Page 48 of Promise Me Sunshine

He doesn’t understand. My fingers shake as I type the next words.I want to stop but I can’t.

Okay. Be there soon.

He must know how to teleport, because I swear I’ve barely received the text before he’s knocking on the door to the studio apartment.

When I answer the door for him, he can’t hide his wince.

Have you ever seen those big suspended slabs of cow that Rocky beats the shit out of? Pretty sure that’s what my face looks like right now.

I drop to a squat and cover my expression with my hands.

“You need water,” he decides, toeing his shoes off. His fingers touch the top of my head very lightly as he walks past. When he comes back with a tall glass of room-temperature tap water, he sits down right next to me and gently pushes my shoulder so that I land backward on my butt. The motion unfolds my pose and I reach for the water, finishing the glass in ten gulping seconds.

I breathe raggedly and can’t catch air. A minute or sopasses and then Miles pushes his knee against mine. “What are you holding in?”

“What?”

“Look, with this kind of pain, you can’t hold it in or hide it or swerve it. Theonlyway out is through. So what is it?”

I make a choked sound and fold down over my gut. “I don’t even know.” I’m a sobbing mess. “Today was fine. Today wasfine.Good even? This feels so random that it’s hitting me like this right now. It’s been months and I just don’t understand why I’m not getting better. At all. I can’t breathe. I can’t live, Miles. I can’t.”

He takes my hand and uncurls my fingers. He presses hard on the muscle between my thumb and pointer. It’s such acute pressure I gasp. When he releases the hold my chest expands by an inch. Air rushes in.

He does it to the other hand as well. “Look,” he says low. “Consider it like you just had a heart transplant. When Lou died, your entire heart went with her. But you have to live, right? So now you’ve got this new heart. And you’re getting used to it. No one would expect you to run up a hill right after a heart transplant. Go slow. Go easy on yourself.”

I press my hands to my heart, one over the other. “I can’t believe people survive this.”

He nods. “Most of the time life is easy, but we think it’s hard. Then somethingactuallyhard happens.” His knee knocks mine again. “It’s normal not to know how to get to the other side. You’ve never done it before.”

“How did you do it?”

“I took it second by second. Sometime soon you’ll be getting from minute to minute and then day by day. And so on. But…the point isn’t trying to get where you’re not. The point is just…enduring.”

What an awful word. Like a curse. Next time I want to sayfuck youto somebody I’ll just shoutendure itinstead.

I curl to my side and before my head touches the hardwood there’s a pillow being shoved under my ear. “I want to carry a framed eight-by-ten of her everywhere I go. If I’m with people who didn’t know her,” I continue, “I want to talk about her incessantly. If I’m with people whodidknow her, I can’t figure out why they’renottalking about her incessantly.”

There’s a beat of silence and then he says, “Then do it.”

“Do what?”

“Talk about her incessantly. Let’s say…two hours? That should be enough to get us started at least. If you need more time, we can add some. Tell me anything you want, in as much detail as you want. And you don’t have to worry about pleasantries or asking about my life or checking to see if I’m bored. For two hours, I’ll listen. No strings.”

I peek up at him. “Seriously?”

He grabs another pillow and situates himself on his back, eyes up to the ceiling. “Shoot.”

Now that I’ve been given permission to say anything I want about her, I have no idea where to start.

“…Lou and I had our own world.”

He laughs. “I can tell.”

“How?”

He rolls his head to look at me. “It’s written all over everything you do and say. Like a signature, or a fingerprint or something.”

And so I tell him about our world together. Yankees games where we wore all the swag and ate all the hot dogs and scrambled for foul balls but chatted through the game and couldn’t tell you the score if our lives depended on it.Getting accidentally sunburned at Coney Island once a summer no matter how vigilantly we tried to prevent it. Screaming with laughter in changing rooms at how absolutely terrible we looked in ill-fitting yet apparently fashionable outfits.

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