“Out with it!”
“I ... I was getting Jake his breakfast,” Andy said.
His father struck him hard enough to send him to the floor. The glass broke beneath his hand, and he felt a hot bright pain as his palm was sliced open.
“He’s dead, do you understand me? Dead!”
Andy tasted blood from a cut inside his cheek. Red drops rolled off his wrist and swirled into the pool of spilled milk spreading around the broken glass. It was in this way that Andy realized that some things, once broken, could never be repaired again.
There was a place in the woods where we used to go in the summertime, Mandy and me. A place that was near the lake but that you couldn’t see from the lake and we used to like going there on the days where it was too hot for anything else. We must have gone there five times—no, I know, we went there exactly five times and each time we went it was better than the time before and when we walked back Mandy would hold her sandals in her left hand and my hand in her right and most times we didn’t say anything at all the entire walk back to my father’s van. But on the fifth and last time, the best time of all, she said “Summer’s almost over.” She said it like she was sad but then I looked at her and I said that it didn’t matter, because summer is just a season, and that the only thing that was over was a season. That made her laugh a little and thinking back on it that might have been one of the smartest things I’ve ever said.
I tried to find that place in the woods and I walked and walked and walked and you’d think I’d be able to find it okay because I’d spent the best times of my life there. Literally, the best times of my life, now that my life was over. But I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t have imagined how differently everything looked with just a change of seasons.
I don’t know what I was expecting to find there, even if I could have found it. Mandy wouldn’t have been there. If Mandy had come back she would have been with her father. The only way that Mandy would have been there was if she didn’t come back. Ever. This is what I was thinking but my thinking was so confused it was no wonder I couldn’t find our place in the woods.
Eventually I stopped looking. I stopped looking and decided to go to the place where I thought that Mandy would be, not where she had been.
Bill Trafton’s boy Curtis rose on the sixth day. His parents embraced him, and Cal could hear Sandy Trafton telling Curtis that “everything was going to be all right, everything will be all right.” He watched their embrace from the couch outside the morgue. Curtis’s eyes, unfocused and milky, found Cal’s. Cal had to look away.
Mandy—beautiful Mandy—lifted herself up off of her hospital gurney. She walked down the hallway, one bare foot dragging on the burnished hospital floors. She left the hospital and then fell to her hands and knees at the bottom of the hospital steps, crawling along the snow covered streets until her left arm gave out and she had to push herself forward on her belly like a snake, with intermittent help from her legs. Hours and hours she crept along in this manner until she reached her home. But then it wasn’t her home at all. It was the home of Jake Barnes, and when she lifted her still pretty face from the cement front steps, it wasn’t to a gentle kiss and a warm embrace but to the cocking of a loaded shotgun.
Cal cried out as he fell from his chair upon waking, hitting his head and bruising his hip as he landed. He was aware of other people in the hallway, some rushing toward him. But he was too tired and heartsick to feel any embarrassment. He remained where he’d fallen, his cheek cool against the hospital floor.
“Cal,” he heard a woman’s voice saying. Her hand was on his forehead, warm where all the rest of him was so cold. “Cal, are you all right?”
He opened one eye and saw Dr. Newcomb peering down at him with concern.
“I’m fine,” he said, his voice unfamiliar to his own ears. “Fine.”
She made as though to help him back to his chair, but he shook her off and seated himself again under his own volition.
She waited until he was settled and looking back at her. He could feel his throat constricting even before she spoke.
“Cal,” she said. And then she spoke the words he had been dreading to hear.
“It’s been seven days.”
He buried his daughter on the sunniest day of the month, just a few days before Christmas. He buried her next to her mother and wished that he could tell them to just open up his plot as well so he could crawl in.
There was a large turnout at the service, and just as many, if not more, at the gravesite. His friends, her friends, the dutiful, and the curious. He shook many hands and thanked many people but registered so few.
“We, uh, left Curtis at home,” Bill said to him as he and Sandy stood shivering at the edge of the cemetery road. “We weren’t sure it was, um, appropriate for him to come.”
“Appropriate,” Cal said. They were lowering his daughter into the ground, and Bill was worried about what was appropriate. Cal couldn’t remember ever feeling this tired.
“Curtis doesn’t know what happened,” Bill said. “He remembers that the radio was on and he remembers that he’d had a good time at the party, but he doesn’t really remember what he did. Thank God he doesn’t remember anything about the crash. He doesn’t remember any of it.”
“Thank God,” Cal said.
“If you need anything...,” Sandy Trafton was saying. Cal thanked her before she could finish. He walked back toward his daughter’s grave.
Laura was there with Stevie. She didn’t say anything as she put her arms around Cal and pulled him into a tight embrace. She was crying when she let him go.
Her dead son extended his hand, and Cal took it, unable to feel its temperature through his leather gloves.
“Mister ...Wilson,” Stevie said. “I’m so ... sorry. Mandy ... was a ... good ... friend of ... mine.”
“Thank you,” Cal said. The boy’s eyes were blank and glassy and his expression was flat, just as the well-dressed woman from Boston had mentioned they would be. He was pale, bloodless-looking even in the light of the sun. Cal wished he could talk to the boy, ask him if he’d seen Mandy in those moments when he was on the other side.
“Cal, maybe you shouldn’t be alone tonight. You could stay with me and Stevie, or...”
“Thanks, Laura,” he said, her touch on his arm making him aware that he’d been staring at her son, searching for something in his eyes. “I’ll be fine,” he told her as he forced himself to look away.
“I’m going to call you, Cal,” Laura said. Her thoughts were completely open to him. He could read them as easily as he could the words and names carved into the headstones surrounding them.
Lost his wife, lost his daughter, no real friends to speak of, carries a gun...
He didn’t want her to worry, but he didn’t know how he could convince her not to.
“I’m going to be watching out for you,” she continued.
“I’d like that,” he said, meaning it.
“Why don’t you come to the car now?”
“In a minute.”
He looked out over the cemetery, expecting to see someone who wasn’t there.
She was gone. Watching the cars file out of the cemetery in a long, laborious procession, he knew that she was gone. They’d said many things to each other and he’d meant it all, but in the end he didn’t say the words that mattered most.
And now he couldn’t say anything at all because that part of him wasn’t working anymore. He sat down in the snow, leaned against a wide, flat headstone and concentrated on saying her name. And once he could say her name, he thought, he would say it over and over again.