He's quiet on the way to the cemetery. Karen insists on him wearing a black baseball cap and some dark sunglasses. She thinks it'll make it harder for people to recognize him. He thinks he sticks out like a sore thumb, making a trip to the cemetery dressed like the unibomber, but doesn't argue. There doesn't seem to be anyone else around anyway.
When they roll to a stop in front of the cemetery gates, the silence gets to be too much. He can feel the unspoken question on her lips. She wants to know if she can come with him, if she can hold his hand walking between the weather beaten headstones, and lay her pretty blonde head on his shoulder while he stares down at the family he couldn't save.
A gruff “stay in the car” is on the tip of his tongue, but instead he takes a deep breath and simply asks, “You coming?”
They walk hand in hand, just like he knew she wanted, leaning into the wind. It's a gloomy day, and he's glad. He wouldn't be able to take sunshine and birds chirping, so much like the last day he saw his wife and children. This is better.
The headstones get newer as they move along, shifting from lopsided angels and lichen covered name plates to shiny marble statues and rectangles of granite. Just as they get to the top of the hill where his family is buried, something stops him, a meathook lodged right in the middle of his chest, the spike pulling him down hard.
He looks down, expecting to actually see a weapon lodged in his chest, but it's merely a phantom. Karen adjusts her grip on his hand, sliding her arm under his before rethreading their fingers together. “Just a little ways more.”
He nods, unable to form a verbal reply. The stones are three identical pavers right in a row, the span of their painfully short lives engraved for all eternity. He waits for the inevitable wave of rage to crash into him, for the adrenaline-spiked need for revenge to overtake him. It doesn't happen. There's just a gaping maw of emptiness inside of him, a coldness that reaches from the icy depths of hell to settle in his heart. It's the first time he's ever thought about what it means for them to be gone forever.
Releasing Karen, he bends down to trace the words on the first stone. Loving Mother and Wife. It's all the more painful when he looks at the other two stones. There are no epitaphs on those, no comment on how Lisa loved science or how Frank Jr. was learning all the words to his dad’s favorite songs.
He's felt the overwhelming waves of anger for so long that their absence takes his breath away, knees buckling under him as he falls to the ground. Head in his hands he tries to push the sobs down, but they spill out in a hoarse wail. The sound tears through the wind, and it's only when he feels Karen kneeling beside him, on arm draped across his hunched shoulders, that the pain begins to subside.
He'd forgotten what it's like to feel… anything really. He wasn't like this before, stoicism was never part of his makeup. He laughed loudly and often, and embraced the swell of emotions the filled his chest when things were good. Cried tears of joy as often as sadness. The tears that roll down his face and splash onto the ground are as welcome as they are painful.
With Karen, there were always glimmers of hope. Hope that he was still human, but until this very moment he'd believed her faith in him was entirely misplaced, that he would never quite reach real feeling again.
The two of them rise, Karen slipping one slender arm around his waist. He leans on her, and she holds him up. For the first time in so long he remembers what it's like to not be alone. His lips brush along her temple, pressing a gentle kiss into the sunshiney warmth of her skin.
The wind whips up again, clouds over head churning like smoke. They part briefly, the tiniest sliver of blue poking through. It seems that there may be clear skies ahead.