In This Moment(94)

I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t lift my voice above a whisper. “I didn’t know about the pills. I didn’t know.”

She doesn’t respond, but she nods her head like she believes me, and she pulls me into her arms and squeezes me hard against her body. “Come inside,” she says against my hair. “Please.”

So I do.

***



One thing I know from watching all those movies with Cole is that real life doesn’t work out the way that it does onscreen. In real life, you rarely know the right thing to say and the best parts aren’t condensed down to a manageable script that wraps up at the two-hour mark. The director never calls cut. There isn’t a period at the end of the last sentence. There’s a question mark.

If my life were a movie, fresh from seeing Mrs. Kearns, I would go to the tabernacle of Jillian’s grave and I would sprawl out on a pallet of lush green grass under a sunlit blue sky. I’d talk out loud for hours, telling her all of the things that she’s missed. The breeze would pick up along with a stirring musical score. A white bird of some sort might take flight from a nearby tree and I would just know, in some secret place inside of me, that Jilly and I are okay.

Real life doesn’t work quite like that, does it? It’s jumbled up and it’s messy and there are too many thoughts, too many feelings curling around inside of you. You can’t unwind them and say for certain, “this is this, and that is that.”

It’s not like that.

It’s like this: grass, scorched and brittle under my sneakered feet and sweat pooling in the butt of my bathing suit from the bike ride over here. Real life is me slapping occasionally at the no-see-ums circling my ankles as I silently stare at the stone tablet that marks the spot where my best friend’s ashes are buried. Real life is me searching for answers but winding up feeling more lost than ever.

Looking around, the only thing that I know for sure is that she’s not here. Not in this place. There’s no way Jillian Kearns would stick it out for eternity in a humdrum Florida cemetery full of browns and greys and a bunch of decaying old farts. Not a chance. She’d go where the action is.

I will if you will.

I tilt my face to the sky and something that Mrs. Kearns told me earlier comes back to me.

“When you girls were about ten or eleven, I was driving the kids to school and I asked them who they would be if they could be anybody. I don’t remember Daniel’s answer. I’m sure that he said he’d like to be the President or some famous athlete with a massive endorsement deal.” She pushed my hair back from my face and sought out my eyes. “Do you know what Jillian said?”

I shook my head.

“I’ll never forget it because it was such an odd thing to say. She told me that she’d be you. You, Aimee.” She cupped her hand to the place where my heart beat under my skin. “Maybe you aren’t wrong. Maybe she is inside of you. But I don’t think she’s making a racket because she’s trying to get out. I think she just wants to make sure you know that she’s there.”





Cole



I can’t explain what’s happening inside my head. It’s like trying to describe in one concise sentence how and why Terminator Salvation went so very wrong. It’s more like, where do I begin?

If I had to bottom line it? Then I’d say that I’m fucking sick and tired of getting in the way of myself.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to do next, but I’m pretty sure that I have to do something or I’ll just get swallowed into the bottomless vacuum of dead space that’s been carved out where my heart should be.

So, on Wednesday night, I dial the numbers one at a time and then I bring the phone up to my ear.

When she answers and I hear her voice—live and unscripted—for the first time in three years, I make myself take a breath and I say, all casual like, “So, there’s this girl…”

My mom, to her credit, doesn’t miss a beat. She doesn’t get gooey on me. She doesn’t breathe heavily into the mouthpiece, or start to cry, or heave the phone across the room.

Nope.

Like she doesn’t have a terminal brain tumor, like we talked yesterday, like there isn’t a giant elephant sitting on top of her, she says, “There always is. What’s her name?”





Aimee



“I, for one, think that you should just call him.”

I look up from my book and see Mara staring at me anxiously. She slides onto the stool next to me and props her elbows on the dark grey granite counter.

“Call who?” Mom tosses two halves of a cracked eggshell into the garbage can. She’s making a batch of pumpkin-zucchini muffins for the morning.