Page 72 of Somewhere Only We Know
“Jax,” I start and turn to her but she cuts me off.
“Don’t say something that’s going to freak me out.”
“How about I love you?”
She smiles, albeit wobbly, but a smile nonetheless. “Yeah, that’ll do it. I love you, too.”
I lean forward and close the small gap between us. Jax is trembling against my lips, emotion taking over as those three words are said as a married couple.
The fire piton Jax’s back porch crackles and warms us in the late December cold. We’re cuddled up on one of the outdoor couches with mugs of hot chocolate keeping us somewhat warm. Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and I find myself pinching myself that we’re married. That I’m coming out of this year with the girl I dreamed of marrying when I was twenty-one. Talk about destiny.
Jax and I talk. A lot. It’s like we’ve both stored things away in the years we were apart and are now playing catch-up.
“Do you go home often?” she asks as we watch the lights in the city illuminate the river.
“No. I can’t.”
“Will you tell me?”
Jax doesn’t have to elaborate. I know what she’s asking me to tell her.
“It was a few months after I found that my dad had limited time left with us. Um, because we were in season, my coach sat down with my parents to be made aware of what was happening. He got their phone numbers in case of big emergencies.” I don’t have to clarify what I mean by the big emergency and I swallow as my telling this story takes me back to that day. “Luckily, we were playing at home. I must’ve been in a spot on the field or up to bat where I didn’t see my coach take a phone call that would change everything. He made the call to have me finish the game. And when it was over, he told me my dad had collapsed again. That it was Kayla who found him. I left the field then and there. In my uniform and cleats as I sped to the hospital just hoping to make it in time. He passed just minutes after I got there.”
Jax’s hands wipes away the tears I didn’t know had fallen. December is usually my darkest month. It’s when Imade the decision to leave school and the girl I loved. It’s when I found out he was sick and that there was no cure. How can we make so many medical advances and not find a cure for so many things? I was mad. At my parents, at the doctors, at science. When March rolls around, that’s when I feel the weight of his loss the most.
“In hindsight I know my coach made the right call not to tell me until after the game. But knowing I could have had more moments with him, is something I find unforgivable. I didn’t cope the way I should have. I lost my dad. I lost the person I look up to from an incurable disease.”
“Did you ever…” Jax stumbles over her words as she thinks of what to ask me.
“Want to join him?”
She nods against me. “Yeah.”
“The thought crossed my mind. He was my best friend.” I tell her and don’t miss the wince. “But then I looked at my mom and Kayla, how they were also just as lost, and I realized that my absence would have destroyed them.”
“I’m glad you stayed.” Jax whispers.
I look at Jax, whose eyes are filled with a light sheen of tears, and lift up my arm in invitation for her to snuggle closer. “Me too, Bee.”
“If things ever get dark again—will you tell me?”
“I promise.”
The hard thing about suffering is that it’s mostly done in silence. That’s why they call itsuffering in silence. The stranger you pass on the street could be contemplating ending it because no one listens to them. An outburst at work means they suffered for too long and needed to let it out before it destroyed them. My suffering was needing to escape from the grief I couldn’t process.
“Will you tell me about your Dad?”
Jax and I lean further back into the couch cushions. With the fire going and the hum from downtown faintly reaching us, I tell her everything. I tell her about his afterwork routine and how, like clockwork, I would hear the sound of his office chair squeaking as he reclined to finish up the rest of his work for the day. I told her that he was a quiet man, but when he spoke, people listened. His stories from when he was a kid, traveling around the country to where his Dad was stationed in the Navy, to his own stint playing college football and then the Navy as well. I tell her about when my parents met as two broke kids who said that love was more than enough. And how they were together for over thirty years until he passed away.
“I realize that my wanting to disappear would have been an act of selfishness.” Jax grips onto me tighter as she lets me get the words out. “My mom lost her other half. The person that she thought she would grow old with. How can she live her life without him?”
“Maybe when we go visit your family, you can ask her?”
I kiss the top of Jax’s head and rest my cheek there. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Do you wanna know how I would feel? If the love of my life was no longer here?”
I think of my not being here and Jax living life without me. The thought is too much to handle. But maybe she’ll tell me her experience from when we were apart. “Tell me.”
