Niles Offborth
Friend
Brother
Husband
Father
We’ll see you again, our Golden Boy
Before everyone departs back to my house for dinner, I move to the other side of his headstone to speak. “I have something I’d like to close with.”
My family waits with dried cheeks and anticipation stilling their movements.
“When I met Niles in the asylum, he insisted on telling me all about his belief in soulmates. He was so passionate of the idea that there is that one person for everyone. That divine other half who was aligned with the stars. Well, he gave me a definition of soulmates that I have agreed with every day since…until today. Soulmates: when you find them, there is no life without them. Now on this day, as I stand in front of Niles’s soulmate and beloved wife he has left behind—I can tell you, like many things, he was wrong. There is life still. Because he is not gone! Not really. He lives right here…” I hold one hand over my heart, and the other over Marilynn’s. “He is that warm feeling when you hug someone you love. He’s the snide comment. He’s the inflated egotistical thought you’ll get when you look in the mirror. He’s in every joke you hear. The laughter of children. He’s the wind and the trees. And he’s cheering his wife and son on, every second he’s gone.”
I touch Niklaus’s cheek and break apart. “He was your mother’s soulmate, but he loved being your dad more than anything in the world.”
Niklaus’s eyes fall closed. In peace. In guilt. In sorrow. In complete and utter loss of words.
“Now, we’re going inside to eat all of Niles’s favorite foods. We’ll drink and tell his most embarrassing stories. Because our golden boy isn’t gone. He’s just waiting for that special group hug when we’re all ready to join him.”
As Rydran, Renly, Krimson, Sapphire, and Niklaus enter the house—my lifelong found family remains at Niles’s grave. Kane comes to the front just for this.
With a confusing mix of smiles and tears, we complete the group hug in honor of Niles. And it’s sad, every group hug merged so delicately into these passing seconds. It’s the hug around Ruth when she lost her legs. It’s the hug when Dessin broke me out of captivity with Absinthe and Albatross. It’s time on the Fun House stage when we’d catch each other and drop Niles just to embarrass him. It’s a ray of sunshine and a dark storm cloud perfectly aligned.
It’s a Niles group hug that will not be whole for a long, long time.
77.The Talk
Niklaus
It’s midnight, and I havequietly snuck out of the Valdawell house to stand over their lagoon and stare vacantly at the reflection of the moon rippling along the indigo surface of the water.
Sapphire is catching Krimson up on everything that’s happened.
My mother has fallen asleep in Aunt Skylenna’s arms on the couch.
And I had to get out of there. It’s impossible to navigate these conflicting feelings combating in my chest. My love for Sapphire and my guilt for those I’ve lost. I’m numb and in so much pain all at once. I am ten years older than the woman I love now. Ten years of experience being tortured and beaten in that prison. Of getting to know Sophia and Jack and mourning them because I know the fatal endings they both met.
I’m fucking confused and distraught and screaming alone in the middle of that prison cell, locked away like a rabid animal no one wanted to go near. I’m still there. And I don’t know how to get out. I can still smell the strange, toxic algae that clung to the walls. The rotting corpses they’d forget about in the less important underground cages. My misery hanging in the damp air like a sword over my head.
I’m still there.
Even though I’m technically out now, I can’t sit with my father and tell him all about it. Let him make ironic jokes to get me to laugh. Then eventually empathize with me. Share his own demons so that we may compare them.
He’s gone.
“I know that look very well.”
My eyes leave the moon’s reflection, finding Sapphire’s father watching me from his leaned stance against a tree. Hands in pockets. A calm, considering expression. Reading different features on me.
“What look is that?” I ask.
“The look of man who hasn’t escaped his imprisonment yet.”
My jaw twitches, and I turn back to the lagoon.
