She doesn’t reply, just tucks my scarf tighter around my neck; smoothing back a strand of hair flying free around my face. “Nearly over,” she whispers, guiding me into position in the front row beside the grave.
The next part of the service begins: interring her bones back to the earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I let the priest’s words drift over me, thinking instead of Tate. The truth is, I’m glad he’s not here to see me like this. Such a wreck. I feel raw, and bruised, as if the worst, darkest parts of myself have been spilled out onto the frozen ground beside my mother’s grave, on display to the world. Tate knows me laughing and at ease, centered and calm, not this ragged mess of a girl. And it may be shallow, but I want to keep it that way: to be bright and good for him, not an endless black hole of grief.
“Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there, I do not sleep.”
I look up. It’s my dad’s turn, reading, with a single red rose clutched in his hand. They’re lowering the body now, a slow grind down into the ground. The words wash through me, and I let out a sharp, twisted laugh.
“Of course she’s there,” I mutter, suddenly so angry. “Where the f**k else would she be?”
Elise’s grip tightens on me.
“I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain.”
Suddenly, I can’t breathe. After sitting, numb, through so many saccharine poems and Hallmark-card consolations, I can’t take it anymore. They’re pretending like this is all some big tragedy, an accident. As if she didn’t choose to leave me. But it’s a joke. Cruelly taken from her family, they say, but the truth is, she killed herself. She chose this. She could have fought it, stayed with me longer, but she didn’t love me enough.
She never has.
The pain comes welling up, and with it, a rage that burns so fierce I feel like I’m about to pass out. “Elise,” I gasp, my chest burning, but she holds me up. She holds me through it all, until dad finishes his poem and tosses the rose down onto the coffin, and the glossy lacquered wood is swallowed up by the dark earth forever.
• • •
We drive back to my house, silent in the backseat of a town car. Dad has invited more people over, to “celebrate her life,” he says, but I’ve played my part. I’m done. I hurry straight up to my bedroom, and find the bottle of prescription pills tucked in my drawer. I sneaked them from my mom’s room, before the doctor cleared it out. I shake out one, then another, small and white in the palm of my hand, sweet against my tongue.
There’s a noise. I look up sharply, but it’s just Elise. She’s got a bottle of whiskey with her. “You started without me,” she says, kicking her shoes aside. She holds out her hand, so I pass the pill bottle. She reads the label.
“Xanax, good choice.” She slips one into her mouth, and sighs. “When I die, I want a real party. None of that poetry, weepy bullshit.” She leaps onto my bed, scooting back against the pillows. I flip the main lights off and follow, so we’re lying there together in the glow of my bedside lamp.
I sink deeper into the pillows, exhaling. “Don’t talk like that.”
“About what, death?” She props herself up on one elbow, looking down at my face. “Too soon?”
“Very.”
“Very soon. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You think any of this does?” I feel the chemicals start working their magic, the smooth hiss and fizzle as they slip through my bloodstream. Elise reaches down and gently strokes my face, trailing her finger along my cheek, my nose, the line of my jaw. I smile, relieved that it’s over now, that she’s here just like she said.
“Tell me I’ll be okay,” I say, slipping further into the numbness. “Tell me it won’t always feel this way.”
“It won’t.” Elise curls in closer to me, her head resting on the pillows just inches from my face. I stare into her eyes, the promise there. “You’ll be just fine.”
I know she’s right, but somehow, that makes it sadder. I’ve been losing Mom for years now, ever since that first diagnosis, and I realize that part of this pain is more from the mother she’ll never be to me than the mom she really was.
Something in me finally breaks. I start to cry, quiet tears slipping out of my body like release. “I can’t do this,” I whisper, clutching Elise. “I can’t, I can’t. She left me. She could have stayed and fought this, and she just gave up instead. Maybe if I’d been better . . . ?”
“No.” Elise stops me with a kiss, sweet and tender on my lips. She cradles my face, unblinking. “It’s not on you, it’s on her. It’s all on her.”
I inhale, shaky. “You won’t leave me,” I say, a quiet note of desperation in my voice.
“Never.” Elise wipes the tears from my cheeks and kisses me again. “I’m yours, and you’re mine. Always.”
“Always.” I fall into her, feeling the gentle pull of oblivion. It’s dark, and warm, and safe here in her arms. I kiss her back, and wait for the pain to be over.
RECESS
They take me back to the conference room after Mel’s testimony, and threaten to put me back in handcuffs and shackles unless I calm down.
“She’ll be fine,” I hear Gates reassuring the guard, but I can’t focus; I can’t stop shaking. I tear away from them, pacing back and forth in the small space. I was so close to the end, so close, and now it’s all ruined.
Lee edges closer, holding out a bottle of water, but I push it away.
“She’s lying,” I tell them again, my voice scratched and sobbing. “She couldn’t stand it that Elise picked me. She always hated how close we were, that we didn’t need her tagging along.” I look up, to Gates and my dad, but they’re frozen, their eyes cast away from me. “I bet she’s been waiting for this all along.” My voice rises with desperation. “To pay me back, for all those mean things I said. It’s not true. You have to believe me,” I yell, “none of it is true!”
I can’t believe she’s doing this to me. It’s not some high school bitch-fight, a war over BFFs and party invites. This is life-and-death, my whole future on the line, and it’s just her word against mine.
“The maid,” I suddenly remember, stopping dead. I turn to them, gripping the back of a chair. “She was there, in the house, with me and Elise. She can testify, say there wasn’t any fight!”