“It was the sweetest thing. Meant to be, everyone used to say. They always got a kick out of telling the story. Finn had placed an ad—one of those Missed Connections on Craigslist—looking for a woman he’d met on vacation. But it was really vague, the way he wrote it, and Maribel thought the ad was for her. She’d just gotten back from Gatlinburg, where she’d met this guy, and … anyway, they arranged to meet, and obviously knew right away that they had the wrong people. He used to tease her about how annoyed she’d gotten, how she’d actually lectured him for not being more specific—Maribel was never one to pretend something didn’t bother her if it did.”
Violet’s mouth had gone dry. Her grip on the phone faltered and it fell into her lap. Hastily, she picked it up, pressed it to her ear, and remembered the vodka cranberry she was cradling in her other hand. She drank deeply as the room caved in around her.
It took all her reserves to summon another question.
“But he thought she was pretty?” she ventured. Maribel’s pictures alongside the news reports of the accident were stunning—her cloud of dark wavy hair, her heart-shaped face, her creamy olive complexion, her petite stature and generous curvature—and had absolutely nothing in common with Violet’s sandy hair and tall, thin frame. “I mean, she was angry, but he talked her into staying for a date anyway?”
Mrs. Branson laughed. “Well, not exactly.”
She told Violet about the good Samaritan and the concert tickets, and as she spoke, Violet’s last bit of resolve fixed its gaze on the framed picture on the mantel. She and Finn on their wedding day, just back from the courthouse and sitting, champagne flutes in hand, in the little walled garden behind George and Caitlin’s house, she in a loose sundress and fitted jacket, he in khakis and a crisp button-down, her smiling directly into the camera while he looked at her as if lost in thought. It had always been one of her favorites.
She had never felt so sure of herself as she had that day.
She had never been so wrong.
Never once had she looked at that photo and wondered what he was really thinking. But by the time she and Mrs. Branson hung up a few minutes later, it was the only thing she could think about.
Besides Bear, that is.
She never could stop thinking about Bear.
18
AUGUST 2012
“That night we met, you said everything was haunted. Everything.” At first, Finn had felt a little ridiculous talking to Maribel’s picture, but a half bottle of bourbon later, it was coming naturally. Exactly a year ago today, they’d gotten in the car and pointed it in the direction of the Atlantic. He’d been so eager to be the one to finally show Maribel something she’d never seen before. Maribel, who somehow always knew when private galleries were opening their doors, and which unassuming pubs had the best craft brews, and when the orchestra would be lighting up the whole world out under the stars. Maribel, who had opened up his own universe to hold so much more love and magic and possibility than he’d dared let himself hope for. Maribel, who had miraculously agreed to be his partner—for life. Maribel, whom he’d just wanted to see for himself against the one remaining big, beautiful backdrop that he still pictured with another woman in the frame.
He’d been so ready to move on to the next phase of their lives. So ready to kick it off with a new memory on the soft sand of the beach. And so tired. So tired he couldn’t even remember having fought with his closing eyelids before he drove across that double line and ruined everything, forever.
To commemorate this anniversary of his greatest regret, he’d chosen to let himself wallow. There was no other way he could fathom to function. He’d called off work. Waved away Caitlin’s offer to sit with him, though he knew she meant well. Drawn the shades. Bought the bourbon. He’d stayed in bed for most of the morning and waited until exactly noon to start drinking, as if that somehow made this approach more respectable. He’d sat Maribel’s picture in a club chair across the coffee table from him and poured her a glass too. Hers still sat untouched. His had been refilled so many times he’d lost count.
“I’m only haunted by what happened to you,” Finn told her now, running his fingers through his hair. “I’d rather be haunted by you. If you could materialize here—” He shook his head, his eyes never leaving her photograph. In it, she had just looked up from her sketchpad at the sound of him saying her name. Her hand was held midair, a piece of charcoal in her grasp, and her eyes were wide, bright, expectant.
“I guess I should be glad that you’re at peace. Or if you’re not, maybe you’re too angry at me to show yourself here. I wouldn’t blame you for that.” His bitter laugh seemed to echo under the high ceilings of the old living room. “Hate me as much as you want. You’ve got nothing on how bad I hate myself. Show up here and yell at me. It would be so much better than this—being alone here without you. I miss you so much…”
Stating the obvious aloud did not make Finn feel better. He’d thought he knew loneliness after his parents died. He’d thought he knew longing. He’d thought he knew regret. He’d known none of those things. It was the natural order, after all, to bury your parents, no matter how prematurely that day came. That was real, valid grief, but it only scratched the surface of the true depths grief was capable of concealing when it came not as a scratch but a puncture wound straight to the heart—efficient, yes, fatal, probably, but only after a slow bleeding out of everything that gave him life.
The room was going out of focus, and Finn’s stomach churned. He couldn’t even get drunk without screwing it up. He should have at least bought a frozen pizza, something to sop up the mess in his gut so he could keep drinking, prolong this haze throughout the day without ending up heaving on the cold, cracked tile of the dirty bathroom floor. This nausea that was taking over wasn’t painful enough to feel cathartic. It was just an enhanced degree of the sick feeling he felt every day when he awoke and looked at himself in the mirror and thought about what he’d done and why he would be this alone forever and why he deserved things to be that way.
No. He deserved worse. He deserved to die on the side of the road, trapped in a car that was supposed to take them so much farther than just to the coastline, to the place where the waves met the earth and the sky opened up and the world seemed large and capable of anything. To a new city. A new home. A new business. A new start. All of it together. Finn hadn’t even been scared of whether it would work out for him to start taking freelance clients, or if they would make friends in Asheville who’d come to mean as much to him as Caitlin did, or what he’d do if his bank account stayed as low as it was as he filled his gas tank to cringeworthy heights before they headed south from Cincinnati that day. It hadn’t mattered if they failed, because they couldn’t truly fail. They would have each other, and that would be enough to make up for anything and everything else that could possibly go wrong. Finn had been absolutely sure. He had never been so sure in his life.