by Jill Cox
Like the fact that she was meeting her parents tomorrow in Rome to set sail on a Mediterranean cruise for two weeks with at least one of her minions in tow.
Or the things Pete wasn’t saying, like the news about Gigi. Or the fact that he was on a plane home instead of to Italy. Or that one of his minions had hitched along for the ride.
When we got to our seats, I wanted to laugh: we were in the bulkhead on the right hand side of the plane. The same two seats from August. I found myself smiling at the memory of that day. I didn’t even recognize that Meredith anymore.
While Meg blathered on in Pete’s ear, he grabbed my black tote from me and placed both of our bags in the overhead bins with his free arm. I slid gratefully into my seat by the window, and had barely strapped myself in when exhaustion overtook me. We were thirty thousand feet in the air and somewhere over Ireland before I woke up again.
Pete slumped in his seat as if every cell in his body needed rest. There were those same rosy cheeks again that I’d noticed when we’d flown to Paris in August, but today, it made me want to hug him. Having grown up traveling with both Ian and Drew, it struck me as odd that Pete was neither snoring nor sleeping with his mouth open. He was just… peaceful. And beautiful. The cropped haircut he’d had at the beginning of the year was now longer, and though it was not the lion’s mane he’d had in previous years, the curls around the crown of his head were the perfect kind of messy, like he woke up that way and wondered why you didn’t.
I watched Pete sleep for a lot longer than I would ever admit, wondering how someone I’d once considered the boorish bane of my existence had just appeared by my side when I needed it most. If any one of my people had answered my calls over the last few hours, I might not have even seen Pete this morning. Now, neither of us were alone.
When the flight attendants rolled the lunch trolleys down the aisle, Pete jerked awake. He rubbed his eyes hard, glancing first to his left, then back at me. “Oh, hey. You’re awake,” he smiled. “Sorry, did I snore?”
“Not yet,” I grinned. “But you did recite bits and pieces of the Gettysburg Address.”
He stretched his arms above his head and yawned. “Weird. Usually it’s The Wasteland.”
Then he smiled wider, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he missed our banter as much as I did.
The flight attendants arrived at our row, chirping ‘chicken or pasta’ in all directions. And although we’d both inhaled our croissants earlier, I guess exhaustion had induced starvation, because Pete and I shoveled everything on our trays into our mouths.
“That was definitely not Florentine pasta,” Pete sighed after the flight attendants had cleared our tray tables on their return trip through the aisle. “Do you need somewhere to stay tonight? Because it’s not a good idea for you to drive to the coast when you’re exhausted. That last forty minutes before Highway 101 is tricky, especially in the dark.”
“It’s the trees.” I picked at the tiny dinner roll crumbs on my sleeve, then brushed them onto the floor. “They make an extra canopy so you can’t see the moon, not to mention all the curves in the road. But don’t worry, my dad’s in Portland. The Lincoln City hospital is sort of small, so they usually send emergencies to the big city whenever they can.”
The color drained again from Pete’s face. His breath became twitchy as his chest rose and fell against my elbow. Then his eyes locked with mine, and suddenly it felt like I was looking at a person I’d known all along but never really noticed before.
Pete watched me hesitantly for a moment, then turned his whole body to face me. “I’ve never told you this before, but I’ve been to Lincoln City.”
“You have?”
He nodded. “Twice as a kid, and once just after high school. Never since.”
“Really? You never told me that.”
Pete’s eyes went soft. “Well, it was before I knew you. And it’s kind of a long story.”
I pointed to the in-flight map flickering on the wall screen before us. “You’ve got a captive audience for a few hours. Even Greenland is listening.”
“Well, if Greenland is listening…” Pete smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Okay, so, once upon a time, there was a goofy high school graduate who somehow got into Stanford.”
“Stanford? Are you serious?”
“Completely. My parents met there, and for my whole life, that was the only place I wanted to go.” A wistful look crossed his face. “When we found out orientation started July 5th, my parents decided to make a family vacation out of it. You know James, the guy I worked for in Shanghai?”
“Yeah?”
“His mom and my mom were roommates in college. They’re our family friends, like –”
“My family and Drew’s?”
“Well, I hadn’t thought of that, but yeah,” Pete nodded. “I spent Fourth of July with my parents at the Logans’ house in Palo Alto, but after I got settled in the dorm the next day, I never called or texted them once. I was too busy making plans, making friends. It felt like my whole life had been leading up to that moment, you know?”
I did know. That’s how I’d felt at Highgate’s orientation.
“There was a huge party the night before I left,” Pete continued. “I came home at five a.m., totally wasted, to find my parents waiting inside the dorm lobby. They’d been calling me all night to let me know we were leaving early. So, when I didn’t answer, they got worried.”
“Sounds about right. Were they pissed?”
He laughed again under his breath. “If they were, they didn’t show it. They just went with me up to my room and shoved all of my stuff into my bags while I hung out with my head in one of the disgusting dorm toilets.”
Now I was laughing. “Wow, Russell. That’s quite a mental picture you’ve given me.”
But Pete wasn’t smiling anymore. “I was such a little jerk, Sully. Before we’d even left the dorm parking lot, I’d passed out in the back seat.”
“Well, you’re hardly the first person who’s done that, you know.” His face went pale again and suddenly contorted, the pain in his eyes so bright that tears pricked my own eyes. “Hey, you’re tired,” I said, laying my hand over his. “We can talk about this later if…”
“No,” he said flatly, his eyes meeting mine. “Let me finish. See, they’d been planning all week to surprise me with this drive back along the coast. Every time we’d gone to visit the Logans over the years, I’d begged my parents to take Highway 101, but we’d always been in too big of a hurry to get home. But that day the whole point of leaving early was to see the sunrise over the ocean together. When I finally woke up, the sun was high in the sky, and we were already two hours into Oregon. I had missed all of California.”
“Pete, I’m sure they understood. They were in college once.”
“I know. But they’d been looking forward to surprising me, and I ruined it for all of us. Of course I apologized, but all day I felt like I’d sucked the joy right out of life. When we reached Lincoln City, my dad decided we’d driven far enough…”
“Because of the tree canopy?”
“Obviously,” he smiled. “So, we checked into a motel somewhere on the south side of town near Siletz Bay, then headed north to find somewhere to eat.”
“North?” I sat up straight. “Sullivan’s is on the north side of town.”
Pete paused, his eyes fixed on mine. “I know. That’s where we went.”
Like those sped-up flashback sequences in a movie, my mind finally registered who Pete Russell really was. He hadn’t seemed familiar to me for the last three years because he resembled Chris Pratt. No, it was Pete himself I recognized.
The dark curly hair. The laugh lines around the eyes. The hopeful smile.
Four years ago, on the night of July 8th, a family of three was leaving Sullivan’s when they turned south on Highway 101, and a drunk driver collided head-on with their car. And I was standing on the front steps of the restaurant, just a couple hundred yards away.
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br /> FORTY
You know that thing that happens when you’re trying to smile your way past the tears, and you end up looking like a Halloween mask? That was Pete. And I just couldn’t take it anymore.
So I yanked off my seatbelt and threw my arms around him, squeezing him so hard I thought I might cut off his air. His entire body seized up at first, but I refused to let go. After a handful of seconds, he buried his face in my shoulder, his breath hitching in his throat as he fought back tears. But that didn’t stop me. I kept holding on, because all my words had escaped me.
The night of the accident, I was waiting for Drew to finish his shift so we could meet some friends at the movies. I had just walked outside when I heard the unforgettable sound of metal crashing against metal. I didn’t see the accident happen, but I saw the two cars once the dust settled. In my terror, I had run back into the restaurant to find my dad, screaming at everyone I saw to call 911. I was shaking so badly that Drew grabbed me and took me back to my parents’ office. Jamie Sullivan held both of us tight as he spoke to the police.
I’d heard the ambulance sirens arriving on the scene while Drew and I huddled together on the sofa in the office, safe and sound and hidden away from the outside world. Employees ran up and down the hallway, helpless to know what to do. We didn’t leave the building until long after closing. By that point, nothing remained of the accident but tiny shards of plastic from the headlights.
The next morning, a policeman came to our house to get a statement from each of us. He explained that the driver – a young woman celebrating her twenty-first birthday – had survived the crash, but the front seat passengers in the other car had died en route to the local hospital. Their eighteen-year-old son had been Medevac’d to a trauma center in Portland with critical injuries.
That’s all my family ever knew. For a while after the accident, we’d tried to find out what happened to the boy, but at the request of the family, none of the victims’ names were ever released to the press. But that didn’t stop us from praying for the son every single night for a year.
None of us had ever forgotten about that boy. We talked about him a lot, actually, even as recently as Christmas. Was he still injured? Had he gone to school? Where was he now?
He was here, right in front of me. Where he’d been all along.
“I’m sorry,” Pete whispered as he pulled away, wiping his cheeks. “You have no idea how many times I’ve wanted to tell you. When I saw your Sullivan’s shirt the first day of school, I knew exactly who you were. I’d seen you that night in the restaurant. You walked us to our table.”
“You remembered me?”
“I mean, what kind of question is that? I don’t meet feisty redheads every day.” He gave me a watery smile. “Anyway, I panicked that first day of class, and I immediately wanted to take back what I said, but I couldn’t without explaining myself. And then so much time passed that the truth felt outrageous.”
I grabbed his hand and squeezed it gently. “Well, at least this explains why you hated my Sullivan’s t-shirt so much.”
He rubbed away a tear with his free hand, then laughed under his breath. “I did not hate it. You look really pretty in green.”
Raw panic bloomed in Pete’s eyes, like he’d stepped too far over the line. But for me, in that moment, it was as if he’d set a bonfire in a cave of shadows.
As if I’d just seen the real Pete Russell for the very first time.
Pete wiped a hand past his eye just as a tear breached his lashes, then he stood. “I think I’m going to stretch my legs a little. You need anything?”
“No. But Pete? Thank you. For finally telling me.”
Pete nodded self-consciously, then headed to the back of the cabin. Sitting there alone, listening to the steady rumble of the jet, I couldn’t help but think what an idiot I’d been. How many times I’d chosen to believe whatever I wanted about Pete without a shred of evidence. How foolish I’d been to let Drew stunt our friendship. How petty I’d been to punish Pete for choosing Meg.
The true reason Pete had never told me about the accident had very little to do with himself and everything to do with me. From the second we’d met at Highgate, I’d failed Pete Russell. I was a judgmental coward with selfish, shallow dreams. And all this time, Pete had deserved so much more from me.
FORTY-ONE
You can wait for arriving passengers pretty far into the terminal at Portland’s PDX airport, and I could see my brother waiting almost the second we stepped out from the gate. Ian grabbed me and then Pete into his usual bear hug and held us both so tightly that Pete blushed a little. But by the smile he gave me over Ian’s shoulder, I knew he didn’t mind much.
“So, is your family here?” Ian asked Pete, glancing around. “I’d love to meet them.”
I panicked. Such a normal question to ask, yet so very wrong.
“No,” Pete said unblinkingly. “I always catch a shuttle home.”
“What? No way. Meredith and I will drop you off. Where do you live?”
“Um, Dunthorpe? Near Bishop’s Close?”
That was quite a swanky part of town. But either Ian didn’t know or he didn’t care. “Grand,” he said, grabbing my bag. “Sit up front and show me the way.”
It turned out that Ian had arrived six hours before us after a thirty-eight hour transit from Estonia via Copenhagen, Reykjavik, New York, Chicago, and finally Seattle. And he thought he had booked me a ticket, but he realized at some point in transit that he’d never gotten confirmation.
“I threw up twice in the transit lounge at LaGuardia,” he said, his voice a little wobbly. “I had a full visual of you alone at Charles de Gaulle with your hair in a messy top knot, sobbing into your scarf.”
Pete’s eyes met mine. “No way,” he smiled. “Not Meredith.”
As I listened to my brother swap travel stories with Pete, my brain couldn’t believe what it already knew. They had everything in common: the vagabond-around-the-globe past, the sharp intellect, the disarming wit. Most people seemed slightly intimidated by Ian, but not Pete. They’d only met that one time at Marie-France’s apartment, but to hear Ian and Pete laughing, you would have thought they’d known each other long before either of them knew me.
Before Ian’s car came to a halt in the driveway, the front door of Gigi’s Tudor-style house opened, revealing two women. The one in the nurse’s scrubs was obvious, so the elderly woman in a black turtleneck and jeans had to be Gigi. Pete had told me she was in her mid-seventies, but her salt-and-pepper hair and youthful face seemed at least two decades younger, despite her poor health.
Pete didn’t even shut the passenger door behind him. He just ran to his grandmother, pulled her gently away from the nurse’s steadying hold, and hugged her as fiercely as anyone could hug someone so fragile. She looked terribly tiny against his large frame as she peeked around his arm to smile at Ian and me. “You brought friends home with you?”
With one arm still around her, Pete turned to face us. “Gigi, these are my friends, Meredith and Ian.” He motioned for us to come closer. “Meredith studies with me in Paris.”
Gigi’s eyes flicked between Pete and me. Then she grinned so widely that her dark eyes crinkled. Just like Pete’s. “I was hoping you would bring Meredith home to meet me,” she beamed, squeezing his waist.
Pete’s eyes met mine for a second, and his grin went a little lopsided. “Gigi, Ian is Meredith’s brother. They’ve both flown home to visit their dad. He’s having surgery tomorrow.”
“Oh?” A shadow crossed Gigi’s face. “I’m so sorry to hear that. Do you two need somewhere to stay? We have plenty of room here if you’d like.”
I had to bite my lip to keep my eyes from filling again with tears. Who offers shelter to two complete strangers when she’s days away from her own death? I opened my mouth to speak – twice – but no words came out.
Luckily, Ian was oblivious. For all he knew, the woman in the scrubs was Pete’s sister. So he stepped forward and took
Gigi’s hand in his, and said the very thing any normal person would. “Thank you so much, Mrs. – um...”
“Margaret. Please call me Margaret.”
“Thank you, Margaret,” he said, winking. “You’re so kind, but our whole family is staying in a hotel near St. Joseph’s. In fact, I promised our mum I’d get Meredith to the hospital as quickly as possible, so we should probably head out, if you don’t mind.”
Gigi smiled warmly at Ian, patted his hand, then turned her attention to me. “You’ll come back to visit, won’t you, Meredith? Maybe Sunday, if your dad has stabilized?”
“I will,” I nodded. And then, for some reason even I couldn’t explain, I closed the gap between us and hugged Gigi as tightly as I could without hurting her. “Your grandson is just like you,” I whispered quietly so only Gigi and Pete could hear. “His mom and dad would be proud.”
When I pulled away, Gigi took my face in her hands, looking so deeply into my eyes I thought she might put a spell on me. Then she turned to Pete and smiled. “Oh, I like this one,” she chuckled. “Peter, come inside after you’ve said your goodbyes.”
Ian grabbed Pete in one of his best, big brotherly hugs – one flat palm pressed against Pete’s back, his solid fingers curved around Pete’s shoulder. Watching the two of them, I felt a giant twinge of guilt. Drew idolized my brother. I hoped he never had to see this. It was one Sullivan too many in Pete Russell’s court.
And just like that, Ian was back in the car, turning the engine over before my mind even registered that he was gone. Pete stepped toward me, wrapping his hand around my elbow.
“Hey.” Pete’s dark eyes were full to the lashes with grace. “This might sound crazy, but I don’t believe it was an accident that I ran into you this morning. Truth is, Sully, I think I might be able to face these next few days now that you’re here, too.”
I nodded, wrapping my arms around his waist and burying my face in his chest. “Pete?”