“Did you just find this?” I roll to my side, mirroring him.
“No, I took a class in college about genealogy,” Oliver says and touches my cheek with his free hand. “Did a paper about life and death and what comes after.”
“Cheery stuff.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be all broody and moody in college?” Oliver brushes his hair away from his eyes. “Anyway, all the writing about death and the afterlife left me thinking, so I came here to tool around and figure things out.” He laughs at himself and shakes his head.
“The chicks must have really dug you,” I scoff. “We always go for the dark and dangerous.”
“Well, we didn’t have too many women hanging around the department in my field of study.”
“Math geek?” I asked, realizing he’d never said what he went to college for in the first place. I was just glad to hear that he was old enough to have gone already. “One of the Poindexter crowd?”
I picture him in khakis with his shirt tucked in too tight, a pair of thick glasses, and his hair cut too short. No, still too gorgeous to fit that mold.
“No, I’m no good at math,” he answers, but doesn’t offer an alternative.
We both lay back flat on the ground and rest in silence for a while. I can almost feel this other Nina and Oliver beneath us, all dust and regret—carved only in stone what they should have engraved in the flesh. I feel for a moment like the world is a gaping hole that I must find my way out of. I feel the bone Nina reaching up to take me under with her, while the spirit Oliver sifts up through century-old dirt, easy as smoke, to whisk the living Oliver away.
“What is it that you want?” Oliver asks, a sudden challenge so deep he may not even know what he’s asking.
“For things to go as planned,” I answer, resting both hands on my stomach.
“And what if that doesn’t happen?” he asks, putting his hand behind his head. “Why not choose another path and give that a try?”
“I don’t know that I’m that fearless,” I say and roll over again to face him. Trying to be brave—to look into his eyes and see a way around my fear.
“You’ve lost faith, that’s all,” he says, staring up into the clouds. “It’s easy to do.”
“Perhaps,” I say. “How do I find it again after all this?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask these days,” he says. “The meaning of life has eluded me, after all.”
“You’re pretty deep for a carefree college guy.” I nudge him playfully.
“Ex-college guy,” he says, looking at me briefly and then glancing back toward the blue above. “Just trying to find myself. Well, maybe I’m trying to find someone else—or find my way back. I don’t know.” He makes a face and raises his eyebrows at some internal thought. Then he shakes his head like he’s wringing something from his mind.
“So what do I do now?” I ask, hoping he has an answer.
I lay back, feeling bone Nina reach out to her Oliver, ever out of her reach, and I know she envies me. I’m sad for her and hope I have enough will to be brave for the both of us. Would she have made a different choice if she had it to do over again, or was the one she made, however hard, the right one?
“You can’t turn around and head back down the road you’ve already traveled,” Oliver says as if he can read my thoughts. “All you can do is keep walking forward and hope that you’ll come across the path that leads you home.”
A couple of years after Lola’s accident, Dad took me out on the lake. The dim blue water was lit with thin ripples of sun, white on the tips of the wake. Further out, the sun sparkled like a fistful of glitter cast like a net to drag in something beautiful.
When the two of us dragged in our own cast, a few fish gave way to a net full of crabs. Suddenly they were clicking and sliding along the fiberglass bottom of the boat. I high-stepped it around until I made it up onto the row seat, and Dad laughed as he tossed the crabs one by one back into the water.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “If this was what we were after, we’d be in high cotton.”
The claws clip-clapped at him as he reached down. I wanted to be brave enough to toss them out, to not fear the pinch of the claws. One caught Dad on the cuff of his sleeve. I swatted at it, and it fell into the water.
“Good job,” Dad said. “Next time we pull this net in, it will be full of fish.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. “Can you see what’s in the net before you pull it in?”
“If the water is clear,” Dad said. “But once you toss it out, you have to pull it in no matter.”
“What if it’s just crabs again?” I asked.
“Then we toss it out till we get what we came for,” he said.
Now, the wind shifts as it sometimes does in spring, and the sky tunes up above us. Hot and cold meet somewhere in the atmosphere, causing a collision so forceful that it draws sound and light out of thin air.
“We should get out of here,” Oliver says, sitting up and taking hold of my hand to help me up.
The first warning drops tag my arm, and we both look to the sky. Still holding hands, we run back through the cemetery. The sky is dark and rumbling, but the rain hasn’t caught up with it yet.
“Do you have more time?” Oliver asks when we reach my car. “Or do you have to get back to your office?”
“I should,” I say, not getting in. “Book deadline.”
“Yeah,” he says, his eyes lighting up. “I saw some of the cover art in the lobby. Food books. You
