“Thank you,” I whisper, edging closer to the stone.
“No trouble,” Santa says, turning back toward the shed. “Take your time; I’ll close up when you leave.”
I hear his boots crunch away as my eyes lock on the piece of stone like it’s going to grow a mouth and tell me all the answers.
WIFE, MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER, FRIEND
JOSEPHINE LONDON LANE
JULY 10, 1936—DECEMBER 10, 2009
Tears sting my eyes for a woman I never knew. My namesake, apparently. Luke wraps his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close to his chest.
“You okay?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. I feel like I’m outside the scene, watching it unfold instead of living it.
We stand there a short while, and when it feels right, I take a step back.
“Let’s go,” I say to Luke.
He quietly leads me back the way we came, through the graves and toward the caretaker’s shed. It’s impossible for me not to picture the darkness: I can see the younger, handsome, and seemingly out of place groundskeeper smoking now, consoling me from afar. In my memory, I’m looking at him from the direction we’re now facing. In my memory, I am standing way over…
My heart leaps and my feet stop as I see it: the green stone angel who cries that day in the future.
Luke turns to face me and asks what’s wrong. Instead of answering, I take off running.
“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.
As Luke pulls into my driveway, the porch light blinks on. I glance at the dashboard clock and realize that it’s nearly eight o’clock, which is not so strange, except that I left before eleven this morning and haven’t called since.
“She must be worried.” Luke says what I’m thinking.
“She should be,” I say.
“Go easy on her.”
“I’ll try,” I reply weakly before I slide out of the van and head inside to confront my mother and discover the truth about my missing memories.
35
“Who was Jonas?” I ask again, somehow guessing the answer but needing confirmation.
My mother’s eyes share a mixture of shock and sorrow that makes me want to look away.
But I don’t.
“Who was he, Mom?” I ask a third time, softer now.
“How do you know…” She looks down at her hands. I stay still, watching her realize that how doesn’t matter.
Mom lifts her gaze once more, but though her head is high now, her posture has cracked.
“Jonas was your brother,” she says in a near whisper.
I am silent, unable to ask her to go on, but she does anyway.
“He died.”
“I know. I was at the cemetery. I saw his tombstone.”
“Why…” She stops herself. “Well, that part doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll tell you how I ended up there after you tell me what happened to my brother,” I say, a tear racing down my cheek, “and why you lied about him. Lied about me.”
“Oh, London, I didn’t lie. I kept a very sad truth from you. I thought…”
“What, that I should be blissfully stupid my whole life?”
“That I could save you the pain,” Mom says, touching her hand to her cheek in anticipation of tears to come. I can see that I’ve exposed an old wound. A very deep, painful one.
“Something terrible happened to him a long time ago,” Mom begins, glancing at me every so often but mostly watching the patterns in the carpet, as if they’re feeding her lines. “Your brother was taken. And killed.”
I inhale sharply. “Who did it?”
“We never knew.”
My mother’s shoulders are heaving now, and I’m the parent for a moment as I walk over to the couch and hold her in my arms. She cries on my shoulder for a brother I can’t remember.
I want to know more, but I can see that talking about it is devastating to her.