Love and Other Dead Things

We became friends because you always found the best places to play. You were the one who told me about the field with the stones, and I followed you away from the playground towards the church. We leapt from the flat stones, hidden in the long shadow of the church steeple, and left muddy Skechers prints in our wake, frozen dance steps. You chased me, but I was faster.

When you caught up to me, your cheeks were rosy, your freckles glistening like dewdrops, the morning newness of childhood. The bells rang from the church three times, and the grass quivered at our ankles.

“We should make a club,” you said.

“What kind of club?”

“Like a secret club.”

“Yes, we should,” I said. In those days of crayons and swing sets and first-grade foolishness, it was a lucky thing to be in a club, especially if it was secret. The clubs were always nameless and purposeless, and I had never been in one.

“And we’ll have our club meetings here. In this field that no one else knows about. The bell will start our meetings.” You pointed a chubby finger at me. “And you can’t tell anyone. Not even Suzy H.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” I promised, and then I took off running, daring you to come after me. I could hear your laughs dying behind me, and I looked over my shoulder to see how far ahead I was and ran into a great wall of human.

“What’s this?”

I looked up to see a man towering over me, snow-white hair and the lightest eyes I knew, dotted by tiny, piercing pupils. Father Tiller, the great and terrible.

“Anna, Oliver.” It seemed as though those little pupils could suck us both into a hellish void, dark matter. “Where are your parents?”

“Home, sir,” I said. We were next-door neighbors.

“This is no place for play,” the priest said. “Don’t you have any respect for the dead?”

“The dead?” you said, a haunted thrill in your voice.

“Yes,” the priest said. “This is where the dead rest. It is not a playground.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Go home, children. And I don’t want to find you playing here again.”

We nodded sullenly and turned for home. I could see the priest watching us in a halo of stained-glass light created by the afternoon sun. Then the trees swallowed him and the church, and we didn’t look back. You walked with your hands in your pockets, biting your lip in thought.

The first time you kissed me, you bit my lip.

We were fifteen, giddy and stupid and pure, and we were walking home from the diner where you had bought me a milkshake. It was before your parents had told you they had bought the house uptown, and we said wouldn’t it be convenient if we were older and got married, because we already lived next to each other? Every second I was with you now, I felt light and incessantly anxious and unable to stop smiling. We paused at the corner of Milton and South, giggling about something, and then you stopped giggling.

“Anna?”

“Yeah?”

“Would—would it be okay if I kissed you?”

It was clumsy and ridiculous and wonderful, and I remember thinking that maybe this was what love felt like but I wasn’t sure. My lip didn’t bleed, but it was sore until the next morning. You said sorry a lot for that, but I was too happy to care if you hurt me.

“We have to come back,” you said as we left the last rays of stained-glass behind us and walked past the playground, where we were supposed to have been playing. “Otherwise we can’t have our club.”

“But Father Tiller will catch us,” I said.

“He’s an old toad. He won’t catch us if we’re careful.”

The next Saturday, we were careful. Instead of running and squealing and leaping between graves, we sat hidden behind a tall stone, talking in excited murmurs. There was a name on the gravestone, and you asked me to read it because you had only learned A through F at that point.

“Paula something,” I said. “I can’t read the last name.”

“Paula,” you repeated.

“We should make Paula part of our club,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to make her feel left out.”

“But she’s dead.”

“I think dead people can be sad, too.”

“Okay. She can join.”

It was early into the summer, the time of year when the bees and wasps make their presence known to us again. It’s funny how I forget about them all winter. But as we sat in the shelter of Paula’s grave, I remembered again. I planted my hand in the grass so I could lean back and then shrieked and pulled it back like I had plunged it into a bonfire. A fat wasp droned away, unsympathetic to my cries of agony.

“Shh,” you snapped. “Father Tiller will hear you.” But when you saw my palm turning purple, you started screaming, too.

Father Tiller found us easily enough. He pulled us to our feet by our sleeves, his brow creased like wrinkled laundry.

“I thought I told you children that you were forbidden to play here,” he said in his quaky preacher’s voice. “You show no respect either for me or the dead.”

“We were keeping the dead company,” you said.

“The Lord keeps the dead company.” Father Tiller swiveled his eyes to me. I was still blubbering, holding my swelling hand and trying not to look at the fantastical colors staining my palm. “And what happened to you?”

“I… I…” I hiccupped for breath. “I got stung by a wasp.”

“If I weren’t an Anglican, I would call that karma. I’d like to walk you two home and talk to your parents.”

We led him to our street, not daring to speak a word, tears filling my nose and running down my cheeks. Shame pushed my gaze to my feet, I couldn’t look at even you, shame was ugly, and I was afraid that it would somehow make you hate me, even if our crime was equal. To my relief, my parents weren’t home, but there was something even more unbearable about facing your parents. We stood in silence while Father Tiller told them of our sins, and after he was gone, they lectured us some more. We mumbled our apologies, and then your dad treated my hand and wiped my tears and told me I was a big girl. I didn’t feel like one.

“We weren’t doing anything wrong,” I told him.

“If Father Tiller told you not to play there, you shouldn’t have been playing there,” he said.

“But what if the people buried there are lonely?”

“They’re not lonely. They have loved ones who come and visit them all the time, and they rest peacefully.”

“It seems so sad there.”

“A graveyard is not a sad place. It’s a serious place. There’s a difference.”

“We don’t want a serious place for our club,” you said. “That’s boring.”

“We have some boxes in the garage,” your dad said. “You can use those to make a clubhouse.”

We stacked boxes in the yard all afternoon and by evening, we had forgotten the graveyard. From the slits between the cardboard, I saw my parents’ car roll into my driveway, headlights slicing through our fortress.

“Anna!” your dad called from the back door. “Your parents want you home!”

“Coming!”

We crawled out of the boxes, and I sat on the porch and fastened the Velcro on my shoes.

“You won’t tell my parents we got in trouble, will you?” I asked him.

“I’ll keep quiet just this once.” He winked. “So long as you’ve learned your lesson.”

I promised that I had.

You were gazing up at him with that serious look you sometimes got, your brow creased, but your eyes softened by your freckles. “Dad?” you said. “If I was one of the dead people, would you come to visit me?”

He frowned and then he had wrapped you in a hug that you clearly wanted out of. “Of course I would,” he said and squeezed tighter so that you squirmed enough to force him to let go.

When your dad died, he was buried in that cemetery. How old were you—seventeen? Eighteen? Father Tiller held the funeral in the stained-glass chapel and told the crowd that when good people die, they go to heaven. Thankfully, he said, your father was a good man. And it would benefit the rest of us to be good, too, lest we end up in another place if we should also have a heart attack. Then you gave the eulogy, telling miscellaneous childhood stories without any meaning or emotion because it was the only way you would have been able to get through it.

After the service, I was the first to find you, your eyes red and swollen, your chest visibly rising and falling as you struggled to breathe evenly. Without saying a word, I wrapped my arms around your shaking body, and you clung to me with every ounce of strength you could muster and didn’t even try to squirm away.

“I’m so sorry,” I murmured and cradled your head in my hand and pressed my lips to your cheek.

You pulled back after another moment and wiped your eyes, tried to shake away the grief like it was water stuck in your hair. “I’m fine.”

Father Tiller came up behind you and put a wrinkled hand on your shoulder. “Well done, my boy,” he said, referring to the eulogy, and then he turned to me. “Anna. You look very nice.”

I didn’t like how I looked, in my woeful, black dress and my mother’s pearls. “Thank you,” I said.

“Oliver, I’d like to speak with you,” he said. “Whenever you have a moment.”

“I can now.” I imagine you wanted nothing more than to avoid the condolences of the dozens of loved ones who were lining up to shake your mother’s hand. You followed Father Tiller to a shadowed corner of the church and stayed there talking with your heads bent together for a long time. I watched you, his hand on your shoulder as he spoke to you, your head nodding solemnly. The chapel began to clear out, and I left with my parents before you had even looked up once.

You started going to church every Sunday, and you told me how magnificent Father Tiller was, how he talked of mysteries beyond human comprehension and made order out of a chaotic and sinful world. There was comfort in duty, and our duty was to be righteous and good. Father Tiller was teaching you how to be good.

“I want to be a priest like him,” you said one day. “I want to study the mysteries and live a holy life and teach others to do the same, like he does.”

“If that will make you happy, then I’m happy for you,” I said.

“Anna, you should come hear him. Just once.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know.”

We broke up after graduation because it was the smart thing to do, and you went to bible college to prepare for seminary, and I went to the state school to figure out my life. I went to the club fairs and the football games and Psychology 101. My roommate ignored me, and I ate too much cafeteria pizza. I went to my first party and drank my first cup of beer and then my second. I thought it would make me feel better if you told me that you were just as miserable as I was, and I was just drunk enough to call you.

“I miss you,” I said into the phone.

“I miss you, too,” the phone said back. You didn’t know I had been drinking. “But I’ll see you at Christmas.”

Christmas was four months away. I hung up and drank another beer. Even in the haze of alcohol, I couldn’t stop thinking about you, even when I kissed some guy and he wrapped his arms around me, I was thinking about you, and I’m sure I accidentally breathed your name over my lips because I couldn’t remember his. He bent down and murmured something drunken in my ear, and I nodded, and there was a dark room upstairs, and after it was over, I cried because I thought it would make me forget you and I didn’t.

When Christmas came, I was more desperate than ever to see you. In the evergreen haze of my living room, you told me you loved me and that you thought it was a mistake to break up and it would be good if we got married—after we had both graduated, of course. You said I was a good girl, I would make a good preacher’s wife.

And then I had to tell you about the night I called you and the boy who wasn’t named Oliver.

“Oh,” you said.

“But I’ll still marry you,” I said. You’re the only one I’ve ever loved. “I just thought you should know.”

“Anna, what happened? I thought you were a good girl.”

“I am,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if I believed it. “Oliver, I’ll marry you. I’ve always loved you.”

“Father Tiller wouldn’t approve.”

“He doesn’t have to.” I felt you letting go of me, and I started slipping. Desperate, desperate, desperate. “Oliver…”

“I can’t. It wouldn’t be proper for a priest.”

“No one has to know!”

“God knows. He sees all we do.”

“So what?”

You flinched, but then you just looked down at your weathered sneakers and shook your head. “I don’t know what happened to you.”

I wondered for a moment if maybe I was breaking your heart as much as you were breaking mine. My lip trembled, and I remembered crying in front of you all those years ago when the wasp stung me. This hurt more.

“You don’t want to marry me,” I managed to choke out.

“I can’t,” you said again, and then you started to quote scripture, but I was already running out of the room, the tears stinging my eyes, my heart shattering so violently in my chest that I felt the shards burn me.

I’ve told myself that it’s all how it should be, even when I can’t fall asleep at night because my mind can’t stop following the dozen threads of what could have been. This is how it should be. You deserve someone sweet and pure and good, someone who follows the holy life you value so much, someone who didn’t lose her virginity at the first college party she went to, someone who wasn’t stupid enough to lose everything she loved. You’ve always been so good, and so innocent, and I would be selfish if I asked you not to marry that girl, because you deserve someone who isn’t me. But I’m not a selfless person.

Back to the graveyard.

We were too scared to go back a third time, so we kept to playing in our yards and on playgrounds. Still, every time we walked past the church and the tombstones, I saw the magnetic pull in your eyes, and I’m sure you could see it in mine, too.

“Do you think Paula is happy?” I asked you. “What if she wants us to be with her, but she’s dead so she can’t tell us?”

“Can dead people be happy?”

“I think if they can be sad, then they can be happy.” I gazed over the fence and could barely make out Paula’s name on her grave. Your dad had said that graveyards were serious places, not sad places. But even in the bright glow of summer, the field looked unbearably sad to me. It looked dead and nothing else. “I hope Father Tiller treats the dead people well,” I said. “I hope he makes them happy.” But in Father Tiller’s eyes, happiness for the dead was an unforgiving silence.

When I left for college after that Christmas, I drove to your house uptown to say goodbye. I hugged you, but you squirmed away. I had ruined your plan, I was ruined.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but you would never forgive me. I would never forgive me.

“Don’t apologize to me,” you said coolly. Your summertime eyes had frozen, and you had outgrown the freckles to soften them. “You must repent to God.”

All I wanted was to repent to you. “If I repented to God, would you marry me?”

Your silence was enough of an answer. There was nothing else I could say; I let myself be lost.

“Goodbye, Anna.” You turned me away, and that was the last time I ever saw you.

After college, I moved back, and I’m living in an apartment uptown. Wouldn’t it be convenient if we got married, because we already live near each other?

You’re the one preaching in that same little chapel and warding the children off the graveyard. The cemetery is especially beautiful in the stained-glass summers, the wildflowers dappling the field with yellows and purples, but no children dare to come pick the daisies or wish on the dandelions, and so the unforgiving silence persists.

I guess I’m saying that I think Father Tiller was wrong. I think he should have let us run and dance through the graveyard and have Paula in our club and squeal and laugh as much as we wanted, chase away the death and the sadness. If I were one of the dead, I would want to be reminded of the living things, the children playing and the flowers growing. If I were your wife, I would let the children that we’re never going to have run over those tombs, and maybe that’s another reason why you can’t marry me.

I love you, and maybe dead things are meant to be danced on.

published in Carolina Muse, October 2024.