Chapter 46
Chapter Forty-Six
JADEN
With Lilly’s taped-together bucket list in my hand, I’m standing in front of my parents’ house and looking across the street.
I have no idea if Brian still lives here, but I at least want to try, so I cross the street.
Someone is moving behind the garden fence.
I stretch up and make out a man with blond hair and glasses.
He’s older than I remember, but it’s him.
Brian.
My breath catches for a moment, and I lower my gaze to the sheet of paper in my hand. Now that I know there’s something written under item seven, I can make out the words without any trouble.
8. Tell Brian that you love him.
All night long, that wish has stayed with me.
I’ve searched for signs I missed, for memories that might now appear in a new light, and I’ve found them: Lilly and Brian riding their bikes down the street together as kids, hand in hand.
The way they put their heads together and plotted pranks.
The way they secretly slipped each other notes and giggled furtively.
But that was only the beginning of everything I couldn’t see back then.
‘I don’t want ice cream,’ my little sister yells at her. ‘I want Milo.’
For a split second, Mom stiffens, then she turns to me. ‘And what about you? You want ice cream, don’t you?’
The difference between Lilly and me is that I’ve already learned how things work with Mom, and that it’s easier to go along. ‘Sure, I’ll take one,’ I say, then I lean toward Lilly. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll bring one for you, Camee. For later, if you want.’
She swallows hard and bolts up from the bed. ‘I want to see Brian.’
‘Fine, then we’ll just go by ourselves, right, Jaden?’ Mom throws me a forcedly cheerful look. ‘Put on a clean shirt real quick, honey, then we can head out.’
Camee squeezes past me into the hallway. I stomp into my room, trying not to think about Milo any longer, not to be sad because he’s gone. Once there, I pull a clean shirt out of the closet and as I slip it on, I see Camee outside the window, crossing the street.
Her steps are heavy, just like her shoulders. She keeps her head lowered, even as she rings the doorbell.
Brian opens the door, briefly knits his brows, then gives her a gentle smile. I can’t hear what he says, but I see Lilly’s upper body suddenly start to shake.
She falls into his arms, practically fleeing into his nearness as if he were her anchor. He rocks her back and forth, and I picture him whispering exactly the comforting words in her ear that I couldn’t find earlier.
I imagine how she feels—dejected, but also safe, understood, seen—and I feel a wild mix of relief and longing crawl up inside me.
I quickly shake it out of my head and force my thoughts to where they’re better off. I’ll order hazelnut ice cream. And vanilla. With chocolate sauce.
There were moments like that over and over again. Situations that, in hindsight, make it seem as if Lilly could only keep breathing at all thanks to Brian.
I was her big brother, but Brian was her refuge. I took it for a childhood friendship, nothing more, and yet it was so much more than that. At least for my sister, who apparently kept those feelings to herself for years.
‘Jaden?’ Without my noticing, Brian has stepped up to the fence. ‘Is that you? Wow, it must have been ages.’
I raise my hand. ‘Twelve, maybe thirteen years?’
‘Wow. How are you?’ He waves me over into the garden. ‘And how’s Lilly?’
So he doesn’t know. It doesn’t surprise me that my parents kept her death from the neighbors, but it’s also immediately clear to me: she didn’t cross that item off the list because she’d gotten in touch with him herself.
It would have been easy. She could have tracked him down or asked our parents if he still lived on their street, and then picked up the phone.
But she couldn’t. Instead, she wrote it on her list and then erased it again. Erased him, the memory of him, the longing. And in doing so probably hoped she could make him disappear from her thoughts as well.
‘Lilly is…’ A sharp pain shoots through my chest. ‘…dead.’ It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud, and it feels shitty.
The smile vanishes from his face at once. ‘My God,’ he murmurs, and I can see he’s fighting back tears. ‘What happened?’
‘Cancer.’ I have to clear my throat, then I tell him the whole story. It hurts, but with every further word, the weight on my chest grows lighter.
‘If I’d known, I would have visited her. I would have…’ He claps his hands over his mouth, and I’m surprised. That Lilly was never able to forget him is clear to me by now, but his heart still seems to be attached to her too.
‘You two hadn’t been friends for a long time,’ I say.
He nods, wistfulness reflected in his gaze. ‘Ten years.’
‘Why did your friendship fall apart back then, anyway?’
He lifts his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. One day Lilly just didn’t want to talk to me anymore.’
Definitely not without a reason, something must have happened. ‘When was that?’
Brooding, he looks off into the distance beyond his garden. ‘We were seventeen, I think—yeah, that’s right, that’s how it was—Suzi Miller and I had just become a couple.’
Suzi Miller, right … and there we have our reason. I fish Lilly’s taped-together list out of my pocket and show it to him.
‘What’s that?’ He furrows his brow, looking back and forth between me and the paper.
‘Lilly’s bucket list.’ I point at the erased item eight. ‘Look, here.’
He takes the list and squints so he can read better. ‘Tell Brian you love him? Is that supposed to mea…’
‘She was in love with you, I think her whole life.’ And she wanted him to know, at least in the moment when she wrote that item down.
In my mind I see Lilly as she writes the list. Filled with longing, she sets the pencil to the page and draws the eight.
More than anything she wishes she could turn back time, do things differently, face her fear of Brian rejecting her.
At least try, because there might be a chance, no matter how small.
But she never learned how to do that, she doesn’t know how to deal with fear or with pain. Neither of us knows.
Something about that thought feels wrong. The knows should be knew. Nyla showed me that. That you can do something even though you’re afraid. How to face things that hurt.
‘Lilly was in love with me.’ Incredulous, Brian lets the list sink, then his expression turns sad. ‘Just like I was with her.’
And like I am with Nyla, yet each of us is going our own way right now. Even though our reasons are completely different, we’re also a bit like Camee and Brian.
Thoughtfully, I shake my head. ‘But if you were in love with Lilly, then why were you with Suzi?’
His shoulders slump forward. ‘I wanted to… it’s so stupid, but when you’re seventeen, you’re just stupid.
’ With a sigh, he props his face in his hands.
‘I wanted to get some experience. So I’d do everything right with Lilly, so everything would be the way she deserves.
’ There’s melancholy in every one of his words.
‘You know, kiss her in a way she’d actually like, make her happy in bed, not come across as a loser, all of that. ’
That’s twisted. ‘You were afraid she wouldn’t like you because you were inexperienced or clumsy.’
‘Everything just had to be perfect for her, I couldn’t take any risks,’ he confirms, but I barely hear him.
‘And Lilly thought you’d reject her anyway because you fooled around with Suzi.’ Neither of them said a single word. They were trapped in their fear. ‘You could have been happy together.’
If the two of them had overcome their fears and talked to each other, Lilly would never have had to put this item on her bucket list.
Ten years of fear.
Ten lost years.
‘My God…’ Brian slumps back against the wall.
I look up at the sky, blinking away the tears that spring to my eyes at the thought of what the two of them have lost.
No, not lost—what they gave up out of fear of disappointment and pain instead of fighting for it. They robbed themselves of their happiness, each of them. Alone.
‘If only I could just…’ Brian’s voice breaks. ‘If I could just see her one more time, just once…’
What would he do then? Kiss her the way he’s always dreamed of? Hold her in his arms, feel her heartbeat?
Arrive. With her.
‘What an idiot I was.’ Pain dominates his features. ‘This life I always thought was just a dream could have been real.’
My heart grows heavy. ‘That life could have been real,’ I repeat, and then I see Nyla before me. With a blissful smile on her lips, dancing in a summer dress, flowers in her hair. Her hands gently stroke the small swell of her belly.
It’s the same image I saw once before, shortly before Nyla came over to my place for dinner. Back then I wondered if it could become real. If one day I could be someone who has a future.
And there is the house again. With a new facade instead of cracked walls, colorful shutters instead of tattered blinds, and a garden in the once-neglected backyard.
Brian says something, but I don’t hear it, I’m so caught up in the images that surface inside me one by one.
In this version of my life where I am not, or no longer, ill. Where I’m happy with Nyla, building something with her. Something that will remain until our hands and faces are covered in wrinkles and our hair is snow white.
Lilly never managed to call Brian and confess her love to him. She could have had him by her side, even if only for a short time. She would have known what his lips taste like and what it feels like to wake up in his arms.
She allowed her fear to steal a few last happy moments from her.
And I did the same thing.
Like my little sister, I allowed my fear to steal happy moments from me, and it might even be more than just a few last ones.
Someone touches my arm, probably Brian—yes, it’s him. ‘Are you okay?’ he asks.
I look up, see the face of a man whose great love is irretrievably lost, and shake my head.
No, I’m not okay. But I’m still not going to let my fear keep calling the shots in my life.
Because beyond this fear, a chance is waiting. A life with Nyla. And no matter how possible or impossible it seems, I want to fight for her.