My eyes fall on the dresser, the one neat spot, where Ryan’s completed vision board now sits leaning against the mirror, an artful, color-filled collage of her wants and goals. Of her plans to move forward. She must’ve stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to finish it. Either that, or she never went to bed. She has that kind of manic focus about her, like if she just keeps moving, the things she’s upset about can’t catch her. The opposite of me. It makes me wonder whether, if she hadn’t been away at school this last year, it might’ve been different for me. More like today.
In big, bold letters across Ryan’s board are the words New Beginnings, and below those, scattered over various pictures of places she wants to go, Italy included. Over all the images are words that sound like things my sister would say: Get gloriously lost, find yourself, trust, love, hold your breath and take a leap—all the things I think of her doing naturally.
I remember the one picture I found, of the heart in the bottle. I stashed the magazine under the bed, hoping she wouldn’t find the picture and cut it out for herself. When I crouch down and look, it’s still there. In her bathroom, the shower shuts off and I flip through fast. Find the dog-eared page opposite the picture of the heart in the bottle and slip out of Ryan’s room with the magazine. Not that she’d care. She’d probably even send me off with the stack of magazines to finish my own board. But something about this particular picture makes me want to keep it to myself.
In my room, I sit down in the bright square of sunshine on the carpet. I open the magazine to the page and carefully cut out the picture, holding it there a moment. I’m not sure of what it represents for me—only that it feels like something I need.
I go to my own dresser mirror, where the pictures of me and Trent are tucked all around the edges, and the dried sunflower from that first day we met hangs from the top corner. I don’t take any of them down like Ryan seems so set on me doing. I’m not ready for that, not yet.
Instead I slide the picture between the mirror and its frame. Front and center. And then I let my eyes fall on the sunflower that Colton gave me just two days ago. It lies on top of my dresser, the petals still deep gold, with just a hint of wilt along the edges from not being put in any water. I pick it up and twirl the stem between my thumb and forefinger, setting the flower spinning into a bright blur before I go to my bookshelf and find the glass bowl left over from Ryan’s graduation-party centerpieces, with their flower petals and floating candles.
I take the bowl to my bathroom sink, rinse and fill it, then come back to my dresser and the flower. The stem is thick, and it takes a few tries to cut through it with the scissors; but I cut it off close to the base of the flower, and once the flower’s free I set it in the small glass bowl of water. It floats there, bright, and alive, and brave in its own little sea beneath the picture. Like I felt on the ocean.
Like I want to feel again.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I’m in the car. On the passenger seat is my bag, packed again for a day at the beach, and again it’s mostly a pretense. In my pocket is money from my dad for lunch and my kayak lesson. I tried to leave without taking it because doing so felt like such a lie, but he wouldn’t let me out the door without it. He, like Mom and Ryan, seems to share the hope that this will be the magic thing for me, and now I feel a responsibility at least to pretend it is.
It’s still relatively early when I head down the driveway and pull onto the road. I roll down the windows and breathe in the air and the already-heavy heat coming off the hills. As soon as I hit the highway, the air rushes past, fresh and cooler, and it feels like I’m dipping a toe back into the flow of life that’s been going on without me this whole time. I have no plan, and I don’t know what I’m going to say when I get there, but I do like Colton told me yesterday and dive in without thinking about it.
The momentum is enough to carry me down the winding road to Shelter Cove, past the bluff where Colton and I were just yesterday, and onto the little main street, where right away my eyes find his turquoise bus parked in front of his family’s shop. This time there is no open spot near it, or anywhere on the street, so I drive all the way to the parking lot at the base of the pier, and I park there. It isn’t until I shut off the car and sit in the quiet a moment that I really think about what it is I’m doing here.
The rush of energy I felt when I left the house fades out like the end of a song, and there’s a gnawing guilt left in its place. I do know what I’m doing. I’m using my half-truth about the kayak lesson, and Colton’s texts, as reasons to be back here. But they’re more like excuses—to forget my own rules, to ignore the tug of my conscience. To see him again. All these things I want are so much stronger than my rules and reasons. Strong enough that they bring me right back to his shop, where I can see the kayaks all lined up in their racks and silhouettes moving behind the window.
My stomach flutters and I stop midstep, almost turn around, but then I see a flash of his profile. He’s carrying a stack of life jackets, but as his eyes sweep over the street out the window, he stops. I know he sees me, because he smiles right at me. And now it’s too late to turn around. I swallow down all the butterflies that have taken flight in my stomach and force my feet to move.
He’s out the doorway in less than a second, shaking his head like he can and can’t believe I’m standing there. “You’re here,” he says, unable to keep his smile from spreading over his whole face, right up to the green of his eyes. He holds his hands out wide at his sides. “Here it is, another day and . . . ,” he pauses, “here you are.”
The breeze lifts a few stray strands of my hair around my face, sending chills down the back of my neck. Colton takes a step toward me and lifts his hand like he might brush them away, but he pauses, just barely, and runs his hand through the waves of his own brown hair instead. “That’s unexpected,” he says.
“I hope it’s okay; I—”