Page 20 of Beyond the Hedge Maze

Finally, a pair of socked feet entered his line of sight. Daring to look up, he was confronted with Rachel’s sad brown eyes, her own face tear-streaked and swollen.

“Rach, he’s gone. He’s gone.”

Rachel dropped to the floor next to him, and Oliver crumpled into her open arms, his glasses knocked sideways as he buried his face into the crook of her neck. He could feel her matching tears dripping into his hair. “I know. I’m so sorry, Olive.”

They held each other until they both calmed, the sounds of Isaac moving quietly about the room in the background. Even after catching his breath, he was reluctant to let her go. He gently wiped a stray tear from his friend’s face before taking a more aggressive approach to his own, carelessly swiping at his cheeks. Oliver’s voice came out like a rattled wheeze as he tried to collect his thoughts. “I don’t think I’m ready to go back.”

The thought of returning to Chapman House a mere week ago filled him with a sense of peace. He had been ready to be home with his grandfather, but now it made his stomach turn. Unprompted, the crooning voice of Morrissey entered his thoughts. I would rather not go back to the old house.

On the other side of the bedroom, Isaac gingerly set a garment bag on the ground and began unpacking and completely repacking Oliver’s suitcase. He completed the task with organized confidence, gathering enough clothes to last Oliver at least a week while properly assessing what essentials he actually needed. He could supplement most things with the clothes and items he kept at Chapman. He left out the sports coat.

“We’re not,” Isaac said definitively as he folded another shirt. “We’re going to Rose’s—no excuses. She called us, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. She said you should be staying with family, and we agreed.”

His phone buzzed again, and Isaac abandoned the suitcase to retrieve it from its spot on the floor in the other room. He had a vague recollection of throwing it after receiving the message from his parents.

“Have you heard from Patricia and Charles?” Rachel asked, reading his mind.

Oliver unlocked his phone and handed it to her, the text up on the screen.

Her eyes furiously scanned the small screen. “Those absolute assholes! What do they mean they’re staying in London until the funeral? There’s planning that surely has to be done.”

Oliver sniffed and rubbed his eyes under the frames of his glasses. “He knew he was dying. I think most of the logistics have been ironed out, but there’s still plenty of coordinating. I need to call the vicar, and sit down to write the obituary, call the funeral parlor, I don’t know. I’ve never had to plan a bloody fucking funeral. I don’t know what I need to do.”

He watched in real time as Rachel slipped into what Oliver had once joked was her get shit done mode. “One step at a time. What do we need to do today? What about the showcase?”

The exhibition had completely slipped his mind. A year’s worth of self-agonizing, critiques, and chapped skin from vigorously removing paint, suddenly meant nothing in the wake of his grandfather’s death. “I’ll contact my studio tutor, and she’ll know what to do.”

“Now that’s settled; the movers are coming next week, yes?” she asked.

Oliver nodded. He had scheduled the move months ago. He had wanted to leave Oxford right after graduation and the exhibition—he needed to get back to Chapman.

“Great. Isaac is going to finish up here, and I’m going to make you some tea before we leave. I told Rose we’d be there for dinner.” The finality in her voice left no room for argument as they both clambered up from the ground.

An unflattering noise bubbled up inside Oliver’s throat. He didn’t know how to communicate how he was feeling. He was simultaneously overwhelmed by how much he loved them despite being crushed under the weight of loss and grief. He didn’t know what to say next, struggling with each emotion that warred in his heart. Instead, he settled for something simpler and embraced them both as another sob ripped from his throat.

***

“Stop fidgeting, Oliver.”

His mother’s words settled like needle pricks under his skin. He was suffocating, sitting between his parents in the pew.

The morning started with their criticisms—the casket wasn’t right, the flowers were out of season, wasn’t there an approved guest list? Certainly the funeral wasn’t open to just anyone? Then it had been an hour of greeting villagers and mourners at the front door of the church, accepting condolences for a man they hardly saw, from the people in his life that they hadn’t even wanted in attendance.

With every new body that entered the church, the temperature rose. Oliver fiddled with his tie again, the black piece of fabric settling around his neck heavy as a noose.

He wanted to go back to the night before, when the grief hadn’t felt so toxic. When Rose had gently run her fingers through his hair, trimming the ends with kitchen shears. When Cillian talked to him like he wasn’t a bird with broken wings. When he soundly slept sandwiched in between Rachel and Isaac in the McNamara guest bedroom after they had all spent the evening cooking and sharing stories.

They were only seated across the aisle, but it might as well have been worlds away. He’d rather be there. And every time he looked in their direction, he found one of them looking back, the same wish on their faces.

His father batted at Oliver’s hand as he unconsciously fiddled with the end of his tie. “Your mother told you to stop fidgeting. Where is the bloody vicar? We’ve been here all morning.”

With every passing second, he was more and more convinced the tie was actually a rope, the coarse strands of yarn no longer figments of his imagination, but real and coiling.

They talked over him like he wasn’t even there. “The estate agent is set to arrive at 1:00, and we can’t be late,” said Patricia.

That instantly piqued Oliver’s attention. As his anxiety heightened, he hoped he had misunderstood and tried his best to push down that feeling of dread creeping up his spine. The question came out in a rush. “Are you selling the townhouse?”

He asked in a moment of desperation, of hope that maybe he’d be wrong. That maybe the comment had nothing to do with his home, with Chapman House.