Bedful of Moonlight by Raven Held (audio ebook reader .txt) 📕

passing. We’re sorry – I’m sorry – but I won’t let you stand there and accuse my daughter of something she didn’t do. Don’t you think she’s been as torn up as you are about what happened?”
“Mom. Stop it.”
“All we’re asking is to know where Blake’s grave is. We just want to see him. Kristen hasn’t been able to face him all this while –”
“Of course she wouldn’t have.” She stared at me with her glassy eyes. “All you had to do was move to somewhere else and start over. Leave this all behind and pretend it never happened so you wouldn’t have to think about it or live with it. It’s so much easier for you.”
It was worse than when Caleb said that to me. Now I knew it was not just him who saw me for the selfish fraud of a girlfriend that I was. All I was doing was protecting myself. I was not keeping Blake’s memory alive – I was burying it. Just so I would not get hurt.
“So what is this? Closure? You think by visiting his grave, you can officially tell yourself you’re over him, that you’re moving on?”
I would have crumbled in front of her right there, but my mother laid a hand on my back, as though to prop me back up. “No, by visiting his grave, Kristen just wants to acknowledge all that she has done and been through and felt for Blake.”
“It’s not closure,” I murmured, not caring if they could hear me. “There never will be closure.”
Because it was true. You never truly got over a person you loved just because they were dead. They would always be inside you, as you carved new spaces to let other people in.
Katherine must have seen something in me, or my mother, because finally, she said, “It’s in a private estate called Wroughton. There’s a cemetery there…”
“Wroughton?” My mother and I exchanged a look.
“It’s a private estate just a little after Balmone Road.” She gave us the address – which we already knew – and the exact location of Blake’s grave. “And please,” she said, when we thanked her, “don’t come back.”

*

I used to think that grief was a phase you went through in life, like wearing jumpers, or wanting to paint your room pink just so Celeste would want to come over to your house after school.
It was not until today when I realised it had been almost two months after my mother and Blake had left me that I understood that grief was not something you grew out of. It stayed with you, like a taint, indelible. It became a part of you, settled into you. If you could say that you had grown out of it, you would have lost a piece of yourself.
Sadness grew like weeds. They only multiplied if you did not get rid of them in time.
I couldn’t get past the fact that he was there all along, right where I was, when all I had been trying to do was push everything that had happened back where I left it.
The cemetery in the day, just after a brief late morning shower, was every bit as restful as I remembered. I was glad Blake was here, not just because he was closer to me than I had expected, but also because if there was one place I would want to be when I was dead, it would be in the Wroughton cemetery.
His grave was well-maintained, as were many others here, but it sat next to a jasmine tree with dark green leaves and white clumps of flowers. I did not have to read what was on the gravestone. The dates that he was born and died were already embedded in my mind.
“Well, what do you know,” mom said, as though she had stumbled upon this discovery herself.
I placed the flowers at the foot of the gravestone, and suddenly found that I did not have the strength to get up. My mother knelt down next to me and pulled me to her.
I did not mean to cry. Really, I didn’t, because I was past that. But I guess I was wrong.
We knelt there on the grass, crying and holding on to each other for a long time. Somewhere in the middle of that, my mother went back to the car and came back with the box that I had hidden under the floorboards in the old house.
“I was going to ask you if you wanted to give all this to Katherine,” she said, “so I brought them just in case. But I didn’t want you to make that choice. Besides, it’s rightfully yours.”
We did not plan it, but for the rest of the day, we sat next to Blake’s grave and under the jasmine tree, amidst a field of fallen white flowers, and went through all the photos and paraphernalia that Blake and I shared. We commented on the snapshots, laughed at some, rolled our eyes at others, and spoke to Blake as though he was there right next to us, invisible but listening in.
In the end, as the gasping heat of the day died down to a chill, we found ourselves crying again, for all that we had lost – all the lost time, all the lost moments we could have squeezed in between to say the things we wanted to, and all the time we had wasted on hurting each other, taking each other for granted.
If there was one thing I had come to learn, it was that there was no such thing as absolute loss. It was true what Caleb said: when something is lost, something else is gained. The reverse is true.
Just like how mom eventually came back to us, Blake had too. And during that period of time where I thought I had lost Blake forever, I had found Caleb. It was the universe’s way of maintaining the balance, after all.
Blake was never gone. I had just been too swept away in the crests of time that I had missed out on the wave that was rolling in. In the span of a month, that loss had seemed like forever. But I suppose we just had to hold out for the return; we just had to wait for whatever it was that we had lost to come back to us, in its own time, in its own way.


Thirty


“Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.”
~ Fran Lebowitz (American writer, 1950 – present)


“About time you showed up. “We could use some extra help.”
Hyde stood in front of the Old Belle, his arms crossed as he grinned at me. There was the distinct sound of drilling somewhere, and I caught a faint whiff of paint.
I took a step forward. The Old Belle was un-characteristically busy. There were, I counted, more than fifteen people in there, browsing, and a handful at the counter. Belle looked radiant as she handed over some change. The counter looked varnished and gleaming, and the armchairs were not the threadbare ones I had grown used to seeing.
“What’s going on?”
Hyde glanced back and beamed at Belle, who, having caught his eye, smiled back. “It’s doing well, huh? We wanted the contractors to come and refurbish the floorboards this morning, but the customers always come first, as they say.”
“Wow.” For a moment, I could not say anything. “Wow. That was fast. Business sure has picked up.”
“All that PR paid off,” Hyde said. “We’re seeing more people from all around the island, not just Wroughton. The Old Belle was in the papers yesterday. They called us a quaint but quietly majestic bookshop with a wide range of books for all ages. Not very original, but at least more people will know of our existence now.”
I nodded. “That definitely doesn’t hurt.”
He pointed at me. “Damn straight. Now, come in. We need all the help we can get.” As he pushed the door open, the bell chiming merrily as usual, he asked, “So did you go talk to Caleb?”
“Yeah. We got into a fight.”
“Oh, he just needs some time. He’ll come to thank us. They’re all better off without that no-good father of his.”
I was spared the trouble of replying him, as the rest of the day saw us as busy as we were in the morning. At least Oliver and Sawyer were not around, so Belle could focus on her work. Caleb’s grandfather had been discharged and couldn’t wait to look after the boys like before.
When the crowd finally thinned around six or so, I was serving a family of four that wanted to know where would be a good place to celebrate their having found a Sue Grafton novel they had been looking everywhere for.
“Definitely Ristrot’s,” I said. “They call it the Celebration Restaurant here. You have to have something to celebrate before they’ll let you in.”
“Well, now, isn’t that interesting,” the mother said, balancing her baby girl on her hip.
After the family left, there were only less than ten customers around. That was when the phone rang.
I could tell by the look on Belle’s face that she was not expecting the call, or the caller.
“Anna?” She pressed the receiver closer against her ear as a smile broke upon her face. “That’s wonderful! Thank you for letting me know. I really appreciate it. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Anna?” I said, once she hung up.
“My sister,” Belle said, beaming away, looking as though she had just found gold. “Yes. Can you believe it? She called to tell me Caleb just got released.”
“Wait, what?”
She nodded again. “Hyde!” she called. “Caleb’s out. Anna just called to tell me he’s out. They’re on the way home now.”
Hyde emerged from the storeroom. He had just been out in the backyard talking to the contractors who were here to fix up the café they were setting up. “Anna? As in, your sister Anna? Caleb’s mother, Anna? I thought she didn’t want anything to do with you.”
“Oh,” she sighed, looking sheepish. “I meant to tell you. Gareth came looking for me yesterday. But before you get mad at me,” she said quickly, “I want you to know that I brought Gareth to Anna’s and we all behaved like proper adults. Caleb is their son, after all. They have to make that decision together.”
“What decision?”
“Gareth apparently held true to his word and turned himself in.”
The Old Belle was quiet as that sank in. It felt as if the few customers remaining were listening in on our conversation too. But everyone was minding their own business. We were speaking too softly for anyone to hear, in any case.
“He did?” I said.
“I don’t believe it,” Hyde declared.
“Well, believe it or not,” Belle said, “he did. And that’s why Caleb’s released now. Gareth promised to clear him of all the blame. He’s going to say he never had any contact with any of us” – she glanced at me – “all this while.”
“What about the witnesses?” I asked. “That old lady at the craft fair?”
“They’re not going to take her statement,” Belle said. “She’s lives in the Beaming Rose Home.”
The therapy home for, well, people who had gone round the bend.
“But … but,” Hyde spluttered. “He’s Gareth. He wouldn’t do such a thing. He’s way too selfish for that.”
“Maybe he isn’t as selfish as you think he is,” Belle said quietly. “He’s his father, after all.”
Hyde snorted. “If he’s his father, he wouldn’t have put his son through all that in the first place.”
“The point is, he