I pressed a kiss to my fingers, then placed them on the headstone. It was warm under my hand from the sun that always spotlighted in this grove, letting the world know that someone truly beautiful resided here.
I peered down and saw a photograph stuck to the bottom of the headstone. Tears pricked my eyes as I stared in awe at the stunning scene it boasted. The northern lights were captured perfectly in the picture, greens and blues soaring across a star-spattered black sky.
Rune.
Rune had been here. He always did this. Every time he came home, he would spend hours at Poppy’s grave, under their favorite tree. Spend the day talking to his only love, his soulmate, telling her about his life at NYU. About the apprenticeship he had secured with a Pulitzer Prize??inning photographer. About his travels around the world, visiting far off countries and sights—like the northern lights—that he would always capture on film and then bring home for Poppy to see.
“So she won’t miss out on new adventures,” he would tell me.
Then there were the days when he would visit Poppy, and I would sit behind a nearby tree, unnoticed and hidden, and listen to him speak to her. When tears would cascade from my eyes at the unfairness of the world. At us losing the brightest star in our skies, at Rune losing half of his heart. As far as I knew, he had never dated anyone else. He told me once that he would never feel about anyone else the way he felt about Poppy and that although their time together was short, it had been enough to last him a lifetime.
I had never experienced a love like theirs. I wasn’t sure many did. Where Ida searched and prayed for a Rune-and-Poppy-type love, I feared it would only cause me more pain. What if I lost them too? How would I ever cope? I didn’t know how Rune survived each day. I didn’t know how he opened his eyes every sunrise and simply breathed. I’d never asked him. I’d never found the courage.
“I had another attack today,” I told Poppy, leaning against her headstone.
I rested my head against the warm marble. Drank in the soothing birdsong that always kept her company. After several silent minutes, I pulled out the notebook from my bag. The one I had never dared open. I traced the words
For Savannah written on the cover in Poppy’s handwritten script.
The notebook she had left to me. The one I had never read or even opened. I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because I was too scared to read what Poppy had to say, or perhaps it was because it was the final piece I had left of her, and once it was opened, once I’d finished the very last word, then she was truly gone.
I hugged the notebook to my chest. “They’re sending me away, Pops,” I said, my quiet voice carrying around the near-silent grove. “To try to make me better.” I sighed, the heaviness in my chest almost bruising my ribs. “I just don’t know how to let you go.”
The truth was, if Poppy could talk to me, I knew she’d be heartbroken at how her death had paralyzed me, wounded me irreparably. Yet, I couldn’t shake it. Rob told me that grief never left us. Instead we adapted, like it was a new appendage we had to learn to use. That at any moment, pain and heartache could strike and break us. But eventually we would develop the tools to cope with it and find a way to move on.
I was still waiting for that day.
I watched the setting sun disappear through the trees, the waxing crescent moon rising to take its place. The golden blanket adorning us turned to a silvery blue as night arrived and I stood to leave. “I love you, Pops,” I said and reluctantly walked through the grove to our home. Our home, that these days, missed its heartbeat.
Because she was buried in the ground behind me. Eternally seventeen. The age I was now. Never to grow old. Never to shine her light. Never to share her music.
A travesty the world would forever be deprived of.
Abandoned Dreams and Frozen Ponds
Cael
Age Eighteen
Massachusetts
“I
T ISN’T HAPPENING,” I
SAID, STARING DOWN AT MY MOM AND DAD ON THE couch. I stood in the center of the living room, seething, body live-wired with anger as I listened to what they were saying.
A morsel of guilt tried to carve its way into my heart as I watched my mom’s tears spill over her eyes and track down her cheeks, but the fire flooding my veins burned that flicker of remorse to vapor.
“Cael, please …” Mom whispered, hands held out, placating. She shifted to the edge of the couch, like she would come to me, to offer me some kind of comfort. I shook my head, taking three steps back until I was almost on top of the unlit fireplace. I didn’t want her comfort. I didn’t want any of this. What were they even thinking right now?
My dad sat on our ancient brown couch, stoic, like the upstanding lawman he was. He was still dressed in his uniform, Massachusetts’s Finest glaring at me, face reddened as Mom cried over me again.
My jaw clenched so hard I felt my bones might crack. My hands curled into tight fists, and I fought the urge to plow them into the brick of the fireplace my back now brushed up against. But that was my every day in this hellhole. In this house full of memories I no longer wanted to have lodged in my brain. My dad was sick and tired of patching up holes I’d made in the walls with my fist. Just as sick as I was of my constant stream of anger. But that anger never left me. So I guess we both weren’t getting what we wanted.
“You’re going, kid,” Dad said, authority lacing each of his words. He was a man of few words. Succinct, and expected his orders to be obeyed. Everything inside of me screamed to tell him where the hell to go. His hard tone was fuel to the flames inside of me. I tried. I really tried to keep calm. But I was losing it. Like a ticking time bomb, I could feel I was about to blow.
“Cael, we have to try something,” Mom said, a subtle plea in her broken voice. Once upon a time, my mom upset would break me. Now? Nothing. “We’ve talked to your newest therapist. You graduated from high school last year. You refused to start college. This trip can help you. Give you back some purpose. Now, you just exist. No job, no direction, no school, no hockey. We’ve talked to the coach at Harvard. He checks in on you all the time. He still wants you. He wants you on next year’s roster. You can do this. You can still go—“
“I DON’T FUCKING CARE ABOUT COLLEGE!” I screamed, cutting off what she was about to say. I
had cared about college once. It was all I thought about. All I
dreamed about. So I could join him, so that we could play side by side, like we’d always planned …
My eyes involuntarily went to the mass of pictures on the wall above my parents on the couch. Shot after shot of me and him throughout the years. Playing in stadiums, arms around one another, smiles on our faces and sticks in our hands, Team USA written across my chest. I wasn’t even sure how to smile anymore. It felt foreign for my facial muscles to function that way. I averted my gaze from those pictures—now a goddamn shrine to what could have been. I couldn’t even look at them. They were all a lie. Told a story of a life that was fictitious.
Nothing about those days was real.
“I’m not going,” I said, a dark warning in my tone. But my dad remained unfazed. He got to his feet. His broad and tall frame had once towered over me, but my six-foot-four height put me three inches above him now, my broad shoulders and athletic body matching his in strength and power. “I’ll never forgive you for this,” I spat, my mom’s quiet cries in the background ricocheting off the constant shield I held around me. Nothing seemed to penetrate these days.
Dad put his hands in his pockets. “Then that’s something I’m just gonna have to live with, kid.”
I knew there was no changing his mind.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.