Chapter 36
Now
Bea
Life does not suddenly, miraculously get easier.
Our jobs don’t fade away, and I don’t become the world’s best, most energetic, and unaffected pregnant woman overnight.
But our days and nights are filled up with so much good that it’s hard to feel too bogged down.
We’ve still got the weight of our heavy things and grief has days where it goes lopsided on me, but it’s worth it.
It took about a day for us to get out of the house to look inside the canoe at O’Doyle’s, where I found a whole assortment of things while Silas grumbled below me, clutching onto the ladder with a white-knuckled grip.
I found coins, paper airplanes, pencils and pens, folded-up paper birds, a baseball, brochures, flyers, a deflated balloon, and a dusty old ball cap.
And, of course, a gold chain. I looked over each thing and tried to imagine what story might be behind it or what small moment brought it there.
After safely descending the ladder, I passed Silas his chain with a lump in my throat and smile on my face, and said, “I know how to do the last thing on the list. I know what to put Merritt’s name on. ”
It took almost no convincing when I asked Martha if we could paint Merritt’s name onto the canoe itself. A permanent fixture in our town for locals and tourists to see. I like to think that if it’s possible, her energy is still here looking out over everyone, granting wishes where she can.
The first time Silas and I hear our baby’s heartbeat, I get what he meant about classical music.
That sound . . . It’s music without words, and my mind sprints through a million imagined stories and just as many memories all at once.
Silas holds our clasped hands to his lips and laughs wetly like he’s doing the same.
We attend our town festival in August but only have one local team competing in the canoe race this year, and they come in second to last. Still, when Ian Carver and his wife reach the finish line, I realize something about the Byrds.
If you’re theirs in any way, they’re going to cheer so loud for you, you won’t even notice who isn’t.
I feel like I hit the lottery to have these people be both my friends and the family I chose.
We go to Silas’s burn group campout over Labor Day.
We hike a mountain and float in those turquoise pools he told me about, and it turns out healing sometimes looks that way.
Walking and moving alongside people who know the pain you’ve been through.
Who will stop with you when you need to rest and who will even carry you when you get too tired, like Silas does for Mila.
Cap and Mila work together to convince us to host a monthly poker night.
Mila has Silas so wrapped around her finger it gives me a toothache.
Saul and Garvin convince Silas to join their bowling league, and it is one of the greatest joys in my life to watch him become freakishly good at it.
The alley in Gandon has the best popcorn I’ve ever had, and it unfortunately becomes my most consistent pregnancy craving.
We have Bonnie and my mom and Kurt over a few times throughout August and September, until Bonnie finally convinces Devin to meet us all for dinner out in Portland.
I recognize how my mindset managed to shift over the months, because I go into it fully expecting it to go well.
I think Devin will have come around by now.
That she will be happy for me, excited to be an aunt, and will be thrilled that I’m with a partner, too.
It does not, and she is not.
“That’s great. You’re having the baby my sister never got to have, and you get to raise him with the guy she never got, too,” she says, voice trembling with fury. “Isn’t this him? Isn’t this the guy she liked for, like, half her life?”
The punch lands how she meant it to, and I struggle to get a full breath. “It wasn’t exactly like that, Devin. There’s a lot more to it.”
“And it’s her,” says Silas, his hand cupped over my thigh beneath the table in a firm squeeze. “The baby is a girl.”
Bonnie sucks in a small gasp. These are the first people we’ve told. “A girl?” she says.
“Oh, even better!” Devin yells, incredulous now. “The first fucking granddaughter. How special. I guess we’re all just supposed to move on and be hunky-dory about everything, huh?”
“That’s enough,” Silas says quietly, the words clipped and vicious.
Devin breaks into an angry sob and puts her face in her hands. Bonnie cries silently beside her.
“You know I was the first person to hold her after Mom?” Devin says through a downpour of tears and fractured, coughing wails that I feel in my chest. “I held her even before Dad. And you. You got so much more of her in the end. She held your hand while I had her fucking ankle. I wanted more time with her. She was my sister. My baby sister!”
Silas gathers me up out of my seat and leaves some money on the table. He tucks me into his side, and I see Bonnie pull Devin’s head to her shoulder before he turns me away and takes me to the truck.
I don’t cry because I think what Devin said about me and Silas is true or that I should feel guilty anymore.
I cry because I know her hurt and that anger, and I understand it.
I even admire it a little. Devin is me a year ago, all that rage so big it’s a relief to aim it anywhere else.
Devin is just grieving out loud. She’s who I’ll be when grief decides to pull me under again, except I’ll have someone at my side who is ready to find me when I get lost.
Silas is the right kind of rough with me that night.
He wraps my hair around his fist and puts me on my knees in front of our couch, takes me in slow, slamming strokes because I can take it, and because they force me to stay in my body and out of my head.
It’s messy and it’s hard and it’s so good.
It’s life. We laugh with tears running down our faces when we’re done.
It’s late October when Micah bursts into the salon one day and asks me to shave his head, which is met by the collective gasps of the entire salon.
He tells me he’s off to a new start down in the Lake Tahoe area and wants a clean slate.
I haven’t shaved anyone’s head since Merritt’s, and my emotions get the best of me before I’m finished.
Still, it’s another full-circle moment, and it’s another strange honor, preparing someone to step into a new unknown this way.
I continue to get bigger, and my capacity to love and hope grows, too.
It feels like there is always something to look forward to, something I’m fighting to memorize as it’s happening.
Like when Sage and Fisher have a surprise wedding on Thanksgiving in their sunroom.
Fisher shocks Silas by asking him to be his best man, and I want his expression burned into my retinas.
It’s that exact smile of his that has become my favorite, and I know it always will be.
It’s the crimp that forms at one corner of his mouth before the rest of him catches up, when he realizes he’s someone’s first pick.
When he’s someone’s favorite. The windows around us all fog until we’re cocooned in love and laughter.
Sam throws together a playlist, and we dance in their kitchen, with the furniture pressed up against the walls, the baby kicking inside me like she’s dancing, too.
Silas and I dance to the same song I cried to all those months ago.
It’s a song about unpredictability and turning points and having the time of your life even so.
Instead of holding me up while I cry, he rests one hand on my small belly while I laugh, and the other one on the curve of my lower back.
Instead of any space between us, we’ve got life binding us close.
“You know it, right?” he says to me. “You know this is forever.”
I look around the room at stacks of dirty plates and one dish that got broken still piled up in the corner.
At mismatched furniture and flowers that are both dead and alive, the empty spaces missing people who still feel present, anyway.
I see every single person still here, all marked by tragedy, every one of them smiling .
. . none more so than the man holding me in his arms. It’s exactly what forever looks like. “Yeah, I do.”