“The tea is from India. Spices are rich there and create such wonderful things, don’t you think?” Rose clutched the china teacup with both of her withering hands that were wrinkled with lines of history and age as she tipped the neck of her silver flask into the tea.
I, too, held on tightly to a hot cup in my hand as I tried to spread some kind of warmth to the rest of my body to infiltrate the ice in my veins and my Antarctic blood. The weather was typical for an occasion like this, with rain spitting at every pedestrian as he walked and clouds that hung so low the leaves of the trees were engulfed entirely.
“Ms. Walker, would you like to say anything to Jack before we end here?” The conductor motioned towards Rose with his pale hand drawing all eyes of the audience to us as we stood in the back. People twisted in their seats to get a better look and cast glances of pity and sorrow from beneath their ancient black veils and hats.
To my surprise, Rose walked forward and took a slow drag of her tea, preparing to speak. With the shaky, yet well formed speech that older women tend to possess she walked to the coffin raised above the mud, slapped its mahogany loudly and exclaimed, “Good riddance!”
Gasps sounded in the crowd and Rose greeted them with smiles and waves as she waltzed back to me, teacup still in hand, and motioned for me to walk away with her.
I’ve got to agree, she was right in her statement. Jack Walker was a jerk.
      ***
The story of my parents leaving me was not an interesting or heartbreaking one in the least. Having grown up in the age of hippies and stoners, they converted to Buddhism about a year ago and left me at my grandparents’ saying they went off to “find themselves” after it happened. I was stuck living with two, smelly old people who stopped loving each other in the early years of marriage, decades ago. Maybe they did love each other, but it was more like a default setting of their speech and nature instead of a mindful feeling.
I’d spent the first week in their residence moping around and feeling sorry for myself and the fact that my parents literally left me on someone’s doorsteps to go off in a group of weirdos to get in touch with their spirits instead of reality. Then, after I was too bored in my room and had fulfilled my emotional capacity with tears, I eventually went out to the kitchen. Grandma Rose was a character. One you’d read about and laugh to yourself because people like her shouldn’t really exist outside of stories, but there she was in the flesh, existing and all. When I entered the kitchen on day eight, Max was leaning and reading his newspaper by the refrigerator while Rose was maneuvering around him to gather her ingredients. Cigarette in hand, she mashed together the cookie dough with the mixer and screeched for Max to assist her or leave the room, in the kindest and calmest translation. With a grunt, he was off in a couple slow steps.
“Luke! You’re alive!” Rose smirked as she jogged over to me, parts of her jiggling in places I’d rather not think about. “What do you think we should do first? I have a brand new deck of cards, the cookies are in the oven, we could-”
“I think I’m going to go out for a bit with some friends, okay Grandma? We can play gin rummy when I get home.” I insisted, already making a move to the front door around the corner.
If you are someone who can draw basic conclusions from obvious clues, you can probably tell that I was lying. The truth was that I wanted to get out. Just out. I wanted to walk around under the streetlights and feel their soft glows and try to force myself to feel something. Anything. I began walking with no definite, decided endpoint, but as the minutes ticked by, my feet carried me back to the graveyard. There, I wound my way through the emerging heads of stone and tried to find his name like a lost someone in a bookstore sorting through titles. It felt so wrong doing that, because he wasn’t a book title. There was more to him than a couple words on the spine. There was chapters and a beautiful cover and a wonderful story waiting to unfold as someone turned the pages of him. But, when he died his massive volume was condensed into a skimpy couple of pages with a tattered cover. When I found it, I stood on top of where his coffin must have laid six feet deeper.
“Hey, Jack. I don’t really know how to uh… do this I guess,” I looked at my shoes and shyly away as if he was watching me with some ashamed and confused expression from the heavens or whatever people believe in nowadays. After taking a deep breath and pulling myself together, I tried again.
“Hey, Jack. Listen, we didn’t have the best relationship but you’re still related to me. You are still my brother. You taught me how to play cards and the proper way to smuggle whiskey out of the liquor cabinet.You took me camping and left me to set up the tents by myself to teach me some kind of lesson about how I could not do anything useful in basic manly tasks,” I laughed softly, took a breath, and wiped away the tears that, to my surprise, had started to form in the corners of my eyes. “So why the hell is it taking me so long to process the fact that you died? Why do I still say you ‘are’ instead of ‘were’? You are still alive in my head. I still picture your blonde hair with its roots colored brown and your blue eyes that everyone seemed to fall in love with. You are tall and kind and smart. Do you remember the time you switched my hair gel with toothpaste and SOMEHOW I went like a year without noticing?” Now, I was laughing harder and in my mind, Jack was somewhere laughing too.
“Or how about that time when mom and dad were meditating in the living room and you brought in worms from outside and dropped them on their heads from upstairs? You were such a prick but people could never not love you. Listen to me now, you ‘were’ such a prick. Maybe I am finally coming to terms with what happened. Probably not. I’ll see you later, bud.”
I was frantically crying then, the ugly kind with sniffling and moaning and puffy eyes with no intention of stopping their rainfalls for the day. It must of been a sight for her that night, a five foot nine, teenage boy dressed in all black sobbing in a cemetery.
“Eh, you talk to dead people too?” A girl turned around to face me from a couple feet and gravestones away. I must’ve been so invested in my crazy talk and tears to have noticed her.
“All the time,” I quietly responded, trying to wipe all remnants of sadness away from my face. Normally, I’d walk away or run from any stranger in a cemetery late at night, but then I was vulnerable and her auburn hair that fell around her face in long locks was comforting in a way. She was wearing a long black dress that fell to her knees with sleeves of intricate lace pulled over her pale skin. High heels of the same darkness were muddy and now their points punctured the grass.
“You can talk to me, if you’d like. I’d prefer to hear someone else’s sob story instead of my own.” The girl gently stated in a neutral tone as if trying to keep me away from fleeing or falling into a deep hole of sadness. She wanted me to talk, and who was I to refuse a beautiful girl in a black dress?
“My brother died three years ago. Jumped off the Golden Gate. No one really knew why because everyone seemed to love him just as much as he loved life. Sure, he was a prankster who poked at people’s buttons sometimes, but that’s why I think they liked him so much. Because his mischievous acts were intervals in their boring, daily lives,” I had never spoken like this to someone before and once I started, I couldn’t stop. “He was seventeen at the time. Now, he’d be eighteen and starting to live his life. I’d still be the kid brother, three years younger,who he’d talk to all the time about how to survive the next few years of high school and how to get the girls and try out for the football team. But he can’t. When he died, my parents left to go heal on some Buddhist retreat overseas and they left me here. Here with my grandparents, left to fend for myself.”
“You feel guilty,” was all she said.
The air around us was cold and her statement cut through its ice with a knife that shoved itself deep in my chest. But when it split my skin, I only felt relief. Her three words explained everything.
“Yeah, I do. Because I don’t process things. I didn’t cry when he died. I didn’t cry when we got that phone call or when my mom and dad collapsed onto the kitchen floor. I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t feel anything. All I knew was that one day, it would click. One day, I’d be living like a normal person and the fact that he died would hit me. Then, I would be sad and mourn for a period of time and after that, I would recover and move on. But that hasn’t happened yet. It has been a year and I cry every time I think of him sleeping somewhere in the ground, surrounded by strangers and not the people he loves. I cry because I am living my life and the world is still rotating and no one seems to care about Jack Walker. It’s like he didn’t even exist. I feel guilty, not because he is dead, but because I am alive.”
It was as if I was burried alive for these years and now I had finally crawled to the Earth’s surface and breathed in the air it had to offer me. The weight of the dirt above me was lifted off and now I could breath easily without rocks in my throat. Right then, I felt alive.
When I looked to my left which was where the girl once stood, there was nothing. The girl had melted into the night sky with her dress while her pale skin was split to create the stars. It was only me, there, me and my newfound truth. What I would do with it is another story for another time, but right then all that mattered was the sky who had given me my words.