“Thank you for coming here with me,” he says.
A bunch of trite responses spring to mind—you’re welcome, don’t mention it, no problem, it’s the least I can do—but none of them feel right, so I simply say, “I wanted to come.”
He nods, glances briefly at the white stone bench beside his uncle’s grave that serves as his mother’s headstone. He takes a deep breath, and lets it out. “I should get out of here, too.”
“You want me to go with you?” I ask.
“No. I’ll be all right,” he says, and for a moment there’s the shimmer of tears in his eyes. He turns away, then pauses and turns back. He smiles in a sad way and gazes straight into my eyes. “This is going to sound weird and inappropriate, probably … but will you go out with me, Clara?”
“Out where?” I ask stupidly.
“On a date,” he says.
“What, you mean now?”
He laughs like he’s embarrassed. “God,” he says, then covers his face with his hands. “I’m going home.” He uncovers his face and smiles at me sheepishly. “But maybe when we get back to school. I mean it. An official date.”
A date. I flash back to prom two years ago, the way it felt to stand in the circle of Christian’s arms while we danced, enveloped by his smell, his warmth, gazing up into his eyes and feeling like I’d finally broken through with him, that he was finally seeing me.
Of course, that was before Kay had a meltdown and Christian opted to take her home instead of me.
He sighs. “I’m never going to live that down, am I?”
“Probably not.”
“So that’s a no, then?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I mean no, it’s not a no. It’s a yes. I will go out with you.” I don’t even need to think about it. With us it’s always been forest fires and formal dances and funerals. Don’t we deserve something normal for once? And it’s been more than six months since I broke up with Tucker. It’s time, I decide, to give this thing with Christian a shot.
“I’m thinking dinner and a movie,” he says.
“I’d love to go to dinner and a movie.”
And now we suddenly don’t know what to say to each other, and my heart is beating fast, and the men are shoveling the last layer of earth over Walter Prescott.
“I’m going to—” I point up the hill toward my own mother’s grave, a simple marble headstone under the aspens.
He nods, then shoves his hands in his pockets and makes his way down toward his truck. I watch him drive away. When he’s gone, I climb the hill, pausing on the concrete stairs that I saw so often in my vision last year. The cemetery seems different to me now, in the snow: uglier, colder, a gray, deserted place.
I stand for a few minutes, looking at my mother’s grave. There’s a smudge of dirt on the top corner of the headstone, and I rub at it with my gloved hand, but I can’t get it to come clean.
Some people go to cemeteries to talk to the person who died. I wish I could do that, but the minute the words Hi, Mom come out of my mouth, I feel stupid. She’s not here. Her body, maybe, but I don’t really want to think about her body here, under the earth and snow. I know where she is now. I saw her in that place, walking into the sunrise, making her way from the outer edge of heaven. She’s not here, in that box, under the ground.
I wonder if, when I die, I’ll be buried here, too.
I walk to the chain-link fence at the edge of the graveyard, stare past it into the snow-filled forest beyond. I feel something then, a familiar sadness, and I know who has joined me.
“Come out,” I call. “I know you’re there.”
There is a moment of silence before I hear footsteps in the snow. Samjeeza emerges from the trees. He stops a few feet from the fence, and a sense of déjà vu washes over me. I throw up a mental wall between us, blocking him from my mind. We stare at each other.