“You! What are you doing at my baby's grave!” Damien looked up from the cement block in front of him, turning in shock and dropping his bouquet of lilies, Essie's favorite flower. He saw a brunette woman walking towards him with a force that could only be matched by one person: her daughter.
“She was my friend. I just wanted to say goodbye.” Damien responded softly, his eyes turned to follow the cement curves that wrote Essie's name.
“Well you can't!” Anger showed through Mrs. Vanderkin's eyes, looking like an intensified version of Essie's face the first day of seventh grade, “She's dead. You should have said goodbye, instead of saying all of those hurtful things that night.”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” he tried lamely. He did not want to talk about this. He had come to see Essie, not explain himself to her mother.
“I saw Essie that night. I saw her cry when you dropped her off and she ran to her room. Then I never saw my baby again!” She broke down into hysterics
Damien broke into sobs as well. “I'm so sorry, Mrs Vanderkin. I didn't mean for this to happen!”
She looked at him with hate in her eyes. “You're a murderer.”
Tears were beginning to cloud Damien's vision. “I'm sorry.”
“If there was any justice, you'd be under this stone instead of my Essie.”
“I'm sorry,” Damien screamed. The guilt was threatening to overpower him. He could hardly breathe or thing is of anything but the voices in his head telling him that it was all his fault and that he had killed the best friend he had ever had.
“You ruined her life,” she spat at Damien and turned to walk away.
Damien just watched her walk away for a few seconds. He watched her brunette ponytail serve side to side as she walked, so like Essie's. Like Essie's had when she had run every day in gym, daring him to catch her and smiling her open-mouthed, chipmunk-cheeked smile when he could not. He remembered how he would let her win, just to see that smile. And she knew it. She liked to pretend too. “That's a lie!” he yelled after her, causing her to turn around and stare at him.
She yelled back at him, daring him to say it again, “No it isn't.”
Damien would not back down. Sure, he and Essie had had their bad times, but he had loved her, and protected her, and been there for her. It had been more than anyone else had done, including the woman standing before him, calling him a murderer. “Yes it is! I didn't kill her. The pills killed her. The drugs killed her. This world killed her. She killed her. But I didn't. She would have done it with or without me.”
“That's not true!”
“Yes it is! You know it is!” Damien was screaming now. But was only half at Mrs Vanderkin. It was also half at him, yelling at him for being so foolish and wasting so much time feeling that intense guilt that was not his to bear. “How many times did she come home smelling like alcohol? How many times did you wake up in the middle of the night and hear her cry from the other room and roll over and pretend you could not hear it? How many times did she flinch when you touched her? She was sick.”
How could he have missed her funeral when she had gone?
“No! No....” Mrs Vanderkin was shaking her head profusely, as if that action alone could ward off the guilt. It could not. Damien knew it. He had been feeling it for months.
“It's true. I'm so sorry, Mrs. Vanderkin,” he said gently. The gentleness had no effect on the sobbing woman, who grabbed Essie's tombstone.
And he left the grieving mother crying and clutching her dead daughter's tombstone.
“There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light.”
Jodi Piccoult, Change of Heart