“London?” Luke calls after me.
I hear him running, too; I’m reassured by the heavy thud of his steps in my wake. At least if I hit a tree or encounter a ghost, he’ll find me quickly.
My North Star in the expanse of graves, the crying angel stands tall above her silent neighbors, keeping watch in the night.
As I approach, the butterflies in my stomach breed and multiply in fast-forward. My side aches from sprinting, and vomit threatens to rise in my throat. I don’t know if it’s the exertion or the anticipation that’s making me feel sick, but I swallow hard to keep it at bay.
Soon enough, I am at the angel’s base. Instead of lingering, I turn in the direction I remember, facing the location of the funeral in my mind.
Instead of the nothing I expect—the vacant plot waiting for the helpless being, the child—there is something.
Slowly, trying to catch my breath, I creep toward it, my mind clicking and spinning and working on the problem it can’t seem to sort out. Until there it is.
The answer.
I find myself standing in the exact spot as in my dark memory, facing not a freshly dug hole but a tasteful, polished headstone surrounded by mature plantings. Light from the street lamp outside the iron fence bounces just right; I can read the ornate lettering plain as day.
I swallow back bile as Luke stomps up next to me. At least I think it’s Luke. I don’t turn to check.
“I lost you back there for a second,” his familiar voice pants as he catches his breath.
Staring, I’m not sure whether I’m still breathing at all.
I stand motionless, eyes locked on the letters. Out of my peripheral vision, I see Luke read them, too, then glance up toward the groundskeeper’s shack in the distance and to the green angel to the left.
“Wait, is this…” His voice trails off midquestion, and, finally, he joins me in the realization. “Whoa,” is all my boyfriend says, before taking my hand and staring right along with me.
When the groundskeeper approaches and scolds us for running through the cemetery and disturbing the peace, I turn to realize that it is him.
He’s older now, fatter and bearded, but were he smiling in sympathy instead of scowling and annoyed, he would look the same. I can see now what I couldn’t see before: I can see him beneath the years.
Luke and I grudgingly agree to leave, but not before I take one last long, hard look at the engraving that will derail my life forever.
SWEET BABY BOY
JONAS DYLAN LANE
NOVEMBER 7, 1998—MAY 8, 2001
34
It punches me in the gut once more, just like the first time I read it and the time after that.
The funeral was in the past.
The past.
And I remember it.
I was so focused on the who that I completely missed the when.
Walking toward the cemetery gates, my head spins so much it aches. Inside the van, Luke cranks the heat and we begin to defrost as we drive in silence toward my house. I am paralyzed by emotion. Not until we exit the freeway and turn left into my development does Luke speak.
“You have to talk to your mom,” he says.
I watch the houses that I remember from tomorrow go by and wonder whether a part of me remembers them from yesterday, too. All the rules to my world are being challenged with this one discovery. The simplicity of knowing what’s coming isn’t so simple after all.
I find myself wanting to call Jamie. Wishing I could. I shake off the thought and watch the houses some more.