I wasn't looking forward to our annual Memorial Day outing to Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery at all. I was still in a crummy mood from Emmy's disappearance, and seeing Dad's grave wasn't going to make me any happier. I appreciated that Stephanie wanted to come along, but I was afraid I wasn't going to be very good company for her.
I'd told her to come over at eight, because it always takes forever to get to the cemetery on Memorial Day and we needed to be there for the eleven A.M. service. It would take us an hour to get to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, then another hour to take the bus to the cemetery.
“It's a big pain,” I said, exasperated. “But it's really important to Mom, so we all have to go every year.”
“I've never been there,” Steph responded. “I'm looking forward to it.”
“That makes one of us,” I grumbled.
Stephanie arrived right on time, and she looked great in her little navy blue sundress. She was all smiles and polite greetings to Mom and Tiff, and it made me feel guilty for being such a grump.
“Leah, you look great in that!” she said, complimenting me on the outfit that was making me feel ridiculous. Mom had done Tiff and me up like perfect little girls, our hair done, summer dresses and matching sandals, and even little purses to go with the outfits.
“Thanks,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“No, I'm serious,” she insisted. “You look really good like that.”
Tiffany and I sat in the back seat on the drive down to San Diego and Stephanie sat up in front. It made conversation difficult so we didn't say much to each other, but Mom and Steph talked quite a bit, mostly about what to expect at the ceremony.
A young Marine fresh out of basic training guided us into a parking spot on the MCRD grounds. In his blues he looked so, so young. He probably wasn't even a year older than Stephanie and me, after all. The moment the car stopped three other brand-new Marines opened our doors for us and held out their white-gloved hands to help us out of the car, with a chorus of “Miss” and “Ma'am.” Stephanie wasn't used to it, but for our little family it was all too familiar.
“Jeeze,” Steph said as we walked to the pick-up area for the bus that would take us to the National Cemetery. “This is, like, too much!”
“You absolutely don't want to see what's going to happen when they find out who it is we've come for,” I whispered.
“You mean your dad?” Stephanie asked, puzzled.
“Yeah. If these guys here had any idea, they'd freak out. You'll probably see it later,” I replied, still whispering.
The bus arrived before Steph could ask any more questions, so we took our seats and rode up the hill to the cemetery without talking, just listening to the bus driver's tour guide descriptions of the areas of Point Loma we passed through.
When we got off the bus Mom handed the envelope she was carrying to the Navy officer greeting the arrivals. He looked at the invitation inside, did a double take, then bellowed out at the top of his lungs, announcing “Medal of Honor widow and daughters!”
Immediately each and every uniformed member of the military and nearly half of the people in civilian clothes in the area all stood straight and saluted my mom, sister and me. Even though I knew it was going to happen and thought I was prepared, I turned as red as a beet like I did every single time. A quartet of officers from various branches of the military stepped up and offered their arms to walk us to our seats, just like always, and just like always, all I wanted to do was run and hide from the attention. We were seated in the front row, right there with all the admirals and generals and the brass, just like always.
“You never told me!” Steph whispered when we sat down and the officers in their dress uniforms walked off.
“I told you it was a big pain,” I hissed back.
“A big pain?” Steph responded, indignant. “Your dad was some kind of hero, and it's a big pain? A big pain to honor him and what he did for our country?”
“No, it's not that,” I objected. “It's all this ceremony, that's what's such a pain. I just wish it could be a simple, you know, lay flowers on the grave kind of thing.”
“Well, I think it's super freaking cool,” Steph said, and turned away to let me know she was done talking about it.
I sat there and looked out over San Diego's bay and downtown and thought about what she'd said, and how amazing the view all these dead heroes had, how yeah, my dad was a hero to this country, but he was still dead and would never hold any of us in his arms, or play his guitar on the couch in the living room, or get to see his youngest daughter even be born, much less grow up.
When Stephanie noticed the silent tears rolling down my cheeks, she leaned in. “Oh, god, Leah. I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. I didn't mean to make you feel bad, or anything,” she whispered.
“No, it wasn't you,” I answered, keeping my voice low. “It's just... I miss him so much. I wish he'd been a plumber, or worked in the nursery with his brother, or anything, 'cause then he'd still be alive, you know? I mean, sure, he was a hero, but I wish he was still around to be my hero.”
Stephanie didn't really have an answer for that so she just reached out and held my hand and rested her head on my shoulder. In all fairness, it was just about the best response she could have had, and it felt good to know she understood.
We stood for the national anthem, which was sung by an African-American Navy officer who had an incredible Whitney Houston-like voice. After that came the twenty-one gun salute, then we sat for the speeches. After the ceremony we walked over to the stone that said James Edward Farmer. Mom handed Tiffany the flowers that she'd been holding all morning and Tiff laid them on the grave. I made no attempt to stop my tears, and neither did Mom. Tiff cried, even though Dad died before she ever got a chance to get to know him. Stephanie cried, too, from the sadness of the occasion I guess.
After a few minutes I noticed a Marine in his dress uniform waiting silently, and to my astonishment his eyes were wet, too. Mom glanced up and saw him, then gasped in surprise “Ricky?”
“Sandra,” he replied. “It's really good to see you again.”
Mom slowly walked over to him as he opened his arms and then she just collapsed against the Marine. He held her for a while, not saying anything while she rested her head on his shoulder. I felt really awkward standing there, wondering who the heck was this guy hugging my mom.
After what seemed like forever Mom let the guy go and turned to face us. “Leah, Tiffany, this is Ricardo Aguila. He was your father's best friend, and best man at our wedding. Ricky, this is Leah, whom you've met before, and Tiffany. Tiffany is seven years old,” Mom announced, and the mention of Tiff's age was clearly intentional. “And this is Leah's friend from school, Stephanie Houk.”
“Any relation to Greg Houk?” he asked, shaking Stephanie's hand.
“Uh, yeah, he's my dad,” she said, unsure of how this Marine might know her father.
“We went to high school together,” Mr. Aguila explained, giving Steph a smile.
He then bent down and gravely shook Tiffany's hand. “Your father was a good man and a true hero, Tiffany. He was also very proud of his family, and I'm sure he would be proud to see how you're growing into a lovely young lady.”
Shaking my hand, he said “Leah, you probably don't remember me. It's been so long since I've been back to the old home town, but I remember you very well. The last time I saw you, you were about Tiffany's age here.”
I mumbled something about how sorry I was I didn't remember him, but he just waved it off.
Mr. Aguila invited us all to lunch and mom accepted. I wasn't thrilled about it, but what could I do? They obviously had a lot of catching up to do.
We ate at a Fifties-themed diner back by the base, which seemed incongruous for right after a memorial service. The food was O.K., I guess. The only thing I really remember is the chocolate malt, but I'm not sure I can really blame the restaurant for my lack of enthusiasm. I just wasn't in the mood.
Mom and Mr. Aguila spent a lot of time talking about Dad, and Tiff seemed interested but I just tuned it out as best I could. I just didn't want to hear about Dad's exploits in Iraq or Afghanistan.
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All I wanted was to go home and not think about Dad and what a great hero to our country he was, or I guess more accurately, what a missing father he was. Why did James Edward Farmer, or “Jeff” to his friends, have to go and get himself killed in some freaking country nobody cares about on the other side of the world, anyway? It just wasn't fair to Mom and me, and especially not to Tiffany. What kind of man abandons his wife and little children like that?
I was interrupted from my thoughts by Mr. Aguila. Actually, I didn't even realize he was talking to me until Stephanie gently nudged me with her elbow.
“Leah,” he said. “It's amazing how much you remind me of Jeff. You've got the same coloring, of course, but it's your expressions most of all.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled.
“You have that same thousand yard stare he used to have,” Mr. Aguila answered.
“She certainly does, doesn't she?” agreed Mom.
“What does that mean?” demanded Tiffany, saving me from having to ask.
“It's hard to explain, Tiffy. It means that Leah sometimes seems as if she sees things the rest of us don't, and would rather not see at all.”
“Like ghosts?” asked Tiffany, eyes wide.
“Not like ghosts in the movies, Tiffy. More like personal ghosts, like memories,” Mom tried to explain, but I don't think Tiff really understood.
Thankfully lunch didn't last much longer, and we were on our way back home soon enough. I just wanted to crawl into bed and close my eyes to make the world go away for a while. Stephanie tried to get me to go out shopping or something with her, but I just wasn’t in the mood. I appreciated the effort to get me out of my pity party, but I just wanted to be left alone. Stephanie seemed reluctant to let me be myself, but when I reminded her that I’ve gotten through it six times before, she relented and went home, leaving me to cry to myself in my bed for a while.
Going back to school after my suspension was strange. At Art, Stephanie sat next to me and Candace was very obvious about sitting in the very farthest possible seat. She glared at me the entire time until I made a fist when the teacher wasn’t watching and pointed at her eye. She got the hint I was threatening to make her left eye match her bruised right one, and she turned away.
Randy saw the whole thing, and busted out laughing, which made the teacher turn around and tell him to please be quiet and concentrate on his work.
At lunch, Andy sat with us, and said “Dude, you really beat the snot out of Alyson and Candace. They looked like they’d gone fifteen with Mike Tyson or something!” He raised his hand and Tom high-fived him.
“Leah, the heavyweight contender!” Tom crowed, but it did nothing to improve my mood.
“I just hope that’s the last I hear from them,” I muttered.
“Yeah, I’m sure it will be,” Stephanie said. “Candace thinks she’s, like, all bad-ass, but you put the smackdown on her and Alyson and the whole school knows it. No way she’s going to do anything now.”
An unexpected perk of the fight was that Nicole, Abby and all the other haters gave me wide berths for a while and didn’t say a single thing to me. I guess a rep as a fighter can be a good thing in some ways. I’m a little bit ashamed to admit it, but I milked it a bit, too. If a bit of intimidation could get some of these people to leave me in peace, well then, a glare here or there was a good thing, right?
School sucked, but there just wasn’t that much left and then it was adios, FHS. The next couple of weeks were tough, and Stephanie was so worried about me she hardly let me out of her sight. I was over the initial shock of Emmy’s vanishing into the night and had even pretty much gotten over being angry at her parents. I mean, they did what they thought was necessary, after all. It was crummy for me and Emmy, and neither of us ever asked for this, but I guess it’s what we got for not being a whole lot more circumspect about our relationship. If we’d kept it secret from her parents, maybe this would never have happened. I kept kicking myself for ever letting what Emmy and I had be anything but our secret, but I could never, ever bring myself to regret what Emmy and I had shared. The time that we had, her living with me and sharing my life completely, was the best month of my life and I wouldn’t trade that memory away for anything.
Still, every time I saw anything that reminded me of Emmy, I felt a pain stabbing me straight in my heart. Every time I got coffee from the java hut (which had become a regular ritual with Stephanie), every time I saw a cream-colored Mini Cooper, every time Tiffany had a bad dream- it all still hurt deep inside. I knew it would fade with time, but some part of me didn’t want it to ever become just a distant memory. The thought that Emmy would become ‘someone I used to know’ made me want to cry, as if I hadn’t already been doing enough of that. Even the thought of my upcoming graduation made me sad, knowing that Emmy should have been there with the rest of us, wearing the robe and mortarboard.
I’d stopped going to V Ball practice after the suspension. I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep myself from punching Abby and Nicole if they said anything, and besides, I’d already signed a letter of intent for Stanford, so I was locked in. I didn’t need the workouts. As a result, I had more free time than I’d ever had in my high school career. I spent a big portion of that time tutoring Stephanie in her classes, because she was trying to boost her G.P.A. there at the end.
We were sitting on my bed discussing her science lab project, when out of the blue, she indicated Emmy’s guitars in the corner. “What are you going to do with Emmy’s stuff?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “I haven’t really thought about it,” but that was a lie. I’d thought about it a lot, but I didn’t want to admit to Steph that I kept all of Emmy’s things exactly the way they were when she left, just in case she showed up unannounced. After almost a month with no phone calls and me checking my email twice a day every day for the first time in my life, I was giving up hope. I didn’t want to give up entirely, though, as ridiculous as it made me feel.
“But all that stuff takes up a lot of room,” Steph protested. “I mean, what, there’s like, four guitars there, and those two amps, too.”
“Well, that old guitar there, that was my dad’s. Emmy only had just the three.” Yeah, it sounded lame to me, too.
“I bet those things are worth some money,” Steph said, looking at Emmy’s collection.
“Yeah. I went with her when she bough that Gretsch guitar and that old-looking amp. She spent six thousand bucks like it was nothing.” I smiled, remembering how Emmy’d wowed the guys at the shop that hadn’t wanted to give her the time of day when she walked in.
“Are you serious? Six grand for a guitar?” Stephanie was rising up to get a better look at the object under discussion.
“Well, I think the guitar was four, and the amp was two.”
“You ought to sell them. Seriously,” Stephanie said, giving me a look that said I would be a fool not to do so. “Like you said, she’s probably never coming back.”
“I am not going to sell Emmy’s guitars,” I responded sharply. “They’re hers, and if she ever does come back, when she does come back, I’ll have them here for her.”
Stephanie realized she’d pissed me off, and backtracked. “Look, I didn’t mean it like that. Hey, I’m sorry. It’s just that’s, like, a lot of money sitting there in that corner. You don’t even have a car, and that one guitar alone could get you one.”
“That may be. But they aren’t mine to sell.” The tone of my voice must have made it very clear that the subject was no longer under discussion.
The rest of the afternoon was awkward, because although Stephanie knew she’d really upset me, she wasn’t ready to apologize for what she felt was right.
Thinking about that night, I came to the conclusion that I had maybe been too hard on Stephanie, and I told her so on the drive to school. “Look, Steph, about what happened yesterday” I began, but she interrupted me.
“I’m really sorry about that. You were right, I mean, that isn’t your stuff to do whatever you want with. It’s just- I don’t know. I’m so stressed about being able to even get into college, and I have no idea how I’ll be able to pay for tuition, either. I mean, It’s gonna be tough, and to just see how much money there is in those things… I guess I kinda just saw dollar signs, you know?”
This was the first Steph had admitted about how worried she was about college, and it surprised me. “What do you mean? Are you thinking you won’t be able to get into State?”
“You know that’s really the only place where I applied, but my grades were just barely good enough for them to even consider, like, looking at my application. They told me my acceptance was dependent on my final grades,” Stephanie confessed, her shoulders drooping. “I’m not some brainiac like you who can get into Stanford, but if I do really well on this last report card they’ll let me sign up for classes this fall.”
Shrugging off her backhanded compliment, I said “Well, let’s make sure you totally kick ass on all your finals, then.”
Her grateful smile made her warm brown eyes light up, and I was happy to see her shake off her overwhelmed feeling.
For the next few weeks we worked long hours on all her class work, and Stephanie even talked a few of her teachers into accepting some very late assignments and allowing her to retake tests that she’d done poorly on earlier in the term. In fact, she managed to squeak out a straight A report card for the first time in her life, sending her (and her mom) over the moon. It was rewarding for me in two ways. First off, of course, I enjoyed helping the girl who had become my best friend in the last couple of months, and second, burying myself in schoolwork (mine as well as Steph’s) helped keep my mind off how much I missed Emmy.
Graduation day was divided into two parts. In the morning and afternoon it was all about family, and photos, and ridiculous robes. With all the commotion and activity I only missed Emmy for brief periods at a time, for which I was grateful.
That evening, it was party time. Stephanie’s mom had agreed to allow a party at their house as a reward for her stellar report card, as long as it wasn’t too big and stayed under control. After all, she didn’t want her position on the town council compromised by rowdy underage drinking at her house, now did she?
It was just a few of us at Stephanie’s that night, but in some ways that was a good thing. We drank beer under the restriction that designated drivers had to pass Steph’s mom’s inspection before they’d be allowed to get behind the wheel. Also, if Mrs. Houk thought anybody was getting too inebriated she would cut them off. I know that my mom had talked to Steph’s about the party and agreed on the restrictions, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Mrs. Houk had talked to everybody else’s parents, too. She was a politician, after all, even if only a local one.
The party was pretty mellow, but in some ways that made it better. We all had fun, but nobody got so drunk they threw up or passed out or anything. We danced, talked about our college plans (or the Marines, in some cases), played music, danced some more… you get the idea. I did O.K. against most of the others playing pool in the garage, thanks to the practice I’d been getting during Stephanie’s study breaks, but she could still beat me with one hand tied behind her back.
Things were winding down around midnight and people were leaving, when a somewhat drunk Stephanie wrapped her arms around me and announced “Hey, everyone! I love this girl! Leah here helped tutor me to straight As! She’s wunnerful!” With that, she gave me a big, sloppy kiss on the lips, which embarrassed the heck out of me.
I peeled her off me, but not before she gave me another kiss. I set her down on the couch, telling her I’d call her tomorrow.
“No, don’t go,” Steph pleaded, but I just told her to drink some water to avoid a hangover, then left with Tom.
I took a quick shower to get the smell of the party off me, then climbed into bed. Thinking about Stephanie, I felt myself turning red again even though there was nobody to see my embarrassment. We’ll have a good laugh about it in the morning, I told myself as I drifted off.