"Yes?" I whispered, putting one hand on his cheek and smoothing my thumb over his cheekbone.
"I tried not to think about it for so long because it hurt so much. And I just wonder, in that moment, where was God then? Where was the love then?" His eyes searched mine, looking for something I wasn't sure how to name. Hope? Some type of enlightenment that would make it better?
My gaze moved over his features, that strong jaw I loved so much, those deep brown eyes that could fill up with pain or with love in an instant. I let my mind travel back to that moment even though I had tried not to do that over the past three years either. I thought about the horror that had filled me—the helplessness, and the unfathomable grief—and I thought about Calder's promise to meet me at a spring in Elysium. I thought about how, in what he thought was going to be his very last moments, he had thought of me. He had sought to protect me in the only way he had left. Don't watch this, Eden. Turn away.
I studied the man lying next to me, the one I had fallen in love with because he gave me the things that were in his mind as if I had every right to them, because he was decent and fair and good. I had fallen in love with him as he carried his best friend twenty miles to safety. I had fallen in love with him because he knew how to tease in a way that felt loving, because he laughed easily and loved deeply, and because he looked at me in a way that made me feel precious. Love beat through my blood. "We were the love," I whispered. "In that moment, we were the love."
His eyes moved over my face, looking for the truth of that and seeming to find it. He smiled that same crooked, tentative smile I had loved the first time I saw it, the one that had calmed me when I was a terrified nine-year-old girl sitting in front of a temple full of strangers who expected something of me I didn't understand.
"Will my emotions always feel like, 'one step forward, one step back?' Will I always be this unbearable mess?" he asked.
"Probably," I answered.
He leaned back and let out a soft laugh. I grinned at him.
"And I'm okay with that," I whispered, going serious. "And we'll create a Bed of Healing, Version 2.0. It'll always be the place where we can be as messy as we need to be, in all sorts of ways." I winked at him.
He laughed and so did I, leaning into each other, sinking all the way down.
And I thought to myself, even though life could be horrifying and earth-shattering, terrible and tragic, it was also filled with moments of breathtaking beauty. And sometimes you just had to laugh.
It was true what I'd once said about the stars—some things are seen more clearly in light . . . and some things are seen more clearly in darkness. Because somewhere in the dark of the night, Calder pulled me close to him and we agreed in ways both spoken and unspoken that the world was ugly and broken, and love was ridiculously dangerous and absurdly unsafe . . . and that we would love anyway. We would keep our fierce and tender hearts open. It felt foolish and ridiculous and right. It felt like the bravest thing we'd ever do.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Eden
We got on the road bright and early the next morning. We were ready to leave Indiana behind. We were ready to go home. Our new life beckoned to us and we finally had everything we needed to start building it.
As we drove, we held hands, silent in our own thoughts. Calder seemed more peaceful this morning, more himself. We stopped at Starbucks and got coffees and muffins and sat in the parking lot. I felt like the world was different today. Something had shifted. Maybe it was the fact that we had all the answers, or at least all the answers we needed. I would tear down all those papers I had pinned to the back of my closet door—the project I'd taken up in an effort to do something with my deep pain and confusion. I didn't need it anymore.
"You know what I've been thinking about this morning, Morning Glory?" he asked.
I tilted my head, taking a sip of my vanilla decaf latté. He stared out the front window, giving me the beauty of his profile. "Xander told me once that he believed there was a purpose to me surviving Acadia that day," he paused, "and a purpose for all the suffering."
I nodded. "Yes, I like to believe that, too," I answered. "For all of us."
He smiled over at me. "Do you think we'll know it when we see it? Do you think we'll understand the reason for the pain someday?"
I thought about that for a minute, sipping sweet warmth and swallowing it. "Maybe it's not so much about one reason or one purpose. Maybe it's like this." I considered my words, looking out the window at the seemingly endless cornfields in front of us, the endless golden sky. "We all attach things to our hearts, kind of like how I pinned all those articles up on the back of my closet door, or how you covered your studio with paintings of me." I smiled a small smile at him. "We all attach things to our hearts, the things we value, the things we need, the things that make us who we are. But maybe . . . maybe it's only when our hearts are broken, that those things can fall inside. Maybe it's only then that those things truly become part of us, and it's only then we truly understand and recognize pain in others because we've experienced it, too. And we've let it make us better, more loving. Perhaps that's what real mercy is. Perhaps that's the purpose to the pain."