I looked out the window. The weak sunlight I’d seen in my room was about to disappear again behind clouds the color of steel. “You spend the night here?” I asked. He hesitated. “Both nights.” I looked at him. “Both?”
“You haven’t come out of your room for almost two days, man.” I nodded like I knew that. I grabbed another bottle of water out of the fridge and drank half of it. “Where’s Miranda?” “My place.”
The clouds swallowed the sun, and the rain started to fall. “Still raining?” I said.
“It’s barely stopped,” he said. “Wellton wants you—” “Don’t.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“Not yet,” I said, watching the waves tumble outside.
Neither of us said anything for a few minutes. I watched the water, and he watched me.
“There’s one thing, Noah,” he finally said. “I think you should know.”
I emptied the bottle, tossed it into the sink with the other, and took a deep breath. “What?”
“Tomorrow. Ten AM,” he said, his voice cracking a little. “Her funeral.”
I grabbed another bottle of water from the fridge and went back to my room.
WEEK THREE
FIFTY-FIVE
Police funerals are like parades.
Everyone gets dressed up. There is marching, speeches, and music. The dead are treated like heroes, as they should be.
I assume they did the same for Liz, but I didn’t go to watch it.
Carter and I—several times I’d told him I was fine, that he could leave me alone, but he never bought it and he was probably correct not to—waited for the pomp and circumstance to end and then drove out to the cemetery on Coronado. He dropped me off at the gate and said he’d be back in an hour.
I wandered through the park, headstones rising out of the muddy ground like dominoes, until I found the one I was looking for.
Elizabeth Shannon Santangelo.
I knelt down next to the freshly turned earth and ran my hand across the dirt, knowing she was somewhere beneath it.
I wasn’t sure what I believed when it came to the afterlife. Like most people, I hoped that there was something else, that in some way we lived on after our lives were extinguished here. But maybe that was just a concept, developed and perpetuated throughout time, meant to help us deal with the finality of death.
As I let the dirt fall through my fingers, I chose to believe that there was something else, because believing that this was the final stop for Liz was too much for me to bear.
The wind picked up and whistled across the cemetery, the rain taking a momentary respite.
I’d heard people say that when someone you care about dies unexpectedly, it doesn’t seem real.
That wasn’t the experience I was having.
Sitting in a cemetery, next to a headstone with her name engraved in elegant letters, made it very real.
I was surprised to see the headstone already in place, but the department arranged her funeral and I assumed that they expedited the creation and placement of the marker, not wanting one of their own to go anonymously into the earth.
I ran my index finger across the letters. The stone was cold, and it sent a chill through my arm, down my spine, and into my heart.
I wasn’t there to say goodbye. Maybe I’d be ready to do that another time, but not now.
I just wanted to be near her.
But as I sat there, knowing she wasn’t coming back, the chill in my body began to pulse, like someone was tapping my insides with a frozen hammer. Everything hurt.
I stared at her name on that headstone for a long time. There were no tears. I don’t know why. But they didn’t come. I knew they’d arrive later, at some unexpected and irrelevant point when I finally gave in to being without her.
The wind gathered speed and rain drops smacked the back of my neck.
I grabbed another handful of dirt. I folded my fingers around it and squeezed.
As the rain pelted me, I stood. I opened my hand, and it looked to me like some of the dirt had disappeared. It had probably just slipped out of my hand, but I liked the idea that it had forced its way into my skin, into my veins, and into my soul to stay with me forever.
I looked down at the earth, the rain matting it down like it was trying to put a protective seal over her.
“I’m sorry I let you down,” I told her, my voice cracking, as I backed away from Liz Santangelo’s grave. “But I will fix it.”
