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Knees buried in the mulch of the rotting playground on Fission Ave is not where anyone wants to be, Ocean thinks, but it’s where she is now.
Noel is different; a couple more kilometers down Nuclear, make a right, then past the general store—vis a vis, as far away as humanly possible from Uranium City Mega Mall’s Taco Bell Fast-Casual Mexican Eatery. She made sure of that. He’s got red roses, with the thorns prickling the stems kept purposefully intact because, “Beauty is pain,” he’d say, “and pain is beautiful.”
He might also say she were soppy for remembering, but his voice is never here to tell her.
Mischa doesn’t appreciate flowers, of course. He sits at the edge of the woods, where the ice and snow tends to crystallize the most—to remind him of home, she hoped. In lieu of multicolored buds, he gets Macklemore CDs and a decrepit, skipping player she tutored for a week to snag at the pawn shop. And these days, she's not terribly superstitious, not anymore; the thing's not going to get used.
But it’s right by his headstone where his hands could reach, if they tried.
Ricky is quaint. He lives at home, in the backyard; once, during rehearsal, she told him off for “derailing” their C-major scales with a tale of his late gray tabby, Dusty. She was the first kitten he ever got to name, and she passed when he was seven; completely irrelevant to ensuring his tambourine rattling was on-beat, she thought at the time. But now, Ocean clings, grasps onto the aside and doesn’t let go, commits every word to memory. She didn’t have to fight to make sure he ended up in the ground beside Dusty, but she was still there when it happened.
Just to make sure he got what he would’ve wanted.
There wasn’t enough to know about her. God, how there should’ve been. How she should’ve opened her ears for a name or a birthday or even a godforsaken favorite color as she did for perceived flaws, things about people to pick apart and rip to shreds. But all that was left of her was her doll, head unkindly severed at the scene with nothing but a gaping emptiness where her smile, mind, thoughts should’ve been.
Ocean found a fitting-enough Raggedy Ann head at the antique shop, and bled her fingers sewing it on.
Now, she sits at the park.
This one’s too small. So, so small. It deserves to be bigger; larger than life; take up space. Painted in color, all beautiful shades of golds, pinks, blues; as vibrant and honest and unapologetic as she might’ve been, had she had the chance.
Here Lies Constance Blackwood
Beloved Daughter, Sister, and Best Friend
It’s awful, really, because this is the first time. Ocean has gone everywhere else, but not here. Not to her. Some selfish shield, maybe; tacking on an extra seven minutes to the walk home from school just to avoid laying eyes on Fission Ave, or more appropriately, this.
But something was compelling—today, on the most empty, nondescript of days. Some invisible red string, looped around the bones of her ribs, tugging forward, pulling each foot in front of the other to scrabble over the frost and mulch until there she is: Constance Blackwood; beloved daughter, sister, and best friend.
Best friend.
Her fingers reach, to pluck at the purple cord threaded around her wrist that’s been all but permanently fused there, since the Accident. They made them in grade three. Sometimes, the happy little way the charms sing as she picks her own skin raw or tugs at hair from the follicle is almost sardonic, too inappropriate in its joy. Then others, it’s sobering. Her nails will calm their scrabbling at her cuticles, just before they start to bleed.
Hey, stop that, she hears in the song of the hearts and stars and letters around her wrist. Be nice to yourself.
Connie always was nicer than Ocean deserved. But then again, maybe the least she could do is listen to her.
She does. Too late to listen in life, but at least, if anything at all, in death, Ocean will do all she might’ve asked.
“Hi,” she says. It’s so frail, even to her own ears, it almost gets carried away on the breeze, in the dregs of the snow still softly swirling from last night’s storm. It doesn’t matter.
There’s nobody here to hear it, anyway.
Still, she talks. “How are you?” That was stupid. She’s dead. So, not doing too hot. “You, you know what, don’t answer that.”
She doesn’t. Of course.
”I’m sorry it took this long,” the words keep coming, after a beat. “I think, um, I was…”
Busy? Scared? Sad? Angry? Overwhelmed? Of all the things that spring to mind, none of them are adequate. What kind of excuse would be?
“Sorry. I’m just sorry.”
The wind howls.
The snow starts to numb her knees, but that doesn’t matter, either.
Her thumb brushes each singing letter on the happy purple cord. B-F-F.
“I wasn’t a very good best friend,” she says, like the fact it is. “The writing’s not a lie. You are—were—beloved. By me. And stuff. Just…not in the right way.”
The charms clutch in her palm. The B is warm. Best.
“I wish,” she croaks, and everything starts to crumble a little, “you were here. So I could get it right this time.”
The edges of the Fs drive into the skin of her fingers. Friend Forever.
She bends in half. “I miss you,” Ocean cries, now, to the snow, head bowed, hands clasped so, so very tight.
It’s so, so very cold, but something is warm, curling around the curve of her shoulders.
“I wish, I could’ve just, told you,” she begs, to the three different deities she’s claimed to believe in, or maybe nobody but the chill, the warmth, this present feeling, “that, that I—”
“Ocean?”
Ocean looks up.
And promptly blunders backwards to thunk rear-first into the snow.
It’s her.
There can be no one else. Ocean’s chest heaves, wide-eyed, breathless, searching, all of it reflected back in the face she prayed to whatever would listen to see, just one more time. It can’t be real.
Please, let it be.
“Connie?” she whispers.
And it’s not completely clear, what she’s going to do after that. What’s going on, why she can see the snow falling through her curls, how her loafered feet are hovering like that, if she’ll ever have to go again because please don’t go.
But then Constance Blackwood, beloved best friend, honest to God, smiles, and none of it matters. Ocean chokes on a sob.
All at once, everything is okay.
It stays that way.
* * *
“Unfinished business.”
“Right,” mutters Ocean, pacing the rickety floorboards of her bedroom. It’s been something of a slumber party, for a while. “Right, right, right. Well, then, we’ve just gotta finish it. For you.”
Something impossible to read crosses Connie’s face. It’s hard to tell when it gets paler, on account of the translucence, but Ocean can swear she knows. “Right, um,” she says, “I mean, yeah. I, I guess we could, but Ocean, I think if—”
“Connie.” Ocean stops her, with hands on her—never mind, she stumbles right through the initial target of her shoulders and into the fog of her torso. Then, tries not to wince like her heart just got a papercut. “Please, for once, let me do this for you,” she asks. Begs, really, gazing imploringly into those eyes that still look chocolate, even like this.
After everything—God, what she wouldn’t do to help her and not hurt her, one time.
A dozen things play across Connie’s pale, too pale features, until finally, thankfully, they settle on a soft, small sort of smile.
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Maybe you’re right. It’ll all be cool.”
Then, she shifts into something else; something sweeter, not completely nameable.
“Thank you,” says Connie, her heart in her voice.
A strange, full-body sensation bursts throughout Ocean.
It’s warm, and it’s cool; it’s new, and familiar; petrifying, but inexplicably comfortable. It’s all-consuming and it nearly pops her mouth straight open to say about a thousand words she’s not even sure of.
And then it’s gone.
“Please don’t thank me,” is what comes out instead.
* * *
Instead of the feeling, Ocean thinks and thinks and thinks about how in the world to finish business that is unfinished.
“So,” she says, when she’s sure she’s figured it out, “I thought we might start here.”
“Ummmm.” Constance blinks. “Here?”
Ocean spins to look her hovering figure in the eye. “Sure! It’s one of the places you spent a good chunk of your time, isn’t it?”
“Ocean, I’m not so sure the choir rehearsal room is going to hold the secret to Elysium.”
“Says who?” she shrills, an octave too high even to her own ears. “You’re talking to me from beyond the grave and I’m the only one that can see and hear you. These rules are arbitrary.” On that note, thank God it’s after-hours, or the nuns might order a round of Confessional to have the demons purged from her soul.
Connie seems to consider this for a moment. Then, “Okay, you have a point,” she concedes.
And so they ransack the St. Cassian Chamber Choir rehearsal room for business that could possibly be unfinished.
After trying to get a ghost to play the trombone (she always wanted to try but figured it was social suicide), concocting a two-part harmony to “Hallelujah” (she’d never sung it in B-flat minor), and whispering a bad word into the ear of the creepy Virgin Mary statue in the corner (Ocean plugged her ears for that one), nobody’s business has been finished.
Ocean flops backwards onto the stage with a dull plunk.
Constance’s form topples inches away. No sound, no rush of air; just her.
“You were right,” murmurs Ocean to the water stains splotching the ceiling. “That was stupid.”
“No, it wasn’t,” says Constance, instantaneous.
Ocean’s fingers start eating at the skin around her nails. “It kind of was. You’re not…fulfilled. Happy. Complete. Or, whatever it is.”
“Who said that?”
Her head flumps over to look at her.
It was so quiet. It could’ve been a slight of the ear. It could’ve not been said at all.
But she’s pretty sure it was.
“It wasn’t stupid,” says Constance, “or a waste. I think…this is the first time I’ve had real fun.”
A smile works its way on her lips. How can it be, Ocean thinks, that someone dead can be so full of life?
She props up to face her completely, on one elbow against the rotting hardwood. “Really?” It’s kind of terrible, how unsure, how hopeful, how pathetic it sounds, but that kind of thing has stopped mattering, as of late. “You did?”
Connie chuckles, chock full of joy in what might be the most miserable situation to exist. “I’ve always wanted to blaspheme Creepy Mary.”
Lord forgive her, Ocean can’t repress the sacrilegious snort that escapes past the hands clapped over her mouth.
She laughs with her, for what might be hours, her own chittering trills and her best friend’s fizzing snorts bubbling up and bouncing off the hollow walls, and for that time everything feels superbly terrible and excruciatingly wonderful.
Ocean will come up with something better next time.
* * *
That something ends up being dandelions.
“What are you doing here?”
Ocean looks up.
Constance isn’t around twenty-four-seven; she nearly might be, but even if this companionship is forged between planes of existence, a best-friendship fourteen years running, some alone time every once in a while is in order nonetheless.
She wasn’t here before, and now she is. Suddenly, that feels distinctly like being caught in the act of—something. She doesn’t look upset, like she wouldn’t allow this, or, God forbid, pass judgement in some way, for being here, for doing—whatever this is.
Ocean’s fingers pause their arranging of flowers before Constance Blackwood’s headstone with meticulous care.
“I thought it might help,” she says, lamely.
She told her they were dumb. Once, in sophomore year, a lifetime ago; a Tuesday afternoon, a walk home from school, past the neighbors’ meagre collection of orchids growing in their front garden after the snow had melted. The barely-holding-on purple blooms, in all of their wilting glory, sparked conversation.
“I like dandelions,” said Connie. “I think they’re my favorite.”
And, like an idiot, all Ocean told her was: “Dandelions are weeds.”
The conversation was over after that.
“I get it now,” says Ocean, two years older and only slightly wiser.
Wordless, the ghost of Constance Blackwood sails to perch on her own grave.
“Why they’re your favorite. They’re—strong. And beautiful, and they grow, despite everything. Like you,” it slips, before she can stop it.
Constance’s shoes dangle just above each hardy little bloom. Ocean’s eyes follow, all the way up the loafers and knee-highs and gingham to her face, and it’s then that she realizes her breath has been holding itself and it’s not very clear why.
Connie smiles, radiating warmth among the dirt and snow-turned-slush. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry it wasn’t sooner,” blurts Ocean. “That I got it, I mean. I told you— when we were walking, the orchids, I—was really awful,” is how that decides to come out.
Suddenly, she’s wrapped in cold—no, warm—no, both, and it makes her shudder and it sucks the ache and stress from every bone and muscle all in one, and it’s the ghost of her dead best friend hugging her.
She whispers, so closely it’s like it’s in the air and the trees and her mind, “It’s cool. You grow, despite everything.”
Ocean’s breath lets itself loose in one tremoring exhale.
It turns out, that wasn’t Connie’s unfinished business.
But it might’ve been hers.
* * *
“This…might not have been the best idea.”
It’s an open field—but even blank canvasses are just waiting to have monsters drawn on; simple, soft clouds can soon bear rain.
This empty stretch of nothingness once held the Fall Fair on it.
So much business was left unfinished here; a whole life’s worth, five times over. Foolishly, she thought the secret to finishing it all might magically apparate at the exact place where the cart hit the dirt, square away that business, and then Connie could be happy, and Ocean could sleep at night without seeing the dents of red in the dust, the limbs in shapes they shouldn’t be, the metal mingled in with the skin.
None of that happens.
“I think I made a mistake,” she confesses out loud.
This time, it takes a little longer. But still, eventually: “Not…a mistake,” says Constance, a little faint.
“I thought, seeing this, maybe— some kind of, closure— but now that we’re here, I just, I think we’re both—”
“Sad,” Connie finishes.
“Yes,” breathes Ocean. Her eyes shut themselves. They can’t look at the blank canvas anymore. “Sad.”
It’s instinct. It’s habit. It’s an intrinsic reflex, and it’s Ocean’s hand reaching for Constance’s hand.
Her five fingers, trembling, vaguely, reach to slot between Connie’s, always warm, always perfectly sized and shaped like fitted against hers is the place they were meant to be.
But then there’s nothing.
Ocean’s eyes blink open. Connie’s are staring back, and sad might not cut it. Ocean looks down.
Of course, she passes right through her.
It’s a surprise, sometimes. Her eyes are too bright, her voice too clear, her presence too solid to remember she’s here, and yet not actually here. Slowly, Ocean’s fingers come away.
They’re cold, and it hurts.
Constance’s face, the fact Ocean can see ever so slightly through it now painfully noticeable, is etched deeply, with—longing.
Wordlessly, Constance gets as close as she can. The very edges of her eternal St. Cassian pinafore clip into Ocean’s sweatered sleeves, a constant reminder, but she chooses to ignore it. She takes in her best friend’s soul next to hers, tries to imagine the feel of her fingers, and be okay with the fact that it’s not at all the same.
No business gets finished in the ashes of the Fall Fair.
* * *
But Ocean keeps trying.
Every night, like clockwork: “Where do you think you want to go next week?” Ocean will ask the dark of this rickety old bedroom, and each suggestion grows progressively more recreational and outlandish.
“Maybe there’s a clue at the ice cream parlor on Tenth,” Connie will say.
And, “You can’t even eat!” Ocean protests, until the air is light with both of their laughter, and they’ll talk and talk well past her self-imposed curfew and get nowhere closer to an answer, smiles wider than they should be.
They’ll still end up going to the ice cream parlor on Tenth.
Every single time, though, it never happens.
“I think you’re getting closer!” Connie will insist, before she chips in another proposal; the antique shop, the creepy corner store, chemistry classroom where they failed to dissect frogs in grade nine.
But they never do.
Not after idea after idea, place after place, things tried, sights seen, memories made, going everywhere, getting nowhere. Connie is still the same.
She doesn’t glow, or anything. She’s not suddenly vibrant, or filled with unicorns and rainbows, or—God—no, she doesn’t come alive, revived and real and touchable before her eyes. It ends up begging the question, though, one Ocean never really thought to ask before: What does happen, when her business is finished?
She doesn’t find out.
* * *
It was supposed to be today.
Ocean crumples to the edge of the mattress in her dead best friend’s childhood bedroom and lets her face sink into her palms. “I’m sorry.”
This was supposed to be the idea.
When the door to the Blackwood residence swung open, Ocean was enveloped in an embrace that she can’t say she remembers feeling since before September fourteenth of last year. There were more tears than anticipated. Mr. and Mrs. Blackwood fell to their knees and swathed her in their arms. Jonah—nine, now—clung to her knees so long he had to be pried from them.
And Constance’s gauzy, transparent limbs passed through their soft and solid ones, trying desperately to hold what she couldn’t.
They ushered Ocean inside, sat her down at the dining room table, and offered a meal she hadn’t planned to eat. It was a batch of cookies they made for the grand reopening of the Café—fresh, their first times in the kitchen since the Accident. Ocean took a bite.
She didn’t have the heart to tell them they didn’t taste as sweet as they used to.
They talked and reminisced, and Connie hovered about them like a moth to a flame, checking for new wrinkles in their skin, failing to hold their faces in her hands.
“Sometimes,” chuckled Mrs. Blackwood, joylessly, as Constance’s fingers passed through her hair and her lips through her cheek, “I feel like her spirit is still here.”
Ocean wished, painfully and distinctly, she could tell them how oh so right they were.
She decided then and there that this would be it.
The Blackwood apartment was turned upside-down. Every corner, every room, every creak in the wood and photo on the wall, drawer full of junk and box full of treasure.
She scoured Jonah’s room. Constance lovingly admired his three-sizes-up wardrobe, the still-standing Jenga tower on the floor, and the fact he’s already graphing lines in math.
Nothing happened.
Ocean darted for the bathroom. Constance giggled faintly at the purple hair dye staining the bathtub, and murmured something about it being nice if she could switch it up with some blue, but it was too late, now.
Nothing.
The kitchen. The Blackwoods must’ve been watching her frantically comb their house top to bottom, but they said nothing. Constance drew a finger over each granite countertop and mentioned how nice it was they were finally reopening the Café. Then, looked less nice when she realized why they kept it closed.
Living room. Oh, they kept the Disney princess DVDs they watched during sleepovers in elementary. Hallway. That picture’s new; Jonah’s graduation, it looked like. Broom closet, medicine cabinet, pantry.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. No business.
When Ocean burst into the bedroom, maybe Constance could tell.
“Here,” she gasped, throwing open wardrobes of t-shirts, bins of plushes shaped like smiling baked goods, boxes of movie tickets and jewelry and sticks of gum long gone bad and sheet music folded in half. “Take a look! There’s, there’s got to be, something in here.”
Constance was frowning. Ocean knew those kinds of things without looking at her, now. “Ocean—”
“No, no, no. Here, what about”—she produced a pinkish macaron from the plush pile, whose stuffing was, upon closer inspection, leaking from its stomach area in a grotesque scene—”this! Maybe, you needed to see this again!”
She waggled it in front of Constance’s grimacing face, through which she could see a collage of band posters on the door. “Look, Ocean, it’s okay, just, hold—”
“Oh!” Macaron stuffing-guts abandoned, she scrabbled from the carpet and pasted a hand to what appeared to be an ordinance to lose one’s mind at a disco. “This—thing! You never got to go to a concert, right? Right? We could take a road trip!” Ocean trilled. “I’ll buy a bus ticket to Sask and everything! Maybe that’s it.”
“Ocean, please. You don’t—”
“But I do,” she pleaded, desperately. “I have to. You have to. We…we’ve got to…”
But Ocean didn’t.
And now, she’s sorry.
Constance is quiet, but she sits herself beside her on her strawberry duvet that hasn’t been slept in. Ocean knows she does.
“I really thought this would be it,” she murmurs through her palms. “I really thought, maybe, seeing them. Or, or something in this house. Or, just, being here. I thought, maybe, that was what you needed to do.”
It’s quiet some more.
“To be happy?” Constance suddenly says, after a while.
Ocean’s palms fall from her face. She still hunches over her knees. “Well, to, finish your business,” she says, lamely. “That would make you happy. Right?”
Constance says nothing.
Ocean’s eyes travel around the room. Pink, and blue; like cotton candy. She never changed the paint from when they were kids.
The Blackwoods left it just the way it was, but it still, somehow, feels a little duller without her weight in the bed and her breath in the air.
She flickers to the dresser, and there it is.
Ocean slips off the bed, pulled, almost. She sails across the room, and takes the curled purple cord. It’s almost identical to the one already fastened around her wrist. The happy little beads slip between her fingers. B-F-F.
“We made those in grade three.” She turns around, to face Connie. The smile on her face is small, but there. “Right here.”
She’s looking towards the carpet; plush, fuzzy, pink. The very same. It’s been washed, sure, but never replaced. Ocean chuckles, despite it all. “We did.”
All of a sudden, Constance looks filled with a sort of verve that she wasn’t. She plunks herself down on the floor and makes a starfish among the fur. “And you said you never wanted me to get rid of this,” she says, almost teasing, “‘cause it felt like ‘sitting on a cloud.’ So, I didn’t.”
Ocean parks right down at her side and lets herself topple backwards, sprawled up. It is like laying on cloud. “I was right,” she snickers.
“Yeah. You were,” says Constance, even though Ocean knows she can’t feel it anymore.
She stares up at the glow-in-the-dark stars still in constellations on the ceiling. “You’d braid my hair.”
“And you’d braid mine.”
Ocean’s head slumps over to look at her, but she’s already looking back. “You’d”—she has to swallow—”keep your nightlight on for me.”
Something about Connie changes. “When there were monsters in the closet, you held my hand.”
She doesn’t think about it. Ocean doesn’t consider it, not even for a second, when her five fingers reach for hers.
Nothing’s there.
She blinks. Slowly, her eyes travel down.
Connie’s thumb twitches, like she’s expecting the feeling, waiting for the solidness of her. It doesn’t come.
It phases through her palm.
A long, long stretch of quiet.
“You know,” says Constance after what might be years, and if Ocean didn’t know any better she’d say she was a little hoarse, “you don’t have to be sorry for any of this. I’m, just, lucky to still be here. Somehow. With, with you.”
Ocean’s eyes snap back up. Constance’s are staring back, and for even longer, Ocean looks nowhere but her.
It’s not the same. Not really. She can’t lay on clouds, have her hair braided, her hand held. She deserves to play Jenga and dye her hair blue and taste ice cream from the parlor on Tenth. It’s not fair that everything feels so cold right now. There should be the heat of her body, the softness of her skin, the oxygen of her laugh. It’s not fair, laying on this floor when she’s so close yet having to cross a world to get to her. She’s real, not tangible. She should be here. She should have her hand held.
“It’s not the same.”
Constance goes different again. “What?”
“It’s not the same,” Ocean tells her, louder this time, and the familiar sting of salt jabs at the corners of her eyes. “You, you should be here,” is all she can insist, face warping.
“I’m here,” Connie almost sounds like she’s pleading, trying to move closer, closer across the floor.
Ocean shoves a hand out to clutch desperately for hers. It passes through. Again, again, again. “Look!” she cries, trying, trying, trying. It never works. She never holds her. “You’re not. But, you should be.”
“Ocean—”
“I need to feel you,” she begs right back, trying senselessly to tip her forehead just to touch hers but it doesn’t happen, all it is is cold. “You need to hug your mom. Feel the carpet. And, I, I want to hold your hand, and braid your hair, and,” Ocean realizes, “I want to be with you.”
“Ocean, we can’t—”
“I know we can’t,” she protests. “But, Connie, I want to…”
She trails off.
Constance’s face is so very close. So impossibly warped with pain, so sweet and soft, so her in all ways.
So beautiful.
Ocean gets a feeling.
It’s warm, and it’s cool. It’s new, and familiar. It’s petrifying, but inexplicably comfortable. It’s all-consuming, grave and daunting and perfect, and it’s love.
“I want,” Ocean says, different this time, “to be with you.”
And Constance always could read her mind.
It’s possible, to want to do something you’ve never done; to long to hold something you’ve never had. Ocean would like to be with Constance; a plain thing, but fraught with so much more meaning than it once was.
She can’t be.
But the feeling makes her try.
All laws of this world and the next one be damned, Ocean reaches to take Constance’s hands, and Constance reaches to take Ocean’s hands, and it doesn’t matter who does what, because all at once there’s no distance between them left.
Everything is warm.
No longer cold and empty and unbodied. The prints of her ten fingers, worn plastic of her glasses, chap of her lips. Ocean feels her.
You’re here.
She wastes none of it. She takes in everything. She impresses every minuscule sensation into the permanence of her memory, breathes her in like she’ll never again, and thinks she’ll never be so stupid so as to let go. Ocean kisses her best friend, cries at the tingle of skin on skin, and everything is okay again.
Then it starts to go cold.
Her eyes bolt open, and Constance is bright—as in, alight. As in, the feel of her fingers starts to slip. Blinking, Ocean grabs for them.
Nothing’s there.
“I lied,” says Connie. Ocean darts to look up at her, lips smiling but eyes weeping. “I’m sorry. I knew what the business was.”
“No.” She scrambles to put her together again, to hold her, to feel her. She just keeps going. “No, no, no.”
“I thought, you’d never— that this would never— so, I thought, if we kept looking, I could hang around for a while.” She just keeps getting brighter.
“No, no. Don’t,” Ocean tells her. I just figured it out. “Please. You can’t.” She’s slipping away.
“I can’t stay,” Constance agrees, not how she’d like her to. “You were— that was it. The one thing I never did.”
“But,” Ocean still tries, senselessly, desperately, “we’re not finished. We have business! Now that we— that I know— there’s so many things to, to—”
“I love you, Ocean.” It’s never been so harrowing to hear. “Thank you.”
“I love you, too,” cries Ocean after her, like if she just says it with enough conviction, it’ll tether her here. It doesn’t. “I love you, Connie. I don’t know, what to— what do I—”
“Keep living,” Constance begs. “Just, stay here. Do good. Everything will be—”
The air goes quiet. The room goes dark. Everything is cold again.
Ocean is alone.
Somehow, it’s colder. It’s quieter than before she took the trip down Fission Ave those months and months ago. Somehow, it’s lonelier to lose the thing you didn’t know you wanted until you had it, until you felt it, until it was in your arms for the second time and you swore you wouldn’t let go when you already had the first.
It’s worse.
Ocean is acutely empty. But: “Okay,” she tells this empty, empty room. “Okay.”
Keep living.
That’s what she does.
She makes it out of town, eventually. She goes to school, for a while; gets a JD but takes her time doing it, because that’s what Constance would say to do, if she were there. She ends up fighting on behalf of the injured, and gets in earlier and stays later than anyone else. She’s tired, but she does good.
Ocean meets people, and helps, and grows old. Keep living, it rings, when hours are long or cases lost or nights lonely. Keep living.
She tries. Well and truly, she does, if for nothing but her.
But in the end, all she ends up doing is surviving.