TONIGHT
“The cemetery?” Colin asks as I tell him where we are going next. We’re already on my street when I tell him to drive past my house and keep going to Greenwood. He parks and I get out. The gates are closed, so we have to climb over the brick wall to get in.
“Holy shit,” Colin mutters. I know he’s thinking this is insane because that’s what any normal person would think. But he scales the wall anyway, and pretty soon we’re walking toward Em’s grave.
“You’re not part of a cult or something, are you?” he calls behind me. “This isn’t like some kind of ploy for a human sacrifice, is it?”
After his little singing stunt, I’m kind of enjoying his irrationality, so I don’t say anything.
“Frenchie?” he says. “Holy shit! What the hell was that?” And I know his foot has probably sunk a little into the soft earth. I don’t know why the ground on this side of the cemetery is soft and mushy and I don’t think I want to know. But if you don’t know about it, it feels like you’re sinking, and it’s easy to imagine that the earth is going to crumble and the dead are going to rise up like zombies all around you.
“I just want to show you something is all,” I say. And then we’re at Em’s grave and I point to her headstone.
“Emily Dickinson,” he reads. “Wait, that isn’t the real Emily Dickinson, is it?” he asks.
“No,” I say, “This is a different one.”
“Oh,” he says, “that’s pretty cool, I guess. And weird.”
I plop down and eat some of my ice cream.
“I hang out here. A lot,” I tell him through bites. “With her.” I cock my head toward her grave.
“Well,” he says, as he starts in on his Cherry Garcia. “Again, kind of weird,” he shrugs. “You a big fan or something?”
“I guess. It’s just that . . . I feel like she gets it, you know? Like I think things that sometimes might be weird to think, but then I read one of her poems and it’s like she already understands.”
“Like a song,” he says. “One you connect with and you think the lyrics are genius but it’s really just because it captures exactly how you think or feel.”
“Yes, exactly,” I say. “Like there’s this one poem about a flower, right, but it’s not. It’s about death. And how some people see a flower and that’s it. They just see a flower. But others see a flower and realize that while it’s pretty and all, its head will soon be chopped off by the morning frost and the little flower is going to be dead.”
“I’m guessing you fall into the latter group of people.”
“I guess. You?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I know the flower is going to die. But”—he says and starts stirring his ice cream—“I don’t know.” He shrugs. He takes a sip of his now ice cream soup.
I set mine aside.
“My dad,” Colin says suddenly, “he almost died in front of me.”
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Colin continues.
“I think it was his pure will and stubbornness that bought him an extra week. He just refused to die in front of me. We were watching The Three Stooges one morning. My mom had an appointment, so it was just us. He started laughing when Mo’s hair flew off his head. But then his laughter turned to coughing, and more coughing, and then his face started getting red as the coughing became more violent.” He pours the rest of his ice cream on the ground. I wait, wondering if he’s going to go on or if I should change the subject.
“Then this white foam started spilling from his mouth,” Colin says after a moment. “So I started crying and screaming as loud as I could. I don’t know who I expected to hear me. I don’t know who I expected to come and help us. But it was all I could do.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “He died a week later, in his sleep. It was a massive coronary. My mom told me later that he’d told her it was my screams that kept him from dying that day. Sometimes . . .” He stops and just shakes his head.
“Sometimes what?” I ask.
“Sometimes I think I should’ve been there the night he did die. I should’ve been there screaming.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“I think about that. A lot. More than I want to,” he says. “But when I think about my dad, I try really hard for that not to be the only thing I think about. Because”—he says with a sigh—“I can’t let that be the only thing I remember about him.”