“Well, no, but that’s not really the point. He doesn’t get to say whether I do or not.”
I studied him for a moment and then said, “I’m not sure you know exactly how much of a gift you have in that voice of yours. People love to hear you sing, Thomas, and you love to do it. I bet, if you asked him, Holden would keep writing for you. He loves to write. I can’t imagine that he would give that up forever.”
“I think he wants to forget all of it.”
“You don’t know until you ask.”
We sat there on the couch for a good long while. Now that I was home to take over soothing duty, Hank Jr. snored softly, his head still resting on Thomas’s leg.
“Assuming that he does want to keep writing,” Thomas said finally, “and that’s a big ‘does,’ what about the two of us going on with the Barefoot Outlook thing? I know you’ve been doing your thing, and I’ve been doing mine but I don’t much like being solo.”
“Me, either,” I said. And even though it wasn’t what I had once imagined for myself, I realized that I did like what we had begun putting together as Barefoot Outlook. Before Sarah’s diagnosis and Holden’s leaving. “Think it will fly with just the two of us?” I asked.
“Won’t know until we try.”
Since that night, that’s what we’ve been doing. Holden did agree to continue writing, and most of the songs he’s sent us were written to include us both. All of our communication went through Thomas. And I hadn’t spoken to him since the morning he left the apartment. I guess it’s better that way because what would there have been for us to say to each other?
Holden did the right thing. I have not questioned this, even at its cost to me. From the moment Sarah’s diagnosis became a reality, I never once thought that he would choose me. I never once thought that he would do anything but the right thing where Sarah was concerned.
A person can only be what they are, and what I know about Holden is this. He’s the guy who’s going to walk the little old lady across the street, pick up the starving dog on the side of the road. He’s the guy who sees right as right, and wrong as wrong, and there’s no in between, no gray. Because if he hadn’t been that guy, it’s as simple as this. I would never have fallen in love with him.
♪
27
Holden
It’s nine-thirty by the time I leave the office and head home. I take Peachtree Road out of downtown Atlanta, choosing traffic over the interstate. The Volvo belongs to Sarah’s father’s company. As an employee there, part of my compensation package includes a vehicle to drive. I had actually put up an argument over being given such an expensive ride for an entry level position, but Dr. Saxon is not a man too many people win an argument against. My job is a good one, a job most college graduates would be thrilled to get just coming out of school. And under any other circumstances, having the opportunity to work with Dr. Saxon would feel like something of a coup.
Sarah’s father is a smart guy. His first invention, over twenty years ago, made him a multimillionaire. He developed a cream for burn victims that accelerated the healing process by as much as thirty percent. From there, he created other medicinal products, mostly rooted in natural sources, that were eventually sold to pharmaceutical companies and put his worth at over two hundred million dollars.
In fact, it is probably Dr. Saxon’s unyielding determination to help Sarah beat her disease that got her to where she is now, in remission, feeling and looking like herself again. I wonder sometimes what would have happened had he not pushed her from clinic to clinic, including one in Mexico, trying countless methods of boosting her body’s immune system. Watching him do everything in his power to help her made me wonder many times if he was fighting not only for Sarah’s life, but his own as well. I really believe that if Sarah had died, he would have too.
That kind of love isn’t something I ever saw growing up in my own home. My father’s love had never been rooted in selflessness. I’m sure there was a reason for it. Maybe it was my mother’s leaving when I was six and the house suddenly becoming a place where Dad and I basically crossed paths and little more. He saw his role as raising me, preparing me for the world and then pushing me out into it.
I know that’s what a parent is actually supposed to do, but my dad’s efforts always felt as if they were rooted in obligation. As for Sarah’s parents, especially her father, everything he did for her stemmed from the purest kind of love, a love I have often wondered if anyone else in her life will be able to live up to.
Our apartment is in a nice section of Buckhead, in between the Buckhead Diner and Phipps Plaza. It’s actually a condominium that Dr. Saxon bought for Sarah about six months after she got her first clear checkup. It’s in a high-rise, its only drawback being that Patsy absolutely hates the elevator and refuses to get in unless I’m carrying her. I’ve discovered that an older Beagle pretty much personifies stubbornness. When the two of us moved in here with Sarah, I expected Patsy to be a permanent bone of contention between us, but somewhere along the way, Sarah decided that my having a dog wasn’t such a bad thing. Although she still doesn’t like for her to sit on the couch or sleep on our bed, she’s okay with her. I should say they’re okay with each other.
I park in the garage and take the elevator to our floor. As soon as I stick the key in the lock, I hear Patsy click, click, clicking across the tile. She is waiting just inside the door, as she is every night when I get home.
Her tail a wagging blur, she’s so happy to see me that she’s shaking, and I wonder, not for the first time, why anyone would choose to be lonely. All they have to do is get a dog. No one has bothered to tell Patsy that I actually did not hang the sun and the moon, and so she continues to think I did. I have to admit I don’t mind. I reach down and rub under her chin where she likes to be rubbed. “Do you need to go out? Have you been out already?”
She jogs in place like a little foot soldier, and I feel a surge of pride for how good she looks. Her coat is shiny, and although she’s not plump, she looks like a dog who is well-fed and well-loved. In the Davidson County pound, she had looked at least twice as old as she does now. I guess it’s true that while lack of care can age beyond fairness, it is also true that the simple ingredients of kindness and love can peel away those years.
“I took her out about a half hour ago.”
I look up to see Sarah standing in the kitchen doorway, a soft smile on her mouth. She’s thin in skinny jeans and a pink sweater; her hair still very short, but thick and again healthy.
“Thanks,” I say. “I didn’t mean to be this late.”
“That’s okay. We had a nice walk.”
“Smells great in here.”
“I’m roasting some vegetables,” she says. “Hungry?”
“Starving.”
“Get your shower, and I should have everything ready by the time you’re done.”
“Sounds good,” I say. I walk over and give her a kiss on the cheek, patting my leg for Patsy to follow me. Instead, she leads the way, and in the bedroom, heads for the fancy dog bed Sarah bought for her when we moved in.
Fatigue hits me in a wave as I step under the shower spray a few minutes later. I lean against the wall and let it do its best to revive me. It’s not as if my work is physical. It isn’t. I’ve been doing research for Dr. Saxon on hundreds of different topics, compiling the most relevant notes for whatever question he has presented me with. It’s interesting, so I’m not exactly sure why I come home exhausted each night.
But then a thought waves itself in front of me like a white flag vying to be noticed. Round pegs, square hole. The constant forcing of a fit. Trying to make something function in a manner in which it was not designed to function. I try not to think about it, belabor it, question it.
I made a choice. Just over nineteen months ago, I made a choice. It’s not one I can regret, or really ever imagine regretting.
The first weeks after I came back to Atlanta were a complete nightmare, for Sarah, for me, for her
family. The diagnosis itself, the suggested forms of treatment. Chemo. Complete mastectomy with reconstruction. The prognosis itself, unwavering in its uncertainty. It wasn’t an if-then proposition. If you take this treatment, then you will be cured. With her cancer, there was nothing definite except for the fact that it had taken her body hostage.
The gratitude on Sarah’s face that first night back in Atlanta told me, as nothing else could, that I’d made the right choice. None of what had happened between us in Nashville mattered at that point. She never brought it up, and I never mentioned it. We went on as before, like I had never left Atlanta to go there in the first place. Like there had never been CeCe.
Her name is like a small electrical shock to my brain, because I don’t let myself think it very often. There’s no point in dwelling on something that can no longer be. It’s not as if I were able to do it in the beginning, put her out of my mind. I think I know now that the heart doesn’t give up what it wants that easily. I have no explanation for how hard I fell or how fast except that it was like finding a part of myself that I never realized was missing until I met her.
Thomas’s call is suddenly front and center, and that’s another thing there’s no point in thinking about. I’m not going back to Nashville. The likelihood of Hart Holcomb actually cutting my song is about as probable as Georgia snow in July. To go back on the off chance that something might come of it doesn’t seem worth what it would feel like to have to leave again. Easier not to go back at all.
I put on sweat pants and a t-shirt and head for the kitchen. Sarah has dinner on the table. We sit down with her telling me about a nutrition class she is taking. In addition to the juicing she’s been doing, she’s considering adapting to a completely raw diet.
“With the way you like salads,” I say, “that shouldn’t be too hard.”
“I think so too,” she agrees. “Some of the research the professor presented was pretty convincing.”
“Then you definitely should.”
She spears a red pepper, looks at me for a moment and then says, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“You look, I don’t know, a little sad or something.”
“I’m just tired.”
“Daddy over-working you?”
I shake my head. “I probably didn’t sleep great last night.”
“Anything bothering you?”
“No. Everything’s good.” I’d like to think I sound convincing but she doesn’t look convinced.
A couple of hours later when we’re in bed, Sarah reaches across and clasps her fingers in mine. Her touch surprises me. For a long time after her surgery, she did not want me to touch her. Even after her body had completely healed physically, she avoided any opportunity for us to be close.
I’ve let myself think that with time, this part of our relationship would come back. So far it hasn’t. We’ve continued to ignore it, even though it’s begun to loom between us like a big black cloud that we can no longer see through. With her fingers entwined in mine, she says, “Thomas called earlier, right before you got home.”
Something jumps inside my chest, and I realize there’s no point in asking her what he wanted. “Did he?”
“He told me about the song,” she says.
“Yeah, you know the odds of that becoming anything.”
She’s quiet for a minute or more before saying, “Maybe it’s time we talk about some of that.”
“What is there to talk about?” I ask, deliberately nonchalant. “Another time, another place.”
“But it was your dream.”
“Was,” I say.
She sighs, turns over onto her side, and, with a fingertip under my jaw, forces me to look at her. “Dreams don’t really go away, do they?”
“Sometimes they have to,” I answer, my tone ragged enough that I immediately wish I had censored it.
She’s quiet for several moments before saying, “Can we drop the walls and be honest with one another, Holden?”
“Sarah,” I look at the ceiling, “I am being honest with you.”
“I know you think you are. Holden, before I knew I was sick, what I wanted more than anything was for you to come back here because it was where you wanted to be. I never pretended that Nashville was my dream, and I guess I wanted you to decide that it wasn’t yours either. But it was your dream. Still is your dream.”
“You know I’ve put all that behind me,” I say.
“I know you think you have.” She squeezes my hand hard, as if bracing herself. “I want you to go back.”
“What?” I hear the surprise in my voice.
“If you don’t, you’ll regret it,” she says softly, “because you’ll always wonder what might have happened.”
“No, I won’t,” I say, firm.
Sarah turns over on her back and now she is staring at the ceiling as well. Patsy snores softly, one z after another, all that is filling the silence between us.
“Sarah, things are good now. Let’s not mess it up, okay?”
“But are they? Really good? Compared to what they could have been, yes, I think they are. Good as in, I didn’t die.”
I sit up on one elbow. “Don’t talk like that.”
“I could have, it’s true.”
“You didn’t, and you won’t.”
“At least not if Daddy has anything to say about it,” she says, a half-smile on her mouth. “I don’t know, Holden, I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m different now.”
“What do you mean?”
“How we’re all just one doctor’s visit and diagnosis away from our lives being shattered as we know them. I know now how in a blink it can all change. I was so arrogant about life and what I thought I deserved.”
“You weren’t arrogant,” I say.
“Actually, I was. I wanted you, at whatever cost, even if it meant that you would never really be happy with the life that we made together.”
“Sarah,” I take her hand again, “I am happy. Stop.”
“You made a choice to give up all the things that you wanted. You made a choice to give up your writing and music, and I let you because I was too selfish to let you go.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true,” she insists. “And if I couldn’t let you go and be sure that you would come back, were you ever really mine to begin with?”
I’d like to answer, to reassure her with the words I know she needs to hear, but they’re stuck somewhere in the back of my throat and for the life of me I cannot force them out.
“Now that I’m admitting all of this, I guess I want to be loved by someone else the way I’ve loved you, Holden. I don’t think I want to go through the rest of my life being the one who loves the most.”
“Sarah, please-”
“Let me finish. We both deserve that.”
“Why are you doing this?” I ask, feeling as if I’m walking on glass and everything beneath me is going to shatter at any second.
“Because I know you won’t ever do it first.”
Her words fall around us like rain pinging off a roof. I try to absorb their meaning. “Are you saying everything that’s happened in this past year and a half has meant nothing?”
“No,” she says softly. “The opposite. It’s meant everything. What you did for me when you knew that I needed you. . .I don’t have any words to come close to thanking you for being who you are. But there is something I can do to pay you back.”
“What?” I ask, not sure I even want to know the answer.
“Let you go. Without guilt or regret.”
“Sarah-”
“Go and be who you were meant to be, Holden.”
“I don’t know why you’re saying these things. This is a mistake.”
“It isn’t. And I don’t want to think of any of it that way. But to hold onto each other for the wrong reasons, yes. That would be a mistake.”
I slip an arm around her waist and pull her to me, a deep sadness si
nking in around me. Because she’s right. I know she’s right.
She presses her face into my chest, and I feel her tears against my skin. “We don’t have to do this,” I say.
She puts a finger to my lips. “There is one more thing.”
Hearing something different in her voice, I pull back to look at her. “What?”
She’s silent until I start to think she’s not going to tell me. “I’ve met someone, Holden.”
The words hang in the space between us, and I see in her expression that she’s not sure what my reaction will be. “A guy?” I ask, the question sounding flat and disbelieving even to my ears.
She nods once, biting her lower lip.
“Who?” I ask, and I don’t think my voice sounds like my own.
She hesitates and then, “He’s one of the doctors I’ve been seeing for my follow-up care. Nothing has happened. But he’s told me he has feelings for me. And I. . .I think I might for him, too.”
I sit up, swing my legs over the side of the bed, lean forward with my elbows on my knees and pull in a couple of deep breaths. “That is probably the last thing in the world I expected to hear you say.”
“I didn’t go looking for it. And if things were truly right between us, I don’t think it would have found me.”
When I can speak, I say, “Is all of this because of the very unlikely possibility of me getting a cut on my song?”
“No,” she says, placing a hand on my back in what feels like a gesture of comfort. “It’s just the trigger.”
♪
28
CeCe
It’s one a.m., and the party at Beck’s dad’s place looks like it’s just getting started. There are enough famous faces in various parts of this house to keep a paparazzi photographer snapping away in every direction. The pool is shaped like a guitar, and two of the guys in Case’s band are sitting on the diving board, taking requests, one song after another.
I’m in a chair at the opposite end when Beck returns from getting us both a drink. “Here you go,” he says, handing me my glass of San Pellegrino and lime.
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