Life's Too Short

by Abby Jimenez

  Two months later

  VANESSA

  We should probably hurry up if we want to catch the light,” Laird said.

  We were standing on the beach at an empty tiki bar. I was leaning on the bamboo railing overlooking the water. The sun was setting and a warm salty ocean breeze blew my hair back over my shoulders.

  Brent was in the surf with his pant legs rolled up, watching the waves.

  I was on Drake’s private island. Brent had been in the country almost as long as I’d been on the road. Part of Drake’s condition in backing BoobStick was that production of the lip balms take place on the neighboring mainland to bring jobs to the locals. Brent and Joel came out to oversee training and do quality control.

  Drake and Laird’s wedding was tomorrow, so Brent had taken a boat over to be my date. It was fucking depressing. Not only was my date gay and in another relationship, but he was also my brother. I’d achieved the crying emoji wedding date trifecta.

  Brent and I had our come-to-Jesus on the phone a few days after I left. He’d known the whole time I might be sick, and he’d respected my wishes not to tell anyone about it, so he never brought it up. But it hurt him that I didn’t confide in him.

  We’d gotten a lot closer over the last few months. I stopped being his big sister and started being his friend—and I liked it better that way. I needed a friend. And he needed me to know he could take care of himself.

  And he could.

  There was a raging pig roast going on in front of the dock. I could see the glow of the tiki lamps from between the palm trees, and music was pulsing in the distance. It was an interesting crowd over there. You were as likely to be sitting next to a Sherpa at dinner as you were Brad Pitt.

  “You should get back,” I said to Laird. “You’re missing your own party.”

  He smiled as he clipped my mic to my lei. “Eh, I’d rather be here. That’s Drake’s thing, not mine. I hate crowds.”

  I smiled. “Well, I’m happy to have the company—and the help. It’ll be nice to have a video for this series that wasn’t made in selfie mode.”

  I’d spent the last two months lying low, trying not to get recognized. I backpacked for a few weeks in the UK. Spent a week in Amsterdam in random hostels.

  Then I’d sort of lost my way. Like a windup toy that ran out of up, I just stopped. I couldn’t move forward anymore.

  There was nothing I wanted to see. No places I wanted to go. I always enjoyed Ireland, so I went there thinking it would cheer me up.

  It didn’t.

  I rented a cottage near Dublin and I just sat. For three solid weeks, binging romance novels. I didn’t go check out the quaint village nearby, I didn’t make any friends. The only thing that got me out of that little house was the wedding, and I’d probably squat here on this island until I died for no other reason than I simply couldn’t go anymore.

  Drake didn’t care if I stayed. I don’t think he had any idea how many people lived on his island. It was sort of a living, breathing entity, gathering and losing inhabitants with the tide. Yesterday I asked him who the dreadlocked man living in the hammock out by the gardens was and he legitimately didn’t know. He said he thought it was, and I quote, “The llama guy maybe?”

  If there was a random hammock llama guy, there could be an eccentric vlogger chick who drank all the wine and lived in the hut by the banana trees.

  My hand hadn’t gotten any better.

  I had good days and I had bad ones. On the good days I could feel my fingers. I could lightly grip things. On the bad days I had almost no use of my hand at all.

  It wasn’t unusual for ALS’s progression to stop for a time, or even regress a little. But eventually it would progress. It always progressed. And now it had started to move up my arm. I’d lost strength in my bicep. The change was noticeable now compared to the other side. Skinny.

  Atrophied.

  It was scary to look in the mirror and see the differences. So scary that I’d taken the full-length mirror out of my hut. It was even worse seeing everyone else notice. To turn around and catch Brent’s eyes darting away from me like he hadn’t been staring at it.

  It made me even more certain that I’d done the right thing leaving when I did. Annabel and Dad couldn’t have handled this.

  It was official. There was a tiny, toothless, ancient Chihuahua in Nebraska that was probably going to outlive me.

  Drake’s acupuncturist took a shot at helping. It worked a little. The good days were usually right after a visit. But my apathy, my lack of drive and enthusiasm and love for life—nothing could improve that.

  I lost something when I lost Adrian.

  It took me a long time to come to terms with that. But I did. I’d lost the ability to decide not to be sad. That was officially out of my hands.

  There are people you can know for a lifetime and they never get into your heart. And then there are those who are already inside it, before you ever even lay eyes on them. Adrian was a part of me always, I realized. It didn’t matter that I’d only known him for a minute in the day of my life, or a second in the day of his. He was eternal for me, immortalized in my soul, before, after, and forever. And forgetting him wasn’t any more possible than changing my DNA.

  I missed him. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night and it took me a minute to realize I was alone. That Adrian wasn’t next to me or just on the other side of a wall. Sometimes I’d see the back of someone’s head and I was sure it was him. But of course it never was.

  It never would be.

  I imagined he’d thrown himself fully back into his work. Maybe he’d started training for a new marathon.

  Maybe he’d started dating again…

  Hopefully everyone was getting back to their lives. I wouldn’t know.

  I’d been radio silent with Dad and Annabel. I changed my number and canceled my email. It was better that way, at least for now. I was a crutch for them—and maybe they were a crutch for me too.

  I had to acknowledge that there was some codependency between me and my family, and all of us needed to learn to live a different way. They needed to make decisions on their own, and I needed to accept being okay with them failing. They’d never be independent if I kept being one phone call away from bailing them out. It was better if they learned to stand without me, that they practiced that now before they had to do it in earnest.

  If Dad or Annabel needed to reach me for anything that wasn’t money, Brent knew how to find me. I put my adoption attorney in touch with Sonja. I knew between her and Dad, they’d find a perfect family for Grace. They didn’t need me to micromanage it. Dad was a smart guy—and way too paranoid to let her go to anyone who didn’t pass muster.

  And Adrian…he’d move on. He’d be fine in another relationship, one that was more manageable and predictable. I hoped he got that. I really did. I loved him enough to want him to be happy.

  Aaaaand I was also petty enough to hope their sex wasn’t as good as ours—but I digress.

  Brent came up from the shoreline looking at his phone. “Hey, did you know #WheresVanessaPrice is trending on Twitter?”

  I snorted. “Doesn’t surprise me. I made a dramatic exit. And good. It means the videos will get more views when they finally get posted.”

  He gave me a sorry look. “You know, if you want, I could come with you somewhere after the wedding. We could go on an adventure. Maybe someplace exotic that has those really aggressive monkeys that snatch your food and shit everywhere?”

  I laughed dryly.

  “I’m serious, Vanessa. This funk you’re in is gross. You need something to look forward to.”

  I shook my head. “Nope. I’m gearing up to be the hermit who lives on Drake’s island. The crazy braless American who day drinks and kidnaps all the baby goats.”

  Laird made a face. “I think we already have one of those.” He hoisted his camera. “Ready?”

  Brent sat on a barstool and went back to looking at his phone.

  I n
odded. “Ready.”

  I put my fake smile on first. Then I turned to face the camera. “Hi, all! Well, I made it! I’m at the wedding. You guys would not believe this guest list. The Weeknd showed up on a Jet Ski this morning and Anthony Hopkins is over there.” I leaned in. “I’m gonna see if I can get him to do the fava bean line from The Silence of the Lambs later. It’s been an amazing couple of—”

  “Vanessa! Oh my God! Chrissy Teigen just mentioned you on Twitter!”

  I paused in my monologue to look at Brent. “Really? For what?”

  Getting mentioned by a celebrity wasn’t exactly unheard of for me, but I didn’t know her.

  Brent was staring at his phone and he didn’t answer.

  “Well? What did she say?”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God oh my God oh my God.”

  He jumped off his stool and shoved his phone into my hand. “LOOK!”

  I read the tweet.

  Can someone please put this poor man out of his misery and tell him where to find Vanessa Price?

  She’d used the Where’s Vanessa Price hashtag and retweeted an article titled “This Man Is Searching the Globe for His Lost Love and You Won’t Believe Why!”

  My soul. Left. My body.

  I clicked on the article and held my breath, hoping to God it wasn’t Monett Missouri Guy.

  It wasn’t.

  Adrian Copeland is on a worldwide quest to find the woman who got away—and chances are you know who she is.

  For weeks famous YouTuber Vanessa Price had been teasing her viewers with stories of a handsome, mysterious love interest. We now know this man is a prestigious St. Paul attorney who won’t stop until he finds her.

  Price is known for her passionate pursuit for a cure to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS, the disease that inspired the Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014.

  Price lost her sister to the illness and in a recent final farewell video, Price revealed she may have the early-onset symptoms of the disease. She announced that she was shutting down her popular channel, Social Butterfly, and in a heart-wrenching goodbye, alluded that her potential diagnosis was too much for her beau, Adrian, and that she was leaving him.

  According to Copeland, they had a disagreement about her choosing to not seek treatment and the couple broke up.

  “I made a horrible mistake, and I lost the love of my life,” Copeland said in a viral video he made three weeks ago, pleading for information on her whereabouts.

  Copeland, who is in the process of adopting Price’s infant niece, said he struggled with a lifelong fear of flying and had to spend a month in intensive therapy to overcome his phobia and deal with the feelings about Price’s potential diagnosis. He’s since followed leads all over the globe, baby in tow, in his attempt to locate Price, who has gone underground. We can’t say if she knows he’s looking, but Copeland has made one thing very clear:

  “I’ll never stop looking. And when I find her, I’m spending the rest of her life letting her know how much I love her.”

  “Oh my God…” I breathed.

  “How the fuck did you not know about this until just now?” Brent said to the side of my face.

  I looked at him wide-eyed. “I’m on a social media hiatus, and when I’m not, I get like two million notifications a day! It’s like a flock of seagulls squawking at me constantly over half a dozen different social media networks! I ignore it!! Why didn’t he call you to look for me? You knew where I was!”

  “I blocked him in solidarity! He’s been dead to me since New Year’s!”

  “Didn’t Dad call you?”

  “Well, yeah, but I didn’t answer! Who answers when Dad calls???”

  Grace. Adrian was adopting Grace.

  I did a laugh-cry as I felt around my dress for nonexistent pockets, searching frantically for a phone that I hadn’t even charged in a week. “My phone. I need my phone!”

  Brent gestured dramatically to my hand. “You’re holding mine! Use mine!”

  I fumbled to the call screen. “His number. I don’t know his number!” I typed his name into Brent’s contacts and it didn’t come up. “How do you not have his number?! He’s one of your investors!”

  “It’s under Jesus’s Abs! No! Wait! It’s under Fancy Hall Cop! Type in Fancy Hall Cop!”

  I pulled up the contact and hit Send, pacing along the bamboo railing.

  The call wouldn’t connect.

  I made a guttural shrieking noise and whirled to run to beg Drake for his satellite phone.

  I was going to miss the wedding. I was going to get on The Weeknd’s Jet Ski and take it right to the nearest airport. I wouldn’t stop moving until Adrian was in front of me.

  “Vanessa!” A faraway voice drifted from somewhere in the distance.

  I slid to a halt in the sand, panting. “Did you guys hear that?” I asked, looking back at Laird and Brent, who’d followed me. Laird was still filming.

  “Vanessaaa!”

  I twisted around. “Okay, that was definitely closer. Who is calling me?”

  Laird was looking around now too. Panning the shoreline with the camera.

  I think we saw him at the same time, because Laird’s camera stopped moving and focused on a man running up the beach from the direction of the pig roast. It looked like a wedding guest. He was in a white linen outfit, kicking up sand at a full run.

  “Vanessa!”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  And then I put a hand over my mouth.

  It was him.

  Adrian.

  I only had a moment to register it before I broke into a run toward him down the beach and we crashed into each other.

  I was instantly whole.

  He gathered me up like I’d seen Drake gather a parachute after landing a BASE jump. Hand over hand, tucking it all into your belly to carry it off in your arms. My thighs were lifted around his waist, my dress hiked up, hands under my ass, warm lips on my mouth, and I wondered briefly if I’d finally died and this was heaven.

  I broke away from his kiss. “Wait. Wait wait wait, what are you doing here?” I breathed. “How? How did you find me?”

  He pulled away just enough to look at me. He was crying. He looked like a man who had cried every single day for months. Like he’d gotten good at it and it was easier to cry now than it was to stop.

  “I knew you’d be here. You wouldn’t miss Drake’s wedding. I knew I only had one shot at knowing exactly where you were. Vanessa, I’m so sorry. I was wrong. I was wrong to ask you what I did. I had no right.”

  I shook my head. “You were just being honest about what you need—”

  “Fuck what I need. I should have kept you still. It was my job to keep you still. I’ve worked really hard to deal with the things inside of me that made it difficult to be strong for you. That was my own shit, and I had to work through that and I’m sorry.”

  I swallowed down the knot in my throat.

  His eyes bored into mine. “I love you. I never said it and I should have said it every fucking day. I love you.”

  My chin trembled. “You got on a plane…”

  He shook his head. “I got on dozens of planes. I quit my job. I woke up every day with no idea where I was going or what I was doing. I didn’t even know whether you’d talk to me if I found you.”

  “You adopted Grace?” I said, my voice cracking.

  “I went to get her from Gerald the day you had him clear out your apartment.”

  “You…you did?” I breathed.

  A small smile played at the corners of his lips. “He gave me a long speech about how I should let you go. Then he made a dramatic exit and I didn’t even let him get down the hallway before I went after him and told him I’d never give up on you and I wanted my daughter back. He said he wanted to see if I’d fight to keep my family together. I must have passed his test.”

  I laughed through tears.

  He smiled. “It was the negotiation of a lifetime. He made me promise to let him see her and to only give
her gender-neutral toys. Then he went on a rant about the patriarchy and subliminal messages in children’s movies. I’ve been taking your dad to Perkins with Grace once a week since you left.”

  I didn’t think it was possible to love Adrian more, to be prouder of him. But I was.

  He nodded over his shoulder. “She’s here, actually. She’s with Drake—who still doesn’t have a shirt, by the way.”

  I laughed and the welling tears spilled over.

  His green eyes held mine and he wiped off my cheek with his thumb. “Please,” he whispered. “Tell me it’s not too late. Tell me you’ll give me another chance. I don’t want to waste another minute. I’ve wasted enough time as it is.”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Yes?”

  I laughed through tears. “Yes.”

  His smile was enormous. It radiated. He kissed me again and I melted into it.

  There was nothing nostalgic about him, not in his familiar smell or the shape of his body, because nostalgia would have suggested that he was a memory. He wasn’t. My heart had never left him, had never forgotten a thing about him. It just started right back up from where we left off, like an ongoing conversation. The inhale to the long exhale of the last two months.

  He pulled away to look at me. “Let’s make this the best time of our lives. Live every day like it’s your last.”

  I sniffed. “And when one of them is my last?” I asked, looking at him.

  “You’re my soul mate. I’ll find you in the next life. Like I found you in this one.”

  EPILOGUE

  THESE CELEBRITIES HAVE

  FALLEN OFF THE MAP, SEE WHERE

  THEY ARE NOW!

  Ten months later

  ADRIAN

  Come on. Put your elbow around my neck.”

  Vanessa pressed her lips into a line. She hated this. “I can do it myself.”

  “No, you can’t.” I scooped her into my arms. “You’re not strong enough. You’ll fall and hurt yourself. Besides, you let Drake do it on that mountain in Venezuela.” I smiled, carrying her to the living room of my—our—apartment and setting her on the couch.