I’m going to end this here, because there really isn’t anything else to say. I’ll always love you, I know that much, and I’ll always think of you from time to time, but I don’t regret leaving. Your sister was so right when she came to see me; everything she said just upset me at the time. I left because I was confused and upset, but I can see it far clearer now. I was in no position to love you, I was weak and fragile and you would have felt a need to fix me all the time, I couldn’t have been your equal back then, and I think that’s what’s really needed in a truly strong relationship, I think you need to enter as equals. So now I’m going to end this letter and mail you the rest of my story, and then you’ll become part of my past, and then one day maybe I’ll be strong enough to be a part of your future.
Goodbye Oliver and thank you. I couldn’t have gotten here without you.
Chapter Thirty
Oliver 7
June had started off with hot days and cool nights in Sederwood, but now as the second week of June rolled around Oliver was left with sticky nights, making it impossible to sleep. He’d just got off his shift at the medical center, which in fact was a small clinic that saw around twenty patients each day, a striking contrast to the busy hospital he’d previously worked in. He was now walking back to the house, because now that he lived so close to his work, he preferred to walk. He was thinking about the work he still had to do when he got home, because the end of a shift didn’t mean the end of his working day. After his first week in town things had moved fast, he’d found Melissa, a twenty three year old college graduate, who had dedicated herself to helping the homeless. Primarily she was a lawyer who helped those who couldn’t afford to pay for a lawyer, but in her spare time she ran the soup kitchen, a project which she had set up while she was in high school, and had kept going all through her time at college, and alongside her demanding career as well. Oliver had hit it off with her right away, her passion to help people was astounding, and she’d found his determination to open up his house to the homeless, to be a quality she regarded highly. From the start she’d helped him get the house up and running, helped to shove aside furniture to make room for beds, three in each of the bedrooms, because Oliver himself had taken to sleeping in the attic, and having that as his space where he could work, but the rest of the house was entirely for everyone’s use. He used the money from the sale of his house to keep things going, buying clothes and food for everyone who passed through, and then he helped them to get their lives on track; it didn’t matter if it was a sixty year old man who’d been living rough for years, or a teenage girl who had been kicked out of home or ran away, he didn’t ask questions about their past, but he listened if they wanted to talk. He’d help them to clean themselves up, and found them employment, but he would never ask anyone to leave, until he was completely certain that they could take care of themselves and once they reached that point, he would help them find a new place to live, and check in on them to make sure they were staying on top of things. When somebody moved out, he would drop into the soup kitchen and find someone new to bring into the house, so there was a constant turn over.
He’d just been to the soup kitchen to find someone new to bring back to the house, so now he was walking home in the sticky June heat, accompanied by a young pregnant woman, and by Melissa who always came along to settle new arrivals in.
‘Now Fiona I don’t want you to feel like I’ve abandoned you, of course you’ll be getting all your meals at Oliver’s house now, but you can come and see me whenever you like, if you need to talk.’ Melissa offers the young woman a kind smile, Fiona nods her head a little anxiously; she isn’t sure what to expect when she arrives at Oliver’s house, she knows that he’s extremely kind and generous, all of the people she’d met at the soup kitchen who had gone to live in his house, had all said how wonderful it was there, but she was still worried.
‘I know I can.’ Fiona swallows down the lump in her throat, ‘I just want to pull myself back up. I really don’t want to burden anyone.’
‘Nobody who comes here is a burden to me or anyone else, I can promise you that.’ Oliver reassures her as they round the corner and the house comes into view, beautifully bathed in the late evening sunlight, they stop in the long grass which surrounds the house, and he lets her take it all in, before he continues, both talking and moving towards the main path.
‘All of the people who stay here are expected to help out, as much as they are able to. There’s always something to be done, cooking, cleaning, gardening, things that need fixing or repainted, so there’s always plenty to do, especially out on the farm land, some of the first people I had staying here started up a vegetable patch, it’s grown quite extensively now, so we’ve taken to calling it the farm.’ He smiles warmly, opening the mailbox and pulling out the letters. ‘Mostly I just want everyone to feel like this is their home, no matter how short a time or how long they stay, this is your home for as long as you need it to be.’
Fiona relaxes and smiles gratefully at him, reassured by his kindly spoken words, she has now fixed her own opinion of him, he is all the things she’s heard him describes as, kind and generous and so much more, she can see why Melissa has been falling for him, and to look at Melissa now it’s obvious, she’s gazing at Oliver like he can do no wrong.
‘Would it be alright if I looked around alone for a bit?’ Fiona asks, skillfully giving them some space to talk alone.
‘Of course, like he said it’s your home now, so you needn’t ask.’ Melissa nods her head, watching Fiona walk off to take in her new surroundings, then once Fiona is out of sight Melissa turns to Oliver, the extraordinary man who had appeared in her little town, and is suddenly changing so much around her for the better. ‘I really appreciate what you’re doing here, have I told you that recently?’
‘Only every single time I see you.’ Oliver laughs falling into step with Melissa, walking down towards the fish pond.
‘Well you deserve it, you’ve done a great thing here, and yet I really don’t know all that much about you, you’re always so selfless, is there nothing you want for yourself? Nothing I can help you with?’ Melissa sits at the edge of the pond, pulling her knees to her chest, not defensively like River used to, but the gesture still reminds him sharply of her.
‘I don’t need anything and you do help.’ Oliver lays the unlooked at mail between them, gazing out over the sloping hills beyond his land.
‘What brought you here? I mean why this out of the way town?’ Melissa’s voice holds just a little desperation, she wants so much to know this wonderful man, but he keeps himself so guarded, she feels like direct questioning is the only way she’ll get to know the man she’s falling for.
‘Honestly I just needed to escape New York – there was some stuff there I needed to forget, and as for why here, I just picked it at random.’ Oliver shrugs his shoulders simply, ‘It’s nothing spectacular I’m afraid, I could just as easily of ended up in a town in Boston, or an apartment in Seattle.’
‘Well I’m incredibly pleased you ended up here, a lot of people think you only have homeless and needy people in large cities, but we get a lot of it round here as well, people come here from a lot of the towns around here, because they’ve heard about the soup kitchen. A lot of the people I see come in just wanted to get out of the cities, even though they had no place to go, they lose everything and have nowhere else to go, and no matter how much I try and do, there are always more people that need help.’
Melissa rests her head on her knees and looks at Oliver, ‘Do you ever miss the city?’
‘Not the city so much, but I do miss my family, my sister and I didn’t part on good terms.’ Oliver shuts his eyes and shakes his head, he’d spoken to Amanda only twice since he’d left, and both of the conversations had been cold and distant, cut short even though he had time to stop and talk for longer, he just couldn’t face it.
‘That’s awful, what happened?’ Melissa sees her opportunity to get to know him a little bette
r, and grabs hold of it trying to keep the enthusiasm out of her voice.
‘It’s complicated, she did something behind my back, I guess she was trying to protect me from something, but it ended up in me losing someone very important to me, and my sister never told me what she’d done, it was an accident that I found out, she slipped up and said something and I forced her to explain.’ Oliver doesn’t want to go into it, but Melissa isn’t willing to drop it yet.
‘The person you lost, who was it?’
‘Her name’s River.’ He smiles hearing her name, he hasn’t said it aloud in a long time, so hearing it now is nice, it brings a sort of comfort to him.
‘Was she your girlfriend?’
‘No, but if she hadn’t of left when she did I think that’s where it would have headed.’ He replies not looking over at Melissa, even though he knows that she wants him to.
‘How old is she?’
‘She was eighteen when I knew her in New York, she’ll be nineteen now.’ Oliver replies.
‘Oh wow, young,’
‘Yeah I guess, look I don’t want to be rude or anything, but I really don’t want to talk about her, it’s just too, raw.’
‘When did you last see her?’ Melissa promises herself this will be the last question, she doesn’t want to push him, but she wants to get answers to these questions.
‘Uh at the end of last summer,’ Oliver gets ready to go back to the house, picking up the mail, ‘I should check on how dinner’s getting on.’
Melissa looks after him with sadness washing over her, it’s been almost a year since he last saw this girl, and he was still clearly in love with her, as he disappears inside the house, she realizes that she’ll never be more than friends with Oliver.
He heads inside and looks through the stack of mail, stopping when he reaches a package which has been redirected from his old address; his heart misses a beat when he sees the handwriting, unmistakably River’s handwriting. Forgetting everything else he has to do tonight, he heads straight up to his attic room, laying on the couch and reading every last letter.
By the time he’s finished reading them he doesn’t know how to feel, she loves him even now, but she doesn’t want contact with him, which he needs to respect even though he wants to find her right now. He knows that she’s safe, and she’s stronger now than she’s been since he’s known her, so that’s an amazing thing which is taking a huge weight off of him. This sudden contact with her though, these letters filled with the remainder of her story, its bringing back all of his carefully packed away feelings.
He needs to try and be ok with this; he needs to try not to let it drive him crazy that he can’t see her. He runs his fingers over her letters, his eyes landing on her rambling words, her hopes that he did love her, and in that moment he hates himself for never telling her that he loves her. He only hopes that she knows.
Chapter Thirty One
River 1
River’s fingers run over the spine of the book in her lap, she’d almost forgotten that she had it, but she’d found it that morning while boxing up some of her books, and there it was hidden behind two other books which had fallen on her shelf, now she traced the gold title with her finger, almost afraid to open it up. The book belongs to Oliver, she’d been reading it the day Amanda had come to see her, and a few days later River had decided to heed Amanda’s advice, and she’d left the hospital, and the state. In the process of packing up her room at the hospital, she’d accidentally taken his book and put it with her own things, and it had been with her ever since. Now as she sat cross legged on her bed, she looked down at it with a sad feeling in her heart, she’d done her best to get over him, and most of the time now she felt fine, happy even, but she knew deep down that she still loved him, it was just a love that she could now manage to handle.
Feeling suddenly brave, because she did manage to enjoy her summer without him, she opens the book up. His name is printed neatly on the inside cover, in black ink carefully written on the white page, beneath that he’d written the day he’d received the book, where he got it from, and then the date he’d started reading it. She turned to the back cover, and printed in his same neat and tidy handwriting, was the date he’d finished reading it, and then a short review of what he’d thought of it. He’d told her once that he always did that with his books, because that’s what his mother has always done, and now River had fallen into the habit of doing it as well.
Her fingers trace his handwriting carefully, taking in his thoughts on the book, he hadn’t liked it very much, and she smiled at this, because she’d loved it when she’d read it in the hospital, they’d debated its merits and faults, and eventually agreed to disagree. Yet even when they got to the most heated part of their debate, they still found it incredibly easy to settle back into easy banter. The way they could always do that was astounding, which is one of the reasons that she was so upset that things had ended the way they had, but she still had hope, sending those letters had given her hope. The last words she’d spoken to him in person had been distant and cold, even though every part of her was screaming out to say she was sorry, to talk to him about her fears and worries, and to ask him what he thought they should do. In the end she hadn’t been strong enough. River is broken from her reminiscence by a tapping on her door.
‘Honey we should probably get going if we want to get there on time.’ Her father sits down on her computer chair and looks across to her. ‘You haven’t changed your mind?’
‘No I haven’t, I think this is something I really need to do,’ she pauses for a second, ‘and that isn’t me speaking rashly or making a foolish decision, I know in the past I probably would have, but not now.’
‘Like making us up and move across the country, because of a boy.’ He smirks at her, teasing her in a way he hadn’t been able to in so long, because for the longest time he’d felt as if he were walking on eggshells around them. A loud crash sounds downstairs followed by her mother yelling at their cat, both River and her father start laughing joyfully, as the little grey kitten that River had rescued, came running up the stairs and jumps up onto her lap. She runs her hand through her soft fur and smiles, before looking back to her father and replying.
‘I needed distance back then, I was running from everything and everyone, I wanted to distance myself from, well from me and who I’d become.’ She lifts up the kitten, appropriately named Stray, and cuddles her small body. ‘I’m not doing the same thing this time, I’m not running from myself or anything else, it isn’t distance that I’m seeking this time.’
‘Then what is it?’ Her father looks at her with a worried gaze, needing to know that she isn’t going to disappear on him again.
‘I need to find myself, and don’t even start on me ok, I know how terribly cliché that sounds, but it’s the truth after everything that’s happened, with my illness and Oliver, I feel like I’m so lost and the only thing that’s remained constant, through all of it and even before my illness, is the writing, and I love it so much so I think I need to pursue that.’ She smiles bravely, ‘I wouldn’t do this if I wasn’t sure.’
‘I know you wouldn’t, I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked, isn’t it what all kids going off to college say, that they want to find themselves, as if the person everyone is meant to be is locked inside college walls.’ He shakes his head.
‘It does make you wonder if they just hand it out on graduation day, you know a sort of congratulations on graduating, here’s who you’re supposed to be.’ River laughs softly, ‘who knows it could be that simple, either that or they give you the tools so you can figure out who you are once you’ve left.’
‘River you already know who you are, going to Nicholls college is just going to help you polish it.’ He insists, ‘But not if we don’t get there on time for your induction, and we have a long drive ahead of us.’
‘Yeah ok,’ River stands up and hugs Stray, ‘I’ll miss this little one, and you will make sure that mom doesn’t chase Stray away won’t
you, I know she doesn’t like her all that much, but I expect to see her here when I get back on break.’
‘You will come back on break then?’
‘Of course I will.’ River hugs him.
‘Your mother and I could move back to New York, we’d be close then and you could stay with us on weekends.’ He offers already knowing the answer.
‘Don’t you dare, I know how much you love this house and your job, I’ve already unsettled you once, and you and mom have made some amazing friends here,’ She shakes her head fiercely, ‘I don’t need protecting, I’m doing ok and I’ll be going to therapy once a month while I’m there, and we can video chat and email, and call each other all the time, and I’ll be back in the holidays.’
‘Well then let’s get on the road, are you still ok to drive your own car?’
‘Yeah,’ she looks up at him with a raised eyebrow, ‘mom wants to come in my car with me. She still doesn’t trust me.’
‘She’ll come around soon, you know she’s just worried about you, we both are.’ Her father leaves the room and she goes back to her bed, picks up the book again and slides it into her dark grey shoulder bag, because she isn’t ready to let him go completely just yet.
Chapter Thirty Two
Oliver 8
‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this though!’ Melissa chases him outside, trying to block out the early September rain with his arms, failing miserably because it’s coming down to fast, her arms fall to her side and she picks up her pace, catching Oliver up just as he throws a bag in his truck.
How I Got Here Page 21