I found out about Dawn Leonard’s death through a post on her Facebook wall. The post’s writer was identified only as “Live Well” and linked to an empty account, though I assumed the person had to have been someone close to her. None of the comments after the post were made by people with Dawn’s last name. And the few photos among her own infrequent posts had been only of herself; no family members or loved ones.

I’d only had a Facebook account myself for less than nine months and had never posted anything on it. I’d begun using it soon after my wife left me as a way to search out people I’d lost touch with over the years. I’d just turned fifty-three at the time and in those scattered months that followed, I’d never made a “friend request” or commented on anyone’s post. I simply weaved back through the posts and photos of people I’d found from my past to piece together a glimpse of how their lives had gone, how they’d aged and changed in comparison to myself.  Most seemed to have had more graceful paths than me.

Dawn and I had met in an art history class we had together shortly after she transferred from somewhere in California to the Midwestern college I attended. We were both juniors at the time. She asked if I wanted to get coffee after class one day and our romance began pretty much instantaneously. Among the things that I found extraordinary about her were her kindness, gentleness, quiet humility, and genuine warmth. I don’t remember who expressed love first, but we were both caught in its throes within a couple of weeks. It was a first for each us, and we were both virgins. This was the ‘70’s, an era where many women, Dawn included, were concerned about risks associated with female birth control alternatives, so we agreed that contraception would fall to me.  We stayed lost in our early euphoria together through the fall and early winter until she discovered in January, in spite of my usually careful precautions, that she was pregnant. I didn’t have time to consider options about our circumstances because she told me she’d decided on an abortion right after she’d revealed the pregnancy.  I remember nodding as my lips pursed and then folding her into my arms. I accompanied her to the appointment, paced the sidewalk in front of the clinic, and drove her back to campus afterwards.  She remained silent the whole way. Not long afterwards, we resumed our intimacy with an increased attention to condom use on my part.  In spite of that, she discovered she was pregnant again just before Spring Break. We repeated the abortion process, but this time she cried steadily all the way back to campus and dropped out of school a few days later.  She left me a note in a sealed envelope slid under my dorm room door telling me she was going home and not returning after break.  It also said that she didn’t want me to try to contact her.

So, I didn’t, although I was devastated for a long time afterwards.  I missed her deeply; the ache inside felt bottomless.  And I thought about her often during the ensuing years but never heard anything about or from her again until a plain postcard with her signature arrived a dozen years later in my mailbox at the elementary school where I taught that said simply: “I’ve forgiven you.” The postcard included no return address and the post office stamp from where it had been sent was illegible.  A slow numbness engulfed me. I had no idea how she’d found out where I taught.

There was no internet back in those days, so it wasn’t until I stumbled upon her Facebook page a month or so before she died that I knew anything else about her.  I reread that post regarding her death several times, then sat blinking and swallowing over a hardness in my throat.  It ended with details about the Catholic church where her memorial service was being held that next Saturday in San Francisco.  I scribbled down the church’s name and Googled directions from where I lived in Santa Cruz.  My wife and I had found teaching jobs there early in our careers when we wanted to move from the Midwest to a warmer climate and had never left. So, without realizing it, Dawn and I had been separated by only a hundred miles for most of our adult lives.  Lives filled with events and regrets, joys and heartbreaks, and good and bad decisions that we’d experienced without any further connection with one another.

I didn’t know what I was expecting, but I was surprised to see the church crowded when I arrived for the service.  I found a seat in the middle of an aisle towards the front.  I’d never met her family, had never even seen pictures of them, so I wasn’t sure what to make of the lone pair of somber-looking people in the first row. There was no coffin or large photograph mounted on an easel in front like other memorial services I’d been to, nor had there been any program to pick up or guest book to sign at the vestibule’s entrance.  As the late morning sun streamed dustily through the old church’s stained-glass windows, I sat very still letting my mind drift, as it had pretty much without interruption since discovering the post, to the time Dawn and I had spent together.  Eventually, an organ’s strain lifted from the choir loft and the funeral Mass began. I mumbled congregational responses to the priest’s opening prayers that were still ingrained in me even though I hadn’t been to Mass since I was in my teens. The Epistle and Gospel were read, then the priest began the eulogy. It wasn’t until he described the deceased as a young man of military distinction that I realized I was at the wrong service.  It was impossible to leave; I was surrounded by grievers fixed on the priest’s solemn words, many dabbing at their eyes with tissues.  So, I listened, too, as the priest described the happy innocence of the dead man’s youth, the closeness of his family, his fervent faith, his compassionate spirit, the untimeliness of his death: the sorts of things I imagined, hoped, were being said at Dawn’s service.  As he went on, the older woman on the aisle in the front pew slumped further and further into the embrace of the young man who I supposed was another son sitting next to her, her shoulders shaking with sobs.

I stayed until the end, but left through a side door. A nun in a maroon and white habit approached me carrying a pile of missalettes.  I stopped her and asked, “Is this St. John’s Church?”

She nodded.

“Are there others by the same name in the city?

She nodded again. “Two, actually. One in the Mission District and the other in South San Francisco.”

I thanked her and watched her go inside.  It was just before noon, the sun directly overhead, a perfect fall morning of clean, white light.

I sat in my car without starting it afterwards.  It was too late to make it to Dawn’s service, and I wasn’t sure anyway which of the other churches was the correct one. I stared out the window at the dwindling crowd of mourners in front of the vestibule. The older woman I’d assumed was the mother was the last to leave, her hand linked through the arm of the young man who’d been sitting next to her. They walked slowly to a faded sedan parked at the curb. He helped her into the passenger seat, then pulled them away. I supposed something like that was happening after Dawn’s service, but perhaps for hers there had been a father, other family members, a husband involved. Or maybe, instead, a lover. At the time she and I were together in college, I thought it impossible  we’d ever be apart.  I thought the same thing about my wife until she’d shocked me one afternoon when I came home from school and found her sitting on the edge of our couch with her suitcase at her feet.  She’d told me she’d fallen in love with someone else and was leaving, then shrugged under my arms as I tried to hug her and drove off.  There were differences between the way I’d felt then from finding Dawn’s note under my dorm room door, but not many.

Perhaps twenty more minutes passed before I drove away myself.  Even though it would take longer, I took the coastal route back to Santa Cruz, the gray ocean waves on my right tumbling endlessly as a marine layer gradually draped them from view. My thoughts tumbled over themselves, too.

When I got home, I ignored the manila envelope on the entry table that had arrived a few days before with the documents finalizing my divorce.  Instead, I went for a run on the beach, showered, changed clothes, then poured a glass of wine. I finished it while deciding which leftovers to take out of the freezer to thaw for dinner and poured another. I stood with that one in the study looking out the window into the backyard. The afternoon had already begun its descent towards gloaming. I watched two wrens as they picked at birdseed from the feeder hanging from a cypress tree branch. They may have been a mated pair, but just as easily, they could have arrived separately and randomly. The last southbound train for the day passed several blocks away. I waited for the sound of it to disappear before sitting down at my desk and powering up my laptop.

I quickly found Dawn’s Facebook page and scrolled through the new comments below the others about her death. They were almost all about that day’s memorial service, how lovely it had been, how moving the eulogy , more memories about the special person Dawn had been.  I took another sip of wine, tapped my cursor to make a comment, and typed: “You were the love my life.  I never knew again the kind of love I felt for you during those few short months. We were so young, and I’m so sorry about how it ended. Rest in peace, sweet angel.”  Before I could consider further, I entered the comment, watched it open with my name in blue preceding it on top of the others, and swallowed off the rest of my wine.

I sat back and looked out the window again. The wrens flew off together, leaving the feeder swaying in the small breeze. A streetlamp blinked on at the corner of the sidewalk beyond the hedge.  I blew out a long breath, turned back to the screen, and saw that a new comment had already been entered above mine.  It had been written by someone named Jonathan Barnes and said: “How dare you? I know who you are.”

A jolt shot through me. I stared at the screen with wide eyes and finally tapped on his name. A new Facebook page linked to it appeared with a photo of a man about my age on the banner.  He had a short salt-and-pepper beard, receding hair about the same color and length, sad eyes, and was embracing a golden retriever on his lap.  He had only a dozen or so “Friends” and none were Dawn. His “Intro” was also brief. It indicated that he lived in the same town she had, worked as an adjunct professor at the same small college where she’d been an admissions officer, and showed his relationship status as divorced.

I minimized his page and Dawn’s appeared again on the screen.  He’d added a new comment above his last. It said: “You ruined my life, our marriage. Try as I might, she never recovered after you. Never.”

With my left hand, I slammed down the lid of the laptop.  I brought that fist to my mouth and bit down at it. I lifted the wine glass with my other, found it empty, and threw it in the trashcan under the desk.  A dog barked nearby; another answered it.  Sprinklers hissed on in a neighbor’s yard. 

Darkness had almost completely fallen before I got up, went into the kitchen, and brought the wine bottle into my bedroom closet.  I had never removed any of my ex-wife’s clothes from her side of it, and if I closed the door, they still retained a hint of her scent.  I shut the door, took a long swallow of wine, and inhaled in the black stillness.