We Didn't Make It After All

Chapter Eighteen

His name was Caleb Frazier, but the world knew him as Jestem Matar, a brooding Renaissance man with a penchant for historic art. To us, he was no different from the other outcasts roaming our town, but on Carrie Becker's radio show, he was a sensation.

"According to news making headlines around America this morning, police have captured a man tied to several murders, from Monroe Hills to Port Orion. Most recently tied to the murder of eighteen year old Ezra Parker, the suspect, Caleb Frazier, is said to have murdered Mr. Parker in plain sight and have taken his own life shortly after..."

Tuning out the static interfering with her voice, I lay on my bed, recounting the countless news reports preceding her's. An earlier segment featuring Katie Rosenlicht had revealed that Frazier had never intended to kill Ezra that day. He had left behind a note for the Holden sheriff department before his departure to Monroe Hills, admitting to his vices. In it, he'd written that he'd had enough; that he was done with the murders; that he was driving to the platform in Monroe Hills known for its desolation, to shoot himself in front of the five thirty to Holden.

So we had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Was that it? Was that really it? If we had boarded a later plane into town, Ezra would still be here? He would still be with me?

"He had said he would do this, Narnie," Clara had sobbed in the car ride to the hospital, referring to the stranger, Jestem. "He had said that if I ever ran away, if I ever reported him, he would take away everything and everyone that I held dear." Her words rang in my ears until they became indecipherable.

Ezra Parker. I tried to consider what life was like before him—I really did—but he had slipped into my every memory, even the ones preceding his arrival that day in late August. Late August. When moths swarmed the lampposts and the sultry smell of sweat varnished the air. When I crossed paths with Ezra Parker for the very first time, convinced that this time, it would be different—that he would be infinite. But even Ezra Parker could not survive the thread of death. This inevitability—this was the plight of the human condition.

I sighed, thinking about his last words, about how hopeful he had been. He had been so sure that things were going to change. It was the universe's greatest act of cruelty, filling him with a sense of beginning just moments before his end.

And the days passed, one after another. The day of his funeral, it rained savagely. I was in my room, applying concealer and listening to Carrie Becker's reporting on Amira Parker's case. Murdered in cold blood by Jestem Matar while sedated in her bedroom with a benzodiazepine she hadn't known she had ingested. It happened on a Sunday, after a fight with her husband. She was in the bar, an empty bar, when Jestem approached her—and because Ezra's father had been the last to see her, because the sheriffs had found benzodiazepine on their nightstand and her dead body in their house, he had been taken away as the suspect. I didn't realize I was crying until Mama slipped into my room. Hearing the interference ricocheting in between Carrie Becker's words and my sobs, she reached for the radio. "I'm turning it off, Narnie."

I dabbed my eyelashes with a tissue, careful not to ruin my makeup.

"Have you eaten?"

I eyed the lentil soup she had brought up just an hour ago, now cold. Its insipid brown took me back to that morning: to the blood pooling out of Jestem's head, brown in the eternal darkness. It was this same brown that had pumped his veins as he stripped me of my new beginning. I thought about his bloodstains, fresh against my face, and felt the nausea taking over. I reached for my trashcan, gagging out the little of the soup I had eaten, wishing that I could purge myself of him instead.

Mama stood on the edge of my vanity, gently massaging my hair. "Baby, I'm here, I'm here..."

"How am I supposed to do this, Mama?" I sputtered out. "How am I supposed to bury him?"

"Oh, Narnie..."

"He wasn't supposed to leave us so soon. How could he be gone—just like that—just like Papa?"

"It isn't a permanent goodbye, baby. He's waiting for you in heaven."

"You act like there are no pretty girls in heaven."

"None of them are you, my sweet Narnie."

"Narnie Larson?" an unfamiliar man repeated just hours later, at his son's funeral. His eyes the same green, he approached me cautiously as Larisa gave her parting remarks behind the podium in the funeral home.

I looked at the man. Did I know him?

"Oh, where are my manners? I'm Clarence, Clarence Parker."

I softened my glare, swallowing the champagne I was gurgling in my mouth. "Mr. Parker."

His lips formulated a weak smile, one that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Call me Clarence."

"I'm sorry, Clarence."

"Sorry?"

"Sorry that I couldn't save him."

"Oh, Narnie, dear..."

I felt my breathing labor.

"You were his best friend."

Then why did he leave me, Mr. Parker? Why did he abandon his best friend? I wanted to ask. I sighed instead, stealing a fleeting glance at his cadaver until I couldn't anymore. "I just can't believe he's really gone."

Mr. Parker smiled again, this smile weaker than the one before. "How can he be gone? You love him so much."

I swallowed the lump growing in my throat.

"Narnie?"

"Yeah?"

He reached for something in his inside coat pocket. "We were clearing out the caravan, Clara and I—and we found this."

I looked at the familiar blue on his hand: Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha.

"It seems to be your copy. I found your name on the inside cover."

I took it from him and opened it to the title page. And there it was: my name, written in my own handwriting, with Ezra's familiar script leading up to it: Life is an endless light with you, Narnie Larson.

I closed the book, squeezing my eyes shut. And when I opened them, tears were pooling down my face like never before. "Excuse me," I said, brushing past Mr. Parker. I exited the venue and entered the lady's room, finding Sol fixing her running makeup.

I rushed up to her, burying my face in her neck. She held me without a word, her silence my sanctuary until my tears ran dry. I cried for Ezra and I cried for her. I cried for the cruelty this world put us through: for the casualties of war and famine. I cried for the possibilities severed by fate. I cried in protest against death. How could I not?

There were times in our lives when we encountered a connection so powerful that it left us completely transformed. All it took was a second, a minute or a day, after which we were never the same again. We are told that true love is nurtured with time—that we do not know a person enough to truly love them until a year and sometimes five. This is a myth. Because I fell in love with Ezra Parker overnight. And maybe it was what we never were that is more enchanting than the days we lived to see. But I found myself entranced by his familiar magic—by the way he could, with a simple glance, read my heart's language.

I worried that I would grow old and no longer remember him. As I saw his face amid the warfare I waged against forgetting, I harnessed the freedom I once felt when I was in love, a freedom I feared could be imprisonment with the wrong person—and I cried more at the possibility that I would never love again.

Bella entered the room not much later, finding the two of us. She hesitated, reaching for her phone before wrapping her arms around my waist. A little later, we were joined by Anderson, Micah and Teo, who enveloped me in their tighter embrace. Then it was just the six of us, standing in the middle of the lady's room in that quiet suburban morning, crying softly for the loss of someone who had become a part of us, someone we were condemned to live on without.

❄

Author's Note: Everything hurts. :(