Last Day of Love

Last Day of Love: Part 4 of 8

Shiloh rises to his haunches and sits at my feet. His spine is erect, his eyes alert. His ears are cocked because the tone of my voice suggests a command.

It’s time for me to do this, but I don’t know what this is.

“Go on.” I point into the black woods.

Shiloh stares at me with wide brown eyes. After a moment, he lies down. His paw finds its way onto my knee.

I push it off and stand up.

“Get out of here.” I wave my hands, scaring him. “You’re not my dog now. I’m not your owner. You’re on your own.” I pause. “You’re free.”

He whimpers, gets up and strides in a small circle, then sits down again.

“I said go.” I lift my foot as if to kick him. He doesn’t flinch. He waits for a moment, then begins to lick my trembling fingers. The darkness that was rising dissipates. I wonder if my family knew how hard it would be to leave him. I wonder if they mean for me to kill him to stop him from following me.

“Fine,” I tell him. “One more night.”

We assume our earlier positions, my legs extended toward the fire, Shiloh sprawled across my knees. I reach for my backpack and unzip it.

I look inside at the worn blue blanket I slept with when I was young, the baseball I taught myself to catch on endless afternoons alone in our backyard. There’s a heavy photo album one of my aunts must have made. I haven’t seen it before, though I’m the only one in the pictures.

Pictures of me as a baby, a toddler, a little boy—always alone. No one ever taught me to smile, so I’m not smiling in any of the photos. They end abruptly, dwarfed by blank pages where more life should be.

I pull out the primers with which I learned to read and write. A deck of cards with naked women on them; a BB gun I used to shoot at doves, robins, squirrels. I find the only CD I’ve ever owned—a burned copy of Bunk Johnson from the free bin at a garage sale. I listened to it once in Critias’s car when my aunts and uncles were asleep.

I’m supposed to care about these things.

I toss my childhood into the fire, I watch the sparks kick up. I inhale the smell of burning plastic and feel nothing.

What worries me are the items I’ve hidden in the bottom of the bag. I’d be beaten, or worse, if the others found them, especially after the Passage. I have to let them go, tonight.

I pull out Eureka’s racing bib from a 10K she won last summer. When she unpinned it from her jersey at the finish line, it caught the wind and glided toward me. I tucked it into my pocket before anyone could see. It was warm from her body and it was mine. The safety pins are still on it. Number 102.

I find the receipt from the gas station where I dared to stand behind her in line, some of her hair tucked into the back of her t-shirt, some of it spilling out along her shoulder blade. My heart raced as I slid the receipt from the counter into my pocket, avoiding the cashier’s eyes.

West Lafayette Stop-N-Go. Cashier: Macy. Time: 1:34 p.m. Apple Mentos. $1.03.

I pull out a T-shirt that reads The Faith Healers. They’re a band from Eureka’s high school. I found the shirt at the Salvation Army—a wife-beater someone wrote the places and dates of local shows on with a permanent marker. I stole it so I could wear it in front of her. I never have. I see now how ridiculous my fantasies were that the shirt might spark a conversation:

Hey, I love that band.

Really? Me too!

Did the shirt shrink in the dryer or something?

No, I just like wearing wife-beaters two sizes too small.

These are the three things I own related to the girl I love. I hold them against my chest, then fling them into the fire. The receipt vanishes; the bib curls into flames. The shirt becomes ash. My love for her remains.

There's one last thing in my bag. It's replaceable and irreplaceable. There are millions like it but none of them like this. My worn copy of The Great Gatsby is the only book I can stand to read.

The book is how I know I love Eureka. When I read it I find words for what she does to me. And when I close it I always feel the awful ache upon reentering the world.

Albion’s baffling words return: He is not like the last one.

Who?

I burn Gatsby slowly, feeding him page by page into the fire.

I’m expected to initiate an endless future, free from small concerns like aging, like death. But I see only blank and disappearing pages. I see a past I don’t understand swirling wordlessly around her.

The fire dwindles. It’s cold and dark and I have failed. If I could have surrendered my love for her, the rest would have melted easily away. But she is a tree whose roots embrace the center of my being. There is no uprooting her. She holds down everything else, making it impossible not to love.

I remember the cake. I unwrap the foil and shake the candles out of the box. I plunge the candles into the cake and light them, staring until their flames lick the icing. I fill my lungs with air and blow with all my might, wishing for my family not to see instantly that my Passage was a lie.

The force of my breath startles me. It smothers the campfire, blows branches off the surrounding trees. I send a bald cypress stump tumbling down into the bayou with a swampy splash.

Giving up in darkness, I pull close the dog that won’t leave, and fall asleep.

COPYRIGHT: Lauren Kate. All Rights Reserved.