Chapter 31
Now
Bea
In addition to last weekend, the next twenty-four hours might be the happiest of my life. Maybe it’s that they all stand out in such stark relief against the last few years, but the syrupy goodness I feel persists.
Silas sets us up in his room with about twenty-seven pillows and a marathon of movies and meals.
I learn that the second movie we would have watched on his birthday, if we’d ever gotten to it, would have been Fantastic Mr. Fox.
I don’t know why I fall a little bit further in love with him over this.
In the plot twist of the century, Cali won’t leave my side. She purrs like an engine and snuggles into me, rubs her head against my hip. Makes biscuits on my chest. I silently mouth “Oh my god!” to Silas, and he pumps his fist in the air.
When my twenty-four hours are up, I change into a clean hoodie-and-sweats set and borrow Silas’s mustard-yellow beanie again.
He drives us for just under two hours to the quaintest train station I’ve ever seen, where we board for a coastal tour.
The cabin where we sit is all polished wooden benches and open air, and somehow, we’ve got the whole thing to ourselves.
Silas packed us each a blanket, but we layer them and huddle together on a bench seat.
“I’ve lived here my whole life and never knew about this,” I tell him at some point.
“Yeah?” he asks. “I done good, huh?”
He’s beautifully rumpled today. The untidy curve of his mouth, the cowlick sticking up toward the back of his overgrown hair. I can’t wait to cut it for him again. He’s two days past needing a shave, and I can’t stop myself from running over his scruff with the back of my hand.
“You done good, Silas.”
“Ellis took us to ride this a lot after my dad died,” he says.
“It’s cheap, so he could afford it, and I think he liked that it kept us all in one spot and semi quiet for a bit.
” His arm curls around my shoulder, his thumb gliding down my hair.
“I came here pretty frequently when I was on medical leave, too.”
We chug along through a copse of Sitka spruces with their branches stretched by the wind.
The way the trees reach for each other makes me think of two girls on a dance floor, arms extended, fingers waving.
Sometimes the wind whistles and it sounds like someone singing along to a song.
I feel Merritt here with us and it feels right.
“Seems like a good place to do some contemplating,” I say.
He nods. “It was.”
“Did you ever think . . . did you ever think you wouldn’t go back to work?
Weren’t you scared to?” Merritt had been the one who heard about his accident, first. She’d heard from her mom who’d heard from someone who’d heard from Martha O’Doyle, and so on.
The unofficial Spunes phone tree. Merritt was in the earlier throes of her second round with cancer that summer, and I couldn’t ask her to go with me to visit him.
It was only two months before that I’d run into him at Savvy’s and he’d told me about Sage’s new neighbor for the season, Fisher, and all I could think about was how vital he’d looked.
Animated and insouciant at the same time. Always more than one thing.
The first time I went to see him at the hospital, he’d been in a medically induced coma, so after only briefly laying eyes on him, Micah had kindly sent me away. “He wouldn’t want you to see him like this, Bea.”
The second time, he’d been alone. Asleep, covered in bandages, still too vulnerable-looking, and still larger than life to me.
“Yeah, I was scared. Even if I haven’t had another panic attack for a few months, I’m still scared all the fucking time,” he admits.
“But I like the money, for one. Keep that to yourself, though. Don’t need people catching on to how much money us blue-collar folk make.
” He gives me a sly look before turning earnest. “And—I like being the one people call on.” He turns a frown out to the foggy ocean, his pupils shrunken to pinpricks.
“I’ve never been someone’s first call. That would be Ellis.
” He sighs. “But at the risk of sounding like a sopping-wet wimp here, after a lifetime of being the one who needed people more than they needed me, I relish being the one who gets to help.”
“You are firmly in first position when it comes to my calls, for whatever that’s worth,” I tell him. “You’re not getting edged out of that spot anytime soon.”
He snorts and lays a kiss at the top of my head, then presses a tentative one to my mouth.
I’m not allowed to engage in any sexual activity for two weeks, and my doctor’s policy is no penetrative sex until week four, as long as everything is looking good.
I can tell Silas is going to treat me like I’m delicate in the interim, and as much as I appreciate his care and know that sex is only one small part of us, I can’t say I love it.
Not when we just got our start, and not when he’s treated me like I could handle anything up until this point.
We do the circuit on the train twice before climbing back into the truck and heading back home for the evening, where we watch movies in Silas’s bed until we fall asleep again in a sea of pillows.
I barely rouse when he leaves for work in the morning, where he’ll be for three days in a row. I only manage to kiss him goodbye and mumble “I love you,” with my eyes still closed, before sleep tugs me under again.
Time, bitch that she is, pulls the same shit she always pulls.
My days are marathons long. Silas and I text regularly throughout, a conversation with no direction and no end.
And since I hardly sleep, anyway, and keep myself awake worrying about my lack of sleep when I try, I spend my nights baking bread until I feel ready to collapse.
I continue to sleep in Silas’s bed, with Calcifur molded to me every night.
Send me a picture of you, I wake up to one morning from him.
You first, I say. He obliges me. He’s on top of a scorched world, dawn rising up from the blackened ridge behind him.
There’s steam floating out of the paper cup in his dirty hand and soot stuck in all the lines of his face.
His tired smile looks even whiter than normal in contrast. Eyes brighter, too.
I fire a picture off to him in return, making sure Cali is also in the frame, and watch the three dots pop up and disappear over and over.
Are you short-circuiting, lol? I ask after the fifth time.
Yeah, Red, I am, he sends back.
I like you guys in my bed. I like you in my shirt, too.
I like it a lot.
Fuck. I can’t wait to come home.
I can’t wait for him to come home, too. I miss his sounds moving throughout the house.
His insistent humming and whistling and his baby-talking the cat.
The way he sweeps and vacuums, like clockwork when it complies with his schedule, every three days.
His distant music in the garage when he’s working out.
Despite being gone for stretches at regular intervals all summer, the quiet is oppressive this time.
The day he’s finally supposed to be off, I get a message from Silas that reads We’re getting held over. There’s a fire in Bend we have to go help on. Good news is, we should be off for a few days before the Fourth now, before it gets bad again. Give Cali a kiss for me.
He follows this up with a phone call a few minutes later to tell me he loves me, and the low rasp of his phone voice has me kicking my feet against the mattress and squealing into my pillow after we get off the call.
I haven’t been a nail-biter since I was five, but by day seven post-transfer, mine are chewed down to the quick. I can’t take it anymore. I know I’m risking a false negative and potentially crushing my hopes, but I have to take a test.
Just one, I promise myself. I’ll only take one, and if it’s negative, I won’t do that to myself again, because it very well could be wrong.
I’m too impatient to wait until the morning before work, even though I know that’s when my hormone levels would be the most concentrated. I haul my water bottle and both of my little cardboard boxes into the downstairs bathroom, Cali weaving in and out of my feet.
“It’s fine if it’s negative,” I tell her.
She slow-blinks her agreement.
“It’s probably going to be. I don’t want you to get your hopes up,” I say.
Her tail flicks behind her. It’d probably be good for it to be negative so I can fortify myself in steps. If it is negative, I can still hold out hope for a positive test when my levels might, hypothetically, be higher, but I’ll at least be able to temper myself this way.
Time isn’t a thief. It’s a prison with a mercurial warden. These minutes take a century.
God, I’m sweaty. I can see tiny beads of perspiration in the lines of my palms. Heart line, life line, fate, and head. I press and slide my thumbs into each until my alarm finally sings.
Me and my reflection lock eyes. Hers are glassy and wild, and her hair is untamed.
I flip it over, my hand trembling so badly I struggle to see.
All it takes is a moment, and I’m immeasurably changed.
The happiest, messiest sob of my life rips through me, a shock of sound bursting out of my lips like a firework. Cali jumps onto the counter and meows in a staccato panic, headbutting my still-suspended palm.
“Bea?” I hear called out, coming from the front door. The test clatters into the sink before I stride purposefully into the hallway.
Our gazes link and his face brightens. “Hey,” he says, breathless, and gorgeous. My pulse stutters. He tosses his keys and wallet onto the counter. “What’s with all the bread?”
I must take the necessary steps to get closer to him. I must march his way and he must watch me as I do, but all of it blends together. The next thing I know, he’s within my reach, as clear as that second line and just as beautiful.
I launch myself into his arms and capture his mouth in a kiss, taste his quiet oof before he’s chuckling against me. We build up a melody of happy, affectionate sounds . . . until they start to scale into something more frantic. He breaks away with a rough gasp and pins me to the door.
“I missed you, too,” he says. He tangles a hand in my hair and smiles a kiss into my eyebrow, then slowly settles me to my feet.
My whole body fills with helium and lifts me back onto my toes to kiss him again. “We did it.”
He cocks his head with a bemused grin. “We . . .” He searches my expression and his hands clasp harder around my waist. “Oh shit. Wait. Are you?”
I nod animatedly.
“You took a test?”
I nod again, and he glitches the tiniest bit, the quickest flash of something. Maybe hurt? But his eyes immediately fill with something like wonder, and he’s smiling so big and so fast that I think I must’ve misread it.
“Yeah. It’s still early, so there was a chance it could’ve been a false negative, but it was positive, so it’s—” I cough out a wet laugh. “It’s a really good sign.”
He tucks me into his chest, and I laugh and cry against him.
I am every emotion trying to be restrained at once.
I’m so excited, I feel nauseated, I’m terrified and trembling, I’m so happy I’m drowning in gratitude, so mad my friend is gone for this.
I’m so worried about how happy I feel, but so hopeful that nothing will go wrong.
My laugh is a waterspout and I’m getting snot on him for the millionth time, but I make fists in the back of his shirt and cling to him like he’s gravity.
“Of course it is,” he soothes. “Of course you did it.”
I almost correct him. I want to say, We did it. You helped me. You’re part of this, too, remember? But I get too in my head, and it’s such a small thing, why should I correct him when he’s looking at me like that, anyway?
He kisses across my cheeks and the bridge of my nose, holding my face with his big hands spread over my ears. “Look at you,” he says, lower lip shining with one of my tears. “Catch of a lifetime again.”