It was silent, but a silent that was so loud I wanted to cover my ears.
Finally, Jude walked past me, stopping right before he walked out. “I’m sorry it wasn’t,” he said, his voice low. “Because I really could have done without all this shit.”
Slamming the door behind him, his footsteps thundered down the stairs, out the door, and out of my life for good this time.
When the screen door slammed, I cried the flood of tears I’d held onto for five years.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I stood in front of the mirror, studying the girl reflecting back. She looked like me, but she wasn’t the same girl I remembered. Something had broken loose in the hours since Jude walked away, and it must have been vital to who I once was.
I felt flat, unable to muster any kind of emotion, and I felt lost, like everything I’d worked for and achieved had led me to a dead end. For the first time in my life, I wondered if the world around me I’d been trying to save wasn’t worth saving.
“Lucy in the sky?” a gentle knocking sounded outside my door. “You ready?”
No, was my answer, but that’s not what came out because when it came to my brother, I never said no. I hadn’t when I’d been asked to speak at his funeral, and I hadn’t every year on the anniversary of his death when dad and I visited his grave. It was the only way I could still show him I loved him and I thought about him every day.
I took one last glance at the girl in the mirror before shaking my head and turning away. That girl was no longer me.
“Hey, dad,” I greeted, opening my door. Like the four prior, dad was in his black suit and had even managed to get his tie almost right. “Just the two of us again?” I asked, looking down the hall. My mom never accompanied us to John’s grave, and for all I knew, she’d never revisited after the day he’d been lowered into the ground.
“Your mom deals with this in her own way,” he said, wiping his palms on his jacket. “We deal with this in our way.”
Most days I wished I could deal with it mom’s way.
“Come on, it’s getting late.” He turned and headed down the stairs. I grabbed my purse and followed.
“You’re driving,” he said needlessly as he locked the front door. The last time he’d been behind the wheel of a vehicle was the day John died.
The cemetery was about an hour’s drive from the cabin, but when you were sitting next to your father in total silence, it seemed more like an entire day without pit stops. This would be my sixth time to the cemetery. I came once a year because it was the right thing to do, but I couldn’t do it any more than that. Besides, nothing of what I loved of John was buried beneath that gravestone.
Dad looked out the side window, thinking whatever the thoughts of a man who had ceased to live were, and I stared at the road ahead, trying not to think because my thoughts only led me down one road.
Like every other cemetery, it was empty. Rolling to a stop, I looked over at dad. He was frozen, still staring out the window.
“Dad,” I set my hand on his shoulder, “you ready?”
He flinched, his eyes clearing as he came back to life. “Ready.”
I slid out of the car and walked around the front. I waited.
And waited.
It was a practice in patience I’d learned five years ago. One I’d perfected.
Dad stood outside the passenger door, fidgeting and fighting with his demons. It took a lot out of me to come see John, but the kind of torture dad experienced to spiral him into a semi meltdown was the kind entire mental illness books were dedicated to.
I’d never timed it, but I’d guess fifteen minutes was about average. This time, he rolled his shoulders back and smoothed his coat into place after only five. Walking up to me, he looked over. “Let’s go say hi,” he said, adjusting his tie for the fiftieth time.
John’s headstone wasn’t far and, about fifty paces later, we were kneeling beside it. Dad looked close to fainting, but I knew he’d hold it together. He always did.
We never said anything, but I always sensed John heard what I wanted to say. The birds chirped, the sun shone down, I pulled my favorite memories of John to the surface, I tried to file the ones of Jude away for good. Life was slowly becoming one giant mess, and I wasn’t sure if this was because I was somehow cursed or if life just blew by nature. I’d been buying into the whole one person can make a difference thing this whole time only to discover that, in the end, the world sucked.
“Would you like to tell me what’s wrong?” Dad asked quietly, resting his hand on my lap.
I startled, whether more from his touch or the broken silence, I didn’t know. “I’m fine.” How was it so hard to make my voice sound normal?
“Lucy, I’ve never heard you once say you were fine. You’re either wonderful or awful or exhausted or rip-roaring angry or anything else but fine,” he said, gazing off into the horizon. “You’re a passionate person. You take after me in that department,” he said, a smile shadowing his face. “Or at least the person I used to be.” He stopped, taking in a couple of breaths, then shifted to face me. “What’s wrong?”
“How did you know?” I asked, thinking of all people on the planet, my dad would be the last person to detect something was going gangrene below the surface.
“When you stop letting yourself feel your own emotions like I have, there’s more room to feel those of others,” he said. “It’s one of the many down sides to becoming a silent shut-in.”