What The Heart Wants

Chapter One

Ican feel my heartbeat in my ears. My throat feels like it’s closing up, but I try not to gasp for air. I run my fingers over the woven fabric of my seatbelt, trying to ground myself.

It only takes a second for your life to be changed forever.

Unfortunately for me, my life was changed on the evening of January thirteenth when my mom and I were involved in a head-on collision.

It was a typical January day in Seattle, cold and dreary.

It was one of my last days off from college before a new semester began.

It was also one of the rare days where Mom wasn’t even on-call as a practicing neurosurgeon.

We spent the entire day shopping and only stopped when we got hungry.

The snow started falling while we were enjoying our dinner, blanketing the city in soft, pure flakes.

It was a wet kind of snow that night, the kind you wish for as a kid.

The kind that makes for great snowmen and snowball fights.

We were on the way home, arguing over the radio volume when I noticed a pair of headlights heading in the wrong direction, the car sliding through a stop sign on the slushy road…

“Thea,” my aunt says, pulling me out of the memory.

“What?” I ask. I shake my head to banish the ghostly memories away. They haunt me more than I’d like to admit.

“I asked if you were hungry. The diner is just a little ways up.” She gestures out the windshield at the road in front of us.

“Oh. No, I’m okay.” I shift awkwardly in the passenger seat, trying to get comfortable. I’ve spent all day cooped up on planes and now I am crammed in Aunt Beth’s car.

Beth nods silently and keeps driving. The only sounds in the car are the hum of the air conditioner blasting and the Fleetwood Mac song coming from the stereo.

I recognize it immediately as it was one of my mother’s favorite songs.

I like to think that it’s her way of smiling down on me and approving of this cross-country move to Driftbay, South Carolina.

I brush a strand of my blonde hair out of my face as tears well in my eyes.

I blink them away as I stare out the window, willing my mind to think of something else, anything else.

I don’t want to break down here. Not here, not in front of Aunt Beth.

I don’t want to make her cry as well. She worries about me enough as it is.

I fiddle with the delicate chain around my neck; a necklace given to me by my mom for my high school graduation — a simple peridot stone, my birthstone, on a thin gold chain.

She thought it matched my eyes. She’d also said it was sophisticated and elegant and as a young woman on the verge of adulthood, that’s what I should portray.

Sophistication and elegance. Those are not the words I would use to describe myself. I am messy and clumsy, a catastrophe compared to my mother.

By eighteen, she had her life figured out. She knew what she wanted and she went after it. She never fully put down roots until she had me. She always used to say that I grounded her, in more ways than one. Part of me always wondered if she ever resented me for that.

At twenty, I still don’t know what I want to do with my life — a far cry from my mother’s preparedness in her own.

I have spent the last six months trying to rebuild my life.

I left college, unable to continue on with the amount of grief that now consumes me.

I lost nearly all of the new friends I’d made after that.

Sure, they checked in at the beginning, but slowly and surely the texts and calls stopped coming.

My friends from high school are spread out all across the country and sent their condolences, but the only one that really stood by me has been my best friend, Ireland.

Everyone worries about you in the beginning but it’s the middle that could use some work.

It was within those six months that I decided to move across the country and live with my mom’s sister, my aunt Beth Ann, in the quiet, coastal town of Driftbay.

She has welcomed me with open arms, having no spouse or children of her own.

In a matter of weeks, I cleaned out our apartment in Seattle and packed up my life.

I need a fresh start and Beth’s beachside escape seems like the perfect place to get it.

Miles of coast pass before me, peaceful and serene.

This is exactly what someone like me needs — a quiet, gentle place to unpack the tumultuous storm of grief rumbling within.

Seattle took so much from me; it chewed me up and spit me back out in nothing flat.

Continuing college just feels like too big a mountain to climb at the moment, so my plan for the upcoming future…

well, to be honest, I don’t really have one.

When you go from an honors student to flunking out, you have to take stock of the damage you’ve created and pump the brakes.

I just want to live. Or at least find a reason to again. Sometimes I feel guilty for making it out alive when my mother didn’t. She was a world-renowned surgeon, a gift to others, a lifesaver, and I’m just…me.

Beth hits the turn signal and makes a left off the freeway.

I focus my breathing on matching the chirp of her turn signal — in and out.

We drive a little ways further and she makes another left before pulling off the road onto a gravel driveway.

She drives up to her house, a quaint, white cottage at the edge of the beach.

Her backyard is miles of sandy shoreline.

The cottage is small, but from the few times I’ve been inside it, it’s plenty big enough for the two of us.

She shuts the engine off and we sit in silence for a few moments before she turns to me, sliding her sunglasses on top of her head through her dark brown hair. There’s gray in the front strands, cruel evidence of time passing.

“Welcome back,” she says, her light blue eyes sparkling. She smiles at me and I offer a weak one back. “It’s not much, but it’s home,” she adds as she opens her car door.

The cottage and porch are a weathered white, with obvious patches of paint chipping and peeling on the porch. Weeds have taken over the narrow flower bed around the edge of the steps; Aunt Beth never could be bothered to get her hands in the dirt.

“It’s perfect,” I say as I open my door, hopping out to stretch my legs.

It may look a little rough around the edges, but to me, it’s welcoming and cozy.

The kind of place that’s lived in. I take a deep breath in, letting the salty air fill and stretch my lungs.

I feel the anxiety dissolve as I take another deep breath.

It feels nice to be out of the car and moving around.

I follow Aunt Beth to the back of her small sedan and help retrieve the last of my belongings.

She lugs my bigger suitcase around the cottage and up the porch steps.

As she unlocks the back door, I grab my duffle bag and shut the trunk.

Memories of the past play out in front of me as I follow in her steps to the back porch.

"Do you ever pull your weeds?” Mom asks as she carries a bag to the porch, eyeing the overgrown vegetation around the base.

Aunt Beth smiles at us from the top step. “I don’t really have time for that,” she says.

“Of course not,” Mom laughs. “I forgot you live at the diner.” She trudges up the steps of the porch.

“Like how you live at the hospital?” Beth retorts.

“It’s nice to see you, too,” Mom says before she and Aunt Beth wrap each other in a bear hug. Then they both turn to me and open their arms wide.

“You coming?” Beth calls over her shoulder and the memory vanishes.

I follow after her and the screen door slams behind me as we walk into the house.

Beth tosses her keys into a bowl on the small, thin wooden table in the entryway before she points to her right. “The kitchen is over here.”

I trip over the navy rug in front of the door and regain my footing, awkwardly shuffling my duffle bag.

“I remember,” I say, finding my voice again. I feel a timid smile creep along my face. I glance in its direction. The late-afternoon sunlight is streaming in through the sheer white curtains hanging above the sink. A small wooden table and four green-upholstered chairs sit in the corner.

“Right.” Beth smiles again. “Of course.”

I can tell she is a bit anxious, as well.

I think back to the times Mom and I visited her when I was a kid.

We didn’t get out here that often. My mother barely had time to raise a child — by herself, I might add — let alone take a vacation across the country.

She was a workaholic, in simplest terms. Aunt Beth is the same in her own way.

She claims she is a free spirit and doesn’t want to be tied down by a traditional nine-to-five.

So of course, she also chose a job with almost no days off.

The diner could survive without her but I know her well enough to know that she can’t stand to be away from her routine and regulars for more than a couple of days.

She leads me past the living room, another room full of white.

There’s a flatscreen television hanging above the fireplace mantle, along with built-in bookshelves full of all sorts of novels.

A fluffy, white couch sits in the center of the room and I see another door in the corner, leading to Beth’s bedroom.

We head down a small hallway, towards the back of the house to the guest bedroom. It’s a decent enough space — big windows overlooking the coast framed by sheer, white curtains, and stark white walls. A lot of white. I can do anything I want with it, she tells me.

I can’t help but think that Driftbay is the bedroom in the floor plan of my life — fresh and full of possibilities.