Chapter 26 Easton #2
The service ends quickly and we eat at a seafood place afterward—probably the first of four meals we’ll enjoy before returning to the townhouse.
“Are you sure you want to come to the graveyard, Easton?” Mrs. Cabot asks, her voice prickly and her mouth pursed. “It’s a long drive.”
Clearly she doesn’t want me there, but before I can respond, Elijah’s hand lands on my thigh, stopping me.
“I asked her to come,” he says in a firm voice, one that brooks no argument.
I expect Mrs. Cabot to scowl, to mutter, to narrow her eyes. But instead she blinks, staring too long at Elijah and then at me, as if she’s actually seeing us here for the first time.
Betty and Mrs. Cabot insist on stopping for snacks before the road trip can begin. We’ve only been on the road for fifteen minutes when Mrs. Cabot tells Elijah to pull over again. He glances around in the rearview mirror while I twist in my seat. “What’s wrong?”
She frowns at me through pinched lips. “My heart is beating too fast.”
Elijah swerves three lanes to the nearest exit.
As soon as he’s stopped the car, I jump out and grab the kit I left in the trunk.
I haven’t used a stethoscope or taken someone’s blood pressure in over four years.
It’s not hard to do, but I sure wish I wasn’t about to test out an old skill on Mrs. Cabot, for any number of reasons.
My heart thrums in my chest—if there was time, I’d check my own pulse too—as I throw open the door closest to her.
“Take a few slow, deep breaths,” I tell her. “I’m sure everything’s fine, but we’re just gonna take a little peek.”
“You’re not even a doctor,” she says faintly. I’m glad she’s still got enough steam in the engine to criticize me. I’d be seriously worried if she didn’t.
With my fingers on her carotid artery, I check her pulse. “A hundred ten beats per minute,” I tell her. “It’s fast but nothing to panic about, okay? Do you happen to know what your resting pulse is normally?”
“How would I know something like that?” she cries.
I shake my head. “I was just checking. Now I’m going to listen to make sure everything sounds okay.” I don the stethoscope and blow on the chestpiece to warm it up before I slide it beneath the collar of her shirt.
“You could have asked,” she bites out, but I ignore her, listening for the sounds that indicate heart failure or a valve abnormality.
“Everything sounds good,” I tell her. This is positive news, obviously, but I wish I had some definitive sign indicating we should just go to the hospital. “I’m going to check your blood pressure. You did take your meds this morning, yes?”
“Of course I did!” she barks.
I nod, wrapping the cuff around her arm. “Uncross your legs for me.”
She manages to comply without flying into a rage.
With the stethoscope pressed to her brachial artery, I squeeze the bulb then slowly release the air as I listen.
Her pressure is high, but I’m not sure what’s normal for her either.
“You’re a little elevated,” I tell her. “Nothing crazy, but a little above where I’d like to see it.
So we have two options. The first is that we can go to the hospital and ask them to monitor you.
The second is that we pull over to that gas station and get you a little water and try this again in about ten minutes and see what direction you’re heading. ”
I want her to vote for the hospital, but I guess I know where Elijah gets his stubborn streak. “I’m not going to the hospital. And I already have a drink.”
She lifts a purple energy drink from the cupholder and I stifle a sigh that is one half relieved and one half exasperated. “Oh dear lord, where did you get this?” I ask, pulling it from her hand and dumping the little that remains on the pavement.
“At the gas station,” she says, “and how dare you empty it out like that?”
I set the empty can back in her cupholder. “Mrs. Cabot, this has four-hundred milligrams of caffeine per serving, and there are two servings. I guarantee your cardiologist warned you about drinks like this.”
“Grandma,” Elijah groans, running a hand over his face, “you’ve got to be kidding me.”
He goes into the gas station and gets her a bottle of water and a small snack. By the time we reach the graveyard, her pulse is significantly slower and her blood pressure is nearly back to normal.
“You seem to be okay,” I tell her.
She rolls her eyes. “I’d feel more comfortable if all this had come from a real doctor.”
I laugh. Yes, Carol, you and me both.
“We can always go to the hospital,” I offer.
She climbs from the car with her chin high. “I’m not going to the hospital.”
Betty and Mrs. Cabot walk toward the graves, leaving me behind to put everything away. “I’m sorry about that,” Elijah says.
“Me too,” I say with a grin. “Now I can’t continue to claim I don’t plan to save her life if necessary.”
He laughs and takes the kit from my hand to place it in the trunk. Together we head into the cemetery.
I’m not eager to be buried anywhere at present, but it’s a beautiful place for it if you’ve got no option. Cypresses and oaks cast the whole cemetery in a pleasant shade, and I like the lack of uniformity, the way many of the graves are practically jumbled atop each other.
It reminds me of this cool cemetery I visited in London. I want to tell Elijah about it—Betty and Mrs. Cabot are far enough ahead of us that they wouldn’t hear—but it doesn’t seem like the time to be bragging about my European travels. Has Elijah ever even left the United States?
That night we were together, so long ago, he said he’d been saving all of it. “I want to do those trips with you or not at all.”
I haven’t thought of that in a long time, but...it doesn’t line up, does it? It’s not the sort of thing a guy says when he doesn’t see you that way a day later.
But I shouldn’t be thinking about it now. Everything else can be all about me, twenty-four/seven, but not this.
“Is coming here hard for you?” I ask.
He gives me a forced smile. “It’s not hard anymore. But it’s still...strange. My brother would be thirty-two now, if he’d lived. It’s impossible for me to think of him being anything but a nine-year-old who wanted my baseball cards.”
My heart squeezes for that little boy, who apparently looked a lot like Elijah. I adore all of the Cabots, aside from his grandmother. I’d have loved him too.
“It was supposed to be me on the plane,” he adds.
My stomach drops. “What are you talking about?”
“We took turns, going up with my dad, and it was mine, but I had some Boy Scout thing at a retirement home. When I got home, Mom told me Dad and Campbell had crashed.”
I reach out for his hand. He grips mine and doesn’t let it go. I hear guilt in his voice, even if he hasn’t admitted to it.
“He deserved to live just as much as I did,” Elijah continues.
“I didn’t even want to go to the retirement home.
I half-assed the entire thing. And for a long time I told myself there must be some reason it worked out the way it did, but what have I done with all these extra decades?
I renovate houses for rich people. There’s no reason I shouldn’t have been the one to die. ”
Of course there is. The world would be so much emptier without you in it. And you saved me. You saved me a thousand times. You were the brightest spot in my childhood and my adolescence, and I have no idea who I’d have become if you weren’t there.
I love Kelsey and Judy with my whole heart, but it was Elijah who gave me the hope that I could wind up happy in a way the rest of my family would not.
We reach the graves and he’s still holding my hand—Mrs. Cabot notes it with a small flare of her nostrils.
I ignore her and turn to the headstones. Seeing their names, their ages...is a shock. In my head, all this time, Kelsey and Elijah’s dad was this adult who’d already lived his life, but he hadn’t. He was only a few years older than Elijah is now.
And Campbell. He was so small, but all I can think is it could have been Elijah instead. It was nearly Elijah.
Out of nowhere, my throat tightens. Mrs. Cabot is crying, and I’m struggling not to cry with her.
“Elijah,” Betty says, in a tiny voice, “I need to sit. Can you help me back to the car?”
He releases my hand and walks away, his arm linked with Betty’s.
I glance at Mrs. Cabot, and her eyes narrow.
“You didn’t even know them,” she snaps. “So why are you crying?”
I didn’t realize I was. I brush at my face. I don’t have the energy to fight with her, and I’d refuse to do it anyway, given we’re at her son’s grave.
She’s correct—I’ve got no right to be crying. It’s selfish, again, and so like my mother to make even this about myself. “Because it’s sad,” I reply in a choked voice. “Mostly, because it could’ve been Elijah.”
She stares at me for a long moment—for once, her gaze is more curious than angry.
“You’re in love with my grandson,” she announces.
I stiffen. “I didn’t say that.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You don’t cry like that over someone you’re not in love with. Over an imagined situation, for God’s sake.”
If I wasn’t so upset at the moment, I might laugh. Only Carol Cabot could manage to get pissed at me over this.
“Have no fear,” I say, turning for the car. “He has never felt the same way.”
“He has never not felt the same way,” she says over her shoulder. “And that’s precisely the problem.”
I stumble over the gravel in front of me, my heels digging in to catch myself. It’s the second time in twelve hours someone has implied that Elijah cares about me, that there are things happening that I’m not aware of.
I didn’t entirely buy it from Elijah, but from Mrs. Cabot? She’s got no reason in the world to say that to me. Seeing me end up with her grandson would be her worst nightmare.
“He specifically told me he doesn’t see me that way,” I inform her.
She shakes her head as she turns back toward the grave. “You’re a very stupid girl if you believed him.”
It’s not as if she’d truly know. Elijah’s not baring his soul to her. I seriously doubt he was texting her about his love life years ago, either.
But it certainly seems as if everybody here knows something I do not.