Chapter Forty-Two Ready, Carefully
The visit to the cemetery came on a Saturday in the third month, unplanned in the way most of their most meaningful moments had turned out to be — Jennie simply looked up from her coffee that morning and said, “I think I want to see her today,” and Lin Xing, without needing clarification about which her, was already reaching for his keys.
They stopped at the same small flower shop as before, and this time Jennie went in with him, and came back out holding a second, smaller bundle alongside his white roses — a handful of pale, simple daisies, chosen for no reason she could fully articulate except that they’d felt right in her hands in a way nothing else on the shelf had.
Mei’s grave looked the same as it always did, quiet and well-kept, the grass around it neatly trimmed by whoever tended these older sections.
Lin Xing knelt and laid his roses down the way he did every visit, murmuring something too soft for Jennie to catch, and then, unprompted, shifted slightly to make room beside him on the grass.
“I want to tell her,” Jennie said, kneeling too. “If that’s alright. I know it isn’t really her grave to hold this. But I don’t know anywhere else to put it.”
“She’d want to hold it,” Lin Xing said, certain.
“She held everything of mine, my whole childhood. I don’t imagine that changes just because she isn’t here to do it in person anymore.
” Jennie laid the daisies beside the white roses, and pressed her palm flat against the cool grass, and spoke quietly, haltingly, about a heartbeat that had flickered once on a screen and then gone still, about a small ivory cloth stitched by a grandmother across an ocean, about a small yellow room that had learned, slowly, how to hold both grief and hope in the same four walls.
“I don’t know if you can hear any of this,” she said finally, echoing, without meaning to, the exact words Lin Xing had once spoken to a screen showing nothing but a shape too small to see.
“I wanted to tell you anyway. I think you’d have loved them.
I think you already do, somewhere, if any of this works the way I hope it does. ”
Lin Xing’s hand found hers on the grass, and they knelt there together a long while, the wind moving soft through the trees overhead exactly as it had the first time, two griefs and one enormous love sitting quietly side by side in the same small patch of ground.
“I used to think this place only held sadness,” Lin Xing said eventually, helping her up.
“I’m finding, lately, that it holds something more complicated than that. Comfort, some days.
Company, most days. I don’t think I understood, before you, that grief could ever feel like company instead of only isolation.” “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said about a cemetery.”
“I have a very narrow field of comparison.” The ghost of a smile, the first real one she’d seen from him in that particular place.
“I intend to keep coming back. Both purposes, now. I find I don’t want to separate the visits anymore.
” They drove home in a silence that felt, for the first time in months, entirely peaceful rather than heavy
— the kind of quiet two people share when they’ve said the hard thing out loud together and found it lighter for the sharing, rather than heavier.
It was that evening, dinner finished, dishes still sitting unwashed in a rare concession to simply sitting still together, that the conversation neither of them had rushed finally arrived on its own.
“Can I ask you something,” Jennie said, “and I want you to actually think about it, not just answer to make me feel better?” “Always.” “Do you think we’re ready?
To try again?” He was quiet without speaking, turning the question over with the same careful gravity he gave everything that mattered most, and Jennie made herself wait, the way she’d learned to over two years, letting him arrive at the true answer instead of the fast one.
“I think,” he said finally, “I was afraid to ask myself that same question for exactly this reason — that saying yes might feel like moving past what we lost too quickly, like it was something to be gotten over rather than carried.” He reached for her hand across the table.
“I don’t think that’s actually what it would mean. I think, if I’m honest with myself, I’ve been ready for several weeks. I’ve simply been waiting to feel less frightened before admitting it, and I’ve since concluded the fear may never fully leave. I don’t think it’s supposed to.”
“I’ve felt the same,” Jennie admitted. “Every time I let myself imagine trying again, some part of me braces immediately for it to go wrong a second time. I don’t know how to turn that off.” “I don’t think we’re meant to turn it off,” he said gently.
“I think we’re meant to carry it forward anyway. Not as something we get over. As something we simply learn to hold while we keep walking.” “Both at once,” Jennie murmured — the shape of the phrase that had become, over three months, something close to a private prayer between them.
“Both at once,” he agreed. “Fear and hope. Grief and joy. I think that might simply be what this next part of our life is going to require of us.
I find, strangely, that I’m no longer frightened of that requirement.
Only of doing it wrong.” “You won’t do it wrong,” Jennie said, with a certainty that surprised her, arriving whole and unshaken from somewhere deep enough that she trusted it completely.
“You’ve never once done any of this wrong, Lin.
Not the elephant. Not the milk. Not the proposal, not the wedding, not even this — this hardest part. You’ve done every single bit of it with your whole heart. That was never going to stop being enough.”
He brought her hand to his lips, eyes bright, and for a long moment neither of them said anything else at all — just sat together in their quiet kitchen, dishes forgotten, the small yellow room waiting patiently down the hall with its door no longer closed, its little stuffed elephant still keeping watch, a small embroidered cloth folded safe in a corner, ready, whenever the time came, to make room for whoever arrived next.
“Ready, then?” Jennie asked softly. “Carefully. Not recklessly. But ready?” Lin Xing looked at her for several seconds, everything he felt written plainly across his face the way he’d promised her, years ago now, he’d never again learn to hide.
“Ready,” he said. “Carefully. With everything we’ve learned coming with us, wherever this goes next.
” Outside, the last of the evening light faded gently over Toronto, and in a small apartment on the twelfth floor of a building neither of them had ever expected to call the whole shape of their lives, two people who had learned, the hardest way possible, exactly how much room a heart could actually hold, sat quietly together and let themselves, carefully, hope again.