“I’m fine. Just went to go visit my mother.” I said nothing about seeing his family’s plot, about his wife.
“Your mother? I—I had no idea. I thought you were visiting your ancestors… Of course. I’m so sorry. Brynn. Forgive me.”
Before I could stop him, he pulled me into his arms and hugged me tightly. My heart pounded against his, and we stood together for half a minute that seemed like a lifetime. His chest rose and fell and pushed mine to breathe with it, and for those moments we were breathing as one person. A surge of desire ran through my nerves as his hands touched my back, ran along my shoulders possessively. Then I remembered everything, remembered that he had pushed me away, and anger rose up to take its place. I needed to be alone, to think about my mom. I did not want to have Eliot edge his way back into my thoughts.
“Why are you here?” I asked, keeping my frustrations bottled. “Did you come here to…” I waved towards the cemetery, not wanting to say his wife’s name.
“No, no,” he said. “Nothing like that. I came to take you to the academy, if you’ll let me. Your, ah, friend Mark is on his way there already.”
“What’s the hurry?” The last thing on my mind right now was Mark or Eliot, and I resented having my day interrupted by two people I had diligently been trying to avoid.
“The problem.” He opened the passenger side door for me, and I reluctantly got in. “You two found a nice little opening into the answer. I checked it out earlier this morning.”
“Oh?” I crossed my arms. “Not last night?”
Eliot recoiled with the snide remark, as though I had slapped him across the face.
“I’m sorry I interrupted you last night. I was so intrigued, and this is such a new avenue to explore, I couldn’t help but come. But I am very sorry to have disturbed the two of you.”
I flushed. “You didn’t disturb anything. Really.”
“Really? He seems enamored of you.” Eliot’s smile was pained, but his emotions towards me were mere trivialities.
“What do you care?”
“Again, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. It’s none of my business.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to become involved with any of the other students,” I said.
“I didn’t mean—”
“It would be a mistake.” I nearly spat out the word. “And I wouldn’t want any more of those.”
Eliot said nothing, just stared ahead through the windshield where slush spattered the glass.I fumed out of the window, and we rode the rest of the way in silence. When we arrived at the academy, I slammed the car door shut behind me.
“Brynn?”
I spun around to see Eliot standing, his hands open in innocence.
“I’m sorry for how you feel right now. If it’s my fault—”
“Of course it’s not! Of course it’s not your fault!” Adrenaline tensed my muscles, and another wash of grief tore its unyielding way through my body. I shuddered.
“What is it, then?”
“I thought it would change things,” I said, blurting out the thought that had been at the forefront of my mind since I left her graveside. “I thought it would change things to see her grave. But nothing changed.” I looked up at him, wetness burning in the corners of my eyes. “Nothing.”
Eliot paused in thought. A snowflake fell on my eyelash, and I blinked it away, a tear falling from my eye.
“Go again. Go again tomorrow.”
I looked up at him. The distance between us felt huge, empty.
“Why? What will have changed tomorrow?”
“You will have changed.”
I held my chin up. If he thought I was only a child, he was wrong. I would not be manipulated again, not by any of his high speeches. Not when he didn’t have the courage to put into action the advice he gave to others. When I spoke again, my words turned his face white.
“And what about you?” I said. My voice was cold, dead. “When will you go visit your wife?”
In legends, nobody dies peacefully. Villains die violently, heroes die unluckily, and if it isn’t arrows or spears it’s poison or drowning.
My mother died violently, and that’s all anyone ever told me. She went to Hungary to take care of my grandmother who had hurt her back, and one day when she was walking down the streets of Budapest someone killed her and threw her body into the river.
My father went to identify the body and see her buried, but he would not let me go. I was too young, he said, and I had school to think of. Later, after he had come back, I begged him to tell me what he had seen, but he never did. I had dreams where a hooded figure would stab me over and over again, tear my body to pieces, throw me into a dark river. My father didn’t know how to comfort me. Some nights I would wake up screaming. Some nights we both would.