Burn (25 page)

Spring came late this year, but by the middle of April the brown landscape had finally given way to green. There were buds on the trees down by the creek, which is where Lona stood with Fenn. And with Gamb and Ilyf, Talia and Gabriel, Zinedine. And Julian.

Her family, all of them, both biological and collected. Later, she was going to have dinner at Maggie and Jeremy's house. Her grandparents – grandparents; she was still getting used to these words – would have come this afternoon if she'd invited them, but it seemed like the memorial should be for people who were tangled more deeply in the Julian Path.

It had taken several weeks for Harm's remains to be sorted and sent to her. Whatever they'd managed to find arrived in an opaque plastic box, which she'd never opened, which now lay below the ground next to the flat, mossy rock. Fenn hadn't understood why she would want him on the property at all, so near them. It wasn't that she wanted him nearby. She just wanted to bury him by the water, where it was fresh and clean and always beginning again.

“Did you want to say something?” Fenn squeezed her hand.

“No.” She should have brought something to read. They had Bible verses for funerals, or poems. She probably could have found an appropriate one in the Walt Whitman anthology Dean Greene had sent her last week when she'd contacted him about summer enrollment. But eulogies were supposed to explain who the dead were, and so Lona felt like anything she might have said or read would have been dishonest. She didn't know who Harm was, not really. She doubted he'd even fully understood himself. She hoped he'd found some peace.

“I would like to thank him,” Zinedine said. “For bringing me back my daughter. Whether he meant to or not. And I'd like to say goodbye.”

It was the second goodbye, of sorts, for the day. That morning Lona had gone to the hospital with Zinedine and Julian to visit Warren. He'd never woken up. He wasn't going to. He was going to lie in a hospital bed in his baby blue tracksuit, a perpetual clean slate for the rest of his life. Lona didn't think she'd need to see him again – it was too hard to think about which Warren was beneath the closed eyelids: the one who asked for stories, or the one who had set off every event in her life. She was ready to stop worrying about the sins of the past.

Julian was having a harder time with that concept. His hair had grown whiter in the past four months. When she'd told him that Harm was dead, he had cradled his head in his hands and sobbed. And when she'd told him that she was his daughter, the tears had continued to flow but they had been happy. “My life of supposed perfection,” he had said, “and you are the only perfect thing to come out of it.” Now he stood on her other side, holding a sealed envelope to lay at Harm's gravesite. Lona took his other hand in hers, and he managed a watery smile.

“Does anyone else want to say anything?” Lona asked. Ilyf and Talia had each lain flowers; Lona sensed that Julian wanted his last correspondence with Harm to be private. “All right. Then I guess—” She wasn't sure how to finish the sentence, and she could feel her eyes start to fill with tears. “I guess—”

“Cupcakes,” Gamb supplied. “You guess cupcakes.”

Cupcakes. That's right. Tomorrow was Gabriel's birthday, so Talia had brought them. Because life was unbearably strange and sad, but lucky people still had birthdays, and sometimes there was nothing to do but eat cupcakes.

“Gabe, your dinosaur chariot?” Gamb squatted low enough for Gabriel to clamber on to his back. “RAAWRRR!” he growled, charging up the hill while Gabriel held on to his neck and laughed. “RAAAWRRR!”

“No, that's fine, Gamb,” Ilyf sighed, beginning to pick up the shovel and blankets they'd brought down with them. “The rest of us wanted to carry everything else on our own.”

Lona let the others go ahead of her, pausing to rearrange the flowers and tuck Julian's letter in a crevice below the rock where it would be protected from rain. Then, as slivers of sun began to peek through the trees, she followed the sounds of their laughter up the path home.

Monica Hesse grew up in the cornfield American town of Normal, Illinois, spending most of her childhood pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder or Anne Frank. She is a feature writer for
The Washington Post,
where she has covered everything from political camp
aigns and the Oscars to the cultural meaning of Doritos. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband and a big black dog named Sheba.

Follow Monica on Twitter: @MonicaHesse

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hot Key Books

Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT

Copyright © 2014 Monica Hesse

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-4714-0060-5

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