Beside me Ellen shivers, and I do too, despite the heat of the afternoon. I know Andie’s speaking metaphorically, but it still spooks me. “What’s he say?” I ask, barely suppressing the trembling that tries to invade my voice.
“That he misses us. But that he’s happy, too. He’s in a really good place,” she explains reverently, then looks over her shoulder at both of us. “He’s not here, you know.”
“No, darling, of course not,” Ellen agrees.
“That’s why I asked, Grandma,” she continues. “Just ’cause I know he’s not down there.” She pats the quiet earth beneath her hand by way of explanation.
“Then where is he?” I squint into the sun. Is he high up in some cloudlike heaven? Staring down at all of us today? “Is he there when you dream at night?”
Andrea laughs like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Don’t you know?” She hasn’t laughed this honestly with me in a year, nor smiled so transparently. I even glimpse love in her expression. Ellen releases my arm, as slowly I crouch low beside my daughter.
“No, Andie, tell me. Where’d he go?”
Blue eyes fix me, clear and bright, and I behold the mysteries of my whole universe. “Silly, he’s at the beach,” she says with a dimpled grin. “Surfing. And the waves are always good!”
The beach. Well, of course. Where else would Alexander Barrett Richardson be? Laughter bubbles up from deep within me, unstoppable, despite the incongruity of being here at my lover’s grave.
That’s when the miracle happens.
For once, just once, Andrea lets me pull her tight into my arms, and rock her like she’s still my baby girl.
***
After the cemetery visit, Andrea and I retire to the adjoining upstairs guest rooms for a nap. She doesn’t even complain about that fact, which I’m pretty certain has a lot to do with the cache of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books she discovered in Laurel’s old bedroom trunk. Typical Ellen, though—neither room has ever been fully converted to dedicated guest quarters. Both retain some of their childhood charm and character. Laurel’s room has an antebellum dollhouse that has fascinated Andrea for years, and Alex’s boasts a bunch of surfing and football trophies, as well as tall shelves lined with his favorite books.
But right now, it’s the cigar box on his old bed that’s holding my attention. Ellen told me she’d pulled together some photographs for me to cart home, but I can’t believe she’s really willing to part with all these family pictures. She wants Andrea to have them, she explained. And me. “Darling, I have more in this house than I can possibly keep up with,” she told me. “You must have them.”
Dropping onto the edge of the bed, I thumb through a disheveled heap of photographs and mementos. There’s a wrinkled camp award for “good citizenship,” a handmade potholder, an old journal. That gives me pause, as I crack it open and realize that Al kept it when he was fourteen years old. From what he told me, I wonder if his first confessions about realizing he was gay might be in those pages. I shove the cloth-bound diary to the bottom of the stack to guard his secrets, and then notice a large picture just beneath.
Gingerly, I pull the framed photo out, and at first I hardly recognize him: he can’t be more than twelve years old, riding high atop Casey’s shoulders. Overhead he holds some flag like it’s an exultant trophy, grinning from ear to ear. He’s so small and young and vulnerable that I want to reach into the picture and save him. Save him from anything that might possibly hurt him, and hold him close like I did Andrea earlier.
With a sigh, I roll onto my back and smell his childhood bed. Plaid pillowcase, handmade quilt, it’s all a little musty. Like he really has left this world, same as he once left this room. Quiet—impenetrable quiet—blankets me as I prop my head on my elbow, and watch dust motes waft listlessly in a beam of light. Squinting, I look at Al in the picture again. He had no idea what the world held for him then, but he was just wide open, ready for it all, fearless.
Strange, but I almost feel like it’s me somehow in that crackled photograph, riding high atop the world. For a minute, I close my eyes, and I’m almost certain that it is.
***
Not sure how long it is before I wake up, and for a displaced moment, I think it’s morning. Blinking back the sleep, I even think it’s a year ago, as I scrub a drowsy hand across my face. Then I remember the anniversary and just how much we’ve all lost.
I slept in this room for days after the funeral. Every now and then, I’d rouse from heavy slumber and gaze through the mottled windowpane into the backyard. I’d spy Andrea with her grandmother, sitting in the garden, or see Laurel coming into the back door, arms filled with brown-paper grocery bags. Whenever I tried to awaken during those days, it felt impossible. Like moving under water in a thick dream; like being drugged. Occasionally I’d stumble downstairs, and Ellen would always kiss me, pointing me straight back to bed. “Sleep, darling. You need rest,” she’d chide me.