The Half Life of Molly Pierce by Katrina Leno Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t know anything. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore. I feel like I’m going crazy.
    When Sayer comes back into the room, he puts his hand on my hip but then he pulls his hand away and I think how every time he pulls his hand away from me I want to grab it back. He’s ready to drive me home now, but I don’t what to go home. I don’t want Lyle put into the ground without me there because he was my friend. I knew him. Somehow, I knew him. I loved him. I loved him like he was my best friend and that wasn’t enough for him but that’s not my fault. You can’t decide how much you love people. It just happens. If you have to think about it, then it’s not really real.
    “I want to go to the cemetery.”
    “You don’t have to,” he says.
    “Was he my friend, Sayer? Can you tell me if he was my friend?”
    There’s a long sort of quiet that stretches out over us, and as much as I am confused—as much as I am scared and as much as my body is humming with a careful, waiting energy—I feel okay as long as Sayer looks at me. As long as his breathing wraps around my body, as long as I am held in his sway, cloaked in his quiet: I am okay. I don’t know why I am okay but I am okay.
    “He was your friend,” he says finally.
    “But why don’t I remember?”
    “Maybe you’re starting to.”
    “And you?”
    “Me?”
    “Do I know you, too?”
    He smiles. I don’t know what kind of smile it is. It’s not a smile of happiness or a smile of understanding. Maybe it’s more like a grimace.
    “No. We’ve never met,” he says.
    And I don’t know if I believe him, but what can I say? I can’t say anything. I don’t remember.
    At the cemetery it is only me and Sayer and the pallbearers who’ve come from the funeral parlor to lower Lyle’s body into the ground. Sayer parks his car and we walk behind their truck as they drive slowly through the graves. The day has turned even colder and my breath comes out in puffs of gray. Sayer walks one or two paces to my left. For whatever reason, I feel like this is some sort of decision. A decision to keep his distance from me, maybe, or a decision to at least be aware of every inch between us.
    This is my fifth funeral, my fifth burial. When my grandparents died, I was sad but it was an inevitable sadness, an obligatory grief. I walked through graves like these graves; all cemeteries look the same. I clung to my mother’s dress as they lowered her mother into the ground but that was only because she was crying, my mother, and I felt her sadness like an extension of my own sadness. I felt her loss more palpably than my own loss. When her father died, it was the same, but when my paternal grandparents were put into the ground, a week apart, I stood back from my parents and was terrified by the grief of my father. I had never seen him cry. And when his father died, I thought he might never stop. I thought once those gates were open, they would never close again. They could never be closed again. How could they, when he was so sad? When his eyes were so red? When his throat was so choked?
    With Lyle it is different. But it is confusing. It doesn’t make sense; it’s cloudy and incomplete. I still have no idea what I saw, what those memories mean and whether they are real or completely made up or some mixture of truth and lies, but at least one thing is clear to me now. I knew Lyle. In some way, I knew him. I know that I loved him, but I know also that at least some part of me resented him. Where that resentment comes from, I don’t know, but I can’t deny that I feel it now. I can’t deny that it’s bubbled to the surface, that it’s clawing around for an explanation.
    But I feel like I should be devastated. Or that I am devastated, and I just can’t work out the reason why. But it’s there, at least, and when we reach his grave and there is the big empty hole they will put his casket into, I am crying. I am sobbing. I am fading.
    I only lose a little while.