Chapter 27 #3
She found herself parking near train tracks that snaked over the woods near her parents’ house.
The tracks crossed a high bridge over a deep river.
When she was in high school, people used to talk about this place.
It was that old clichéd story kids told about other kids back in the ancient times of the eighties, when stupid kids jumped the tracks to see how close they could cut it, before the inevitable happened.
Grim urban legend blended with cautionary tale.
She sat on a stump and watched the trains rocket past. Her dad had told her the trains went seventy miles per hour across this stretch of tracks.
It had been too cold out for the first of May. Or maybe it was the continued chill inside her that never went away these days.
She had no plan. Felicity needed to be someplace where she wouldn’t have to see anyone, where no one would hear her fall apart.
The trains were deafening enough that even her noisy brain calmed.
Maybe what she’d been thinking of as numbness hadn’t really been numbness at all.
Maybe she was trying so hard to muffle a stadium’s worth of emotional clamor inside her and that was why it felt easier to turn down the volume, the vibrancy, and even that essential vitality of who she was … and who she had been.
Then she screamed and screamed and screamed.
Letting every bottled thing surge from her.
The anger. God, when did she get so angry?
She hadn’t even noticed the anger beneath the sadness and fear and panic.
How could she pick apart the disparate threads of feelings when she was so focused on crumpling them up in a ball?
Anything to make the enormity of what she felt seem smaller and more manageable.
Trouble was, the more she did this, the more everything became tangled.
Even the good feelings were mixed up in that knotted mess inside her.
It would’ve been better to throw the whole thing out.
Like an abandoned, unsalvageable embroidery project chucked in the trash when the crafter finally realizes there’s no way something so snarled and imperfect could ever be useful or beautiful.
As the train bellow faded, the call came in from Dylan with the news that had snapped her out of her self-pity.
Her aunt had died and left her the plant shop. If she didn’t take it, Toby would get it. She was devastated. The idea that her aunt was gone flooded her with a marrow-deep grief. But it was a rush of something she could really truly feel, even if it was sadness filling all that hollowness.
In that moment, something had unfurled, just enough for Felicity to see that maybe she could do one more thing. A single step. A single goal. She could do that. She could do it for Aunt Jeannie.
And maybe if she could do that, she’d think her life was worth something again. It was a tally mark on a score sheet.
Even tonight, when she saw Sam’s sugars, that fleeting thought was there, though she’d tried to ignore it. She’d go get Sam’s stuff, because what did she care if it was dangerous if she could help out someone she loved? Maybe if she could do something then she’d feel worthy.
But this wasn’t a freight train howling in her popping ears.
Her hand tightened on the leather bag. Medically, this could have waited.
Sam had been right and hadn’t wanted Felicity to risk it.
But Felicity hadn’t spared a thought for the danger.
In the drawn-out split second she stood there, she faced that twisting gray chaos and saw a reflection of the mess inside her. And she was afraid.
But there was more.
Something opened.
Felicity saw that nothing inside her had ever been empty. She was full. Full of the people she loved. Full of this place she’d adored since she was a lonely little girl. Full of that essential spark of who she was that hadn’t been extinguished like she thought it had.
Everything had been wrong. She’d been so stuck in the idea of her worth being measured by what she could do.
Even in coming back here, she’d said she could do this one more thing.
Maybe doing would make her better. If she could check all the boxes.
Do her Ms. But she had been approaching everything the wrong way around.
She had thought the doing was the point.
That doing and helping and working hard would make her worthy. She’d had it all wrong.
That was what Nic had been trying to tell her on the night Ani was born.
She’d thought ending things would be easier for her hurting self and for everyone around her she was hurting too. She’d felt worthless. She had thought if she lost what she could do, her energy, her humor, her contractor’s daughter’s can-do attitude, there would be nothing left.
But even with all that stripped away, she was still her.
The worth of one’s life can’t be measured in function.
She was a person who loved deeply. She was not a before or after. She was not some broken tool that should be thrown out as scrap when the handle falls off. She wasn’t even the sum of her abilities or talents or achievements.
She simply was.
And she needed to exist.
She turned away from the deafening darkness barreling toward her and started to run up the church stairs.
Nic appeared at the door of the restaurant. He shouted, but she couldn’t hear him.
She smiled because she needed to tell him. She would tell him.
Then everything went black.