Chasing Abby(81)

Ryder looks a little bummed that I didn’t provide any input on my mom’s suggestion, but he quickly forgets once we’re inside the house. My mom serves lemonade and iced tea and we all gather in the living room to reminisce about Caleb. Claire sits in the armchair while Chris and Jimi sit on each arm. My parents and I sit on the sofa while Ryder and Junior sit on the floor next to the coffee table.
“Remember when he let me drive his car?” Junior says, then he takes a sip of his lemonade.
“He did not,” Jimi says, shaking her head.
“Yes, he did. He told me not to tell you all ’cause you’d be mad. But he let me drive it down Sandpiper and back to the house. He said he’d never seen a fourteen-year-old drive with such panache. What’s panache?”
Chris shakes his head. “Something you definitely do not lack.”
Junior’s face splits into a wide smile. “Caleb knew me so well.”
“How about you, Ryder?” I ask. “What’s your favorite memory of Caleb?”
He shrugs. “The first time we sang in the library?”
“The first time?” Chris asks. “How about the time he taught you to play ‘Wild Horses’ on your guitar?”
“He never finished teaching me.”
For some reason, these words knock the breath out of me. I rise from the sofa and head for my bedroom, where I can grieve in private. I close the door behind me and curl up on my bed, trying to temper the anger building up inside me. The irrational voice in my head telling me I should be angry at Caleb for leaving me.
The knock at the door just annoys me. “I’m fine!”
The door opens a crack. “Abby?”
Claire’s voice is unexpected and only makes the tears come faster. “I’m fine, really.”
She pushes the door open a little wider so she can stick her head in. “Can I come in?”
I nod, then I sit up and grab a tissue out of the box on my nightstand. She enters and softly closes the door behind her. She has a fat manila envelope in one hand and I imagine it’s probably one more thing Caleb left behind that I won’t be able to look at.
She sits next to me on the bed and lays the envelope in her lap. “I can’t imagine what you must be going through.” She reaches across and grabs my hand and the softness of her hand is comforting. “But I was hoping that I could maybe share something with you that might make you feel less alone. You see, when I was very young, my mother homeschooled me. When she was feeling well, which was usually a few hours a day, she would teach me everything she could about reading, math, and science. In our tiny home in the woods, she was my teacher and my classmate, my mother and my friend. We were each other’s worlds, so when I lost her at the age of seven, I lost everything. And it took me a very, very long time to recover from that loss. It wasn’t until I met your father when I was fifteen that my life began to show any hope of a happy ending.”
She opens the manila envelope and removes a large stack of paper from within. She sets the envelope aside and lays the stack of paper on top of her lap.
“After your parents decided that it would be better for us not to be part of your life, I grieved for a while. I hadn’t just lost you, I had lost the right to know all the things that would make you who you are today. All the birthdays and holidays. All the school projects and bedtime stories. All the triumphs and failures. All the lessons and heartbreak. I was going to miss all of it. That was the worst part. But I quickly realized that, if I was diligent, it’s possible that you wouldn’t have to miss out on any of that stuff.”
She hands me the stack of paper and I lay it gently in my lap. “For the past seventeen years, I’ve kept a journal, an unpublished memoir of sorts. I tried to record all the most important events of our lives over the past seventeen years, in hopes that one day I would be able to gift it to you. And I’ve documented what I remember most from the time your father and I met up until the day we lost you and beyond. I’ve tentatively titled this memoir Shattered Hearts, but it will never be published. It’s for you and only you. I printed you a copy and emailed you the file.”