She sent word to me that she was having a small service for him on Sunday, and by small I mean only me and Denise. Since no body was recovered, Bo was officially listed as a missing person, but we knew better. That’s why the memorial was so small. Devon had disappeared and no one else knew the truth, no one conscious anyway.
I wasn’t sure what Savannah knew, what she’d seen. She’d suffered brain damage when Trinity had thrown her into a tree and she had slipped into coma only hours after she’d been rescued. It was with her in mind that I took a lantern to the river to join Denise Bowman in remembering her son, the love of my life.
Even now, as I lay in my bed with the cloak of midnight all around me and the night singing right outside my open window, I can’t imagine enduring anything more gut-wrenchingly painful than that service by the water.
The sun was setting across the river, its orangey glow reflected in every ripple of the water, a silent tribute to the memory of the dying day. It seemed apropos; we’d come in memory of the dead, too.
I could hear the creak and groan of the trees as they swayed in the wind, and just below that, there was the soft whisper of the leaves rustling, their gilded tips fluttering and twisting on the breeze.
From the road, I could see Denise standing at the water’s edge, her back to me. Before I descended the bank, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The tangy scent of citrus filled my nostrils and my thoughts went immediately to Bo, as they always did.
When I opened my eyes and looked around, searching the dappled woods for him, my heart squeezed painfully with the realization that my mind was just playing tricks on me. Bo was nowhere around. He was gone.
Denise had asked an old family friend, a minister, to come and say a few words, to give Bo a ceremony even if no one else knew of it. When he was finished, Denise opened a jar and spread some sort of ashy substance across the water. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it wasn’t Bo. The chalky mist that drifted down river was just a symbol of him, carried quietly away by the wind.
I put my arm around Denise’s shoulders, each of us drawing what little comfort could be had from each other’s grief. She squeezed my hand and thanked me with her bloodshot eyes. And then she walked away with the minister, leaving me alone on the bank, staring into the water.
My legs held strong until I heard their engines start and then I collapsed, my knees sinking into the mud at the river’s edge. Digging the lighter I’d brought from my pocket, I lit the lantern and set it onto the water and gave it a little push.
I watched Bo’s lantern drift steadily down stream, away from me. The further it got from my view, the harder I cried. I closed my eyes once more, drawing in the scent of Bo that still clung to the heavy air, breathing him in.
How long I stayed like that, I have no idea. The constant ache in my soul that seemed only to worsen with each passing minute drowned out life and most everything in it, including time.
When night had fallen and there were no more tears to cry, no more moisture left to shed, and I had only the company of crickets to see me home, I finally left. It occurred to me that no matter how long I knelt there, crying by the river, Bo wasn’t coming back, and since I was no closer to saying goodbye than I ever had been, I might as well go home.
Closing my eyes against that excruciating memory, I drifted off to sleep for the first time in three days. Fatigue had finally won.
I hadn’t been asleep very long when I woke. Only forty minutes if my clock was telling the truth. At first, I wasn’t sure what had stirred me. I was still hovering in that place between wakefulness and sleep, suspended between the two. I was so exhausted—emotionally and physically— that I felt as if I’d been drugged, my head thick and fuzzy.
I listened closely for sounds, for what had roused me. Outside my open window, I heard nothing but the sounds of nature, the same nighttime lullaby as always.
An agonizingly familiar tangy scent assailed me. Again. I felt the sting of tears at the backs of my eyes and a sob clogged my throat. It was all in my head. It had to be. Bo was gone. I was just imagining his smell.
As I lay there, breathing him in, I realized that, this time, my treacherous body didn’t even seem to know the difference. It was reacting to him, to the magnetism of him, as if he was near, even though he was no longer with me. It just felt like he was. Just a feeling. Nothing more. Emotional trickery.
I gave in to the urge to cry—again—the damn breaking as his scent swirled through the air and his presence swirled in my blood.
“Bo,” I groaned, turning to bury my face in the pillow, wishing that it could drown out the bittersweet memory of him, the smell of him, or that it would swallow me whole so that I could find peace, find relief, find him in death.
A soft, familiar voice hushed me.
“I’m here,” it said.
The voice was Bo’s. I’d know it anywhere. My ears were confirming what my body already knew. Bo was near.
I sat up and looked around my moonlit room, inspecting the darkness. Desperately, I searched the shadows for some indication that I wasn’t imagining him, but I found none. No matter how much I wished it otherwise, I was still painfully, achingly alone.
I flopped back onto the bed, tears streaming down across my temples, collecting in a warm pool just inside my ears. I closed my eyes and lay perfectly still, drinking in the still-strong aroma, basking in it.
It startled me when a cool finger touched my cheek. My skin tingled in recognition when it brushed away a tear as it slid from my eye.
Slowly, I opened my eyes. In my gut, I knew I’d see nothing. And I was right, but that didn’t stop the electricity that shot through my body when the finger traced a path to my lips.
“Shhh,” the voice said.
My soul soared despite my mind’s unwillingness to consider the possibility. I knew that voice. I knew that touch. Even on my deathbed, I’d remember it, crave it, need it. And this was no trick of my mind. It was real.
It was Bo. It had to be.
The murmur of death, a dark shadow overcast,
Ringing long and eternal as life slips slowly past,
It breeds the unthinkable and touts the unknown,
It begins at the end, on a whisper, a moan.
EPILOGUE
The next day, I woke with traces of Bo all around me, even inside me. He swam in my blood, alive and well. Though I couldn’t see him and I really had no reason to believe that he could’ve survived that last fatal poisoning, I knew, somewhere in the bottom of my soul, that he lived.