Page 15 of Haunt Me

Jon doesn’t look at any of us right away. He looks down at the guitar instead, like he’s gathering himself, like the instrument itself might lend him some of the steadiness he needs.

“Raven loved nature,” he finally says, voice already rough. “One of her favorite things in the world was sitting around a fire on a summer night while I played guitar badly enough to make her laugh at me.”

A few soft, wet laughs ripple through the church. I don’t join them. I can’t.

Memories flood in anyway, whether I want them or not. The stars scattered thin in the sky, brighter out there than they ever were in a city. The smell of woodsmoke clinging to everyone’s clothes by the end of the night. Jon’s guitar, a little out of tune more often than not, and Raven curled up on a blanket beside the fire, swaying to whatever he played, humming along even when she didn’t know the words. It was a weekly thing for years, one of those small rituals that felt permanent right up until it wasn’t.

“When she found out she was sick,” Jon continues, “she asked me if I’d sing at her funeral.”

His voice cracks wide open on the last word, and he has to stop, has to press the back of his hand briefly against his mouth before he can keep going.

“I told her not to talk like that. I told her she wasn’t going anywhere.” He shakes his head slowly. “I still couldn’t believe my daughter was going to die. Some part of me still can’t. But life doesn’t always go the way we plan for it to.”

He strums the guitar once, testing it, the sound small and fragile in the quiet church.

“So I’m going to honor my daughter’s wishes.” He looks up then, eyes finding some point past all of us, somewhere none of the rest of us can follow. “Two parts of my heart are gone now. My wife, and now my little girl. But I hold onto the promise of seeing them both again someday.” His voice breaks once more. “Take care of our girl until I get there.”

He begins to play.

I recognize the song the second his fingers find the first chord, “I Can Only Imagine,” the same one Raven used to hum along to at the fire, and Jon sings it now with tears running steady down his face, voice unsteady, but somehow never once losing the melody.

Beside me, Knox’s head drops, shoulders shaking silently through the whole thing.

I hear every word Jon sings, but I let none of it touch me. I sit there with my jaw locked, and my hands folded in my lap. I refuse, actively refuse, to let myself feel a single thing while a man sings his dead daughter into the ground in front of two hundred people who all came here to watch us grieve properly.

Somebody has to hold it together. It might as well be me.

The rest of the service passes in fragments after that. I catch pieces of it, the pastor reading something from scripture I don’t absorb, someone else standing to share a memory I can’t fully follow, the low murmur of the congregation rising and falling around me like weather. Before I understand how we got there, we’re standing outside beneath a white tent, the cold biting through my suit jacket, the casket suspended above a hole in the frozen ground that somebody had to dig through actual ice to make room for.

The pastor says a few final words. I don’t hear most of them either. All I can focus on is how final everything looks, the mechanism lowering the casket slow and mechanical, like this is just an ordinary Tuesday and not the end of the only life I actually wanted.

Everyone looks so calm about it. So accepting, like grief is supposed ot have a schedule and today’s the day it’s allowed to end.

One by one, people file past afterward, murmuring the same handful of condolences, hands on my shoulder, on my arm. Voices telling me anything they can think of to fill the silence I clearly can’t fill myself. I nod at all of it, but I don’t remember a single face by the time they’re gone.

Eventually the tent empties and the last few cars pull away down the gravel road, until it’s just Knox and me left standing at the edge of the grave. Both of us left staring down at the same six feet of frozen dirt like staring hard enough might undo it.

Neither of us says anything for a long time.

“I don’t know how to do the next part,” I finally admit, voice barely above the wind.

Knox doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice is as wrecked as I’ve ever heard it.

“Neither do I.”

We stand there together a while longer, two men who both loved her, neither one of us with the first idea how to walk away from the ground she’s under.

Samuel

No one answers me at first.

Maybe because there’s nothing to answer. Maybe because the words don’t sound like a request, not even to me. They hang in the cold between us. Knox stands there staring like he’s heard me say something in a language he almost understands but can’t bring himself to translate.

I can't stay here.

The wind moves across the cemetery again, carrying the smell of snow and damp earth and flowers already beginning to die. It slips beneath my collar, through the seams of my suit, into places grief has left open. I should feel it more than I do. My hands should ache. My face should burn from the cold. I should be aware of my body as something living.

Mostly, I feel hollow.