Page 119 of Every Beautiful Mile

When his eyes flutter open, it’s with a sleepy, “Hi.”

He half yawns and reaches his arms overhead in a stretch before turning to face me. Lines of shadow and light stripe across his beautiful body, half-covered with a sheet.

I hug the pillow underneath me and face him. I try to smile, but the sadness carved on my skin moves like concrete.

“Hi.”

“What’s in here this morning?”

He gently taps my forehead as his bottomless eyes search mine.

I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.

“On the east coast of Mobile Bay, there’s this thing that happens that they call a jubilee. I won’t even bother trying to tell you the exact details of what has to occur for the whole thing to happen because I’d butcher them, but it involves tides, temperature, oxygen levels, and winds doing all the exact right thing. Anyway, when all these things cooperate, the shallow shoreline is flooded with gobs of fish and crabs, and the people all come together and celebrate the harvest in the middle of the night.” I don’t know why I think of that night in Alabama lying in Ethan’s bed that morning, but I do. “As you can imagine, it’s an extremely rare phenomenon, but we got to see it by some weird stroke of luck.” I almost laugh thinking of us wading through that dark water in the middle of the night with those ridiculous washtubs.

“The man that took us out that night told me jubilees weren’t any more special than anything else in life. That everything is a magical phenomenon of one kind or another. He told me that what makes jubilees fun is they are rare and eventually stop, and we shouldn’t pass anything up just to avoid the pain of the ending.

“For some reason, this morning, I was thinking after looking back on everything I’ve seen this summer, jubilees really are everywhere. The way Sedona has red rocks, and the lonely saguaros grow for hundreds of years in the desert. The way mystery lights dance in Marfa and the Colorado River made the Grand Canyon. The way we make a perfect series of unrelated choices that hand deliver us to something that feels like the rarest magic in all the world.”

I don’t need to clarify the last part. We both know what I’m talking about.

Us.

His fingers interlace with mine as I blink back the tears that want to fall.

“Let’s have coffee on the roof this morning,” he says.

I nod. “And feed the birds,” I say.

Because I’ll miss that, too.

***

Ethan doesn’t go into the restaurant that day.

We go through the motions of doing everything we had done in the days before, except there’s a somber undercurrent that won’t be ignored. We speak less and stare off into the distance more. I’m so lost in my own head I can’t exist in the present, no matter how little of it we have left together.

Marin and Finn will be back tomorrow, and before they left, we planned it out to spend four days in Bar Harbor before flying home. All I can think about is the end.

I cling pathetically to his side as we walk around downtown that afternoon. As if the more I touch him, the longer I’ll be able to feel him when I leave.

There’s a game people play where they ask what you would do if you only had one week to live. I’ve always answered it by stating grandiose plans of seeing something exotic or doing something crazy with the people I love. I now know I would just mope, exactly the way I’ve been doing since I woke up this morning.

I’m not seizing the day. I’m losing it.

I stop in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Cancel the dinner reservation, Ethan. This day has been awful. You know it just as much as I do. As much as I hoped not talking about it would make it better, it feels worse—like we are in some kind of depressing funeral march on a treadmill that won’t stop.” I blink through the burn that’s piercing my eyes. “I can’t share you with anyone tonight. Not the strangers we walk by on the street or the waitress who will take our order or anyone else. The bubble we’ve lived in for the last two weeks is going to pop the minute I pick my kids up tomorrow, and I hate myself for how sick it’s making me feel and how needy I’m acting.”

He smiles, but it doesn’t meet his eyes. He knows.

In the middle of the busy Bar Harbor sidewalk, he cups his hands around my face and pulls me into a kiss that’s so devastatingly heartbreaking I almost collapse.

“If you weren’t leaving next week Nel—”

I shake my head. “Don’t,” I say firmly. “Let’s just go to the house.”

Hand in hand, that’s exactly where we go.

---