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Richie wanted to give Kate a proper burial. A Christian one like she would have wanted. There were too many funerals going on for his taste. He’d only been to one, and that was his father’s. That had been a happy occasion on many levels for him. He and Seth were finally free of the tyranny. Richie didn’t have to deal with being called retarded, and Seth didn’t get beat up on. Uncle Eddie had been the dad Richie always wanted, the one he didn’t want to put in the ground, but there he was. Too many funerals. Two too many.
As far as he was concerned, he had lain his father to rest that very week, and now he was going to have to bury a girl.
Richie convinced Scott not to come. The kid had been through enough in the past day, and he didn’t need to have to go and get his sister’s body. Richie promised him he would bring Kate back to him and that they would do right by her. It was the least that Richie felt like he could do. He wished he could do more. He wished he could bring her back, make a bargain and bring both her and Eddie back, but he was sure that his life was barely worth another person’s, let alone two of them. There would be no making deals with whatever god that existed. There would only be the sharpness of absence.
Part of it that tormented him is that he never knew what Kate was to him. There was no label to her. Richie liked neatness, he liked knowing answers to things, and he liked having order. Seth was brother. Eddie was father. Kate… Well, what was she? His mind lingered on the word victim, and that caused his stomach to roil. He thought of her much more tenderly than he had anyone else whose life he’d ruined. There were many, too. Monica haunted him to this day. He thought of her and her kids. He hadn’t meant to do it, but that didn’t matter to him. He had done it, and his list of regrets was growing longer and longer. Eddie and Kate were on that list now. Guilt was growing in him, and he wasn’t sure if he would be able to process it. Talking about it should be easier than allowing it to pool within him but wasn’t. Letting the feelings fester was easier than articulating them most times. He had Seth, though, when it all finally bubbled over. He didn’t want Seth to think he was a monster and that he meant for all this carnage. Seth was one of the last things he had left.
He pulled the car up next to the blood well. He didn’t want to look at where he knew Kate would be lying. She told him she hoped he burned in hell before taking one last shaky breath and departing from this world. Why didn’t she let one of them turn her? He thought that she would let Scott for sure. He wasn’t looking forward to cradling her in his arms and lying her in the backseat of the car. He’d carried dead bodies before, but hers would be by far the heaviest. He thought of her in the backroom of the Twister with her wide eyes, asking to be set free. She was a kid. He shouldn’t have kissed her. He shouldn’t have leaned in and touched his lips to hers, but he had. It was hardly sexual, though there was something there that he didn’t have a word for. There was a spark. There were few intimacies that he had experienced, but in that moment, he was connected to her. For a second, he didn’t feel like he was sinking in a sea or not understand what was happening to him. He wanted to set her free, but Richie was selfish sometimes. He should have told Seth to let her leave, let them all leave. Jacob would be alive, Scott would be human, and Kate would be going to homecoming and prom. She would have gone back and lived a normal life. He didn’t know what would have happened to him and Seth, but he knew that they would have made it work in their favor. They were better together. They covered the bases better. They were a team. Seth was his partner. They would have continued as usual. They all would have.
He still couldn’t shake that time in the Twister with Kate, but the one moment he shared with her that shook him to the core was when she asked him to pray with her for his own peace of mind. Richie hadn’t prayed unless he had to. He and Seth had gone to a Catholic school, Eddie’s attempt at making sure they got a good education, so sometimes prayer was compulsory, but it’d always been hollow for him. The only things he knew about the Bible really was from watching The Ten Commandments and other biblically-themed classic films. His upbringing was not terribly religious. His dad blamed his mother and her religion for his birth and Seth’s being close together. “The damn bitch never believed in birth control. She had religious objects. All that Irish Catholic bullshit, and that’s how we wound up with you two,” Ray had said. When Kate asked him to pray, he was skeptical, but he was desperate, and she was earnest. He believed that she did want him to find that peace he wanted. His mind was not quiet then. It was a piecemeal of horrors, but during that prayer, he had closed his eyes, and for a few words, his mind was quieted.
Richie got out of the car and walked to the wooden platform. There was nothing there but a plain white sheet. There was no body of a girl. Richie stood on the spot that she died and cursed under his breath. He had promised Scott he would bring her back, and he couldn’t even deliver on that. He was failing Kate’s brother. He was failing himself. With a deep sigh, he sat on the spot he was standing and put his head in his hands wearily. He was tired, down to the marrow of his bones. He wanted this to be over. He wanted to stop hurting people. He had wanted to bury her. Richie Gecko was a bundle of unmet wants and needs, and at the bottom of that all, he felt like a failure. He had failed. He had to make sure he never did again.