I went out after a while and put my arms around him. “When you’re ready, Sweetheart.”
He patted my hand and stared up at the sky. “Do you need me?”
“No, Sweetie. I’m all right.”
He nodded.
Oliver did nothing for hours. I let him be. Sometimes it was best to just let Oliver alone when he was upset and allow him come to me when he was ready to talk.
He came in for dinner, but he wasn’t eating. Neither of us were. “I just spoke with Lance two weeks ago,” He said softly. “He never told me he was ill. His funeral’s the day after tomorrow. Alex and Lucy’ll ride with us to Caernarfon to pay our respects.”
“Of course.”
It didn’t seem real to me at all that one of us could have died. Not one of us Bennington kids. It didn’t sink in that any of it was actually true and not some horrible dream until we got to the church where Lance’s memorial service was being held.
It was very hard to take. There were dozens of people wandering about that none of us knew. They looked at us oddly. It seemed like they should be the ones out of place, not us. I caught myself looking for Lance in the crowd, as if I would see the top of his head cutting a path around the shoulders of everyone else and hear him call, “Silvia! How are you, Dear?” It was at that moment I caught sight of the coffin and him in it.
He looked so tiny lying there, like a child’s body with an old man’s face. Even with the work they’d done on him it was easy to see he’d suffered. His dirty blond hair had fallen out and the patches that were left had turned dark grey. He had deep set circles under his eyes. His once pudgy face was drawn, painted the wrong shade of peach and his teeth looked too large beneath his lips. He didn’t look like the Lance I’d known in life.
“Oh, my,” Lucy whispered what I was thinking, “Is that him?”
“It is,” Alexander’s voice was barely audible. He walked to his old mate and covered his frozen hands with his own. “Ah, Christ! Lance!”
“I can’t stand this,” Oliver looked away from the casket.
I took his hand. “I know, Sweetheart. None of us can. I can’t either.” My eyes stung with tears. I looked away and across the room, but I could not stop them from falling.
“I can’t look at him,” Oliver swallowed, “He looks so…so small.”
“He wasn’t very big, Oliver.”
My husband looked at me. His beautiful brown eyes glowed with tears, “He wasn’t small to me, Sil. To me he was always very big. He was always very, very big.”
Alexander embraced his brother, “This is rough, Boyo.”
“He looks so tiny. As if he was helpless all his life. Lance was not helpless. He was strong. He was…” My husband trailed off. He clutched his brother’s shoulders. His eyes were wide, almost wild, “This is Lancelot, Alexander! This is Lance Crosby! Lance Crosby can’t be dead! It isn’t right!”
Alex held tight to his brother, “But he is,” He whispered, a single teardrop fell from his eye. It clung to the dimple in his chin, “I wish he wasn’t, but he is. And, no, it isn’t right. There isn’t anything right about it. I hate this!” He hissed, “I fucking hate this!”
It was then that Lucy spotted Merlyn Pierce, who was standing against a far wall. We were all grateful to have a reason to walk away.
“How are you?” Merlyn hugged each of us in turn. We answered in generic terms, “You OK, Mate?” He directed the question to Oliver, who shrugged and looked at his feet.
“Just trying desperately not to snivel,” He didn’t look up. He tightened his face into a frown and closed his eyes, pinching back his tears.
The conversation ended quickly. People were gathering to listen to each other speak tributes to Lance. Alexander, Oliver, Lucy and I took seats in the second row of chairs with Merlyn and Penny behind us. Oliver held my hand as people clamoured up to speak of our old school chum. I knew my husband was thinking about anything he could instead of how his best friend’s body was lying in a casket not even thirty feet away. He stared at a beautiful spray of roses that Sandy had sent. They were yellow, pink, orange and blue. Happy colours that matched the ones Lance wore in his favourite scarf, the one we’d see him in every chance it was cold enough to wear it. I knew Sandy had done that on purpose. She had always been so thoughtful.
“…and I know my dad had loads of buds, too,” His daughter sniffed from the podium, “And some of his buds he’d kept since he was eleven years old. He told me a story about when his mum first brought him to Bennington, the school I attend now. He said he was afraid because he knew he would be smaller than the other boys and someone was bound to pick on him. And he was picked on, on his second day by an older boy. He said this boy was monstrous, had him by the jacket and he didn’t know what he was planning to do. But a set of twins came along and they started telling the boy off. This bully tried to hit one of them, but the other one jumped up on to his back. He held the boy down while the other twin pulled the boy’s pants so far up his bum that he cried. Daddy said he was never afraid again after that because he was never alone.”
I watched the memory of that wash over Oliver and Alexander. They exchanged bittersweet smiles. Merlyn put a hand on each of their backs. I hadn’t known that story, but it didn’t surprise me that it had happened.
When his daughter was done speaking, his wife asked if there was anything anyone else wanted to say. Alexander looked at Oliver, but Oliver immediately choked up and shook his head. “I can’t,” He said in a harsh whisper, “You do it.”
“I’d like to say something,” Alex called out.
“Please do!” Lance’s wife, Daneen, smiled sincerely, “Hello! Thank you so much for coming! Are you Alexander or Oliver? I can never tell.”
“I’m Oliver.” He waited a second, “Just joking. I am Alex.”
She laughed. “You do that to me every time!”
Alexander stepped up behind the podium. “I’m Alexander Dickinson. That there’s my brother, Oliver, if you couldn’t tell.” He pointed to us, “And his wife, Silvia, in the green dress. The pretty lady in the blue dress is my wife, Lucy. The other bloke’s Merlyn Pierce. We’ve all known Lance since we were little kids,” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and then back again, “That’s a true story about what happened to Lance second day at Bennington. Mind, I did get hit a couple of times and so did Oliver, but somehow Ollie managed to get Sean Donnelly down to the ground and I didn’t know what to do, so I yanked his pants up to his ears,” Everyone laughed, “The band ripped. Poor guy. But I was happy to do it for Lance.”
“It was one of those things you don’t plan, how we got to be friends with Lance. There were too many first year boys at Bennington that year, so instead of two to a room, we got three. Poor Lance got tossed in with me and Ollie. Alphabet, yeah? Crosby, Dickinson, Dickinson. I remember Ollie and me, we were scared, too, but we had each other. Lance, he was all by himself. That first night my brother and I didn’t pay him much mind, we were putting stuff away and messing around, being cocky. Lance hardly said a word. I never thought about how scared he really must have been.”
“Next morning Ollie and me were trying to sort the way to class and we heard some codswallop happening on the other side of the wall. So off we go to take a look and there’s some big meatball of a kid picking on the bloke we shared a room with. Ollie starts after him by himself, says, ‘Leave ‘em alone, you…’ mind, I better not use the word he did. Anyway, we marched right over and picked a fight. We were eleven and we saved Lance from a third year, we did. But we did more than that. We landed him in detention with us, second day!”
Everyone laughed again, even Oliver. Alexander paused, scratched his cheek and continued, “And it wasn’t the last time, either! We got Lance into all kinds of mischief. We had him rubbing soap on windows, turning off the hot water on people in the showers. Sneaking in and rearranging the furniture in Professor Wilkins private quarters in the middle of the night so he’d wake up and be all disoriented. That was interesting.”