Excerpt from Finding My Way Back
I
wasn’t sure how I felt about the task I was undertaking or what I expected to
get out of it. Closure, maybe? No.
After everything I’d been through, closure just didn’t seem adequate. Maybe I just needed to see. To be sure that I hadn’t mixed everything up
in my dreams. But closure? No, definitely not to find closure.
I’d
left Aunt Laura back at the hotel, telling her that I just needed some time to
myself. She understood that. After sitting at my bed side for two weeks in
the hospital, she needed some time to herself. Wow.
Two weeks. For me, it had seemed
much longer. Between Valeria and my
dreams, it had seemed like a year. But
you weren’t supposed to dream when you were in a coma. Were you?
I
parked the car and grabbed the cardboard box that sat on the seat next to me,
bracing myself for what I was going to do.
To see. I slipped out of the car,
straightened my dress and began walking across the lawn, inwardly grateful that
I’d decided to wear flats instead of heels.
I kept up this inward dialogue...flats vs. heels...as I walked down the
path to my destination. My heart beat
faster as I got closer, and my palms began to sweat around the box I was now
gripping so tight that my hands began to hurt.
I
paused for one brief moment - eyes closed -
breathing a silent prayer.
Then
I looked up.
They
shared a single monument:
Charles
Morgan Jordan, born March 22, 1969
Emily
Elizabeth Jordan, born August 18, 1970
One
shared date. The date they died. Three weeks ago today. Did they seem less dead because I’d missed
the memorial? No. I still had violent dreams of the night my
parents were murdered.
In
a way, I was glad I had missed the ceremony with its endless line of mourners and
their endless barrage of condolences. As
it was, I’d only had to hear “I’m so sorry for your loss” three times: once, in the hospital after I woke up and the
doctor expressed her sympathy, once in the police station when the detectives
assigned to my parents case told me how sorry they were, and then at my hotel,
when Matt’s parents came by. At least
that one was genuine.
I
took the flowers out of the box I carried and spread them across the mounds of
dirt. I wasn’t prepared for the violence
of the grief that stabbed my heart repeatedly, assaulting me like some vicious
killer. I felt like I was dying. Falling to my knees, I crawled to the
monument, tracing their names, tears running down my cheeks. I’m not sure how long I lay there on the dirt
before I cried myself to sleep.
I
woke up and looked around. I wasn’t in
the cemetery any more. I was back in
Summer Cove in Dave’s Diner. There
weren’t any customers – just Jessie – wiping down the booth where I found
myself sitting.
She
turned her auburn head toward me and winked.
“It
wasn’t a coma, you know.”
“Wh…what
did you say?”
She
stopped wiping down the table, looked me in the eye, one hand on her hip.
“Your
coma. It wasn’t real. It was drug induced because of your head
injury.”
“O-k-a-y,”
I said slowly. I was trying to wrap my
head around being back in Summer Cove again.
Had I been dreaming all along.
Jessie
shook her head and rolled her eyes at me, plopping herself down in the seat
across from mine. “You weren’t always
this dense. Your. Coma. Wasn’t.
Real.” She gestured toward me
impatiently, rolling her eyes again, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure
out what she was trying to get at.
Shaking
her head, she leaned across the table and whispered in my ear. “Maybe Matt’s coma isn’t real either.”
It
took several seconds for that to sink in, then a smile spread across my
face. I was just about to thank her when
she grabbed my arm, cocked her head to the right, eyes glassy like one of those
Stepford wives and said, “You’d better wake up.
You’re asleep in a cemetery and you never know who might be watching.”
