“You can ride it, too,” he said. “If, you know, you come over to Dad’s sometime.”
“Thanks. That’d be fun.”
He sat around some more, looking uncomfortable the way boys do when they’re sitting somewhere under extreme duress. If I were
a good sister I would have told him to go ahead and do something more fun. But I didn’t mind sitting there with him. He radiated
something that made me feel good inside. Hopeful.
But pretty soon he got up. “Well. I gotta get to Mike’s. We’re going to church tonight.” He ducked his head, as if church
were embarrassing. He walked toward the door. “Well… see ya,” he said awkwardly. And he was gone.
I sank back into my pillows and watched the horses on my wallpaper go nowhere. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself
on one of them again, the way I used to do when I was little. But I couldn’t see it. All I could see was the horses bucking
me off time and again, dumping me on my butt on the hard ground. They had faces, too—Dad’s, Mr. Angerson’s, Troy’s, Nick’s.
Mine.
After a while, I rolled to my back and stared up at the ceiling, realizing at once that there was something I had to do. I
couldn’t change the past. But if I were ever to feel whole again I would have to say goodbye to it.
Tomorrow
, I told myself.
Tomorrow is the day.
Even though I’d never been to Nick’s grave, I knew exactly where it was. For one thing it was on the news about every ten
seconds for the first two months after the shooting. For another I’d heard enough people talking about it to get a pretty
good idea.
I hadn’t told anyone I was coming here today. Who would I tell? Mom? She’d cry, forbid me, probably follow me, screaming at
me out the open driver’s side window. Dad? Well, we weren’t exactly on speaking terms. Dr. Hieler? I would have, but I didn’t
exactly know I was going to do this the last time I saw him. I probably should have; Dr. Hieler probably would have driven
me, and right now my leg wouldn’t hurt so much from walking all this way. My friends? Well, I had kind of kicked all of them
out of my life, one way or another.
I walked down a few rows of neatly kept graves with polished new headstones and unweathered bouquets and found it between
his grandfather Elmer and his aunt Mazie, both of whom I’d heard of, but neither of whom I’d ever met.
I stood and stared for a minute. The wind, which had only begun to shake off the winter, played around my ankles and made
me shiver. It all felt right—my desperation, my chest aching from exertion, the chill, the wind, the gray. This was how
graves were supposed to be, right? It’s how they always were in the movies anyway. Cold, murky. Did the sun ever shine when
you visited the eternal resting place of someone you loved? I doubted it.
Nick’s grave gleamed just like those around it, the light of the overcast sky playing great gray shadows across the words.
Still I could read them:
N
ICHOLAS
A
NTHONY
L
EVIL
1990–2008
Beloved Son
The words “Beloved Son” took me by surprise. It was small, italicized, almost hiding in the grass. As if in apology. I thought
about his mom.
Of course I’d seen her on TV, but it never seemed like the real woman. I knew her as “Ma,” just as Nick had called her, and
she was always so laid-back and nice to me. Always sort of in the background, intent to let Nick and me do our own thing—never suffocating, never issuing edicts about proper behavior. Just cool. I liked her. I often thought of her as my mother-in-law
and enjoyed the fantasy.
Of course Ma would have wanted Nick remembered as a “Beloved Son.” Of course she’d do it in the most laid-back way possible—whispering it to him in tiny letters on his headstone. Just a whisper.
You were beloved, son. You were my beloved. Even after all of this, I still remember the beloved you. I can’t forget.
There was a bouquet of plastic blue roses sticking up from a built-in metal vase at the top of the headstone. I bent and touched
one of the brittle petals, wondering if Nick would’ve been the type to want flowers on his grave, and then I was taken aback
that I had never bothered to know that about him. Three years together and I’d never bothered to ask him if he liked flowers,
if his favorites were roses, if he found the unnatural color of blue on plastic roses to be absurd. And suddenly that felt
like a great tragedy in itself, my not knowing.
I lowered myself to my knees, my leg screaming under me. I reached out with my forefinger and traced Nick’s name.
Nicholas
. I smirked, remembering how I teased him about his name.
“Nicholas,” I had sung, dodging around the corner between the kitchen and dining room, holding the framed photo I’d just snatched
off the fireplace mantel in my hands. “Oh, Nicholas! Come here, Nicholas!”
“You’re going to regret it,” he said from somewhere in the living room. There was a smile in his voice and, even though I
was teasing him over a given name that he truly hated being called, I knew he wanted to catch me not to punish me but to be
playful. “When I get my hands on you…”
He jumped around the corner with an “Aha!” I squealed and ran, laughing through the kitchen and up the stairs toward the bathroom.
“Nicholas Nicholas Nicholas!” I yelled through my laughter. I could hear him laughing and grunting behind me, just on my tail.
“Nicholas Anthony!”
“That’s it!” he cried, lunging for me and catching me around the waist just short of the bathroom. “You’re gonna pay!” He’d
knocked me to the floor and flopped on top of me, tickling me until I cried.
Seemed so long ago now.
I traced the name on his headstone again with my finger. And then again. Somehow it made me feel like the old Nick—the one
tickling me on the hallway floor outside the bathroom on the second floor of his house—was more alive than he’d ever been.
“I don’t hate you,” I whispered, and then I repeated it, louder. “I don’t.” A bluejay answered me in a tree off to my left.
I searched the leaves and branches with my eyes, but never found it.
“It’s about time,” said a voice behind me.
I jumped and whirled around, falling off my knees and onto my butt. Duce was sitting on a concrete bench behind me, leaning
forward, hands dangling between his knees.
“How long have you been sitting here?” I asked, trying to slow my heart by resting my palm on my chest.
“Every day since he died. What about you?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“I know.”
We stared at each other for a minute. Duce’s stare felt like a challenge. Like the way a dog will stare down another dog when
it’s ready to fight.
“So what are you doing here now?” he asked.
I locked eyes with him, this time doing the challenging myself. “You can’t chase me away from here,” I said. “And I don’t
know why you blame me so much anyway. You were his best friend. You could’ve stopped the shooting, too.”
“You were the one with the list,” he countered.
“You were the one who spent the night at his house two days before the shooting,” I snapped, and then added softly, “We could
do this all day. It’s stupid. It’s not going to bring anyone back.”
A car rolled up and an old man gingerly piled out of the back seat, then picked his way to a grave nearby, holding flowers
at his hip. We watched him as he knelt slowly, his head bent over, his chin nearly touching his chest.
“The cops, they questioned me too,” Duce said, still looking at the old man. “They thought maybe I was in on it because I
hung around with him so much.”
“Seriously? I never heard that.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, his face sour. “You were all about poor you, poor Valerie. You were shot. You were grieving. You
were a suspect. You never even considered any of the rest of us. You never even asked, man, how the rest of us were doing.
You totally just ditched us.”
I looked at him, stricken. He was right. I hadn’t asked Stacey during our one visit how anyone else was doing. I hadn’t called
anyone. E-mailed. Nothing. I hadn’t even considered it. “Oh my God,” I whispered, and suddenly I could hear Jessica’s voice
in my ear:
You’re just selfish, Valerie.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think…”
“That Detective Panzella practically lived at my house, man. Took my computer and everything,” Duce said. “But the real kicker
is… I really had no idea. Nick never said anything to me about shooting anybody. He never even warned me or anything.”
“He didn’t warn me either,” I said, but my voice was almost a whisper. “I’m so sorry, Duce.”
Duce nodded, fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette, took his time lighting it. “I felt really stupid for a while, not knowing.
I figured maybe we weren’t as good of friends as I thought. And guilty, too. Like I should’ve known and then I could have
done something. Helped him. But now… I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t tell us to spare us.”
I let out a sarcastic grunt. “Well, if he did plan to spare us, it so didn’t work.”
Duce chuckled softly. “No kidding.”
The old man was struggling to his feet again, pulling his jacket tight around him as he headed back toward his car. I watched
him. “You remember the time we went to Serendipity together? The water park?” I asked.
Duce chuckled. “Yeah, you were a drag that day. All whiny about being cold and hungry and nag nag nag. You wouldn’t let him
have any fun.”
“Yeah,” I said. I looked back at the grave.
Nicholas Anthony.
“And at the end of the day when you guys took off and Stacey and I had to look all over for you and we finally found you
eating Oreos with those two blond girls from Mount Pleasant…”
Duce’s grin widened. “Those girls were hot.”
I nodded. “Yeah, they were. And do you remember what I said to Nick when I found you there?”
I looked up at Duce. He shook his head no. Smiling. Hands dangling.
“I told him I hated him. I said it, in those words. ‘I hate you, Nick.’” I reached down and picked up a dried leaf and began
flaking it to bits with my fingers. “Do you think he knows I didn’t mean it? You don’t think he died thinking I hated him,
do you? I mean, it was forever ago and, you know, we made up that day. But sometimes I worry that he still thought about me
saying that and that maybe, on the day of the… the shooting… when I tried to stop him he remembered me saying I hated him
back at Serendipity and that’s why he killed himself. Because he thought I hated him.”
“Maybe you do hate him.”
I thought about this and then shook my head. “I loved him so much.” I let out an exasperated laugh, shaking my head. “My tragic
flaw.” That’s what Nick would have called it, had I been one of the suffering characters in one of his beloved Shakespeare
tragedies.
I heard a scraping of clothing against concrete. Duce had moved to one side of the bench and was patting the concrete next
to him. I got up and sat next to him. He reached down and picked up my hand. He was wearing gloves and the warmth of his hand
enveloped mine, radiating through my whole body.
“Do you think he did it for me?” I asked softly.
Duce thought about it, spat on the ground at his feet. “I think he had no idea why he did it, man.” It was a possibility I’d
never considered before. Maybe I couldn’t have known what Nick was about to do, because Nick himself didn’t even know.
He let go of my hand, which quickly grew chilly again without the warmth of his glove around it, and slid his arm around me.
It made me feel weird, but not entirely in a bad way. In some ways Duce was the closest to Nick I’d ever be again. In some
ways it felt like Nick’s hand behind me, Nick’s warmth beside me. I leaned my head back into the hollow of his shoulder.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
I nodded.
“If you loved him so much, why weren’t you here before now?”
I chewed my lip. I thought it over. “Because I didn’t really feel like he was here. He was still so much everywhere else I
looked, I didn’t think it was possible for any part of him to be here.”
“He was my best friend,” Duce said. “You know?”
“He was mine, too.”
“I know,” he said. There was an edge to his voice but it was very soft. “I guess. Whatever.”
We sat there in silence for a while, both of us staring at Nick’s grave. The wind picked up and the sky darkened and the leaves
swirled around my ankles in tighter and tighter circles, making them itch. When I began to shiver, Duce pulled his arm away
from me and stood up.
“I’ve gotta go.”
I nodded. “See ya.”
I sat there for a few more minutes after Duce left. I stared at Nick’s grave until my eyes watered and my toes felt numb from
the cold. At last I stood up and brushed a leaf off of the headstone with my toe.
“Bye, Romeo,” I said softly.
I walked away, shivering, and didn’t look back, even though I knew I’d never again go visit his grave. He was Ma’s
Beloved Son
. The words carved in the granite said nothing about me at all.
A police cruiser was sitting in the driveway when I got home, Dad’s car parked behind it and a battered red Jeep behind it.
A feeling of dread washed over me. I trudged up the driveway and let myself in the house.
“Oh, thank God!” Mom cried, rushing from the living room to the front door. She wrapped herself around my neck. “Thank God!”
“Mom… ?” I said. “What’s… ?”
A uniformed officer followed her into the entryway. He looked none too pleased to be there. He was followed by Dad, who looked
even less happy than the officer. I peered into the living room and saw Dr. Hieler, sitting on the couch, the lines in his
face making it look harsh and tired.
“What’s going on?” I asked, pulling away from Mom. “Dr. Hieler… ? Did something happen?”
“We were about to issue an Amber Alert,” Dad said, his voice ragged with anger. “Jesus, what next?”
“Amber alert? Why?”
But then the officer was ambling toward me. “You probably don’t want to be picked up as a runaway,” he said to me. “Just so
you know.”