“Nah, mostly since I got home this morning. While I was gone, I mostly drank to excess and slept as much as possible.”
“In my medical opinion, you had it half right.” She wiped her hands dry and stood watching him from the other side of the counter.
He nodded. “I actually guessed that’s what you’d say.” Now he leaned forward again, closer to her. “But what I’ve been thinking is that I need to do a little revisiting.”
She waited.
“I think I want to go back to some of the places where my memories are strongest so I can lay those things to rest.”
The fact that he still had not spoken Dahlia’s name did not escape Lily’s notice.
She nodded, hoping he’d go on to explain, clarify, or at least something.
“So you’ll come?”
What?
“What?”
“You’ll come with me?” he asked. “You’ll help me?”
Lily turned back to the sink and closed her eyes for a second, settling into the strange balancing act. Could she do this for him? With him? And why was it even a difficult question? Of course she could. She would. He was her friend. He needed her. She would be there for him. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying not to feel the memory of his arms. When she turned back to him, he was watching her with an eager expression.
When she spoke, her voice came out more quietly than she’d anticipated. “I’ll come if you think it will help.”
He got up off his stool and walked around the counter. “Are you kidding me?” he asked. “Having you with me makes everything better.” When he put his arms around her yet again, she found herself trying not to stiffen.
This was an entirely new problem, and one she had not anticipated. Deacon had always, all the time she’d known him, been affectionate. As a little kid, he’d wrestle with her, dunk her in the pool, bump her arm to show he’d noticed her. He was the most huggy teenage boy in all their group of friends, and his affection was never, ever weird. The way he’d always cuddled with Dahlia was different, but now that there was no Dahlia, Lily felt the strangeness of all of this.
Come on, she told herself. He needed comfort. His world had just changed forever. He was re-figuring his whole life. She understood that.
But why did she find herself both craving and evading his touch? What was it about the way she felt in the circle of his arms that gave her a sense of both comfort and fear? What was she afraid of?
She knew, much too well, the answer to that.
Chapter Six
A never-ending stream of juicy bugs smacked against the Jeep’s windshield as Deacon drove the winding road through the woods. His stomach felt full of hornets—butterflies were too tame. Beside him in the passenger seat, Lily sat forward, like she was trying to get there before him.
“I can’t believe we’re going back. It’s been twelve years since I’ve been to Lafayette.” She gasped and squealed. “Look! The sign. We’re really here.”
Deacon drove under the wooden arch signaling entrance to Camp Lafayette, where he’d spent a month every summer from ages eight to fifteen.
Lily clapped her hands. “There’s the admin building. Remember that lady who ran the camp when we were like nine? She was the worst.”
Deacon shook his head. “You think everyone was the worst.”
“Maybe. But she was a terror. I was convinced that when she told us she sent someone home, she really chained them up in the admin building’s basement and forced them to write letters to parents telling them how much fun Lafayette’s service week was.”
Deacon almost laughed. “Service week. Yeah, I don’t think we were ever mature enough to appreciate the nuances of that particular project.”
It had taken Deacon a month to schedule and arrange this visit back to Lafayette. Or at least it had taken a month for the actual visit to happen. He wanted to do it. It was his idea. But there was something about taking this trip back in time that made him nervous.
Lily looked anything but nervous. She was practically leaping out of the moving car. She pointed to a parking space by the front door, not a difficult find, since it was midweek in autumn and no one else was around.
He pulled in and yanked up the parking break, checking to make sure the windows were all the way up and all knobs and switches were off.
Lily was jiggling the key he’d gotten from the property manager in the door handle.
“I’m in,” she said, only then looking back over her shoulder to find him still inside the car. When she noticed that his seatbelt was still fastened, she gave him a thumbs-up and went inside. Deacon felt a bit of that prickle of anxiety loosen. It was nice to have Lily around. She never hurried him.
The subtext of the rest of that thought hung in the car like Dahlia’s ghost. Well, the ghost of their relationship anyway. After the wedding debacle, Deacon started to realize how fast Dahlia’s pace had always been. He spent all his life running to keep up with her, and as soon as she was gone, he settled into what felt to him like a more natural rhythm. And today, more than a month after what should have been their wedding day, he was here to say goodbye to one part of their history.
The door to the admin building creaked in precisely the same way he remembered it. The rush of stale air that blew past him smelled like every summer in his childhood—a mixture of chlorine and fire smoke with hints of pine sap and skunk.
“Isn’t it perfect?” Lily stood in the center of the building’s main room, a large open area with a purpose that was never quite clear to Deacon. Lily spread her arms wide and turned in a slow circle. “I think I lied to adults in this building more than anywhere else all the days of my entire life combined.”
She pointed to one side of the room. “In that chair I denied knowing anything about the fireworks for three years in a row. In that one, I denied the streaking. Over there, I sat and looked into the eyes of a very sincere counselor and assured him I knew nothing about the breakout scheme for the next night. Everyone always believed me.”
Deacon laughed. “That’s why you were the front man. First line of defense with grownups. Dahlia could never have done that. Everyone could always tell when she was lying. Besides, she couldn’t sit still. Her fidgeting would have given her away every time.”
Lily walked the perimeter of the room, checking the view from every window. “The trees are bigger. There’s a new parking lot over there. There’s the trailhead to the lake. Remember that kid who tried to sleep in the tree? When he fell, he broke both collarbones. Ouch.”
Deacon appreciated the steady stream of chatter and general memories. He still had to gather his resolve for what came next.
When he was ready, he and Lily took the trail past the girls’ cabins, past the amphitheater, and over the bridge to the grassy hill near the lake. She looked in every window, pointed out all the bunks she’d had, and reminded him of things he’d forgotten. He paid as much attention as he could. At the hill, he walked up to the fire ring and sat on a stone.
“Right here,” he said. “This is where I kissed Dahlia for the first time.”
Lily nodded and sat on a stone opposite. They were only a few feet apart, but Deacon appreciated the distance, because it would help him with something he needed to do.
Pulling his wallet out of his pocket, he said, “Don’t laugh.”
She shrugged up her shoulders as if she hadn’t yet determined whether to go along with his demands. “Don’t be funny.”
“I solemnly swear I will not be funny.”
Lily’s tiny smile created a dimple in her cheek that drew his eyes.
He looked down at the grass by his feet and said, “Okay, but seriously, my therapist is making me do this, and now I feel like I’m twelve years old again so please be nice to me.”
“I’ll be nice.” She folded her hands on her knees.
He unfolded the letter he’d handwritten and shoved in his wallet. This was draft four, because the first three were, chronologically, horrifyi
ng, shameful, and angsty. This one wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t required to be perfect. According to his therapist, it was only required to be completed.
So.
He cleared his throat. “Dear Dahlia,” he read. “There are a few things I need to say to you. I’m working on getting over you, but you are tied up in every memory of my life. Untying those strings is scary, because everything in my history, and therefore in my present, might actually fall apart.
“Today I’m at Camp Lafayette, and I need to walk through a memory so I can let you out of it. Remember the night you organized the breakout? When you brought your cabin of girls to meet my cabin of boys at the lake? And we had our first kiss? I have a confession.
“That was not my first kiss.”
He looked at Lily, who was inspecting her fingernails.
“When we made the plan, while we were canoeing that afternoon, I wasn’t lying when I said I’d never kissed anyone.”
If he hadn’t promised his therapist that he’d read this aloud, he’d tear the letter up right now. But keeping promises had become imperative to Deacon lately, so he kept reading.
“I kissed Lily behind the meal hall at dinner that night.”
The sounds of birds and breeze through trees grew louder as Deacon’s voice went silent. Lily tore tiny pieces from a fallen leaf and didn’t look up. Even when the silence grew uncomfortable, she continued to stare at the leaf pieces in her hands.
He picked up reading again. “I wanted to impress you so badly that I asked Lily to help me. And I’ve never thanked her for how helpful she was, because I never mentioned it again ever. To anyone. That night I decided that my kiss with Lily didn’t count. That it was only warm-up. And I’ve always told everyone that you were my first kiss. But you weren’t.”
He cleared his throat. “And now, here in this place, I need to say the truth. The story I told, to you and everyone else, was not the real story. You were not my first kiss. And although it doesn’t change how I always felt about you, it does change the story of us. You were not my first kiss, and you will not be my last.”
Deacon folded the letter on its creases and slipped it back into his wallet.
He leaned forward and put his arms across his knees, staring into the memory of a fire. He didn’t know how long they sat there like that, saying nothing, looking at the ground, lost in their own memories of those summers in this place, but when his legs started to tingle, he stood to wake them up.
On the other side of the fire pit, he saw Lily wipe her eyes.
Oh, no. Which part of what he’d said had made her cry? How did he manage to mess this up? His therapist was going to hear about this. Stupid idea.
He stood up and stopped in front of Lily, shoved his hands in his pockets, and waited. She was so good about waiting for him, he figured he could return the favor.
When she finally looked at him, her red eyes were leaky and swollen.
“Lil, I’m sorry. I’m not sure exactly what I did, but if you tell me I won’t do it again.”
She shook her head.
Great. Maybe she was more like Dahlia than she used to be. One of Dahlia’s favorite tricks was to withhold her reasons for being angry so he would apologize for everything, anything, and nothing. He didn’t think Lily would do this. That she was even capable of it.
But then she reached out and put her hand on his arm. A beam of afternoon light filtered through the trees and touched the crown of her head, making her auburn hair glow. She smiled at him, and that smile reminded him of so many good things about this place.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice damp and cracking.
“What?” He knew he sounded like a dumb guy, but he must have misheard her.
“Thank you for telling that part of the story.” She rubbed her sleeve against her eyes. “Every time I’ve ever heard you talk about that night, you say that Dahlia was your first kiss. You might be surprised how many times I’ve heard you tell that story over the years.” She sniffed. “Here’s a hint—a lot of times. I’ve felt erased from your history for half of my life.” Her voice did a little hiccup. “Sometimes I wondered if I’d imagined it, if it never really happened. But it did. It happened. We were each other’s first kiss. You’ve just given me back one of my missing memories.”
Deacon stood in the clearing and watched Lily pull herself back together. He hadn’t even known his lie had hurt her, but she called him out and forgave him in the same breath.
“How do you feel?” she asked him, with her Lily-skill of turning the conversation back to him.
He thought for a second and then told her the truth. “I untied a piece and I didn’t fall apart.”
Chapter Seven
Lily washed her hands for what must have been the thousandth time. “Do you think it’s true that Christmas season is sicker than any other season?” she asked the hospital locker room in general.
No one answered. Everyone was too tired.
Some kind of nasty flu dropped in on Charleston for the whole month of December, so not only was the ER full of spiking fevers, broken and sprained limbs from dizzy falls, and patients who couldn’t get office appointments during overfull days, but inpatient beds filled up at a far more rapid rate than usual. Add to that the number of health care providers who fell victim to the wretched bug, and it was a Merry Christmas at MUSC. Lily felt like she’d been holding her breath all month.
The ladies of Charleston had come out in full force to bring Christmas to the hospital. Trees lined the perimeter of the lobbies and a stocking filled with candy canes, gold-foil paper crackers, and silly trinkets hung from every room’s door handle.
Lily’s mom had made sure to put a few extra gifts in the stockings that would come to Lily’s hall. She included paperback books, earbuds, and vials of essential oils to “make the rooms smell homey.” Lily wasn’t sure whose home smelled like oranges and eucalyptus, but she certainly appreciated the gesture. It was fun to see her parents come into the hallways, her dad in a horrible white Santa beard on an elastic band and both wearing elf caps with jingle bells dangling off the points.
“If anyone needs nonspecific winter holiday gifts, we have these,” her dad said, holding up a box full of blue paper gift bags covered with cut out snowflakes. “All the same stuff is inside,” he told her, leaning in close like it was a secret.
“That’s very thoughtful of you, Dad. Thanks. I’m sure everyone will appreciate the kindness.” If a person made a list of her dad’s qualities, kindness would always top it. His gentle nature in no way got in the way of his business success, but everyone who knew him recognized the tenderness he always displayed.
Lily always appreciated her parents’ examples of community service and humanitarian aid. Like any southern gentleman of means, her dad hoped that she’d settle down and marry a wealthy man, raise a house full of babies, and eat lunch with her mom twice a week. But he couldn’t be more supportive of her decision to go to nursing school and work in the hospital. He always told people Lily was walking in the path of kindness. She couldn’t think of a better compliment.
For two days, Lily had picked up shifts for nurses who had gotten sick or had family holiday obligations. She knew this was standard at Christmas time. The nurses who had no children were working, mostly without complaint, so those with kids at home could be there for the holidays.
With two days left until Christmas, the manufactured cheer filled up the halls. Lily found it best to stick to the rooms and the hallways and avoid the locker rooms as much as possible. The exhaustion generally collected there, where no patients could see it. And it was as contagious as the flu.
For the last hour of her shift, Lily violated her own Cardinal Rule: she checked the clock every few minutes. She felt like whimpering every time, because she knew the time would never pass that way, and she was right. All she wanted was a seamless shift change, a quick drive home, and a bath that lasted about six hours. Or at least something to eat that hadn’t come from a c
ellophane wrapper.
At seven, she breathed a huge sigh of relief and pulled off the latest pair of gloves. Checking the schedule at the nurses’ station, she saw that Elise was scheduled to relieve her. She made a few notes about the patients so Elise would know the things that didn’t show up on the stats charts (like the little girl in 4127 who handled the pressure cuff much better on her right arm than on her left, and the man in 4133 whose legal name was Francis but preferred to be called Jojo). When the only thing left for Lily to do was see Elise’s face and say goodnight, Nancy Anne, the shift coordinator, came around a corner shaking her head.
“Sorry, Lily. Bad news. Elise is sick. Stomach bug. She called in half an hour ago, but I couldn’t find you. I had to cover Celeste’s patients because she broke out in hives after doing a shift at her church’s soup kitchen. Please tell me you can stay.”
Several hundred ways to say no crossed her mind in the few seconds before she answered. “Are you kidding me? Twenty-four hours straight during a flu epidemic the day before Christmas Eve? I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.” She held out her fist and Nancy Anne punched her knuckles.
“Don’t call it an epidemic where anyone can hear you,” Nancy Anne said. “Thank you for being willing. I will not forget this, at least not before I forget to eat, shower, and shave my legs. Oh, wait . . .”
Lily breathed out a single syllable laugh. “Yeah, I know. Okay. Coffee. Then I’ll go back and tell my friends on the east hall that we’re going to party all night long.”
But instead of eating or drinking anything, Lily went into the locker room and did a few minutes of yoga stretches, washed her face, and texted Deacon.
Remember how we’re having pre-Christmas dinner and a Jason Bourne marathon tonight? We’re not. Gotta stay and heal the sick. Sorry. Happy Christmas anyway.
Then, because she could, she changed into a new set of scrubs and brushed and braided her hair. Finally, in an effort at merriment, lipstick. It helped a little.
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