Free Surviving Valencia by Holly Tierney-Bedord

seemed strange and morbid to the neighbors?
    “Don’t feel bad, kiddo,” my dad had said. “Just be glad you’re up here instead of in there.”
    “I want to be in there with them,” I said.
    “Oh, is that what you think?” he said, not so kindly.
    That was what I knew.
    “Please buy me a spot too. I want to be with all of you.”
    “You’re not acting very grown up,” said my mother, overhearing. I can picture her, looking haggard, looking like she could not take anymore.
    “I just feel left out.”
    “Will you listen to yourself? Think of what you’re saying. You should be very, very ashamed of yourself.”
    “I just –“
    “Quit taking this personally,” said my mother. “It’s not about you.”
    I took it very personally though, when I was eleven years old, to see the place where the four of them would rest together eternally, with no space for me.
     
    Tonight the graveyard was black. For the first time, it seemed like it might not have been a good idea to come here alone. I found a flashlight in the glove box and made my way through the cemetery, following the skinny beam of light, trying to remember where they were. At the point when I started to feel like I should just give up until it was light out again, when I looked back and the car looked so frighteningly far away, I found them. I crouched down, making sure to keep my butt off the squishy wet ground, and shined the flashlight across the headstones.
    Van was first. Evan Roger Loden. He’d never been known as Evan a day in his life. June 15, 1968 – November 26, 1986. A chintzy, faded ribbon on a plastic wreath flapped in the night wind. It said Son . The last time I had visited, the same wreath had been here, but it had been new. Had my parents been here between then and now? I pulled the wreath from its rusty metal stake, and also removed the tattered one leaning up against Valencia’s grave that said Daughter . There were rules against leaving these tacky pieces of garbage here year round. I was surprised some groundskeeper hadn’t taken them down a long time ago.
    I looked around me, making sure I was still alone. The cemetery is creepy at night. It is not the ghosts I am afraid of. There are so many places to hide. I shined my light around and then let it fall on my sister’s headstone. There was a chalky pile of bird poop on it. I rubbed at it with the corner of the faded ribbon. The night wind picked up and a prickly sheet of icy rain began to fall.
    I crouched back down a bit, and pulled my collar around my face. This was no longer surreal. When had it stopped being surreal? That is when the emptiness takes over for agony. Once you become numb, you never feel anything quite as acutely again. I suppose being numb robbed me of much that other young people enjoy. It is what it is.
    Valencia Patricia Loden said the words neatly etched in granite. Who, since she was born ten minutes after Van, had managed to score herself her own birthday, but not her own death day. June 16, 1968 – November 26, 1986. I followed my old superstition of standing in front of Valencia’s grave, since there was not a skeleton beneath me, just dirt.
    I waited to feel something. I touched the gravestones, running my fingers over the texture of their names.
    “Van?” I whispered. Could he see me? Did he remember me? I wish I believed he was watching me.
    The wind was blowing harder and I pulled my sweater sleeves around my fingers, clicking off the flashlight so I could be alone with them in the dark.
    “Valencia, who am I?” I whispered. I felt stupid for saying this aloud and caught myself looking around, as if someone had heard me. I wanted to cry. I wanted to connect to them. But I just kept feeling empty. My legs started to burn from squatting to avoid the wet earth, so I let myself sit on the damp grass, let the icy, pellet-like drops of rain dampen my hair and face.
    You might as well go, I told myself. What were you expecting?
    But I stayed