Montaine by Ada Rome Page A

breathed deeply, his chest visibly
rising and falling.
    “Come on.”
    He grasped my hand and
towed me along the choppy cobblestone path and onto the rolling grass. He aimed
like a laser toward a point in the distance. His legs moved in long, purposeful
strides. I struggled to keep pace, stubbing the toe of my sneaker here and
there on a hillock of unmown grass or swerving to avoid a collision with a
teetering headstone.
    Some of the stones were
faded and rubbed raw by decades spent exposed to the harsh northeastern
winters. Others had the fresh sharpness of recent burials. Tiny rounded stones
marked the graves of children. Elaborate monuments of weeping angels memorialized
entire generations. Towering elms rose and spread like a cathedral ceiling,
their leaves shaking in the breeze with a whispering hush like the voices of
the dead.
    Trent stopped so abruptly
that I ran into his back. I apologized softly, but he didn’t seem to notice.
His gaze was fixed on a slab of shining pink marble set into the earth. He
crouched before it, swiping it gently with his fingertips to remove a few
leaves and particles of dirt.
    Rosalind Pauline Dover . Daughter. Friend. We love you forever. 1982-2001. Underneath the text was a carved circle. I knelt beside Trent to get a closer
look at the detail. The circle was divided by a cross into four spaces. Within
each space was a picture. A tree, a gust of wind, a flame, and a drop of water.
The four elements.
    Reluctant to intrude on
Trent’s thoughts, I waited and wondered. I knew that he was thirty-three, so
the dates on the headstone would have made Rosalind Pauline Dover his
contemporary in age. The four elements, of course, reminded me of our
conversation on the rooftop. His body was covered in tattoos of the four
elements. He had said that the meaning of those tattoos involved a girl who was
now gone. Rosalind was clearly that girl.
    The sadness of the
discovery hit me with a blow that was almost physical in its violence. Trent’s
body was a monument to a ghost.
    “I suppose you’ve pieced
together part of it,” he said as if reading my mind. His voice was gruff and
raw. He immediately cleared his throat, attempting to disguise his emotions,
and rose to his feet. “Want to hear the rest of it?”
    I nodded. The wind kicked
up, stirring the elms and sending a chill along my naked arms. The gray,
swollen clouds moved quickly across the leaden sky.
    “Rosie.” He spoke the
name with a deep sigh. “We were in college together, here in Leidensburg. We
met as freshman and formed an instant bond. I first became friends with Kill at
around the same time. The three of us were pretty much inseparable. Kill was
actually the journalism star in those days, kind of a big man on campus. Rosie was
very bohemian. She wore long patchwork skirts and crystal necklaces. I was a
bit of a hippie too.”
    I couldn’t help but
laugh. “You? A hippie?”
    He smiled sheepishly. “I
looked great with long hair. I think I even wore it in a braid at one point.”
    This made me laugh even
harder.
    “I’m sorry. I really
shouldn’t be laughing.”
    “It’s alright,” he said
softly. “Rosie would have appreciated the humor in it.”
    “So, she was your
girlfriend?”
    He paused and gazed up at
the billowing clouds.
    “No. Things never went in
that direction between us. She was my best friend, even more so than Kill. We
told each other everything, all of our secrets, our dreams and plans, our
deepest thoughts. We’d talk for hours on end and never get bored. I guess
that’s what true love is, but you don’t always realize that when you’re a nineteen-year-old
kid. You expect constant fireworks, not a slow and steady burn. Maybe real love
needs both.”
    He glanced meaningfully
at me from the corner of his eye.
    “I suppose that I was in
love with her without ever admitting it to myself. We might have eventually
ended up as a couple. I don’t know. Suddenly, it was too late to find out. She
was