Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story (79 page)

His eyes fought to focus through his bruised and swollen cheeks. The image of Dwayne grinned back at him, with Egan, Dinesh, and Buck peering down at the sea below.

“We headed over the side when things started looking gnarly, man. Thought we might be able to help,” panted Dwayne. “Blessed Mother, you’re a lot heavier than you look! We almost lost you there once that rock gave way. Good thing you didn’t fall from any higher or we’d all be flatbread right now!”

“Oh, fucking righteous!” Andrew took a huge gulp of air and laid his aching head against the rocks, praying fervently in thanks as he waited for his heart to stop pile-driving out of his chest.

He craned his neck to see the top of the cliff. Emily, his gorgeous, beautiful Emily, stood there, laughing and weeping.

“I love you!” he screamed, battling the roar from the pounding surf.

“Andrew!” she screamed back, too overcome to say anything more.

He waved back madly despite the firebrand of pain shooting down his arm.

“Thank you.” He turned back to the guys. “Thank you so bloody much.”

Dwayne patted his back. “No problem. But I’ll tell you, it helps to work with crystal balls. They build up your catching arm.” He nodded to his feet where a metal candy tin sat.

“Oh! Fucking, fucking righteous!” Andrew cried at the sight. He looked up the cliff where the satchel still sat on the ledge above.

Nick and Nora, together. At last.

31

B
ETWEEN
T
HE
S
WEATING
, the swearing, the laughing, and the crying taking place around him, Andrew didn’t know how he was finally hoisted and hauled up the cliffs and back onto solid ground and into the waiting arms of Simon and Christian. They pulled him to safety, careful of his arm.

His mother, equally overjoyed and appalled at his injuries, fell onto him at once. “He needs to go to a hospital,” she ordered as she hugged and kissed him.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to play lead guitar,” Christian remarked, panting through a huge smile, though its edges quivered slightly as he inventoried all of Andrew’s various cuts and bruises.

“Not on your life. My fingers are still moving.”

“Thank God for that,” cried Simon, taking a stronger hold as he moved him far from the cliff edge. “Otherwise we’d have to toss you back over the side.” His eyes were red and his breath came up short. “Fuck, man. You can’t do this shit anymore. I thought we lost you. Do you have any fucking idea?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Before Andrew could say more, a swarm of women descended on him. Zoey’s large hands flapped about his injuries like a flock of anxious ducks, Margot, her ankle still lame from the fall in the basement, hobbled around him inspecting the damage, and his mother stood guard while Neil held onto her side for support.

Yet he fought to lean around them, this sea of loving hands and ecstatic smiles. Where was she? Where was Emily?

She stood a few feet away, staring at him. His coat hung open on her shoulders, and he could see her chest rise and fall erratically, though her hands lay still at her sides. She took one step, then another, and then there was nothing but her arms, her mouth, her hair, and the warmth of her body in his arms. The smell of her was full of life and tears. There with the wind gusting around them, hands, all those hands joined hers, and held him steady before lowering him gently to his knees. Emily kneeled in front of him, still clutching his hands in hers while she took in his injuries.

Before he could say a word, a cacophony of groans heralded the arrival of Egan and Dwayne, the last of the stoners to make it up the cliff. In their hands they bore the remains of Nick and Nora. Without a word, they placed the tin and the satchel in front of Emily and stepped back. Her eyes widened, and she gasped in shock once she realized their significance.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if they hadn’t saved them,” he said, squeezing her hands. “Nick would have found her.”

“We really must get you and Neil to a hospital,” his mother repeated. “You need a doctor. Heaven knows what’s broken.”

“Probably easier to tell what isn’t,” retorted Simon. “But you know, I think I like it. The boy needed to get roughed up a bit. You were way too pretty before—now you look like a true rocker.”

“Is she gone?” Emily asked as she peered into Andrew’s face.

He nodded.

“Does it hurt?”

“Only when I breathe.”

A half-grin, half-cringe graced her face, and she softly kissed him. “I…I was…I…”

He kissed her in return, holding back a painful grimace at what had to have been a split lip.

But the warmth of her lips worked like a drug, and before he knew what was happening, he couldn’t stop kissing her, although the tears that coursed down his face stung like hell.

“Andrew! We really must go. You’re still bleeding,” his mother insisted.

“No, wait,” he said after he removed his lips from those he loved. He wiped the tears and sweat from his face with his good arm. “We have to do this, and we have to do this now.”

He touched the tin with Nick’s ashes and took it up in his hand. “No time like the present. What do you say, old man?”

“But Andrew, you really should get to a doctor,” Neil admonished him as his hand cupped his shoulder. Neil looked over Andrew’s beaten face and over to Emily and back again. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you—to both of you. I never wanted…I’m so sorry…”

“There’s nothing to forgive. Truly.”

What Andrew had wanted to say was,
Thank you for fighting against her to try to save me
, but he was too overcome with emotion by the look on Neil’s face.

“He was thinking of all the money he’d lose if you died,” Margot said finally, breaking the moment. “Only the royalties kept him fighting, right Neil?”

He chuckled warmly and smiled up into the sky in relief. “Yes. I couldn’t allow another manager get a hold of you. They’d totally muck up your licensing.”

A siren blared and emergency lights flashed from the direction of the highway. Traffic was backed up as far as the eye could see. They had completely forgotten the wreckage they had left in their wake.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Christian. “Hold tight, everybody.” He got to his feet and ran toward the road. A distraught Dwayne and his fellow stoners hurried close behind, evidently off to claim rights on the sardine can that was once the Big Doobie.

With a small chuckle, Neil sat down next to Claudia and placed his arm around her, and Margot and Zoey joined Simon and summarily lowered their heads onto his shoulders. They all took a moment, resting for the first time in what seemed like forever as they gazed out at the horizon. The sea appeared calmer, the whitecaps not as threatening, despite the strong wind.

Emily sat still at Andrew’s side, their hands linked.

“I hate her,” she whispered bitterly. “I know I shouldn’t, I know I should try to feel some sympathy for her, but after what she did—to Nick and Nora, to me—and to you, I just can’t find any kindness in my heart for her. I hope she’s tortured wherever she is now. I hope she rots in—” Her words caught in her throat, and she paused and stared down at their joined hands, squeezing them harder. “Listen to me. I sound just like her, don’t I?”

Andrew studied her face, the bruises that blushed along her neck in a faint line of sickening purple, and the gash on her forehead. How she could try to find goodness in the most irredeemable gave him tremendous hope for their future together.

“It’s far easier to hate, sweet girl. Most of the time it takes too much courage to love, to believe. It’s easier to lock everything away where we can never be hurt. But you’re nothing like her, Emily. I can’t imagine anyone as good as you being able to understand what lived in her at all.”

“And you do?”

“Yes, more than I’m proud of, I’m afraid. She lived with the loss of love for so long it poisoned her. What was left of her after torturing Vandin and experiencing his death, who knows? But her bitterness consumed the last shreds of her. She hated Nick, and she loved him just as strongly—all she wanted was that love returned…” He faltered for words because he’d known that same emptiness…the same longing for a piece of his soul that would complete him. After stumbling and searching in the darkness for so long, how could he not understand the same anguish that had consumed this ghost?

At the very last moment before he fell, a presence greater than anything he had ever known reached out and engulfed him. Was it God? Redemption? He had no idea, but it had broken his heart with its grace—he could only imagine how it had devastated her. He tried to explain, “I think that she could have been saved—at the end. When she felt what lived…beyond this life, it could have saved her. But she was too far gone. When I saw Nora’s ashes I knew that it would destroy her if I touched them. So I took a risk and remembered what Nick had said, to seize life. And I did.”

Everyone was staring at him now, riveted by the story. He went on to explain all that The Lady in Red had told him about her husband and her hatred of Nora, and how he discovered she could not touch her ashes. Facing Emily again, his voice was calm but resolute. “I can’t forgive her, though. Perhaps that tells you what kind of man I am, but I couldn’t let her hurt you ever again.”

He feared he had said too much, for Emily leaned against him and buried her face in his shoulder; he shushed her and breathed in a deep lungful of the sea air, so grateful to be alive, so grateful to hold her.

“Why do you think she couldn’t touch the ashes?” asked Margot.

“I don’t know.”

Margot looked away from him to Neil for his response, ever the scientist in need of explanations. “Andrew was right,” he said quietly. “She was horrified of them—they represented everything she despised. When she was inside of me, I had only glimpses of consciousness, like I was locked in a black room with mere flashes of clarity. But after Andrew threw Nora’s ashes at me, I felt her pain—it was torture for her to be near them. They fueled her hatred and bitterness, and her hatred and bitterness consumed her at the end.”

They all stared at the satchel that lay on the ground, innocuous in the sharp midday sun.

Emily’s fingers brushed against the remains. “Nora loved Nick so much. A love like that just doesn’t disappear. It can’t. I know these are only her ashes, but there’s something of her still there.”

Margot smiled at Emily. “I believe you.”

“Got it!” They heard Christian cry and turned to see him jogging across the grass bearing a small shovel. Dwayne and the stoners caught up next to him with despondent and crestfallen looks paining their faces. “Found it in the back of the Big Doobie,” Christian told the crowd. “Which, um, is now being dragged away for scrap, unfortunately.” The stoners turned their heads to the highway and whimpered at the sight. “We better act quick, though,” Christian informed Andrew, “’cause the stretcher is coming for you any second, man. I think they heard your mom from all the way out here.”

Andrew took the shovel. “You really want to play lead guitar, don’t you, mate? Simon, would you care to do the honors?”

Simon stared at both Andrew and the shovel, and for a brief moment Andrew thought he might walk away, that all of this had forced him to a breaking point. Simon looked between Andrew and Emily and made up his mind. He took hold of the shovel and began to dig a hole. When it was done, he was the one who opened the tin and the bag and each of them in turn took a handful of ashes and laid them to rest in the rich earth. The crowd was silent and respectful; whatever wishes were offered were whispered too quietly for other ears to hear. Finally, it came to Emily and Andrew. She took a handful of Nora’s ashes; tears trailed silently down her face and fell into the fine gravel where they disappeared like rain.

“I hope you find him, Nora. I hope you have a forever with him.” Her voice broke, and the ashes cascaded from her fingers like diamonds.

There was only one handful left from Nick’s tin. Andrew took them and placed them down in the earth upon Nora’s. He tried to find the words, words that would thank Nick for showing him just how damn precious it all was.

“You lucky bastard,” he finally offered up. “You’ll never have to say goodbye.”

Emily replaced the earth in the hole herself and patted it down with her hands until she was satisfied. The whole group gathered to help Andrew to his feet. With his arm slung over Emily’s shoulders, they left the lovers to have their moment beneath the cawing gulls and the brilliant sun.