Page 53 of A Thousand Broken Pieces

Blackness. Black swirls laced with red. Red for blood and anger. Black for the loss and the state I’d been left in. Ice trickled down my spine, picking up speed until a thought came to mind—was this painting how Cillian had been feeling that night to do what he did? Nothing inside of his heart to live for?

Death his only option.

Death, to stop the pain.

Death, to escape whatever hell life had become for him. He’d suffered in silence and died that way too.

A hand landed on my shoulder. The touch was gentle and supportive. “Beautiful,” Miriam said, and her voice was shaking. I didn’t look up, but I thought I heard tears in her tone. “It’s so truly beautiful, Cael.” I stared at the painting and saw no beauty in it. It was like a void, sucking everything bright and light into its mouth. The longer I stared at it, at the flashes of red, the swirling brushstrokes, and pitch-black opaque of the center, a deep coldness settled over the rest of me.

Goose bumps covered my skin when I truly studied the picture. It was almost like Cillian had been beside me, guiding the brush. Like he wantedme toknowhow it had felt inside his soul, giving me a glimpse of why he’d felt there was no other option. I shuffled in my seat.

I had no idea what happened after we died. But had it been possible for him to show me this? Had he somehow been in this moment with me, urging me tosee? Tounderstand. Foolishly, I searched around me for any sign that he was here. Then I shook my head at my stupidity.

What was I eventhinking?

Yet the picture stared back at me, like it had an ominous force, a malevolent agenda, trying to swallow me into darkness too. Was Cillian’s presumed depression so numbing that all his light was sucked from him into a nothingness void of despair? Was this kind of bleakness too much to live with and his reasoning for taking his own life simply to stop this level of anguish and darkness?

If it was, how could I ever hate him? How could I ever question why he didn’t want to stay in this world if this was what he lived with every minute of every day?

Had this darkness stolen his voice too? Is that why he didn’t tell me he was suffering? Had it robbed him of his plea for help? Had it given him no other choice but to succumb to its pull?

I tasted salt on my lips and realized it was from the tears that were tumbling from my eyes. I didn’t want to feel this. I didn’t want this picture to be me too. If this darkness had been in Cillian, could bring such a strong hero down, could it be in me too? Panic wrapped around me and almost brought me to my knees.

Leo appeared beside me. “Let’s take a walk, son.” I stood, not wanting to think and just wanting to be led away from here, from that darkness I felt was calling my name.

I felt the group’s stares on my back and knew there would be one set of blue eyes hyperfocused on me. But I let Leo take me to the white sand of the beach. I didn’t even feel the heat from the blazing sun bearing down upon me. Chills kept me frozen, like I was standing in a freezer, unable to escape.

Leo didn’t talk at first. He just sat beside me. Until he said, “It was my father.” I stopped breathing, only starting again when he said, “I was fifteen.” Leo paused, and I heard him take a deep inhale. “I found him.”

I closed my eyes, hearing the gentle flow of the water, trying like hell to use it to calm me down before my heart tried to lurch from my chest.

“For years it consumed me,” Leo said. “So much so that I became lost to darkness too.” He wrapped his arms around his legs. “I was self-destructive. I flunked out of school. Threw any possible future I had away.”

He let that confession hang in the air between us, until I grabbed hold of it, reeled it in, and asked, “What changed?”

“I got sick and tired of it, Cael,” he said, and I heard the honesty in his deep voice. “I’d lost my dad, but that day, I also lost myself. The boy I was died, and the one I became afterward was born.” He smiled, and I frowned. “Then I met my wife.” Savannah’s pretty face automatically came to my mind, and I felt a spark of grace inside of me grow, and a solitary candle flame began to rise, sucking up more oxygen from the well of grief inside of me to give it more strength.

“I wanted to be better for her.” Leo tapped his chest over his heart. “But Ineededto be better formyself.” He finally faced me. “So I went back to school and decided that rather than running from my father’s death, I would face it head-on, honor the man that was my entire world by helping those just like him … and those just like me—the grievers.”

“Why did he do it?” I asked, my chest cracking open and feeling like I was bleeding out, marring the golden sand in red.

“I never knew,” Leo said and ran a fistful of sand through his fingers. One by one the grains poured back onto the beach—nature’s hourglass. I stared at those grains of sand. A billion tiny parts making up a whole. “Knowing what I do about depression, I imagine it was that. But I’ve never known.” He faced me again. “And Cael, I’ve had to make peace with that.” Emotion radiated from Leo’s frame, but I could see he embraced it, wore it like a cape rather than a shroud.

Leo placed his hand on my shoulder. “I’m always ready to talk, when you are.” He got up and left me on the beach. I stayed out there until the sun began to fade over the horizon, a burn-orange semicircle casting the beach in a golden glow. I only moved when darkness fell and the stars came out. I looked up at every one and thought back on what Savannah had said in Norway.

I searched each star for one that could be Cillian. But there were somany, just like the billions of grains of sand I sat upon. Lifting from the sand, I made my way back to the hotel. The lights were still open in the gazebo where we had painted.

The pull of a thread inside of my gut guided me back there, to the piece that I didn’t even remember painting. When I reached the gazebo, everyone’s paintings were still out, drying. I made my way around them, looking at what my friends had been thinking when they had opened their hearts. Dylan’s was full of pastel colors and blues. It was affectionate, somehow. Peaceful. Like the feeling of coming home.

Travis’s made my chest ache. Eleven white crosses in a vivid green field. The sun was bright and yellow shining down upon them. And there was a flash of orange and red standing to the side, hand upon one of the crosses. I understood that to be Travis, mourning his friends.

Lili’s was three hands holding on to each other tightly, never letting go. Only two of the hands were lighter, almost transparent, angelic. Jade’s was a riot of color, every color that could be named. It spoke of vibrant people, bright and fun and filled with life. Her mother and brother.

Then I came to a stop at Savannah’s. Pale pinks made flowers of her canvas. A mason jar sat off to the side, a blossom tree in the background too. Stars hung in the sky, looking down upon the scene. It was calm and peaceful. It looked like a place I wanted to see.

“The blossom grove,” a gentle voice said out of the darkness. I turned to see Savannah coming up the stone stairs from the hotel into the gazebo. She was dressed in a sage-green dress that had strap sleeves and floated around her knees. Her blond hair was down and curled with the heat. She was more beautiful than any of these paintings.

“It’s a cherry blossom grove, back in Georgia. What our small town was named for.” A nostalgic smile flickered on Savannah’s lips. “It was Poppy’s favorite place.” She reached my side and ran her hand over the bottom of the tree. “It’s where she’s buried.”

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