Chapter 44
Bex
The day after the marathon, we limp back to my dad’s house to continue packing. A full day is spent on Jessie’s endless closet and my dad’s smaller one. A second day is devoted to the basement.
Theo returns to London, the buzz about our show begins, and shortly thereafter, Baby Makes Three—complaining about us all the while—announces they’re branching into selling supplements because travel is “a dying industry.”
They know they’ve lost. Even a few of their followers say as much, though most of those followers are me and Katrina.
When Theo gets back to New Jersey, the bulk of the work is done.
What remains is the hardest part: Bronwyn’s room.
I can’t bring myself to throw out all her awards and diplomas and mementos, so we’re putting them in storage instead.
But even going through them tears me up inside because my god, she had so much potential and worked so hard, and I hate that it all came to nothing.
Theo nods patiently as I show him her awards and explain what they were for. I know he has his own thoughts about all this, but he didn’t know her. She didn’t win all these things at my expense. She was entirely in the dark because that was where I wanted her to be.
“Look at this,” he says, handing me a piece of paper with a photo taped to the top. It’s me and Bronwyn at some summer camp we attended as kids, wearing matching teal camp T-shirts and popsicle-stained grins, her blond head leaning against my darker one.
Beneath it is a fill-in-the-blank form. She says her favorite food is pizza, her favorite movie is Frozen, her favorite show is Wizards of Waverly Place. Her best friend, she says, is “my sister.”
Me.
She thought of me as her sister, even back then, and it’s taken me all these years to realize it was true.
She was the best sister anyone could have asked for. I wound up silencing myself just to make sure Jessie would stay, but that wasn’t her fault. It was mine and Jessie’s.
And aside from the way it all ended, I would not change a thing.
· · ·
The realtor is bringing in new furniture to stage the house for resale, so aside from the beds, all the stuff is donated by week’s end. On our final day in New Jersey, Theo helps me load my bags into the car and locks the door behind us.
I might never step inside this house again, but maybe that’s okay. I was always treated like an interloper or unwanted guest here, and even the good memories come with a bitter aftertaste.
I’m ready to create new memories, happy ones. I’m fairly certain they’ll come easily with Theo.
We’ve got some time before we need to be at the airport, so I ask him to stop at the cemetery on the way there.
“You want me to come?” he asks, sliding his fingers through mine once he’s pulled into the parking lot.
I shake my head. “I’m okay. It’ll just take a second.”
I walk through the field, the one where I first saw Theo and first kissed Theo, and stop in front of the graves.
I still miss them. I always will. It will never stop seeming unfair.
But their tragedies led me to a job I’m excited about and best of all they led me to Theo, a man willing to tell the whole world how he feels even if it terrifies him and who’ll miss me when I’m gone. I can’t wish those things away.
I step in front of my father’s grave first.
I miss him. I miss the sound of him making coffee in the morning and his dumb dad jokes and his boring tomato facts. I still haven’t grasped that I will never get these things again. I’m not sure I’ll ever grasp it.
He was misguided, but he had good intentions. I wish we’d been able to discuss these things in person, but this will have to do.
“I know why you were worried about Theo, but you were wrong,” I whisper.
“You were wrong about him, and you were wrong about me. I will never get to hear you say you’re proud of me.
I wish I had. But I also don’t need to hear it anymore.
I’m proud of myself. I’m proud enough for both of us.
And I want you to know that I’m going to be okay. ”
Jessie is next. All the things I’ve been thinking about saying to her get stuck in my throat as I kneel in the grass before her grave.
“Jessie, you were wrong about so many things, perhaps even everything. You really fucked up. For almost two decades, you really fucked up, and you nearly ruined me in the process, but you know what? I’m gonna let this one go.”
I’ve saved Bronwyn for last, because this one’s the hardest. I take a seat in the damp grass because it’ll take a while.
“I have so much to tell you,” I whisper, just the way I used to. When we’d curl up on the couch during winter break, after a semester apart, and fill each other in on finals and boys and friend drama.
And then I swallow hard, trying to stop the sting of tears. Because we won’t be taking turns here.
She’s never going to tell me about a boy she just met. She’s never going text me after her first day at a new job, or because Jessie said something insane. She isn’t going to send me a photo of a positive pregnancy test or my new niece wrapped in a hospital blanket.
“I’m married. You’d like him, though not in the way you thought you would.
We’re going sand-skiing in Peru for our honeymoon this winter, which you’d have hated.
And I’m moving to London. You were right, by the way.
They don’t say cheerio anymore.” My voice cracks. “Maybe I’ll bring it back in style.”
This is getting hard. That ache is building in my chest, that wave of grief.
It isn’t the same as whispering on the couch.
“I miss all the stories you’d have told me. I miss having you there to hear mine too. And there’s never going to be a big moment of my life without that half second of wishing I could share it with you. Without a little emptiness when I remember I can’t.”
I bury my face in my hands and take a shuddering breath. “That’s enough about me, for now,” I conclude.
My eyes sting when I can finally face her headstone again.
The life ahead of me is big and bright, and I wish she was going to be a part of it.
All I can say, nearly a year after her death, is that the world was lucky to have her for twenty-four years, and I was so unbelievably lucky to get her for eighteen of them.
“You were the best sister I ever could have asked for,” I whisper, my voice rough. “I wish I’d told you sooner.”
I press my lips to the top of her grave and then I stand, brushing the grass from my jeans.
I turn toward my husband, currently leaning against the hood of his car with a sort of hopefulness in his eyes that wasn’t there last winter.
This graveyard I’m crossing to reach him is the space between two tectonic plates, the half second of lag between one scene of a trailer and the next.
The people in this graveyard are an old story, a sad one.
But he’s the next chapter, my next chapter, bright as the sun.
And I can’t wait for it to begin.