Five Years Later
“It smells awesome in here, Auntie Sean,” Sophie says, blasting through my kitchen to investigate the source.
Her backpack hangs off one shoulder; she’s just gotten off the school bus, and as is rapidly becoming tradition, decided to stop at my place instead of carrying her scrawny behind home.
She lifts the lids on the pots on my stovetop to take a peek at the gumbo bubbling inside and makes a show of drawing a deep breath, and I cluck at her from the sink, where I’m washing my dishes.
“Does your momma know you’re here?” I ask, wiping my hands off on a kitchen towel.
Sophie rolls her eyes. It still stuns me how much she’s grown in the last few years, shooting up from being a skinny preteen I could hoist in my arms to a tall young woman who has to tilt her chin down to look at me.
“Duh,” she says. “Where else would I be?” She pulls out her phone, sending a text to what I assume is her family group chat. “I’m telling Mom you’re making gumbo, and that there’s enough for all of us.” She pauses. “Mom is asking if Steve can come too.”
I sigh, as if I hadn’t made an entire lobster pot’s worth anticipating an impromptu dinner party.
“Sure,” I say, “Steve can come too.”
Five years ago, when I made it back home to Chicago after escaping imprisonment and multiple near-death experiences, it became apparent that I couldn’t continue my life as if nothing had changed.
As if I hadn’t almost lost my life and didn’t lose my greatest love.
I’d needed a change of scenery and change of pace.
A quick search for interventional cardiology jobs landed me at a practice on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
Within a month, I’d put in my notice, signed on a fixer-upper, and made the move.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when Winona and Sophie followed three months later.
Winona finally sold her house and met her boyfriend almost immediately upon touching New England soil.
Steve is a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, owns a successful construction company, and he’s been obsessed with my girl since helping her take her carry-on out of the overhead compartment after landing at Boston Logan.
Our little, strange family, spread out amongst three homes, all less than a quarter mile apart: Winona and Sophie in their cozy duplex, Steve in the apartment complex a few streets down, and me, myself, and my three-year-old hound mix, Copper.
The pace is slow and easy here. The town is just big enough to not be smothering, just small enough that I run into my patients in the grocery store. The air tastes fresh, like the sea, and before he passed, I could take Onix on car rides to the beach.
Sophie sneaks a sip of my gumbo, then exclaims when she burns her tongue. We laugh, and she heads out my door.
“I’ll be back in…two hours?” she says.
“You’ll be back whenever you feel like it and we both know it,” I tease.
Sophie flashes me a gap-toothed, million-wat smile.
“We sure do!” she says. She swings the door shut, and I am back in my silence. I check the stove, then wander to my living room.
There’s a baby grand here. It’s not a brand-new Steinway like the one in Alphonse and Mary’s home, or a vintage Bosendorfer like Julian’s, but a used Yamaha with a crisp sound that echoes along my walls.
I lift my fallboard and play a song from memory, and when I close my eyes, I can almost feel him there, the warm press of his arm wedged against mine, his left hand playing bass, my right covering treble.
I start off humming the melody, and then the hums turn to words.
Copper plods to my feet and joins in, howling along, and I laugh out loud and ache in a way that most of the time I’ve been able to ignore.
The thing about grief is that you can’t quiet it. It lives in the corners of your mind, looming, jumps out when you least expect it to remind you of your loss. And the person I lost is still living. I chose to push him away.
My doorbell rings. It chimes through the house, and I sniffle and wipe the tears from the corners of my eyes. It’s probably Sophie again, coming to ask whether she can do her homework at mine just to maximize her chance at a meal.
“That was quick,” I call out. “Seriously, nugget, at some point I’m going to start charging you rent—”
The person behind the door is not my seventeen-year-old goddaughter.
He’s tall and well hewn, with broad shoulders and long legs.
His hair is shorn, and his beard is trimmed and neat.
His features are a clash of masculine and feminine: a strong jaw, chiseled cheekbones paired with doelike lashes, full lips that I know are plush to the touch.
He smiles down at me, and slight crow’s feet form at the corners of his eyes.
“Hello again, Sean,” Julian says. “Is now an okay time?”
My heart thunders. I don’t know what to do with my hands, and so they curl together.
I want to tell him that there has never not been an okay time.
That I’ve tried to forget him, to scrub him from my mind, but that he sits somewhere in a layer I can’t reach under my skin, marking me like a tattoo.
That I hate that he disappeared from my life, but also that I’m glad he was gone, because the one I’ve made in his absence is so peaceful and calm and I would trade nothing else for it.
That even still, I’ve waited, and hoped, that he’d disrupt it.
That I didn’t even try to meet anyone else, because I knew that there could be no one else.
“Hello again, Julian.”
We smile at each other, and it feels like home.
He steps in close. “May I?”
I nod, and he cups my cheek. My skin burns at his touch, and I shudder, see him tremble too. All this time, and he’s still the only person to make me feel this way.
Suddenly there’s a sensation. Brisk, cool, like a sea breeze. The ache in my right knee from a torn meniscus last year disappears. The tension in the back of my neck eases.
“Oh,” I whisper, clutching his wrist to hold him to me. “Oh. Julian…how did you…when…?”
“It’s like Rose said.” He smiles. “I had to want to. More than anything else in the world.”
For a moment we’re silent; all I can do is take him in. He folds his bottom lip into his mouth, nervous under my appraisal.
“I know I just showed up out of nowhere. Is there…do you have…”
I know what he’s asking, and I duck my head, just a bit shy.
“No, I’m not with anyone,” I confess. “You?”
“Five years sober over here,” he says, and we beam at each other, unspoken words passing between us. I still love you. I never stopped. I’ve thought about you every day since.
“So…” I say. “What’s the plan? You just dropping by?”
“No, actually.” He looks down at me intently, his expression tender and beseeching all at once. “I was hoping to stay a while. See whether New England is more my speed.”
I turn my head until my nose nuzzles into his palm. He’s favoring herbal scents these days; I inhale notes of rosemary and sage, pine and freshly tilled soil, like the earth after a rainstorm.
“The gang is coming over for dinner tonight, if you want to join,” I say.
“The same folks?” he asks.
“Plus one, minus another,” I inform him. “Winona’s bringing her boyfriend, and Onix passed a few years ago. You’ll meet Copper in a second.”
Julian nods, looks around. His eyes shine, and he opens his mouth to say something, then closes it again. When he finally speaks, it’s around a voice thick with emotion.
“It’s been a long time,” he confesses. “I…don’t know where to start.”
I laugh, even as my heart swells in my chest.
“You can start by not letting all my heat out,” I say, and at the invitation, he bites back a smile.
I step aside, open the door wide to let him in, and without another word between us, I know that the goodbye we shared so many years ago in that cabin was our last. That this moment has marked the beginning of Julian’s new, beautiful, wonderfully finite life, and mine too.