Epilogue
Elijah
Come home, baby,” I can hear Mom whisper to me.
“Okay, it’s time. I’ll join you now, so don’t worry.” I can feel the flood of relief filling my chest. I think I’ll watch the sunset as I fall. “Goodbye,” I whisper.
“One more step and I fall,” I say, so calmly. When I raise one foot just a bit, Aaron panics.
“Okay! Okay! I’m staying here—fuck, I won’t move, I promise,” he insists. I’m watching him, and he looks miserable. I’ve never seen him look so afraid, so distraught. Not even as he stood over my drugged body.
“Why did you come? You can’t stop me.”
He’s pleading to me with his eyes, hands trembling as they stay reached out for me. “Please—I need you to come home. Please.”
I shake my head. “Aaron, it’s time. This has been a long time coming.”
Aaron groans in frustration. “I know I can’t fix it, Button, but I can help you handle it. I’ll help you. But stay. Stay with me, please.”
My chest is hurting now—my peace half replaced by his pain. Our souls are so forged together that we share even that.
“You’ve always fixed it. Everything all the time.” I turn back to the setting sun. “I can understand why it’s frustrating that you can’t fix this. Can’t command me off the ledge. It’s not your fault I died, Aaron.”
“YOU’RE NOT DEAD! Stop saying it like you’ve already jumped!” he shouts. The irony of the statement—the way it feels so perfectly accurate to me.
“But I have. I jumped the moment she touched me. I just spent a while holding onto the ledge.”
He cries, kicking a rock at his feet and narrowing his eyes at me as I look back at him. “Then why? Why fucking wait?”
I love him so much. I love him so much that his anger warms me—gifts me a gentle smile, fills my heart.
“I was hoping love was enough to make life worth it,” I answer calmly, and Aaron’s eyes grow wide, and as he looks at me in such devastation, he falls to his knees. “It was. Until that night. Now, there is nothing. No love is worth what this is doing to me, what it’s doing to you.”
His face is soaked in tears, his hands clasped together in front of him.
“That night did nothing to me but make me want to protect you even harder—to take care of you, to love you more if I possibly could. To be a better man. But this—this is destroying me, Benjamin. This will kill me.”
My eye twitches, and I can feel that peace slipping away more and more. “Aaron, stop. Go home.”
“No! If you get to jump, I get to speak. Don’t you remember what you said?
What you told me? I love you so much I could die.
So much that now I want to live. That’s what you said.
Do you not love me anymore? Am I not enough?
” he questions me, a knife twists in my chest as I feel the hot tears start to collect in my eyes.
“You know that’s not it—”
“No. I know nothing because you tell me nothing. Please, Button. Come here.”
There is some part of me that wants him to hold me so badly—wants him to stop crying, to stop looking at me like I’m crushing him from the inside out.
It’s clawing its way up my throat, trying to get out of me.
I feel anger—anger that I got so close again and have another obstacle. Why can’t I just die?
“Shut up!” I scream, tears falling again.
“You’re so fucking unfair, Aaron! I tried.
I tried for months to live with the constant reminder of her.
The feel of her hands, the sound of her voice, how fucking terrifying it was to not be able to move—to scream.
” I’m sobbing now, staring at the sun as it’s disappearing under the horizon.
The streetlamp turns on. “Is that not worth anything to you? I couldn’t do it.
In the end, I really could only take so much, baby.
You can’t take this from me—you can’t fix it.
It has nothing to do with loving you and everything to do with being able to see past my own terror to find you in the first place. ”
I’m panting, arms now outstretched again to keep my balance.
“Benjamin,” he cries. “I love you so fucking much. Please—please don’t leave me. Don’t leave me here without you. I can’t handle it. Please, I’m begging.”
I can’t look at him, terrified of what I’ll see when I turn to look.
“You’re strong, Aaron. You’ll get through this. I promise.”
“Motherfucker! You aren’t listening to me!” he screams. “I won’t! I won’t get through it! I’ve spent over half of my life watching you—waiting for you. And now you want to up and die? Fuck me! I feel like I’m being shredded to pieces, Button.”
At that, I finally look over my shoulder again to face him.
He’s still on his knees, sobbing, head bowed to me as he begs me to come down.
My darling God, praying to me.
“I love you more than anything else in this world, my little bluebird,” I tell him, and he jumps up to stand—eyes so terrified, so fucking terrorized.
“No! Wait! Don’t go, don’t leave me. Wait—please,” he wails.
“I can’t do it. I can’t. I need you. Don’t go—don’t leave me to love you in this purgatory.
I’ll hold you every day; I’ll love you so fucking hard through every moment in any way you need it.
Just fucking please don’t go. Don’t make me watch.
” He takes a step forward. “Don’t make me watch you die. ”
“Aaron…” I whisper. He’s slowly stepping toward me—but this part of me clawing its way to him keeps me on the railing.
“Baby—I will burn that entire house to the ground. I’ll fucking kill her with my bare hands. I’ll spend every day of the rest of my life in bed with you, soothing your cries and kissing away your tears. If that’s what you need, I’ll happily dedicate the rest of my life to taking care of you.”
“I can’t ask that of you. I can’t make you do that.”
“That’s what a god does,” he says simply, startling me down to my bones. “That’s what I’m made to do—to care for you, to guide you, no?” Slowly, I find myself nodding. He’s closed half of the gap by now—hands outstretched as he walks—staring up at me like he’ll scream if I make any sudden moves.
He continues. “If I didn’t want this, if I didn’t crave being that kind of person for you—I would have never let you get on your knees in front of me and devote yourself to me. I would have never buried myself so deep inside of you that our souls intertwined into one.”
I can feel the hot tears slipping all the way down my neck as I watch him, listen to him. He’s convincing me… and maybe he’s right. He does like taking care of me. And maybe with time, I can feel better? I started to feel better after the first time, eventually.
“The moment you let me sink my teeth into you—no, the moment you stood there and let me watch you shower, staring at me with those curious, sweet eyes of yours—you became mine. You can’t just leave.
You’re stealing. You’re taking from me what’s mine, Button.
It’s not fair,” he scolds. I see my necklace in one of his hands, feel that barbed wire around my throat tighten.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper—because I am. Because I want to jump so badly. “I just wanted to follow in their footsteps. My parents.”
Aaron takes a deep breath, now close enough to grab me if he wanted to. “It’s okay, baby. I forgive you.” He’s staring up at me, hand held out for me. Inches away. “Benjamin, come down. Now.”
Nodding, I turn away from the water. He’s right, I can’t just leave him. At least not like this—not in front of him. And I could never deny him anyway. I reach a hand out, feeling his fingertips on mine.
My sneaker catches on the box holding my mom’s ashes. I’d forgotten she was there.
My stomach falls as I slip backwards—hearing a scream that might be mine but is probably Aaron’s as I watch the sky above me—falling. It’s so slow, so slow in time.
I spent so long trying to save Mom—just for her to kill me in the end.
I feel the tension leave my body as I fall, as I hurdle toward an end I’ve dreamt of for so long.
And then terror fills me anew as I see Aaron clear the railing—hand outstretched as if to grab me. He’s so beautiful, even like this. Petrified and upside down. He will die too.
My stupid, silly little bluebird. Doesn’t he know he can’t really fly?
I didn’t want to hurt anyone. And now I’ve killed him. I’m sorry—I’m so fucking sorry.
Goodbye.
I’m wailing. As I come to, as my eyes shoot open and I spring up off the mattress, I am deafened by the sound of my own cries.
My skin is clammy with sweat, and the sheets wrap tightly around my bare hips. I feel suffocated; I feel like I’m about to panic.
I was coming down—I didn’t want to die.
“Hey,” Rowan’s soft, sleepy voice is just barely audible beneath the weight of my sobs. “Little angel, come here.”
His warm hand spreads across my abdomen, and he tugs gently from where he’s lying next to me, still half asleep.
I stare into the darkness of his bedroom, just barely able to make out the outline of his corkboard hanging past the foot of the bed.
Aaron had talked me down from the ledge.
We both died at my hands, and all for nothing.
“Elijah,” Rowan tries again, sitting up, his voice now clearer the more he wakes. “You’re panicking. I need you to breathe for me.”
“Rowan,” I gasp, eyes still trained on the outline of the notebook papers hung in front of me. “Rowan.”
“I’m here, you’re okay. It was just a dream.”
“No! It wasn’t—” Another violent sob leaves my body, and he rests his head onto my shoulder.
What happened to me? What girl was I speaking of? The way I spoke, I made it sound as if I were assaulted.
And my parents? Had they both killed themselves?
“It wasn’t what?” Rowan pushes, and I turn my face to stick it into his thick neck.
“It was a memory,” I whisper.
His hand tightens from where it now rests on my hip, and he breathes out a heavy sigh. “Tell me about it.”
“I can’t,” I cry. “It was so bad. And it was all my fault. We died, and it was all my fucking fault, Rowan. I’m sorry. I’m so—”
“None of that,” he interrupts. “I don’t want your apologies. It’s over now, do you hear me? It’s over.”
“But—”
“I’m alive, and so are you. We’re together. Sometimes destiny is out of our hands, you know? All that matters is that we found each other again.”
I know that. I know I should be grateful just to be by his side. But I can’t help thinking of Benjamin and Aaron, and how desperate they were to stay together.
How I ripped their happiness away, just to cultivate my own.
“I love you,” I hear myself say, and Rowan rubs his nose over the side of my face.
“I love you too, Eli. Now let’s lie back down, okay? It’s 5 a.m.”
I let him pull me down, curling up against his chest as he runs a hand leisurely through my hair.
But my mind is still on the bridge; I’m still watching us die after I had decided I wanted to live.
“You had saved me, you know,” I say, and Rowan’s hand pauses in its movement.
“What?” he asks.
“I was going to jump, and you talked me down,” I clarify.
“Then—”
“I fell. I fell right off the ledge just as our fingers brushed. Fucked right?”
Rowan is quiet for a long time. He breathes deeply as he thinks, and I replay my vision over and over again.
“Get some sleep, baby. In the morning, we’ll still be together, and I’ll still love you more than life,” he declares gently.
It’s as if he always knows just what to say to me, just how to calm me down.
And despite the tragedy, and despite the terror, there is one thing I know for sure that warms my heart more than anything else: Rowan loves me so much that he’d die for me.
That is what I’m choosing to take from my newly detailed memory. That is what I will carry with me.
Not the brush over our fingers before I fell, not the devastation on Aaron’s face.
But the amount in which I am loved, and the red thread of fate wrapped so securely around me—throughout this lifetime and the next.
And somewhere deep inside of my soul, as I fall slowly back to sleep, I hear the sound of my own voice, distant and sweet.
Hello again, you are still so beautiful.
I love you, my little bluebird.
It’s so nice to have found you again.