by Jessi Kirby
“I know,” Colton says, looking down at the steering wheel.
Everything in me—breath, pulse, thought—stops.
“You know?”
His eyes run over me, and I don’t see any of the things I’m waiting for—hurt, anger—none of it. The only thing I can feel from him in this moment is sympathy. “I thought,” he says quietly. “You hold back—the way people sometimes do when they’ve lost someone.” He pauses. “Or when they think they’re going to. I had a girlfriend a couple of years ago who got like that when things—” He clears his throat. “She held back with me that way. The way you do.”
My heart leaps back into action, alternately pounding out guilt and worry and relief against my ribs. He doesn’t know he’s talking about Trent, but he can see more than I realize.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I should’ve told you sooner, but I’ve been . . .”
Holding back for more reasons than just feeling guilty about Trent. Holding back because I’m afraid of what will happen if you know the truth. What I’ll lose.
A lump rises in the back of my throat, and tears well up, ready to overflow with what I know I need to say next.
“Don’t be sorry,” Colton says, leaning closer. He brings his lips, so softly, to my forehead in a kiss that asks nothing in return. I close my eyes and let the feeling of it sink in, and wish it were that simple.
His lips move to my temple, trail down my cheek, and linger there, a breath away from mine. “You told me that,” he whispers, “not to be sorry for the things you have no control over.”
Our lips brush, and I feel like there isn’t anything I want to hold back. I almost sink into him, into another kiss, but he pulls away, just enough so we’re eye to eye in the darkness between us.
“Please,” he whispers, “don’t be sorry for anything. Especially this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I DRIVE HOME in silence. Dark, heavy silence, broken only by an occasional set of passing headlights. I see flashes of tonight: the sunset, the glow of the water, the fireworks, that kiss. And flashes of another night and another kiss.
The first time Trent kissed me, we were night swimming in my pool. Late, after everyone else was asleep. I’d swum past him under the water, feeling my hair ripple behind me in the light and hoping my silhouette looked as pretty as I felt right then. When I came up, he was there in front of me. His hands just barely grazed my waist, and we balanced there on that moment, wondering and knowing at the same time what was about to happen. Our first kiss was soft, sweet. A question on my lips. He tasted like the watermelon bubble gum he was always chewing, and the stolen summer night. The memory produces a tiny ache around my heart, a kind of longing that feels distant and nostalgic.
The feel of his lips on mine is just a whisper of a memory. But the memory of Colton’s is vivid and alive. Where Trent’s first kiss was shy, timid, a question, kissing Colton was like already knowing the answer. Knowing that answer was each other.
But there is so much tangled up in us, and all around us. Loss and guilt. Secrets and lies. So many things he doesn’t know, things that I am sorry for because I do have control over them. Or I thought I did until tonight. I thought I did until I recognized that long-forgotten falling sensation I didn’t know I would feel again. Didn’t know I could feel again.
When I pull into the driveway, the house is dark, and I sit for a moment and look out the window at the sky so full of stars it looks like it can’t really exist. Like something so beautiful and so fragile couldn’t really be true. And then the light in Ryan’s room switches on, and all I want is for her to tell me it can.
She jumps a little when I burst through her bedroom door without knocking. “Hey, how was your—” Her smile falls at the sight of me. “What’s wrong?”
That’s all it takes. I make it the few steps to the bed where she’s sitting before I crumple into her, and everything I’ve been holding back unravels.
“Hey, hey, hey,” she says, putting her arms around me. “What’s going on, what happened?”
I close my eyes tight and curl into myself as my shoulders shake in her arms.
“Quinn,” she says, pulling me away from her enough to look at me. “What happened?”
I see it again, our kiss. “I . . . he . . .” Then I hear his words, Please don’t be sorry for anything. Especially this, and I bite my bottom lip, run my hands over my face that’s hot and wet with tears.
“He what.” She sits up straight now, concern etching itself deeper into her expression.
I shake my head. “We kissed, out on the water, and it was so . . . and I . . .” My voice hitches, and another sob drops my chin to my chest.
Ryan’s voice goes gentle again. “We talked about this already, about how it’s okay to feel—”
“It’s not,” I say, looking up to meet her eyes.
“Quinn, it is. You have to believe me on this. You and Trent—”
“It’s not that!”
The edge in my voice surprises us both, and she’s silent as she looks at me, taking in my puffy eyes and trembling chin.
“Then . . . what is it?” she asks slowly. Like she’s afraid to know the answer.
I swallow over the tears that are thick in my throat, and over my own fear of what she’ll think. “I did something awful,” I whisper. I look down, away from my sister’s eyes, at my hands twisting in my lap. “Something I should never have done, and now . . .”
My palm comes to my mouth to hold back the rising sob, and the words I know I need to say out loud.
I can feel my sister’s eyes on me, but I don’t meet them. “What? Just tell me. Whatever it is.”
I hesitate for a tiny moment, and then I do what she says.
I tell her everything, beginning with the letter I wrote. I tell her about the days I waited for an answer, and the nights I searched for him. I tell her about Shelby’s blog, and how I finally found him. About how I never meant to meet him, but once I did, I wanted to know him. And how now that I know him, the last thing I want to do is hurt him. And then I tell her about our kiss tonight. The way it felt, and what he said after, about holding back and being sorry. And finally, when I’ve told her everything and there are no words left for what I’ve done, I look at my sister.
She is quiet for a very long time after I finish. I sit on her bed, surrounded by tissues, puffy eyed and waiting for her to tell me that it’s going to be okay, or that he’ll understand, or that it’s not as bad as it seems, but she doesn’t. She takes a deep breath. Looks at me like she’s sorry for what she’s about to say.
“You have to tell him.”
“I know,” I say, and the acknowledgment sets off a fresh wave of tears in me, but Ryan doesn’t hold back.
“Not just because he deserves to know the truth,” she says. “You need to tell him because it’s the only chance you have for anything between the two of you to be real, if that’s what you want.”
She looks at me now, eyes serious. “But first you have to actually decide what you want. You’re halfway there, I think, but . . .”
She pauses, presses her lips together, and then says something else I already know, deep down in a place that’s hidden away.
“If you want to open yourself up to Colton, you have to let go of Trent first. Let him be a part of who you are—your first love, your memories, your past. But let him go. You have to,” she says softly, “so that you can be here now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“And you would accept the seasons of your heart just as you have always accepted that seasons pass over your fields.
“And you would watch with serenity through the winter of your grief.”
—Kahlil Gibran
I FINISH TYING my shoelaces and stand up. Look at my reflection in the mirror. Breathe. And then I let my eyes wander over th
e pictures of me and Trent. I follow them, all along the edge of the mirror, to the sunflower he gave me, hanging pale and dry next to them. I take one more deep breath, and then I reach out and cradle it in my hands, as gently as I can.
I glance down at the picture I cut out from Ryan’s magazine. The heart, washed up on the shore of an empty beach, encased in glass. I look at it and think about what Colton said about all his ships in their bottles—how he didn’t want to build them anymore if they were never going to see the ocean—and I understand.
I feel the same way.
I slip out the front door as quietly as I can, because I need to do this alone. My legs carry me down the steps and over the dirt, and I start to breathe again. My heart starts to work again.
I feel my feet hit the ground, one in front of the other, until I get to the end of the driveway. And then I stop. Breathe. And I begin again, down the road I’ve been avoiding for so long. The road that was the beginning of us, to the place I thought was the end of me.
It’s been so long since I’ve run this way that it looks unfamiliar at first. The trees are fuller, the grape vines thicker. But I know this road. I know its rolling hills, and I know its turns. I know the stretch where the sunflowers grew wild in the field and along the fence.
Where they still do.
They’re brilliant against the summer sky, swaying gently in the breeze. I stop to listen, and I can almost hear his voice.
“Hey! Wait!”
I close my eyes, and I can see him there, smiling, holding a sunflower in his hand. But then another memory pushes its way in. The splintered fence, swirling lights, petals and blood spread over the ground.
I open my eyes and I’m back here, now, where the ground shows no scars, and the fence has been mended, and the sunflowers grow tall and beautiful all around it.
I fix my eyes on the field of gold as I take the dried flower I am holding and raise my hand above my head. I watch the tall stalks bend and sway when I roll the papery petals between my fingers and release each tiny piece into the breeze. All our firsts, and our lasts, and everything in between. They swirl and dance on the invisible currents, and then one by one, they disappear to a place they will always be a part of.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Fear can paralyze people. One reason recipients don’t write is because they are afraid they will hurt or harm the family somehow by ‘bringing up something they don’t want to think about,’ the loss of their loved one. Of course, what they don’t realize is that this is a loss that you carry every day. . . . Another deterrent to writing is the time it takes for the recipient to heal physically and psychologically from the transplant. A recipient has to take a myriad of drugs to avoid any possibility of rejection. This procedure of balancing the amounts needed of the drugs can take months or longer. The trauma to the body and spirit is immense.”
—Karen Hannahs, Intermountain Donor Services: “Why Don’t They Write?”
FEAR IS A hard, heavy knot in my stomach when I pull up to the kayak shop. I have to force myself out of the car. The door to the shop is propped open with a scuba tank, and the sign says OPEN, but when I poke my head through the doorway, I don’t see anyone behind the counter. I hover there, neither in nor out, my sister’s words running through my mind.
You have to tell him. He deserves to know.
I knew these things before she told me—it was the fear of losing him that kept me quiet. But standing here now, I realize what I fear even more is hurting him. I picture his face when I say the words, and my resolve to tell him starts to drain out of me. It takes all my strength to hold on to it. After a long moment I take a deep breath and cross the threshold into the shop. Its racks of equipment are clean and bright in the early-afternoon light, and a fan oscillates slowly, blowing the now-familiar smell of plastic and neoprene my way. I glance around, half expecting Colton to come from the back room carrying a full scuba tank or a set of life jackets and wearing a wide grin, but he doesn’t. Nobody does.
I take a few tentative steps toward the back room, and that’s when I hear a voice, just above the low whir of the fan.
“Would you stop already?” I barely recognize it as Colton’s, the way it cuts through the words. “It was a mistake,” he says, “and you need to let it go.”
I go still right where I’m standing.
“Please don’t get mad at me, Colton.” The other voice is Shelby’s, and there’s an edge to hers too. “I just want to make sure you realize you can’t make that mistake. You don’t get to. The second you start missing your meds, you risk going into rejection—don’t you get that? You could die.”
I don’t dare move. I try not to breathe.
Shelby goes on. “So you never get to make that mistake, Colton—not because you’re tired, or they make you feel crappy, or you’re . . . distracted.” She sighs.
The knot in my gut twists itself tighter.
“Distracted?” Colton spits the word back at her. “By what? A girl? Living? It’s been over a year. Am I still supposed to sit around and take my vitals and watch the clock for my next dose, and think about the fact that it’s all on borrowed time? Should I focus on that?”
Shelby’s voice turns angry. “Do you realize how selfish you sound right now? How ungrateful?”
No, no, no.
If her words knock the air right out of me, I can’t imagine what they’ve just done to Colton. The silence that follows is excruciatingly long, and it takes everything in me now not to creep closer and step in between them.
“Wow,” he says finally. His voice is flat. Cold. “You really just went there.” He clears his throat. Laughs, but it’s joyless. Angry. “I’m done.”
There are footsteps. The quick shuffle of his flip-flops over the floor, heading toward the doorway. My fear unravels into panic at being discovered, and I look around for a place to hide—not just from Colton and Shelby, but from all the things I came to tell him.
“Really? You’re done?” Shelby shoots back, and the footsteps stop. “What about that letter? It’s been over a year for that too, Colton.” Her voice has gone all calm again, but it’s false, the kind you put on when you know you’ve fired an arrow that’ll win you the fight.
She has no idea how far that arrow reaches.
The rising panic in my chest turns into something heavy and thick that spreads out all at once, my heart pumping it into every last cell of me, like blood. It sits there, rooting my feet to the cement floor as the room begins to spin.
I sink down against the wall behind me. That letter.
“I’m sorry,” Shelby says. Her voice is softer now, regret creeping in at its edges, but she goes on. “I get that it’s hard. And I know you’ll write his parents when you’re ready. But you should at least answer the letter you got. That poor girl lost her boyfriend, and tried to reach out to you, and you can’t just leave something like that unanswered. Do you know what that must feel like?”
That poor girl.
There is no air in the room. Not where I sit, eyes squeezed shut against tears that want to spill down my cheeks. That poor girl who tried to reach out to you. Who found you when you didn’t answer. Who’s been lying to you since the day you met.
It’s silent for what feels like an eternity, and the tension stretches so tight between the walls of the shop, I know it’s going to snap any second.
Shelby pushes on, even as I beg in my mind for her to stop. “Maybe it’ll make you feel better, to answer it,” she says. “Maybe it’ll remind you that it’s a gift, Colton. Not a burden.”
I feel Colton snap before he even speaks.
“Do you think I need a reminder?” His voice is all sharp edges and open wounds. “You don’t think the med schedule, or the cardio therapy, or the biopsies are enough? Or the scar on my chest? You don’t think that’s enough?”
“Colton, I—”
“Not a day goes by that I’m not reminded, over and over. How lucky I am. That I should be grateful. That I should be
happy just to be here.” He pauses, clears his throat. “That the only reason I am is because that guy—someone’s boyfriend, son, brother, friend—died.”
His words, and the way he says “that guy,” like Trent is a total stranger, knock the air out of me though I’m already down, crouched on my heels against the wall. A flicker of anger lights up somewhere in me now too—at him, and at myself. Out of all the rules I broke to find Colton, withholding Trent’s name in the letter was the one I actually followed. Now I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d written it all down, every detail of who Trent was, so he’d know who “that guy” was. Maybe then he would’ve written back.
My hands are shaking, and now a part of me wants to step out from the shadows. Ask him the questions I somehow forgot I wanted the answers to.
The air is thick with silent tension, then Colton goes on. “Do you know what that feels like, Shelby? How am I supposed to answer a letter like that? Tell her I’m so sorry about her boyfriend? Promise her I’ll take care of his heart? That I’ll think about it every day and never forget that I’m here because he’s not?”
Colton’s voice catches. “Don’t you get it? That’s what I want. I want to forget, all of it. Why is that so horrible? To want a normal life?”
“Colton, that’s not what I—” There’s a small shuffle, like maybe she took a step toward him.
“Leave it alone,” he says. “Leave me alone.” He pauses, and in the quiet, my own heart thunders in my ears. “I don’t need any more reminders.”
I push myself up onto my feet. Concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, swift, desperate, silent. I need to get away.
I almost make it to the door before I feel the warm, familiar weight of his hand on my shoulder.
