“Yes.” My answer is immediate.
We get back on his bike and tear off down the road, and I try very hard to leave my bitterness back at the school where it belongs.
We drive all the way to Cannon Beach on a seaside road. We hike down to Haystack Rock and stare at the ocean as we lean against the rocks. We marvel at how big it is, while we’re so small.
On the horizon, a sailboat glides across the water, it’s white sails billowing into the sky like clouds.
We both stare at it for a while, until it disappears from sight. Finally, Dare turns to me.
“After my mom died, someone gave me a poem to read, and it actually helped.”
I stare at him, unconvinced. “A poem?”
He smirks. “I know. But yeah, it did. It was about a ship and how the ship doesn’t lose it’s value or it’s usefulness or its being simply because it sails away out of sight. It’s still as large and valuable, and it still exists, even though we can’t see it. So, in a way, dying is like a ship that sails away for another destination.”
I stare at him, and there’s something big between us, something unsaid, but big all the same.
“I’ve read that one,” I tell him. Because I live in a funeral home, I’ve read all the poems about death. “That’s a good one. That’s probably better than the dragonfly story that Finn told me.”
Dare smiles a small smile and he doesn’t ask to hear the story, but on the way back up to his bike, he grabs my hand and holds it. I don’t pull away, I just savor the feel of his long fingers woven between my own.
We drive forty minutes back to Astoria with the taste of the sea on our lips and the feel of Dare’s chest beneath my fingertips. It’s a good ride, and I hate to see it drawing to an end as we idle through the streets of Astoria.
I especially hate when we idle toward Ocean’s View Cemetery.
I look away from its wrought iron gates and brick columns, from the trees that weep along the shadowy lanes inside. Because I know, that at the back of the neatly lined plots, there’s a large white angel standing over a white marble stone. LAURA PRICE lies there beneath the surface, eternally sleeping, forever gone from me.
I squeeze my eyes shut, and I must squeeze Dare, too, because he turns slightly.
“Are you ok?”
I nod against his back. “Yeah.”
Lie.
Dare notices the cemetery, and I feel him tense a bit.
“You’re surrounded by it here,” he tells me, his voice as soft and quiet as it can be on the back of this bike. “In order to move forward, you have to move away.”
I nod, because I know.
As I move my head, I open my eyes, and as I do, I notice something.
Finn.
Standing in the gates of the cemetery, watching us ride away.
He doesn’t call out, he doesn’t chase me, he doesn’t even seem angry. But the expression is still there on his face… the expression that tells me I let him down. I told him I’d go with him to visit our mother, and I didn’t. And because I didn’t, he went alone.
I close my eyes.
28
VIGINTI OCTO
Finn
It’sTime.