In the Evermore


"She's dying. There's nothing you can do for her now. Nothing any of us can do."

Nothing. Wake unto me...

"It's spread through her lungs. All we can do now is ease her pain."

Ease her pain. Forsooth. As if the insistent stench of medicine and death wasn't an irony unto itself.

The doctor's words were lost in a great buzzing cacophony within Holden's mind. He'd fallen back, reveled in his
tears. He'd cried out in anguish and impotent frustration. He'd lashed out a hundred times before, or at least felt
that way, but not now. This time he didn't move. Couldn't if he'd wanted to.

He looked into the doctor's eyes. He watched his mouth speaking words he did not hear. The silence warmed him,
numbed him to what happened.

She's dying. She's already gone. Her lungs, her heart, her mind. Her breath.

Her life.

Gone.

One death was enough.

Holden had raged those very words. He'd screamed them into the frightened eyes of the doctor as he choked the life
out of him. Now there was only silence and a doctor that might have spoken.

Rapture and grace.

"Can I see her?" he asked, his voice barely more than a whisper.

The doctor's words came and went without passing Holden's ears. Of course he could see her. They wouldn't deny
him that. They never could.

The doctor – what was his name? It didn't matter – stepped aside. Holden offered him a courteous nod as he
passed.

Down the halls of wasted ends, he didn't so much as glance into any of the rooms he passed. It was a tunnel to him,
oppressive in its fluorescence, with just one path that could not be deviated. It wasn't the thought of anything
horrible on the other side; it was the joy he couldn't bear to see; those looks, those hugs, that said everything
would be alright. Not now.

And at the end of it all, there was a door. On the other side, she would be waiting with all the grace the world could
offer. It was always different. Sometimes clear glass showering in the morning light from the window. Sometimes it
was tantamount to a prison door with only a modest glass slit for viewing. This time it was already open. He was
expected.

The open door filled the hall with a sense of dread as undeniable as the cold. He passed through and entered
another world; a world where the end was a concrete, finite thing.

She was reading, but looked up when he entered, the book set aside. Pillows piled around to help her sit up, she
would have looked regal if not for her wasted form.

"Hey." He managed a hint of a smile for her.

Her eyes filled with tears that wouldn't fall, she smiled back. "Hey. So, I guess you heard the news?"

With a sharp nod, he came to the bed and knelt by her side. "Yeah. Just outside." He ached to say something more,
but the words would never form. What was there to say? No half-shod wisdom would make any difference.

She saw that. Her eyes shimmered. "How are you?"

The question that had broken his heart more times than he could remember. How was he? That was all she wanted
to know.

"I'm fine. I..." What?

Her hand came to rest over his and gave a squeeze. He barely felt it.

"I want to hear the poem again."

"It's so old."

"It's lovely. I want to hear it."

He couldn't say no. He'd never been able to anyway.

There was no need to remember. It was short and she loved to hear him say it. He'd never understood why, but had
never given her a fuss even when she wanted to hear it more than once.

 "Wake unto me
 blind enough to see
 Life at its base
 Lines on her face
 Rapture and grace
 Death washed ashore
 in the Evermore"

"In the Evermore," she whispered along. "It's beautiful. What's the Evermore, Holden?"

"I don't know." There was no saving her.

She gave him the same half-smirk he'd fallen in love with and sometimes raged at. "If anyone should know, it's you."

Distantly, he said, "Maybe if I knew... "

"What? Things would be different?"

"Maybe... "

She shook her head. "No."

"How can you be so sure?" He couldn't keep the challenge out of his voice and regretted saying anything at all.

She showed no sign of any hurt she may have felt. "I'm not afraid of what's coming. It's not something to run from."

"But I don't want to lose you." Again.

"And you won't. I'll always be with you. Somehow. I promise."

Tears welled in his eyes. He knew well the danger in promises; he'd become intimately familiar with that.

                                                                               ~

The early morning haze was only just clearing up as the mourners stood in a solemn semi-circle around Penny's
grave, temporary black sentinels bunched up against the cold. Her mother, Helen, spoke. She managed only short,
choppy sentences to keep her voice from breaking. It was the sort of woman she was: she couldn't be thought a
weak link in anyone's mind, especially not now, in the eyes of her daughter. She, among all the gathered, seemed
above the dreary morning.

He'd taken a turn to speak. It seemed so long ago now. He couldn't remember what he'd said. Nothing profound.
Nothing like Helen seemed to manage.

"She never wanted the world. She only wanted home. Her own life," she went on.

Meanwhile, Holden surveyed the gathered crowd. There was Jill, Penny's older sister. She took it the hardest, aside
from Holden in the early days. There was Preston, Penny's ex-boyfriend turned best friend. There had been a time
he'd been suspicious of a man she'd slept with still being so close. It didn't take long for it to pass. Karen and
Rhianne, high school friends that had, against the odds, managed to stay together in the years to follow. Mike and
Laurel, neighbors who would offer the clothes off their backs to someone in need. Their children were in school today.

This time.

More friends, coworkers, acquaintances, friends of friends, and so on that didn't matter. But one face in the crowd
that he hadn't seen in... How long?

Penny's father, estranged since she was young. That was all she would say on the matter. He knew not to press the
issue. Something about it touched a nerve for her. She'd never felt the need to introduce her fiancé to her father,
and he'd never come looking for her.

But they'd met more than once. It just all seemed so distant. He could barely remember the man's name anymore.
His face was a masque of controlled grief. Despite the effort he put into maintaining his composure, there was no
doubt as to the measure of pain he was dealt. More than the rest, Holden thought. But he'd never known why.

"She'd never miss an opportunity to flash that smile," he'd told Holden once. "And when you saw it, there was no
letting her down." And when he'd said that, his lips stretched tight and his nostrils flared to hold back the tears.
"Well..." He offered a half-hearted smile. "Unless you were me."

He skipped the get together at Helen's after seeing Penny into the ground. He'd heard all the stories that would be
traded there any number of times already, and was frankly bored of them.

It struck him what a horrible sentiment that seemed to be.

But he would go on. There was time enough for only so much mourning in one man.

She was gone. All his life he'd searched in vain for that one spark that would make him realize there was more to life
than the droll monotony. And he'd found it.

Penny had become everything to him. He would shirk the things he knew he should do just to be near her. Just to
hear her laugh, maybe cry. He'd long ago come to realize he adored the sound of her voice when she had tears in
her eyes.

To see her wasting away like she had was torture enough. He hated to admit it, but her passing came as something
of a relief. Now he didn't have it hanging over his head anymore. Now he could get on with himself.

And do what? Miss her? That was all he was good for now anyway.

Desperately, he tried to distract himself from her anyway he could. He watched television, engrossed himself in one
book or another, tried to keep in touch with friends that were purportedly "there" for him.

None of it worked. Without fail, he found himself walking the streets at night, alone but for his own thoughts. And
his thoughts had only one subject.

                                                                               ~

Seated at his usual corner table in the coffee shop, Holden glanced over the newspaper without reading any of the
stories. Every so often he would focus on a headline, but that was all. It was all so played out by now. The world
never changed, and the news was just the same as it ever was.

Life was life and it did what it liked. There was nothing to be done about it. He might have been heartened by the
thought if it hadn't been the seventh or eighth time it popped into his head in the last hour.

Everyone talked about moving on, God's will, Penny would have wanted it that way. He could hardly fathom how
sickening those little catchphrases had become. They were slogans for people that couldn't think of what to say, but
were too dense to just stay quiet. Maybe it was the vain need to feel appreciated that inspired them to their useless
nuggets of self-important wisdom.

Maybe he was just an asshole.

The bell over the door jangled its call to the small gathering of coffee folk. Holden wouldn't have been surprised if
none of them were drinking.

His attention was roused. In truth, he was desperate for the slightest thing to take up his thoughts at that point.
He'd been down the path of self-deprecating hopelessness before, and it had never done him any good.

The girl in the doorway was an affront to his grief. She dared him to forget himself and think only of her. Her eyes,
filled with promises of laughter, made a quick pass over the denizens of the shop before she resolutely set herself
toward the counter.

Penny...

It was too soon since she'd gone. If he went back to the cemetery, her headstone would likely still be there. Still, this
girl was irresistible.

As she ordered her usual tall iced mocha, Holden gathered up the paper he wouldn't read and left his half-full cup
behind.
The door closed behind him, drowned out the bell. He took a deep breath of the musky morning air, skirted around a
puddle, and set off. His only destination was away.

                                                                               ~

She was a phantasm in every corner of his world. She was on every street corner, peered out from every window.
She never smiled, and he yearned for that to change. With Penny's death so near, why had this woman come to him
now? And why, but for his own madness, was she everywhere at once? Why so soon?

On the second day he steeled himself for the worst, and approached one of her hundreds of selves. She turned to
him with a sort of indifferent expectation in her eyes. There was no cursory grin for a stranger, nor eyes that
demanded solace. She simply looked on, as though she were just any other person.

But she wasn't.

He'd railed against his pillow all the things he wanted to shout at her, "Go away! Leave me alone! How?" But when
the time came, he was silent. He only looked on in silent reproach, as though her very existence was something to
accost.

"Yes?" she asked.

He stared back and wished he hadn't come near. He imagined tales of broken homes, of laughter and love, he saw
fields meant for running, and none of it was hers. None of it was the same.

With an uncomfortable, self-conscious stance he turned away from her. What could he say? "Hello? Why are you in
my life?" She wasn't in his life. She only was.

He shook his head and chuckled, turned his back to her. He didn't feel her gaze on his back beckoning him to her.
The winds of the world didn't shift in response. Life went on all around them and that was all there was to it.

He only felt guilt, shame. What kind of man, what kind of fool, was he now? To see her in every moment when he
could only guess at her name. As though she would understand.

The sound of his shoes accompanied him away. She said nothing. He couldn't say if she even watched him go, or if
she just went about her business.

She didn't wait for him at the next corner and the windows of the world seemed to all go dark as one.

                                                                               ~

There came a day when Holden awoke, and his first thought was not his lost love. There was not regret with which
he viewed the future, but a certain lackluster steadfastness. Thoughts of Penny and her death came, but they
weren't so paramount anymore. Gnawing agony had turned into a dull ache.

Day by day, he assured himself he was growing more sane. More like a man and less a broken down thing that wept
at the first notes of the wrong song.

He'd started back to work and noted the barely real smiles and only half sincere offers of consolation without the
same bitterness he had before. It was a mild amusement at the human lessons learned that dominated him now.

But the world is eternal and has a longer memory than one man.

On his way home from work, the most important thing on his mind the game at seven, he looked up to see her
approach.

She had a bag of groceries and her face turned up to the sky. The clouds threatened rain, but she welcomed it.

A smile tore at his face as she passed, and he swung in behind her. With a bounce in his step, he pulled even.

"Looks like rain," he started. It was as terrible a line as he could think to say.

She glanced at him out the corner of her eyes, barely moving her face in his direction. "Smells like it, too."

He laughed. "I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but I hope you're not part dog."

"You can't smell it? Sort of... old. Maybe musky, if it didn't sound so drab. Always before it rains."

"I don't think I was gifted with a nose that could predict the weather. That does sound like a talent, though."

Now she turned to him for the first time, her lips drawn tight in a smirk that threatened to show itself. "Is that how
you try to pick-up all your girls? A bad first line, and then the mocking starts?"

"Well, I tried being charming, but it only ever got me a bigger bill for dinner."

"And I suppose you're a hopeless romantic, right?"

"Of course. Aren't we all?"

"You mean guys?" she asked dubiously. "Because in my experience, no. But they love to say it."

"Okay then. What's romantic to you?"

She stopped there and shifted her bag in her arms. "What kind of question is that? Who are you?"

He smiled and extended a hand. "Holden Emerson. Pleased to meet you." When he realized she couldn't return the
gesture, he closed his hand and slowly pulled it back. "Right, so... What can I call you?"

The first drops of rain fell, and for the first time she smiled a smile he could never resist."I told you!" she said. "I can
always smell it."
He could only smile back before he looked at the clouds overhead. "Maybe you should teach me that trick."

"Annabelle."

"What?"

"My name," she clarified. "Annabelle."

"It's nice."

"It's stuffy," she corrected. "I hate it. My friends call me Penny."

Of course they did.

He already knew this time would be no different than the rest. They would fall in love, they would plan their lives
together, he would promise her they'd be together forever, and in the end, she would pass. He would see it coming
all along, but he would try to ignore it.

Like a frightened child, I run to her arms every time. If I only stayed away, it could all come to an end. No more pain.
She would finally rest. But I wouldn't see her smile... And he wouldn't be able to recite for her the poem she loved to
hear.

One time, he didn't know when, it would be different. He had to believe that. Until then, he would languish with her
perpetual death. "We'll be together forever," they'd promised each other. So, in the winding, unkempt will of the
Evermore, their word was kept.

David Plinski