It was dark when I half woke. I wasn’t alone in the bedroom. I could see nothing in the darkness, but I could feel Kevin standing by the door. My heart beat out a staccato rhythm, but my body remained loose and limp. I opened my mouth, but found I had no voice. The words I formed fell back into my throat. His presence seemed to move from the doorway to the end of the bed. Whatever his intent, I was powerless to either resist or comply. I blinked in the darkness, tears forming at the corners of my eyes.
“Go back to sleep. Everything is fine,” Kevin said, his voice low and commanding.
Everything wasn’t fine. He was dead and I was alone and none of this was supposed to happen. I rolled onto my side and sobbed as the darkness overtook me.
I awoke with a start. I heard a noise, rumbling and deep, like a man’s voice. I strained my ears, but heard nothing more. The sun peered in around the blinds. Kevin’s clothes were at the bottom of my bed, neatly folded.
I grabbed the clothes and buried my face in their folds. They smelled of citrus, as if recently laundered. I slipped on Kevin’s blue-striped dress shirt. His belt lay coiled on top of his black slacks. I found his wallet in the back pocket and placed it on top of his dresser beside his wedding ring the funeral director had returned to me only two days before. Something was missing, but I couldn’t think what. Another noise, this time like the scraping of a chair.
I headed downstairs. I went into the kitchen and was neither surprised nor alarmed to see Blair Winters sitting at the table. He looked up from the magazine he was reading and gave me a small “Hey.” Blair held up the set of keys that Kevin had given him the day we moved in. “I let myself in.” He pocketed them.
Blair Winters was Kevin’s best man at our wedding and best friend in life. He was a pallbearer at Kevin’s funeral and cried without restraint at the grave site.
They were an unlikely pair, Kevin and Blair. They had met at basketball tryouts their junior year of high school. Kevin was a serious guy who believed in hard work and dating one girl at a time. Blair was already on his way to becoming one of the most popular guys in high school. He had a rumpled, lazy look that drove girls crazy, which was fine with him.
When Blair left Greenfield for college, everyone in town said he’d never come back. They were wrong. The ink wasn’t dry on his degree before he was back in town, much to the delight of his mother and the dismay of several coeds. He opened a small skateboard shop that dealt in exclusive, expensive parts. His mother had called his shop “a fine waste of an expensive degree.”
I could still see the remnants of the playboy I knew in high school as I looked at Blair’s face that morning. I noticed lines forming around his mouth, and a sadness that stretched over his face like a mask, but they did nothing to diminish his sex appeal. Even in my numb state I recognized his appeal. He looked like a man any woman would kiss. A coed, a mother, a nun.
I grabbed a box of cereal. “What are you up to?” I opened the fridge for the milk. I had to move two casserole dishes and a bowl of grapes in order to reach it. The entire town had cooked for me. I would be eating lasagna for years.
“Nothing,” he said, tossing the magazine into the recycle bin by the back door. “I checked on you, but you were sleeping so I came down here.”
“How long have you been here?”
He looked at his bare wrist. “Uh, it was pretty early when I got up. I couldn’t sleep so I decided to go for a walk. I wandered around for a while and found myself in front of your guys’ house. Your house.” He pawed at his face with both hands. “I guess it was around three,” he spoke into his palms.
“A.M.?” I asked stupidly.
“Yeah.”
I shrugged and grabbed two bowls. Blair and I ate our cereal in silence.
“Do you want to know what his last words to me were?” Blair asked, breaking the stillness. He didn’t look at me, just traced the maze on the back of the cereal box with his index finger.
“Yes.”
“We were on the phone, the day before he … We’d been talking for about ten minutes; I was trying to help him with a problem he was having.” He threw me a look I couldn’t read, and then went back to the maze. “It was just some stuff at work he was trying to get straight. Anyway, at the end of our conversation, he said, ‘You’re a great friend, Blair. Like a brother.’” Blair’s face trembled and crumbled. I thought he was crying, but when he spoke next his voice was calm. “Do you remember his last words to you? I mean, do you want to tell me?”
“No.”
Kevin’s last words to me? Did he kiss me good-bye before he drove off into his eternity? Did he call me from work to tell me he’d be home early—or late? Had he called on his cell phone, pounding his fist at red lights and telling me how he loved me? I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember.
Since Kevin died, I had tried to look into the days and weeks prior, but all I could see was a yawning, dark hole. My memories had been taken by blunt force. I wasn’t sure when it happened, when my memories had slipped away. But looking at Blair’s grief-doused face, I was certain they were gone.
Most of them, anyway. The dark hole, the abyss where my recent past resided, wasn’t a complete void. Swirling in the midst of obscurity were pockets of light, like snapshots. Each one swam alone, unconnected to any other, unfettered. One of them, more a soundtrack than an image, played over again in my mind: Kevin saying, “Don’t wait for me.”
The statement taunted me like a bully. What did it mean? Whom was he speaking to? When had he said it? And when would I remember again? But even if I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying, I played it over and over in my mind just to hear his voice.
Blair stared at me for a few moments, and, when it was clear I would say no more, he got up from the table in a series of jerky movements that caused milk to spill from his bowl onto the table. “Sorry. I should go.” He walked to the back door. I followed wordlessly. Blair kissed the top of my head, an easy place for him to reach. He was over six feet tall, I just over five foot four. “If you need me, I’m only a phone call away. Day or night, Kate. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He reached for the knob and hesitated. He turned and looked into my eyes. “Seriously, Kate. Anything.”
“I know.”
When he was gone, I locked the back door and felt the emptiness of the house enfold me.
I left the dishes on the table and walked into the living room. Everything had been cleaned mercilessly. I could see no evidence of the funeral reception. It was as if it had never happened. I sat on the floor, my back to the two-seater sofa, and drew my knees up to my chest. Maybe it hadn’t happened. Maybe it was a mistake. A divine clerical error.
Once, when I was at home unpacking my food after grocery shopping, I discovered a bag that didn’t belong to me. I had stood in my kitchen wondering what I should do with four avocados, a package of condoms, and denture cleaner. Maybe that’s what had happened this time. I’d picked up someone else’s tragedy by mistake.
“The cereal is going to dry right onto those bowls,” Kevin said from the kitchen.
“Who cares?” I said, lost in my wishful thinking.
“You hate it when the cereal is stuck to the sides of the bowl.”
“Kevin?”
“I’m cold,” he said.
“Where are you?”
My head felt light, a nebulous balloon floating above my body. I ran into the kitchen, catching my toe on a chair. “Kevin?” There was no one there.
The phone rang. I stood immobile, staring at it. My heart ricocheted off my breastbone as I reached for the receiver. I picked it up and pushed it to my ear. My lips parted. “Kevin?”
“Kate?” my mother said. “Are you there? I wanted to tell you that I left a turkey salad in the fridge for your lunch.” I nodded, saying nothing. I hung up. It wasn’t Kevin. He wasn’t here. Hope and helplessness blended like oil and water in my stomach. Of course Kevin’s not here, I thought. He’s dead. No one talks to the dead.