Excerpt From a Novel I’m Slowly Writing

It’s been three weeks since the funeral, and all I could do was visit Rose’s grave. Every day, for hours on end, I just stood there thinking in a perpetual loop. Maybe this is a dream. She’ll walk up behind me, hug me, and we’ll smile. It’ll be any minute now. This can’t be happening. This can’t be real. Maybe this is a dream…that’s where the loop restarted, just going and going. There wasn’t anything else my mind could think of. Accepting what had happened felt impossible, as if this was all one big mistake. Rose wasn’t the type of person who could be killed, her life couldn’t just be over. I felt like such a child for thinking like this, but there was no way around it. She was always there in each of my darkest hours, so where is she now?

I was lost in thought that I didn’t notice Arthur walking up to the grave.

“Miles.” He was solemn and quiet.

Arthur, what’re you doing here? I didn’t realize I wasn’t speaking out loud.

“You okay?” He put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t respond. He turned his gaze from me to the tombstone, his eyes watering. “It’s freezing out here, you shouldn’t keep standing here like this.”

I’m fine. The weather wasn’t bothering me at all. I was oddly warm.

“Miles,” his voice was starting to break. “I know you’re in pain but you can’t keep doing this. You haven’t come in for work. Thankfully the higher-ups understand your grieving and I can handle the workload, but this won’t happen forever. Have you been eating? The dark circles under your eyes…have you gotten any sleep?”

The silence after his questions seemed to hurt him more than it should. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to answer him, it was that my body wasn’t reacting. My brain was moving a mile a minute thinking of every what-if, what should be, and could have been. My body had shut down. It felt as if my mouth didn’t work.

Arthur fell to his eyes and the tears came bursting out. “Listen okay?” He finally cracked. “I know she meant the world to you, but some of us need some help too! You can’t just selfishly stand here for days on end and expect the rest of us to take care of you like she did!”

Those words broke me from my trance.

“Selfishly?” My throat was dry and my voice was low. “Take care of me?” I turned to him. Arthur looked up.

“Yes, selfishly.” Arthur stood up. “You’re standing here waiting for someone to save you, while the rest of us are trying to save ourselves. We went back to work, we’re processing our grief while life moves forward instead of just lying in wait, dropping everything!”

“The only thing I’m waiting for,” I coughed. My throat was so dry, I couldn’t remember the last time I had a drink. “The only thing I’m waiting for is everything to make sense!” My eyes started tearing up. “Back in high school there was the accident. It put me in a coma for eight years. When I woke up, it felt like I came to a whole new planet! My father was gone, the world completely changed, and there wasn’t a damn thing that made sense! I was just a kid who woke up and was told they’re an adult now. You think that was easy for me? No, of course it wasn’t easy - it still isn’t.” My eyes went from watering to crying. “She was there when I had nobody else. I was lost in a world that made so little sense I had no idea what was what. Hardly anything felt familiar. Now she’s gone. I still have no idea what’s what. No idea what I’m supposed to do. I just have no idea.”

Arthur saw my tears, and shook his head. “I can never understand that.” He looked me in the eyes. His eyes shone with a strength I hadn’t seen in them before. “All I can tell you is that this isn’t what she wanted.” He jabbed a finger in my chest. “What she wanted for you was for you to finally move past your past and stand on your own two feet. You’re an orphan. You’re stuck in a new world. You’re best friend was just murdered.” Arthur’s voice cracked. “You weren’t the only one who loved her. You weren’t the only one who depended on her. But you are the only one who hasn’t realized that their life will still go on!”

He screamed the last sentence. I was taken aback - Arthur was never the assertive type. To see him like this was really something. I started laughing.

“What?” He was confused. “Why are you laughing?”

“You’ve grown up so much since high school.” I tilted my head down. “It’s crazy to think that after all this time you’d change so much.”

“I-what-well,” Arthur smiled. “I had a good friend to help me along the way.” We stood for a moment, smiling at each other. “Too bad you missed a few years to mature.”

“Oh, someone’s cocky now too?” I burst out laughing. After a few minutes it turned into crying. “She’s gone. She’s gone, and I don’t know if I have the strength to move on.”

“Miles,” Arthur shook his head. “We don’t move on. We move forward.”

“I had always used her strength as a means to pretend I had my own.”

“You never needed to pretend.” Arthur pointed at my heart. “This right here, this is where you’ll get your strength from. She’s always with us. Right here, in our hearts. If you want to draw strength from her, then do it. Take it from your memories. Take it from her legacy. But don’t you dare ever forget that it’s your strength too. You will move forward.”

Those words felt like they came from Rose. I could hear her voice echo in my head, Come on Miles - with a name like ‘mile’, you’re supposed to go far. You can’t stop now! Get up!

I looked at Rose’s grave. This isn’t a dream. And maybe I missed a few years of maturing to be able to handle this. “I have never been able to stand alone. I’ve always depended on others to help me get by. I’m not sure if I can make good on your legacy.” I knelt down in front of the tombstone. “But I promise, I will do my best.” Tapping the tombstone, I stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?” Arthur smirked. He knew what I was going to say, he just wanted to hear me say it.

“Where else? We’re going to save the world.”

I looked back to Rose’s grave one last time. Trinity “Rose” Pierce. Beloved Daughter, Sister, Friend. Her flames of passion warmed all our hearts.

Looking at her grave, I couldn’t help but think of when we first met. My mother's funeral was a fiasco. I was about ten years old then, with no understanding of death. Being crowded around adults and constantly told ‘oh your poor baby’ and ‘it’s okay, she’s in a better place’ didn’t help at all. Instead, it made things worse.

Better place? What better place? Can we go there? My young mind didn’t understand what they meant, I just thought they meant she was in a different spot that was much nicer than the funeral parlor we were in. I tried to go ask my father about it, but he was also crowded around by people offering condolences making him inaccessible to me.

Is it the park? The park’s a nice place. Momma must be there! With those thoughts in mind, I went to the park. The weather was bad that day - dark and rainy with a storm headed in. The winds were pretty strong too. The park was close by.

I can make it. I’ll go check and when I mind Momma I’ll bring her back and Pappa won’t be so sad anymore! What was supposed to be a quick trip turned into me getting lost in the park. There was a forest in it. A small one, but a forest nonetheless. I wandered into it, tripping over every broken branch and falling into every puddle along the way.

If it weren’t for Rose’s family having a picnic that day and getting held up in the rain, who knows what would have happened. Rose saw me fall, and then had her parents grab me. After explaining the situation, they took me back to the funeral parlor. It must’ve been an awkward conversation for the adults who didn’t notice a ten year old walk out the front door, but I didn’t care. I latched onto Rose, who kept telling me everything was going to be okay. Her saying helped way more than any adult did, in that she didn’t understand what was going on either yet said she would help me figure it out.

She was always there to help me figure life out.

“Where do we start?” Arthur asked. I shook my head, getting myself out of the daze from my memories.

“With getting her justice.”

“What do you mean?” Arthur looked concerned about that.

“I mean we’re going to catch her killer.”