Chapter Forty-One
It’s not until I’m in the car, until I hear the ringing of the phone, until his voice picks up, that I realize what I’m doing.
“Lauren,” he says, his voice groggy. “Hi.”
“Where are you?”
“Home,” he says. “Why? How’s your dad?”
“Could you meet me somewhere?”
There is a pause on the other end of the line, but I know I haven’t lost him.
“Of course,” he says. “Where?”
I pull into the Trancas Country Mart a little past 10:00 p.m. Stone is already parked when I get there.
I step out of the car, and he does, too. He’s wearing jeans and a zip-up hoodie. His face looks tired, but he smiles, anyway.
“Hey,” he says. “It’s good to see you.”
We take a few steps toward each other, and then he’s pulling me into a hug. I melt into him. I feel the pull of our bodies together—all our history. How much has taken place, right here, between us.
“Can we talk?”
He looks behind me, as if expecting someone else, and I realize how strange this must be for him. We haven’t seen each other in five years. And here I am asking him to meet me in a parking lot at 10:00 p.m.
“Of course,” he says. “Let’s get inside the car. It’s not warm.”
I hug my arms to my sides and follow him around to the passenger seat of his Bronco. He opens the door, and I hike myself up.
Once we’re both inside I realize how cold I am. I rub my palms together, and Stone turns on the heat.
“Thanks.”
He looks at me, searching my face.
“How is Bonnie?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “It’s soon,” he says. “I can’t even say it out loud, I’m sorry.”
I think about the last time we were here, the day she died. I close my eyes tightly and open them again.
“I was happy to hear from you,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I wasn’t sure if I should have reached out.”
“I’m glad you called.”
He turns to me. He takes my hand. “I’m glad you did, too.”
I look down at our fingertips.
“Ever since I came back I can’t stop thinking about us,” he says. “I know this is ridiculous, I know you got married, but I keep thinking that we made a mistake. That I made a mistake.”
I feel my heartbeat in my sternum, rattling my rib cage. I say nothing.
“I look at Bonnie and my dad, what they have. I want it.”
“I know.”
He runs his thumb back and forth against my palm. “I think we had it.”
I think about the morning he left for Colorado.
How I had refused to see him off, to say goodbye again.
How I had stayed at my place in town until I knew he was gone, and how I didn’t want to travel back to the beach for months after.
How he hadn’t called me, not to say he got in, not for a week, and when he did it wasn’t to say he missed me, it was to tell me he wanted to surf Costa Rica and to ask if I wanted to come.
I was heartbroken, torn in two, and I remember wondering how he wasn’t, how this breakup wasn’t affecting him like it was me, how it was possible for him to make plans for anything at all.
All I could come up with was that it hadn’t been real to him. That our decade together was just the preamble for life, for his real life, to start. That he’d look back on me the way you do on a childhood pet that had passed away—fondly and with a touch of melancholy.
This summer felt so good because it was in so many ways the answer to the question I had wondered forever: Did he care?
But this summer was also a fantasy. It’s what happens when memory isn’t muddled by more life.
I pull my hand away.
“We didn’t,” I say. “You remember it that way because you haven’t let yourself stay somewhere with anyone else.”
I think about Leo, about meeting him at the Beach Cove. Our first few dates, when getting to know him felt like watching a movie I hadn’t seen in years. The familiar recognition.
“We’re romanticizing what could have been, but we don’t need to. We already know what was. We didn’t work. And at a certain point, you have to realize that the why doesn’t matter. All that matters is we didn’t.”
Stone nods. When I look up at him I see that he’s swallowing, hard.
“Life moves only forward,” I tell him, and as I say it I feel a shift down deep in my stomach. Because I know that it’s true. “We can’t go back,” I say. “It’s just not how it works.”
Stone nods. “I wish we could,” he says. “I’d do so many things differently. I wouldn’t leave. I made too many mistakes, Laur.”
I think about the idea of mistakes. The idea that there is a right and wrong way to act, to feel, to be.
“I don’t know if I believe in mistakes anymore,” I say. “I think there’s just what we choose to do about what comes next.”
He blinks at me, and I think that maybe he’s going to fight me on it, or kiss me, or ask me, again, why we are here, but instead he keeps looking at me.
In his face I see a thirty-eight-year-old and an eighteen-year-old.
I see him at nine and twelve and twenty-five.
I see every single version I have known and loved.
“What are you going to choose to do?” he asks me.
I think about my dad in the hospital, Marcella curled up against him. I think about Sylvia, standing at the front door. And Stone, right here beside me.
I take a deep breath.
“I’m going to say goodbye.”