“Oh, Mellie… my little Jelly Belly,” Dad whispers along the top of my head, stroking a loving palm up and down my upper arm.
Mom laces her fingers with mine on my opposite side, and a semblance of peace finally settles into my bones.
Then, I purge the events of the last four-and-a-half months. Zephyr, Parker, e-mails, scars, love, confusion, kismet, and deceit. It all spews out of me, and they sit silently, patiently, absorbing my messy tale that the universe has thrown at me, leaving me windblown and breathless. I’m not sure what they’ll think of me or how they’ll react, and I don’t know what I’m even looking for—advice? Solace? Support?
My father squeezes me tighter. “My little girl fell in love again.”
I stiffen at his words, my heart thundering. Out of everything I just confessed, that was the takeaway. That was the salient point. Swallowing, I nod my head against the crook of his shoulder, burrowing deeper. “And now I don’t know what to do.”
“There’s only one thing you can do if you want to move forward,” Dad mutters gently. “You’re weighed down by self-made barriers. You’re still drowning in the past. You need to set yourself free.” He shifts on the couch, pulling me closer. “Mellie, you gotta dig deep. Locate what exactly is preventing you from getting past this. You say you feel deceived, lied to. But is it more than that? Is there a deep-seated part of you that is still clinging to… guilt? Guilt of finding love with someone else?”
Shivers track down my arms, and the notion steals my breath.
My mother’s voice pipes up. “It wasn’t the heart itself you were looking for, sweetheart… it was permission. Allowance to move forward and start anew. But that’s something only you can give yourself.”
I fall farther into my father’s embrace as I clench my mother’s hand, my lungs tightening with revelation. Is that the true source of my confliction?
An underlying sense of guilt for leaving Charlie behind for good?
If Parker truly had Charlie’s heart, it would have felt like a tiny consent. An authorization from the universe—from him. In a way, I’d have both men with me; Parker in my arms, while still holding Charlie in a loose grip.
When I discovered the truth, I was stripped of that ideality. And yes, it hurt that Parker lied, that he chose to hide instead of trust me with the truth, but maybe the real struggle is buried within myself. I’m forced to make a choice.
Remain in the past, or let go for good.
Dad sighs, his chest laboring beneath my tearstained cheek, and he whispers softly, “There’s only one thing left to do.”
“What’s that?” I croak out.
A heavy beat of silence hovers in the air, shimmering with possibility. With something attainable. With hope.
“It’s time to unchain Melody.”
There’s teasing in his tone, but his words trumpet through me, symphonies and stars. Fresh tears coat my eyes, but this time, it’s a breakthrough… not a burden.
Parker thought he had the wrong heart.
He hid the truth from me because he was afraid I would reject him once I discovered that he wasn’t carrying a piece of Charlie inside his chest.
He didn’t do it out of spite or malice; he did it out of fear.
Fear of losing me. Fear of losing himself and everything he’d cultivated.
Fear is a very human thing—a forgivable thing.
And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I didn’t fall in love with the wrong heart.
I fell in love with the right heart at the right time.
I fell in love with Parker Denison.
As my tears fade to strength, I’m filled with certitude—optimism. I can see the future dancing in front of my eyes, colors and songs, rebirth and bright lights.
Parker.
I also dance that night. While my mother hugs me tight and makes her way back into the kitchen, my father pulls out his old record player, dusting off a familiar casing and placing the disc over the spindle. When the needle touches vinyl, and the record starts to spin, the song bursts to life, and I’m transported back in time to this same living room as a young girl, over twenty years ago.
Giggles break through my happy tears as I step onto my father’s sock-covered feet with little grace, and he clasps my hand in his, holding me steady behind my back with his opposite arm. We laugh, we cry, and I heal, as Unchained Melody filters through my ears and fills my soul.
I’m still not sure what I came here for.
All I know is that I leave with exactly what I need.
Tires bite at the gravel as I slow to a stop, rubber against rock. The dark sky twinkles with a sea of stars and milky moonlight, and I can’t help but smile as I turn off the engine.
Reaching forward, I pluck the little piece of paper off my dashboard, dusting my thumb over Parker’s handwriting, then I heave in a deep sigh and slide the note into my front pocket.
The air is humid when I step from the car, hitting me like a brick wall. It takes a moment to find my breath, but less because of the sticky late-August night, and more because of what I’m about to do.
My feet carry me forward as jitters scatter along my skin and mosquitoes buzz into my ear, and when I come to a stop at my destination, I sift through my pocket for that note.
Zachary Adler on Melbourne Street.
Parker thought I wanted this. He thought I wanted this faceless man with Charlie’s heart, and he thought I wanted it more than I wanted him.
The thought alone causes my chest to ache.
Falling to my knees, my gaze dips down to the precious stone, a stone that has absorbed many of my tears and desperate pleas. My eyes blur as I reach out to trace the carving of his name with shaky fingertips.
Charles James March
1991 – 2020
For a moment, my thoughts drift back to that fateful day on a downtown street.
The day the sun died.
I can still smell the homemade pizza in the air. I can hear the sirens ringing in my ears. I can feel the frosty raindrops on my skin.
I’m lost, I’m so lost…
Thunder cracks above me.
I’m losing him.
“Charlie,” I sob, watching in numb horror as he’s fastened onto a stretcher. Everything happens fast, startlingly fast, and paramedics are talking, possibly in tongues, taking vitals, and I’m still clinging to the illusion that this is all a terrible dream.
Charlie’s eyelids flutter as he flickers in and out of consciousness. “Mel…”
“I’m here. I’m right here.”
I used to visit his gravesite daily, until it became too much to bear. I had to force myself to stop coming because I feared my own soul would somehow bleed out, seep into the soil and earth, right along with his.
I inhale a shuddering breath, memories trickling through me like melancholy drizzle.
“No, no, please… I can’t do this alone,” I cry out, nearly hysterical. “What happens to the sun when the sky falls?”
My question hangs between us while everything else keeps moving. Charlie is carried to the ambulance, and I’m on my feet, racing alongside the stretcher, still crying, still disintegrating.
“Charlie!” I reach for his cold hand, squeezing tight as the rain falls fast and mercilessly. “The sun falls with it, Charlie. Please… I’m nothing without you.”
Tears blanket my eyes while my fingers continue to skim over the lettered engraving. Charlie’s final words fill me with serenity.
Assurance.
Permission.
“But… it still shines, Mel,” he murmurs hoarsely. Charlie swallows, his peach-spun eyes trying to find my face through the wreckage and rainfall. His fingers grip mine with the last of his strength, and for the tiniest second, I am warm. “It just shines in a new place.”
A watery smile pulls at my lips as my heart releases the heavy weight of guilt.
“I miss you, Charlie,” I say with gentle sadness, my voice catching on a muggy draft. “I miss you so m
uch, and I always will. But I wanted you to know… I found a new place to shine.” My chin lifts, my eyes settling on the full moon. “I thought you would be so disappointed in me. I thought that somehow, wherever you are, you’d be looking down on me with anger and shame, horrified that I moved on without you. That I found love again after everything we’d shared. After everything we’d built.” I suck in a rickety breath, searching for all the things I want to say. “But that’s not true, is it? You gave me your blessing with your final words, you gave me permission to move on and let go, and God, I didn’t know what it meant then… I didn’t understand your meaning because, how could I? I thought the sun died that day, and I would never shine again.”
Crickets and cicadas sing a soothing soundtrack to my final farewell as I bend down to place a kiss along the etchings of his name. “The sun never dies, though. It only sets,” I finish, licking fallen tears from my lips. “Then it rises, and a new day begins.”
With Parker’s note in one hand, I reach behind my back to pull a second note from my rear pocket. It’s a letter I’ve kept for the past two months, ever since I received it in the mail—a letter I had no idea what to do with.
Until now.
It’s an apology message from Eleanor March, Charlie’s mother, atoning for her cruel behavior the night I almost drove my car into a tree. She was drunk on wine and impossible grief, and she manifested that fury into misplaced blame. She blamed me for living. She blamed me for surviving and carrying on when everything she held most dear was lost.
Through the hurricane of suffering and bereavement, we look for outlets to blame, something that will alleviate even the slightest weight of the burden.
So, I sympathize, I do, and I forgive.
I forgive her.
But I’m not looking to make amends or revisit old wounds. All I want is peace.
Fetching the lighter I snagged from my parents’ house, I flick the little wheel with my thumb as I clutch the pieces of paper in my opposite hand.
Zachary Adler.
Eleanor March.
A flame bursts to life, illuminating the shadows around me, and I watch as the fire licks at the parchment, the corners crackling into kindling and climbing higher. Before it reaches my fingers, I toss the remains onto the gravestone, observing the way the embers flicker and burn, turning the paper into cinders.
Goodbye.
I blow away the ashy residue, then press my palm to the stone one last time. “It’s time to rise,” I whisper into the night. “It’s time to eat peach pie again.”
Rising to my feet, I feel a weight lift, a new beginning waiting for me, and all I want to do is go to him. I want to wrap my arms around his neck, jump into his arms, and tell him that I see him.
I see him—the man he is, the man he’s always been, and the man I love with my whole heart.
But I don’t.
I don’t do that, because before I step out of the cemetery and reach my car, my phone rings.
Leah.
My fingers swipe to accept the call, and I place the cell phone to my ear. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Girl, don’t freak out. Where are you?”
“What?”
Static and poor reception crackle in my ear.
“Have you seen the news?”
There’s panic laced into her tone, causing goosebumps to pimple my flesh. I swallow through a worried frown. “No, I… what is it? What’s wrong?”
Leah falters before continuing. “It’s Parker, babe. He’s on the news,” she says with careful urgency. “It’s a breaking report…”
My blood runs cold.
I can’t breathe.
“He’s hanging off the Delavan Bay Bridge.”
—THIRTY-SEVEN—
I really fucking hate heights.
There’s no good reason for it. It’s not like my fear of the dark, where it was conditioned into me as a child due to traumatic circumstances. This is just some random, shitty phobia I decided I had while working a high rise job with co-workers a good five years back, before I broke off to do my own thing. I’d glanced down from the scaffolding and almost pissed myself.
So, when I was contracted for a roofing job last April, my knee-jerk reaction was to turn it down. Bree said she’d get me out of it if that’s what I really wanted, but shit, money was tight that year, and honestly, I kind of felt like a pussy… so, I took the job.
And then I fell off that goddamn roof.
It was a two-story drop that nearly killed me, and if it weren’t for a big ass sycamore tree that partially cushioned my fall on the way down, I likely would have died on impact.
Instead, I landed myself in the hospital with a broken fucking back and a grade three concussion.
At the time, death would have been a welcome alternative. When they were wheeling me through the hospital on that stretcher, and I finally came to… I was pissed.
Why couldn’t it just be over?
I craved peace, but all I got were six long, torturous months out of work, unbearable pain, and medical bills out the ass. A dark cloud of depression funneled through me, blackening my veins, poisoning my thoughts, and while I was stuck in my house, bedridden and crippled, all I wanted to do was die.
Work was my outlet. My saving grace. I needed to keep moving, remain in motion, stay busy—but that was stolen from me. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever heal properly and be able to work again, and the prospect was dauntingly terrifying.
On a particularly grim night over the summer, delirious on painkillers and feeling little hope for the future, I told Bree to just fucking kill me. Smother me with a pillow. Lace my Fruity Pebbles with rat poison or some shit. Didn’t matter. I just wanted out.
She lost her mind, of course, freaked the hell out and almost had me committed right then and there. From that point forward, my sister stopped by my house daily to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid, and as soon as I was up walking around again, regaining some semblance of my only marginally better life, she enrolled me in those dumb meetings.
That’s where I met her.
Melody.
My moon.
That’s when everything changed for me, and I guess I have that roof to thank.
But as I’m standing on this goddamn bridge with a complete stranger, staring over the edge into an endless black abyss, I can say for damn certain, I still really fucking hate heights.
“Just let me do this, man. Get the hell out of here.”
I’m not sure what kind of twisted shit the universe is up to, but out of all the motherfuckers in the world, I’m the one standing here, trying to talk this guy out of jumping fifty feet into the bay.
Me.
I’m literally enrolled in a suicide support group.
And I’m kind of pissed at myself for not paying more attention to Ms. Katherine’s pep talks.
“Go,” the man says as he hangs off the outer side of the guardrail, facing the water, limbs shaking, his sweat glinting off the line of street lamps. “Let me die.”
Shit.
When I saw this guy about ready to launch himself into Delavan Bay, I stopped without really thinking anything through. I didn’t have a plan—no earth-shattering advice or profound lectures. No magical words to knock some sense into him.
So, I’m basically just standing here, clueless and thoroughly unqualified, inching my way closer, while my brain short-circuits trying to figure out an angle.
Swallowing, I close my eyes and try to envision the meetings, hoping to pull some sort of grandiose wisdom from the bits and pieces I actually paid attention to.
Why did I take so many fucking naps?
Those jarring fluorescent lights burst to life overhead, and I picture myself rooted to that red plastic chair as idle chitchat swirls around me, but their words are muffled, faces blurred, because Melody’s hair is tied into a loose braid today, draped over her left shoulder. She’s fiddling with a little blue hair band secured to the end that matches the color of her sundres
s. And when she glances my way, her eyes shimmer with tiny cerulean flecks, sprinkled into those pools of bright green.
Damn it.
This isn’t the right angle.
The stranger heaves in a deep breath of courage, dragging me back to the bridge. His body dangles carelessly over the water, his fingers loosening on the rail. “I appreciate the effort, but I need to do this,” he says, chin to his chest.
Wait, no, shit.
Starting points!
“Hamsters,” I blurt. “Do you like hamsters?”
This captures his attention, and the man snaps his head towards me, a confused frown settling into place between sweat-laden brows. “What the hell are you talking about?”
I pace forward with slow, careful steps, my heartbeat doing the exact opposite. It’s jack-knifing inside my chest as adrenaline pumps through my veins. “Okay, maybe not hamsters. Something else.” Fucking hell, I’m terrible at this. “The smell of Grandma’s gumbo simmering on the stove during Easter brunch.”
He blinks.
“Flying your kite with Dad. Rainbow sherbet. The scent of wet grass after a summer thunderstorm.” I add as an afterthought, “We’ve had a lot of those this year. So great.”
“Are you on drugs?”
My feet carry me right to the edge of the rail, and I extend my arm like a tentative plea. “Starting points. You know, shit that makes you happy. Little things that don’t suck. Like… dancing in the lake.”
I’m close enough that I can make out the color of his eyes—dark, dark brown, matching his shoulder-length hair and goatee. The man glances at the water, then back to me. “Sure, yeah. I’ll go do that one right now.”
Shit… poor selection.
“Fuck, I don’t know. What do you like?”
Cars begin to park along the entry to the bridge, bystanders stepping from vehicles to gawk and wave their cell phones around. A curious audience trickles in, one by one, gathering a few yards away and causing my insides to spiral with nerves.
The Wrong Heart Page 32