My body works overtime to tell him.
My heart beats in triplets, in syncopated rhythms, stopping and starting as he kisses me.
I like your hair, Zach.
Your smile makes it easier to breathe.
Everything about you is beautiful.
I love you, Zach. I really do.
AFTER
January
The real Zach was right in front of me yesterday and I let him slip by.
“You’ll do it today,” the other Zach—Memory Zach—says from the passenger seat beside me. “He’s not going anywhere.”
“I know,” I say, but I’m feeling the anxiety bubbling up inside me. Both at the prospect of meeting real Zach and at where I’m headed to beforehand.
I left school today thirty minutes earlier than I did yesterday, skipping last period entirely, and this time I’m driving north instead of south, toward Lyndale Heights Cemetery.
When I pull into the parking lot of the cemetery, my stomach does a few somersaults. I’ve never been here in my life, only driven past it, either completely unaware of it or with a fleeting thought, sometimes a prayer, that I’d never have to walk through it.
It hits me even as I think this that remembering has nothing to do with it. I might have been here before, for the burial.
When I shut off the car, I turn and face Memory Zach. Look into his eyes, which are kind and concerned.
Come with me,I want to say, but no, I need to talk to my brother on my own.
Make a joke about concerts for the dead.I want to think about music, the happiest song I know, and I want the little brother I never knew to be hearing it right now, to be somewhere or something that is not dead.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Memory Zach.
He reaches for my hand and squeezes.
“Okay,” he says, instead of what he must want to say:Don’t forget about me.
It is a given, by now, that I won’t, so I don’t bother to say it. Just take a deep breath, gently untangle my hand from his, and climb out of my car.
Some part of me might already know where Rory’s grave is, but if that’s the case, my mind is certainly not in any hurry to share that information as I glance left and right, trying to figure out which direction to go.
I spot a sign with a map of the cemetery and find the section containing the newer graves. It’s several yards north of where I am. I follow a concrete path to it, then walk between the graves, searching for a stone with his last name. My last name.
And then I find it.
I’m expecting his grave to be empty, devoid of flowers, like many of the headstones around it, but a bouquet of fresh hydrangeas sits in front of it. The flowers seem to shiver in thecold.
I kneel on the ground in front of them.
My fingers trace out the words on the granite stone.
TheR.
I see it on flesh instead of on rock.
RORY DAMIEN SULLIVAN. OCTOBER18, 2009–JUNE9, 2010.Instead of a poem or quote, it simply saysWE WISH WE’D HAD YOU LONGER.
