Chapter 21
How can a place so morbid also be beautiful?
Even in the dead of winter, I’m surrounded by bright, colorful flowers.
The cemetery is filled with day lilies, carnations, roses, deep purple irises, and white clusters of baby’s breath.
They all mock the death that pervades this place.
I’m no better. In my left hand, I tightly clutch a bundle of cheery, yellow buttercups I picked up at the gift shop at the hospital before we left. They were Mom’s favorite.
A sudden, cold gust of wind pushes through, rattling the bare branches of the trees nearby, causing them to creak and pop under the blue, sunny skies.
The bite of the freezing wind would make me shiver if I weren’t already emotionally numb inside.
Ryder never showed up, but Faith, Randy, Brea, and Jamie did.
That was a very awkward conversation to have at seven in the morning in a hospital room.
Faith and Randy don’t know how to feel about the possibility of becoming grandparents.
I hated seeing the look of disappointment on their faces mixed with the joy of expectation.
I know I’ll have to have a similar conversation with Freda and Mitch. I’d rather get a root canal.
Even though my hospital room was filled with people, and I was surrounded by friends and family, the one person I needed most wasn’t there.
After a dozen attempts at texting and calling Ryder, I finally gave up.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up completely.
I plan to arrive on his doorstep once we leave here.
“Do you think they would mind if we pulled some of the weeds?” Hailey asks as we stand shoulder to shoulder and peer down at the matching headstones that belong to our parents.
After being discharged an hour ago, I asked Hailey if she wanted to see Mom and Dad. We had been putting it off, but today I had this overwhelming need to be with them. So, here we all are—me, Hailey, Daniel, Jayson, Julien, Fallon, and Elijah—huddled together where my parents are buried.
“I don’t think the caretakers would mind at all,” Daniel answers her, going down to his knees and pulling up a few of the straggly weeds that have popped up around the base of Dad’s headstone.
Hailey joins him and clears away the dandelion and chickweed from around Mom’s.
Daniel visits their graves once a week and leaves fresh flowers in the metal canisters planted into the ground in front of their tombstones.
Looking at where the flowers should be but aren’t, I assume that someone must have come and taken them away once they wilted and died.
Even though I drove by the cemetery last week, Hailey and I haven’t visited our parents’ gravesites yet. It was too painful for both of us for different reasons. However, we recently agreed it was time and we would come together.
“How’re you holding up?” Jayson asks me, taking my right hand and linking our fingers.
Fallon sidles up to my other side and I tilt my head to rest it against his upper arm.
He’s too tall for my head to reach his shoulder.
Elijah has his arms wrapped around Julien from behind as they stand next to us.
“Not good,” I reply truthfully, and Jayson squeezes my hand.
I’m sore from being accidentally hit and kicked during the fight last night, but that’s not what’s important.
I touch my stomach with our joined hands.
Baby gummy bear is doing fine. The ultrasound showed its tiny heart rapidly beating, so fast and strong.
Of course, we all burst into tears again, just like we did when I got the first ultrasound last week.
And once again, Ryder wasn’t with us. I felt his absence like a lead anvil being dropped on my chest, crushing the breath out of me.
“Would you mind driving me to Ryder’s once we’re done here?” I ask Jayson, but I get two answers in return when Fallon and Jayson both say yes at the same time.
We stay quiet as Hailey talks to our parents, begging their forgiveness for running away, not caring that me, Daniel, or the guys can hear her.
She bends down on her hands and knees and kisses each gravestone, then reaches her hand back for me.
I slip away from Fallon and Jayson and kneel with her.
Handing her half of the buttercups, we gently place them on the frosty ground over where our parents are buried.
I’ll come back again by myself so I can sit and talk to them, tell them my secrets that they already know as they look down on me from Heaven. Today, I just needed to be here.
Hailey wipes her face clean of the tears that have been flowing from her hazel eyes. “Would you mind singing ‘Amazing Grace?’” she asks me.
“Of course,” I reply.
Hailey, Daniel, and I link hands where we kneel, and I begin the song. As the slow melody flows from my lips, I close my eyes when I hear Dad’s baritone join in. He’s right here with me, watching over me. And the sadness that had filled my heart, lifts and is replaced by his love. By Mom’s love.
I miss you. I love you, I silently tell them.
We love you, too, pumpkin, they say back.
I can’t hear anything over the pounding of my heart. No, scratch that. Over the loud cracking of my heart as it breaks into a million jagged pieces, looking at Ryder’s stricken face as we stare at one another on his front porch.
Randy and Faith have decked the outside of the house with the same holiday decorations they have used since I was ten years old.
White lights line the roof and eaves, and the inflatable snow globe pulls against its tethers holding it to the ground.
The front doorframe is surrounded by Christmas garland, and a huge wreath made of poinsettias and fresh pine clippings hangs on the front of the door.
I inhale the tangy odor of the pine boughs and it reminds me of the Christmas tree in Fallon’s living room.
Cheery holiday music pumps out of speakers Randy installed on the porch a few years ago.
Currently, a tabernacle choir is singing “Silent Night,” and for some reason, the lilting melody makes me want to cry.
It took a good ten minutes for me to persuade Jayson and Fallon to drop me off here and not stick around.
This was something I needed to do on my own without having an audience of protective alpha males around to make the entire situation more fraught with tension.
Besides, Jayson and Julien’s house and my old house are just down the street, so it would be an easy walk to meet up with them after I finished here.
Hopefully, I’ll have Ryder with me when I leave, but I have a sinking feeling that I’m going to be sorely disappointed with that wish.
How could things go so wrong between us in such a short amount of time?
The obvious answer is secrets. Secrets have a way of messing up everything.
Secrets grow like mold until they rot all the good.
Jayson kept things from me when we were dating.
Ryder kept his illness a secret until he had no choice but to tell us.
Hailey’s dark secrets…we’re still dealing with the repercussions of those, but at least she’s getting the help she needs to deal with them in a more positive way that doesn’t involve hurting herself.
And me? Perhaps I’m the worst one. Look at what my secrets have done.
I may lose the man I love because I was afraid to tell him the truth.
Not able to take the sadness I see in his beautiful copper eyes any longer, I angle my head over to the porch bench swing. “Can we talk?”
A heartbeat. A breath. A blink. Things that take just a millisecond to happen, but right now they feel like forever as I wait for his answer.
“Yeah. Give me a sec.”
Ryder steps back inside the house, leaving the front door open just a crack, but he doesn’t invite me in.
The warm air in the house rushes out through the small opening and it makes me shiver even though I’m wearing full winter gear.
I’m not going to wait at his door like a sad puppy, so I take a seat on the bench swing and toe the floor to get it moving.
The air smells like snow, crazy as it sounds.
Mom used to say I was a human barometer because I could smell rain and snow right before it started to fall.
There’s a dampness to the air and something else; something earthy.
Sure enough, as soon as Ryder comes back out dressed in warm clothes and carrying a reindeer-patterned fleece blanket, the first tiny flakes of snow flurries whirl aimlessly around like dust moats.
I stop the swing so he can sit down. He spreads the blanket over both of our thighs but makes no move to sit closer to me. The six inches he leaves between us feels more like a mile.
Watching the kids from across the street run excitedly out of their house to play in the falling snow, I ask, “Are your parents home?”
I saw them this morning when they came by my hospital room before I was discharged.
Not a conversation I am looking forward to having again.
I love Faith and Randy, but I’m not prepared for more questions or more sad, disappointed looks from two people I have always considered to be family, just like Jayson and Julien’s parents are family.
Faith, Randy, Freda, and Mitch have always treated me like their own daughter, and I love them very much.
I hate myself for what I’m putting them through.
Two of them will be grandparents, I just don’t know with absolute certainty which ones yet.
“No. Dad went to the garage, and Mom took the girls Christmas shopping.”
So, we’re alone, I mentally sigh in relief. Good.
I want to slide my hand over to his but stop myself from doing so, afraid he would reject my touch if I tried.
“I love you,” I tell him, my voice unsteady.
“I know.”
God, how those two words hurt. No, I love you back. Just I know.
“How long have you known?” he asks me, and I can literally feel my heart drop to my stomach.
“A few weeks.”
“Christ, Elizabeth,” he grits out, his face pained.
Fallon once told me that words can hurt more than physical blows. I can see the truth of that now in how Ryder looks like I just stabbed him in the chest with a sharp blade.
“And you told Jay?” His question is more like an accusation.
I shift in the seat to face him fully and rearrange the blanket over me. “No. He found out by accident.”
“Fallon?”
“Yes, I did tell him.” I’m going to lay all my cards out on the table. No more secrets or half-truths. “Julien knows, too. So do Hailey, Daniel, and Mr. Montgomery.”
Confused, Ryder asks, “Why would Mr. Montgomery know?”
Dang it.
“He, uh, paid for my ultrasound and doctor visit.”
That knife I had stabbed him in the chest with? I think I just twisted that sucker and plunged it in deeper.
I reach inside my jacket pocket where I put the sonogram image. “I was going to tell you the night we had the picnic in my backyard. I had it all planned out. I was going to show you this.”
Before I’m able to take out the picture, Ryder’s hand grabs mine and stops me. “I don’t want to see it. I can’t. Just tell me one thing. Is it okay?”
It. Not her or him.
“The baby is fine. Strong heartbeat and the cutest—”
“Stop,” he snaps and literally catapults off the bench swing, almost knocking me off.
I grab ahold of the metal chain and put my feet down to stop it from tipping too far back. Ryder leans his forearms on the porch railing, turning his back to me. The wind whips the top of his brown-black hair and ruffles the hem of his wool coat. I choke back the tears that want to flow.
“Ryder, please,” I beg him. “Please talk to me. I want to fix things. I want to apologize. I want…” I want you. I want us. I want this baby.
“I’m leaving to go spend the holidays with my grandparents.”
He’s leaving? “What?”
Ryder turns around and leans back on the balustrade. A few snowflakes drift and land in his hair and on his shoulders. “I want to see them before I start chemo.”
Okay. Makes sense. “Will you be back for Christmas?”
“No.”
Our families were going to spend them together like we usually do.
This year will be at the Jameson’s home.
Fallon and his parents are planning on joining us.
This will be my first Christmas without Mom or Dad.
I don’t know how Hailey and I are going to make it through that day.
I need Ryder with me that day, so I don’t fall apart.
He’s always been my safe place whenever I was drowning.
And he just said he’s not going to be there.
My throat burns as I choke out, “Will you be back for New Year’s?”
The guys had been planning to throw Ryder and I a combined birthday party since he would be in the hospital during his real birthday going through ablative chemo. Our birthdays were two weeks apart, Ryder being the older of the two of us.
“No.”
I toss the blanket off me and stand in front of him, anger burning away the desolation and shame I was feeling. “In other words, you’re running away. That’s basically what you’re telling me. You won’t talk to me. You won’t let me explain. You refuse to even look at the sonogram picture.”
His hands suddenly grip my face. “I can’t, Elizabeth. You don’t understand. No one does.”
Wrapping my gloved fingers around his wrists on either side of my face, I shout, “How can you expect me to understand when you won’t talk to me!”
My outburst makes us both jump.
“I need time. I need you to give that to me,” he whispers, and I shake my head wildly because this feels like goodbye. This feels so wrong on so many levels.
I’m about to fall to my knees and beg him to not leave—to stay and work things out, to spend the holidays with me like we had planned, to forgive me, to love me, to love this baby—when he bends down and kisses me.
The kiss is soft and salty, our combined tears wetting our lips.
And then he lets go and walks back inside the house.
The lock of the front door clicking back into place is the ugliest sound I have ever heard.
I have a key. I can open the door and go inside and confront him. Force him to sit down and discuss things.
Taking out the square sonogram picture, I contemplate leaving it on his doorstep.
I shove it back inside my coat pocket and pull the collar of my winter coat up and then tug my hat down.
I force myself to take one step, then two, then three, until I’m walking down the street toward the Jameson’s house, leaving my broken heart behind with the boy I have loved since I was nine.