Page 7 of Dove
As if carved from stone, and feeling just as cold, I stood in place until the last person scurried away to the safety of their car, leaving Josh and me the only remaining presence at our parents’ graves. The flowers I’d clasped since we’d been handed them bit into the skin of my clenched fist. My boots sunk into the saturated grass when I finally took the few short steps to the edge of my mother’s dug grave, looking in. It was filling up from the rain, wet and muddy. They’d likely have to drain it before they could lower her, and it hurt my heart that she’d stay exposed, unable to be laid to rest until the storm passed.
Gleaming back at me, pristine and pretty, her white coffin hovered over the accumulating rainwater. I’d had to pick it out, since she’d never prepared for something like this to happen. She’d been just as optimistic about beating cancer as everyone else.
You didn’t know pain until you shopped for your mother’s gravestone and wrote out her epitaph.
Josie Leann Riley-Hex, it read.Beloved Wife and Mother.
I should have written more. Icouldhave written more, but that was all my aching heart could manage. I’d never known how much planning went into a funeral, how much my mother had been dealing with when my father had died. I’d barely been six when he passed, and I imagine she’d tried her best to shield me from the worst of those daunting tasks.
It had been hard enough dealing with the fact that I’d survived while he hadn’t, working through the reality that my dad was gone and never coming back. That those last few moments I’d had with him were the last I’d ever get.
Tears rolled down my cheeks as I silently thanked my mother for doing the best she could in her own grief. Our relationship hadn’t been perfect, but she was my mother, and I loved her.
Pressing a kiss to the wilting petals, I placed a white rose on top of her coffin with one last final goodbye.
I’d barely noticed Josh had left my side until I looked over my shoulder and realized he was gone. In an instant, I panicked, my mind taking me back to the day he left. My heart pounded, seizing in fear until I noticed him to my right, standing in front of my stepfather’s grave which sat beside my mothers. Relief rushed through me.
I sniffled, wiping tears and rainwater from my eyes as I watched him kneel before his father’s grave.
Their relationship had always been strained, and after Josh left, Gareth had hardly uttered his name. They were a family touched by loss, burdened with grief, just as mine was. Josh had never known his mom, considering she’d died while giving birth to him. He’d once confided in me that his father blamed him for her death and couldn’t forgive him for living while she hadn’t. I’d never asked how he’d known that—whether it was something he felt or something his father had said. I’d been younger then and scared to know the truth, too afraid I’d never be able to look at Gareth the same if I knew.
With one last look at my mom’s grave, I made my way over to Josh’s side to pay respects to my stepfather. He’d been a good husband to my mother and never treated me as a burden. He’d welcomed me into his home and heart just as easily as he had my mom, and while I’d been distant at first, I’d grown thankful over time. Gareth and Josh had given my mother and I a home again—a family. We’d been a broken picture of one, but with them, we got a second chance at what had been taken from us.
I liked to think we’d given them that, too, but as I grew up and Josh’s relationship with his father grew worse, I knew we hadn’t. Not really. I worried Josh would resent us for coming in and demanding space in his life for two people he didn’t know, but whatever was going on with his father ended there. Josh got along fine with my mother, and it was easy to see he loved and adored me.
Since the moment I arrived, even when I’d been withdrawn and despondent, afraid my mother was trying to replace the father I’d lost, Josh had been patient. He always carved out time for me, and when I started to take interest in the farm, he was the first one to offer to teach me the ropes.
That’s why his leaving had been the worst betrayal.
My shoes squished in the waterlogged grass as I stepped up beside him, the remaining flower a heavy weight in my hand.
I wanted to say something, to console Josh like he had me that day in the hospital, but the words didn’t come.
What was there to say?
The only words that bubbled up inside me were: Why? Why did you leave? Why did you leaveme?
I kept my mouth shut.
Placing the remaining flower in my hand on his grave, I silently thanked Gareth for making my mom so happy, for accepting me and carving out a space for a daughter he never had.
The cemetery was silent—save for our breathing and the patter of stray raindrops hitting the surrounding headstones. We stayed there for a few more heartbeats until Josh finally rose, his impressive height towering over me. He mimicked his father in almost every way, in stature and looks, but his eyes… I’d seen pictures of his mother, and he had her eyes, dark and knowing.
We were alike in that, him and I. We both shared that particular feature with the parents we’d lost so young. Windows to the soul of our loss.
I wondered if that made it harder for Gareth and my mom to look at us, knowing they saw their loved one’s gleaming back in our irises. For the longest time, after the death of my father, my mother wouldn’t meet my eyes. I thought she’d been trying to hide the sadness in their depths, or the redness that rimmed them, an easy tell she’d been crying, but now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe it hadn’t been that after all, maybe it had been something far sadder. A constant reminder in her child of the man she’d lost.
Josh cleared his throat. “Ready?” he asked me, his rich brown eyes drawn to my blue ones.
No. A part of me wanted to stay here, curl up on the saturated grass by the plot of soil my mother now called home, just to feel close to her one last time.
Afraid those words would slip out if I opened my mouth, I nodded instead, giving our parents one last longing look before turning. The rain started to wane, as if the need for it had passed. Still, Josh opened the umbrella I had denied earlier.
I sidestepped out of its protective reach.
“Dove,” he huffed. “You’re soaked. Just let?—”
His voice trailed off as I sped walk to the sleek SUV Josh apparently called his own these days.
