Page 135 of Fated

A mosquito buzzes then lands on my sweat-covered forearm. I slap it and then step under the line of trees, the pine needles crunching under my feet. A picnic table, a gray, worn, splintered thing, sits hobbled and lonely under the trees.

A lone blackbird watches as I walk further from the ocean, toward the tall granite marker. The bird isn’t singing. It’s perched on the stone, its feathers glossy black, its head cocked.

When I reach the stone, the blackbird flutters away in a spray of wings and wind.

I don’t want to look.

I don’t want to see.

I know what I’ll find.

I’m too late.

I step forward, pressing my fingers to the pink-and-gray granite. The stone is warm, almost hot, in the sun. It’s unyielding. Unfeeling.

It’s a memorial. A granite marker. The kind placed in cemeteries or at battle sites, or where people want to remember or perhaps never forget.

“You came back.”

I turn at the deep, craggy voice.

My heart jolts, kicks, and then settles. It’s Odie. Or a version of Odie I’ve never seen. His long, black pants are wrinkled, his white shirt salt-stained, and his face creased and worn with wrinkles that weren’t there the last time I saw him.

The tears, the fear, the shock, the wild rage that’s been pressing on me since I read the article, and then the next, and the next, claws and fights to be freed.

I want to fall to my knees and weep at his feet. Instead I nod.

“I’m back.”

He gives a sharp nod. Looks at my hand pressed to the granite. The name my fingers trace.

“Hard to think it’s been two years,” he says, studying the memorial.

My throat tightens and I nod.

“Will you come back every Christmas? Pay your respects? It gets lonely, me being the only one left.”

“Why do you stay?” I ask, thinking about the emptiness of the island, the loneliness of living in a place where you’re the only person left.

He shrugs then looks out over the sea. The shadows of the whistling pines fall in bars across his face. “I figure I should’ve died here too. I might as well stay.”

I look back to the gray stone then. To the marker that tells me in harsh, stone-cut lines, what happened on Saint Eligius. There’s the date, Christmas Eve, two years ago.

The words—“In memory of the residents of Saint Eligius who died on December 24”—and a list.

That’s all.

A list of names.

As if names written on a stone can tell the world how much they have loved, how much you have loved them. As if words on a stone can describe a life.

The names are all there.

Amy Marie McCormick.

Sean Alexander McCormick.

Aaron James McCormick.

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