Staring At The Sun

"Grief does not change you; it reveals you." - John Green

She planted them to keep the rabbits out, but they brought the ghosts in.

Hazel will always remember Fiona this way: knees planted in the dirt, a smudge of it on her forehead from where she’d absently wiped earlier. It’s the way she was happiest, fiery head of curls bent over her latest acquisition, scooping the earth tenderly from a designated plot.

“Oh my god, Haze, it’s perfect,” Fi had said when she’d showed her the listing for the cottage. “Please, can we?”

It was ridiculous, Hazel thought, for her to even ask. From the moment she asked for anything, green eyes lit up with that light that Hazel swore she’d only ever seen through the stained glass her childhood church’s confessional, she was helpless to do anything but submit.

They’d put together their paltry earnings and were just able to make the down payment on the little white house with its pink shutters and peeling paint.

The previous owners had been honest. There was obvious work that needed to be done, and they had mentioned the rabbits. Hazel just hadn’t imagined there’d be so many of them.

“There’s no way you can have a garden with these bitches around,” Hazel told Fi. But Fi, unflappable as always, already had the solution.

“They hate the scent,” she said in answer when Hazel raised her eyebrows at the plethora of seed packets her girlfriend brought home that day. Only Fi would plant an entire field’s worth of flowers to avoid exterminating pests. “Plus they look gorgeous.”

Hazel had shrugged; she wasn’t a flower girl.

In time though, she’d grown to love them in her own way. That flaming field came to represent a safeguard of sorts: a barrier between she and Fi and the rest of the world.

The brightness of the sun hitting the flowers would stream through the windows on lazy mornings when they lay in bed together.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they Haze?,” Fi said, and Hazel would look over at her groggy face, twine her finger in a piece of Fi’s hair, spread out over the pillows like fire.

“Beautiful,” she agreed.

—

That had been in another life.

The marigolds assault her eyes now, like staring too long at the sun without protection. She can’t see how she ever found it beautiful, only painful. Thick shades in each window blot out the light as Hazel sits in the quaint little dining room, staring at the clock on the wall. She pulls the bottle of whiskey closer, cradling it against her chest absently.

She sleeps through most of the day now. If she had her way, she’d sleep through the nights, too. The nights are the worst. That’s when the ghosts come, crowding all around the windows, knocking at the glass. No matter how much she drinks, she can’t get them to go away; she’d once gone on her phone in a fit of paranoia, and found that Aztecs believed marigolds attracted spirits. Well, shit. No one else might know she was here, but how did you hide from a spirit? Answer: you didn’t.

At first they terrified her, tapping at the glass, scratching cold claws up the sides of the house, but now they were only a grim fact of life. A horrible fact, yes, but there were worse things.

Like the tightly wound hatred in Fi’s father’s voice on the phone when she told Hazel to stay away from their family.

Like the look on Fi’s face the second before the impact that sent them hurtling off the road, down the ravine on one side of the Vermont highway.

—

They’d been going home, as usual, and as usual, Hazel had had too much to drink.

“Your friends all hate me,” she said, pumping the brakes and putting the wipers on faster to keep up with the rain sloughing down the front window of the car. Headlights passed them like blurry stars in the night.

“You expect all my friends to hate you,” Fi said. “You expect everyone in my life to hate you as much as you hate yourself and then you go and act accordingly.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I have to convince them I’m right about you. It’d be a lot easier if I didn’t have to convince you too.”

“So you admit they hate me, then.”

“You’re missing the point, Haze!” Her voice was tearful and Hazel turned to look her in the face, for one second.

One second too long. “Sometimes I think-” Fiona began, but then her eyes widened, her focus shifted; Hazel turned forward and realized too late she’d veered off the road. The sound of her Camry crunching over the guardrail was like the scraping of a drain being unclogged beneath their feet, and then they were plummeting, broken glass spraying over them like sharp confetti, the chalky taste of the airbags filling Hazel’s lungs. She’d woken up in a hospital and at first hadn’t remembered a thing. Her head was pounding. When they told her about Fi, she was so full of pain medication that she hadn’t understood, thought it was part of a dark, murky nightmare, the kind she drank to silence.

But it wasn’t a nightmare; it was real, and Hazel would grow to wish that she’d never waken up a second time from her morphine-clouded sleep.

—

At the funeral, everyone’s eyes had slid to her as she crept, late, into the back of the church, sitting in the very last pew. She made herself stay there until the very end, weathering the sensation of their blame burning holes in her skin as she watched the priest’s lips curl around words that fell meaningless past her ears. The first words that reached her that entire day were the ones spoken by Fiona’s mother when she’d approached Hazel on the way back to her car after they’d all watched Fi’s casket being lowered into the ground.

Hazel was walking fast, head down, but Gloria O’Neill caught up with her, the sharp pain in her voice causing her to turn around. She felt forced to look the older woman in the eyes as she said, “You have some nerve coming here after what you did.”

“I..” Hazel began. Usually she had a retort for every situation, a sarcastic needling at hand, but this time a genuine apology was warranted instead and she drew a blank.

“You what?” Gloria said. “Didn’t mean to kill her? From the beginning I knew you were no good. My Fiona was a nice girl; she didn’t deserve this.”

Hazel opened her mouth, but Gloria only said, “You reek of gin,” and spun on her heel.

Shortly after that, she’d received the call from Fiona’s father. I don’t want to see you anymore. Stay away from my family.

—

Hazel takes another long pull from her bottle of Jack Daniels. A tapping sounds at one of the windows in the next room and she shuts her eyes, preparing for another night.

Fiona’s parents had never known about the cottage. Hazel knew she’d longed for the day when she could tell them the good news, that they planned on getting married and already had invested in a house. The day when her parents would finally accept that she and Hazel were something serious.

“They just need time,” Fiona liked to tell her. “They’re old-fashioned and I know they’re trying to be supportive of me but it’s hard for them.”

“What’s so hard for them?” Hazel had spat. “Some people are gay. Get over it.”

In her mind the O’Niells had nothing to cry about. They came from a nice home. They had the best fucking daughter they could ask for.

“They need time,” Fiona had repeated.

But they would never get that time.

Hazel doesn’t know how long she’s been here- she’s lost count of the nights. The newspaper comes every day; it piles up on the stoop outside. Hazel estimates it must be a couple of feet deep now, though she hasn’t checked. She hasn’t gone set a foot outside since she got here.

The ghosts didn’t come at first; they materialized over the days. Sometimes she thinks she can see them, slivers of white outside of the blinds, but every time she goes to look there is nothing there.

Sometimes she thinks she might be going a little insane.

She can’t erase the thought of Fi’s eyes that night, those deep green pools widening in fright. She can’t stop thinking of how harsh the last words she’d spoken to the only person she’d ever loved were, and of the way Fiona had started to respond.

Sometimes I think-

What did she think? Did she think that her family and her friends were right about Hazel? That she was too prickly, too rough around the edges?

Even kind, patient Fiona had to have her limits. Hazel knew she didn’t like how jealous she tended to get, how she never wanted to do anything with other people, always just the two of them. Hazel knew it was a problem, that she had a point, but she’d been this way since she was a kid and she wasn’t sure how to change it. Whenever something good came into her grasp, she clutched it tight, always afraid she’d lose it or someone else would come to take it from her.

—

Hazel hears the tapping again, this time from the window right in front of her. She ignores it, focusing fully on the bottle which has begun to blur in her vision. She’s drank too much too early and the edges of everything begin to seem unreal.

“Haze.”

She freezes. None of the ghosts have ever spoke before, but the shadow on the other side of the window has a solid persistence about it.

“Haze, let me in.”

The voice is muffled behind glass, but it is unmistakable.

“Fi?” she says, the voice coming through her lips cracked and foreign to her ears.

“Why do you have it all locked up?” she thinks she hears Fiona say. A knock sounds again on the window. Hazel gets up, steadying herself against the table.

“Haze, are you there?” The familiar form of her teases against the cloaked glass, before moving away.

“No!” Hazel almost shouts, running to the window and pulling aside the shade. It’s dark out, but she can see the pale figure of Fi walking back across the field. It turns for a moment to regard her, sadly.

“Prove me right about you, Haze. Prove me right.”

Hazel hears herself yell Fi’s name again. Her hand comes up, working into a fist, and smashes through the window. “Come back!” she thinks she calls, but Fiona is already gone and there is only blackness in her place.

—

Hazel wakes up to a throbbing pain in her hand and in her head. Sun is streaming through the broken window above her where she lies on the floor. The house around her looks transformed, magical. Like the home of a stranger.

She staggers up from the floor and find some tissue in the bathroom to wrap her hand. The pounding is still in her head, but something else has joined it, something she hasn’t felt in a long time. She holds a staring match with the fifth, unopened bottle of Jack Daniels she brought, before taking it, twisting the top off, and pouring it down the kitchen sink. Hazel goes to the door and steels herself, taking a breath before she opens it. The sea of marigolds floods into her senses. It must have rained last night; small streams of water slide down their stems like tears.

Like staring at the sun. Painful, and she has to believe, worth it. She does not close the door behind her when she goes. She does not look back.