Barely There

Chapter 28 - Dandelion Seeds

They walked beside one another towards the familiar black rusted gates and stone pathway. The afternoon sun beat down on them, the cancerous rays reflecting off of the shiny fences and into Leda's eyes, forcing her to squint her way through the maze. Leda's heart skipped a beat as she recalled seeing Grayson visiting a grave at the same time she had been visiting Kia months ago.

He must have been visiting Castor's grave.

She shifted closer to him as he led them to the garden of caskets and corpses, feeling herself weaken as she passed the familiar grave stone with her family's name on it. A magnetic force pulled her towards the moss covered stone and she clumsily kneeled on the grass, casting her head down and looking at where her brother's decaying body would lay sleeping under the dirt. She noticed the pain had simmered down from a sharp stab to a dull ache that weighed down her limbs and bones and she pondered whether the feeling would ever truly go away. A warm hand placed itself on her shoulder and she turned her head, her eyes traveling up the arm then settling on his warm eyes, the pain lessened. But only slightly.

After minutes or hours or both, she stood up, leaning against Grayson as he walked the rest of the way to the rows of graves on the opposite side of the pathway. He came to a stop in front of a smaller stone. The headstone was cleaner than all others, the surface clear of moss or a speck of dust. Her eyes ran across the words engraved on the stone.

Castor Lowe

June 6, 2014

Her limbs remained rigidly in place as she read the words over and over again, bracing herself for the sudden impact. The words carried no trails or specks of her remaining past and so her eyes scanned over the letters until they became meaningless and scrabbled. Without her knowing, the guilt slowly attached to her veins until her blood was poisoned by it and soon she felt it slowly gnawing away at her flesh from within. The feeling was dangerous and as she analyzed the numbers on the headstone she felt the connection between the death of her brother and son grow larger and larger.

Without flinching, she turned to him.

"Was it my fault? Is all of this just my fault?"

He turned to her, his eyes widening like a doe as he tried to discern what her question was referring to.

"Leda, what are you talking about?"

"It's just that–. That night that everything happened, everyone got hurt except for me. You lost a child, my parents lost Kia, Clementine lost her brother who she never got to meet, and I just lost some memories and broke a leg. I mean for fucks sake it almost feels like I was the cause for all of this." She spoke fast, the words tumbling out too fast for her brain to decipher and filter. "Nobody should have gotten hurt. I don't even know what I did but I'm sure I did something...I had to since I feel so guilty. Right?".

With a blank slate devoid of emotions, he stepped close to her, talking low as if they weren't alone, speaking low enough so that not even the spirits could listen in.

"You know I love you and I always have. So you know that when I say this...it's just me loving you and trying to help you the way I know how...Leda, you're absolutely losing it if you think that you're the cause of two deaths. Do you think that you didn't get messed up by that whole accident? You're telling me I lost a child but you lost two. Your parents lost Kia but hey look at that....so did you." His words were venomous and she stepped back at his growing anger with unnamed reasons that she could never understand. "I'm not telling you how to grieve since I have no clue what's going through your head right now but blaming yourself for the death of two people is not the right way."

She looked back at the clean stone, looking for scratches and dirt. Confusion dripped into her blood and she struggled to word the thoughts in her head into something they could both understand.

"I should have been the one to die." Her face struggled to keep its numbness as she felt the guilt cook into a boiling antipathy of herself. "Castor and Kia didn't deserve to die."

"And you did?"

His voice broke into a flurry of emotions, anger, sadness, or hopelessness at her insinuations as he stepped back away from her completely, seeming to begin the reconstruction of the walls he had kept around himself before their reunion at the cafe on a cold morning. 

She turned her eyes to his for a split second before letting them drift back to the small grave. Her brown gaze caught on the wilted dandelion stuck in the grass beside the headstone and she reached down, plugging the stem out of the dirt. 

The one thing that she never forgot was this. Ripping apart dandelion petals with her breath. Her mother said it was because of her "destructive tendencies" that she felt the need to do this every single time she spotted a dandelion but Leda credited her habit to her own boredom or childishness or humanity. It was a mere quirk and nothing more and Leda knew that but her mother's voice echoed her head. Deciding against the warnings of the voice, she shifted her lips in the shape of an O before letting air seep out and trickle through the dandelion. She blew the white fluff before the wind could carry it and let the yellow petals reveal themselves in the sunlight.

The pappus traveled through the air before scattering around the graveyard and planting new life once more. Pleased with the silent rebellion, she carried her guilt with each step as she walked away from the gravestone, her back facing the last bit of her past as Grayson trailed behind her pensively.

She battled the thoughts rolling through her head before surrendering completely and forgetting them one more time like she did four years before.