The next person in line stepped forward, and my eyes fell upon Harley. My stomach flipped, and my heart shuttered, leaving all lingering feelings about my father behind.
For a moment, she was just as speechless. Whether or not because she was more prepared for the encounter, Harley eventually managed to offer a comment of consolation.
“I’m sorry about your mom. She was… tenacious, compassionate, and a beautiful, heartfelt woman. Everything about her… she was just such a genuine person. I’ll miss her, and I know you do, too.”
Whatever fracture in my soul that was widened by my mother’s death now splintered like lightning into the most compounded, dispiriting heartbreak. The abyss swallowed my thoughts, my words, and threatened to drag the rest of me down with them. Harley reached up and wrapped her arms around my neck, pulling up against me into a hesitant hug. The slight awkwardness melted against the warmth of her closeness. My hands found a forgotten, familiar fit around her waist, and I squeezed her into me, resting my chin on her shoulder and discovering myself embraced by the floral fragrance from her long brown hair.
No sentence or other recognizable structure of words had yet to escape the chaos circling as a cyclone in my mind, but my profound delight in her presence, coupled with a powerful sense of a plenum restored, led me to breathe her name in recognition and relief.
“Harley,” fell as a whisper in her ear, and, in response, she seemed to flinch against my chest. Ultimately, Harley released her hold around my neck and pushed backward, fighting against my arms around her until I realized that the moment was over.
Once again, she was the one with enough courage to speak first.
“Um, it’s… It’s good to see you, Ry-… uh… I… uh… yeah.”
She seemed to be struggling with her own confusion, openly stuttering, then stopping herself when trying to voice my name. She moved to walk away, continuing down the line toward Hollis, but I couldn’t bear to see her go, not when she was actually there, and, in my dreams, I was haunted, incapable of reaching out to her.
The motion happened as instinct. I reached out and touched her hand, grabbing her wrist with a force of desperation otherwise uncalled for. She turned, scared and shocked. Her face was simultaneously pale with angst and flushed from a fever of feelings.
I released the strength of my fingers but didn’t let go. “I… I’m sorry, I…” The real reason for the act couldn’t be permissibly voiced. Even in my addled state, I knew that to do so would suggest an hypocrisy of mine, too heinous to admit.
My inelegant babbling continued, therefore, with no objective or end in sight. “I, uh… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… Well, I…uh…”
Embarrassed and ashamed, I knew my actions spoke volumes without warranting any admission. My sight dropped from Harley’s stunning, pulse-pausing beauty and beheld our hands, touching for the first time since I swatted hers away so many years before.
A silvery gleam at her wrist drew my attention, catching the sanctuary lights from just beneath the sleeve of her sweater. The bright glimmer shone through my eyes and penetrated deep within my mind, turning into a spotlight that searched, found, and backlit a time-obscured memory that remained hidden, dormant, and shrouded in darkness. The resulting silhouette prevented my perception but ushered forth a shadow of remembrance that at least suggested a context for the unknown shape.
Could it be?
My thumb shifted from the gentle but firm grip on her hand, sliding over her smooth skin until it reached the cuff of her cardigan. I edged the fabric back, revealing the source of the reflection.
My world stopped turning as time seemed to rebel against universal order, ridding itself of rules meant to forever distance pieces of the past from reaching the present’s pertinence.
My eyes darted from Harley’s wrist to mine, only two hands away, where the face of my watch could be seen. As a span of years seemed to shrink into an instant, causing past and present to pretend unity, a doorway toward the future appeared where I thought none possible.
I raised my head, having added both revelation and hope to my soup of emotional disarray. Harley looked up from a similar, shocked study of our wrists, and her irises met mine. The impossible thought being reflected through her big blue eyes mirrored my own.
You kept it? You’re wearing it?
But, the inscription, the words… After all this time?
Neither of us spoke, but, if only for a moment, we were seventeen again, experiencing a connection that needn’t be burdened by words.
Harley’s demeanor was the first to change, while I remained stricken and staring like a dumbfounded fool. She glanced at the line of people behind her and ahead toward Hollis, who was quietly watching the reunion of romance relinquished. She turned back to face me just as my confusion was considering a smile, but her shift in expression and subsequent actions had me exchanging that hopeful happiness for further flummoxed frowns. Doubly glassy-eyed from simultaneous afflictions of both confusion and tears, Harley faced me again while wearing what could only be described as horror, humiliation, and shame. She tugged her wrist from my grasp, lowered her head, and sped out of sight before I could even mumble a word.
The sanctuary’s atmosphere and its line of people remained unchanged, the vast majority of whom hadn’t noticed anything inordinate taking place.
The next person in line stepped up to meet with me and mourn together, if only for a short time, but I merely nodded and shook their hand with fingers reduced to rubber, not hearing a word that was said. I turned to Hollis and could read his opinion of the matter clearly, for his was a brotherly expression of empathy, wholly lacking in any suggestion of sympathy. Initially, I thought he was the only one who recognized Harley and I’s meeting, but soon I was corrected as my father’s disappointed curses under his breath reached my ears.
Undisturbed by either of their responses because any amount of ridicule couldn’t surmount my own self-condemnation, I looked over the line of people toward the doors where Harley disappeared.
It wasn’t until that moment, in the middle of my mother’s funeral, that I was finally forced to face my own feelings and fully admit to myself just how much I missed her. I knew then that I didn’t deserve her, not in a million years after what I put her through, but, still, I already knew what it was to have a life without her and, more than anything else I’d ever wanted, I needed to know if there was another way: a life with Harley Andrews, living it together like one long, wonderful day… Until The Sun Burns Away.
Harley
Twilight was falling over the Fleming’s farm, and, needing a reprieve from the swarm of townsfolk attending the wake inside the house, I had moved outside for some fresh air.
I wandered the porch, breathing in the warm comfort of dusk, but soon noticed the small wooden swing hanging beneath the big oak tree in the yard. I descended the steps of the wraparound porch, slipping my heels off as I moved, barefoot, into the grass beneath the blackening purple sky.
I approached the weathered wooden plank, dangling above a worn patch of dirt, suspended by two long, faded ropes. I sat down and let my legs hang freely, as I so often had as a kid. I watched the sun’s trail of orange shrink along the horizon, eyeing the heavens as the first few twinkles of starlight seemed to serenade the rising moon.