66. September 18, 2202 Winchester, Massachusetts
Oliver sleeps fitfully in the darkness. Beatrix can’t. She rises from his bed and goes to the window across from it, pushes the heavy curtain aside. The last stars of twilight fade, disappearing into the coming dawn.
“Good morning,” Oliver says from the bed. He sounds unsure, like he shouldn’t say those words on this day. His last full day. His face is etched with agony and exhaustion.
Beatrix burrows into the blankets next to him. “Not yet,” she says. “The sun won’t rise for another three minutes.”
His mouth lifts at the corner. “Why do you know that? Did you become a meteorologist while I was gone?”
She swallows the lump that has risen in her throat. “I thought we could have one more adventure together. One more thing we’ve never done.”
He musters a smile, so weary and pained it makes her want to cry. “What is it?”
She props her chin on his chest. “Watch the sunrise and the sunset on the same day.”
He lays a gentle kiss on her forehead. “I’d love that.”
They watch the sun break the horizon through the glass. Oliver clutches her hand. “I don’t want to go,” he says, to her, to the universe, to anyone who will hear his plea.
She squeezes it. “You still have time.”
Hours.
She shoves the thought away, but it lurks in the shadows of her mind, injects every other thought with its poison. This is it.
“I brought you something,” she says. She rolls over and reaches for her bag, tossed on the floor next to the bed. She rummages inside. “Or should I say, I brought you something back.” She pulls out his journal.
It isn’t the same one he left in that Florida motel.
The leather cover is softer now, worn from his touch and then hers.
The corners are dog-eared, the edges of the pages discolored.
And it’s twice as thick—at least—crammed with scraps of paper and postcards scrawled with her notes, no longer the slim notebook he could slip into a coat pocket.
It isn’t his anymore. It’s theirs.
She hands it to Oliver. He runs his fingertips over the embossed cover, flips through the dotted pages. “You finished it?”
“I had time,” she says.
Oliver rolls his eyes. He smiles anyway.
He slowly turns the pages, stops when he reaches one headed with his cramped printing but filled with her neat cursive. He passes her the notebook. “Will you tell me about it?”
Beatrix glances at the page. Woodstock. Her first entry. “You would have loved it.” A pang of sadness pierces her heart at the memory of those long-ago days. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to go.”
Oliver squeezes her hand. “I’m glad you did.”
She settles against his shoulder. He doesn’t smell like Lancaut anymore. She breathes him in, real and here and now and hers. He wraps his arm around her.
She tells him about Woodstock. About living in New York City afterward. About traveling the world, following his journal, and about all the wonderful people she met and the strange adventures she had because she did.
She tells him she took a lesson at his mother’s dance studio, the day that it opened.
She tells him about the fireworks in Washington. How his father made her laugh until her sides ached, how his mother knew all the best spots to eat and rest and watch the celebration. How she can see both of them in Oliver now, saw him in both of them that day.
He gives her a weak smile. “I knew they would like you.”
She takes his hand. She tells him she was with them, at the end.
“Thank you,” he whispers. She wipes the tear from his cheek.
Beatrix talks until she is hoarse. Once, she thinks Oliver has fallen asleep, but when she stops speaking, he opens his eyes and asks her to continue. When she reaches the last tearstained page, she can barely read her own handwriting.
Oliver runs his fingers over it, smeared ink on warped paper. “What happened?”
“I ran out of hope,” Beatrix confesses.
His gaze darkens. “Then what did you do?”
She closes the notebook. “It felt like an ending. So, I began again. I went back to London.” Because she always goes back to London. “And then, I lived.” Made her own memories, beautiful and ugly and entirely hers.
She lays a gentle hand on his cheek. “I wasn’t a ghost, Oliver. I promise.”
Time has never moved so fast for Beatrix, like the River Wye swollen by spring rains, rushing, rushing, rushing away. She lies with Oliver for hours, curled around him on his bed meant for one, not speaking, not doing anything except existing with him. At the same time. In the same place.
They watch the sunset.
“Bea?” His voice is weaker now, fading with the daylight. She can still hear the fear in it.
She props her chin on his chest. “Yes?”
“I don’t think—” His voice breaks. “I can’t say goodbye to you.”
She squeezes his hand. “You don’t have to.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Beatrix runs her fingers through his messy curls. “Don’t be sorry. We don’t need to say goodbye.”
Oliver searches her mismatched eyes for answers.
“When I was writing my entries in your journal, I used to imagine every person in those pages was still there, still existing in their moments. Neil Armstrong, stepping onto the moon. Those dancers, leaping across the stage at Drury Lane. Queen Victoria visiting the Great Exhibition over and over again.”
Oliver smiles, imagining it.
“How else can you travel to those moments if they aren’t always there, waiting for you?” She lays her head on Oliver’s chest, listens to the thudding of his heart through the thin cotton of his T-shirt.
Here. Here. Here.
“I’m sure Lucy could give you some scientific explanation,” Oliver says. His voice rumbles through his chest beneath her, just like it used to. “But I like yours.” He wraps his arm around her.
“Think about all the times, all the places, we’ve been together. Dancing in the Piazza San Marco or on the frozen Thames. In my living room and through the streets of London. On a hotel balcony overlooking Paris. We will always be there.” Together, spinning across time itself.
Oliver’s eyes drift closed. A fear greater than any Beatrix has ever known tears open an abyss inside her. She presses closer to him, listens to the beat of his heart, wills her own to beat along with it. Stay with me.
“I will always be at the Globe picking your pocket,” Beatrix says softly in his ear. She waits for him to tell her she didn’t steal anything from him, that she was the only one who ever tried.
He takes a shallow breath. She clutches his hand. Stay with me.
Tears spring to her eyes as the memories flood her heart. “You will always be there, too, making the absolutely mad decision to invite the woman who pulled a knife on you to lunch.”
“Best decision of my life,” he mumbles. He doesn’t open his eyes.
She chokes out something between a laugh and a sob.
“We are still standing on the Rialto Bridge.” She strains to hold back her tears, to keep her voice steady.
“Still exploring the world under one grand glass roof. Still counting the stars over Lancaut. Always. Even when you’re gone.
” Her voice breaks. Tears spill down her cheeks, soak through Oliver’s shirt to his skin.
“You don’t have to say goodbye to me, Oliver. Because you and I will never end.”
Oliver struggles to open his eyes. When she looks into them, something in her glass heart cracks, like it knows this will be the last time. Because he knows it, too.
“No goodbyes?” he whispers.
She places a soft kiss on his forehead, kisses his lips and tastes the salt of her own tears. Of his. “Never.”
Beatrix doesn’t remember leaving Oliver’s room.
She doesn’t remember coming down the stairs or sitting on the faded sofa next to Zoe.
Doesn’t remember who put the crocheted blanket over her shoulders, though it is Theo who hands her a mug of tea, just how she likes it.
Did he ask her? Did she tell him? She wraps both of her hands around the oversize ceramic mug, lets the heat of it warm her.
It’s scalding, but she doesn’t care. This pain is different, at least.
Theo sits in the low armchair next to her. “How is he?”
“Sleeping.” That much she remembers. Remembers the panic that swelled inside her as his eyes drifted closed, the urge to wake him, to keep him with her. She takes a sip of her tea. It burns her tongue. She still feels cold and hollow, like everything has drained out of her.
There is nothing left to do but wait. Again. Still. Wait for that inevitable moment when Oliver leaves her for good. Leaves them for good. Because Zoe and Luke and Theo are all gathered in the living room with her, all drowning in their own thoughts and memories of Oliver.
He would hate to see them like this. If he were here, he’d take her hand in his or tip his forehead against hers, and he would say, Talk to me, Bea. And she would.
She swallows painfully against the lump rising in her throat.
“I picked Oliver’s pocket at the Globe. Did he tell you?
That’s how we met.” She speaks her memory into life.
It feels good to share it with the others, to make it more real.
“And when he tried to ask me to lunch, I pulled a knife on him.”
Zoe laughs. The sound is foreign in the heavy silence, too warm and bright: a ray of sunshine breaking through the storm clouds. Beatrix welcomes it.
Luke shakes his head, slouched in the far corner of the sofa across from her. “I called bullshit when he told me. No way is he brave enough for that. He said he wasn’t in any danger.”
“He didn’t think I’d use it?” Beatrix asks.
“Oh no, he did,” Zoe confirms. “He just knew that even if you stabbed him, it wouldn’t kill him.”
“I did point out that it would still hurt like hell,” Luke says.
Zoe catches Beatrix’s eye. “He said it would have been worth it.”
Beatrix shakes her head. He would say that, wouldn’t he? “Well, I didn’t stab him. We had lunch, and I overcharged him for a tour of London.”
The corners of Zoe’s lips curve, and she glances across the coffee table—cluttered with fast-food wrappers and half-empty cups—to Luke.
“I met these two at freshman orientation. I was a very high-strung freshman. I was taking way too many classes, for starters. Oliver always knew when I was stressed, when I was having a bad day, when I needed someone. It was like this weird sixth sense. I thought he was the most empathetic person I ever met. Turns out, he just knew how to count.”
Beatrix furrows her brow, missing something. Luke tries—and fails—to stifle a laugh.
Zoe rolls her eyes. “I had this bad habit of chewing on the ends of all my pencils while I worked. When I was done using them, I’d stick them in my hair. But if I got frazzled, I’d forget, find another pencil, then stick that one in my hair, too.”
“Rinse and repeat,” Luke adds.
“The more pencils in my hair, the more stressed I was. I didn’t even realize it. Oliver figured it out.”
“She got up to seven once,” Luke says.
“I was writing my thesis proposal, and let’s just say it was not going well.
Oliver stayed up all night with me in the lab until I figured it out.
He had no idea what I was talking about.
He just knew that I needed to talk it through, needed someone there to keep me going.
” Zoe’s eyes shine. “He was my someone.”
She brushes her tears away. Beatrix takes her hand and squeezes it.
“As Oliver’s oldest friend…” Luke begins.
Zoe rolls her eyes. He swallows, and his smile falters.
“I don’t know what to say. I mean, I’ve known him since we were seven.
He was my first friend when I moved here.
I truly can’t imagine what my life would have been like without him.
And I can’t imagine what it will be like when he’s gone.
” He blinks back the tears in his eyes. He glances at Theo.
“He told me once, after he lost his mom and dad, that he hated when people told him it would get better.”
“He told me that, too,” Beatrix says.
Luke nods. “He said it did get better some days. But some days, it got worse. He said it would sneak up on him out of nowhere. Every first, every milestone his parents missed, was like losing them all over again. I think that’s what the rest of my life is going to be like.
Picking up my phone, only to realize he’s not there to call. ”
Beatrix glances over at Theo. He won’t look at Luke, won’t look at any of them.
“We made the best memories together,” Luke says. His voice is hoarse. “I’m going to miss making more with him.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Zoe says, her own voice quivering. She raises her coffee mug and clinks it against Beatrix’s. They both drink.
All eyes land on Theo. He sits in the armchair next to Beatrix, his elbows resting on his knees, his gaze fixed on the worn floral rug beneath his feet. She waits for him to speak, to share some cherished memory of his brother with them; craves some new piece of Oliver to hold on to.
Theo looks at her. Oliver’s eyes, but not. “How did you get more time?”
Zoe tenses next to her. She shoots Luke a look Beatrix can’t read.
“I was scared, and I wished,” Beatrix says.
“In that case, I think Oliver has it covered. Don’t you?” Theo reminds her of William, of the way he sounded, the way he looked at her the night she died, all hurt and anger, searching for someone to blame.
“Theo.” There’s a warning edge to Luke’s voice.
“It’s fine,” Beatrix says. She understands what Theo wants, what he thinks she has. “You don’t want this life for your brother, Theo. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, let alone someone I love.”
His shoulders sag. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just—” He takes a ragged breath. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.” He looks quickly away, his eyes shining.
“Haven’t you been listening?” Beatrix asks gently.
Theo’s throat bobs, but he doesn’t answer.
“None of us do.”