The Kiss: An Anthology About Love and Other Close Encounters(102)

Luci made a beeline over the thick carpet to the antique dresser against the far wall. Despite its plushness, the perfectly clean carpet didn’t have any vacuum lines. Luci’s mother would be jealous. She was always going on about how her housekeepers never seemed to do as good a job as other peoples’. She only hoped she wasn’t leaving footprints as she leaned over to open the jewelry box on the dresser.

She lifted the top section out of the box to reveal a velvet case. Colby had shown her this case and its contents — his mother’s antique jewelry collection — one day when his parents were out. It had just been a make-out ploy on his part, but because she loved all things with a connection to the past and romantic symbolism, Luci had been pleased with the gesture. And then rewarded him well and fully on his parents’ bed.

She stared down at the antique rosary nestled in the velvet case. Then she took it, tugging it over her head and around her neck. It was a tight fit, but it hid beneath the high collar of her hated black dress and no one would get it off her easily. She returned the empty case and closed the jewelry box, hoping she’d be able to return the rosary without Candace having yet another loss to mourn.

Then she retraced her steps out of the room.





*


After closing the door softly behind her, Luci crossed from Colby’s parents’ room back along to a door she’d skipped the first time she passed through the hall. The room she wasn’t sure she even wanted to enter. The closed door bore a jigsaw-puzzle sign that spelled the name ‘Colby’ in colorful letters. Luci knew she should stop staring. She knew that this sign didn’t even remotely represent her dead boyfriend, but she felt as if she was frozen. The light would be still be on inside, though she couldn’t see so from the hallway where the thick carpeting blocked any bleed … was it his bedside table lamp?

Only a few more steps, she urged herself. Still, the doorknob didn’t turn beneath her resting hand, nor did the metal warm to her touch. She hadn’t been aware of being so cold —

“Even you couldn’t make him happy.”

Though she knew who had spoken, Luci slowly pivoted away from Colby’s bedroom door to see Cicely standing in the open doorway of her own bedroom across the hall. Cicley turned and crossed to her bed. The rumpled covers made it obvious that she’d been sitting there for some time. Cicely’s eyelashes were spiky and slick with her unshed tears. Luci tried to tamp down the inappropriate relief she felt at the rude — quite nasty, really — interruption. She tried to not relish the distraction.

“Everybody thinks you’re so perfect. So pretty,” Cicely said. Her fifteen-year-old sneer was practiced and faultless. “But even you couldn’t fix him. Why didn’t he let you fix him? Why did he need all that … that …”

Luci couldn’t think of anything to say to Cicely that would make finding her brother dead any better. The siblings shared a bathroom. Colby must have known that Cicely would be the one to find him. It was a terrible thing to do to his little sister. An event that would haunt her forever after. Luci turned away and pressed her forehead against Colby’s bedroom door. If she pressed hard and long enough, would the jigsaw ‘C’ forever emboss itself into her forehead? Did she want it to?

“Empty bags of blood and buckets,” Cicely continued. “And … and he cut himself all over. Like some sick ritual.”

Luci hadn’t needed this extra image added to the images she’d already conjured. She was quickly sliding into the emo realm, and it didn’t suit her or her life at all.

“I know you know why.” Cicely started to sob.

“I don’t, really,” Luci finally responded. “Not in a way that makes any sense.” She was talking more to the door than to Colby’s little sister. “I have to do something, but then I’ll come back. Okay?”

“I don’t care,” Cicely cried.

“I’ll come back.”

Cicely curled into a ball on her bed and buried her face in her ruffled purple pillow.

Luci, thankful to still be moving through her grief and not incapacitated on her own bed, turned the door handle and slipped into Colby’s room.





*


Colby’s room didn’t look any different from the last time she’d been here … four days ago now. Still, she took a moment to just stand and stare. She had to take these moments. She had to understand the choices they were both making. She’d thought they could build something between them, something that a poet would one day choose to immortalize …

The walls and ceiling were painted black and covered in neon-white handwritten death-poetry quotes. Colby had always heavily favored Tennyson, while Luci adored the words of Browning and Keats. She’d read something into that, once — something that was obviously just whimsy on her part, because reality was so pained and dark now.

She moved past the bureau. The black paint on the antique was already flaking off. Colby had said that one side had gotten scraped when his family moved from back east. She ran her fingers across and along the books that lined the top shelf of the bookcase as she approached the bed. Colby had mixed the King James Bible, a satanic bible, and the Koran in with books on witchcraft, mythology, and — oddly — Darwin. She didn’t understand his filing system. The entire second shelf was occupied by Victorian poetry, along with a number of secondhand books she’d bought him.