We can’t get caught up in something like that again.
It would be a lie to say the things I feel for him aren’t real, but…they’re not allowed to be real. I think if I don’t entertain them, and if he resolves not to entertain whatever he’s feeling that is off-limits, then things will settle down. We can get ourselves under control.
I desperately want that to happen. Not just for my child and her late father, but also for me and Beckett. He and Theo and I all need each other. Always have, always will. We really have built up a most special bond, and harming it would crush us.
But no, none of that came to me quickly.
After Ceceli left, I spent over an hour crying again in my bedroom, not feeling anywhere near steadied. Confessing myself to her was helpful in a way and not helpful in many others; sure, I got the truth out of my chest, but I hadn’t found relief.
She hadn’t sided with the shadowed parts of me like I thought—and hoped—she would.
She hadn’t said, ‘Noelle, of all the fucking guys you could’ve picked, you went with the one you can’t have? Does your brain work? Where’s your respect for Cliff? Find someone who didn’t grow up with him and earn every ounce of trust he had.’
Nor had she said, ‘Look, girl, I love you, but don’t even go there. Not with him. I mean it. That’s a tangle that will ruin everything.’
No, she said Beckett and I make sense together because we’re two halves of the same whole.
Two halves of the…?
How could that be?
How could that be when I was Cliff’s other half for almost five years?
I didn’t know then when she said it, and I still don’t.
I don’t even know how to feel. It’s like I’m back on that seesaw, but the feelings are not at all like the ones I used to be torn between.
All I know is it sobered me somewhat to see my sweet daughter so unaware of what had transpired. It isn’t her fault Beckett and I did something stupid, and she shouldn’t be punished for it in any way…and, really, neither should we. Not so much that it destroys us.
At first, I feared he might not want anything to do with me ever again. He and Cliff held each other in such high regard, loved each other long before Cliff and I did, and I’ve played a big part in making a mess of that. But I don’t believe it’s possible for me to earn Beckett’s hatred. As terrifying a thought as it is, there’s next to no substance to it.
Thus, I don’t have to have spoken to him to know he isn’t okay with the dynamic between us and Theo being broken.
But I still have to say it to him. The words need to be put out there so that something of a truce can be called. None of us deserve to suffer a separation after the suffering we’ve already been through.
Theo is watching cartoons on the couch with a bowl of fruit, believing the best fib I could come up with about Beckett (that he had something important to do this morning and will be back later). It won’t hold forever, and I can’t stay in this stressed-out mood all day—it’s already been over twelve hours since I last spoke to him. So I stuff my whorl of emotions down and retrieve my phone to text him.
They try to come back up when I see his messages from when he left here last night.
I fight them with a quick breath and the thought, It’s in the past. It’s time to take care of business and move forward.
Then I do it.
ME: I’m glad you got home safely
ME: Can we talk?
I’ve barely sent the second message before I’m being startled by an incoming phone call from him.
For a lung-gripping second, I’m both eager and scared to hear his voice.
Then I shake myself—outwardly, with big wiggles of my arms and shoulders.
Get it together.
“Baby,” I call to Theo, “I’m gonna step into my bedroom and talk on the phone for a minute, okay?”
She nods slowly, her eyes still glued to the TV.
I answer the call as I hasten to my room. Then I turn and look through my open door to make sure Theo doesn’t come down this way and hear me.
“Hello?” I say.
My voice seems drier than it was just seconds ago, like I haven’t used it in a long time.
“Hey,” he returns.
His voice isn’t as rich as usual either.
He sounds how I’ve felt all this time: knotted up.
“Oh,” he goes on dimly, “I just noticed your messages. I didn’t see them before I called. How funny that we thought about talking to each other at almost the same time.”
An ache rolls through my entire being.
My hand trembles around the phone.
He doesn’t sound amused. I don’t feel amused. Of course we were of one mind, though, even on something so random. That’s us. And normally, amused is exactly what we would be about it.
What I am now is—is—full almost to bursting of sadness and awkwardness and longing. But not longing like he inspired in me last night, because that would be wrong. Except how could I not still feel it, with him so far away and that deep sentiment I felt between us still thrumming and his touch still all over—
No, no, stop. Stop.
I inhale shakily.
And…I admit I do still feel that.
Which is a big part of the problem.
Which is why I need to talk to him.
He hasn’t gone on speaking. I would bet money he’s dealing with his own emotional jumble over there.
I clear my throat, then say quietly, “Yeah. Funny.”
I wonder if he’s really nodding or if it’s just what I can imagine him doing.
“Beckett,” I barely get out now, my voice thin, “what we did wasn’t—”
“It wasn’t okay,” he blows out on a breath. “It wasn’t something we should’ve done.”
The ache in me worsens, makes me feel like I truly am about to burst.
“No, it wasn’t,” I agree.
He sniffs. “I mean, it was really…um….”
The soft drop of his tone doesn’t help me piece together the rest of his sentence.
He could be trying to reiterate that it was horrible of us to give in to those kisses, or he could be trying to admit that despite how horrible we were, giving in felt like glimpsing perfection.
Both things would be true.
“Yeah,” I say. “I…I know.”
“But it can’t happen again.”
That does tell me where his sentence would’ve gone, and it makes my stomach swoop.
“You and Theo—I can’t lose you. Please—” his cracking voice hurts my heart, “—please tell me I haven’t lost you. I’ll do anything, Noelle. We can put this behind us. I can put how it felt behind me. I know things have been all shaken up since our accident the other night, and I know Cliff didn’t deserve this from us, but we can get back to…. Just please, please don’t push me out of your lives.”
‘I’d feel hopeless without you.’
Old words of his soar up through my memory and pierce straight through my chest.
“I’m begging you,” he finishes now, softly.
I can’t tell if forbidden affection or sweet relief is hitting me harder. There’s absolutely no fucking way to tell.
I love hearing him confirm that our stolen minute felt big to him too.
I love learning I’m not alone in wanting to get around it so we can save our friendship and do right by Cliff.
I love remembering how he spoke to me on that particular emotional night…what, a year and a half ago? When I was hurting and it made me doubt how much he cared. When he took that doubt and dissolved it.
It’s an old, yet fresh, reminder of how we have each other’s back no matter what.
Not counting that faltering moment I had, we have been at each other’s side every step of the way these last two years, no matter what, immovable, not always sure of what to do but always sure of us.
“You haven’t lost me,” I reply, fisting my free hand beneath my chi
n, wishing like hell that I could see his eyes. “Or Theo. You’ll never lose us. We could never push you away—we could never want to. There’s too much of you here.”
Whatever else he may be feeling or thinking about right now, there’s definitely relief in his huff of a sigh.
“And I agree,” I add. “We should put the other stuff behind us because it—it can’t keep going. We can’t be like that ‘cause we’re supposed to just be friends, and….”
“Yeah.”
“God, no, I can’t lose you either. I wouldn’t be right without you, Beck. Neither of us would be.”
His deep breath is audible.
I’m taking one of my own, I realize. The ocean water doesn’t seem to be blocking up my lungs so badly anymore.
“Thank you,” he tells me in a tone that is somehow gentle and ardent at the same time. “Thank you. Noelle, if you had told me to go fuck myself, my heart would’ve—would’ve just—”
I nod with matching ardor, remembering my brief fear from earlier. “I know. That’s me too. Thank you too.”
“Of course. Christ, I…. Of course.”
Silence falls between us once again.
In a way, it’s lighter than it was at the start of our call. But in another way….
It’ll just take some adjusting to, I tell myself. What he and I got ourselves into can’t be erased from our memories, but we can settle it and get back to the way things used to be. It’ll take time, but we can do it.
I find comfort in that.
Briefly.
Then Ceceli’s words come barreling through it.
‘Hearts heal. And they don’t go back to the way they were before whatever it was that broke them—they heal into something different.’
My pulse is leaping again, the emotion to blame unnamable.
She said my heart and Beckett’s heart healed into something different together.
And I can’t help wondering, for a few seconds that halt my breathing, if there is any way to go back to how things were before we cared about each other like this, or if….
I can’t dive any further into it than that.
“Do you wanna stop by at some point and see Theo?” I find myself blurting out. “Of course I don’t expect you to wanna hang out. I know things with us are…uh…. But she asked about you when she woke up, and I told her you left to do something and you’d come back later sometime. And I guess I shouldn’t have said that without asking you, so—”
“No, it’s fine,” he cuts in reassuringly. “That was a good thing to say. Yeah, I’d love to come see….”
Even though his sentence trails off, I know what the end of it is.
‘You.’
‘I’d love to come see you.’
I know, just know, he stopped himself from saying he would love to see us—Theo and me, not just her.
Part of me is glad he didn’t voice it. The rest of me wishes he had.
Tangled feelings notwithstanding, I really couldn’t bear to lose him. Delighting in spending time together is a big part of what we have.
“We would love to see you,” I say back to him.
I know he had to have been hit as hard by everything as I was, so I’m sure he’s not smiling, because I’m not smiling. Still, I can feel his muscles loosening all the way from here. I swear I can.
“Me too,” he replies. His voice is finally a little warmer than it was before. “Both of you.”
There it is.
Oh, my pulse.
And I’m not even looking at him, not even standing in the spotlight of his gaze, not even being faced with the temptation to touch him…not being forced to remember….
It won’t be easy.
We’ll have to adjust to this, yes.
But this isn’t the first time we’ve had to get used to a difficult change.
And just like before, we can do it.
Just like before, we have to.
- 16 -
B E C K E T T
one year and nine months ago
I’m sure she’s fine.
I’m sure she’s fine.
I’m sure she’s fine.
Feels like I’ve said this to myself two hundred times already, but it’s not sticking.
Noelle was supposed to come to my place over an hour ago, and she never did. I don’t know what’s up because she isn’t answering my calls or texts.
It has made the tremors in my hands and the twist in my stomach even worse than they already were.
Not hearing from her has done nothing but worsen how I’ve felt about today being Cliff’s birthday.
She and I planned to spend time together after she took Theo to her parents’ house at noon. We don’t have anything on our itinerary other than being near each other, but that doesn’t matter. Being together has been like a safety blanket for both of us since we lost him, even if we end up crying, even if we just sit in silence because talking is either too hard or simply not necessary. And when we aren’t with each other in person, we often text; lately, we’ve also gotten in the habit of sharing nightly phone calls. Every little bit of togetherness matters to us.
This is one of those days when it matters extra.
Though we’ve only dragged ourselves through half of this day, I feel like it has gone on for much longer, and I’m certain she does too.
I need to be around her.
I’m supposed to be around her already.
What if something happened to her?
The worrisome thought prods at me, unsettles me that much more.
I try to shake it off.
I’m sure she’s fine.
I’ll soon find out, because I’m on the way to her and Cliff’s place.
I mean, her place.
Cliff isn’t there anymore.
In some ways, I’m still getting used to remembering that—even though he’s been gone for two months, it’s hard to grasp sometimes.
All of this has been so.
Fucking.
Hard.
Nothing in my life has ever been as hard as losing him, and that includes growing up with parents who hated and hurt me damn near every day of my life.
Two months without Cliff. Two months of struggling.
Sure, Noelle and I have been leaning on each other, and being able to do that has been invaluable, but there’s no escaping the pain. Not really. It lies in waiting. It bursts out without warning. It rests in the golden hair my honorary niece got from her dad, and in songs we hear that he used to like, and in strangers who bear a passing resemblance to him, and in things we unthinkingly say that remind us of him a sharp second later, and in driving past places he enjoyed going and will never, ever go again.
It has screamed through every hour of this day—the day he would’ve turned twenty-six—and will continue to do so because fuck, fuck, he should be here celebrating, laughing, smiling, partying.
He should be alive.
It’s not right that he’s not alive anymore.
His was not the kind of soul the world needed to be rid of. The nonprofit organization he worked for to help underprivileged kids look for brighter futures—they and everyone else needed so much more of what he had to offer. His kindness, his patience, his belief in being good no matter…no matter what ever….
I blink hard at the tears nagging my eyes, swallow at the pain in my throat. They can’t show up right now. I’m driving, which is nerve-wracking enough after the wreck.
God, I hope Noelle will be home and be safe.
Maybe she fell asleep on accident?
What else could’ve happened, right?
The worry prods at me again.
But I’m sure she’s fine.
She’s probably fine.
Except, ‘What else could’ve happened?’ is a stupid question because I know everyday nightmares befall people all the time. It’s precisely what happened to Cliff.
My stomach twists up even more—so hard it sends a reverberating pang through the rest of me
.
I hate the thought of something happening to her.
Cliff died in a horrifying rush of unfairness, and the same could happen to any of the rest of us, including Noelle.
I hate that thought.
I’m nearly sickened by—God, no, not even just sickened—I’m nearly crippled by that thought.
And it’s swirling up fast now, making me feel short of breath, making my hands sweat around the steering wheel.
What if she got hurt somehow?
What if she has needed help for the last hour and I didn’t know because I thought she was just late getting to my apartment and had her phone calls and messages silenced?
Did I realize too late that I needed to take things into my own hands?
What if something killed her too?
I’m swallowed by a crushing flood of possibility—another car accident, or something health-related, or a gas leak in the duplex, or someone robbing her at gunpoint at a gas station.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
I’m mere moments from being a totally panicked mess by the time I come into view of that very duplex—
—and oh, thank fuck. Her car is in the driveway. It’s not out on some road in shreds.
“Thank you,” I huff out to heaven. One nightmare checked off the list.
My legs are wobbly once I’m out of my car, but they still haul me up to her door in record time. Even with my muscles tired from tension, I knock insistently.
“Noelle?” I call out. My voice sounds tense too.
I wait.
My heart pounds.
My breaths won’t come.
I wait more.
I knock again.
Nothing happens.
Nothing happens for too many forever-long seconds.
And the lack of response makes my bones ache.
Spikes of worry dig into me so hard I want to cry out.
“Noelle!” I bang on the door with my fist now. “Are you in there? For the love of—”
The metallic sound of locks being turned sends my already-fast heartbeat dashing off with wild hope.
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