Silence (38 page)

“Maybe five. Why?” Alison raised an eyebrow, and Emma nodded in response. She stood stil, in front of Eric, while Alison dragged Michael through the doors of the school.

“Are you leaving?” Emma asked him.

“Leaving?”

“School. You aren’t realy a student here.”

He hesitated and then said, “No. If it’s al right with you, I’d like to stay.”

This surprised her, but she covered it by saying, “Not if it means we have to keep Chase, too.”

“I heard that.”

Eric chuckled, but he looked pained. “You have to keep Chase, too. He’s enroled.”

“But—”

“The old man insisted.”

“The old man who was going to shoot me? And probably shoot you as wel?”

“That one.”

“But—but why?”

“Because he’s decided he’s not going to shoot you. Or me.

Wel, not for that at any rate. Emma—”

She looked at him for a long while, and then she smiled.

His turn to look slightly confused. “What? Have I got something on my face?”

“No. But you know, you did stand between me and a loaded gun. That’s not a bad character trait in a guy.” She nodded toward the door. “Unless you want to beat my late-slip colection, we can talk about this later.”

She started up the stairs, and Eric fel in beside her; Chase puled up the rear. “You realize,” he said, sounding aggrieved, “that you’re forcing me to go to school and listen to a bunch of boring teachers talk about crap that has nothing to do with my life?”

“So sue me.”

Eric laughed, and Emma smiled again, less hesitantly. It wasn’t al despair and loss, this whole living business. Sometimes, it was good. It was important to hold on to that.

On Tuesday night, Emma went to the graveyard. She took Petal, her phone, and Milk-Bones, and she made her long and meandering way through the residential streets, where lights were on in different rooms.

Petal was, of course, offended by the nighttime excursions of the local wildlife, and Emma caught a glimpse of raccoons when she was almost yanked off her feet because she was foolishly holding the lead. She continued to hold it, however.

She looked for ghosts, for patches of strangeness in the architecture, but the dead—at least in this neighborhood—were sleeping. And Eric had said graveyards were peaceful because the dead didn’t go there.

Emma, who was not dead, did.

She had thought that, with the realization that Nathan was somewhere else, she could give up these nightly excursions, but somewhere else, she could give up these nightly excursions, but she’d come to understand that she didn’t go for Nathan’s sake; she went for her own. For the quiet that Eric himself seemed to prize.

It was a place in which she never felt the need to say I’m fine.

S he didn’t feel the need to talk, or be interesting, or be interested; she could breathe here, relax here, and just be herself.

Whoever that was.

She found a wreath of flowers standing on a thin tripod, just in front of Nathan’s grave, and she swept a few falen leaves from the base of the headstone before she settled into the slightly dewy grass. It had started here.

Petal butted her with the top of his broad, triangular head, and she made a place for him in her lap, scratching absently behind his ears. The sky was clear, and the stars, insofar as any city with profuse light polution had stars, were bright and high.

She could pretend, if she wanted, that the entire past week hadn’t happened. She couldn’t as easily pretend that the last few months hadn’t happened, and that hurt more. But…maybe she was selfish. Seeing Maria, meeting her, had left her with the sense that she was not entirely alone; that she was not even the only person to suffer the loss she’d suffered.

It helped. She scratched Petal’s head, fed him, and looked at the moon for a bit. It was good to be here. It was good, as wel, to be home. To be with friends. She rose, picked up Petal’s leash, and began to head there.

But as she started toward the path, she stopped, because someone stood in the moonlight. There wasn’t a lot of other light someone stood in the moonlight. There wasn’t a lot of other light here, but it didn’t matter. Emma didn’t need a flashlight to know who it was.

She walked, slowly, toward him, and when she was a couple of feet away, she stopped.

She hadn’t expected to see him. Not here, and not for years.

Certainly not in the graveyard where she had come for the silence and privacy that he had given her while they were together.

She wanted to hug him. She was afraid to blink. But his lips turned up in that familiar little half-smile as he waited, as if he knew she couldn’t decide what to do. She wanted to say so much, ask so much. But in the end, because he was dead and she knew it, she held out her hand. He took it, and cold blossomed in her palm, spreading up her arm.

She wondered what he felt, if he felt her hand at al.

“Helo, Nathan,” she said quietly.

“Helo, Em.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michele Sagara lives in Toronto with her husband and her two sons, where she writes a lot, reads far less than she would like, and wonders how it is that everything can pile up around her and wonders how it is that everything can pile up around her when she’s not paying attention. Raising her older son taught her a lot about ASD, the school system, and the way kids are not as unkind as we, as parents, are always terrified they wil be Having a teenage son—two, in fact—gives her hope for the future and has taught her not to shout, “Get off my lawn” in moments of frustration. She also gets a lot more sleep than she did when they were younger.