We Are the Light(66)
During those first few years, Jill and I would usually bring a blanket and sit down on the grass right above Darcy’s belly, and we’d take turns telling my deceased wife about what happened to us during that week—all of Jill’s culinary ups and downs at the Cup Of Spoons, all of my experiences with my adult-sitters, and all of our Saturday adventures. Even after more than three years, Jill breaks down crying at the end of each graveside visit when she tells Darcy that she misses her and is doing her best to take care of me. And I’ll pat my lips with my hand and then touch my wife’s cold headstone, transferring the kiss.
We religiously leave a fresh batch of flowers, which are never there when we return the next week. On the drive home from the cemetery—maybe as comic relief—Jill and I like to make up stories about what happens to our bouquets. Our favorite is a running one about a graveyard keeper named Gary who collects all the cemetery flowers for his wife, Gertrude, who requires massive amounts of store-bought flowers before she will make love to him. Gary’s graveyard pay is meager, which requires him to steal whenever he is feeling hot to trot, which is always. Often, Jill and I will get really creative and the stories become quite elaborate. Sometimes we’ll be so into the week’s version that we’ll sit parked in our driveway with the engine off just to finish telling the latest episode.
Woe is the horny henpecked Gary, who must steal all of the graveyard flowers to earn love and affection!
That’s how we always end each chapter.
At some point in the game, we brought Darcy in on the joke, telling her that Majestic’s mourners are now buying the flowers specifically for Gertrude instead of our deceased loved ones, just to ease poor Gary’s suffering. It makes Darcy laugh, if only in our minds.
That first Christmas, Isaiah and Bess returned to California to spend the break with their granddaughter. Like I already mentioned, Eli still hadn’t been in contact and was rumored to be staying permanently in the Golden State. Mark and Tony resumed their yearly Christmas tradition of screening It’s a Wonderful Life and I heard that it was a sold-out event with a large police presence. But I had decided I would never again set foot in another movie theater, let alone the Majestic, even though Mark and Tony had given all Survivors lifetime free passes. Most of the original group members have resumed their usual moviegoing habits, which Phineas says is a form of immersion therapy.
When I first asked Phineas if I should make myself go to the movies, he said, “You’ll go when you’re ready.”
And while we had dozens of holiday invitations from all of The Survivors, Jill and I decided to leave Majestic for the month of December, driving south with the goal of ultimately spending Christmas with my mother and her boyfriend’s family in Florida, if only to get as far away as possible from the Majestic Theater. Phineas also thought it might be good to face my lifelong biggest fear (my mom), saying, “That dragon has your gold!”—meaning that if I could metaphorically slay the metaphorical dragon that was my mother, I could reclaim what she’d stolen from me. I wasn’t sure what precisely my mother had stolen from me, but facing Mom felt significant, especially in the early shadows of Darcy’s murder. So Jill deputized Randy once again, touching each of his shoulders with her favorite Cup Of Spoons spatula, before handing him the keys to the restaurant. Shortly after that ceremony, we hopped into her truck and hit the road in search of psychological gold.
By December first, our hometown was already lit up with strings of Christmas lights and plastic Santa Clauses and reindeers and snowmen and gigantic silver snowflakes, all of which depressed me. When we officially left festooned Majestic by turning onto the highway, I felt a wave of relief wash over me. I was anxious about being away from Phineas for the first time, even though we agreed to chat by computer screen once a week. But mostly I just felt an overwhelming desire to get very far away from the Majestic Theater before the one-year anniversary of my wife’s murder.
When we got to Jill’s parents’ woodsy cabin outside of Brevard, North Carolina, it was late and we went right to the guest room without even seeing Mr. and Mrs. Dunn. Jill slept in the queen-sized bed and I slept on a love seat in the corner, but it was the first time we had spent an entire night in the same bedroom since that time I told you about in Maryland by the lighthouse. Even though I was tired, I had a hard time sleeping. Apparently, Jill did too, because in the middle of the night she whispered, “Lucas? You awake?” When I confirmed I was, she said I could sleep in the bed with her if I thought it might be more comfortable. The love seat wasn’t long enough for me to fully stretch out my legs, but I wasn’t sure I should get in bed with Jill on account of wake-up sex. The best lovemaking I had ever experienced in my life happened whenever I had unconsciously started making love with Darcy in my sleep. We would both wake up in the middle of sex—going full speed—with no idea how it had even begun. I was worried about having wake-up sex with Jill, but I didn’t want to say that, so I said nothing and just stared up at the darkness until the sun rose hours later and began to cast long shadows on the bedroom walls, which were celery green.
I hadn’t seen Jill’s mom and stepdad since the day Jill married Derek. They looked like smaller, more wrinkled versions of themselves, despite the fact that they were avid hikers and ate vegan. As we ate breakfast together—bananas and peanut butter on raisin bread—I couldn’t help noticing how at ease Jill was around her parents, who both smiled at their daughter and listened to her and often touched and hugged and kissed her. I kept thinking that if I’d had parents even half as nice as Jill’s, I would never live so far away from them.