence.
My father’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Do you want some music on?”
I shook my head, but couldn’t find the voice to speak. He looked away and kept driving. My mother twisted in her seat to look at me, opened her mouth to say something.
“Don’t, Rachel,” Dad said, touching her arm. “Just leave her be.”
I met my dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror, tried to express my gratitude silently, with dead eyes.
Rain fell. Slow, thick drops through still, warm air. Nothing like the storm that stole Kyle. Gray, heavy clouds, low in the sky like a broken ceiling. Wet cement, glinting grass and puddles on the sidewalks.
I clutched a crumpled, folded piece of paper in my hand. The note. I had it memorized, now. I’d read it and reread it so many times.
The viewing, a small room filled with too many people. I stood next to the casket, refusing to look in. Stood next to a tastefully-created collage, pictures of Kyle, of us together. Strangers in the pictures, I thought, seeing happy me, happy, living him.
Words spoken, empty condolences. Hands squeezing mine, lips brushing my cheek. Weeping friends. Cousins. Becca, hugging me. Jason standing in front of me, not speaking, not hugging me, his offered silence the best thing he could have given me.
Then, oh god…Mr. and Mrs. Calloway, standing in front of me. They’ve been here all the while, but I couldn’t see them. Couldn’t bear to meet their eyes. But now they’re here, hands clasped and threaded between them, two sets of brown eyes so much like Kyle’s, pinning me, searching me. I said little about what happened. There was a storm, a tree fell. Kyle saved me.
Nothing about the proposal, the ring on my finger, the wrong finger. Nothing about the fact that we were arguing. That it should have been me.
That if I had done…god, so many things differently, their son would still be alive.
Nothing about his death being my fault.
If I had said yes, he would still be alive. We’d have gone up to the bedroom. Made love. The tree would have crashed through the house, but not near us.
I stared into their eyes and tried to find words.
“I’m so sorry.” It was all I could say, and even that was barely audible, shattered words falling like shards from my tongue.
“Oh Nell…me too.” Mrs. Calloway wrapped me in a hug, bawled onto my shoulder.
I stood stiff, the physical contact too much. I had to suck in air through my nose and let it out through my mouth into her straight black hair, trembling and tense. I couldn’t let myself feel. If I felt, I would break.
I don’t think she understood that I was begging her forgiveness for killing her son. But those three words were all I could dredge up out of myself. Eventually her husband pulled her away and tucked her into his side while she shuddered.
People came and went, words were spoken. Faces passed in front of me in a blur. I nodded at times, mumbled things. Just so they would know I wasn’t catatonic, that I was physically alive.
I wasn’t, though. I breathed. My synapses fired, my blood pumped in a circle. But I was dead, dead with Kyle.
Dad slipped to my side, held me in a one-armed hug. “It’s time, Nell.”
I didn’t know what I was time for. I pivoted in his embrace and glanced up at him, brows scrunched.
He saw the question. “To have the service. To close the casket and…bury him.”
I nodded. He pulled me to a chair and I sat down. Mr. Calloway stood with his back to casket and spoke. I heard his words, but they meant nothing. Words about Kyle, about how wonderful he was, how great he was, how much promise he had, cut short. Cut short. True words, but empty in the face of things. Nothing mattered. Kyle was gone, and words meant nothing.
Mrs. Calloway couldn’t say anything. Jason talked about how Kyle was such a great friend, and those words were true, too.
Then it was my turn. Everyone was looking at me. Waiting. I stood up and walked to where everyone else had stood, behind a little podium with a disconnected microphone. I picked at the wood with my fingernails, which was painted a dark plum by my mother.
I knew, then, that I was changed. The old Nell would have known what to say, would have found polite and well-meant words, would have spoken about how incredible Kyle was, how loving and thoughtful, how we had a future together.
But none of that came out, because I wasn’t that Nell anymore.
“I loved Kyle.” I stared at the blonde wood of the podium, because the eyes of the people in the seats would have pierced my armor of numbness, would have spiked through to the river of magma deep inside me that was my emotions.
“I loved him so much. I still do, but…he’s gone. I don’t know what else to say.” I pulled off the ring from my right hand and held it up. A few people gasped. “He asked me to marry him. I told him we were too young. I told him…I would go to California with him. He was going to go to Stanford and play football. But I said no, not yet…and now he’s gone.”
I couldn’t hold it in anymore, but I had to. I choked the breakdown back, sucked it in and forced it down. I slipped the ring back on my right hand and walked out of the viewing room without looking into the casket. I knew, from when Grandma Calloway died, that the thing in the casket wasn’t Kyle. It was a shell, a husk, an empty clay gourd. I didn’t want to see that. I wanted to see Kyle in my mind as the strong, gloriously gorgeous Adonis, the way his muscles moved and rippled, the way his hands touched me and the way his sweat mingled with mine.