Part 42 (1/2)

Of course, she didn't think about him every day. That would have been crazy. It had been over a decade. A decade and a half. She'd dropped out the semester he got killed and finally finished up her degree at three different schools on the West Coast. She'd been married, divorced, and she liked her job. She was completely sane. She didn't drink.

But she often found herself thinking, He was the one.

”Of course the one that gets away is always the one,” her friends would say.

But Perry Edwards hadn't gotten away.

He was everywhere after he died. He was in every guy who turned a corner, or drove by, or asked her to dance, or bought her a drink in a bar.

After he died, Perry Edwards was the air. He was everywhere.

”Maybe you should visit his grave,” her therapist had said. ”It'll give you a sense of closure.”

Okay, Karess had thought. I can do that. Okay.

So here she was, pulling off the freeway, driving through the kind of town she didn't think existed anymore. A church on every corner. Little houses with little porches. There was an actual dog tied to an actual tree in a front yard. Jesus, Toto, I don't think we're in LA anymore.

It took two stops at two gas stations to get directions to the cemetery, and then she started to wonder how she'd ever thought she'd find his grave: there were four times as many people buried here than there could possibly be alive in this f.u.c.king town.

She parked. She got out.

It was a typical late September day. Karess remembered, vaguely, these kinds of September days from her freshman year in college in this state. The raggedy leaves. The spooky branches of the trees. The sense of things fading and dying, but springing up crazily one last time before they did-blazing, writhing. Look at me!

s.h.i.+t.

There were rows and rows and rows of Shepards. That must have been one big miserable family, stuck in Bad Axe for generations. And a little circle of Rushes. Mother, Father, Beloved Son. Karess wandered through the old part of the cemetery to the new part. He hadn't been gone that long, after all. Some Owenses. Some Taylors. A crowd of German names. And then she decided maybe she should follow her gut. She'd close her eyes. She'd turn around. She'd let her instincts guide her.

It didn't work.

She found herself under a tree. Like all the others, it was losing its leaves. They were falling all around her. Orange and red. She could smell the earth. The gra.s.s. That dampness. Moldy, like old clothes. Loamy. Cool.

She would, she decided, sit down. She would close her eyes for a little while and rest, and when she felt more energetic, she would go back to the entrance-those wrought-iron gates she'd pa.s.sed through-and start over, and she would kneel down if she had to and brush the leaves off every f.u.c.king name, look at every single grave, even if it took her all day.

Even if it took her days.

110.

There was a sad landmark on every block of that town: The bench they'd sat on, watching the other students walk by-backpacks, short skirts, iPods. The tree they'd stood under in a downpour, laughing, kissing, chewing cinnamon gum. There was the bookstore where he'd bought the collection of poems by Pablo Neruda for her, and the awful college sports bar where they'd first held hands. It was called something else now, but from outside it looked the same. There were the pretend Greek columns that pretended to hold up the roof of the Llewellyn Roper Library, and Grimoire Gifts, where he'd bought the amber ring for her-set in silver, a globe of ancient sap with a little prehistoric fruit fly trapped in it forever.

And the Starbucks where they went to study night after night and never opened a book.

Craig's father, beside him, said, ”Son, slow down,” and Craig said, ”Sorry, Dad.” His father had been blind for years now, and one of his worst fears was getting into an accident he couldn't see coming.

Craig just wished his father could see it with him. The beauty of it was the strangeness, the familiarity. The girls in their short skirts. The guys with their weird hair.

”You won't recognize the place,” Debbie had said. She still lived there, worked at the university hospital. She'd become a doctor, and over the years had remained Craig's best cyber-friend. They emailed every week, although they'd seen each other only a handful of times in the last decade, when they'd met up in various places they happened to be flying through. Her husband was a doctor, too. Back in New Hamps.h.i.+re, Craig had a wife and two kids and a little house that backed up to a little mountain. He'd built his father a small, solid cabin on the property.

”Just stay away, Craig. I mean, I'd love to see you. But you have no idea. It'll freak you out-not because you'll remember it, but because you won't.”

Craig had a family now. He'd written a book, published it. He'd traveled the world promoting the book, and had never come back here.

Now he was back.

And Debbie had been wrong.