Where Forever Lies (2 page)

“Thanks, Mom, that means a
lot to me,” Paige said as she waved to Kyra one last time
before she got in her car. It was too early to already be in a bad
mood, but with all the stress and grief, she couldn’t help it.

As she backed out of the
driveway, she wondered if her decision to not take Kyra to the
funeral was the right one. She had taken her to the showing to let
her pay her respects, not that she understood it all, but Paige felt
it was the right thing to do and Kyra had fussed around the entire
time.

♥♥♥

Driving down the curvy roads of
Sweet Haven, Tennessee, her mind couldn’t help but replay
yesterday’s unpleasant incident. Trying to try to talk to
Sharon, Randy’s mother, for the first time in a long time had
turned out to be a big mistake. She knew Sharon didn’t like
her, but she wanted to give her condolences anyway, and hopefully
make amends for their broken past. But Sharon didn’t want
anything to do with her or Kyra, and blatantly ignored them as she
turned her nose up and walked away while Paige had been in
midsentence. She shook her head in disgust as she thought about the
situation, blowing out a frustrated breath as she drove furiously
around each curve in the road. It was obvious his mother didn’t
want anything to do with Kyra and that was her loss. She got the hint
now, and was not going to beg her to be in Kyra’s life.

She tapped her fingers irritably
on the steering wheel as she drove, feeling her stomach churn as she
relived the hurt from yesterday, knowing she’d have to face the
same people again today. She never would have thought someone could
be so heartless. But the showing was the last straw, and she was not
going to make any more attempts at reconciling with her. She had
enough of her own family around supporting her that his family’s
nonexistence would not hinder her or Kyra. She liked to pretend that
was true, but she knew Kyra would ask questions later and she would
have to tell her something. She sighed as she slowed down for a stop
sign, feeling all the tension start to form a headache.

Paige didn’t know the
reason why Sharon felt the need to act this way towards her; she knew
she had never done anything to her. The fact that she and Randy were
relatively young when they had Kyra is the only thing she could think
of. And if Sharon just didn’t like her, she didn’t know
why she would have nothing to do with Kyra. It just didn’t make
sense. Paige remembered Randy talking about his mom’s drinking
habit... but still, she didn’t know why that would affect her
relationship with Kyra. She figured in time she would come around,
she just hoped it wouldn’t be a tug of war game with Kyra.

She watched the wooded scenery
fade as she got into town, replaced with fast food joints and
shopping centers, and felt the anxiety begin to rise the closer she
got to the church where the funeral was to be held. Coming to a
stoplight, she nervously tugged on the collar of her light blue
blouse that paired with her funeral black slacks and black sandals.
She grimaced at all the bad memories and finally turned into Sander’s
Addition towards her friend’s house.

As she pulled into the driveway,
she saw Kyleigh open the door and slowly walk out, her head hung low
and a Kleenex clutched in her hand. Kyleigh, usually energetic and
vibrant, looked tired and lifeless. Paige could empathize with her,
but hated to see her friend that way. They were both wearing their
grief on their faces. Kyleigh’s tan complexion looked pale and
her brown eyes were red from crying. Paige gave her a half-hearted
smile once she was inside. “Hey, you doing okay?”

“Oh, I guess so. How are
you? Did you sleep okay last night?” Kyleigh asked, knowing
that after Natasha’s suicide Paige had had horrible nightmares
for weeks. Her feelings and emotions about death seemed to haunt her
the most when she was asleep and her guards were down.

The nightmares seemed to linger
forever and Paige wondered if they would ever end. There had not been
any dreams in the past few months, and she somewhat missed them. Even
though they were usually terrible dreams, it made Paige feel closer
to Natasha, and she would take the nightmares over nothing at all.

It had been six months since
that incident, but Paige was still grieving from her friend’s
abrupt death. She thought about her almost every day and wondered
what had driven her to kill herself. Things had been tough for
Natasha sometimes, but Paige never thought it would have led to
suicide. If she had known, she would have tried to do something,
anything, to change her mind.

“No nightmares yet, and
hopefully none are on their way anytime soon,” Paige said as
she backed her Toyota out of the blacktop driveway. She felt that she
was ending a chapter in her life and moving on to a new unwritten
one. She saw a future with many uncertainties and a lot of
adjustments ahead.

Once they finally pulled into
the parking lot, dread seeped into her veins and coursed through her
body. She knew she would not have been able to go through another
funeral if Kyleigh wasn’t by her side, it would have been too
difficult. At only twenty-three she shouldn’t have two people
close to her already dead. They were supposed to have lived a full
life, but instead it had been cut dramatically short. Life was
completely unfair sometimes. She looked over at her friend, feeling
the panic settle in her stomach and begin to take root there, causing
her to feel nauseous. She turned to Kyleigh and asked, “Well,
are you ready to go in?” She pulled some lip gloss out of her
purse and absently applied it to her lips. It was a habit that she
had yet to break.

“I guess, let’s get
this over with. Are you nervous?” Kyleigh asked with a weak
smile as she shoved some tissues into her purse.

“Yes, but it helps that
you’re here, too,” Paige said, giving her friend’s
hand a quick squeeze. She glanced in the mirror and sighed as she
noticed how horrible she looked. Her hazel eyes were red and swollen
and her pale cheeks were flushed from nervousness. Knowing there was
nothing she could do to cover it up she opened the door and trudged
out into the sunny June afternoon and into the darkness of grief that
awaited her. How many more funerals would she have to go to in her
lifetime? She had a feeling it would be more than her heart could
handle.

As they walked through the
crowded parking lot and towards the building, memories flashed to six
months ago to Natasha’s funeral, which was also here at the all
too familiar white church. Paige felt like she was having a moment of
deja vu. She felt the flashbacks starting to creep in and the
nightmares of Natasha in her green silky dress resurfacing. Paige had
watched with bated breath as Natasha sat up in her casket and gazed
blankly around the room as if she didn’t know where she was. At
the time, the nightmare had seemed so real, so vivid that she had
woken up with her heart pounding and her skin soaked in sweat, tears
had been steadily falling down her face. She remembered the horror of
watching her dust herself off and then look down at where she lay,
looking utterly confused. Paige felt the tears stinging the edges of
her eyes and shuddered.

“Are you all right?”
Kyleigh lightly touched her shoulder as she saw the look on her face.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m
just having flashbacks, but... I’ll be fine,” Paige said,
trying to reassure her friend, and at the same time reassure herself,
that she could do this again—she had to—this wasn’t
something that she could miss. She would only feel worse in the long
run if she skipped out on today. She could not wait for this to all
be over, though, so she could start picking up the pieces of her
shattered and disassembled life and try to move on; hopefully free of
the death that kept sneaking up on her lately.

She kept her eyes trained on the
blacktopped parking lot, not wanting to meet anyone’s stares
and see the look everyone seemed to give her about being here, as if
she didn’t have a place here. Just because things didn’t
work out between Randy and her, didn’t mean she didn’t
care about him. He was her daughter’s father, and even though
he was dead, he always would be her father.

They opened the huge wooden
doors that were covered in beautiful stained glass and stepped into a
small foyer where people were gathered around, some crying, others
quietly talking with each other. Without saying a word, they made
their way to the open double doors that led into the church
sanctuary, both agreeing to take a seat in a hard wooden pew in the
back of the crowded church, by themselves. A lot of the people were
her own age, and as Paige glanced around the room, she realized she
knew most of them. Randy had been a popular guy and everyone who knew
him must have been here to say their final good-bye.

Once the sermon began, they
listened silently as the preacher talked about Randy Madison’s
short life on earth and how he would be greatly missed by his family
and friends. In the distance, she could hear murmurs of grief
throughout the congregation. Paige thought she was handling the
sermon fairly well, considering the situation, and then the preacher
mentioned Kyra. Even though it was only a brief mention, it had the
power to make the tears start falling and she wiped at her eyes with
a Kleenex. She was completely shocked that they had even decided to
mention her at all, but she was incredibly thankful that they had. It
meant more to her than they would ever know. Kyleigh leaned over and
gently rubbed her shoulder, trying to ease her feelings, sympathy
showing on her face as tears spilled down her own reddened cheeks.

She took in a deep breath,
wishing the preacher would hurry up and end his sermon because she
didn’t know how much more she could take. She let herself
concentrate on the multi-colored flowers up front and did her best to
drown out everything he was saying about Randy. She knew him, knew
everything about him, and she didn’t need to hear it all again
while he lay up front, dead.

After the sermon finally ended,
everyone filed into a line to walk towards the open casket to say
their goodbye. Paige felt as if she was in a dream and hoped, for a
moment, that she
was
just sleepwalking.

This could not be real,
she
thought,
maybe I will
wake up and everything will be back to normal
.

Instead, she found that she had
unconsciously made the walk to the front of the church and was only a
few feet away from Randy’s body. In her peripheral vision, she
caught a glimpse of Randy’s mom sitting off to the side,
crying. Paige reached the casket where Randy lay and noticed his
hands were clasped together, a leafy vine intertwined in them. She
thought of her dream and reached down and tenderly touched his hand.
It was so cold she almost jerked back from the unease of how lifeless
he felt. She felt a tear form in her eye and watched as it fell down
her face and landed on Randy’s hand.

As she slowly walked away, she
knew her life was forever changed.

Letting go is never easy. Life
is good about handing out constant reminders. Sometimes all it takes
is someone saying a certain word or phrase. Other times it’s a
smell that reminds you of the person you lost. And sometimes you pass
someone on the street who resembles them, and you have to do a double
take to make sure it’s not actually them. Paige had dealt with
all that in the past six months and she wondered if she would ever
become blind to the reminders. She knew things would get harder
before they got better, but time seemed to be standing still for her.
Getting past this hill of grief was proving to be extremely difficult
for her. At times, it felt like a mountain full of snow and ice that
she had to trek over barefoot. She didn’t know where to turn to
get relief from the feelings that seemed to want to drown her.
Heartache seemed to hammer at her body, making her whole being feel
as if she’d been in the fight of her life; she was losing and
grief was winning.

She sat on the couch watching
Kyra play quietly with her toys. The TV hummed in the background but
she barely noticed what was on. She was hoping to relax, considering
it had been a stressful month, but found it impossible. She found
herself thinking about Kyra’s and her future; how, from now on,
it would just be the two of them, and how she was going to deal with
the entire burden of being a single mother. She knew thinking about
this would only depress her even more, but with everything that had
happened in the past month, it was hard not to. She felt her life
seemed incomplete. There was an empty space there now and she saw it
plain as day. She’d never noticed it before, when Randy was
alive, even though he was absent in their life for the majority of
the past year.

She was not going to let herself
cry in front of Kyra, but she couldn’t shake the heartache that
seemed to keep growing. It just seemed to be building to the point
that it was hard to see over. Kyra interrupted her thoughts by
climbing up and plopping on her lap facing her. Paige watched as her
daughter carried on a conversation to herself, bouncing her head
enthusiastically up and down as the conversation intensified. Paige
couldn’t help but smile at watching her. She made the dark
times more bearable.

In an instant, Kyra abruptly
stopped talking, her hands dropped to her side, and her eyes focused
behind them. Paige stared at her daughter for a second, confused as
to what she was doing. Slowly turning around, she narrowed her eyes,
looking for what had caught her daughter’s attention, but saw
nothing.

“What were you looking at
Kyra; I bet you were tricking me, weren’t you?” Paige
said grinning as she carefully leaned Kyra back, tickling her belly.
Kyra giggled profoundly and grabbed at Paige’s hands to block
any more tickling. Still smiling, Paige leaned her back up and
relented with the tickle monster. Once upright again, Kyra began to
sing the itsy bitsy spider song, her tiny fingers making a crawling
motion in the air. Her red Minnie Mouse pajamas matched her red hair
and one long curl hung down in her eye. Paige absently brushed it
away, listening as Kyra continued to sing.