Blue Wide Sky

by Inglath Cooper

  When I finally do find my voice, I say, “That’s amazing, Gabby. You’re amazing.”

  “Kat is the amazing one. I’ve learned more from her than I could ever hope to teach her.”

  “Has she had broken bones since you brought her home?”

  “Femur twice. Each arm once.”

  I wince. “Why is she in the wheelchair?”

  “For the past year, she’s had pretty much constant back pain because of a disc in her spine. The pain is worse when she walks, so she uses the chair. We’ve seen doctor after doctor, and the conclusion is that the surgery is too risky.”

  “I’d love to know more about her case,” I say.

  She looks at me as if she’s wondering whether my request has been made out of politeness or curiosity, but it’s neither, and I think maybe she sees this. “Thanks,” she says.

  There’s something in her voice that tells me she’s not used to offers of help of any kind. “It must be hard,” I say, “handling all of that on your own.”

  “Sometimes,” she says, shrugging. “I just want to do what’s right for her.”

  “She’s lucky to have you.”

  “I’m lucky to have her.”

  It’s enviable, the obvious bond between the two of them, forged I would guess from needs and wants that go beyond the normal. A child with medical issues, even the strongest of families would be challenged by. And a woman who wanted this child with all her heart and soul.

  “Did you ever get married, Gabby?” I ask, and the question surprises even me. It’s just out there, hanging in the stillness surrounding us, bold as the ebony of the night.

  “Yeah,” she says. “A long time ago, when I—”

  She stops there, and I want her to finish the sentence, somehow needing to hear what had happened. “When you?”

  “Didn’t know what people need to have between them to last.”

  It’s a big statement. I consider it, and then say, “I’ve learned something about that myself.”

  It feels as if we’re walking a tightrope here, a misstep to either side bringing a promised topple into things I’m not sure we’re ready to talk about.

  “I should go,” she says.

  She’s right. I know it, and yet I don’t want her to. I suddenly want to know everything there is to know about her life. Even though I’m the last person on earth with any right to. “I’m glad you came over, Gabby.”

  She puts on her sandals and gets to her feet. I stand up next to her, and we suffer through a few moments of awkwardness, what to say next, me not wanting to move because it will just make her leave sooner.

  “I hope you enjoy your stay here, Sam,” she finally says.

  I hear the finality in this statement, as if she doesn’t expect us to see each other again. My mind races with the need to somehow tell her that being here without seeing her doesn’t make any sense at all. But I can’t. It’s too much. Too soon. I feel it.

  So I just say, “Okay.”

  “Good night, Sam,” she says, backing away and then turning to walk quickly across the dew-damp grass, up the steps to the porch and around the house. A minute later, I hear her car start, back up and pull away, the sound of the engine fading into the night.

  My head begins to pound in its usual spot, and I stand, staring out at the lake until the pain reaches a new threshold, something in its intensity feeling almost deserved.

  A promise is a comfort for a fool.

  ~ Proverb

  Gabby

  I can’t sleep, but it’s not as if I expected to.

  My head is filled with a collage of images that cut back and forth between this new Sam and the boy I remember.

  The new one is a man — with all the subtle nuances that go along with life experience and the hard knocks required to obtain it. It has changed the way his eyes see the world, and there’s a wariness to him that I never knew before.

  Before.

  Before we made plans to spend our life together. Before he left here when we were teenagers. Before he married another girl. Before my heart got shattered into too many pieces to ever fit together exactly right again.

  I’m aware that at my age this sounds melodramatic and overstated.

  But when you’re seventeen and the boy you love moves out of the country with his family, there really aren’t any words to describe that kind of pain.

  The night he told me that his family was moving out of the country, I truly thought I would die. We were on a date, what I’d thought to be a normal one, except for the fact that he was quieter than usual. No joking. No smiles. It was July, and we’d gone out on his parents’ boat, found a cove to skinny dip in, and then lay on the bow staring up at the stars.

  He’d reached for my hand, his grip tight. Without taking his eyes from the sky, he said, “I have something awful to tell you, Gabby.”

  My heart knocked once and then set up a rapid rhythm. “What?” I asked, suddenly scared that something was wrong with him.

  “My dad—he’s been transferred to South Africa.”

  I heard the words, and, yet at first, they made no impact. They just sat on the surface of my understanding, like raindrops on wood. “What do you mean?” I asked, even as I realized how stupid the question sounded.

  “He told me this afternoon. He and Mom say Ben will stay here because he’s already in college, but that I have to go with them and do my senior year of high school there.”

  I’d never really thought about what it would feel like to be punched in the stomach with the full force of a strong fist. But that was the only thing I could think to compare it to, a feeling of having had all the oxygen knocked from my body.

  Sam rose on one elbow, cupped his hand to my face. “I can’t stand it,” he said. “The thought of being without you for that long—”

  A sob erupted from my throat then, the sound harsh and pain-filled. Sam leaned down and kissed me hard, as if he could think of nothing else to do to ease the anguish in us both.

  I slipped my arms around his neck and kissed him back with a desperation I had never before felt. As if I could feel him slipping from my grasp with each passing second. And all I wanted was to hold him to me so that nothing could ever take him away.

  Before that night, we had never actually made love. We’d been as close as we could be without crossing that line, both of us wanting to wait until we were married. We believed it was right, and that what we felt for each other was worthy of it.

  But in those moments of frantic fear, I could think of nothing but wanting to be as close to him as it was possible to be. Still naked from our swim, the temptation was too great to resist, and with only the slightest prompting from me, Sam let me know that it was what he wanted too.

  Maybe the nature of loving someone is that you don’t realize what you have until you are faced with losing it. We both knew that night. I had never before and have never since been consumed with that kind of love, wishing that I could literally melt into him, be a part of him that could never be left behind, as I was surely going to be.

  Making love with him was everything I’d imagined it would be, except for the sadness I felt afterward, lying in his arms, wishing for some way to make the night last forever, wishing we could run away.

  As if he’d read my mind, Sam had said exactly that. “We could leave,” he said. “Go somewhere where our parents couldn’t find us. Start our life together now.”

  I’d felt myself caving to the possibility, pure grief for all that we were facing screaming at me to do so. But I’d thought of my dad, the heart attack he’d had a year ago, my mom and the pain it would cause them. I wanted to scream at the unfairness of it. How could anything this cruel happen to us? “It would kill them,” I said. “Your parents and mine.”

  “I know,” he said, his voice breaking on the words. “But a year. What if you meet someone else? What if you—”

  I stopped him then with a kiss that made no secret of the fact that there would never be anyone who
could replace him. “Don’t,” I said. “You know how I feel about you.”

  He ran his hand up my bare leg, let it settle possessively on my breast. “I love you, Gabby. I love you so much.”

  “I know. I know you do.”

  Looking back, I guess that was when we had surrendered to what was ahead for us. I believed with all my heart that we would survive that year, that he would come back to me, and we would pick up where we left off. That nothing or no one could permanently separate us.

  One year was what we would have to suffer through until Sam turned eighteen. I couldn’t imagine how, but we were determined to focus on that point in our future, even though it seemed like a hundred years away.

  We made plans for when he could legally make the decision to return here without his parents. We both wanted to go to the University of Virginia, and we would get married so that we could live together there.

  And of course we would write and talk on the phone as often as we could.

  This was our survival plan, and we were six months into it when I got the letter from Sam.

  The letter that ended it all. The letter that made me realize none of it, not a single moment of it, had ever been the least bit real.

  Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.

  ~ Mother Teresa

  Sam

  My headache is gone when I wake up just after sunrise. I feel energy coil inside me and decide to go for a run even as I question the wisdom of it. But I refuse to let the worry unravel. I’ve never lived my life like that, and I’m not going to start now.

  The morning air of spring is still crisp and fresh, and I run the country roads with an appreciation for the beauty around me that I can’t deny I’m seeing with new eyes. For so many years, I’ve lived on a sort of autopilot. Plowing through my days at the hospital as if there were an unidentified finish line to be crossed somewhere ahead in the future.

  In doing so, I’ve missed a lot.

  Color, for example. It’s as if I’m now aware of it as I’ve never been before. The green of the mountain on my left. The blue of the lake I catch glimpses of here and there.

  Maybe I got used to the frequent rainy days in London, and things just seem brighter here, more vivid. But I don’t think that’s it. It’s more like I’ve spent my adult life in a place that was not my home, and I could never see it as such.

  And this place, this place I once loved as my own, has continued to call me back.

  I think about Gabby now—realize I’ve been putting it off—and let myself remember what it felt like to sit beside her last night, nearly shoulder to shoulder. How familiar it was to be with her that way, just sitting by the water and talking, even though it has been twenty-five years since we last did so.

  I run to the end of the state road where a high-rise condominium is poised at the end of the point. The view from here is the best on the lake. I stop and take in the wide expanse of water, watch the early morning fishermen speeding to their favorite coves. I wait for my breathing to slow and then head back the way I came, my pace slower now, not from a lack of energy, but so that I can process the feelings knocking around inside me.

  In coming here, I don’t think I let myself consider that I might still have feelings for Gabby. Too many years had passed, too much pain had been endured and shelved to ever consider revisiting any of it.

  But the door between the past and present is a thin one, and I can already feel its give. I wonder how it can possibly hold back the inevitable.

  I spend the rest of the morning keeping myself busy with repair work to the house. I fix a few shutters that are hanging crooked, sand down the porch steps and make a note to buy some paint when I go into town.

  I’m at the top of a ladder cleaning out a gutter when I remember David Lanning, a guy I went to med school with in London. I’d heard some years ago that he was practicing at Duke in North Carolina, and a mutual friend had mentioned that he’d become a pediatric surgeon with a specialty in bone diseases.

  Next to my brother, David had been one of the smartest guys I’d ever met, and he had the kind of devotion to learning that made him a professor favorite.

  I get down off the ladder and retrieve my cell phone from the house, coming back outside to sit on the steps and Google the main number at Duke. An operator there connects me to David’s office, and a receptionist tells me that he is in surgery. I leave a message with my name and number, and only then do I consider the fact that I have probably grossly overstepped my bounds in making the call. But I’ve already left the message, so I get back to my busywork, keeping the phone in my shirt pocket in case it rings. Which it does, just after two o’clock.

  “Sam,” David says. “Is that really you?”

  “Yeah. It’s been a lot of years, huh?”

  “Too many to count. How are you, man?”

  “Good,” I say. “And you?”

  “Can’t complain. Few aches and pains here and there, but who doesn’t have them? Are you still in London?”

  “Until recently,” I say. “I’m actually in Virginia. Smith Mountain Lake?”

  “Yeah, beautiful place. What brings you there?”

  “My folks had a summer place here when I was growing up. I’m visiting for a while.”

  “Well, you’re just a couple hours down the road from me. It’d be great to see you.”

  “I’d like that.” I hesitate, and then, “I was actually calling for your professional opinion on something, David.”

  “Shoot.”

  “A friend of mine has a daughter with osteogenesis imperfecta.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” David says.

  “She has a deteriorated disc that keeps her in pain, especially when she stands or walks. Because of it, she spends a lot of time in a wheelchair.”

  “How can I help?”

  “I don’t know if you can, but her mother has seen numerous surgeons who consider her case high-risk.”

  “Would you like me to take a look?” David asks.

  “That would be a huge favor.”

  “For an old friend? Not at all.”

  “Thanks, David. Should I have my friend call your office to schedule the appointment?”

  “Yes, that would be fine. Will you be coming with them?”

  I haven’t thought of this, and my answer reflects it. “I’m not—I don’t know for sure.”

  “Well, I hope so. It’d be really great to see you.”

  “You too. Can’t thank you enough.”

  “Okay, then. Take care, Sam.”

  “You too, David.”

  I click off the phone and sit down on my newly sanded steps. Now all I have to do is tell Gabby what I’ve done.

  It is kindness to immediately refuse what you intend to deny.

  ~ Pubillius Syrus

  Gabby

  I’m in the cafe totaling up register receipts when the phone rings. I pick up the old-fashioned handset, answering with the standard “Hayden’s Marina.” Hearing Sam’s voice, I’m caught off guard and pretty much stutter a hello.

  “How’s it going?” he says.

  “Pretty good,” I say, with a hint of question in my reply.

  “I was wondering if you and Kat might be up for a picnic on my boat tomorrow.”

  I hesitate, and then say, “Sam. Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. But I do have something important to tell you.”

  Unable to imagine what it could be, I wonder at the serious note in his voice. “What time were you thinking?”

  “Noon?”

  “Okay. Noon it is,” I say.

  “Great. I’ll see you then.”

  He hangs up, and I place the receiver back in its cradle, wondering what it is he could possibly have to tell me.

  “Um-hmm.”

  I look up to find Myrtle studying me with a knowing grin on her face. “Um-hmm, what?” I say.

  “Um-hmm you�
�re talking to that fella who liked my grits and collards.”

  “You never forget a fan, do you?” I say with a reluctant smile.

  “No, ma’am. So when are you going to tell me the real story about him?”

  “There is no story,” I say.

  She gives me one of her familiar harrumphs. “There’s a story.”

  I feign intense concentration on the calculator and my batch of receipts, but she’s still waiting when I look up. “We knew each other when we were kids.”

  “Old friend, huh?”

  I can tell she’s buying that, like she’d buy full-price Christmas paper on December twenty-sixth. “It was a long time ago.”

  She walks into the kitchen, picks up a dish towel and starts wiping down the countertops. “Didn’t look to me like either one of you had forgotten much of anything,” she says.

  “That’s not a place I’m going.”

  “Been my experience that we don’t always get to choose where the heart takes us.”

  I’d like to argue with her, but I can’t seem to find any words that feel like they’d be convincing enough.

  “Did I hear you say something about a picnic tomorrow?”

  “It’s not that kind of picnic.”

  And we’re back to, “Uh-hmm.”

  Kat rolls through the door just then, glancing back and forth between us both. “What picnic?” she asks.

  “The one you and your mama are going on with that handsome Mr. Tatum tomorrow.”

  I throw her a look. “Just how much of my conversation did you listen in on, Myrtle?”

  “Enough,” she says, chuckling.

  I’d like to be mad at her, but no one can be mad at Myrtle for long, including me. “Sam called to see if we’d like to go out on his boat tomorrow,” I say to Kat.

  “Cool,” she says. “He seems nice.”