After the church service had ended, Pete went to his bedroom. There was no Sunday school, no coffee or tea, and all but a few had left for their respective homes the moment Auntie Betty’s rendition of “Silent Night” had ended.
Pete could not eat. In fact, he didn’t even know if his mom had cooked lunch. He went straight to his room and his parents let him be. His mind seemed to have seized up. Thoughts trickled slowly and with great difficulty, like thick, stinking, unrefined molasses.
The only thought he could decipher in the darkness was the face of Petrus. He had to see him. He had to. As soon as possible. There was no question about it.
When Pete awoke, it was Monday already. He had no idea anyone could sleep for that long. Stranger still, he had no idea someone could sleep for that long and be just as tired as when he went to bed. Perhaps even more so.
His parents allowed him to stay home from school. He was immeasurably grateful, and although he didn’t know how to express this to them, he suspected they knew.
He was already at the rock when 16:00 rolled around. Standing about ten metres away from it. Staring at it. The multitude of images crisscrossing his mind became a blurry patchwork. His brain could not retain a single image. There were too many.
As he stood there, he wondered how he had got there. Had he run?
A new image appeared. A silhouette. He had trouble discerning it against the images spinning in his mind. Was it real? Was it a memory?
“Pete!”
He kept staring at the source of the sound; the silhouette coming closer. No matter how hard he tried – even squinting, tilting his head – he could not make it out.
“Pete!”
“Pete!”
The third “Pete” was like a fist through an opaque mirror. The glass shattered, light streamed in, the images in his mind dissipated, the blurriness gone, the spinning too. He could see again. The silhouette was not an imagining. The sound not an echo of some past conversation.
Petrus was in front of him. Standing a few feet away. Uncertain. His eyes puffy, tired, moist.
It was too much for Pete. He could not look at the only person in the world he thought he wanted to see. The tears in Petrus’s eyes were too real. Said too much. Said things he was not prepared to hear.
The tears came. But not alone. They brought with them sobbing – his whole body shook, his legs became wobbly and the hard, beaten earth under his feet became a spongy, tottering mess. Like the mud in the dam, that night when it all began.
Petrus’s hands shot to his face, covering almost every inch of it. Yet tears still seeped through the gaps between his fingers, the pain hidden behind his hands just as evident as if he had not covered his face.
They stood there, feet apart, weeping, with the rock in the distance and the mountains on the horizon cloaked behind a dark veil of cloud. Like they were weeping too. The sun, hidden somewhere behind the veil, not able to face this great hurt.
Eventually the ground underfoot firmed somewhat. The sobbing subsided and the tears stopped rolling, although they remained welled up in his eyes. But none of the pain had disappeared. In fact, Pete longed for those few glorious moments before Petrus had arrived, when everything was a blur, and his heart didn’t feel like it was being hacked out with a panga.
Petrus wiped the tears from his face but only half-succeeded. He sought out Pete’s gaze, gestured with his head towards the rock and started walking. Pete followed.
They did not sit on the rock, just stood next to it, afraid to touch it. “My grandfather had a heart attack when I was nine,” Petrus said, his eyes fixed on the uneven stubbly surface of the rock. “I asked him when he came back from hospital whether it was the most pain he had ever experienced.” A tear escaped Petrus’s eye; he swallowed, the grief gushing up, and drew a short breath. “My grandfather laughed and said no. He said it was nothing compared to the pain he felt when his twin sister died when he was still a boy.” Tears were again streaming down his face. Somehow, he managed to continue speaking. “I now understand what he meant.” He looked up at Pete, biting his lip. “I feel it,” he said, then punched his fist against his heart twice. “I feel it.”
“I’m so angry,” Pete said. “I’m so, so angry.” He glanced at the horizon, searching in vain for the mountains hidden behind the greyness. “I just want to—” He took a few steps away from Petrus. The proximity too much for him. It was making words impossible to articulate. Then, from the deepest part of him, he screamed. It didn’t sound like him, but he felt it reverberate inside him, scraping his throat. He screamed again, and again. And again.
Petrus remained standing next to the rock, shaking his head, pursing his lips, feeling each scream as if it were his own.
“It’s not fair,” Pete shouted when his last scream evaporated into the still air. “It’s not fair!” His voice was croaky and cracked. Petrus shook his head more and more until something broke and his face contorted.
“Why wasn’t it me?” Pete said. “Hell, why was it anybody? None of the other bombs exploded, why did that one?”
“No,” Petrus said, raising his head a fraction, “it should have been me. If I had stayed with her, walked her home ... something, I could have protected her.”
Pete shook off the idea. “No, no, no. Then both of you would have ... no. It’s my fault. If I hadn’t come up with that stupid plan of involving the two of you in the concert, then—”
“Pete,” Petrus interrupted. The tears had stopped and he walked up to Pete and touched his arm so that Pete would meet his pressing gaze. “It wasn’t stupid. It was right. It will always be right.”
“How can it be right?” Pete asked, spreading his arms and hands open. “What’s right about it? She’s—” He still couldn’t bring himself to say it. “Look what happened. Nothing is right about what happened, Petrus. Nothing. And it’s my fault.”
Petrus placed his hand on Pete’s hair and dug his fingers into his scalp, rubbing it in a circular motion, pressing harder with each rotation. “What do you think Sarita would say if you asked her if she would do it all again?”
Pete knew the answer. Petrus didn’t even have to ask. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t accept it, even though he could see Sarita’s reaction to that very question, her utter disbelief that they’d even consider not going ahead with the plan.
“That’s not the point,” Pete said, “if she had left right away—”
“Pete, no—”
“I kissed her,” Pete blurted out. The tears that had momentarily ceased were back. All the pain of before compounded into that one utterance. “If I hadn’t kissed her, then, then—”
“You kissed?” Petrus’s mouth was slightly agape.
“I know, how ridiculous, how selfish.”
“Did she kiss you back?”
Pete was startled by the question and stared quizzically at Petrus. “Well, yes.”
Petrus couldn’t hold the gaze. His face lapsed into his hand, grief rose up from him like a mist. It looked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t. Pete waited. He had no idea if he had just done something wrong, said the wrong thing. At this point his mind was having trouble decoding the most basic of messages, which this one wasn’t.
Petrus finally spoke through his sobs. “She told me the night of the concert, when we met up before it started, that her heart had betrayed her mind, her common sense. Those were her exact words. I knew exactly what she meant; she didn’t need to explain. So ...” Petrus wiped the tears away with his right hand. “I’m just happy. That’s all. Happy for her. Happy for you. For that moment.”
It was all too much. The weight of Petrus’s words. The concert, the bomb, the last six months. The kiss. Everything struck Pete down. He dropped to his knees, forehead against the very earth where he had first seen her. He thought he could feel the warmth of Petrus’s hand on his back, though it was impossible to tell. Everything was just too much. He missed her too much for it to ever make sense.