In Memoriam ✔️

1

Kyle plucked idly at the hairs on his arm just above his wrist – a nervous habit. His daughter used to pull at those same hairs, tugging softly just so with her little fingers as she drifted off to sleep. At the time that rhythmic picking had driven him insane. Kyle had touch issues. Always had.

Now he would have given anything for his daughter to be there fidgeting as she fell asleep, her nighttime sweaty head soaking into the shoulder of his shirt. He missed the smell of her silky baby hair and her lavender body wash all around him, as she lay there on top of his chest. Most of all he simply missed her.

Nothing can replace a parent's love for their child. More, nothing could ease the loss of having that child ripped away, dead before her childhood could ever be lived.

The memory of his Charlotte clung to Kyle like a phantom limb, so deeply embedded that he could feel her pressed there, snuggling up against him. He could smell her, a faint scent dulled by memory, yet no less overpowering. His shoulder even sweated, as if sensing the heat of her head pressed against it. Yet when he reached to hold her, to let her know that she was safely in his arms, his hands met with only open air.

Daddy had always made everything okay back then. He had been her safety net, hovering on the edge of every playtime, there for each boo-boo and childhood disappointment. He had always been there for her...until that day that he wasn't. The day he looked away.

Kyle pulled out a pack of Marlboro Reds, slapping the pack against his palm a few times, then peeled back the plastic wrap. He pulled out the first cigarette from the top left. That was the order of things – top to bottom, left to right, everything in its proper sequence. Order held importance, it held a sway over Kyle, and it acted as his guide. Without it, he was adrift.

That order had been dismantled with the death of Charlotte, and ever since then Kyle had come unmoored. Daughters didn't die before their fathers. That was not the proper sequence.

He took a drag off the cigarette, unrolled his car window, and exhaled, the smoke catching on the evening breeze. The wisps shifted in gentle eddies, catching the unseen currents of the wind and dissipating into the night. Kyle focused on the dance of the smoke, not ready to look at what lay beyond. As it thinned, he lifted the cigarette back to his lips, breathed deep, then let out another puff of smoke, exhaling through his nostrils.

His nerves quieted. He knew that the habit was unwise, especially for someone with his health concerns. He knew all the data and had seen all the anti-smoking ads, but he just didn't care. When Charlotte had been born he had made a promise to drop the habit, to make sure he would be there to watch her grow older, but the burden of that promise had ended with her death. What was the point of it now, anyway? He doubted that he would be long bound to this mortal coil, gone long before any cancer could ever come claim it's due.

The cigarette half gone, a pillar of ash hanging precariously from its tip, Kyle finally allowed himself a glimpse beyond the smoke. Across the street stretched the Hillview Memorial Cemetery. Apparently every cemetery in Wake County seemed to have the words Memorial or Gardens shoved somewhere in its name. Maybe it was that way everywhere.

Order, Kyle thought. Don't let yourself derail.

He tapped off the ash of his cigarette and glanced to his left. The low, pillared wall ran around the curve of the street and disappeared. To his right, it vanished among the trees dotting Morris Hill. The whole stretch had been built of red brick – a popular staple in Raleigh and the surrounding area. Here the red of the wall had muted with age, and in spots stained green from years of growth and decay, the wet seasons and lush woods taking their toll on the now crumbling structure. If it were not for the tall wrought iron pickets stabbing up through the brick into the sky, Kyle imagined the wall would have tumbled down decades past. As it was they presented a feeble skeletal structure holding the wall intact and provided the only line of defense against vandals – their sharpened pickets presenting an at least mildly imposing facade.