“Deep, square breaths, Eppie.”
I did some of those. Rise and fall. Rise and fall.
The blackened, blurred edge started to recede, sloughing away from my vision, but white stars filled the gaps where they once were.
Taking my shoulders into his grip, Lincoln moved me around to face him. “Talk to me about what you’re feeling,” he said, his eyes alight with encouragement. “Tell me what this means to you.”
I felt—
I felt…
I felt nothing.
I saw a woman this morning. We’d fleetingly connected stares at a red light. She wore a tattered patch on her navy-colored Dickies shirt that read, “Louise.” She was on her way to work, to the only mechanic garage in town, I figured, based on her attire and the thick line of grease in the crescents of her nail. It was like the opposite of a French manicure, as opposite as you could get on the color spectrum.
This woman in the ground was her.
And she was also the man who’d offered me his cart in the parking lot of Winn-Dixie when Lincoln decided a cake was an appropriate thing to bake on one’s birthday and that ingredients needed to be purchased immediately. The man wore a toddler on his hip and a curdled trail of spit-up down his back, and our encounter was so brief and momentary that I wasn’t sure I’d remember many more details about him once those two descriptions were lost from my short term memory.
She was that man also.
Because she was truly no more than a stranger to me. No more than another once-resident in a town where I happened to live. She could’ve been anyone, because she was no longer someone to me.
Why hadn’t I figured this would be how it would go?
I thought I came here to finally mourn her, but that wasn’t it.
I came to mourn the loss of a mom. You would think they’d be one and the same, that the loss of her—that her death—was the truest tragedy. For most daughters, I supposed that’s how things went. But for me, the slow tragedy began with that first dose she’d administered. I wondered if she knew that she’d been immunizing me against her with every doctor visit she’d scheduled, every lie she’d fabricated. If mourning was necessary, that should’ve happened back in the hospital when I found out who she really was. But I didn’t fully mourn then. And now, so many years later, it felt like too little too late.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. Is it wrong if I say if I am?”
In the few months I’d known him, Lincoln never let me feel guilty for expressing emotions that weren’t what would be considered appropriate for the time or place. Now, like all of those consistent situations, was no exception.
“Your feelings are exactly that, your feelings. Eppie, there is no right or wrong here.” He met my eyes and examined me, probably trying to pull something out. I wasn’t sure what emotion clung to my features. I wasn’t sure what he would interpret given the look I offered. “I’m going to talk to you a little bit about something I know to be true, okay?”
“More cheese?”
“Maybe.” He smiled, head tipped to the side. “But I’m willing to take that chance.”
I gave him the go-ahead with a quick nod.
“A whole lot of what we’re taught in life is complete, utter crap. Seriously, forget all that you think you know. Blood is not thicker than water. Family is not life’s greatest blessing. You know how I know that? Because, like you, I got the short end of the stick when God pieced my relatives together.” Lincoln’s mouth scowled, waiting while a memory or something played out in his brain, then his lips parted to speak. “But somehow, the fact that I was placed into this loveless familial entity made me a man who knew exactly what love was when I finally got even just a small taste of it. Like that perfect, juicy bite from a fruit that’s ready for the picking when all you’ve ever known was the sourness of an unripe peach. Living without love made me ripe for it.”
“You’re wrong,” I said, a smile playing on my lips. “You’re not cheesy. You’re totally fruity.”
Lincoln didn’t bother to disagree with me. “Maybe so. It’s just that I see you here, seemingly guilty at your lack of emotion toward your mother, and that’s okay, Eppie. Because it’s not that you’re without feeling. It’s not that you don’t have love. It’s just that she’s no longer capable of earning any of yours, not even her memory,” he said. “So the fact that you deem me worthy of that love is a huge honor, my little peach. You’ve saved up all of your love for me.”
“Now you’re just plain crazy.”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “But I think being just a little crazy makes me capable of loving you like crazy, so I’ll take it.”
“I’ll take it, too,” I said, then paused a moment. “But I did love her once, you know? In the blissfulness of naivety, I loved that mom I thought I had.” My chest was tight, a balloon nearly pushing out on my ribcage. With a slow, steady hiss, I forced out the air trapped within me. “I don’t know what I was expecting when I came here.” I tossed my hands to the sky. “It wasn’t like I believed she was still alive, but without seeing this permanent place in the ground—without reading those dates right in front of me—it was like I was free to make up my own ending, not the one where she gave up on herself. Or maybe she gave in to herself. I don’t know what truly led her there, what made her take those actions.” This sounded preposterous, surely. But sometimes even the hard things needed to be spoken. Maybe when it came down to it, they were the only things that needed to be spoken at all. I decided to put on a brave face and speak them. “I would pretend she was just at Vista, really taking her time to get healthy. I’d make up these alternate endings to our life. She’s coming home next month. She’s doing so well she’s teaching classes on overcoming your obstacles and inner demons and she won’t be home until Christmas,” I explained. “As it turns out, death isn’t always an ending.”
“Nope, it’s definitely not. The dead don’t take their memories with them when they go.” Then, with his hands around me, he gathered me closer. “You deserve an ending, Eppie. A happy one.”
“I don’t think I need a happy ending, necessarily. I just want a happy life where the good slightly outweighs the bad. And that’s what I have with you, Lincoln. Even in this short amount of time, you’ve tipped the scales in favor of good. Even this…” I turned a hand toward the tombstones flanking us, their shadows long in the early evening light. “You’ve managed to make this okay for me.”
“You know how concerned I am over every part of you being okay,” he smiled, making my mind and heart flit back to the night I found him on my roof. The night of the perfectly awkward kiss and declarations of young, incurable love.
“Well, you’ve done that,” I confirmed. “You’ve done that remarkably well.”
“So did this end up being a good birthday for you then?” he asked, his brow lifted, arms bracketing me in.
“A good birthday,” I answered, nuzzled against his chest, my newest favorite place in this world. “A good everything.”
THIRTY-TWO
“Open up the envelope.” Lincoln had as big of a grin as the elasticity of his face would allow. And if his overly excited knees didn’t stop bouncing, they’d soon slap him in the chin. Nothing about his face or body was settling; it was all cartoony grins and over-exaggerated movements. “Open it, Eppie.”
“I’m a little worried that something horrifying is hidden in this, Lincoln. I’ve got that classic something-is-going-to-jump-out-and-scare-the-ever-loving-crap-out-of-me type jitters. I’m drowning in anxiety.”
“You’ve made your irrational fear of surprises loudly known to me already. Plus, it’s an envelope. Folded paper. Nothing scary about it. I promise, this is a good one. Scout’s honor.”
I decided not to put up a fight, even though I did question the authenticity of his boyscouthood. With my index finger in the flap, I tore the top from the padded envelope and stared directly into it.
“Bungee cord?”
�
��We’re jumping.” He grinned, taking the red and black rope from my hands. “Nothing but you, me, and a giant bungee shooting us out of the sky, narrowly missing earth.”
“I don’t know—”
“Listen.” He yanked the cord away from me and snapped it between his hands and one hooked end ricocheted off the driver’s side window. That crack of metal against glass really didn’t make me feel any more at ease. “I’m a pansy. I hate heights. If you think that you’re more scared than I am about this, you’re sorely wrong.” Yet somehow I doubted that. “This is your birthday gift, Eppie. The chance to finally jump and get someone the help they need. In this instance, that’s me getting over my irrational acrophobia.”
“I don’t think it’s all that irrational—”
“We’re going to take that leap together.”
“To our deaths?”
“To our future!” Lincoln’s fist pumped in the air and Trudy swerved erratically to the left. Dropping both hands back onto the wheel, he guided her into our lane like reining in a spooked horse. “Sorry ‘bout that.”
“I get the gesture, I do. And I’m grateful for it, but I don’t think any of this is necessary. I’m good where I’m at, truly good. We don’t have to have some grandiose playing out of symbolic jumping for me to be okay. You’ve already gotten me to that good place.”
“Maybe, but I’m not in that place yet.” Eyes on the road, Lincoln talked through the windshield as though he was holding a conversation with the painted yellow line up ahead. There was a lot of intense brow furrowing currently going on. “This is what’s about to happen. I’m going to get up on that ledge and I’m going to panic. My chest will get tight. My breaths will trip upon themselves. The world will spin as though on a merry-go-round. And then we’ll jump.” That ill-placed speed bump was a sick joke, making me practically shoot through the roof as we bounced over it in his jalopy. “And then I’ll realize that the fall isn’t nearly as scary as the fear.”
“Or you’ll realize it’s infinitely more so.”
“That’s certainly a possibility.” He shot me his crooked smile. “I plan on jumping today, and it would make the experience all the more pleasurable to have you strapped to me while I do it.”
Weighing the incredibleness of being pressed up against Lincoln’s body with the horribleness of plummeting to my premature death, I made my swift and easy decision. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
Another unbalanced smile. “Let’s do this.”
Evidently the day of my celebration of birth was a popular day for testing immortality, which was a touch morbid since we’d started the earlier portion of it at an actual cemetery. There were two couples already ahead of us in line when we arrived at the Extreme Activities tandem bungee jumping facility, just an hour outside of town and into the curving hills and dirt roads that twisted through the mountainsides flanking Masonridge. We were in the literal ridges around Mason, I supposed. And there was this bridge called “Lover’s Ledge,” suspended one hundred sixty feet above a river that, though flowing with water, didn’t look nearly deep enough to swallow our impact had our bungee decided to snap instead of retract. If things went wrong, their only option was to do so terribly.
“It’s gonna be a total adrenaline rush.” Spike, our Extreme Activities Instructor—or EAI as he acronymed it—used the word total the way some people used salt. It flavored practically every sentence out of his mouth. “Like an atmospheric orgasm.”
“Not necessarily what we’re going for,” Lincoln said, adjusting his harness though I’d begged him not to fiddle with it at least fifty times now. “But I’m certain it will be an adventure.”
“Totally,” Spike, who—fittingly enough—had bleached tipped hair standing straight on end, said in complete monotone over the shrill echo of both a grown man and woman screaming bloody murder that bounced loudly off the canyon walls. I was baffled by the notion that jarring sounds like these were just the background music to Spike’s everyday work life. I’d request a different soundtrack if I were him. “Alright. I’m gonna go push this next couple off and then I’ll be back for you. All good?”
“All good.” Lincoln was speaking for himself only.
“Are you sure you still want to do this?” Sometimes people changed their minds after the eighteenth or nineteenth time of asking, right? That’s what it meant to wear someone down, I figured. “No one has to know about our chicken-ness if we back out. Your secret is safe with me.”
“Here’s the thing, Eppie.” Lincoln leaned against the rusty railing, then stepped off from it, then tried leaning once more, but it was so glaringly obvious that he was terrified and couldn’t find his confidence up so high on this bridge. “I’m a coward by nature—”
“No—”
“Let me finish. There’s a very real possibility that our leap from this post will render you deaf from all of my decibel-shattering wailing, so I feel the need to get this out while you can still hear me, okay?”
“Okay.”
“So,” he continued. “As I was saying. I’m a coward. That’s my go-to. It kept me out of the army and there’s every indication it’s what killed Charlie as a result.”
“That’s so not even fair to assert crap like that.”
“I could’ve been there, Eppie. I used to have these dreams that Dan and Charlie and me were all on the front lines together, just like we’d always planned. Then out of nowhere this bomb would go off and I’d throw myself on top of the guys and somehow shield them with my skinny body and we’d all end up completely safe and unharmed and I’d be a regular hero.” He fiddled again with his straps and I swatted his hand from the harness. Then I clasped my hands together, staring at them as he spoke, ignoring whatever it was that he was doing with his hooks and straps. “I’d have these visions, Eppie, and man, they felt so real to me. The frustratingly ironic thing is that I’d awake with these panic attacks and they were ultimately what kept me out of the army altogether,” he said, his voice pushing out of him quietly. “I’ve always wondered how things might’ve been different had I not just envisioned my future, but actually lived it out instead.” He closed his eyes, then said softly as a low whisper, “I’ll never know if I’m capable of being a hero because I was always too busy being a daydreaming coward.”
“Why do I get the idea that no amount of me challenging your position is going to change your faulty self-assessment?”
“Wise woman,” he grinned.
“Very. But here’s the thing, Lincoln. Our minds play tricks on us. And yours has been tricking you into believing you’ve somehow failed.” Couple Number Two just sprang from the platform. I didn’t need to see them fall to confirm that. Their hoots and hollers were evidence enough. “That wasn’t your mission, you have to understand that. That just wasn’t your mission.”
“You’ve heard of being in the wrong place at the wrong time?” Lincoln asked, his thumbs all the way under his harness now. I’d have to demand that Spike do one final assessment on Lincoln’s get-up before taking the jump, because I was sure he’d fiddled his way out of safety. “I think there’s such a thing as failing to be in the right place at the right time, too. I’ll never stop wondering about that, Eppie—about my epically failed timing. I don’t think I’ll ever cease to wonder.”
“Well, just stop wondering,” I demanded abruptly. My hair blew into my face, the dark strands wrapping across my wind-chapped lips. With my hand, I swept them back under my helmet, securing them there. “Wonderment should only be reserved for the good things. Not the things you can’t change.”
“That’s a good assertion. I get that,” he agreed. “You’re pretty smart, you know that?”
“Yes, that’s one of the things I do know. And you’re pretty brave to come all the way up here and throw a perfectly good body off of a perfectly good bridge.”
Playful wickedness entered Lincoln’s eyes at the same time his brows shot up and down. I liked how animated he could be at times, and by at times, I meant
all the time. “You think my body is perfectly good?”
“Yes, well... um, you know what I mean.”
“I do, I think,” he spoke. “And I think my show of bravery might just be masked stupidity. This really is a terrible idea, isn’t it? To trust some guy we just met, these flimsy harnesses, and an oversized rubber band? We’re smarter than that, aren’t we? Please tell me we are.”
The platform was now empty, awaiting our turn. Spike did a very Spike-y thing and waved us over with both flailing hands raised high above his head as he jumped up and down, his over-enthusiasm for thrill evident in his body language. We were obviously up next.
“We are smarter than that, yes. But I say we just do it. It’s absurd, but it requires absurd amounts of bravery, so I think this could really work for you,” I suggested, already making my way over to Spike at the middle portion of the bridge. I could see through the wooden planks below me, and it wasn’t like there were these huge, rushing waves threatening to swallow us up or even a dozen angry crocodiles with their jaws unhinged, ready to devour us. The river was peaceful, calm. And suddenly so was I, remarkably.
It was a different story for Lincoln.
“Finding... it... hard... to... breathe.” That sounded like five separate sentences, poor guy. Panic had clearly begun its attack. “World. Spinning. Heart. Pounding.”
“And now you know what it was like for me during our first kiss,” I teased, hoping that saying things like that would help Lincoln focus on anything but his overwhelming fear growing within him.
“Not... fair... to... bring... that... up... now,” he panted out breathlessly. Spike began the work of rigging us together as he bound our ankles and instructed us to wrap our arms around one another, our appendages acting as additional harnesses. “I think... my lungs... just cracked... one of my... ribs.” Lincoln pulled out from my arms and clawed at his chest with his long fingers.
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