Chapter 4
(August 2024)
Bucky met Lena at a station in Crown Heights and together they made the trip to Highland park. The A-train was fairly empty and quiet, and Bucky was happy to keep it that way. Lena had other plans, and spent most of the ride talking about everything and nothing. She told Bucky about her week at work and the creepy looking man who’d come in for records. She told him about a bird that flew into her window, the recipe she found and might make for dinner that night, and the neighbor's cat who just celebrated her tenth birthday.
“Her name’s Astrid,” Lena explained.
“The cat or the owner?” Bucky asked.
Lena chuckled. “The cat.” She fished around in her bag, pulled out her phone, and held it up to Bucky’s face. On the screen was a picture of a black cat with white paws. “This is her.”
Bucky’s lips twitched. He loved a good cat picture. If Alpine could stay still long enough, that’s all there’d be on his phone. He doesn’t really use it for much else anyway.
“Great cat.” He nodded in approval.
Once they got off the train, they began their trek through the park. It was nice enough weather and so the walk was pleasant.
All the while, Lena didn’t let up on the stories. She talked about a documentary she saw on art forgery that featured one of her old college professors as an expert. She talked about a book she read on the Habsburgs and an upcoming adaptation they’re making for Netflix. Then she explained more about Netflix, while Bucky indignantly reminded her that Sam had made sure he knew about Netflix. She talked about the scone she ate for breakfast in such incredible detail, Bucky was almost convinced to go get one himself.
“The best part of it was the crunchy sugar on the top,” Lena explained, and Bucky had to admit it did sound good.
“I’ve never had a scone with fruit in it before,” he admitted.
“I’ll have to take you for one sometime!” Lena waved her hands emphatically.
“Okay.” Bucky’s lip twitched again.
Lena continued to talk to fill up the space, and Bucky continued to absorb every word, only contributing in the odd interval where he deemed a response relevant or necessary.
Bucky’d gotten so used to the cadence of Lena’s voice as they walked that it was jarring when she suddenly fell silent. Abruptly they’d stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Truth be told, Bucky had no idea which way they were going the whole time, he’d been allowing Lena to lead the way in an astounding act of trust and release of control. Besides, she’s the one who’d taken the trip before. Many times, in fact.
So, when she stopped short, he stopped short, nearly knocking into her and sending them both to the pavement. He looked up and followed her line of sight. Across the street was an understated iron gate with red brick posts.
A stone placard on either side of the entrance read: Mount Moriah Cemetery.
“We’re here,” Lena announced, a sudden and terrible hardness in her tone.
Without looking back at Bucky, she crossed the street, letting him stumble after her as she made her way into the cemetery with sure and practiced steps.
They weaved through headstones and family plots like bees in a garden. It took a whole twenty minutes to find the ones they were looking for.
The Barnes family plot is small in comparison to some of its neighbors. There were only four headstones total. His parents were next to each other on a diptych stone: Georg and Winnifred Barnes. Then there was Frances, who was only two years younger than Bucky. She died back in ‘84 in a car accident.
Finally, next to Frances was Rebecca. You could tell it was the most recent headstone by how clean it was and its smaller pile of stones on top.
Bucky stared at all of them almost blankly. He didn’t know what to begin to think.
“Your other sister Hannah is buried in Seattle with her husband,” Lena offered. “I never really got to know her or her family.”
Bucky nodded. “She was the middle sister, always sort of marched to her own drummer. I’m not surprised she built a life far away from here.”
Lena hummed, “The only other Barnes plot is in D.C.”
Bucky quirked a brow. “Who’s in D.C.?”
“You.”
“Oh.” Bucky blinked. “Right. Arlington.”
“Bubbe used to visit once a year,” Lena recalled. “Once I moved in she started taking me with her.”
“Oh, uh, thanks.” Bucky scratched the back of his neck.
Lena smirked at his awkwardness and shook her head. Silently she reached into her bag and pulled out a draw-string pouch. “Hold out your hand,” she commanded.
Bucky hesitantly moved his hand out so that it was parallel to the ground. Lena scoffed and took his hand in her own, flipping it so that it was palm up, before reaching into the pouch, pulling out a smooth grey stone, and placing it gently in his grasp. She then reached back in and pulled another identical stone out. Crouching down before the dual grave of Georg and Winnie, Lena closed her eyes, her lips moving over the shape of a soundless prayer before she placed a kiss on the stone and carefully lowered it onto the pile collecting at the foot of the headstone.
She stood up and looked expectantly back at Bucky.
Bucky looked down at the stone in his hand and then back towards Lena before shuffling closer to his parents’ grave. He then closed his eyes and tried to think of what he wanted to say to them.
I love you, he began. I miss you, he ended. He pressed the short message into the stone with a kiss, and then slowly lowered it next to Lena’s.
Lena shuffled over to Frances and Bucky followed. She looked over at him expectantly until he held out his hand with his palm up. Reaching into her little pouch, she pulled out another stone and placed it in his grasp before picking one out for herself.
Lena repeated her ritual from before, closed her eyes, said a prayer to herself, kissed the stone, and placed it gently on Frances’s headstone. This time she didn’t look back at Bucky, just stepped away to give him room.
Bucky took Lena’s place and closed his eyes. I love you, he began again, I miss you. He kissed the stone and once more placed it next to Lena’s.
When he looked back up, Lena was sitting on the grass in front of Rebecca’s grave, staring at the headstone as if her gaze could make the carved marble change into someone else’s name.
“It’s weird,” Lena says without shifting focus, “I used to go to your grave with Bubbe every year, and now I’m at hers with you.”
Bucky nodded in a silent agreement as he lowered himself next to her. It was weird, unnatural, for him to be alive. For all these people to be gone.
“You know I’d always known I’d end up here.” Lena gestures around them. “After my mom died my dad took me to a kid shrink. The woman told him that a brush with mortality at such a young age could manifest in two main ways: anxiety over death or a detachment from it.”
“For a while it was the former. Ironically I couldn’t be separated from my dad without freaking out. I just kept thinking, ‘He’s going to die. He’s going to leave me too'.” Lena huffed, “Then one day a switch flipped and the pendulum swung the other way. If anyone could die at any time then death was not such a big deal.
“I always knew I’d end up here”–Lena gestured at Rebecca’s grave–“but I always expected that I’d be there when it eventually happened.”
Bucky’s brow drew a tight line down his forehead as he looked over at the young woman as she began to look more like a girl.
“The fact that I wasn’t–” Tears sprang to her eyes and a shuddered breath escaped her. She swiped quickly at her eyes and cleared her throat. “The fact that I wasn’t here makes it feel like it never even happened. But here she is”–Lena placed a hand on the headstone–“here’s the proof.”
Lena shot Bucky a red-rimmed look. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye.” She turned away from him then, in sudden mortification, feeling small and foolish like a child. Rebecca used to pull that look when she got caught doing something she wasn’t meant to be doing, something that usually ended with something else breaking. One time it was a vase, another it was her arm.
Bucky swallowed around a growing lump in his throat. His vision began to blur and a distantly familiar feeling dropped in his stomach. He followed an old instinct he’d thought long gone and gently tapped the toe of his shoe against Lena’s to get her attention.
“I know how you feel,” Bucky assured her. “It’s been decades now,” he huffed to himself, still somehow bewildered by the thought, “but it barely feels like even one has passed. It doesn’t feel real sometimes.” He glared at where the headstone says 2020. “Rebecca was only a kid the last time I saw her.” He glanced back at Lena. “Now she’s gone. They all are.”
Lena nodded as tears freely streamed down her cheeks and placed a knowing hand on his knee and squeezed. When she let go, she reached into the pouch and pulled out another, final set of stones. Bucky wordlessly grabbed one from her palm.
Once more Lena brought a stone to her lips, hovered just over the surface with a prayer, and then kissed it. This kiss was different from the others. It lingered, her lips frozen in a pucker almost as if she couldn’t physically remove them. Eventually she placed it on the headstone with the rest of the small but growing pile.
Bucky looked down at the stone in his palm and began to worry it between his fingers. He closed his eyes and exhaled.
I love you, he began again, I miss you. He was about to bring the stone up to his lips when he hesitated.
“I wish I could have seen you grow up,” he said aloud in a soft, cracked voice, a thumb gliding over the smooth edge of the stone as if it were a cheek before he finally dropped a kiss to it. The stone soon joined ranks with the others, but the two didn't move from their place by the grave’s side.
It was quiet and the air was still. There was no one else for miles.
Suddenly, like a crack of lightning across a clear blue sky, Bucky hunched over himself and let out one, powerful sob.
Lena jumped a little at the sound of it, but then steeled herself for when, like the echoing call of thunder, it was followed by another.
She placed a careful hand on his back, and when he did not pull away, lowered her head to rest on the edge of his shoulder.
He didn’t say anything in return, only leaned into the shaking touch.
They stayed like that until their bones ached, and then longer still until the sun began to dip past Queens.