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My father is buried beside Andrea’s grave, and the funeral is not lavish in any sense, not fit for a name as large as his is, but it is enough. People come and go, paying respects, and I stay sitting by the headstone, long after the light has died. They do not linger in the dirt the way I do.
It is some time before another visitor comes.
“Your dad wouldn’t want you to be like this, you know,” she says, sitting next to me in the grass. I have been so lost in my own abyss that I didn’t hear her approaching until she was right on top of me. She is silent for a moment, pausing at the breeze. It rustles her hair, short and pale like moonlight against her jaw. “He wouldn’t want you to be sad.”
I almost reply, tell her she doesn’t know what my father would want, that she doesn’t know what it is like to cling desperately to and lose the love of a father at all, but that would be cruel in a way even I cannot bring myself to be. The words would leave my mouth like bullets, and I cannot take the shot. That’s how it is, with her, with us. How it’s been since the start.
I am not known for my bite the way Sophia is. I am known for the kill, the way savagery has cradled and reared me when my father had been unable to carry my weight himself.
“There’s nothing else to be,” I say in place of the gunshot, and she sighs, draws her knees to her chest as she used to when we were younger.
Before my father belonged to me, he belonged to the world, and he joins it again under our bodies. In the silence that follows, I think. There is the image of his eyes, the way they had not recognized me at all—and his hands, that had carried me through fire and bombshell and from the edge of death time and time again, reaching for me to bring about that very thing he had fought so hard to keep me from when he’d been breathing. The dead still moved, still moaned, still ate, but they did not breathe. He did not breathe before I had pulled the trigger, nor after. It had been so fast, such a learned reaction, that I had not even thought about what I’d done until his head hit the floor, until all that he had ever been or ever would be ran out onto the carpet.
The what ifs come and do not cease in his absence. Had I not come to his door that morning, had I just let him continue to sleep. He wouldn’t have been alive, not really, but he would have still been something. He was tired. I should have let him rest a little while longer.
Through it all I can’t help but hear her words, so long ago now it seems a lifetime away.
“Mostly I just feel sorry for them.”
She must know my way of thought by now, because she reaches out, holding my hand against the carved stone as we once had before a chain linked fence. The wind brushes the exposed skin, the scarred over bone of my face, and I do not want to look at her, so I close my eye.
“You feel sorry for them? Why?”
I had been younger when I’d asked that question, staring out brave-faced against the prison fence and the dead that walked despite. My father’s hat, barely fitting on my head, tilting down and shadowing my eyes that would have otherwise given me away. I wouldn’t tell her, until much later, that I had been scared of them at the time, that I had found some sense of reassurance in what she said next. Sophia had looked at me then, forlorn in a way that was unnatural for someone so small, and had squeezed my palm in her own.
“Because they look so sad. Don’t they look sad to you?”
I do not want to tell her now, that I understand what she meant all those years ago. He had looked sad.
Was it a mercy? Did I even know what that meant after all this time? Sophia runs a thumb over my knuckles, back and forth, and I don’t know whether she is soothing herself or attempting to soothe me, and I do not ask. She has had nervous ticks like this for almost as long as I’ve known her, though I think back, pinpointing when they’d begun. Sometime after Atlanta, after the prison fell and her mind, fragile as it was, went with it.
For a long time, I’d thought she was crazy, shattered somehow like glass, but what did that make me, in comparison?
“You’re mean,” she had said, once, not long after I’d lost my eye. “I don’t want to be friends with you anymore.”
And she’d been right; I had been mean. Cruel for cruelties sake, and cold as winter. So it surprises me, how she holds my hand right at this moment not as if she owes me it but as if she wants to, and what she says next.
“I miss you at Hilltop.”
I don’t quite know what to do with that, so I let it sit there, between our joined hands, feel it settle down into my lap. For a long time, I say nothing at all, and she does not push the way Lydia might. Though she too has given up on me leaving the freshly turned dirt. I wonder how long it will take for the grass to regrow, for new life to cover what is below, as though he’d never existed at all.
“I don’t know what to do,” I confess, to her, to the wind, to the carved name of my father that stares back at me, stoic.
“You could come back,” she offers.
“Alexandria needs me right now,” I say, “the people here are looking to me to take his place.”
And they do, I know that much, the way they expect me to wear his face and flinch instead at the sight of my own. It is not normal, the way that I look. They don’t say so, but they think it. They must, with how they avoid staring for too long.
“You’re not your father, Carl,” she states, easy like the air fluttering her hair. “And that’s okay.”
I’m not, I think. I am my father’s son, and he has died and left behind a legacy I cannot hope to fill and people that will never see me as a hero the way they had revered him. To them, I will remain the warning sign, the reflection of what has been lost and what will never be again. And beyond that, a reminder that Rick Grimes was not as infallible as they had convinced themselves—as I’d convinced myself.
“I have to try,” I tell her, like it’s final, like it matters in the end. Who am I hoping to convince? Me or her or the dead man I’ve buried under my feet?
Sophia nods, tight lipped, and doesn’t fight the issue. Somewhere phantomly I feel the clamp of her teeth around my wrist, the way she’d bitten me once to make me mind her, hard enough to make me drop a loaded gun. It’d hurt, bad, and we had rolled and thrashed around and screamed our throats raw. And then after I had tried to apologize for whatever was deeply wrong with me, but she had voiced the thought, aimed it at herself, quicker than I could.
“Everyone in my family dies,” she’d said, bowed head and golden hair hanging like a funeral shroud. “Do you think it’s because of me?”
“No,” I’d told her, an arm around her shoulder. Had she felt that all the time, this gnawing, festering of the brain that I did? This knowing that something was not quite right? It wasn’t the virus, but I had understood even at that age that it was rotten in another sense. “That’s just the way it is.”
There are no teeth this time as she knocks the toe of her boot against mine. Normally, she would make a smart remark, but she just pats the back of my hand instead, and I know the pity worrying the lines of her face by now, aging it more so than anything the dead or living ever could. She shifts beside me, lets go of my hand, and I almost miss the warmth.
“Try not to stay out here all night,” she says, dusting the freshly laid dirt from her pants. “It’s too cold to stay out here as long as you are.”
I watch her leave until she is blacker than black, a barely perceivable pinprick swallowed up by the night, and do not move from his final resting place. It would feel like a betrayal, somehow, to go. He’d done this before, slept by Andrea’s, mom’s grave. I had caught him many times in the months that followed her death.
Quietly, I prepare to do the same now.
It smells like damp earth as I curl my body over the dirt, like a newborn baby that knows not a thing. Maybe I don’t, anymore.
When I wake, there is a blanket swaddling me.
People want blood and a hail of bullets, they want doomsday and dystopia hand in hand around the dinner table, an apocalypse we have fought and bled and clawed our way from the depths of, by the skin of our teeth and nothing else. They want my father’s life, his work, reduced to rubble in the aftermath of another war we cannot survive.
Perhaps there is a sick, demented part of me that wants it too, that threatens to poison the rest of me. Revenge is like that, I’ve learned.
“We need to hit them back!” a woman screams, slams her fist down against the wood of the table where we meet, and she is all tears and bitter words. “We need to do it now, before they kill any more of us!”
“You’re crazy if you think we can take the Commonwealth,” someone else says, scoffing, and I sit at the head of the table, and no one looks at me. They are afraid of the wound marring my face, of what it means, and the fact I do not hide it beneath bandages any longer for their own convenience.
I turn my head to look at Lydia, who stands with her back pressed to the wall, arms crossed and angrier than the word can hold meaning. She says nothing, and hasn’t for days, since we last fought. Like so many of the Alexandrians before me, she too wants war. Sophia sits two chairs down, eyes trained hard on the grain in the wood.
“We can’t fight them,” I say finally, and the argument stops abruptly. Gazes shift to me, and then scurry away. Sophia’s remains. Out of the corner of my good eye, I have time to catch the way Lydia turns and leaves the room.
“They killed your father!” the woman screams, her eyes ringed red and bloodshot, and she is shaking with it, the fury of his murder.
“War won’t bring my dad back,” I reply, and something in Sophia’s gaze softens as she regards me. I look at them all, these people he has left behind with a son that cannot speak nearly as well as he could, and try not to imagine them each dead within the week.
“He spent all this time after everything ended trying to build something new, something better than the old world we lost. I don’t want to see that destroyed. We don’t have the power, or the people to fight the Commonwealth,” I continue, and I’ll never be him, but my voice drops and I am stern as I can remember him. “War isn’t an option. We need them, and they need us. The person that shot my dad is being punished.”
Alone, his killer sits in a cell, the picture of his frightened face as I gripped the bars swimming before my vision. He had looked horrified, huddled into the corner as though I was going to find a way to bend the iron with my hands alone, climb my way through the narrow slots to find my own retribution. There had been a time I might have found a way, had I been younger when he’d stolen my dad from me.
“I get to check on you. See your misery. You get to sit and remember the life you had. That’s a far better punishment than death.”
I had been seething with it, rage hot and dripping like venom when I’d seen my father’s murderer, blubbering in self pity, apologizing only because he had been caught.
“My dad taught me that. It’s more civilized. It’s what he would have wanted.”
The people of Alexandria are angry as I leave the table, and I cannot blame them, but I cannot let them kill themselves, either. Sophia says nothing, at least not with words, but her smile stays in my thoughts long after the day is done.
Our ending comes three weeks later. All things considered, I am shocked we have managed to hold onto it for this long.
“Just say it,” I sigh, removing the weight of my gun from my hip. It rests there, in the middle of the table where she sits, teeth clenched.
“I think you’re making the wrong choice,” Lydia tells me, and this much I already know.
“What would you have me do?” I ask, and the chair creaks when I sit on the other side. The truth is that I am tired. How had my father managed it all? The weight is already deforming my spine.
Lydia turns away, blonde hair in her face, scowling at the floor. “I’d have you stop pretending to be your dad,” she spits out, and it’s molten, burning, but I have no energy to back away from the heat of it all. “You’re so caught up in doing what you think he would do that you won’t stop to be yourself. The Carl I know would make them pay for it.”
Burying my father did not mean I wanted to pile other bodies atop his.
I lean back, drumming a finger on the wood. She has never known community until our people brought her in. Until I did. I cannot fault her for her anger, this perceived wrong she feels must be corrected. We had gone to war before, together, scarred and broken and grasping onto the worst of each other to keep moving forward. My father’s hat, that once had been mine, shields her face from where it sits on her head.
“That’s not who I want to be anymore.”
The fabric of it was so worn now, but it had kept me safe—I’d believed so, anyway, as a child. It would transform me, make me strong, like him. When she turns to look at me, that same sticky, thick fear I had known for so long is in her eyes, and I think maybe the hat has never had power at all. Maybe it was just what I had made it.
“We’re just different people,” she states, simple. I’m not sure what she expects of me. One more fight? To feel love as though it’s violence and gore and nothing more? I am tired of such a thing hurting when it should not.
I think of Andrea, lay dying in her bed, and how she’d earned the title of mom twice over.
“A relationship, it’s what you make of it. If you love someone, you’ll make yourself happy… and that’ll make them happy. And you’ll stay happy. That’s what’s important. Being happy. That’s what everyone wants in the end.”
“Yeah,” I nod, and do not struggle against a pain that shouldn’t exist, “I guess we are.”
She leaves sometime after, before nightfall, and takes the memento I had shed in my growing up with her.
Time moves differently without him by my side.
Before I know it a year has passed, and I keep myself busy in the ways I know how to. There are fences to be mended, animals to tend to, and people to be fed. I make long trips by horseback, to Hilltop and far beyond, meet with those in the Commonwealth that need to have their hands shaken and their words and ideas listened to. I let the older ones take the rest of the work, Michonne and Maggie and whomever else is willing to carry it with me.
Sophia is one of them, accompanying me on the treks. She walks beside her horse and me, holding the reins as the long grass sways past our ankles. We trade with one another, plot to expand our communities' respective reach, plot for whatever comes after that.
“Do you ever think you’ll get used to it?” she asks, the sunset in her eyes, bluer than I’ve ever seen the color.
“To what?” I ask, listening to my horse snort, shaking its mane in the summer heat. I reach a hand up, passing my fingers over its neck thick with muscle, patting absentmindedly. We’ve given them names, the both of us, though we’d told ourselves we shouldn’t, just in case.
“Journeying to the Commonwealth,” she says, breathing out a huff. It’s a long trip, and we know it well enough by now.
“Guess I’ve gotta be,” I reply, looking out at the setting sun and the empty fields. Walkers are seldom in this area, but we are armed regardless. We cannot afford not to be.
“Do you ever think about just moving there?” she asks next, and I laugh at the suggestion I know is not serious. “Wouldn’t have to do this every couple months.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I say, turning to watch the cork of her mouth as she smiles, the way her freckles shift and dance across her face like the fireflies starting to show themselves in the grass.
“Hey, just a suggestion,” she giggles, and it’s childish in a fleeting, happy way I’d almost forgotten. We aren’t that far now, we both know it. The journey could be complete before it gets too dark.
“Yeah, you got any more of those?” I ask, reaching for the saddle. Slowly, I mount, waiting.
“Oh, I got plenty,” she follows, pulling herself up. Her hair is longer now, just at the middle of her neck, and I wonder if she’ll cut it again. I almost don't want her to. “Tell you what, Grimes. I’ll race you, and if you win I’ll give you some more ideas.”
“You’re on.”
She’s bolting before I can even finish, and I’m left laughing in the dirt her horse kicks up in her wake. For the first time since I lost him, things feel almost easy, and I try not to feel guilty for once.
She’s lying stretched out before the fire. We’ve made camp for the night, between Hilltop and another outpost. Earlier, before the sun had drained from the sky, she had sat and scribbled in a notebook she’s taken to carrying around, that it’s five years to the day. Sophia had announced it quietly, and before the knowledge had time to turn my stomach, she’d found a way to replace that, too, asking me to tell her a happy memory of him.
I’d started the fire, and sat with her by the warmth, halfheartedly sharpening a knife, and told her about something still alive. And he was, in that piece of remembrance I held, and she had asked if she could write it down.
Sophia had been attentive, noting the past to paper as if pulling a stone from a creek bed, afraid it would turn too smooth and small with water, fading like time does to most everything. There was something tender about the act of her doing so that I couldn’t name, but by the time I had told her all there was to tell, I didn’t feel sad at all.
“Do you ever think about stopping?” she asks, and she’s resting back on her elbows now, face tilted up to the stars that I’ve never really bothered to look at until now. Her notebook is beside her, full of my minuscule words, and the fire crackles between us. I watch the way it cradles her jaw, waves between her long curling hair and highlights the slope of her nose. She’s relaxed in a way I find hard to let myself be.
“Stopping what?” I ask, glancing at the blade still in my hand. It catches the light when I turn it between my fingers.
The corner of her mouth twitches up, and she kicks the toe of my boot with hers. “All this,” she lowers her head to the flames, staring into them until it melts the blue of her eyes. “Running around, traveling back and forth, trying to fix the world.”
I huff out a laugh. “That what you’re thinking about doing? Settling down somewhere?”
For a long time she’s quiet, but then her voice comes, just a soft whisper of an answer. “Maybe.”
That makes me look up at her again, peering across the blaze that turns our small world we’ve made for the evening orange. I could never say when the change had really happened, between us, but somewhere in the passing years it has become different. Not bad, not painful. Just different.
She was the first kid I met after the world decayed around us. We played in the mud outside Atlanta, when my father had seemingly come back from the dead, and we’d ran through the fields at Hershel’s farm, and then through the prison’s courtyard, clutching each other's tiny hands against the fences that were the only thing keeping us safe. We’d survived through the fall, the rebuild, and the world had not killed us yet. Sophia was grown into herself, now, and I’d followed. We weren’t kids anymore—we hadn’t been in a long time.
In the firelight, she catches me staring, and she looks back in that soft, indecipherable way.
“Where would you go?” I find myself asking, setting the knife aside.
She breathes out, thinking. “Oh, I don’t know. Somewhere close enough to people in case I needed, but far enough so I wouldn’t have to hear them all the time,” she says, and I can’t help the way it makes me smile.
“You sound like my dad,” I tell her, and she laughs against the burning wood. The flames curl, lick themselves up the logs.
“It wouldn’t be so bad, you know,” she says, blinking against the light. “Some place open, no damn walls around us like Hilltop or Alexandria or the prison. Open land, like the farm. That’d be nice, I think.”
And I can see it, what she says, and I know it would be possible. It would be, now.
“Don’t you ever think about settling down?”
I pause, staring down at my lap, my hands empty of the knife and the means to kill easily, and suppress the way they shake. I have, I think, and beyond this I’ve thought of who I’d go with, and what would happen after that.
“Sometimes, yeah,” I admit, and it’s the first I’ve ever said it aloud.
“You ever picture what that’d look like for you?” she asks, and it’s like asking to share a secret, the way she says it. I feel nervous in a way that is foreign to me, meeting her eyes.
The fire crackles, pops loudly between us, bursting red embers up into the air.
This too I’ve given thought, and I do not know how to say it, so I just nod. She is grinning, giddy for something more to know about me, sitting up and scooting closer. When she speaks again, it is with a tilted curious head and a hushed voice.
“Am I there?”
The way she asks is as if she already knows, and something seizes in my chest. It has been there for as long as I’ve known her, but it isn’t until now that I understand what to call that feeling.
Beside me, the knife sits, forgotten.
“Yeah,” I answer, and my throat feels tight with it, forcing the word out. Her smile fades just so, as though she wasn’t expecting to actually hear it, and then it is back, stronger, growing full against the night.
“Well, that’s good,” she says, tilting her head again in that way she does when she is trying to figure something about me out. “I’d be kind of insulted if I weren’t.”
I feel her palm, soft and warm over my trembling fingers, stilling them. Her hand is not quite so calloused, nor so soaked in blood the way mine have been forced to be. Even so, she doesn’t seem to mind holding them, so long as she has something to cradle and be cradled by. I should move, should look away but I cannot be bothered to consider the things I should do anymore.
It’s obvious to me what she is doing. She is giving me time, something hard to come by these days, a moment to decide, to pull away as I have throughout our shared years. We dated once, though it was nothing more than this, a hand held and a passing hug, a friendship tainted and gone sour, spoiled like everything always is. She had asked me once, to be her boyfriend, before either of us even knew what that meant, and I’d rejected it outright, only sheepishly asking for another consideration later. And we’d read comic books we found side by side on a sofa, or played cards, and tried all the while not to speak of the people we’d lost along the way.
With her free hand, she reaches out, touches a tentative fingerpad just under the scar tissue that stretches from that angry, gaping wound, disfiguring me. She doesn’t seem to mind it, either, nor does she register the wrath I’ve long since associated its existence with. Sophia looks at me, and she is so beautifully bashful in this moment, and I cannot breathe.
“Carl,” she says my name, quiet, like this too is a hidden thing between us, “I know I kissed you once, but I really think I could do better, this time.”
The curve of my mouth is involuntary. “That was on the cheek.”
“Shut up,” she says, leaning in.
It’s strange, in the nicest sort of way, to be kissed by her. Admittedly, I don’t have much to compare it to. The only other mouth I’d known was Lydia’s, and she had taught me many things, but mostly what I did not want. Sophia makes a noise as if she’s surprised when I reach up to hold her face, like it’s shocking to feel confirmation that I want her.
“Took you long enough,” she mumbles when she pulls back, and then her lips are on mine again.
I can feel the smile she presses against my teeth, the way I grin with her, the way her laugh bubbles into my mouth as though it’s my own, and I hope that Andrea is somewhere with my dad, my mom and my baby sister Judith who’d never lived long enough to know me—that they’re waiting for us with Glenn and Carol and everyone else we live for and remember—and that they can see that we are happy.
And that is enough.
We go back to Hershel’s farm.
It has sat empty for so long, no one to keep it company. Sophia and I love it well, like it has been ours from the beginning. We make repairs, clear the land, and the work is hard sometimes, but it is fulfilling in a way travel in Virginia was not.
No one had been shocked, really, when we’d packed and left, taking our horses with us. Lydia had been there the last time we’d visited Hilltop, and she had seen it, how close we were, and had said nothing. Maggie had possessed a knowing look in her eyes, back then, had nodded and said for us to be careful on the journey home. In the years since our initial departure, her and Michonne have found their way to the Commonwealth, living somewhere I cannot bring myself to.
My father’s ghost drifts through the streets there, and I know it well enough to avoid going but once a year, to visit old friends.
Outside, Sophia sits on the porch swing, a bare foot rocking it back and forth lazily, one hand holding a notebook and the other on her belly. I bring her fresh vegetables that we’ve grown and water from the well.
“Thank you, I was starving,” she says, taking the plate happily. The writing rests on her lap, against the slight curve of her stomach where our child is growing. The breeze sways the ruffled fabric of the long dress she wears, and she looks serene here, on the porch swing, like an illustration in the picture books she is modeling her own by.
I lean down to kiss her, quick but enough to taste the juice of a tomato. She has started craving these a lot, I’ve noticed. Silent, I sit beside her, an arm over her shoulder as we watch the empty fields and the golden midday shimmer. With my other hand, I reach up, push my dark hair from my face and feel the smooth leather that covers my missing eye. Sophia had been hesitant about my wearing it, wondering if perhaps insecurity was at play, but I’d told her I didn’t want our baby to grow up seeing it.
Andrea, we’d decided would be her name if it were a girl. And if it were a boy, Glenn.
“Making progress?” I ask, motioning to the pages of the notebook I know she has written and rewritten for years, now. She has begun sketching, too, and has gotten pretty good at it.
“Mhm,” she nods through her chewing, smiling closed-mouthed, her eyes pinched shut. Before she takes another bite, she speaks. “I was reading through older entries,” she says, “and I noticed that you said the last time you’d seen a walker was four months ago.”
I blink, the words not making sense in such an order, and turn slightly to look at her. Four months? It had truly been that long? They get slow, lethargic in the winter, especially when the snow begins to fall heavily, but it is Summer and the fields have been bare of them since as far back as I can recall. It’s almost unthinkable, imagining a world where they are not lurking at every corner.
“That sounds right,” I reply, “why do you think that is?”
She pauses in thought, pouting in a way that makes her look so much younger. “Maybe they’re just at that point of decay,” she offers, and it makes sense, really.
My father did not live long enough to see the world be rid of them, but because of him perhaps I will, perhaps Sophia and our child will, and I don’t know what to do with that. It sits, heavy like a stone in my chest, and seems to grow heavier with each passing year. Sophia knows what I must be thinking now, because there is something sad and solemn in her eyes. Wordlessly, she rests her head down against my shoulder, rocking us, soothing the haunted children that still linger within both of us.
“I hope they never have to experience what it was like for us,” I tell her, and she passes me one of her cherry tomatoes like a gift, like a nonexistent ring that we’d pretended we had when we read vows in the living room three years prior. That boy, continuing on like a spirit in me, would have sneered and said such things were a part of the old society, that it had no place in the new world order.
Maybe it didn’t. I couldn’t have cared at my age, because it had made us happy, and that was the whole point.
She nods against my shirt, and together we eat the tomatoes. “I want them to know, though,” Sophia murmurs, “about what we survived. They can’t forget, not like other people have.”
I know she is speaking about Maggie’s son, and beyond that, those we’d encountered before he’d ever been born. Survivors that had hidden behind the walls of Alexandria and Hilltop, who had grown weak and frail in their paralyzing fear, and who had not made it through humanity's darkest hour.
“They won't,” I answer, and gesture softly to the notes still in her lap. “What are you thinking about titling it?”
“I’m thinking The Book of Grimes,” she states, and I laugh, and she laughs with me.
“You’re so corny,” I tell her, and she hums.
“Sounds official,” she defends.
“Sounds like a legend,” I reply.
And it is, in every sense of the word.
Andrea grows fast, and her mother and I are aging faster. She is taller than the uncut grass now, when she comes to stir me from my chair. By the fireplace, Sophia sits, drawing and comfortable. She lifts her head from her sure study focus of the paper, and smiles as our daughter asks to be read to.
“Daddy,” she tugs against my pant leg, eager and wide eyed. Her hair is light and curling at the ends like the woman I love, though Sophia thinks she looks more like me. Truthfully, I think she is an equal mixture of the best of us. “I want you to read to me before bed.”
In her small hands, she holds the hardback that Sophia has bound by hand. I take it from her, feel its familiar weight as our daughter climbs up and into my lap. She is so young, about the age me and Sophia had been when it all started, and it is hard to hold back the imagined torment of her living as we had when she looks up at me, trusting that I will care for and protect her. That nothing will ever harm her so long as her father is near. The way she beholds me is how I had once looked to my dad, and I understand now more than ever how he must have felt.
I open the cover, rest my chin atop her small head, and begin to read aloud.
“Do not fear, dear reader, for this may seem like a scary book at first, and your mommy or daddy may even read it in a scary voice,” I say, speaking exaggerated, guttural, and Andrea giggles where she sits, staring at the pictures Sophia has drawn, scenic images and colorful backdrops that remind me of our farm.
She is watching me, smiling from across the room. I return it, and trail my gaze back to the page.
“Shame on them,” I say, normally now, turning the paper. “But this is not a scary story. This is a story about hope.”
Andrea’s palm flies out toward the paper, over the cartoonish drawings that remove the grotesque truth of the walkers’ form.
“One day, a long time ago, dead people decided that they didn’t want to be dead anymore. Nobody knows why. And don’t be embarrassed if you get scared. It scared everyone. Nobody knew what was happening or why, but life changed,” I read, and feel her squirm where she sits on my leg. She pulls her hand back, as though the paper has the ability to bite her, and holds her hand close to her chest instead.
“Dad?” she asks, turning her head to look at me. “Were you scared, too?”
I try to smile, and nod. “I was, and your mother was. But we had friends. And each other.”
She seems to like that answer, and shifts to look back at the book.
“Everyone was tested. That’s why this time came to be called the trials. You’ve probably heard your parents talk about it. Many good, strong people lost themselves along the way.”
The words come and come, and I recite them, the faces of those we’d known flickering somewhere beyond my vision. The memory of what we’d done to make it here, to this farm. Andrea does not know the depth of it. She can’t. Maybe when she’s older, but maybe not even then.
I read passages that Sophia has written, taken from my own mouth, and tell Andrea about a man she will never meet. He would have liked her, I know it, would have bounced her on his own knee by the fire and rocked her to sleep the way he’d done to me. My father had done the best he could, better than anyone else could have managed, and I had lived through it all. And when Andrea had first come into the world, and brought with her a new sort of hope, I had thought that was a father’s true job: to protect his child.
But more than that, I know now that it is to love, unconditionally, the way he had loved me.
I turn the page.
“Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, you’re there and you’re safe because of Rick Grimes.”
The sentence is read aloud, and I pause, staring at the words until they blur into the shape of his eyes, his laughter lines, and the harbor of his hands that had kept me steady.
Andrea looks up at me, her small hand touching my face and the stubble I have not shaven, and it is alright for me to be sad, I know this too. She doesn’t ask why I am crying, why I am tear staining this book, but she tries to wipe the salt from my face the best she can.
“You would have really liked him,” I tell her, pressing a kiss to the crown of her fragile head. “And he would have loved you, too.”
“Who?” she asks.
“Your grandfather. He did all of these things, my father. This book is about him.”
“I know,” she says, flippant the way I had been with him at that age, “you tell me that every time.”
It hurts, though I won’t show it, to hear that. Sophia pauses where she sits, watching and listening, and I think maybe I cannot bear to exist in this moment. Sometimes, it’s easier, to close my eye and travel back in time through memory, to a place where he is still with me. I sit in that space in my mind for one second, and then two, until his hands around me feel real and his voice telling me he is proud of me is here in the house with us.
Andrea nudges me, and her hands settle on either side of my jaw, and when I leave that safe space, that comfort I sometimes allow myself, she is grinning, and has never been hurt. She will never know pain the way that I have become friends with it, will never feel the weight of a gun or a life taken by her own hands.
“Read it again!”
I nod, and flip back to the beginning.