“I’ve never loved anyone more.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, praying that this was all a dream, that when I opened them again, I’d be in my bedroom and Bo would be beside me. Alive.
“Bo, please,” I wept.
“Thank you,” he panted.
My eyes opened at the touch of his cool fingers to my lips and then his arm fell back to his chest with a hollow thud.
“Bo!” I shook his shoulder, but he didn’t move. “Bo!” I tapped my fingers against his cheek, but still got no response.
I looked into his face, the face that had haunted my dreams, the face that was etched onto my heart. I searched his dark eyes, but they were empty. They stared blankly past me, looking into a world that I couldn’t see.
“Bo, don’t go,” I cried. “Please don’t leave me.”
As I watched, his form began to fade. As his body’s last efforts to fight metabolized the remainder of the blood, I lost sight of him. Though I could still feel the ever-cooling shape beneath my hands, I could no longer see Bo. He disappeared right before my eyes.
“Bo!” I wailed, the last bits of my heart exploding in a spray of emotional shrapnel that left me dead and lifeless inside.
The crunch of metal drew my attention away from Bo and I remembered that my friends were stranded down the road, at the mercy of Trinity. But I didn’t want to leave Bo. Not yet. I couldn’t bear to let him go.
More noises reached my ears, the sounds of struggling, scuffling. What if there was still time to help them? How could I not at least try?
Guilt, sharp and poignant, seared my soul. I was so torn. I wanted nothing more to stay with Bo, but deep down, I knew that the only right thing to do was to help the living. They still had a chance for happiness, even if I did not.
I leapt to my feet and ran as fast as my stiff muscles would carry me. As I reached the car, I saw that the doors had been ripped off, the windshield was broken and the hood was up, the radiator steaming and hissing in the dying glow of the headlights.
I heard a faint rustling and I saw a flash of red in the forest. I raced forward to Savannah. She was jerking spasmodically where she lay at the base of a tree. There was a dark stain on the bark, blood that ran down to where she was crumpled on the ground. The right side of her face was covered in it and her hair was wet with it.
“Savannah?”
There was no response; she just continued to twitch. She was making a gurgling sound in the back of her throat that made me nauseous. Whatever Trinity had done to her, I knew Savannah was in trouble.
Pulling my cell phone from my pocket, I dialed 911. When I’d reported the accident to the operator and hung up, I cradled Savannah’s head in my lap and listened for sounds of Trinity or Devon. After a few minutes, when still I had not heard the sounds of other people, I realized that I was alone in the night. It was absolutely silent but for the suffering of Savannah and the tick of the car’s engine where it was slowly dying on the road behind me.
********
Three numb days later, I lay in my bed, reliving the nightmare of the previous seventy-some hours.
After the ambulances had come and one of them had taken Savannah away, one of the responding policemen attempted to question me as an EMT checked me out. To his questions, I said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Another officer tried to get through to me, but the pain I was feeling was too consuming to allow my brain enough function to manufacture a believable story, so still I said nothing.
I heard the word “catatonic” bandied about in hushed whispers, probably because all I could manage during the entire ordeal were bouts of staring off into the distance alternating with crying jags where I sobbed so violently my ribs ached.
On the ride home, that’s what I did the most of—cry. After that, for hours and hours each day and all through every sleepless night, I cried. I mourned a loss so great, I wasn’t sure I could survive it, didn’t think I wanted to. I prayed many times for death, not wanting to see another sunrise and face another day without Bo in it. But each day, despite my pleas for relief, dawn came and I got up and went about pretending it was business as usual, that I was whole and human. Only I wasn’t. Even now, I’m not sure what I am. Half dead. Half human. Nothing complete, and I never would be again.
Late the night Bo died, I ventured to see Lucius, to carry out Bo’s last wishes and deliver the message “Heather.” When Lucius answered the door, I knew by the look on his face that he knew, that I need not explain that Bo was gone. Whether it was the gaping hole in my heart that gave it away, or something less subtle like my puffy red eyes and absolute silence, I don’t know. But he knew.
After I gave him the message, I turned and left. I could tell he wanted to talk, to help me, to comfort me, but I had no interest in anything but the grief that was tearing me apart. There would be no solace, no relief for me. Though my physical life continued, my inner life had been extinguished. It had disappeared with Bo.
Besides, I had to conserve what little spark I had left in me. There was one more stop I had to make before I could collapse in the blessed peace and solitude of my bedroom—Bo’s house.
Barely able to get the words out, I told Denise what had happened as best I could. Her grief seemed nearly a match of my own, but where I had the regret of not having had enough time with Bo, she seemed to have an ocean of regrets of another sort. Though I was curious about them, I was glad that she didn’t want to talk about it. I doubted I could’ve listened. It was all I could do to be in the house, where I smelled Bo as if he still lived there, as if he still lived anywhere. As if he still lived at all.
She sent word to me that she was having a small service for him on Sunday, and by small I mean only me and Denise. Since no body was recovered, Bo was officially listed as a missing person, but we knew better. That’s why the memorial was so small. Devon had disappeared and no one else knew the truth, no one conscious anyway.
I wasn’t sure what Savannah knew, what she’d seen. She’d suffered brain damage when Trinity had thrown her into a tree and she had slipped into coma only hours after she’d been rescued. It was with her in mind that I took a lantern to the river to join Denise Bowman in remembering her son, the love of my life.