Page 89 of Wished

I made sure my dad heard me. “I’ll be back.”

Because he wouldn’t leave if I told him I’d be back. He wouldn’t.

Then I ran down the hall to the bathroom, locked the stall door behind me, and got on my knees and prayed. And I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. And just to be sure, I made a wish.

An hour later, with aching knees and a tear-ragged throat, I crept back into my dad’s hospital room. My heart stuttered and sort of caved in inside my chest. Because I’d been wrong. My mom was sobbing. And my dad had left even though I didn’t say goodbye. He’d left even when I’d told him I’d be back. And most importantly, he’d left even though I’d prayed and wished that he wouldn’t.

So, this time around, I want to say goodbye.

It’s going to end—it has to end—one way or another. But when it does, I at least want to say goodbye.

“I don’t know if you’ll remember this,” I begin, and when Max starts to speak I shake my head. “Don’t ...” I clear my throat. “Don’t ...”

Max steps forward, crosses the rug I cleaned just last week, and takes my hand. “Anna. What?”

I clutch his hand, feeling the warmth and the strength of his grip.

He doesn’t understand. He has seven years of love behind him and he imagines a lifetime of love ahead. I don’t know if we’ll ever leave this reality, and I don’t know, if we do, whether or not he’ll remember this.

“I’m leaving. I’m saying goodbye,” I say, my voice hushed in the stillness.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, shaking his head and gripping my hand. But he does, because his eyes are tight and his face is pale.

“I’m not sure what’s going to happen tomorrow. Maybe you’ll forget me?—”

“Anna, what are you talking about?”

“Maybe you’ll hate me?—”

“Stop,” he says, pulling me closer, tugging me against him. “Anna, stop.”

But I don’t. I can’t. “Maybe you’ll wish you never met me. Or maybe we’ll still be here, and you’ll still want me.”

“I’ll always want you.” He grips my arms, and I can feel the shaking in his hands, the tightness in his chest, and the thundering in his heart.

“But if you wake up tomorrow, still here, still wanting me? Don’t come after me. Don’t come looking for me. Don’t. This love isn’t real.” He starts to argue, so I shake my head. “It isn’t. It isn’t real. You didn’t have a choice in it. I took your choice.”

“Leaving is taking my choice,” he says. “I don’t understand. You aren’t ... you’re not making any sense. We’re happy. I love you. You love me.” He pauses as if he’s wondering if the love he took for granted actually wasn’t true. “You love me?” he asks slowly. “Anna?”

I see in him the boy who wasn’t given love, the man who turned from love, and the man who in Paris asked me to find him and tell him that love wasn’t anything to be afraid of. He trusted me to find him and love him and give him a choice in loving me.

His expression has clouded, doubt twisting through him, tinging the memories of the past seven years. Before the doubt can work its way into his heart, I say, “I love you. I loved you from the minute I laid eyes on you. And it’s been growing exponentially ever since—so fast that you’ll never catch up.”

“Then why?” he asks, holding me tighter.

The weight of the library has deepened, the heaviness drawn into a slumberous breath, the last rattling struggle of a shuddered inhale. On the desk the rivière necklace gleams dully in the light, winking sleepy blue eyes.

“I can’t keep this wish,” I say, speaking to the gradients in the necklace. The soul-deep blue; the achingly vivid indigo; the yearning of a dark winter sky; the colors of wishes and love. “Tomorrow, if you wake up and we aren’t married but you still remember, please know I’m leaving because I love you. I love you desperately, and if you ... if you still feel even a glimmer of what you feel now ... I’ll be happy just to see you, to know. If you don’t remember, I’ll come. I’ll risk your hate. I promised I’d show you your letter, so I will.”

I look up at Max, and his brown eyes have taken on a frosted edge, icy like winter-blue. “Why,” he asks in a hard voice, “wouldn’t we be married?”

I swallow, my arms shaking as I wrap them around his shoulders. My vision is dark at the edges, the sparkle of the necklace a flash at the corner of the feathering blackness.

I reach out to the necklace, with my heart, with my mind, and I wish?—

Let him go.

Let him love who he wants to love.

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