by Jessie Evans
Not wanting to get caught spying on the Cooney house, I’m about to start the car and pull away, when the rest of the woman emerges, and the world tilts on its axis.
I’m certain that it’s her—Caitlin Cooney, alive and well. The long blond hair is the same shade of honey and caramel, and the slim build achingly familiar. For a moment, relief floods through my body, turning my insides to liquid, but then the woman turns, and my hope goes swirling down the drain.
The hair is the same, but this woman is taller, with an oval face instead of the heart-shaped one I was expecting. She is beautiful, but she isn’t Caitlin, and judging by the wedding ring on her finger and the baby bump beneath her flowered sundress, she’s not a candidate for my Summer of Blondes, either.
Still, as she turns to look at the Cooney house, there is something in the slope of her nose that is so familiar I feel compelled to learn who she is.
I pull the keys from the ignition and step out of the car. When my door slams, the woman’s head jerks in my direction, but the anxiety in her expression vanishes when our eyes meet. I may secretly be a monster, but good looks, charm, and an expensive haircut ensure I’m not the sort who frightens women when I show up behind them on the street.
“Hi,” she says. “Are you here for the wake?”
I shake my head. “No, but I’m a friend of the family.” I hold out my hand. “Gabe.”
“Aoife,” she says, one hand fluttering to her chest before she takes mine and gives it a quick squeeze. “I’m the kids’ oldest sister.”
I nod, concealing my surprise. So this is the older sister who ran off with her drug-dealer boyfriend, leaving her two-month-old baby behind. This is the woman whose disregard for her responsibilities forced Caitlin to drop out of school, lose her scholarship to an exclusive college preparatory program, and take over raising her niece and three little brothers when she was only seventeen years old.
And now Aoife is back, pregnant again, and wearing a wedding ring…
Getting to the bottom of the prodigal big sister’s sudden return would have been enough to convince me to stick around for a few more minutes, even if, at that moment, a van hadn’t pulled into the Cooney driveway and slammed on its brakes.
Aoife and I both turn toward the new arrival as the driver’s door slams with a sharp whump, and a redhead, with wild curls and wilder eyes, rushes around the front of the vehicle. She makes it halfway across the patchy grass of the front yard before she staggers to a stop, her jaw dropping as she shakes her head slowly back and forth.
The girl looks familiar, and I’m about to say hello, when she shouts—
“Holy fucking shit!”
Aoife jumps, startled, and I take a step in front of her, not sure what’s wrong, but certain it must have something to do with me, since this woman can’t pull her eyes away from my face. I’m assuming we must have a past—maybe I had a thing for redheads before Caitlin and I got together—when the woman lets out a hysterical burst of laughter.
“You’re alive,” she shouts, pulling in a breath that emerges as a sob. “You’re fucking alive. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.”
The van’s side door slides open, and a sleepy voice from inside asks, “What’s wrong, Sherry?”
I hear that voice, and my heart stops.
Time slows to a crawl. It feels like it takes hours to turn my head, an eternity for my gaze to shift from the redhead’s face to the face of the woman emerging from the van. And then I meet her eyes—pale green eyes above a freckled nose and full lips I’ve dreamed about kissing too many times to count—and I forget how to breathe.
It’s her, standing on the cracked driveway in wrinkled khaki shorts and a pale, yellow tee shirt. It’s Caitlin. She’s here. She’s here and real and beautiful and alive. So alive, I can smell her smoke and spice scent drifting across the yard, and swear I hear her pulse race as she meets my gaze and a hundred emotions fly across her face.
Shock is followed closely by confusion, pain, and then a look of joy so naked it feels like an invasion of privacy to watch it light up her features. I should look away, but I can’t. I’m afraid to look away, afraid to blink, for fear that by the time I open my eyes, she will have vanished all over again.
“Gabe?” The word bleeds hope, her voice so raw it’s painful to hear.
Yes, I want to say. Thank God you’re okay. But I can’t seem to force my lips to move.
“Gabe?” she repeats before I can recover the ability to speak. “Please, say something.”
“Yes,” I say, voice breaking in the middle of the word.
I know I should say more. I should tell her everything I’ve thought and felt and feared for the past year, but I don’t know how to start. I should go to her, pull her into my arms, and show her how fucking relieved I am to see her, but I can’t seem to take a step forward. All I can do is stand at the edge of the street, staring, feeling like my heart is splitting open and Caitlin is rushing in to banish the emptiness that’s been with me since the surgery.
Only now, looking into her eyes, do I realize that the hole inside of me is in the exact shape of this girl, and that—even more than my lost memories—it is the loss of her that has made me feel so incomplete.
“It’s really you,” she whispers after a long, silent moment, shaking her head back and forth like she still can’t believe it. “Oh my God. Oh…my God.”
Her hands fly up to cover her mouth as she bursts into tears. She cries like a dam breaking, like a tidal wave rushing toward the shore. Her tears are terrifying, and some part of me realizes they’re dangerous, even before she starts gasping for breath.
“Caitlin, are you okay?” The redhead starts toward Caitlin, but before she takes two steps, Caitlin’s eyes roll back and her knees buckle. She hits the ground with a muffled thud that is apparently what I needed to jolt my body into action.
I lunge forward, jumping onto the sidewalk and sprinting across the grass. I kneel next to Caitlin and gather her limp body into my arms, heart slamming against my ribs as a dark voice inside my head insists I’ve killed her.
I know it’s not true; I know she’s only fainted. I know it the way I know that fairy tales don’t come true, and a kiss never brought a beautiful girl back from the dead. But still, I’m terrified that I’ve lost her all over again, and the only thing I can think to do is kiss her, so I cradle the back of her head in my palm, and press my lips to hers.
For a long moment, there is nothing but softness, and the faint pressure of her teeth, firm against my lips, but then her breath rushes out. Her eyelashes flutter against my cheek, and her arms twine around my neck. She pulls me close with a strength that’s surprising, and kisses me with enough passion to light a city through an endless winter.
She kisses me, and I am the one brought back to life.
The moment her tongue slips between my lips, I remember the way it was with us, the way she made me feel so fucking alive, vibrating at a frequency so high and sweet it can only be heard by magical creatures and people who are purely, desperately, endlessly in love.
At that moment, sitting in the dust and brown grass, with her warm in my arms, I make a vow that I will have it all again.
I will have Caitlin and magic and the life we dreamed of together, back before something ripped us apart.
Chapter Twelve
Caitlin
“You’re something between a
dream and a miracle.”
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
It’s not real. People don’t come back from the dead. This is just another horrible dream. It isn’t real. This. Isn’t. Real.
My head spills out an endless, silent litany of despair, but my heart is shattering with happiness. Every cell in my body is catching fire, shining so bright I could illuminate a universe, because Gabe is alive.
He is alive and I’m never, ever going to let him go.
I pull him closer and he presses his lips harder to mine, kissing me with the hunger I’ve missed
so much. Our tongues tangle and his taste floods my senses and it is the best taste, the sweetest, most miraculous taste. It breaks my heart only to heal it and break it all over again, but I don’t care. I don’t care that this moment is so beautiful that it hurts. I don’t care about anything except the fact that Gabe is in my arms.
We hold each other so close my ribs feel like they’re bruising, but it still isn’t close enough. I need to be closer, I need to thread my spirit through his bones so tight no one will ever be able to tear us apart again.
“You’re here,” I whisper against his lips. “You’re really here.”
“I tried to find you, but I couldn’t,” he says, his fingers digging into my skull, that hint of discomfort enough to confirm that this isn’t a dream.
Gabe is alive. Alive.
“She told me you were dead,” I sob, clutching at his shoulders when he tries to pull away, refusing to let his body move more than a few inches from mine.
“What?”
“Your mother. She told me you were dead,” I repeat, the words coming faster. “I didn’t want to believe her. You hadn’t been admitted to any hospital, and none of the funeral homes had your body. So I broke into Darby Hill, looking for clues, but I found an email, and ashes, and then your father sent me a letter telling me I shouldn’t come to the funeral.” I pull in a shuddery breath, but I refuse to start crying again.
“I don’t understand.” Gabe’s brows pull together. “Whose funeral?”
“Yours. They had a funeral. For you,” I say, knowing I’m rambling, but too keyed up to stop. “Or they faked a funeral to make sure I stopped looking for you. I don’t know. I have no idea how they could do this, how they could—”
“Hold on a second.” Gabe blinks and uncertainty flickers in his ice blue eyes, those eyes I’ve dreamed about so many times, but have been positive I would never look into again. “You think my parents faked my death?”
“They did,” Sherry pipes up, reminding me that we have an audience. “I know it sounds crazy, but I was there. I saw the letter your dad sent.”
I glance up to see Sherry standing behind Gabe with the kids gathered around her. Sean and Ray looked stunned, Emmie still seems sleepy from the nap we took in the van on the way here from the airport, but it is Danny’s expression that catches my attention. Danny is staring down at me with an “oh shit” look on his face I haven’t seen since the time I caught him drinking one of Dad’s beers when he was eleven years old, and lit into him with enough fire and brimstone to make sure he hasn’t looked sideways at an alcoholic beverage since.
I can’t imagine what has him so spooked, but then his eyes shift to his left and my gaze follows, and there she is—my big sister, Aoife. She’s wearing a gauzy floral sundress, and practically glowing with health. She looks more like a kindergarten teacher than the strung out mess I remember, a transformation that, with Gabe back from the grave, is too much for my brain to make sense of.
Our eyes meet, and a nervous smile flickers at the edges of her lips.
“Hey,” she says. “Should I come back later? This seems like…a weird time.”
My first instinct is to tell her to go and never come back—we’ve managed for four years without her, and I have bigger things to deal with—but then I realize she must be here for the wake. No matter what a shit mother and big sister she’s been, I can’t very well tell her she’s not allowed to mourn her father.
“Can you give me a couple of hours?” I ask in a tight voice as Gabe helps me to my feet and stands beside me. For a moment, I feel the loss of his touch like a physical blow, weakening my knees, but then he takes my hand and my knees firm up again. I look up at him, holding his gaze as I tell Aoife, “There’s a lot going on right now.”
“I understand,” she says, then adds in an upbeat tone. “Would it help if I took the kids with me? We could catch up, give you two some privacy. Maybe I could take everyone for ice cream, if we can find a place that’s open this early?”
I open my mouth to say “hell no,” but Sean is already shouting that he wants two scoops of mint chocolate chip, and Emmie is smiling up at Aoife, clearly willing to accept this stranger as a friend if she’s offering ice cream. Emmie discovered a passion for raspberry sorbet a few months ago. Since then, she has been willing to eat any number of previously reviled vegetables in order to earn her scoop of dessert after I’m finished cleaning up dinner.
She, of course, has no idea that the woman offering to buy her a treat is the mother who abandoned her. The mother who never called, sent a single email, or offered so much as a dime to help cover the costs of raising a child. The mother who has no idea that her daughter has struggled to meet so many developmental milestones because she was using drugs and drinking for four months before she realized she was pregnant. For years, I’ve wanted to tell my sister all of it, to tell her how deeply she fucked up, and watch her face crumple as she realizes what a waste she is.
Now, I just want her to disappear. I don’t have time for Aoife, or anger, or anything else, but Gabe.
“I’ll go with them,” Sherry says, obviously sensing that I don’t want Aoife left alone with the kids. “You two take all the time you need.”
I nod, silently thanking her, my heart flipping in my chest when she smiles and tears rush down her cheeks. She knows how monumental this is, and I know she’s as happy for me as if it were the love of her life who had just been resurrected.
“Okay, guys. Let’s get buckled up.” Sherry herds the kids toward the van before turning back to Aoife with raised eyebrows. “You want to meet us at Two Scoops?”
“Sounds perfect. Meet you there,” Aoife says, starting toward a silver car parked at the curb. It’s only when she turns that I notice the telltale roundness beneath her dress.
I realize she’s pregnant, and my breath rushes out like I’ve been punched. The pain of losing Gabe’s and my baby hits all over again, made fresh by the realization that I’ll have to tell him what happened. I’ll have to tell Gabe that I lost our child, that he was a boy, and that I loved him so much it hurt, even though he was dead before he left my body. I have so many things to tell the man I love, so many awful things, but the awful things are now suddenly bearable because he is alive.
Alive.
The word keeps exploding in my brain, destroying everything I thought I knew was true. But it is the best kind of devastation. It’s a flood wiping the earth clean, giving me a chance at the life I was so certain I’d lost.
I turn back to Gabe as Sherry pulls the van out of the driveway, staring up into his face, memorizing the slope of his cheekbones and the way his dark lashes flare around his eyes and his hair falls over his forehead. I don’t ever want to look away. I want to stand here staring until this feels real, until I know he isn’t going to disappear the moment I turn my back.
“I don’t know where to start,” I say, breath rushing out.
“It’s all right.” He brushes my tangled hair behind my ear, reminding me I must look a mess after the long flight and my nap in the van. But it doesn’t matter. The way Gabe’s looking at me leaves no doubt I’m the most beautiful thing he’s seen in ages.
“We’ll figure everything out,” he continues. “I’m just so glad you’re okay. I recovered a memory of you a couple of weeks ago that…scared me.”
My forehead wrinkles. “Recovered?”
“I had the surgery.” Gabe turns his head, lifting his thick, nearly black, hair with one hand, revealing a long, pink scar. “Since then my memories have been patchy.”
“Oh my God,” I say softly, letting my fingers brush across the puckered skin. “But you’re okay? You’re better?”
“I’m tumor free.” He drops his hand, letting his hair fall into place as he turns back to me. “But I lost most of last summer. The memories have been coming back, but it’s slow. I didn’t remember your name until January, and it’s only been in the past few months that I’ve remembered…other things.”
“Other things,” I repeat numbly, my pulse thudding unhealthily in my temple. Gabe lost most of last summer.
Lost. That means he lost the months we fell in love, and all the memories of who we were together.
I’m already starting to panic even before Gabe says—
“I know we used to steal things, but I don’t remember why.” He glances over his shoulder toward the house before continuing in a softer voice. “And then, a few weeks ago, I had this memory of my hands at someone’s throat, and an image of you, your neck covered in bruises. After that, I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” The thud in my temples becomes a pain that digs into the back of my eyes. Surely he can’t mean…
“I was afraid I had…hurt you,” Gabe says, looking down at me with shame in his blue eyes.
Shame.
Gabe doesn’t do shame. He rarely does regret. I’ve heard Gabe say he was sorry a handful of times, but I’ve only seen him genuinely filled with regret once. It was the night we killed Pitt, but he didn’t regret the murder. He regretted the lies he’d told, and that he’d let us fall so deep in love when he knew he would be dead before the year was out.
And now he’s standing in front of me, alive, but missing pieces of what made him the man he was. The old Gabe would never have thought that he was capable of hurting me, not for a second. The old Gabe would have fought for me, killed for me, died for me. I knew it, and he knew it. It was the kind of thing that went unspoken between us, so obvious that there was no need to say the words.
Sure, the old Gabe wasn’t your conventional, upstanding citizen, but he was a man who knew himself, inside and out, and made choices based on his own marrow-deep beliefs in what was right and wrong. They weren’t the same things society calls right and wrong, but Gabe’s convictions were stronger because he had worked through the big questions and come up with his own, authentic answers. But now, he seems to have lost touch with those answers, and may have lost more than just his memories of last summer.
