16. Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
Luna
“You’re worried about your wife,” I say as Carson’s dad helps me set up my camp.
He opens a lawn chair and plops his butt in it to watch me finish up. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“So, it’s a doctor’s appointment?”
“Yeah, but like I said, I’m sure it’s nothing. We’re just getting older and we need to accept that with that comes a few changes.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, you both look fabulous.” I begin to set up my griddle, because my stomach is super unhappy with me for neglecting to put any food in it. “I’m going to make myself a breakfast sandwich, do you want one?”
He rubs his stomach. “One thing you should know about my boys and me is we will never turn down food.”
Just then Cole pulls into the driveway, followed by Carver.
“Luna’s showing off her outdoor culinary skills,” Dan yells over to them. “Do you boys want some?”
Carver starts walking in our direction, but Cole heads toward the cabin. “I’m good. I’ve got to pack.”
“No way am I cooking for him.” I point my spatula at the man who stuck his knife in my tire this morning.
“Why not?”
“She’s just bent out of shape that I caught her sneaking away,” Carver says, relaxing into the chair next to Dan.
I narrow my eyes at him but throw a few more slices of bacon onto the griddle. “I thought we were keeping that to ourselves.”
Carver shrugs.
Dan looks between the two of us.
“He didn’t catch me. He saw me, and I’m the one who decided to come back, so don’t give him credit for anything other than giving me a flat tire.”
Dan rolls his eyes. “I don’t want to know. As long as you’re back, all is well.”
I crack an egg, wondering if that’s true. Between my mother’s premonition and the way Cole has been acting, I’m not so sure.
“What is Cole packing for? Where are you boys headed?”
“Jackson’s sending us down to Texas to do a little intel.” The look he gives Dan tells both him and me that it’s something he can’t discuss in my presence.
Cole comes back out with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He shoves it in the back of his friend’s truck. “You ready?”
Carver chuckles. “I guess I’m going to have to pass on breakfast.” He slaps his hands on his knees and stands.
Dan rises with him. “Where’s Carson?”
“Back at the warehouse.”
“He didn’t need to come home and pack?”
Carver rubs his hand over his head, wincing as Cole gets in the passenger side of Carver’s truck, slamming the door shut. “Carson’s not going with us.” He pats Dan on the arm. “I’ll look after him.”
I busy myself putting the sandwiches together as Dan walks Carver over to the truck.
He opens his son’s door, and they have a conversation.
When he returns, he doesn’t seem to be in a very good mood. We watch as the truck pulls out of the driveway. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come back,” I say hesitantly, handing him a plate. “I didn’t mean to cause a problem between your sons.”
Dan takes it from me, pointing for me to sit in the chair next to him. “I’m going to tell you a few things about my boys.”
I listen quietly as he tells me about two souls so tightly intertwined that nothing can come between them. It’s beautiful, actually. I can’t imagine what life would be like to have someone you can trust completely by your side at every stage of your life.
“They’ll find their way. They always do,” he finishes confidently. “All you need to do is be yourself.”
He loves his family deeply, but most importantly, he trusts them.
“There is something about Carson that is different.” I turn away, slightly embarrassed by my bold admission. “I’ve met a lot of people on my travels, and none have ever made me want to …”
“To what?” He sits forward, encouraging me to go on.
“I don’t know, share, I guess.”
“When I met Lily, I instantly wanted to share my entire life with her.” He stares into the trees. “It didn’t matter to me what that looked like as long as we were together.”
“It’s not how I pictured it. Not that I imagined it happening at all. I never thought I’d spend enough time with someone for them to grow on me. With Carson it just happened.”
He smiles knowingly, finally looking at me. “We don’t know what we don’t know.”
“Isn’t that the truth.”
“But I’m guessing none of that is the reason you ran last night.”
I set my plate beside me and curl up into a little ball in my chair, because I’ve never told anyone this. “When my mother was dying, she told me the darkness was after me.”
He doesn’t react or interrupt, letting me know he’s listening.
“She never knew it had already caught up to me and that I had outrun it. I never told her about … you know, all that stuff with my dad.” I wave my hand, not to dismiss it, but because that part of the story doesn’t matter.
Again, he remains still.
“She saw things in her final days.” I pick at a tiny hole in the knee of my jeans. “My mom saw your sunflower garden, and the path you built for your wife.” I pause to gauge his reaction. “Anyway, she told me I would be safe there.”
“How do you know it was my wife’s garden she was seeing? Sunflowers grow across the globe.”
“True, but she also described you.”
“You must keep your face turned toward the sun,” my mother signs clumsily.
The hospice worker told me I shouldn’t let her ramblings affect me, but how can I not?
“It’s okay, Mama,” I assure her.
“The darkness is chasing you.”
She grabs my hands, not letting me sign anything in response to what she’s just told me. She releases them to continue. “Run to the garden. He’ll save you.” I gently push her back against the mattress, but she continues to sign. “It’s a rocky path with sunflowers. He’ll meet you there.”
“Mama, it was just a bad dream.”
“Promise me you’ll run to him.”
“I promise,” I sign before crawling up beside her and resting my head against her chest just like I used to when I was little.
Her heart races beneath my ear, but a few seconds later, she takes a deep breath and wraps her arms around me, squeezing tight. I let my eyes fall closed. It’s the one thing that always works. For both of us. Her heartbeat gradually settles beneath my ear.
I want to tell her that I’ve already faced the darkness, that it was my dad … the same man I think she’s telling me to run to. But I don’t say anything. I’ll never taint her gentle heart with the ugly things he did.
The very next day it’s more of the same, except she’s not afraid. Nothing seems to be chasing me today. We seem to have gotten past that part of her vision. Her hands wave excitedly as she describes the sunflower garden to me.
“Our granddaughter loves it there with him,” she tells me.
The him she’s been talking about is my father? That confuses me. We haven’t talked about him since the day she pulled up in front of his trailer and decided not to let me out. I never saw my dad again after that.
It confirms that all of what she’s envisioning is not real. Because I’d never in a million years let my child anywhere near that man.
Her hand goes to her heart, and she smiles while staring at the ceiling. “He’s teaching her how to sign the word for sunflower,” she says, signing the word herself.
An irrational fear hits me at the possibility of my future daughter inheriting my mother’s deafness.
“Daddy doesn’t know how to sign,” I remind her gently.
She turns toward me. “Not him.” She shakes her head adamantly. Her brows pull together as she signs. “This grandfather loves her more than life itself. He’s a big man.”
I laugh as she draws her hands over her cheeks as she describes him.
“He has a beard, huh?”
She nods, a small giggle leaving her lips. “That little girl loves to tug on it. She’s healing his broken heart.”
“Why is his heart broken?” I ask, playing into her imagined reality.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
A few moments later, she’s back in the present, and we continue our conversation without any more talk of sunflowers or big men with beards and broken hearts.
She listens quietly with a smile on her face as I tell her all about the van I bought and how I’ve mapped out the things I want to see.
You know, normal things. The things she made me promise her I’d do once she left this world.
“We both have a lot of exploring to do,” she signs.
Our plans were to do some traveling together, but cancer became a fork in the road, splitting us in different directions.
“Oh, it’s my turn to hold her,” my mother signs, suddenly. Her hands rise to the ceiling. “She’s beautiful.” She smiles serenely and then her arms abruptly fall to her sides.
“Mama.” I stand quickly, moving to her bedside. When I look into her eyes, I know she’s no longer here.
Big Dan reaches over and touches my leg lightly. “How did she describe me?”
I shake my head, clearing the worst day of my life from my mind. “She said you had a beard,” I laugh lightly, not telling him more than that. He’d never believe me.
He chuckles with me. “There might not be as many bearded men in the world as there are sunflowers, but I have to tell you, you’ve stumbled across the best of both.”
We laugh together, and I decide not to tell him the entirety of the story. No use dragging him into the delusions of a dying woman.
“Anyway, it just took me back. But I promise you, I wasn’t running from Carson.”
“No, I don’t suppose you were,” he says, his gaze going to the truck that’s just pulled in. “But if there is a darkness chasing you, I want you to know that she sent you to the right place.”
We watch his son and an older man walk toward us.
“One of the last things my mother said to me was to keep my face turned toward the sun,” I tell him, not taking my eyes off Carson. “When I look at him, a warmth settles across my cheeks.”
“Because he is your sun.”
“But what if I can’t be that for him?”
“Even the moon casts a glow. It’s just a bit gentler.”
Carson pulls me from my seat when he reaches us. “Pack your bags. We’re going to Ireland.”
“What?”
“We’re going to Ireland,” he says again. “Oh, sorry, Grandpa, this is Luna. Luna, this is Grandpa.”
Dan and his father look at each other as Carson shows me the plane tickets on his phone. “We’ll fly from Reno to Chicago and then to Shannon. I thought it would be less busy than flying into Dublin,” he rattles on.
What is happening?
“I’m going to go pack myself. We need to leave in a few hours.” He starts to jog away. “Wait, do you have a passport?”
I nod.
“Perfect. Don’t forget to grab it,” he yells before disappearing inside the house.
Carson’s grandfather chuckles at the look on my face. “I don’t suppose anyone warned you that we were all a little crazy.”
“Why are we going to Ireland?” I ask him.
“Well, I’m thinking it’s because you might have mentioned something about going there,” he answers.
I immediately think of the conversation I had with Lily about Dan making all of her dreams a reality.
“But what about Cole?” I ask, turning my questions back to Dan.
“Cole is off on his own adventure.”
“But …”
“They’ll find their way back to each other. Like I said, you just remember to be yourself and it will all work out. You’ll see,” he says confidently.
“Do you have an umbrella?” Carson’s grandfather asks. “I hear it can be kind of rainy over there.”
I shake my head.
Dan places his finger under my chin, directing me to look at him. “Keep your face turned toward the sun and you won’t need a damn umbrella.”
Right.
Carson barges out the front door.
“Where are you going now?” his grandfather asks, clearly amused by everything going on.
“To ask Mom if I can borrow her binoculars.”
“For what?”
“To see the puffins,” he hollers, disappearing around the bend.
“What the hell are puffins?” Dan asks.
A smile lights my face, remembering how we read about them in my mother’s journal on our way here. “Birds.”
“Huh, never heard of them.” He sits down to finish the rest of the sandwich I made him.
His father lowers himself into the chair I was just in. “I’ve got the poles in the back of the truck. Want to see if anything’s biting down there?” He nods toward the trees.
“Sounds like a mighty fine plan.” Dan looks up at me. “What the hell are you still standing around for?”
Oh, yeah. I’m going to Ireland.
Holy fuck.