The thought alone causes my chest to ache.
Falling to my knees, my gaze dips down to the precious stone, a stone that has absorbed many of my tears and desperate pleas. My eyes blur as I reach out to trace the carving of his name with shaky fingertips.
Charles James March
1991 – 2020
For a moment, my thoughts drift back to that fateful day on a downtown street.
The day the sun died.
I can still smell the homemade pizza in the air. I can hear the sirens ringing in my ears. I can feel the frosty raindrops on my skin.
I’m lost, I’m so lost…
Thunder cracks above me.
I’m losing him.
“Charlie,” I sob, watching in numb horror as he’s fastened onto a stretcher. Everything happens fast, startlingly fast, and paramedics are talking, possibly in tongues, taking vitals, and I’m still clinging to the illusion that this is all a terrible dream.
Charlie’s eyelids flutter as he flickers in and out of consciousness. “Mel…”
“I’m here. I’m right here.”
I used to visit his gravesite daily, until it became too much to bear. I had to force myself to stop coming because I feared my own soul would somehow bleed out, seep into the soil and earth, right along with his.
I inhale a shuddering breath, memories trickling through me like melancholy drizzle.
“No, no, please… I can’t do this alone,” I cry out, nearly hysterical. “What happens to the sun when the sky falls?”
My question hangs between us while everything else keeps moving. Charlie is carried to the ambulance, and I’m on my feet, racing alongside the stretcher, still crying, still disintegrating.
“Charlie!” I reach for his cold hand, squeezing tight as the rain falls fast and mercilessly. “The sun falls with it, Charlie. Please… I’m nothing without you.”
Tears blanket my eyes while my fingers continue to skim over the lettered engraving. Charlie’s final words fill me with serenity.
Assurance.
Permission.
“But… it still shines, Mel,” he murmurs hoarsely. Charlie swallows, his peach-spun eyes trying to find my face through the wreckage and rainfall. His fingers grip mine with the last of his strength, and for the tiniest second, I am warm. “It just shines in a new place.”
A watery smile pulls at my lips as my heart releases the heavy weight of guilt.
“I miss you, Charlie,” I say with gentle sadness, my voice catching on a muggy draft. “I miss you so much, and I always will. But I wanted you to know… I found a new place to shine.” My chin lifts, my eyes settling on the full moon. “I thought you would be so disappointed in me. I thought that somehow, wherever you are, you’d be looking down on me with anger and shame, horrified that I moved on without you. That I found love again after everything we’d shared. After everything we’d built.” I suck in a rickety breath, searching for all the things I want to say. “But that’s not true, is it? You gave me your blessing with your final words, you gave me permission to move on and let go, and God, I didn’t know what it meant then… I didn’t understand your meaning because, how could I? I thought the sun died that day, and I would never shine again.”
Crickets and cicadas sing a soothing soundtrack to my final farewell as I bend down to place a kiss along the etchings of his name. “The sun never dies, though. It only sets,” I finish, licking fallen tears from my lips. “Then it rises, and a new day begins.”
With Parker’s note in one hand, I reach behind my back to pull a second note from my rear pocket. It’s a letter I’ve kept for the past two months, ever since I received it in the mail—a letter I had no idea what to do with.
Until now.
It’s an apology message from Eleanor March, Charlie’s mother, atoning for her cruel behavior the night I almost drove my car into a tree. She was drunk on wine and impossible grief, and she manifested that fury into misplaced blame. She blamed me for living. She blamed me for surviving and carrying on when everything she held most dear was lost.
Through the hurricane of suffering and bereavement, we look for outlets to blame, something that will alleviate even the slightest weight of the burden.
So, I sympathize, I do, and I forgive.
I forgive her.
But I’m not looking to make amends or revisit old wounds. All I want is peace.
Fetching the lighter I snagged from my parents’ house, I flick the little wheel with my thumb as I clutch the pieces of paper in my opposite hand.
Zachary Adler.
Eleanor March.
A flame bursts to life, illuminating the shadows around me, and I watch as the fire licks at the parchment, the corners crackling into kindling and climbing higher. Before it reaches my fingers, I toss the remains onto the gravestone, observing the way the embers flicker and burn, turning the paper into cinders.
Goodbye.
I blow away the ashy residue, then press my palm to the stone one last time. “It’s time to rise,” I whisper into the night. “It’s time to eat peach pie again.”
Rising to my feet, I feel a weight lift, a new beginning waiting for me, and all I want to do is go to him. I want to wrap my arms around his neck, jump into his arms, and tell him that I see him.
I see him—the man he is, the man he’s always been, and the man I love with my whole heart.
But I don’t.
I don’t do that, because before I step out of the cemetery and reach my car, my phone rings.
Leah.
My fingers swipe to accept the call, and I place the cell phone to my ear. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Girl, don’t freak out. Where are you?”
“What?”
Static and poor reception crackle in my ear.
“Have you seen the news?”
There’s panic laced into her tone, causing goosebumps to pimple my flesh. I swallow through a worried frown. “No, I… what is it? What’s wrong?”
Leah falters before continuing. “It’s Parker, babe. He’s on the news,” she says with careful urgency. “It’s a breaking report…”
My blood runs cold.
I can’t breathe.
“He’s hanging off the Delavan Bay Bridge.”
—THIRTY-SEVEN—
I really fucking hate heights.
There’s no good reason for it. It’s not like my fear of the dark, where it was conditioned into me as a child due to traumatic circumstances. This is just some random, shitty phobia I decided I had while working a high rise job with co-workers a good five years back, before I broke off to do my own thing. I’d glanced down from the scaffolding and almost pissed myself.
So, when I was contracted for a roofing job last April, my knee-jerk reaction was to turn it down. Bree said she’d get me out of it if that’s what I really wanted, but shit, money was tight that year, and honestly, I kind of felt like a pussy… so, I took the job.
And then I fell off that goddamn roof.
It was a two-story drop that nearly killed me, and if it weren’t for a big ass sycamore tree that partially cushioned my fall on the way down, I likely would have died on impact.