Karess got lost somewhere south of Bad Axe, and by the time she found her way off the freeway she was exasperated and wondering why the hell she’d thought this was a good idea, and what it was she’d been hoping to find or lose by coming back to this godforsaken state after all these years away in search of a boy she’d barely known.
But somewhere inside herself she also knew, even as she threw her ruined map (coffee spilled on it, and wrinkled to shit) behind her into the backseat of her rental car, why:
Somewhere inside her Perry Edwards was still alive.
Of course, she didn’t think about him every day. That would have been crazy. It had been over a decade. A decade and a half. She’d dropped out the semester he got killed and finally finished up her degree at three different schools on the West Coast. She’d been married, divorced, and she liked her job. She was completely sane. She didn’t drink.
But she often found herself thinking, He was the one.
“Of course the one that gets away is always the one,” her friends would say.
But Perry Edwards hadn’t gotten away.
He was everywhere after he died. He was in every guy who turned a corner, or drove by, or asked her to dance, or bought her a drink in a bar.
After he died, Perry Edwards was the air. He was everywhere.
“Maybe you should visit his grave,” her therapist had said. “It’ll give you a sense of closure.”
Okay, Karess had thought. I can do that. Okay.
So here she was, pulling off the freeway, driving through the kind of town she didn’t think existed anymore. A church on every corner. Little houses with little porches. There was an actual dog tied to an actual tree in a front yard. Jesus, Toto, I don’t think we’re in LA anymore.
It took two stops at two gas stations to get directions to the cemetery, and then she started to wonder how she’d ever thought she’d find his grave: there were four times as many people buried here than there could possibly be alive in this fucking town.
She parked. She got out.
It was a typical late September day. Karess remembered, vaguely, these kinds of September days from her freshman year in college in this state. The raggedy leaves. The spooky branches of the trees. The sense of things fading and dying, but springing up crazily one last time before they did—blazing, writhing. Look at me!
Shit.
There were rows and rows and rows of Shepards. That must have been one big miserable family, stuck in Bad Axe for generations. And a little circle of Rushes. Mother, Father, Beloved Son. Karess wandered through the old part of the cemetery to the new part. He hadn’t been gone that long, after all. Some Owenses. Some Taylors. A crowd of German names. And then she decided maybe she should follow her gut. She’d close her eyes. She’d turn around. She’d let her instincts guide her.
It didn’t work.
She found herself under a tree. Like all the others, it was losing its leaves. They were falling all around her. Orange and red. She could smell the earth. The grass. That dampness. Moldy, like old clothes. Loamy. Cool.
She would, she decided, sit down. She would close her eyes for a little while and rest, and when she felt more energetic, she would go back to the entrance—those wrought-iron gates she’d passed through—and start over, and she would kneel down if she had to and brush the leaves off every fucking name, look at every single grave, even if it took her all day.
Even if it took her days.