by Jessi Kirby
I follow Colton as he weaves among the people and into the shade of the produce stand. He brushes his fingers absently over the rainbow of fruits as he goes. “Best place ever to pick a picnic,” he says over his shoulder, tossing me a peach I barely catch.
“What do you like?” Colton says, stopping in front of a display holding multitiered stacks of perfect produce. I scan it and spot a basket of raspberries so red they don’t look real. Colton swoops them up. “What else? Sandwiches? Chips? Everything?”
“Yes.” I laugh. “Everything, why not?”
He’s so happy about it all, it’s contagious.
We load up a basket full of picnic supplies—a couple of sandwiches, chips, old-fashioned sodas in glass bottles, more fruit—and then top it off with the honey sticks in the canisters next to the register. Two of every flavor.
Outside, three friendly minigoats trail behind us with hungry eyes and silly little grunts as we walk. Being next to Colton like this, in the sunshine and the coastal air, I feel the lightness of the day. Easy. Like we’ve left our real worlds far away. We find a bench in the shade and sit, side by side, sharing the raspberries straight out of the basket and tossing a few to the goats who now sit in front of us begging. He tells me some story of how he was traumatized by these same goats as a kid, and I laugh and lean into him, and for a second I forget myself and let a hand fall on his leg like the familiar gesture that it is.
He stops midsentence and glances down just as I take it away. There’s a long moment of quiet. I try and think of something to say. Colton checks his watch. Clears his throat.
“So I have someplace I want to show you, but we need to go soon so I can get back in time for my sister not to freak out,” he says, standing up. “You might want to make a restroom stop before we go—there isn’t really one where we’re headed.”
“Okay.” I stand quickly, thankful for an excuse to take a moment to get myself together. He points at a sign with the silhouette of a farm girl on it, and I start that way. “Be right back.”
“I’ll be here,” he says, opening a bottle of water.
I cross the parking lot to the restroom and glance back, just for a second, but it’s long enough to see him open his door, pull out the pill counter, shake a few pills out, and wash them down with a swallow of water.
I feel for him in that moment—feel for him that he has to take whatever medication it is, and feel for him that it’s something he thinks he needs to hide—that any of it is something he feels he needs to hide. But I’m hiding things too. It hits me then, why it’s so easy to be around him, and why maybe it’s the same for him with me: we don’t have to acknowledge those things we want to keep hidden. Those things that define us to those who know us. We can be remade, without any loss or sickness. New to each other, and to ourselves.
When I get back from the bathroom, Colton is just getting off the phone. He smiles. “Ready?” As soon as I say yes, we’re in the bus again. He pulls out of the fruit barn and turns onto the road, but we don’t head back to the highway. Instead we follow the road as it winds between the oak and elm trees that tower and bend until they meet above us, forming a green canopy. We drive along the curve of the hills, and when I can smell the ocean on the air, we make a sharp turn up a steep, winding road, climbing at an almost impossible angle.
“Where are we going?” I ask again.
“You’ll see,” Colton says. “We’re almost there.”
When we finally reach the crest of the hill, I can see we’re on a point, far above the ocean that surrounds us on three sides, deep blue and sparkling like the sun spilled out and broke into tiny pieces over its surface. We park in a little dirt patch on the side of the road, and Colton glances at my feet in their flip-flops. “You okay to do a little hike in those? It’s not far.”
“Sure.”
“Good.” He smiles. “Because I think you’ll like this place.
I look around, and all of a sudden I know where we are. “Is this Pirate’s Cove? That nude beach?” I’d heard of it before, heard that it was full of nothing but old, overweight, naked men who sometimes played volleyball and always laid out and tanned, well, everything. “Are we—we’re not going there, are we?”
Colton laughs so hard he spits out the sip of water he just took. When he finally gets ahold of himself, he smiles at me. “No, we’re not going for a picnic at Pirate’s Cove—unless of course you really want to. Where we’re going has a way better view than that. Follow me.”
He grabs the bag with all our picnic supplies in it and puts the loops over his shoulder, then heads for a little dirt trail I hadn’t noticed when we parked. I’m still standing in the same spot when Colton turns around. “You coming?”
I follow him down the narrow trail that twists through shrubs so high it feels like we’re in a tunnel, and the only thing I can see is him in front of me. We don’t talk, and I can’t help but wonder what it is we’re going to see, but I don’t ask. I like the idea of not knowing, and the sense that wherever he’s taking me will give me another little glimpse into him. After a few minutes he slows his pace and so do I, until he stops completely.
“Okay, you ready?”
“For what?”
“For my favorite lunch spot.”
“Ready.”
He steps aside, and in front of us is a cave that opens out to the ocean like a window. Through it, I can see the deep blue of the water and the wide span of the horizon, and I realize it’s one of the places he told me about while we were lying on the beach. And we’re here, just like he said we’d be.
“Come on,” he says, taking my hand. “Just watch for glass in the cave. People leave a lot behind.”
It’s noticeably cooler when we step into the arch of rock, but what I feel more than anything is the heat of Colton’s hand around mine as we make our way over the remnants of secret parties and hidden bonfires on summer nights. When we get to the other side, where the sunlight and ocean sounds pour in, he drops his hand.
“What do you think? Not a bad view, right?”
“Not at all,” I manage.
The edge of the cliff we’re on is like the edge of the world, with its sheer drop below us. Colton lowers himself and sits, dangling his feet over it like he would if he were sitting on any chair or bench anywhere else. I inch down to the ground and do the same thing, though it makes my heart skip more than a beat. He brushes off a little space between us and unpacks our picnic, and soon enough we’ve got our backs leaned into the rock on one side of the cave and a breeze blowing over us as we take in the view. Colton picks up his sandwich, but instead of taking a bite, he looks over the water like he’s thinking about something. “Do you know what’s really strange?” he asks, after a wave crashes and recedes.
“What?”
“It’s strange that I don’t know you at all, not really.” He pauses. “But I know a lot about you.”
I’m glad he’s not looking at me, because I’m sure I must go pale. If only he knew how strange it really is. How much I know about him without actually knowing him either. How many pictures I’ve seen, how many moments of his life, big and happy and painful and scary. Moments that moved me to tears, made me want to know him, justified my finding him.
And then I think of how well I know the heart that beats in his chest right now. How knowing it makes me feel like I know him on another level too. How a tiny little part of me wonders if Trent’s heart in his chest is what makes it so easy to be with Colton. Is what gives us that feeling, like maybe even though we don’t know each other that well, our hearts do.
“Hm” is all I say—is all I can say. I take a small bite of my sandwich so I don’t have to add anything, even though I have no appetite at the moment. Something about his tone makes me scared to go down the path of this conversation with him, but I can’t help it.
“What . . . do you know?” I ask, despite my fear of what his answer will be.
“Well, for starters, I know you’re not the world�
�s best driver,” he says with a grin.
“Funny.”
“Let’s see,” he says, like he’s thinking. “I know you live in the country with a family you’re close to.”
I nod.
“That you have one dimple when you smile, and that you should smile more because I like it.”
This makes me smile.
“See?” he says. “Like that.”
Heat creeps from my chest up my neck.
“I know you’re brave about doing things that scare you. Like the kayak yesterday, or sitting here right now.” He looks me in the eye. “I like that too.”
His eyes roam over my face for a moment that feels too long, but then they come back to mine, and he speaks softer, gentler. “You trust easy, but questions seem like they scare you, which means . . .” He pauses, seems to be weighing his next words carefully. “You have things you don’t want to talk about.”
I look away, scared that if I let him see my face, he’ll know more than he does already—that he’ll see everything.
“It’s okay,” he says, reading my reaction wrong. “We all have stuff we carry around like that, things we’d rather just forget about.” He pauses and takes in a deep breath that comes out in a heavy sigh. “Problem is, most of the time you can’t. No matter how hard you try.”
I hear two things in his voice right then. Pain and, beneath that, guilt. I know those feelings so well, they’re not hard to recognize, and I think I might understand why he never answered my letter. It must’ve been everything he didn’t want—a connection to his past, and the acknowledgment of a stranger’s death, and the pain of those mourning that death. The guilt must’ve come with that.
Empathy is what I feel in this moment. Because the things we’re carrying around, that we’re not talking about, they are the same.
A wave thunders down on the rocks below, and white water engulfs them, hiding them momentarily beneath swirling white foam. I look at Colton, and he reaches his hand to my face, brushes his thumb slowly across my cheek, which I realize is wet with tears again.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “For whatever it is that you went through.”
“Don’t be,” I say. It comes out with more force and emotion than I mean for it to. I want to take away the weight of his guilt. “Please don’t ever be sorry.” I want to make him understand what I really mean. I look at him then, and I say something Trent’s mom said to me that I didn’t believe. Right now I want, more than anything, for Colton to believe it for himself. “You can’t be sorry for something you had no control over.”
He looks down at his lap, then brings his eyes back to mine, searching like he knows there’s something else there, something between us that runs deeper than this conversation, but he can’t see it, and I don’t show him. We’re sitting on the edge of a cliff with a long fall and no safety net.
“Then let’s not be sorry,” he says, steering us away from it. “Let’s just be here now.”
“Is that, like, your mantra?”
“Sort of.” He shrugs. He’s about to say something else, but his phone rings from his pocket. He reaches in and silences it.
“Do you need to answer that?”
“No, it’s just my sister.”
“Maybe you should get it. She seemed a little worried earlier.”
“She’s always like that with me,” he says. “Protective.”
He waves a hand like it’s no big deal, but his eyes leap out to the water, avoiding mine. “She means well by it, I know, but it can be a little much. Sometimes I think she still sees me as pretty helpless.”
We’re quiet for a moment, and I think of the picture of him from when he first went into the hospital—pale but smiling, flexing his thin arms, Shelby standing at his side doing the same thing. I glance at him out of the corner of my eye, at the same dark hair and green eyes set off against the deep tan of his face.
“That’s not what I see,” I say.
“No?” he asks with a smile.
“No.”
He leans in close. “Then what do you see?”
I’m aware of the shakiness of my breath, and his, as I look at him. All the pictures in my mind—the ones of him before, and the ones of Trent—disappear, and I am here with Colton, now.
“I see . . .” I pause and lean back a little, putting more space between us. “I see someone who’s strong. Who knows a lot about life already. Someone who understands what it means to take a day and make it a good one.” I pause, looking down at the water for a moment, then back at him. “Someone who’s teaching me to do the same.” I smile. “I like that.”
This makes him smile.
“So maybe we could keep doing this,” I say, surprising myself. “Making each day better than the last, and being here now, and all of that.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Or the next day.”
“Both.”
His phone beeps again. “Damn,” he says. “We need to go.”
Another wave crashes on the rocks far below, sending its salty mist swirling up and around us, blurring our pasts and the things we don’t want to think about. We linger there in the present moment and the possibilities it holds for a few more minutes, and then we collect our things and go back to our separate worlds.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“You will need to take anti-rejection medicines for the life of your [heart] transplant. It’s vital that you never stop taking your anti-rejection medicines, or change the dose, unless your transplant doctor or nurse tells you to do so. Stopping your anti-rejection medications will eventually allow your body to reject the organ.”
—University of Chicago Hospital Patient Care Guide, “Life after Your Transplant”
RYAN’S CAR IS the only one in the driveway when I get back. When I walk up the porch steps, I can see her lying out next to the pool on one of the lounge chairs, one of Mom’s cooking magazines draped over her face. I walk over, not sure if she’s awake, and she lifts the corner slightly when she hears me.
“Hey, how was the kayak lesson?”
It’s a normal question, but I can hear the smile in her voice, like she’s joking by asking it. Testing me out.
I sit on the lounge chair next to her. “The waves were too big to go out today.”
“So what’d you do instead?”
“Came back here.”
She takes the magazine from her face, then reaches back and reties her top before she sits up. “Yeah, but you were gone all day. What’d you do before you came back?”
“We—I—” I catch myself too late.
“Ha. I knew it.” She raises an eyebrow and smiles. “So who is he?”
“What if I was with one of my friends?”
Ryan lowers her sunglasses and levels her eyes at me. “When’s the last time you hung out with any of your friends?”
I shrug. I really can’t remember.
“Right. So who’s the guy?”
“How do you know there is one? “
“Wild guess,” she says. “That, and I can tell when you’re not telling me something. So talk. Who is he?”
I don’t answer right away. I want to tell her about Colton, and the day. I want to tell her how it felt sitting next to him on that cliff. That I’m worried and drawn in at the same time. I want her to give me advice, like she did the first time I asked about kissing Trent, and after the first fight we had, and whether or not I should be the first one to say I love you, or if I was ready to sleep with him. Ryan always had the answer to all my questions.
I want to know what she would think if she knew the truth, but I’m terrified of it too.
“He’s,” I say, choosing my words—and details—carefully, “he’s the kayak instructor who gave me the lesson the other day. We just had lunch today—since we couldn’t take the kayak out.” Half-truths, omissions.
“Aaannd . . .” She leans in, waiting.
“And then I came home.”
The latest issue of Eating Well comes fly
ing at me and I have to duck. “Oh come on. Tell me something.”
“I did.”
She gives me a look.
“His name’s Colton.”
Ryan motions like Come on, and I so badly want to tell her more.
Instead I shrug. “I don’t know, he’s . . . he’s really sweet, and we just hung out.”
“That’s great,” she says, reaching a hand out to my leg. She pats it. “It really is. It’s a good thing to be moving forward.”
Moving forward sounds better than moving on, but I’m still hit by a pang of guilt at the thought, which must somehow show on my face, because Ryan changes the subject.
“Anyway, it’s better than I can say for myself at the moment.” She gestures at the magazines and candy wrappers spread all around her. “Does he happen to have a sweet older brother?”
“Just a sister,” I say before I can stop myself. I ask a quick question to avoid any more from her. “Are you okay? You seem . . .”
Ryan shrugs. “Bored? I am. I was supposed to be on the other side of the world right now, but here I am. Back home. Lying by the pool, reading Mom’s magazines, hanging out with Gran and her Red Hat ladies. I love them and all, but their lives are more exciting than mine right now, which is just . . . sad.”
“What about your whole vision-board thing, and your art portfolio? What about the run today? I thought you were all ready for new beginnings, and conquering the world.”
Ryan rolls her eyes. “I know. That’s called faking it until you make it.” She purses her lips a second. “Clearly I haven’t made it yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Ethan dumped me in the middle of the airport and flew off to Europe alone, and I’m so . . .” She shakes her head, and I know she’s replaying whatever happened in her mind, and I’m sure she’s about to get angry all over again, but she looks at the ground, and her shoulders just kind of sag.
