All This Time(71)

I notice tears welling up in her eyes, see her breathing through it, fighting them off.

I want to know what’s going on in her head, why she’s fighting so hard. Why she’s hiding.

She takes a deep breath, her chest rising and falling.

Finally she whispers a single word.

“No.”

I’m so ecstatic just to hear her voice again that I almost don’t register the meaning. Then my lungs collapse in on themselves, that one word pushing all the air out of me.

“I can’t,” she adds, her voice scratchy, barely audible. “I can’t be happy.”

Her words from that last night come back to me all at once.

We were never meant to be this happy.

“Why not?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady, as if my whole world isn’t riding on this moment.

“If you really know me,” she says, still staring at her reflection, “then you know why not.”

“Laura.”

The thing that pulls her away from me each time she gets close.

“I understand how hard her loss must be, believe me, but, Marley—”

“She died because of me!” she says, her voice cracking. “I saw that car. I saw it and I couldn’t move. I didn’t save her. I didn’t even try.” She sucks in a long breath, continuing. “Laura would have saved me. She would have…”

She stops and fights the tears back again.

“Then wouldn’t Laura save you now?” I ask her, leaning closer, desperate to make her see. “Wouldn’t she tell you to be happy—”

“I don’t get to be happy. I don’t get to cry and feel bad about Laura, because I’m the reason she can’t feel anything,” she says, frustrated, heartbroken. “So I can’t love you, Kyle. I won’t.”

Those words bounce around inside my head. I can’t love you, Kyle. I won’t. She said my name like she’s said it a thousand times before, like she knows me. Like… she already loves me. Because how can she say she won’t love me if she doesn’t already want to?

That’s when I realize that her fingers are clenched tightly around mine. The feeling is so familiar to me that I don’t even know when she grabbed me. I just know that her hand is in mine.

I turn my palm up, twine my fingers with hers, and I silently plead with the universe to let this work. Please, please, please let this work.

“I traveled many roads to find this lost treasure, this piece of me,” I say softly.

She looks up, startled, as I reach into my pocket.

“But it was you who found it and returned it to me,” I say as I hold up my hand, palm up between us, fingers closed around something. “Now I wish to give it to you.”

Marley looks from my hand up to my face, questioning. She looks down again as I slowly unfurl my fingers.

Nestled there in the center is one perfect snow-white pearl.

I hear Marley’s sharp intake of breath as I lift her hand and gently place the pearl in her palm. It’s too much. Her lip quivers, and the dam breaks. Tears she’s held in for years finally rush out. I wrap my arms around her as her shoulders heave, and she buries her face into my chest.

I sit there, holding her, letting her cry. I keep her safe while she feels the pain she’s never let herself feel.

After, we sit under the cherry blossom tree, her eyes still red and puffy.

She plucks little flowers from between the strands of grass, dozens of tiny blooms littering the ground around us.

“I don’t know what to do now,” she says as her hair falls in front of her face, still shielding her in some small way from me and everyone else.

My hand brushes lightly against hers, that magnetic pull between us suddenly alive again. Somehow stronger than it’s ever been. “We’ll figure it out as we go,” I say, her hazel eyes shifting up to meet mine. “I’ve waited all this time for you. The slower we take it, the longer it lasts.”

I reach up to tuck a yellow Doris Day behind her ear. “And I’m okay with that.”

The smallest trace of a shy smile lets me know she’s okay with that too.





41


The next evening we meet up in the Cardiology waiting room, and Marley hands over her yellow notebook of stories.

It’s so cool to see the story that she wrote for us, a world that I actually lived in for an entire year, here on paper. I see the places my brain filled in the gaps, building, making real memories from every one of her sentences.

I tell her about those moments. How I thought Kim had died in the accident. How I almost lost my mind trying to cook my mom’s béarnaise sauce. How I got into a fight with Sam at one of our Saturday touch football games.

I laugh as I read a few paragraphs about a time we fed the ducks at the pond, a big brown-and-white one almost taking my finger off while Marley laughed in amusement. I look over at her sitting on the opposite side of the couch from me, taking in the small smile on her face. The same girl I fell in love with.

Real.

I study the dark circles around her eyes, the curtain of hair hiding her from the rest of the world. Her sadness is heavier now than it was in my dream because she lets me see it all. She doesn’t hide behind her words, writing about the person she so desperately wants to be. Sometimes the darkness completely overtakes her, but I can see the Marley I know hiding just inside the shadows, fighting her way out.