CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Once I started, I couldn’t stop. It took me more than an hour to make the short drive back to the cabin.
I stopped on the side of the road three times, my head slumped over the steering wheel, my body absorbing aftershocks of mindless grief.
It wasn’t all because of Penn. My body had been waiting to spill a hundred stored-up things for too long.
A boy, though—that one—had been my undoing.
His words and the space he kept between us ran a knife into a secret spot, so hidden, I’d forgotten my own way into it.
By the time I parked under the same tree that always left the white Ford dusted with pollen, I’d stopped crying enough to go forward. My eyes and cheeks had swollen to new sizes. I kept sucking air into my nose in short bursts that matched the shallow panting of my lungs.
“Vivian!” I called once I’d hopped from the cab. I didn’t know what I would possibly say to her. I simply needed my tía.
I tried two more times. No answer came from her usual places. The workshop was closed and silent, but the red Camaro was still there. And I knew she was still nearby. More than her promise to stay as long as I needed her, I felt the surety of her presence as something more than a watchful spirit.
That thought was an unexpected balm. I smiled the way you do over a welcome summer rainstorm and let my head tip backward.
Emotion hadn’t totally cleared out; it lurked behind my tear ducts and my battered chest wall.
One tiptoe thought, one too-sweet thing could send another trail of tears over my cheeks.
The most potent trigger was the tickticktick of a second hand.
But this one didn’t haunt my memory. I glanced down and saw that I was living it in real time.
Penn had fallen asleep when I needed him most.
In seconds, I could tell the boy who more than knew me all about our real-life visit. He’d say a thousand sorrys. He’d draw a thousand kisses over my forehead, my wounds. He would appear and look at me just that way, and I would tumble into him, so much, I could even forget I was dying.
Because I was dying. Even Patrick “Penn” Gerrity could not change that truth. But he could be my . . . escape.
There on the Bearberry Creek porch, frigid tears tumbled again over this one word. My fingers pinched the golden watch crown. (Bring him, just bring him.)
But I stopped. An invisible force around my arm quivered (a cure, a shot of adrenaline into withering veins). I stared into the champagne dial, and for the first time, I saw more than hour markers. I wasn’t looking at a portal. It was my own reflection. Sylvie Christina Castellano.
And yes, I was dying. But the girl in the crystal face wanted to live while she was still this much alive.
She wanted to be free of those too-heavy resentments she’d let pile up for years.
And she finally understood what her tía had sensed, that her Perfect Triangle hadn’t solely been about reaching for the future.
It had really been about plotting an escape.
But escape didn’t always bring freedom. She realized she couldn’t wrap the entirety of hers around a beautiful, curious boy. His magic only reached so far. She’d have to find freedom for herself.
I’d have to find it for me.
Motion gripped my limbs. I kicked off my shoes and socks.
My bare feet padded across the lot, passing old trees and the massive workshop until they stopped at the creek.
With jeans rolled to my knees, I waded into the rustling water, deeper and deeper.
My eyes blurred over the moving current, smudging out the motion of ripping away all my bandages.
My wounds split open. I would leave this bleeding part of myself here and the broken truth of who I really was.
The truth of how I’d lived (not lived) for too long. It was time to stop escaping it.
My head pounded, temple to temple. For weeks I had been so jaded and numb, I’d missed so many signs of death. Tía Viv had missed those changes at first, but she had a better excuse. My beautiful tía had been so busy living. I had come to Sacred already dying.
Bitterness was a blackened cloud I’d dragged across all my skies. I’d lined my insides with the phantom shape of it, thinking it would protect me. Instead—-
Bitterness had been killing me from the inside out. But now I was dying from the outside, everywhere.
I screamed again and again. Repressed pain twisted through my muscles and strained arteries. (I imagined them so thin now, my heart hanging by remnants.) I pinched my eyes shut and let memory come. And I let myself feel.
The hurt over my parents’ absences. The wall they’d kept between me and their life at sea. My friends abandoning the years-old idea of “us” so quickly when they’d discovered a heart-place I couldn’t be part of.
These situations needed real talk. Instead, I had tucked them deep inside, covering them with mantras about me not needing to care. Hiding an escape plan inside a Perfect Triangle. But I was wrong; letting things out and working through them was the only way to set them free. To set myself free.
Faster than Penn had ever come or gone, a spark of light broke over the surface of the creek.
Pain flowed downstream with my tears and all the tricks I’d pulled to pretend I didn’t care.
Those tricks were illusions. Because I did care.
I did hurt. But I didn’t have to hold so much of it.
I didn’t have to escape from it either. Live through it. A new mantra.
My lungs opened as I imagined my parents and my friends—the good and healthy parts of us. My spine and arms and legs loosened. I wished I could leave some words behind for them. But I would have to hold on to those words of love instead and keep them just for me.
But my heart was the last holdout. I couldn’t help it; I reached for Penn. The second hand still moved. Tickticktickticktick. It wasn’t too late. Penn could still be here and see and know me. Just a few turns of that golden crown—so easy.
My heart lurched when I stopped myself again. I hadn’t wanted easy when I’d stood in front of Penn for real. I’d only wanted the real part. I still did. Only now, I could call the feeling what it really was. I could say it like a name I’d only just learned. Love.
It was a word I always held back, afraid to say it and end up all the way broken when it died. But my heart’s escape plan had also failed. I’d built it believing that love could be doled out and measured, little by little. (Keep some back for next time. Save it, withhold it.)
I was wrong about this too, because here was my own heart—finally allowed to be shattered like handblown glass.
The pain was all things, everywhere. But true love was all things, everywhere too—an entire forest. An ocean filling children’s sand pails and its own boundaries, day after day, and never running dry.
Love might end. It might say, No, not yet. But it would never run out.
I sensed an imperceptible shift then. I didn’t hear her approach, and she didn’t call for me like she had so many times during my childhood.
You’re going to be late for practice!
It’s time for dinner!
I knew that when I turned and stepped up the creek bank, she’d be there, skirting the imaginary line between the cabin grounds and the mouth of the woods. Today she didn’t stride out smiling—ready to sand and cut and shape. Everything slowed and stilled around her, and she didn’t move at all.
As I wiped my eyes dry and crept forward, I knew she would have stayed right there if that was what I asked of her.
This person who had never broken a promise.
This tía who’d never been late for a pickup or too busy for a bedtime story.
Vivian had lived a big, big life, yet she’d never let me get lost in it.
Weeks ago, I told Penn that I wanted to be able to choose when people come and go. But sometimes, you can’t. Sometimes, the choice is already made for you. And you just have to accept it.
When Abuelo Castellano was dying, he held on until we could get to the hospital and say goodbye. But that waiting was for us, not him. And while I could keep my tía here for another day, or ten, those hours would be for me and not her.
Now as I reached her, and clasped her hands into mine, they were warm.
Everything about her was heat and sunlight and brightness.
The gleam in her eyes, the lit glow of her cheeks.
Muscles new and young. Her stance strong and wiry.
As I drew her in close, energy buzzed beneath her skin with the power of elsewhere.
I didn’t know what form my own deathbed would take. A bridge, a bench, my bed with a sleeping cat curled at my feet? But that was not true about Vivian. Hers stood only yards away, green and lush. And there I was, bent over the edge of it like I’d been at my abuelo’s bedside.
And so I said, “I know what you have to do, Tía.”
Only now did a tinge of unease sweep across her face. Her hand made a fist. “I can’t, not when you still need me. I won’t leave you.”
A stream of tears trickled over my cheeks as I shook my head. “You’re not leaving me. I’m letting you go.” The edges of my words shook, but I stayed solid. An oak tree in the wind. “Just let me let you go. I’m going to be okay.”
“Oh, mi amor.” Emotion pooled around her eyes. But her mouth drew up in a blurred line, as if she were proud. “Te amo, mucho.”
“Te quiero,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. But I can’t follow you right now.” No, not yet. I cut a glance to the looming forest. “You said I would know the next step, and there’s something I need to do first.”
She nodded. “Then let me leave you with this. All those cajas I made—it’s a lovely thing to have a secret place to hold your wishes and dreams. But there comes a time when you need to set them free and see where they fall.
You have to take that risk with your heart.
No matter how long you have left here. That is living. ”
She reached to frame my shoulders.
“Wherever your next steps take you, I’ll be right there. You might not see me, but I will always be with you. I promise.”
Tía Vivian never broke her promises.
This was the last thought in my head as she embraced me one final time. The hug lingered until we both eased away at the same moment, letting go together. Then she turned away to walk into the woods, where a triangle of three trees or a tessellation of thousands would draw her into their center.
My tears fell, heavier than ever, as she disappeared from view. But I was thankful for them.
I was thankful for the hurt that told me that even in death, I had lived enough to love. To love my family. To love my friends. To love that one curious boy. And I was thankful that I had loved enough to let him go.