Oliver walks around and kneels down beside me, giving me time to collect myself.
“I’m beginning to think that you’re not real,” I finally manage to say.
He laughs, tossing back his head so his face is lost in sunlight. The sound of his laughter glints off the stones, splits the air around us wide open, its bizarre echo ringing in the ears of the dead.
“What does that mean?” He stands up and sticks his hand out to me, helping me up off the ground.
“You only turn up when I’m sad. And you have a weird way of making me feel better about feeling bad.”
“So I’m a sort of aptly timed apparition, if you want to keep the graveyard motif going?” Oliver says in his easy way, taking my hand right there in public, as it were. When I stand up, he brushes my hair back from where the breeze had blown it forward.
“Exactly,” I answer, very aware of his hand around mine.
Our evening together hangs between us like a book on a shelf that both of us reach for but neither takes down. I’m afraid if I open the pages, I will want to know how it ends.
I wipe the last of the tears from my face. Oliver steps closer to me and I’m drawn in a step as well. He reaches out like he means to touch my face but doesn’t.
“Come with me,” he says.
He heads deeper into the cemetery. I follow, letting him walk us away from the breathing world.
“I hope you don’t mind me finding you here. You weren’t at your office,” he says as we step over a low hedge and into an older section of the cemetery.
“You went to my work?”
Oliver smiles apologetically. I’m flattered that after only one night he remembered where I said I work. Jack never seemed interested in that part of my life. Truth be told, I’m not sure I was all that interested in his either.
“Who did you tell them you were?” I ask Oliver, watching the ground, avoiding gravesites.
I fear him saying that the receptionist thought he was my son. He’s probably only ten years older than Cassie at best.
“I told the girl at the front that I was your priest,” Oliver says, looking straight ahead.
“And she bought it?” I ask when he stops walking and turns to me. “You don’t look like any of the priests I’ve ever seen.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” He runs his hand through his hair in what I’ve already come to realize is less of an egocentric mannerism and more a nervous tick.
“What did she say?” I ask, wondering if she said anything about Jack.
“She said your other religious guru was already there so I’d need to make an appointment for some time later in the week.”
“She’s good cover that way,” I say, remembering that she never really liked Jack anyway.
Oliver never tells me what he actually said. As we walk, I let him joke and talk, and his words begin to fade in and out and I lose track of our conversation.
Somewhere near the back of the cemetery, we stop. Standing amid the stones, I feel cold and sad. I shiver like a cloud has crossed the sun suddenly enough to chill the air.
“Nina,” Oliver asks. “Are you ok?”
“Yes,” I answer.
He pulls me softly towards him and wraps his arms around me in an embrace. I can hear the words that are meant by the gesture, the I wish you weren’t sad, the I don’t really know what it feels like to lose your father, the This is all I know how to do right now to make it better.
I can’t breathe without breathing him in. I step back, but we don’t completely separate. For a moment, I think he’s going to kiss me, but then he pulls away and lets go.
“What are we doing here?” I ask, taking a long breath to clear my head.
He offers a slight smile. “I wanted to show you this one,” he says and kneels in front of an old stone so weathered it is more readable through touch than sight.
I go down on my knees in front of the stone to see what he’s looking at. Oliver and Nina, together in death where it could not be in life—1912.
“Spooky, huh?” He lies down on the ground beneath his name and pats the spot over the other Nina.
I stand there and look down at the space beside him. He pats the ground again and winks at me. I’m thrown off by him. The wink isn’t a come-on, it’s a comfort. I stretch out in the grass and weeds beside him and over her. Normally, it would seem like bad luck to walk over a grave, but there’s something in the intimacy of this supine position that feels more like connection than irreverence.
“Is this how we end up?” I ask, filling the silence.
“I don’t know.” He reaches across the scratch of grass between us to take my hand. “The more I figure out, the less I know.”
I look over at him and he looks at me. The gravestone with our names protrudes from the ground inches from the tops of our heads.
“Who do you think they were?” I ask.
“People who should have, but didn’t,” he says, looking up toward the bright spring sky.
“You think this is us?” I ask, worried that this is all some weird fantasy, me with my agenda and he with his—some lady named Nina who fits into his play, some young lover to take my mind off this painful part of my life.
“No.” Oliver chuckles. He rolls over onto his side to face me, props his head up with his hand. “I just find it an interesting coincidence. It makes me think about the choices we make and how to know
