Chapter Text
The day before his wedding, Oliver’s fiancée hands him a cup of coffee, and he takes a sip, and blinks. A tear falls into his cup. She looks up at him, alarmed, and he bleats out the words, “I can’t marry you. I’m so sorry. I just can’t.”
The next six hours are a war zone. Shelley’s father screaming at him. Oliver’s father screaming at him. Shelley sitting in the corner of the loveseat couch they just picked out together, looking shell shocked more than anything, but not quite surprised. Oliver packs up as much as he can and heads to a friend’s house upstate; on what would have been his wedding day, he gets uncharacteristically trashed by the afternoon, then passes out on his friend’s couch and has wild, almost nightmare-like dreams about Elio that he can’t remember when he wakes up.
He takes the week he would have spent on his honeymoon to get his life in order: find a new apartment in the city, move the rest of his stuff out of the place he shared with Shelley, quietly let his close friends and immediate colleagues know that despite the last-minute cancellation, he and his family are okay.
He wakes up the Saturday after what would have been his wedding day with a startling kind of clarity: he has to call Elio. His mind latches onto this thought as if it had been the root of his intentions all along, but of course, it must have been. It always would be.
He goes to the post office to make the long distance call, his entire body thrumming with anticipation. He’s out of his mind, maybe — to think that Elio would even want to talk to him, let alone want anything else Oliver is about to ask. But he’s taken too many chances this week to back down from the one that matters most.
“Pronto.”
Oliver almost pulls the phone from his ear, wondering if he could possibly have dialed the wrong number. It’s a woman’s voice, older. Not Annella’s or Mafalda’s. One he doesn’t recognize.
“Hello?” he asks warily.
The woman’s English is heavily accented. A relative of Elio’s, maybe. “Oh … are you calling for Samuel?”
“No — Elio.”
Her voice takes on a different tone. “Ah,” she says lowly. “So terrible what happened.”
Oliver’s heart is sinking before he can even open his mouth.
“They delayed the funeral, you know,” she says. “Given the circumstances. It’s Monday, if that’s what you were calling to ask.”
The world goes very still.
“The — the funeral,” Oliver echoes.
She rattles off an address for a funeral home in Crema, with the grim, almost efficient tone of someone who’s had to do the same thing to a dozen other callers that week. Oliver’s tongue feels too thick for his mouth, the colors of the post office too bright, his hands disconnected from his body.
“What — what happened, exactly?”
It’s his voice asking, but it isn’t him. He has this insane compulsion to keep this woman on the phone, long enough that Elio will interrupt, come barreling in from some corner of the villa and somehow know who it is on the line; Elio, alive and well and cheeky as ever, clearing up what has to be some kind of mistake.
“You don’t know?”
“No, I wasn’t …”
“Car crash. This past Saturday. Drunk driver hit the boys from the side. Such an awful thing to happen here, of all places.”
“Awful thing,” says Oliver dumbly. He can’t think of words on his own. There is nothing left in his brain anymore, just a sharp, persistent whine that is slowly drowning out everything else. The walls of the post office, the plastic of the phone in his hands, the ground underneath his feet.
“I’m sorry, who is this?”
Oliver sets the phone back in its cradle. He walks out of the post office, into the too bright June sun, stumbles over to the curb, and throws up.
Oliver can’t let himself close his eyes. Not the night after the phone call. Not on either of the connecting flights to Italy. Not on the train, and certainly not in the taxi, even though the familiar scenery whirring by is almost more than he can bear. Every time he so much as blinks, he sees Elio — a bloody, lifeless Elio, extracted from a car by strangers, the light in his vibrant, cutting eyes extinguished in one fell swoop.
It’s his fault. He knows it in his heart. Do you mind? he’d asked Elio that day on the phone, and Elio had sucked in a rattling breath. You’re being silly, Elio had said to him, all postured and stiff — as if he really was Oliver in that moment, and not just in name. As if he were the older one, the wiser one, the one who had to reassure Oliver and not the other way around — You’re being silly.
But Oliver had heard past it, straight to the quiet splinter in Elio’s heart. He knew what he’d done. What he’d walked away from, and left in his wake. Until now, he had known there were consequences, but none so grim as this: in another life, Elio would have been at his side, spending the holiday with him. In another life, Elio would never have been in that car to begin with.
In another life, Oliver wasn’t a goddamn coward, and Elio didn’t pay the price.
It occurs to Oliver, halfway from the train station to the Perlman’s, that he won’t be welcome there. That he should take his hastily packed backpack to the room he’d booked in Crema and avoid them altogether. It won’t be lost on any of them that Elio died on what should have been Oliver’s wedding day.
His chest tightens. He wills himself not to break down in the cab, his fingers knotted into fists so tight that his nails are cutting blood into his palms. If he’d just called as soon as he’d broken it off — just run out of the apartment, to the nearest telephone, and told Elio right then and there —
“Can you turn around?” Oliver asks.
The driver takes him back to Crema, to the little building he’s renting a room in.
“Sir,” the driver prompts him, when he doesn’t immediately get out of the car.
And maybe he won’t. He shouldn’t be here. He can’t go to that funeral. He had chances, so many chances, and he doesn’t deserve this last one. It would be an insult to Elio’s memory, to only show up now, when it’s far too late.
“Sir?”
“Sorry,” Oliver mutters. He’ll have to wait. Get another taxi or a bus to the train station, before this man assumes he’s crazy and drives him straight to a police station. He grabs his backpack and rifles in his back pocket for the now exorbitant cab fare, leaning through the window and muttering a quick “Grazi.”
“Oliver?”
He freezes. No, he can’t freeze. It isn’t his place, isn’t his right, to be the weak one right now — because he knows this voice.
He turns to see Annella’s eyes wide and glistening with tears. She is grey-faced, her expression stretched in a way he never could have imagined the summer prior, dressed in dark clothing. Samuel is beside her, looking as though he has aged ten years, his own eyes red-rimmed and his body slack and unlively, like someone else is inhabiting it.
Their grief is somehow even more unbearable than his own.
“I …”
He starts to apologize, but before he can, Annella takes his face in both of her hands and says, with a heartbreaking kind of gratitude, “You’re here.”
Oliver tries to blink away his tears, but they come too quickly, too startlingly — he has never been one for crying and now that it keeps happening, he doesn’t know how to make it stop.
“I’m so sorry,” he manages. “I’m so sorry.”
Annella releases his face then, but only so she can pull him into an embrace, the kind so unreserved and so unapologetic that he feels like a thief for accepting it. He should say something comforting, something kind, but his own pain is too selfish and he suddenly can’t find the words.
Annella releases him, swiping at her eyes, and matters only get worse from there — Samuel embraces him, too.
No, he thinks to himself. You should hate me. Hit me. Banish me from this place. This place that is so already haunted by Elio’s ghost — the flimsy table they shared a drink at, the monument where they curbed their bikes, the bookstore that Elio slinked in and out of like a shop cat. An alleyway where they snuck a kiss, a corner where their hands grazed, a bus stop where Elio tripped and fell right into him.
It is too overwhelming; he keeps his eyes open, and he sees the past. He closes them and sees the ugly future. There is no escape from this, the walls pressing in from all sides, the weight of it more than a person can bear.
“Where are you staying?” asks Samuel. “Not here, surely?”
And just like that, Oliver’s intentions of sneaking back to the airport are dashed. “Yes, I …”
Annella sucks in a shuddering breath, shaking her head. “Absolutely not, please stay with us.”
“I — I couldn’t.”
“You must,” Samuel agrees.
“There is always a place for you in our home.”
It hurts him in a place he didn’t know he had left to be hurt, to hear her say that. The place in their home is a place that belongs to their son. Elio’s room and Elio’s books and Elio’s posters on the wall.
Annella is the one who spares him. “Settle in here,” she says, patting him on the cheek. “You join us when you’re ready.”
When they part ways he sees the Perlmans heading in the direction of the funeral home, a few streets away. Oliver has to force himself to breathe so he won’t throw up again — but the idea of it, Elio’s body in some casket, or reduced to ashes in some urn, is too much. Elio as an object, not as a person; Elio as a past-tense when he has been so aggressively present even in the moments he couldn’t have been further from sight.
He makes it to the privacy of his room and even then isn’t prepared for the swell of it, for the intensity of the grief he hasn’t even let himself feel yet. The door clicks shut behind him and he’s on the floor, sitting up against it, his face in his hands, his knees pulled up to his chest. His body doesn’t know how to let the pain out or how to contain it — he has never felt weaker, never felt this rootless, this lost. He hates himself, then hates himself even further for having the comfort of being able to hate himself, when he should have nothing. Stripped. Bare. Finished.
Elio’s gone.
His body wracks with silent sobs, the final floodgate opened at last. He shoves his wrist into his mouth, trying to muffle the sound of it when it becomes unavoidable, but it’s pointless. He doesn’t care who hears — he’s beyond shame, beyond dignity, beyond any of the trappings of his former self. He cannot go forward or backward from here.
After some unknown period of time has passed, Oliver is wrung out like a sponge, nothing but an empty vessel. He stumbles into the bathroom, pours himself a glass of water, and regrets drinking it almost as soon as he does. His eyes immediately start to well up again. He stares at himself in the mirror, this ridiculous, puffy-eyed, wreck of a man, and doesn’t even know what he is looking at well enough to feel hatred for it anymore.
He knows, then, exactly where he must go. He will not see the Perlmans again. He will not go to that funeral. But he will say his goodbye to Elio, in the only place he properly can.
He washes his face a second time, runs his hands through his hair, and changes his outfit, making himself just presentable enough that nobody will balk at him downstairs when he asks to borrow a bike. What happens is worse — he sees the pity in their eyes. He forgets that it is ultimately a small town. They all know why he’s here.
“Take the car,” says the manager.
Oliver tries to plead otherwise, but the manager insists. He’s too tired to argue. He takes the keys and then takes the lonely, solitary road down to the berm.
He parks the car a ways off; he doesn’t want to be able to see it, doesn’t want it interrupting the sanctity of this place. He has this idea, maybe, that if he comes here, he’ll be able to close his eyes — even if it’s just for a second — and imagine things the way they once were. That maybe he will hear that low, self-conscious chuckle on the wind, or feel the graze of Elio’s shoulder on his arm, or remember that erratic, wild beat of Elio’s heart against his palm in the dark.
He doubts he’ll be afforded that kind of mercy. He doesn’t deserve it. But if nothing else, he can at least come here and attempt to say his goodbye.
He’s nearing the little hill that leads down to the water when he sees a bike propped up on a tree. His breath catches in his throat. It looks just like Elio’s — it may well be Elio’s. It occurs to Oliver that he may have been the first person Elio showed this spot, but he has no way of knowing if he was the last. If someone else is here — someone else, with Elio’s bike, no less — that must mean that Oliver isn’t the only one here to say his goodbyes.
He doesn’t know why he continues down the path anyway. A morbid curiosity, maybe. In some ridiculous way, Oliver is jealous of whoever it is — this person who may have had Elio’s weeks, his months, when Oliver only had him for days. In a less ridiculous way, he is grateful for the existence of whoever it is — whether it’s a friend or something more. Elio had someone, at least. Someone he knew and trusted well enough to bring them here. And Oliver knows that that alone is enough for him to trust this person, too.
He is half-expecting to find Marzia, sitting in the dirt with her feet in the water. But the water’s edge is empty, as still and untainted as it was when Elio first brought him here, before he barreled into it.
What he sees instead is a liquor bottle, half-empty, the amber brown of it reflecting against the sunlight and the water. It’s on the ground, and there are pale, slim fingers wrapped around the neck of it. Oliver’s heart starts racing before his brain even wraps itself around what he’s seeing. He takes a step forward, and then another step, and sees the figure of a boy slumped and unconscious against a tree — a gangly, dark-haired boy, his face obscured by shadows but still unmistakable.
Oliver is losing his mind.
For a moment he doesn’t move, taking in the scene — on the other side of the figure is a backpack. Elio’s backpack. He takes a step closer and sees, past the bruise that’s coloring half of his face, past the ugly stitches that mar one of his cheeks, past the glaring blue of the cast on his arm, is Elio himself.