A stab of guilt pinches in my chest. I should be with her right now. She would have already gone to the apartment, looking for me, but I just couldn’t be there. If I’d stayed, she would have talked me off the ledge. Those beautiful blue eyes of hers would have met mine and I would have gone with her, if only to stem her hurt during the ordeal of yet another goddamn funeral. I had to get out of there before I could see her dressed in her mourning clothes and my own sense of duty kicked in.
I could not fucking sit in a pew at the front of a depressingly empty Presbyterian church, staring numbly at a coffin, knowing that Ben’s lifeless, cold body was inside it. It would have taken my very last energy reserves along with what little remains of my will to live to make it through a service like that, and I need both to ensure I don’t throw myself in Lake Cushman tomorrow morning.
How simple would it be to let the clear glacial water flood me, fill me up, and drag me down into the darkness? Seems like such a logical solution to the problem that I’m currently faced with. I’m hurting. I’m suffering beyond any measure I’ve previously experienced. If I sank below the still, mirrored surface of the lake and let the patient waters take me, then it would be done with. No more pain. No more suffering.
Except…
Suicide’s never going to be an option for me. Not while Silver draws breath. I know what it is to be left behind, tossed and turned in the wake after someone you love punches their ticket on that one-way journey. It’s a fate worse than death to exist in a world where the person you love decided it was better to die than stay behind and love you back. It isn’t that simple. It’s never that simple. But that’s how it fucking feels.
My mother was haunted by her ghosts. In the last two or three years before she died, she never knew a moment’s peace. The black dog was always crouched over her, baring its teeth, refusing to let her up even for a second. And through it all, she tried. She woke up every morning and made herself get out of bed, and she tried. Most days, she failed. She was angry. She was manic. She hallucinated, and she kicked and screamed. Exhaustion drove her to put the muzzle of that gun in her mouth, and despair made her pull the trigger. It took a long time for me to accept that what she did that day didn’t mean that she didn’t love me enough. It was just that the pain and the endless, bottomless agony of being alive was too big for her to overcome in the end.
If I took myself out, eventually Silver would come to the same realization. Before that, she’d know the same brilliant, blinding kind of pain that I felt as a six-year-old boy, and I could never fucking do that to her. Ironically, I’d die before I ever put her through something like that.
A trickle of incense hits the back of my nose, bringing me back into myself—I’ve been so absent for days now that I’m always kind of shocked when I snap out of my reveries and realize that I’ve somehow found my way across Raleigh, or, in this instance, to Holy Trinity. A Catholic church, because my mother was Catholic. That’s how Ben and I were raised. Ben should have been brought here for his funeral service, but I wasn’t thinking straight when the funeral home informed me that Jackie’s will stated all services should be conducted as per her Presbyterian faith. I should have demanded the arrangements be changed. Jackie had no right to include Ben in her will in the first place, but it had already taken everything I had to make sure Ben was buried here instead of back in Bellingham.
Holy Trinity is soaked in the same rich, velveteen sublimity that all Catholic churches share. A humble reverence that’s momentarily calmed the restless void in my chest. People mistake the healing atmosphere inside buildings like this for the presence of God all the time. It’s awe-inspiring, to feel the soul salved simply by walking inside a specific building and sitting quietly for a while. That’s the thing, though. Madness grips people’s lives at every fucking turn. Kids; bills; work; financial stress; the expectations and hopes of others. Everywhere they turn, there’s so much noise and chatter and fucking insanity that the first moment they get to sit in the silent dark and breathe, they’re bound to feel like they’re communing with the sublime.
That’s why I came here, after all. Because this is a good place to think.
Eterno riposo, concedere a loro, o Signore, e lasciare che perpetua risplenda ad essi la luce. Maggio le anime dei fedeli defunti attraverso il ricordo di Dio, riposa in pace, Amen.
The words aren’t welcome. I haven’t searched them out, but they push to the surface of my memory anyway, shoving aside my other thoughts. I remember the susurrus of her voice, catching on the consonants and vowels, creating a melody out of the prayer every All Souls’ Day in November. I knew Thanksgiving was only a few weeks away when my mother decked our apartment out with chrysanthemums, set three extra places at the table, and lay out food for people I’d never met before. Nor would I, since they were all dead. My grandparents were long gone by the time I was born. So was my uncle, her half-brother, who managed to fall from the third-floor balcony of a hotel room in Rome when he was drunk and landed on his head.
She’d cook every single Italian recipe she could remember from her childhood, and then she’d wrap me up in my thickest winter jacket, and we’d go knocking on our neighbor’s doors, offering them dolci dei morti—the sweets of the dead. She’d told me that the small white biscuits were supposed to sweeten the bitterness of death, and that in Italy, children would knock on doors for them along with other candies and treats in return for a prayer for the dead.
Eterno riposo, concedere a loro, o Signore, e lasciare che perpetua risplenda ad essi la luce. Maggio le anime dei fedeli defunti attraverso il ricordo di Dio, riposa in pace, Amen.
All Souls’ Day is long behind us now, but my mother’s voice chants her prayers regardless. The door to the church groans, and a rush of cold air makes my arms break out in goosebumps. Someone’s just come in. Part of me is irritated that the silence is going to be marred by someone else’s presence. Then again, I’m glad I’m not alone anymore. Another second of solitude and I might never have resurfaced again…
“Thought I might find you here,” a gruff voice says behind me. Not the voice of a priest, that’s for sure. Far too whiskey-soaked. The hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention, an alertness returning to me that’s been gone ever since I answered that stupid fucking door to Maeve.
For a second, I think it’s Zander, come to drag me to the funeral at Greenwood, but then—
“Heard you were living here in Raleigh. Guess I didn’t really believe it. Not ’til now.”
Being tased is a unique experience. Hard to describe. Your body locks up, screaming in pain, jaw clenched, hands clenched, asshole clenched, fucking everything clenched, and your mind is screaming at you to MOVE! Get. A. Way. From. The. Pain. But you can’t. You’re frozen in place, lungs seized, and all you can do is lay there and take it. I’ve never felt anything like it before. Until this moment right now.
If the best memories of my childhood are of my mother, then the worst, without a shadow of a doubt, are of my father. Even when she was manic and hysterical, making wild, outlandish threats, he was still worse…because he was indifferent, and then he was fucking gone. Over the years, I’ve tried to erase the stain of him from my head, but Giacomo Moretti has always been paradoxically indelible.