Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JORDAN
“So do you want to tell me what happened before?” Jo asks.
We’re in a gazebo by the Central Park Lake, both of us sitting sideways on a bench so we can face each other, the remains of breakfast spread out between us. It’s early enough that there aren’t rowboats out yet, so the lake is calm, the sun reflecting off the glassy surface.
Tucked away on the bank of the lake, surrounded by a blanket of trees, it feels like we’re the only people in the city. I take a long breath in and let it out slowly. “I’ve never told anyone this.”
Jo brings her Converse-clad feet up onto the bench, wrapping her arms around her legs and resting her chin on her knees. “You know there’s no pressure, right? You don’t owe your secrets to me or to anyone else. But I also hope you know that whatever you tell me stays between us. That’s always true, but it’s extra true right now. I’ve always thought of this part of Central Park as sacred. Like whatever you say in one of these gazebos stays right here.”
“Have you spent a lot of time up here?”
Jo grabs her iced coffee, taking a sip. “I went to college in the West Village, but whenever it got too loud and crowded for me down there, I used to jump on the C train and take it straight here. I would walk through Strawberry Fields and then wind my way to this gazebo where I could watch the lake.”
“It’s hard to imagine anything ever being too loud and crowded for you.”
She looks at me thoughtfully. “That’s mostly true now, but I didn’t have the easiest time in college. I told you finding friends has always been hard for me, and while it’s not something that bothers me now, it did back then. It felt like everywhere I looked there were groups of girls making these forever friendships, and it was never something I could seem to find for myself. I loved all my classes and learning all the things, but sometimes being the weird girl who was always a little too much of everything for anyone got hard, and that’s when I would come here. Something about being here reminded me that it’s okay to always be myself. That I don’t have to change who I am for anyone.”
Jo’s eyes bore into mine, and I hear what she’s not saying. She brought me to her most sacred place in the city to remind me of the same thing. To tell me without telling me that no matter what, I can always be who I am with her. That she likes me for who I am, scars and trauma and all. It’s an unbelievable gift, and it has me opening my mouth and spilling all my secrets to her.
“I wasn’t with Allie when she died.” I blurt it out and then inhale sharply, rubbing a hand over my chest where it aches, like just saying the words takes something from me. But then Jo reaches across and takes my hand, looking at me with only compassion and understanding. It fills the empty space that those words left behind. “I was upstairs in the surgeons’ lounge, and Molly had to come tell me she was gone.”
Jo squeezes my hand, and it gives me what I need to keep going. “I went over it in my head a million times for months. What if I had gone down to the ER with her when she had that consult so she wouldn’t have been waiting for Molly alone? What if I had convinced her to pass the ER consult along to someone else since her shift was already over? Maybe she would still be alive, or maybe she wouldn’t, but at least I would have been with her when she died instead of what actually happened, which is that she died alone, without anyone who loved her. Grief takes your mind to some really dark places. There were times during the first year when the what ifs and the guilt were so intense and overwhelming, I didn’t think I would survive it. It slowly started to get better, and I can be a person in the world again, but there are times it still takes me over, and I can’t shake it.”
“Asking me to wait for you inside the hospital instead of outside.” It’s a statement, not a question. Jo’s voice is quiet, and I can hear her put the pieces together.
“Yeah.” I sigh out the word, grateful I don’t have to make her understand because she already does. “Logically, I know nothing will happen to you standing outside a hospital on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at eight in the morning, but knowing it and making my brain accept it are two different things. And then when I heard that crash on the street while we were walking…” I trail off, not knowing how to say it in a way that Jo will comprehend.
“Your instinct was to protect me in a way you weren’t able to protect Allie.”
The simplicity of Jo’s words and the way she says Allie’s name so freely have emotion clogging my throat and my eyes burning.
“Yes,” I whisper, sure if I speak any louder, I’ll lose the tenuous grip I have on my control.
Jo lets go of my hand and stands, coming around to sit behind me. She wraps her arms around me from behind, propping her chin on my shoulder and saying nothing, letting me have my moment. I cover her hands with mine and lean my head against hers, closing my eyes and fighting the waves of emotion that threaten to take me under. Grief and guilt for Allie and gratitude for the way Jo seems to understand exactly what I’m feeling and what I need and how to help and the comfort I feel with her wrapped around me all tangle together until I’m breathless, crushed by the weight of it all.
“It’s okay, you know,” Jo says, tightening her arms around me.
Despite everything, I huff out a laugh. “Is it though? I forced you to wait for me inside a hospital because I was scared of you waiting outside by yourself, and I protected you from a loud truck. None of that seems normal.”
Jo scoffs. “What’s normal? Who gets to decide that? I mean, fuck Jordan. Your fiancée died. You and Allie were planning an entire future and then suddenly, that future was gone. It’s a pretty tall order to expect yourself not to be affected by that. Give yourself some grace, J. You’re doing fine.”
I close my eyes again, Jo’s words a balm to my still-troubled soul. “You really think so?”
I feel her nod. “I know so. I’ve never grieved like you have, so I could be full of shit right now, but I think there are no shortcuts through grief. I think you have to feel your feelings and do what feels right to you. Some days are good days, and other days you’re protecting your summer bestie from a loud truck on Seventy-Second Street. All of those things are fine and they’re all normal. Grief is a process. There’s no timeline and absolutely no rush. You owe it to yourself and to what you and Allie had together not to skip any steps.”
Jo’s words mend something inside of me that’s been fractured since the night Allie died and suddenly, she is nowhere near close enough to me. Turning on the bench, I tug her into my lap and wrap my arms around her, holding her against me. She stiffens for a second like she wasn’t expecting this, but then she melts into me, fitting perfectly against my chest. I bury my face in her hair and feel everything inside of me settle.
“Thank you,” I mumble.
Jo leans up and presses a kiss to my cheek. “You don’t have to thank me. It’s just being a friend. Anyone would say the same.”
“No.” I pull back so I can see her face. “They wouldn’t. You understand me, Hurricane. Better than anyone, I think. I didn’t realize how badly I needed to be understood.”
Jo’s cheeks turn pink, and something flickers in her eyes so quickly part of me thinks I imagined it. “I do understand you. And you get me too. I think maybe we needed each other this summer.”
My first instinct is to insist that I need her for way more than just the summer, but I shove it down, because summer doesn’t last forever. After Labor Day, Jo goes back to her job in Pittsburgh, and I’ll still be here operating on adults and going back to my white-walled existence that holds no appeal now that I’ve seen what my life looks like with the splashes of color Jo brings to it. But I don’t tell her that. Instead, I just say, “I think so too.”
Jo gives me a sly look. “Are you finally admitting that you love the J’s Summer of Fun?”
I smirk at her, happy to let the heaviness go for a while. “Never.”
She shakes her head. “I’ll get you to admit it. Maybe after our road trip. I’m really amazing on a road trip.”
“I just bet you are, Hurricane.”
She lays her head back on my shoulder and lets out her happy little sigh I love as she stares out at the water. “You know, you never told me why you need to go to Pittsburgh.”
Shit .
“Didn’t I?” I ask, knowing for sure I didn’t.
Jo shifts, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a couple Fireballs, handing one back to me. “You absolutely didn’t. So, why are you going back voluntarily when the last time you were there it was because Jeremy kidnapped you and forced you into the trip.”
I pop the Fireball in my mouth, deciding to just let it all hang out. “I have to meet with Molly about some estate planning type stuff that Allie and I started right before she died. I didn’t have it in me to deal with it until now, but I think it’s time. And also…” I hesitate because the real reason I want to go isn’t the estate planning even though I do have to handle it. The real reason is more complicated, but this is Jo and if I can tell anyone, it’s her. “I want to go visit Allie. I haven’t been since her funeral, and it feels like something I want to do.”
Jo slides off my lap and sits back on the bench, facing me, a smile on her face. “See? I wasn’t blowing smoke up your ass. You really are doing fine, J.”
I narrow my eyes at her, trying to figure her out. “Because I want to go to my dead fiancée’s grave?”
“Because for two years you haven’t felt ready to go visit her, but now you do. You stayed away because you weren’t ready to handle all the feelings being in the cemetery would bring up, and now you’re going back because you know you can.”
I concentrate on the way the Fireball burns my tongue while I consider what Jo said, the way she blew right past the legal crap I could probably just deal with by phone if I really wanted to and zeroed in on the heart of the matter. “But I don’t know if I can. This is an experiment.”
Jo shrugs. “Maybe, but it’s a good experiment. It’s another step to healing, and I think you’ll surprise yourself.”
“How so?”
“I think you’ll like being there. Talking to Allie. Telling her about your life now.”
I let out a short laugh, but there’s not much humor in it. “What life? The one where I have a job I don’t like and an apartment that never felt like home until you scattered neon blankets all over it and built a habitat for a plastic dinosaur that now lives on my coffee table?”
“Uh, yeah. The life where you’re trying to figure out what kind of future you want for yourself now that the future you had planned isn’t available to you anymore. The life where you give yourself over to a summer of fun and do things like get a plastic dinosaur dressed every morning and take a scavenger hunt through Manhattan in the middle of the night and order four different kinds of takeout and watch disaster movies with candy popcorn. This is what living looks like, J. Allie was the coolest woman in the entire world. I think she’d get a kick out of hearing about it.”
I stare at Jo, the rest of the world dropping away until all I can see are her bright green eyes and the spray of freckles across her nose. Her messy ponytail cascading over one shoulder left bare by the wide neck of her T-shirt slipping down her arm. The frayed hem of her cutoff jean shorts and her silky-smooth legs ending in her signature pink high-top Converse. Everything about her is comforting and familiar and also not as I feel something shift inside me. A lock snicking open on a door marked more that I’m not ready to open just yet.
I clear my throat, shaking it away. “Hurricane, I think you might be the smartest person I’ve ever met.”
Jo smiles, tossing me another Fireball. “I just call it like I see it, J.” She glances around the gazebo, as if seeing it for the first time. “You know, for years this was my sacred place, but now I think it belongs to us. I think I like having a place that’s ours.”
I pick up Jo’s hand again and squeeze it, so fucking grateful for her and this friendship and this place and this day.
“Me too, Hurricane.”