I smiled, too. He’d said something similar to me one night when we’d been between my sheets sharing the darkest parts of ourselves. It was the same night that I’d confessed I’d known I was unhappy with Keith years before I left him, and I didn’t know if that made me a fighter or a coward.
“Anderson was in a bad funk,” Momma Von continued. “He’d been gambling his money away at the casinos outside of Seattle and throwing the rest of it at pills. He was messed up, constantly in a haze, and one night he’d run his truck off the road and hit a tree.”
I gasped.
“It was here in the neighborhood and he wasn’t going very fast so he was fine,” she added quickly when she noticed my reaction. “But that might have been the worst part of it, actually. He didn’t get hurt and he knew he could fix up his truck, so he was making light of the situation, and Dani lost it on him.”
It was such a foreign concept, to try to imagine a younger Anderson who was so careless. The only Anderson I’d known was a quiet, smart, strong man with purpose and intent behind everything he did.
“And usually, when Dani would get fed up with Anderson’s antics and give him a stern talking to, he would take it in stride. Sometimes he learned from her, sometimes he joked around and made her angrier before she’d eventually give in and laugh with him. But something about this time was different. And instead of hearing her, he spoke over her, and called her out on her own shortcomings in his eyes.”
“Shortcomings?” I asked. “I’ve only ever heard him speak highly of her. I didn’t think he saw a bad bone in her body.”
“He didn’t, not really. But he was angry and defensive, and so he told her that maybe it was her who was living wrong. He called her out on never having any adventures, on living safely and by the book. It was the first time they’d really had an argument, and it ended in him sleeping on my couch that night and her going to bed with a head full of thoughts about her life.”
I could feel it coming, the part of the story she wasn’t supposed to tell me that Anderson likely never wanted me to know. I sat up straighter, hands wrapping tightly around my mug that had grown cold already.
“The next day, she called Tucker and said she wanted to float down the river. She’d never done it before because it just wasn’t her thing. She didn’t like to hike or ride bikes or run the Alder loop or any of that. She was a reader, a learner, and it was the first day she woke up and questioned if that was a good thing.”
Momma Von’s eyes welled up a little at that, and she swallowed hard before continuing.
“Tucker said he’d go with her, but it was a bad day to be on the river and he knew it. The waters were rough, the rocks more exposed because of how shallow the river was that summer. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was just her or the two of them or our entire crew.”
“Oh, God,” I whispered, covering my mouth with my hands.
“They both flipped out of their tubes. Tucker made it to shore but Dani hit her head on one of the rocks.” Momma Von’s voice cracked. “Anderson was the first person Tucker saw, and he’d run to the river, finding her lifeless and wrapped around a rock near the bank.” She wiped at her nose. “He tried to resuscitate her when he pulled her out of the river, but he was too late.”
And just when I thought my heart couldn’t break any more, her words crushed it into pieces.
Momma Von took a deep breath, shaking her head. “Nothing was the same after that. Tucker blamed Anderson, Anderson blamed Tucker, then they both blamed themselves. And where Tucker eventually let go and learned to live again, Anderson never did. Well,” she added, soft gray eyes finding mine now. “Until you, that is.”
My hand still covered my mouth and all I could do was shake my head, eyes blurring along with Momma Von’s. “And when he watched me fall into the river earlier today, he saw her, didn’t he?”
Momma Von nodded. “He hadn’t been able to save Dani, but he was there to save you. And when he finally got you on the shore, he couldn’t control his emotions. He lost it because he was scared of losing you, Wren.”
I bent at the waist, abandoning my mug on the coffee table so I could wrap my arms around my middle. I wanted to run to him, to hold him, to rock him and tell him I’m okay and he’s okay and everything would be okay. The urge was almost strong enough to lift me from my seat, but then reality crashed in again.
The truth was that though his fear was sparked from Dani, it still came back to losing me. And that fact wasn’t changing, even if it wasn’t the river that was taking me.
“Do you understand now why he acted the way he did?”
I nodded, arms still wrapped around myself and eyes on my sock-covered feet. “I do.”
“But?”
My eyes squeezed tight, and two tears slipped free. I didn’t even know how it was possible to still have tears left to shed.
“But it doesn’t change anything I said to him. I’m leaving, Momma Von,” I said, peeking up at her. “We’ve known from the start that this was only temporary. This is it. It all ends here.”
“But why?” she challenged. “Is it impossible to be long distance? To overcome the hour between here and the city?”
“It’s not just the distance. He’s never had a relationship. Not one.”
“And you’re scared to be the first?”
That question knocked the breath from my chest. “No. Yes.” I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’m so confused, I’m lost, and I came out here to find myself but all I did was find myself in another man’s arms.”
“So, is this about Anderson or about you?”
“Both,” I answered quickly. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. He’s not ready for me, I’m not ready for him. I mean, he’s still healing from Dani and I haven’t even been divorced for a full year. Not even a full seven months yet! It’s just crazy. We were a summer fling, a distraction, a way to pass the time.”
Momma Von clucked her tongue, setting her mug next to mine on the table and turning to face me completely. “I don’t believe that, and I know you don’t either. So why don’t you just tell me why you’re really afraid of loving him.”
My heart stopped, kicking back to life again with a force that made me whimper. Love?
Did I love him?
And that’s when I realized that I’d never asked myself that because I knew in my gut the one solid truth that trumped any answer I would have had.
It didn’t matter if I loved him, because I wasn’t allowed to.
“I can’t love him,” I croaked, throat dry and hoarse. “I haven’t even been single. Sarah even said at the pig roast how quickly I’d moved from one man to the next. The timing is all wrong. I can’t love him when I’m still trying to love myself.”
“There you go again,” she said. “Living your life like you think you should because of what other people think or say. Maybe it is too soon, maybe Anderson is a mistake and you’ll both crash and burn at the end of it all, whether that end be tomorrow or next week or ten years from now. But wouldn’t you rather live your mistakes this time instead of playing it the way you’re ‘supposed’ to?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It can be,” she argued, pulling the blanket from her lap and standing. She looked down on me with both pity and challenge in her eyes. “If you don’t love Anderson, if you feel like you can walk away from him without regretting it, with steady hands and a head held high, then do it. Take everything you learned from him and all of us out here this summer and go back to your old life. Go find yourself.”
She paused, chewing her lip, her old eyes tired as they implored me to listen.
“But if the thought of losing him forever makes you lose your breath, if living without him seems impossible now, then don’t let him go. Don’t walk away so easily. There are no rules when it comes to life and love, and even if there were they would only exist to be broken. There’s no methodology, no equation, no right or wrong or guided path of light. Stop asking yourself what
other people will think or what you should do and listen to your heart. You ignored it for years with Keith,” she reminded me. “Don’t take away its voice now that you’ve finally stopped to hear it.”
I blinked up at her, unable to grasp it all, to make sense of any of it. She was right, but so was I, or were neither of us? Why did everything feel laced with bad decisions?
I wanted to ask her, beg her to tell me what to do, but she’d said what she’d come to say. With my mind still racing, she simply reached for my hand, squeezing it softly with a knowing smile before turning and leaving me alone to sort through the mess.
And what a mess it was.
Hold on.
Those were the words I’d seemed to live by my entire life.
I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment, but part of me thought it must have started with my mom. Not that I held onto her, but that her leaving taught me to hold on to those closest to me. That had always been Dani and Aunt Rose. And when Dani passed, I still heard those words.
Hold on.
And so I did.
I held onto the memories of her, of us, of our family. I held onto the hope for what she could have been. And more than anything I held onto the guilt I felt about how she died.
It was my fault. That was a fact that would never change.
But my outlook on it had to.
It was a dreary day, low clouds setting the mood as I climbed the cemetery stairs. My long-sleeve shirt was damp, clinging to every inch of my skin, and the hat I wore rode low, nearly covering my eyes. Everything was heavy—my boots, the mist I walked through, my heart. I wasn’t ready, but it didn’t matter.
Today would be the day I let go.
Her resting place was easy to spot. Even if I hadn’t been here every single year on the anniversary of her death, I wouldn’t have missed it. Her headstone was bright white, her name in large, all-capitalized letters. There was one, single yellow rose engraved on the front—the rose of friendship. The gray and black headstones around hers seemed to only point to her more, as if they all knew who I was here to see, too.
It was such an eerie scene, the hill of the cemetery, graves only half covered by the ground while the other half of them protruded, shielded by marble or granite or stone or cement. The mountains were the backdrop for these lives taken, lives no longer lived, and wasn’t that the kicker? To die and be surrounded by life—by plants, animals, humans, all living like they’ll never know what it feels like to die.
I’d been the opposite.
I’d only existed, breathed—and just barely. I’d stopped living the day Dani did, and it seemed I was only waiting to be taken down with her. Only when I’d met Wren had I realized that was a disservice to my cousin. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be miserable, to live every day the same, to wake and work and sleep until every year of my life had withered away.
She would have wanted me to live.
Wren had shown me how.
And maybe that was all that mattered.
The night before had been long, sleepless, filled with tossing and turning and thoughts as dark as the night. I’d started off angry—at Wren, at myself—but somewhere in the early hours of the morning I transitioned into sadness, and then into acceptance as the sun rose over the mountains. I wanted to be with Wren, I wanted to build a new life with her, but maybe that wasn’t her purpose at all.
Maybe the reason she came into my life was simply to bring me back from the dead.
Every morning felt like a new possibility instead of a cross I had to bear, and I knew I had her to thank for that. She’d shown me how to remember Dani’s life and still live my own, and I knew I’d never be the same man I was before I knew she existed.
So, as I knelt beside Dani’s grave and placed twelve yellow roses down before her, I took the deepest breath I could imagine, and I did the impossible.
I let her go.
“Hey, loser,” I said to the stone that was meant to represent her. It was all I said for a while, and the longer I stared at the stone, the more I felt her there with me. It was almost as if she’d placed a hand over mine, as if she was leaning in to listen, as if she already knew what I was there to say.
I cleared my throat, though it was tight and raw already. I’d had so much I wanted to say when I got here and yet I knew it didn’t matter if I actually spoke at all. Dani could feel me, just like I could feel her.
So instead of speaking, I just sat with her. There was no wind, not through the fog, and so it was almost like sitting in silence with her. My heart beat was loud but steady, my breaths calm though I wasn’t. I ran a hand over the edge of her stone, traced the letters of her name, and then I leaned my forehead against the granite.
And I cried.
My shoulders shook, chest aching, tears rushing from my eyes and running along the bridge of my nose until they fell into the grass at my knees. Just when I thought I was out of breath, stomach clenching and lungs burning as my ribcage crushed in on them, my body would think for me, inhaling deep and starting the process all over again.
It hurt.
It healed.
Time passed like a lucid dream, seconds and hours one in the same. By the time I’d released every emotion I’d harbored for seven years, my eyes were just slits I peered through, swollen and red and raw like every other part of me felt. I ran the back of my wrist under my nose with a sniff, balancing on shaky knees until I found the strength to stand.
“I love you,” I finally spoke, voice foreign. “And I will always remember you, but now I promise to live for you, too.”
It was short, simple, but it was everything I felt. It was my heart and soul in just a few words. And as I turned to leave, I dropped the weight there in the cemetery, and it was Dani’s voice I heard in my head as I did.
Let go.
My next breath was cleaner, easier. It was the first in a new life. I’d let go of the guilt, of the pain, and now I would move forward. But the hardest was still yet to come.
Dani was first, but Wren was next. And though I knew I had to let her go, every cell and molecule in my body held tight to her, as if she were the lifeline, as if she were the blood and the air.
I knew I had to let her go.
I just didn’t know if I actually could.
RUMINATE
ROO-muh-nayt
Verb
To engage in contemplation : meditate
One week.
It was all I had left before I went back to my old life.
Except, my old life wasn’t the same as I had left it, either. The truth was I didn’t really have anything to go “back” to.
Yes, I would be going back to work, back to my old circle of friends, back to my city—but the life I would make there would be different than the one I’d left behind just three months before. And now I had only seven days left to get what I needed from my little escape, to find whatever it was that I was searching for.
Maybe it was that notion that made me wake uneasy, my stomach a mess as I made a pot of coffee and held a clammy hand to my forehead. I didn’t even want cinnamon rolls, which clearly meant something was wrong. Still, I tried to push through it, filling the largest mug and grabbing my sketch book before moseying out to the front porch.
I had always been a firm believer that we, as humans, have gut instincts for a reason. Maybe it’s that we’re in tune with the universe, or maybe it’s something chemical within us—but we know when something is wrong, or when it’s about to be wrong. It’s the reason we leave five minutes later for work one day, or call a friend we haven’t in a while, or pick up a book we’d walked by so many times before. It’s a feeling, deep within us—something we can’t ignore.
I thought the uneasiness I’d awakened to was from everything I still had yet to figure out in Seattle, or from Anderson, or from my still-lackluster sketches. But when a car I knew too well pulled into my drive, I realized my body had been warning me of something else entirely.
Every hair on my body sto
od on edge, electricity coursing through me, adrenaline spiked just at the proximity of him. He was still in his car, and there was plenty of space between us, but I knew that wouldn’t last long. And seeing his black Mercedes parked in my sanctuary was like spotting a lion in a coral reef. He didn’t belong here. He was a threat and yet he’d never survive long enough to be one.
He needed to leave.
Keith cut the engine, the barely-there purr surrendering to silence as he pushed his door open and climbed out. His dark eyes locked on mine and he stood with one hand on the roof and the other on the door still propped open, waiting, watching me. I swallowed, closing my sketch book and calmly laying it beside me on the bench, and then I stood.
He sighed, taking in the full sight of me, his eyes softening as he finally shut the door and crossed the space between us. I counted every step, the sound of the gravel crunching beneath his cherry-brown Sutor Mantellassi shoes a direct line to my heartbeat.
As his steps grew faster, so did my pulse, and then he was on my porch, just three feet away. The man I wasn’t supposed to love, but always would. The man who made me feel less than. The man I’d left behind. And now he was here, in the one place in my life that hadn’t been touched by him.
He was robbery in a suit.
“Wren,” he greeted, and I fought against the urge to shudder at the sound of my name on his lips. It called to me and put me on alert all at once.
I kept my eyes trained on his, and not much had changed, yet everything had. His hair was still dark and trim, clean cut and styled to perfection. He didn’t have to smile for me to know he still had the same white teeth, perfectly aligned except for the small overbite that I used to love so much. He was dressed in a beige suit, as if he’d come from the office, except his office was a dental practice, so it didn’t make sense. No, he hadn’t come from work, he’d come dressed up for me.
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