Page 92 of The Wondrous Life and Loves of Nella Carter
“You need to get some sleep, Ma.” He’d taken to calling me “Ma” and Gabby “Mother” over the years. I let him take me home and put me to bed, the sweet young man now tending to my grief alongside his own. I took a long, deep look at his face, wondering how it would change as he aged and I disappeared from his life. He had his mother’s eyes, and I longed to stare into them and wish I could trade some of the years I’d lived to extend hers.
I left him a letter and a forwarding address, packing one single suitcase and discarding my typewriter, notebooks, and pens. I wouldn’t need much. I’d set out to end this deal with Death. He’d won. He’d taken the last thing worth writing about.
I joined bands of hikers, working my way through Mexico to Guatemala to Peru to Brazil, seeking the highest highs. I drowned my thoughts with ayahuasca and the herbal psychedelics of Vilcabamba, Ecuador, hoping it’d end consciousness altogether. I leaped off every cliff into the warm Caribbean Sea or the Bay of Campeche looking for any god who would answer. I interviewed every local, searching forsuperstitions about caves and grottos and rivers where darkness lingered, diving headfirst, waiting for Death to step out of the shadows as I inched closer to the end and throwing in the towel. I knew Gabby would never want me doing any of this: flirting with my own end and that of the world on her behalf. But I wanted him to tell me why he’d taken her. He’d promised me years with her, but he’d never said how many.
Death never appeared.
I’d settled in Buenos Aires, a place Gabby had wanted to go. Most midnights, I’d taken to walking through the Cementerio de la Recoleta like a wandering spirit, thinking Death would return to such a familiar space. The aboveground crypts spread out before me each night like a small city of the dead, the crosses stretching into shapes in the moonlight. I’d felt dead and could only find a sliver of peace while in the quiet of the cemetery after the world had gone to bed. Thoughts of Gabby and Winston would dull in the dark quiet.
“Mamita, please,” came a voice one night.
I’d just begun my nightly routine, the graveyard long deserted and closed for the evening. I followed the noise of the voices, keeping to the shadows. I stumbled upon an elderly woman in a thin nightgown being trailed by a handsome young man who could either be her son or grandson. Only two candles and the moonlight lit the path before them.
I listened as he tried to convince her to return home. The softness of his Spanish was a beautiful melody, as if he were singing her back to where she belonged.
My foot scraped the gravel, and he whipped around, calling out, “Who’s there?”
I stepped out of the shadows to not startle either of them. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m just here visiting too.”
His eyes found mine, and I watched his ease settle into his shoulders and his expression turn from fear to warmth. “It’s no problem.”
The older woman sat before a crypt, running a shaky hand gnarled by time over the plaque. She whispered nonsensical words.
“My grandmother sneaks out of the house at night,” he said. “Coming here to be closer to my grandfather, her beloved.”
She was probably stuck in a sundowning loop, her memories and the present fractured by the disease of dementia.
“My family wants to send her away, but I won’t let them. Everyone is concerned about these episodes, but I don’t mind this nightly stroll with her.” His eyes combed over me, and I was taken aback by the gentle kindness he showed his grandmother. A selfless act. “And why are you out this late in the graveyard by yourself? It’s not always safe.”
I couldn’t answer his sensible question. I should’ve been afraid, but I knew I couldn’t die, only Death allowing me release. My entire world for the past few years felt like these midnight strolls, an aimless loop through memory, loss, and death. I could fill each crypt with something I’d lost: a friend, a lover, a home, a job.
“It’s peaceful, isn’t it?” I stared up at the moon as it hid behind a patch of thick clouds, shrouding us in subtle darkness. It would be fitting that I couldn’t see this stranger fully.
“The quiet of the dead often is,” he replied. “Reminds us how loud living is. That it’s all worth it.”
“Is it?” The question slipped out, crackling between us. Too intimate for strangers. I smiled sadly as his eyes flitted between me and his mourning grandmother.
“She has forgotten so much. But the memory of her love remains. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Would it be better if she forgot that too?” he asked. We both watched as his grandmother kissed the tips of her fingers and touched the letters of her husband’s name.
His question was one that had haunted me after every loss of every love and every city and every friend.
“Maybe if it would prevent the scars ...”
“Isn’t love nothing more than both a mark of joy and sorrow in equal measure?” he posited.
“You speak as if you’ve never had a broken heart.” I pressed a hand to my chest, knowing I carried all my scars inside; my heart was a bruised and battered thing, barely functioning.
“This woman”—he led his grandmother to her feet—“raised me after the death of her only daughter, my mother. Seeing her fade from me ...” His voice broke. “I’m glad to have lived and loved her, even when it comes time for me to lose her.”
The perpetual knot in my chest, hardened over the last few years from the loss of Gabby, loosened just a bit.
He grasped his grandmother’s hand and led her deeper into the darkness, whispering his good night. For the next few weeks, I returned to the cemetery, not just for myself, but to wait and watch in the shadows as he completed his loving midnight routine. If I had been up to it, his would’ve been a story worth recording, his selflessness a brief reminder that good continued to endure.
But I wasn’t up to it. I wasn’t up to it for a very long while.
A black fan blew hot, listless air around the travel agency, ruffling the stacks of pamphlets with each pass, moving in the same rote sequence—a good metaphor for my life at the time. A boxy gray TV hulked up in the corner, suspended on a white wire shelf, a muted press conference of President George W. Bush talking, the Spanish captions covering half the screen.
I tracked the drips from the air conditioner as they raced each other down the side of the wall. A brief buzz ran through me when the drip I’d picked won and ended as the two drops plopped together, becoming one and speeding down to the floor.
