Dear Sully

by Jill Cox

  She wasn’t wrong, Sully. I honestly had never wondered about Sarah’s life before. I had no reason to wonder. Sarah was Sarah.

  “I grew up in Ohio,” she began, taking another bite of her cookie. “I was an average kid who made average grades, but my real love was painting. So I went to an average college, expecting an average life – husband, kids, a white picket fence. And then I met Cooper.”

  Cooper? I thought. Who the heck is COOPER? And does the church know? Does James?!?

  My face must have betrayed my inner monologue because Sarah smiled. “You heard me correctly, Mister Grumpy Face. Cooper Phillips was a redheaded spitfire of a man who loved China with his whole heart. His grandparents had lived here as missionaries in the fifties, and he’d grown up traveling with them to the land that held their hearts.”

  I gaped. “Are you saying you fell in love with a dude who isn’t Jesus? Does Jesus know?”

  “He does,” she smiled knowingly. “At least I hope so. When Coop and I got married, we took vows in His name.”

  My. Mind. Was. Blown. “You were married?”

  “Yes, a week after college graduation,” she smiled wistfully. “And we moved to China a few months later so Coop could improve his Mandarin. He came here on a student visa, and I somehow managed to get a job as an administrative assistant for an American study abroad consortium here in Shanghai. That’s how we met James.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa… James knew your husband?” Suddenly, I realized the complexity of their relationship went beyond a do-gooder having the secret feels for a nun. “Were the two of them friends?”

  “We all were. I met James first; he popped by the office one day to meet with my boss, the dean. A few weeks later, the faculty decided we should include a service component to the study abroad program. Dean Waterhouse put me in charge of logistics, so James and I started working together immediately. That was… gosh, ten years ago now.”

  I did the math in my head. Sarah was at least thirty-two. Ever since I’d known her, I’d assumed she was closer to my age, but actually, she was even older than James. Mind blown again.

  “Once Coop heard about the Restoration Initiative, he wanted to help too,” she continued. “Within a few weeks, we were helping James every weekend. Coop was really good with the residents, you know? He liked learning about their provinces and figuring out all the nuances of the different dialects. It was… well, it was a really sweet time in all our lives.”

  Without warning, Sarah’s eyes filled with tears, and Sully, I had literally no idea what to do. You can’t hug a nun, bro. You just can’t. I didn’t even know if I should touch her.

  So I pulled my hoodie off and handed it to her, like some sort of overgrown handkerchief.

  Which might have been weird enough on its own, but underneath, I was wearing a Sigma Phi Beta Crawfish Boil t-shirt that read PINCH MY TAIL in three-inch letters.

  Not my finest moment. But it made her laugh, which gave me the courage to ask the question I knew she wanted to answer. “Sarah? What happened to Coop?”

  “He was stabbed,” she answered with only a tiny wobble in her voice. “In the middle of the day on a random Wednesday. He and James were at the train station inviting people to the soup kitchen and some homeless guy just pulled out a knife and stabbed Cooper. To this day, no one knows why, because the man stabbed himself immediately afterward.”

  “I’m… Sarah, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I’ve never heard this story. James never –”

  “Do not be sorry,” she commanded, her lips trembling. “You haven’t heard it because James doesn’t talk about it. He still carries enormous guilt for what happened, as if he could have prevented it. One time he even told me he wished he’d been the victim. Survivor’s guilt is a real thing, you know. Well, I guess you do know, don’t you?”

  For several minutes, we sat outside, the breeze blowing past us. I never know what to say in those moments. I always imagine what I might like to hear if I were the person in pain, but then I remember I am a person in pain, one who gets really pissed when people feed him platitudes. So I just sat there, mute. But Sarah hadn’t finished her story. She took in a deep breath and carried on.

  “I left Shanghai immediately,” she said. “I didn’t pack anything except my passport, my clothes, and Coop’s ashes to give to his parents. I have no idea who cleaned out our apartment or who ended up with our belongings. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be away from here, no matter the consequences.”

  “So that’s when you joined the order? When you got back to Ohio?”

  “I didn’t stay in Ohio. I moved to New York City. My creative brain wanted to paint. But I couldn’t do that, because my logical brain was too busy working overtime ignoring my grief. So instead, I worked in a flower shop by day and got blackout drunk by night. I don’t remember most of the first eighteen months after Coop died. And what I can remember, I don’t want to remember. There are a million ways to make a bad decision, Pete, and I’ve made them all.”

  My stomach flipped. “Listen, Sarah, you don’t have to tell me the rest. It doesn’t matter, right? You’re here now. You’re doing your life’s work –”

  She chuckled. “What does that even mean, ‘life’s work’? All I really did was join a convent to reboot my life. And when they sent me back here, I just figured this assignment was my penance for all the dumb things I did in New York. Living and breathing in Shanghai – the place where I lost everything that matters – well, that’s its own special kind of hell, isn’t it?”

  My mind flashed to my parents’ accident, then to Ian. “But… how do you do it, Sarah? How do you face your grief every day?”

  “I don’t know, really. But sometimes, it feels like God’s forging together the broken pieces of my life for some new purpose. Whenever something I do or say alters the path for somebody else, it feels like a tiny spark igniting a flame. And on those days, I feel peace.” She smiled a little. “You must think I’m crazy.”

  “Uh, no. No, I really don’t,” I answered, too freaked out to admit a tiny spark had just ignited inside me too. “So I guess this means you don’t regret living in your own personal hell?”

  “I regret a lot of things, Pete,” she said, her expression suddenly tense. “But how can I regret coming back here when God keeps sending beautiful people into my life? Like you, for example. The sisters in my convent. And James…”

  If Sarah hadn’t just thrown my whole life into question with her special kind of hell tangent, I might have called her out for that little James-induced starry-eyed smile on her face. But I wasn’t thinking about James or Sarah right then, Sully. I was thinking about you. For the first time in a very long time, I began to imagine a future rather than a long to-do list to complete before I died.

  And in that future, I saw you.

  Maybe I wouldn’t have verbalized it that day in September, but the spark, Sully. A spark ignited that day of the thirty-six hundred tulips, and it’s never flickered since.

  That’s the day that set me back on track toward you.

  And, because I know my favorite matchmaker will ask what happened next, here’s the scoop.

  Sometime last spring, while I was teaching in Portland and you were living in Galway, Sarah quietly stepped away from her vows and became a normal civilian once again.

  Dean Waterhouse hired her back to the study abroad program.

  James finally confessed his secret love. Then she confessed hers.

  And next September 21st, in Palo Alto, California, those two living examples of mercy and grace will marry one another in front of their family and friends.

  I’ll be the best man. Wanna be my date?

  Aw, come on, Sully. You wouldn’t make me boogie by myself on the twenty-first niiiiiight of Septembahhhh, would you?

  (Are you smiling? Good. Hold onto those happy feels, please. These next few stories won’t be fun for you to read.)

  Substitution

  For fourteen months after your
brother died, I flouted my unfinished dreams – grad school, teaching, growing old with you. But that all changed after the day of the tulips. Suddenly, I was on a mission to salvage my lost dreams and find you again in the process.

  So while my right brain untangled the Sully problem, my left brain tackled grad school applications.

  Addison College.

  Columbia.

  Stanford.

  University of Wisconsin at Madison.

  Yale.

  Boom. Operation Reboot commencing. Stage One complete.

  One morning in early October last year, probably around the same time you were finishing your first draft of Night and Day, I was sitting at James’ computer when Brooks’ avatar popped up on his video chat. When her brain finally registered it was me on the screen, she actually blushed.

  “Oh, um… hi. I didn’t expect… uh, where’s James?”

  “I’m sorry. James can’t come to the phone right now. Can I take a message, ma’am?”

  Brooks smiled. “You know what, rewind. Hello, bearded grizzly man who is not James Logan. Is Pete Russell available?”

  “He might be. What’s up?”

  “I’m not sure, really.” She held up a stack of papers with Vick’s signature on them. “Do grad school rec letters count as billable hours or has Vick gone soft in his old age?”

  “Um… the second? Sorry to ruin your inheritance.”

  A smile crept into Brooks’ face that I hadn’t seen in a really long time. “Look at you, smarty pants. What prompted this decision?”

  “Dunno,” I shrugged. “Guess I missed having ink stains all the way up to my wrist.”

  “Lefty weirdo,” Brooks smirked. “Okay, well, since you’ve just gifted me with some good news, I guess it’s my turn: Amy Harrington’s pregnant.”

  Amy Harrington was my mom’s co-teacher the last couple of years before the accident. She was young, fun, and Liz Russell’s favorite mentee. And when my mom died, she took over the French department at St. Francis Prep at the ripe old age of twenty-six.

  “Wow,” I grinned. “That’s a trip! When’s she due?”

  “Christmas, give or take a few weeks.”

  “Well, that’s exciting. So, what made you think to call me? Because I don’t want to burst your bubble, Brooksie, but I know nothing about babies. I’ve never even changed a diaper.”

  “Like I needed you to clarify that for me,” she scoffed. “No, what Amy needs is a qualified long-term sub. Preferably one with a native-level accent and geek-level knowledge of useless grammar rules. Know where I can find one of those?”

  I don’t need to tell you why Brooks’ words sent liquid sunshine coursing through my veins that day. I loved Shanghai. I will always love the Restoration Initiative. But at that particular moment when I was already repositioning my inner compass, the chance to put my real expertise to use was too good to be true.

  So I said yes to substitute teaching. And six weeks later, I headed home.

  Sullivan’s

  You know that expression “you can never go home again?” Let’s talk about that for a minute. See, vagabond types like me tend to forget that life back home carries on. While you’re off living in your alternate universe, you mistakenly assume the people back home are stuck on pause. That when you return home, everything will be just the way you left it, like a time capsule waiting to be opened.

  But nothing – not the songs on the radio, or the slang, or even the drink menu at Starbucks – looks familiar when you return. The people from your past have been living just fine without you. They share thousands of memories collectively, and none of them look like yours.

  Amy Harrington was set to be induced on the fifth of December, but in her e-mail, she’d asked me to come shadow her at St. Francis Prep for a full week beforehand. So I flew to San Francisco the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

  The plan? To win you back before I drove to Portland, no matter what, no matter what.

  Scott and Becky Logan took me to trade in my Range Rover for something with good gas mileage that wouldn’t tag me as a trust fund kid. An hour after Thanksgiving lunch at the Logans’ house, I drove north toward Lincoln City in my certified pre-owned hybrid sedan.

  The original plan was to arrive at your house at twilight with my heart in my hands, ready to offer it back to you for safekeeping. I’d dreamed about it for weeks: the perfect Hallmark holiday reunion, replete with sweeping anthems in the background and magical twinkle lights and mistletoe above your door.

  Do not judge me, sister. You wrote a Hallmark-worthy novel about us. I’ve read it and I’ve seen the cover. (Cough cough, twinkle lights, cough cough, Eiffel Tower, cough cough, BRIDGE.)

  However, by seven that evening, jet lag reared its ugly head. And since driving tired is the same as driving drunk, I picked some random motel off the interstate near Medford and dozed for ten hours straight.

  And so it came to pass that on Black Friday last year, I drove into Lincoln City and found myself in midday gridlock traffic by the outlet mall on Highway 101. Which is why I didn’t arrive to your house until two p.m. And when I knocked on the door… well, it wasn’t you who answered.

  Hello, tween girl. Who are you, and what have you done with my Sully?

  Okay, I didn’t say that. I said, “Oh! Hello. May I speak to Meredith, please?”

  Either that kid had no idea who I was talking about, or she was a pre-teen passive-aggressive freak. And I guess her mom and dad were down at the outlet mall saving fifty percent on big-screen TVs, because they weren’t home either, according to the tiny gatekeeper.

  Dear American Tweens: never tell a six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound man that you’re home alone. Even if he is dressed up.

  What is wrong with kids today, Sully? My word.

  I must have driven up and down Neptune Lane fifty times trying to convince myself that I’d picked the wrong white house with black gables, but nope. That was the only one. So, I drove over to your restaurant. And hey, good news: I barely registered any PTSD aftershocks when I pulled into the parking lot because guess what? Sullivan’s Restaurant looked like an arcade.

  Do you know about this clownery? Instead of your parents’ subtle signage written in a tastefully Gaelic font, there is an enormous shamrock on a sign twenty feet in the air. But wait, it gets better – the apostrophe in Sullivan’s is now a leprechaun.

  Inside the restaurant, the dark mahogany booths have been altered to look like a fun house ride. Someone has decoupaged a bazillion touristy stickers onto the wood, and the cushions are now upholstered green, white, and orange, like the Irish flag.

  Are we even allowed to sit on flags? I thought that was against the law.

  When I asked the gum-smacking hostess if I could speak to the manager, she scurried away, the green shamrocks on her headband bopping up and down with each step. A minute later, some guy named Tony appeared at the front desk.

  “Can I help you?”

  It took my eyes a few seconds to focus on his face, what with all the flair decorating his suspenders. But when they did focus, I fixed that dude with a look. “You’re not Jamie Sullivan.”

  “Uh, no.” His dark eyes blinked back at me. “Sorry, do you know Jamie?”

  “Yes. Sort of. I mean, I went to college with his daughter.”

  “Oh!” Tony’s rotund face lit up. “Follow me to my office. It’s quieter back there.”

  So I did. And after a dozen questions or so, I had all the answers I never wanted. Because SPOILER ALERT: you and your parents had moved to Ireland MONTHS before that day. What?!

  Tony couldn’t remember what town your B&B was in or what it was called. All he really knew was that Jamie, Molly, and their daughter had blown this Popsicle stand for their Motherland.

  My brain didn’t register much after that, so I excused myself as politely as I could, and when I got to my car, I searched the Lincoln County Appraisal District website on my phone for Andrew Sutton, hoping Drew was named after his granddad like
I was. Ten minutes later, I was standing in front of Sutton’s grandmother, Maureen. “Drew is spending Thanksgiving with his girlfriend’s family up in Seattle,” she answered politely. “But I’ll be sure to tell him you dropped by.”

  I was so shell-shocked, I didn’t even think to ask her about you.

  Somehow my car made it the mile or so west to Road’s End Beach, where I grabbed a couple of sweatshirts from my suitcase and stumbled down to the sand. Laying one down on the ground and tugging the other over my head, I sat my butt on the first sweatshirt and watched the winter sun begin to set over the Pacific.

  She’s gone, I kept telling myself. She’s actually gone.

  For the briefest moment, I considered ditching my substitute job for the next direct flight from the West Coast to Ireland. How hard could it be to track you down? I assumed you’d moved back to Doolin, and in a town that small, everyone knew everyone else’s business. I could find your new place in no time at all.

  But then I put myself in your shoes for a minute. Instead of moping around after I left, you’d chosen a new path, and you know what? In that moment, I had mad respect for you, Sully. My girl Meredith doesn’t waste time on losers. Are you kidding? She makes her own destiny.

  The thought of you marching into the future made me smile all of a sudden. The Sully Swagger – back in full effect. Cue the pyrotechnics, Beyoncé. There’s a new queen in town.

  When the sun dipped below the horizon, I jumped back in my car to drive east toward Portland. By the time I’d pulled into the driveway at Darby Manor, I’d decided to let you go.

  At least, that’s what I told myself. Over and over and over again.

  Heritage

  I’m not sure I can describe the way it felt to stand in my mom’s old classroom, using her quirky earworm songs to help a bunch of adorkable freshmen learn their irregular verbs. It felt… full circle-ish. Like she was right there with me, beaming with pride, ready to take on this challenge with me from her place inside my heart.