Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
“We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.”
~Jane Austen, Persuasion
O n the flight, Viet and Willa chattered away while Elle spent most of it looking out the window, something she generally didn’t do.
They weaved through the bustling LAX crowds toward baggage claim. Ryan waited at the carousel, his arms open and smiling large as he spotted them.
“I missed you, baby.” Ryan cooed, as he pressed a gentle kiss against Viet’s forehead.
Elle stopped watching the happy reunion between her friends. Viet was her ride or die, but Ryan had become a friend in the years he dated and then married her best friend. A swirl of emotions fizzed through Elle. Joy at her friends’ deep love for one another. Gratitude for Viet and Willa flying to Perry to be with her over the last few days. Jealousy that there wasn’t a pair of loving arms for her to walk into at baggage claim. Not just any arms, but Clayton’s arms.
An hour later, Ryan dropped Willa in front of her apartment a few blocks away from Elle’s and then drove Elle to her building. Viet jumped out of Ryan’s silver SUV, offering to help Elle lug her bags upstairs and unpack before walking back to his place. Elle waved him off, saying she was beat and just wanted to take a shower.
It was a half-truth. She just wanted to be alone. That choking lump in her throat needed to be released, and she didn’t want to do it with Viet there. He’d want to ease the pain and wipe away her tears. She didn’t want to be comforted; she just wanted to feel the grief. So much of her life was spent tucking her feelings away. It was time to just let them out, but in the safety of her own condo with herself as the only witness to her sorrow.
Unlocking her door, she dragged her two suitcases in, setting them in the small hallway by the front door. Hanging her purse on the hook by the door and placing her laptop bag next to her suitcases, she slipped her sandals off and tucked her feet into the slippers she kept by the door. Ned, Willa’s cousin who had been renting her condo while on a contract with a local hospital as a nurse, had moved out to stay with Willa for the last week of his time in Long Beach. He’d be leaving for Alaska next week.
Elle walked around her condo like a visitor to a museum, taking it all in. Ned had made sure that the place was clean. It looked just as it had before she left. Dull light, tinted in gray, came in through the large windows overlooking the ocean.
Wandering her condo, she surveyed each neatly organized closet, clean counter, the perfectly folded purple throw blanket hung over her gray couch, categorized bookshelves, and the picture of her with Pete, Janet, and Tobey at her college graduation that sat on her nightstand. That lonely picture would soon have company. One of the pictures she planned to add would be that picture of her and Clayton at the Anchor Bar. Seeing the photo each day would stab painfully but that ache would allow her to remember when she was an “us.”
She pulled her suitcases into the bedroom to unpack and settle back into this place that used to be so beloved, but now was just a condo. Not the home she’d left as she’d flown away from Perry.
At the bottom of a stack of folded shirts was Clayton’s Team Paw Patrol tee that she had worn the first night she slept over and so many nights after. Taking the soft blue shirt in her hand, she sat on the corner of her bed, tracing the T-shirt’s white lettering. With each stroke of her finger, another tear fell. Clutching it to her chest, she released the rest of her tears, letting them rage like a long awaited and much needed rainstorm. The hot tears tumbled down her cheeks and onto the shirt, dampening it in her sadness. She hadn’t put the shirt in her suitcase. Clayton must have. She’s not sure when.
She pressed the shirt to her face and mumbled into the well-worn fabric, “Thank you for everything, Clayton.”
She wept, pressing the shirt close to her heart. She had left a memento of “us” with him, and he had sent one with her. When Elle’s dad left, she took all the mementos of when her mother, father, and she were a “Them,” tossing them in the trash in the hopes it would erase the pain. It hadn’t. This was a different kind of pain. That had been the pain of the left behind, the unchosen. This was the pain of the leaver, the chooser. She was more like her father than she’d believed possible. She had left. She had chosen her life here and his life there.
“Goodbye, Clayton.” She folded the shirt and tucked it, and her heartbreak, into the bottom drawer.