The Best Part of Me

by Jamie Hollins

  The two of them stood motionless, watching Darcy stalk across the yard into the crowd of people with her Jameson whiskey bottle in her hand.

  “What the fuck?” Sean said.

  Ewan didn’t really know what to say to him. “You said something she didn’t like.”

  Sean ran his hand through his hair. “I just asked where Lisbeth was. She left the dome light in her car on, for fuck’s sake.”

  Women. They were complicated creatures most times. Always talking in riddles and expecting men to read their minds. Ewan had no explanation to offer his cousin, who stood beside him with his hands on his hips. Knowing Sean, he would shake it off quickly and chalk Darcy’s bitchiness up to some unknown reason that had nothing to do with him.

  Because God forbid Sean could ever do anything wrong.

  There was usually nothing he couldn’t talk his way out of. But the growing look of unease on Sean’s face led Ewan to believe that his cousin was finding it hard to come up with an excuse why Darcy had just flipped out on his ass.

  A car door slammed shut, and Ewan looked over his shoulder to see Quinn making her way from the drive to the side of the house where he and Sean were standing. It was about time she’d finally gotten here. She was carrying a clear round cake container in front of her as she stepped carefully through the yard.

  He started to salivate, and it wasn’t because he was excited to eat her cake.

  She dressed in dark denim that hugged her slim legs and a light-colored shirt with a corduroy blazer. Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail that swooshed behind her as she tried to avoid the uneven spots along the ground.

  Stepping away from his dumbfounded cousin, he started toward her and caught her attention. Her normally sunny face seemed weary. She smiled at him. But when the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, he knew something wasn’t right.

  Suddenly, the side door of the house flew open right into Quinn’s path.

  More precisely, right into Quinn’s cake.

  Lisbeth, looking disheveled and on her way to being drunk, gasped when she realized she’d hit someone with the door. And when she yanked the door back, Quinn stood behind it—motionless. Her arms were still extended in front of her, but the cake was lying on the ground. The container had popped open and icing was smeared along the inside of the lid, and sections of cake were lying in pieces on the grass.

  “Oh, God, Quinn. I’m so sorry!” Lisbeth instantly knelt to help save the unsalvageable birthday cake.

  Quinn stood staring down at the ground, finally dropping her arms to her side. The surprise on her face twisted into complete defeat as she took a shuddering breath. She exhaled with a loud sob.

  Before Ewan could reach her, she quickly turned and hurried back toward the driveway, her face in her hands.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” Lisbeth muttered as she tried to shove the cake back into the container. “Ewan, don’t let her leave!”

  Obviously, he wasn’t going to let her leave. Stepping around Lisbeth, he jogged after Quinn and caught up to her just before she reached her aunt’s car.

  “Hey, wait up.” He put his hand on the car door as she tried to pull it open.

  “Please, I want to go home.” She sniffled.

  “There’s no reason to go home,” he said. “So the cake got trashed. Big deal.”

  “I don’t care about the damn cake,” she shouted, stomping the ground. Her eyes flashed helplessly at him, and he could see a lot more hurt than dropping a cake could ever cause. He watched as she scrunched her nose before tears flooded into her eyes and started rolling down her cheeks.

  Fuck. Anything but tears. He couldn’t handle tears. Why couldn’t she be angry and screaming at him? He could deal with that.

  “I just want to go home,” she said, wiping her face.

  He wasn’t about to let her get behind the wheel in the state she was in.

  “Let’s take my truck,” he offered, steering her away from her car in the direction of where he’d parked. He opened the door for her, and she crawled into the cab of the truck without a word. Because he realized she had no intention of doing so herself, he pulled the seat belt across her body and buckled her in. He gently shut the door and hurried around to the driver’s side.

  He had no plans to take her home. Maybe if he drove her around for a while, she’d cry whatever it was out of her system. So he headed south toward the Blue Hills Reservation. They left the streetlamps and house lights behind them, and soon the only light came from the waning moon.

  After about fifteen minutes, Quinn had settled beside him, her body swaying with the movements of the truck. He should say something to her, but damned if he wasn’t out of ideas. He glanced over and saw the tear tracks on her cheeks as she looked down at her hands in her lap. God, what did he say to make her feel better?

  Well outside of town, he pulled his truck off the road into one of the tourist overlooks. The national park lay open before them, illuminated by the moon. In high school, he’d bring girls here in the wee hours of the morning to make out. But making out was the furthest thing from his mind at the moment with Quinn sitting next to him breaking to pieces.

  After turning the ignition off, he angled toward her, not knowing if he should reach for her or take her hand. If it were him, he’d want to be left alone. But he didn’t know if Quinn wanted that. He’d never been in a situation that required him to deal with this. Shit, he’d never been in a situation where he cared enough to want to deal with this.

  “I’m sorry.” She swiped at her cheeks. “I didn’t even say hi to you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She wiped her hands on the front of her pants. He decided to crack his window a little, and the cab was instantly filled with the sound of crickets. The gentle breeze blew the lazy branches of the trees on both sides of the tiny gravel overlook. It was a beautiful night. One of the nicest nights that they’d had in a long time. But somehow he knew Quinn wasn’t thinking about the breeze or the breathtaking view in front of them.

  “Did you know that my parents were killed a little over a year ago?”

  Her question surprised him. “Yes.”

  “Do you know how they died?”

  “No.” His low voice was barely above a whisper.

  She was looking straight ahead out the front windshield, staring off into some unknown but painful memory before she continued talking.

  “It was a picture-perfect day. A Friday. I remember that much. I had an exam that morning, and then I was free until later in the afternoon. I’d made plans with my parents to meet them for lunch downtown. We had a standing lunch date. Every Friday.”

  Ewan wanted to stop her from telling this story. A story that she didn’t want to tell. But he sensed that she needed to tell it, so he let her continue.

  “The university was offering a summer semester in Paris, and although it was something that we probably couldn’t afford, my parents had encouraged me to go. The only place outside the United States I’d been to was Germany, and traveling the world was something that they both advocated. I was so excited to go study in France with some of the most beautiful gardens in the world as my backdrop. I’d always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower. To walk in the footsteps of the king and queen at Versailles.” She bit her bottom lip and dropped her chin. “I needed a student visa for my passport. So to condense some errands, we’d stopped at the post office in the federal building across from our lunch spot.”

  As soon as she mentioned the federal building, he knew where this story was going.

  Ewan stared at her fingers as they flexed and twisted in her lap, resisting his urge to take her hand. He sensed the mindless tangling of her fingers was what was anchoring her in her story. Like a focal point of concentration.

  “The line was unbelievably long. We stood inside those thick plush rope lines that zigzagged back and forth in the lobby. My afternoon class started at two o’clock, and I hadn’t counted on such a long line to mail off the passport. I’d needed
to go deposit a few checks as well, so my parents remained in line at the post office for me while I headed a block away to the bank.”

  Ewan moved his gaze to her profile and watched as her bottom lip trembled. She stopped talking for a minute before looking up at him with sad gray eyes. Eyes that carried so much pain.

  “I never saw them again.” Her voice caught on the last word.

  She looked back out the front windshield and took a deep breath.

  “Quinn, you don’t…”

  “Yes, I do,” she whispered.

  He didn’t want to hear any more. He didn’t want to see that look on her face, like her whole world was collapsing.

  “I was at the bank when the bomb went off. It tore a hole in the front of the federal building. Sixty-three people died that day. My parents among them. And if I hadn’t been at the bank, I would have died too.”

  “Christ,” Ewan whispered, his quiet curse seemed loud inside the cab of the truck. His body shuddered, and he tensed at the thought of her being that close to death.

  “They said it was a disgruntled employee. Someone who worked at that building who’d just been laid off. He planted a bomb in a backpack and left it beside one of the pillars in the lobby, right next to the post office.”

  She pulled her lips in and squeezed her eyes shut.

  “You don’t know how many times I’ve thought back and tried to recall every single person I passed as I walked out on my way to the bank. I search through all their faces in my memory, trying to find that man. Someone who may have been acting suspicious. Someone with an angry face. I figured that for someone to do something so awful, he must have looked awful, right? But I can’t remember. I try to tell myself that it doesn’t matter. That even if I did see him, there isn’t anything I can do about it now. But it haunts me. Knowing that I could have rubbed shoulders with him on the way out. That I could have held the door open for him as he walked inside.”

  Her tiny voice broke on the last word, and he watched her face pinch. His entire body tensed even tighter than it was, wondering what he could possibly say, knowing full well that there was nothing.

  “It had been my idea to mail the passport that morning. If we would have used another post office on another day…” She shook her head. She took a deep breath before she continued, “The last thing my mother said to me was to be careful crossing the street. I remember looking over my shoulder before I reached the front doors of the lobby, and I saw my parents standing in line, my dad’s arm around my mother’s shoulders. He was saying something to her, and she was smiling up at him.”

  She looked over at him then. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, her lips pursed from holding back a sob. He had the urge to wrap his arms around her, to pull her into him. But he sat motionless, his hands clenched into fists in his lap, squeezing as if it were a matter of life and death. God, please make her stop telling this story.

  After what felt like an eternity of silence, she said softly, “Tomorrow’s my mom’s birthday.”

  He didn’t respond, only watched and listened.

  “May twenty-eighth.”

  Moisture once again gathered along her lower lashes as her chin began to quiver.

  “Tomorrow’s her birthday, and I’d completely forgotten.” Big, heavy tears fell from her lower lids directly onto her jacket.

  “I forgot my mom’s birthday,” she whispered to him. “How could I forget?”

  Two short sobs racked her body before she fell against him, burying her face in his chest. Her little hands, damp with her tears, twisted into his button-down shirt. He could see Quinn breaking apart right in front of him, and he was helpless to stop it.

  Instinctually, he slowly wrapped his arms around her as her body shook with grief. Instead of calming her, his comfort seemed to be making it worse as her sobs became louder. No one had ever cried on his shoulder before, and he didn’t want to fuck this up. He wanted to gather her closer, to pull her inside of him so he could share this burden she carried. He smoothed the loose tendrils of hair away from her face and rested his chin on the top of her head.

  Instead of trying to say something—because he had no idea where to start—he just held her in silence, stroking her head.

  He heard her take a deep breath before she cried, “I’ve been so wrapped up in everything here, and I completely forgot. Just because she’s gone doesn’t mean I should forget her birthday!”

  “Shhh,” he said as he rocked her, trying to calm the rising panic inside her.

  “She would never have forgotten my birthday. I feel like the worst daughter in the world.”

  “No,” he said slowly, shaking his head.

  “God, I can’t tell if I feel worse at this moment than when I did after they died. I don’t want to forget them. They don’t deserve to be forgotten!”

  “They aren’t forgotten.”

  “They were two people. They walked and talked and breathed. They built a life together, started a family together. And only a year after they pass away, their own daughter forgets her mother’s birthday like they didn’t even exist! Like the fifty-two years they were alive mean nothing now that they’re gone!”

  He tried to think of something profound. Something that would reach down into her shattered heart and comfort her. But he had nothing.

  “God, will this pain ever go away? Will I ever be able to live with this guilt?”

  Just fucking say something!

  “It’ll go away, Quinn.”

  “When? When will it go away?”

  As he looked out over the valley of the park trying to think of how to reply, he thought of his own brother. Darren had been seven years older, and there wasn’t a worse case of hero worship than the way he’d felt for his older brother. He knew what it was like to lose someone you loved.

  “It goes away a little every day. Some days the pain comes back. But the sooner you realize that your loved ones wouldn’t want you hurting over them, the easier it is. You let go of the reasons they aren’t here anymore, and you hold on to all the happy memories instead.”

  She took a great shuddering breath and nodded into his chest. And after some time, her sniffles grew sporadic and her body stopped shaking. Her hands unclenched, smoothing out his shirt, and he felt her relax into his arms.

  They sat in silence as the minutes passed. Her small body was warm against his, and her hair smelled like lavender. He could feel the patter of her heartbeat as her chest rose and fell with his. The overlook was blessedly empty, and the only sounds were the distant songs of crickets.

  “My mom always wanted the same cake for her birthday. On the way home from work, my dad would stop and pick up an ice cream cake. It had vanilla and chocolate ice cream with a layer of little crunchy cookies in the middle.”

  “Sounds good,” he said.

  “It was the only time we ever had that cake. It would have been weird to have it any other time of the year.”

  He moved his thumb lazily back and forth along her spine.

  “One year my dad surprised her with diamond earrings. It was one of the only times I remember my mother being speechless. I was about ten at the time, and the earrings didn’t look like anything special to me. But my mom… She snapped them right out of that box, put them in her ears, and never took them off. When I asked one day why she always wore them, she told me that it wasn’t the size of the diamond that mattered. It was the love that they were given with. Later I realized how long my father must have saved up to buy those earrings on his teacher’s salary.”

  “He must have really cared for her.”

  “Oh, he did. He would have done anything for her. My mom was a beautiful woman. So full of kindness and love. But she had a temper that you didn’t want to cross. Where my father was practical and calm, my mother was impulsive and easily defensive. Think of my Aunt Maura only louder.”

  “Good God.” He shuddered. He felt her smile against his chest.

  “I remember the year after he bought t
he diamonds, he got my mom a vacuum cleaner for her birthday. It came in a big, tall box, and he wrapped it up with a bow on top. She was so excited until she saw what it was.”

  Her tiny frame trembled with laughter before growing still again. The hair on the top of her head was tickling his chin, but he didn’t care. Clouds were moving in over the hills across the valley, and he knew it was only a matter of time before they’d block the moon.

  “I miss them,” she said softly.

  He squeezed her a little tighter, just to let her know he heard her. He knew she wasn’t looking for him to reply. Ewan was glad, because he wouldn’t have known what to say anyways. He didn’t want to tell her that the “missing” part was never going to go away.

  ###

  Darcy appeared to be speechless. A state Quinn, or anyone else for the matter, wasn’t used to seeing.

  Quinn and Darcy sat at Aunt Maura’s dining room table. Darcy’s hands wrapped around a cup of hot tea, and Quinn bent over a college application to the Rhode Island School of Design’s landscape architecture program. She’d just finished retelling the tale of what had happened to her the night before. She started with her realization that she’d forgotten her mom’s birthday, the disaster with the cake, and ended her story with Ewan holding her for half the night in his truck.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Darcy muttered, staring slack-mouthed at Quinn.

  “I know. It was a rough night.”

  Darcy just shook her head. Her friend hadn’t known how her parents had died. And when she’d gotten to that part of the story, she’d spilled every detail—again. The retelling wasn’t getting any easier. But Darcy was closing in on best friend territory, and she wanted her friend to know everything. And it was about time the two of them started sharing more with one another. They were, after all, planning on moving in together in Providence.

  “I don’t know what I’d do. I can’t even imagine—” Darcy stopped and blinked rapidly, her long, dark eyelashes moving like hummingbird wings.