When Lizzie had jumped from my truck, screaming for me to pull the vehicle to a stop, my heart had been in my throat and my stomach had shot through the floor of the cab. The moment she’d flung the door open, I’d started sweating. When she tried to rush out and around to the bed, my heart rate had skyrocketed and I thought I was going to be sick.
I’d spent the following hours on the road battling nausea and sharp pains in my chest.
Lizzie had been putting herself in danger, and my instinctive reaction had been pure, unadulterated terror.
Despite her being the center of my little panic attack, it isn’t her I’ve been mad at, but my own reaction.
And what that really means. But given my stellar record for always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, I’ve tried to keep my mouth shut over the whole thing.
“I…” Still, I can’t find the words. I rub a hand down my face and sigh. Long and low. “What was in the coat?” I finally ask, grasping at any topic unconnected with the heat I can feel in my face.
“Sorry, what?” Lizzie blinks.
“The coat. You rushed out of the truck for it. There must have been something in it.” No one loves their coat that much.
If Jace is to be believed, Lizzie is a hell of a mechanic. But that is perhaps where her skills in male-dominated fields end. There’s no way, for example, that she’d make a decent poker player. Her face is a kaleidoscope of emotion. It shifts through surprise, shrewd assessment, worry, discomfort, and finally sorrow.
Those pretty curls at the corners of her mouth suddenly start to turn downward, shadowed dimples mark her cheeks where they pull back in a grimace of pain. A furrow appears in her smooth brow and her eyes seem to widen, to bulge in innocent, raw emotion.
I immediately regret my question.
“Never mind it’s none of my—”
“It was a picture,” she says, so quietly I almost miss it. The words whisper across to me. “A picture of someone I loved.”
Loved. Past tense.
My gut pulls tight with a familiar pain of loss.
“You lost them.”
It’s not a question but she answers it anyway with a simple nod. She then brushes back the strands of hair that escape the blanket and fall over her face.
“One last year, my dad. Then my friend Nick, three months ago. Track accident.”
Two. Two losses in less than two years.
I take a steady and calming breath, as if relishing the privilege of still being alive while others have suffered and been lost. There is something about death. Something about confronting bereavement that makes your own mortality so much more striking. A painful reminder that life is short. Whether it’s a physical loss, someone taken away completely by death, or the loss of who they are, and the slow disintegration of the memories that make them into the person you loved. Either way, it’s impossibly painful. Either way, it makes you smell the air around you differently. It makes you see the world around you with a new perspective.
“Everything felt wrong.”
Lizzie’s words pull me back to the conversation. She has shifted down in her seat, her arm is folded on the side of the chair and her head rests over her elbow. The blanket has snagged a piece of golden hair, causing a messy loop to stick up awkwardly from her shoulder. Either she hasn’t noticed or she doesn’t care.
“My home,” she says, “my things. It all felt wrong. Like they weren’t real anymore. Because he wasn’t there.”
He.
An odd sensation, like a niggling sour taste in my mouth, begins to irritate the back of my throat. I swallow it and manage to stay quiet. Thankfully, Lizzie isn’t looking at me. She’s staring out over the front porch, looking past the truck and toward the looming shapes of the trees beyond. At the same time, I’m not sure if she’s seeing any of it at all.
“I sort of felt like… like I wasn’t allowed any of it. Like it was wrong to live my normal life, you know? How could I go to work on Mondays? How could I come home and make dinner like nothing had happened? What movie could I escape to that didn’t have some kind of memory attached?”
I nod solemnly.
After Matty had died, I’d felt the same. Not about my home but about the town. I’d hated walking down main street or being in the diner. Anywhere where there were people.
During the search for his body, the funeral, and the wake, it had been emotionally gutting but at least it had felt right. When everything had passed, people went back to their lives. And any reminder of that—any public place in which residents of the Forge congregated—had been pure torture. Like they’d all forgotten him. Those weeks and months had been worse than watching the coffin being lowered into the ground.
And now I witness it every Sunday.