Page 81 of Hello Darling
“Yeah. The car crash was…I just want you to know why it’s been so hard for me to…”
I sit up. She starts crying. I’ve seen a hint of tears in her eyes so many times, but this is the first time she’s really cried in front of me and I feel my heart being ripped out of my chest. I put my hand on hers.
“You don’t have to tell me this if you don’t want to.”
“No,” she sniffles and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “I want to. I was planning to, while we’re here. I want to.” That hand covers her heart and she continues. “It’s so weird, I haven’t cried in years, and the all of a sudden a month ago, it’s like something got…dislodged, or something.”
I squeeze her leg. I know exactly what she means.
She sighs. “I was eighteen. After graduating. I was taking a year to work at the gym before going to college, and the plan was to do some traveling with my boyfriend too. Cody. I’d been with him on and off since we were sixteen, but we were really together then. It was October. I was hanging out at his place, but he’d gotten drunk and we had a fight and I wanted to go home. I didn’t have a car and didn’t want him to drive me, so I called my dad to pick me up. He was in the middle of something, so my mom came instead. It was pouring rain. Cody was living with his brother, about ten minutes from our house. But after half an hour she still hadn’t shown up…The guy who hit her lived two towns over, he wasn’t drunk, he was texting and driving too fast. Someone saw him run the red light at the intersection, and…He died too. Supposedly it was instant for her. I try not to think about the details so I don’t picture it.”
She’s not crying anymore. I think it was getting to the part where she could tell me about it that was hard for her. I wait for a while before saying, “I’m so sorry, Stella.”
“She was so wonderful. God, I wish you could have met her. She would have loved you.”
“I wish I could have met her too.”
“Anyway. She was there and then she wasn’t. I never got to say goodbye. Cody felt so guilty about that night. So did I. So did my dad. But Cody, he was actually really great at getting me out of the house after that first month. I was just taking care of my dad and trying to keep the gym going. I never ended up going to college, and Cody and I never traveled together. But he was a really good boyfriend all of a sudden. For a few years. He stuck around and things got to be pretty fine, and then he started getting really restless. Five years ago, in the summer, he got a job on a fishing boat to Alaska, with his brother, making good money. He was going to spend the summer out there, based in Anchorage and then come back. I heard from him less and less as the weeks went by, and once October had come around, he’d just completely ghosted me. I understood after a while that it was the guilt that kept him around before that, but he never said goodbye.”
“Shit. What a dick.”
She laughs. “Yeah. I mean. He just didn’t know how to handle it. Whatever. My brothers were the ones who got me out of bed finally after weeks of depression, because my dad didn’t want me going to work. He was trying to take care of me the way I did with him, but my brothers forced me to work out with them, and they blocked his number on my phone, blocked him on social media so I wouldn’t obsess about him. And I didn’t, eventually. I worried for a bit that he’d been injured or something, but Billy and Keaton know guys who were in touch with him. He was fine. I think for a while I still believed he’d come back. More than anything I just wanted to talk to him about it, it’s not like I was still in love with him. But it never happened.”
After a beat, I say: “I’m feeling really bad about sharing my stupid Hugh Grant thing.”
She puts her hand on my cheek. “I don’t want you to feel bad about anything. You’re so good. To me. For me.”
I would do anything for this woman.
“I hated that I never got to say goodbye to my mom. I hated that Cody was too chicken shit to say goodbye to me. My best friend Mona moved to Portland last year and we said we’re just five hours away, we’ll spend weekends together, we’ll FaceTime. But. It’s hard to stay in touch with people.” She looks at me, her eyes brimming with tears again.
“It is. But I do. I’ve learned to. I had to.”
“I’ve learned to say goodbye to people long before they’re gone. I have to.”
“I don’t plan on ever saying goodbye to you, Stella. Not because I can’t handle it, because I don’t want to.”
She covers my face with wet kisses, and I know that we won’t talk anymore tonight. She’s poured a lot of her heart out to me all at once, and I would do anything to keep her from hurting.
I would do anything for this woman, except say goodbye.
