No Words
A MacGyver short story

This was the last place on earth where MacGyver wanted to be.

He walked slowly down the grassy path between rows of markers, right and left. He didn't feel the bite of the December chill; though he wore a black wool overcoat, he did not draw the collar closed. He did not take note of the crystals of ice that drove into his eyes; they were already stinging. He walked past ancient marble statuary and the neat, incised granite squares in the grass. Names, dates, words of loss... none of them touched him. He read them but he could not register them. They were not the names he was looking for. They were not his name.

Ahead, a tall, thin figure of a man stood in the path. He did not look up as MacGyver came to stand at his side, to read the words on the stone that stood before them, marking two places; one heaped with freshly turned soil, the other long-covered with grass, neatly groomed. Flowers were heaped around and over both makers, but most of the words could be seen. The ones that could not be seen could be remembered.

They stood together in silence for a long time, MacGyver and the tall, thin man. The icy rain turned to snow and gathered on the wool of MacGyver's coat, beads of jewel and crystal sequin. The flakes powdered his hair and stuck to his face, melting and dropping unnoticed from the line of his jaw. They stuck to his lashes, making his dark eyes blink and shudder. He drew in a breath as deeply as his aching chest would allow, and then he exhaled silently.

The man beside him stirred slightly. He didn't look at MacGyver; rather he raised his head and regarded the denuded treetops that reached up half-heartedly toward the dusting sky. He coughed slightly; a husky, crackle in the quiet of the cemetery. He shifted his feet and hunched his shoulders under his dark-colored gabardine trench coat. He seemed that he might say something, for a moment—but that moment passed and he continued to merely stand, in silence.

MacGyver had no words. There were no words in him anywhere, the only words were the words on the stone in front of his weary eyes. Even the man next to him—a man he had not seen for so many years that he might have been dead too for all Mac had known—even for him he had no words. Somewhere deep inside, a small boy wept because he had lost someone, suddenly. Not to death, but to the unknown. One day the child that MacGyver once had been had woke up and his grandfather had been gone.

The letters that arrived, brief and coldly worded, had done nothing to ease that feeling of loss—of abandonment. The money that accompanied these notes was carefully saved and grudgingly spent. His mother never wept or spoke about her father's departure, except to answer young MacGyver's tears with her own unstinting love.

There would be no more words from her now—only the ones now carved in the stone. Forever the same, forever cold, but they were words that Mac could read and remember. Ellen MacGyver. Beside her, his father James MacGyver rested in his place, long ago become a smooth, undisturbed swath of grass.

MacGyver found himself kneeling on the ground without remembering how he'd come there. He reached out his hand to touch the loose soil of his mother's grave. He closed his fist and let the dirt sift between his fingers. Opening his hand, he watched the falling snowflakes touch his palm and melt instantly. His fingertips, even smudged with dirt, were white and bloodless. He stared at them.

Hands gripped his shoulders; he stood and allowed himself to be guided back to the car. He sat numbly in the passenger seat as the man started the engine and turned the heaters on full-blast. He said nothing when asked, in a voice gruff from disuse or grief, where he was staying. When no answer came, he merely drove the car.

When they found a hotel, the man still didn't say anything to MacGyver. He paid for a room and waited long enough for Mac to settle on the bed before he turned and closed the door. Mac sat there for the entire night, wrapped in friendly darkness, alone with his grief.

In the morning he woke and roused himself. He shed his mourning garments. He showered and dressed.

As he left the hotel, the attendant hailed him.

"Sir, the man left this for you. He said to make sure that you got it."

MacGyver looked at the card. There was only an address, written in neat, stilted letters, and a single name.

Harry.

He stared at it. It was not a name that he'd been looking for, but he realized that it was a name that he had very much wanted to see.

Mac slipped the card carefully into his wallet, then he turned up his collar and went out into the snowstorm.

fin