Thanks for the Memories

A Whiter Shade of Pale

Camila's POV:

The wine tasted expensive. It was sharp and strong and made me wince with every swallow. I sipped on it slowly, sat in an oversized armchair in the lounge of Danny's parents, Beth and James' house.

The mood was different at the wake from at the ceremony, everyone was chatting and smiling, some of Danny's favourite songs played in the background. I could hear Dinah telling a story about Danny's antics at my twenty-first birthday party, everyone laughed when she described how he was dared to go to the club with his clothes on backwards. The memory hit me like a freight train, I smiled but it felt like a knife in the chest.

Losing the person I love at twenty-five is hard; I'm no only grieving the loss of what we shared but also what we could have shared. I had lost my future and it felt crushingly hard, I was struggling to imagine how I would cope without him, how I could continue.

There is one huge reason I know I have to continue, and that reason is Max. He is everything to me and was everything to Danny. I decided not to take him to the funeral service, at four years old he didn't truly have a real understanding of death or loss yet. Instead, last night, I perched on his small bed, on his Avengers sheets, and told him that his Daddy was picked by the angels to go to heaven, that we wouldn't be seeing him again.

'But he'll come back right?'

I had to look him in his blue eyes and say, 'No Buddy, he's not coming back.'

My heart was broken when the doctor pronounced Danny dead at the hospital, but telling Max his father was gone for good, seeing the look of despair on his little face, it felt like the broken pieces of my heart were being ground into the dust on the ground.

I stood to make my way to the kitchen for a refill of overpriced, terrible wine when I barrelled straight into the boy in question.

'Mommy!' He yelled, grabbing onto my leg and smiling up at me with his father's eyes. The sight of his blue eyes gripped my throat with ghostly fingers; I had to swallow down a sob at the feeling.

'Hey Buddy, you're back early.' I crouched down to his level to wrap him in a tight hug.

'I'm so sorry, Camila.' Jenny, Max's babysitter said, sounding apologetic.  She lived next door to here, Danny's parents are friends with her parents, and she offered to watch Max until after the wake. 'We were playing in the yard, he ran through a crack in the fence. I couldn't catch him.'

'It's okay,' I smiled at her to let her know I wasn't mad. He could be pretty quick sometimes. I pushed his dark blonde locks from out of his eyes; it was a deeper shade than Danny's hair more like mine was at his age. 'Did you have fun at Jenny's?' I asked him.

He nodded vigorously, 'She gave me chocolate.'

'I can see that.' I laughed, tilting his chin to see the brown sticky mess smeared around his mouth. I tried to wipe it away but he pulled away.