Beautiful Darkness(16)

L? Where are you?

I scanned the room. The wall over her bed wasn't covered with the remnants of the books Lena loved. It was covered in something else.



Nobody the dead man & Nobody the living

Nobody is giving in & Nobody is giving

Nobody hears me but just Nobody cares

Nobody fears me but Nobody just stares

Nobody belongs to me & Nobody remains

No Nobody knows Nothing

All that remains are remains





Nobody and Nobody. One of them was Macon, right? The dead man.

Who was the other? Me?

Was that who I was now, Nobody?

Did all guys have to work this hard to figure out their girlfriends? Untwisting the twisted poems written all over their walls in Sharpie or cracked plaster?

All that remains are remains.

I touched the wall, smearing away the word remains.

Because all that remained was not remains. There had to be more than that — more to Lena and me, more to everything. It wasn't just Macon. My mom was gone, but as the last few months had shown, some part of her was with me. I had been thinking about her more and more.

Claim yourself. It had been my mom's message to Lena, written in the page numbers of books, scattered across the floor of her favorite room at Wate's Landing. Her message to me didn't have to be written anywhere, not in numbers or letters or even dreams.

Lena's floor looked a little like the study that day, books lying open all over the place. Except these books were missing their pages, which sent a different message altogether.

Pain and guilt. It was the second chapter of every book my Aunt Caroline had given me about the five stages of grief, or however many stages of grief people say there are. Lena had covered shock and denial, the first two, so I should've seen this one coming. For her, I guess it meant giving up one of the things she loved the most. Books.

At least, I hoped that's what it meant. I stepped carefully around the empty, burnt book jackets. I heard the muffled sobs before I saw her.

I opened the closet door. She was huddled in the darkness, hugging her knees to her chest.

It's okay, L.

She looked up at me, but I wasn't sure what she was seeing.

My books all sounded like him. I couldn't make them stop.

It doesn't matter. Everything's okay now.

I knew things wouldn't stay that way for long. Nothing was okay. Somewhere along the way between angry and scared and miserable, she had turned a corner. I knew from experience there was no turning back.





Gramma had finally intervened. Lena would be going back to school next week, like it or not. Her choice was school or the thing nobody said out loud. Blue Horizons, or whatever the Caster equivalent was. Until then, I was only allowed to see her when I dropped off her homework. I trudged all the way up to her house with a Stop & Steal bag's worth of meaningless worksheets and essay questions.

Why me? What did I do?

I guess I'm not supposed to be around anyone who gets me worked up. That's what Reece said.

I'm what gets you worked up?

I could feel something like a smile tugging at the back of my mind.

Of course you are. Just not the way they think.

When her bedroom door finally swung open, I dropped the sack and pulled her into my arms. It had only been a few days since I'd seen her in person, but I missed the smell of her hair, the lemons and rosemary. The familiar things. Today I couldn't smell it, though. I buried my face in her neck.

I missed you, too.

Lena looked up at me. She was wearing a black T-shirt and black tights, cut into all kinds of crazy slits up and down her legs. Her hair was squirming loose from the clasp at the back of her neck. Her necklace hung down, twisting on its chain. Her eyes were ringed with darkness that wasn't makeup. I was worried. But when I looked past her to her bedroom, I was even more worried.

Gramma had gotten her way. There was not a burnt book, not a thing out of place in the room. That was the problem. There wasn't one streak of Sharpie, not a poem, not a page anywhere in the room. Instead, the walls were covered with images, taped carefully in a row along the perimeter, as if they were some kind of fence trapping her inside.

Sacred. Sleeping. Beloved. Daughter.

They were photographs of headstones, taken so close that all I could make out was the rough stubble of the rock behind the chiseled words, and the words themselves.

Father. Joy. Despair. Eternal Rest.

“I didn't know you were into photography.” I wondered what else I didn't know.

“I'm not, really.” She looked embarrassed.

“They're great.”

“It's supposed to be good for me. I have to prove to everyone that I know he's really gone.”

“Yeah. My dad's supposed to keep a feelings journal now.” As soon as I said it, I wished I could take it back. Comparing Lena to my dad couldn't be mistaken for a compliment, but she didn't seem to notice. I wondered how long she had been climbing around His Garden of Perpetual Peace with her camera, and how I had missed it.

Soldier. Sleeping. Through a glass, darkly.

I came to the last picture, the only one that didn't seem to belong with the rest. It was a motorcycle, a Harley leaning against a gravestone. The shiny chrome of the bike looked out of place next to the worn old stones. My heart started to pound as I looked at it. “What's this one?”