Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Elias
The decision came gradually, then all at once.
It was a Thursday in late February, the kind of day when winter had overstayed its welcome.
Everyone in Maren walked with their shoulders hunched against a wind.
I had walked to the library, a route that took me past the high school I no longer attended.
The windows were bright with people who were still moving through the motions of their lives.
I had learned not to look at things that reminded me of what I was supposed to be doing.
In the library I sat at a table in the back corner and opened one of Nana's recipe journals.
I had been carrying them with me more often, all four volumes in a canvas bag that had belonged to Pop, the strap worn soft from years of use.
I was not reading for content. I was reading for her voice, the particular cadence of her notes in the margins, the way she described things she loved.
The honey must be buckwheat, she had written beside a cake recipe. The dark kind, almost bitter. The sweetness needs something to push against.
I sat with that for a long time, my finger tracing the words, until the librarian's voice came over the intercom announcing closing in fifteen minutes. I packed the journals carefully and walked home through the dark.
Vera was in the kitchen when I came in, standing at the counter with her back to me, her phone pressed to her ear.
She turned when she heard the door, her face doing something complicated.
Relief and worry and the particular exhaustion of someone who had been waiting for something without knowing what it was.
"That was the school." She set the phone down with a click that sounded too loud in the quiet kitchen, her hand staying on it a moment after, like she was deciding something. "They're asking about your enrollment. For the spring term."
I stood in the doorway with Pop's bag heavy in my hand. The weight of the journals inside it felt like the only weight I wanted to carry. "I'm not going back." The words came out flat, and I meant them, and hearing myself say them out loud was the first thing that had felt certain in months.
"Elias." She took a step toward me, her hands lifting and then falling back to her sides, the gesture of someone who wanted to touch and didn't know where it would be welcome. "You need a diploma. You need..."
"I need to leave." I set the bag on the floor by my feet and looked at her, really looked. The lines around her eyes had deepened since December. She held herself like she was bracing for something. "I can't stay here, Vera. I can't be this anymore."
She went very still. Her mouth opened slightly, then closed, and she turned away from me toward the window above the sink.
Her reflection ghosted there in the dark glass, her hand coming up to press against her mouth.
When she turned back to face me her eyes were bright with something that had not quite become tears.
"You're eighteen. You have the inheritance.
You can legally..." She stopped and shook her head once, a small sharp movement.
"I'm not saying you should leave. I'm saying you can. If that's what you need."
"It is." I held her gaze so she could see I had thought this through, that it was not grief talking, that it was something steadier and older than grief.
She held my gaze for a long moment, her jaw working slightly. Then something in her face settled. "Okay," she said, exhaling. "Then we figure out how to do it right."
Vera was different with a task in front of her.
The practical efficiency that had handled hospital paperwork and funeral arrangements and the logistics of my arrival was now turned toward my departure.
She made lists. She called people. She sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and a notepad and worked through the steps with a focus that felt like relief to both of us.
Something concrete, where before there had only been the shapeless pressure of waiting.
The GED was first. The accident and the surgeries and the months that followed had made returning to school impossible, but I could test out.
Vera found a prep program, online and self-paced, and I sat in the guest room with the beige walls and worked through modules while she handled the other arrangements.
It was easier than I expected. My mind had always worked well with structure, with information that could be organized and retained.
I finished the coursework in six weeks and took the test on a Saturday in March, in a community center two towns over where no one knew my name.
The administrator who handed me my results was a woman with grey hair pulled back in a bun and reading glasses on a chain.
She looked from the paper to my face with an expression that was professionally impressed.
"These are excellent," she said, setting the paper on the table between us and sliding it toward me.
"You could do anything with these scores.
College, if you wanted. Technical programs."
I took the paper and folded it carefully into my pocket.
"Thank you." She opened her mouth like she wanted to say more, something encouraging or advisory, and I was already turning away, already moving toward the door and the parking lot and Vera's car waiting with the engine running.
I did not want advice about futures, I wanted the credentials that would let me leave.
The house on Carver Road sat empty through all of this.
I went there once, in early April, when the GED was done and the practical arrangements were moving forward and I could not avoid it any longer. Vera drove me. She did not ask to come inside, just sat in the car with her hands on the wheel and watched me walk up the path.
The key turned smoothly. The house smelled closed-up, the particular stillness of a place that had been left waiting.
Beneath that were the fainter traces of what had been.
Pine cleaner in the kitchen, the cedar blocks Pop kept in the closets.
Something else I could not name, the particular chemistry of their lives that had permeated the walls over thirty years.
I stood in the entryway and looked at the living room.
The couch with the worn spot on the left arm where Nana always sat.
Her pressed flower frames still along the top shelf of the bookcase.
The third stair creaked as I climbed it, exactly as it always had.
I stood in the doorway of my old bedroom and looked at the bed with the navy comforter and my textbooks still stacked on the desk where I had left them in December. I could not make myself go in.
I went back down. I walked through the kitchen and touched the counter where Nana had rolled out dough, opened the cabinet where her recipe journals had lived.
The space was empty now, the four volumes in the canvas bag at Vera's house.
I stood in the doorway of the garage and looked at Pop's tools hung in their specific order.
I felt something in my chest split open and then seal itself again, fast and automatic.
The reflex I had developed for survival.
I locked the door behind me and walked back to the car. I did not speak until we were halfway home.
"I need to sell it," I said, my voice coming out rough, unpracticed. I was looking out the window at the spring fields going past, the first green pushing through the brown at the edges. "Or rent it. I can't live there. But I can't just leave it empty."
Vera's hands tightened on the wheel and then relaxed, her knuckles going white and then returning to normal.
"I'll find someone to manage it," she said carefully, the voice she used when she was trying not to press.
"A property company. They handle renters, maintenance, all of it. You don't have to think about it."
"Thank you." I turned back to the window. The fields kept going.
She glanced at me, quick, then back at the road. "You're really going, then." Her voice had a quality I had not heard in it before, something she was working to keep level. "This isn't just... you're really leaving Maren."
"I'm really leaving." I said it quietly and felt the truth of it settle. Not a decision anymore. A fact.
She nodded, a small movement, and her jaw tightened in the way that meant she was holding something back.
Some objection or feeling she did not know how to offer and I did not know how to receive.
We drove the rest of the way in silence.
When we got back Trent was standing in the kitchen with a beer in his hand and he looked at me with an expression I could not read and did not try to.
The weeks after that had a different quality to them.
The decision was made and Vera knew it and even Trent seemed to sense that the situation had changed, that I was no longer waiting but moving toward something, however undefined.
Vera set a departure date with me at the kitchen table one evening, practical as always, writing it on the calendar on the wall like an appointment.
I looked at the circled number and felt, for the first time in months, that time was moving in a direction.
Coming off the suppressants was doctor's orders.
Dr. Ansley had mentioned it in one of our follow-up conversations, her reading glasses pushed up onto her forehead, her eyes steady and direct in the way she was direct about everything.
"Your system needs to regulate," she said, folding her hands on the desk between us.
"The suppressants were necessary post-surgery, but long-term, your body will be healthier if it finds its natural cycle. When you're ready."