Page 62 of Almost Him

My numb nod is all she gets in return, but I hope she knows how much I appreciate her right now. Later, I’ll tell her. When my thoughts aren’t a tumbling tangle of Alden’s smile, his body being lowered into the ground, his laugh, his life.

I close the door behind me and survey the room. Our bed is unmade. The sight makes me smile. We always agreed that making a bed was pointless busy work. No one sees it but us, and we’re coming back to it that night. Why bother?

I strip off my dress to change into sweatpants and a tee shirt. My slobby clothes, Den used to call them. Makeup lies strewn around my bathroom counter. Had I been standing here laughing with Mom and Tori while they helped me with my hair and makeup only a week ago?

I wash my face and take my hair down. The faint smell of Alden’s aftershave makes my heart clench. When I return to the bedroom, I notice one of his discarded hoodies tossed on the chair. I pull it on over my shirt and curl up in bed, surrounded by the scent of him.

All I want to do is sleep forever.

My body makes a good attempt at it. When I open my eyes, the room is pitch dark except for the glow of the clock on the nightstand, showing me I’ve slept nearly nine hours. The house is as quiet as I’d expect it to be at one a.m.

My stomach growls and aches. When was the last time I ate? Mom handed me something this morning before the funeral, but I don’t remember what or if I ate it. It’s tempting to close my eyes again and try to escape, but Smith’s advice to me at the funeral pops into my head.

He lost his long term boyfriend of over five years to a car accident before he met Harry. He put his arm around me at the funeral and whispered, “Do you want me to punch the next person who says they’re sorry for your loss?” The understanding in his face was so comforting.

“Can I kick them while they’re down?” I mumbled.

“Absolutely.”

His sympathetic eyes on mine pulled the words from my lips that had been beating through my head for days. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“You get up every day that you can. You be kind to yourself when you can’t. But every day that you can, you get up and do whatever needs done. The days will move on, and it’ll get easier.”

I doubt that last part, but there are things that will need to be done. Like making sure the authorities find the men who did this. The robbery was featured on the news and is still being repeated as they look for the men who were caught on the security camera, but it won’t last. Robberies aren’t rare, and neither are shootings. People will quickly move on and I’m not going to let this become some unsolved case in a pile.

And then there’s Oliver. His father is sick, his brother and mother are gone. He has no family. If he survives, he’ll need his friends. He’ll need me. Alden would want me to be there for him.

Those are the reasons I get out of bed and make myself eat. They’re the reasons I’ll need to keep coming back to every time I don’t want to move.

After I eat, I’m not sure what to do with myself. It’s the middle of the night. With a bath in mind, I head back toward my bathroom, but find myself standing inside my childhood bedroom. We haven’t done anything with it yet. Odds and ends have found their way here and it’s become a temporary storage area.

It’s a clear night, and moonlight glows through the window. The sight of a teenage Alden grinning at me while he lifts the window flashes through my mind. The broken trellis my dad gave us sits in the corner of the room, waiting on me to follow through with my plan to paint it and use it to frame my wedding pictures.

The window gives a familiar sound when I push it open. Cool air flows in. I sit with my back to it, leaning against the wall.

It’s unlocked, Alden. It’s open, even. Where are you?

“Come on, Den,” I say, the words coming out in a sob. “Just once more, please.”

I’m not sure how long I sit there, my arms curled around my knees, sobbing my heart out before Dad sits down beside me. I didn’t even hear him come in.

For a few minutes, we just sit there while my sobs dry to an occasional hitch in my chest. “I’m never doing this again,” I tell him. “I’m never falling in love again. I can’t.”

He puts his arm around me, and I lean on his shoulder. “I know that sounds like a good plan right now, but I’ll let you in on something I didn’t realize until I was much older. You can’t avoid love. It’s the most vital part of us. Love drives us in ways we’d never steer ourselves. It even lives in the darkest of our emotions. Jealousy, joy, despair, hope, grief, they’re all derived from love. The want of it, the loss of it, the giving and receiving.” He sighs and kisses my temple. “Grief is the most brutal, and I wish I could take this pain away, but it’ll get better. I promise.”

* * *

Detective Ramos, the man in charge of investigating the robbery and murders, calls me two weeks after Alden’s funeral with the first bit of good news we’ve gotten.

Everything so far has been one big frustration. Like the security video. We were lucky, I suppose, that there was video at all, but it’s grainy and only captures the parking lot and front doors. The Stop Along didn’t have functioning cameras inside.

The news has been sharing still shots from the video of the two men who entered right behind Alden and Oliver, hoping for an identification. The part of the footage right before that is what plays in my head on a constant loop. Alden and Oliver approach the doors. Alden opens the door and holds it for a woman to go ahead of him. Oliver says something to him, and Alden turns and smiles. It’s that smile I think about.

The turn and smile.

He was so happy.

We know very little of what took place inside. The woman Alden held the door for had gone straight to the restroom in the back, and she stayed put when she heard the shots. The customer who tried to intervene was shitfaced drunk. His story of how many shots he fired and in what direction keeps changing. The only part he relayed that we know is accurate is that the men demanded the customers’ wallets, cash, and phones. A few days after the robbery, all the empty wallets were found in a dumpster along with Oliver’s smashed phone.

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