I took his right hand into both of mine and placed his palm over my heart.
“There is a reason you didn’t die that day,” I said with compassion, devotion, “and it had nothing to do with cowardice. You deserved to live, and every day after that, because you had a purpose—and yes, you still had a family.” I pressed his hand firmer against my heart. “I am your family, Atticus, and you are mine, and if you believe in fate, you’d see we were meant to meet, that everything that has happened to bring us together, was meant to be.”
“And what if I don’t believe in fate?” His voice was careful, reasoning. “What if I believe that if two people were meant to meet, it shouldn’t take the deaths of their family to make that happen?”
I placed my right hand over his heart then.
“Maybe finding each other is not why our families died,” I said. “Maybe we would’ve met anyway; we would still be sitting here together right now, with our families asleep in the cabin—maybe their deaths were meant to make us who we are, and who we have yet to become.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t believe in fate—I’d believe in God before I believed in fate, and that’s saying a lot.”
I smiled.
“I don’t believe in fate, either,” I admitted.
His brows crinkled slightly in his forehead and he looked to me for an explanation.
“I am a firm believer in the course of one’s life being controlled only by his or her actions and deeds,” I said. “I guess sometimes using fate as an explanation for a terrible sequence of events is easier for someone to accept, who doesn’t believe in God.”
(I wanted to smile back at her, and I nearly did.)
“Look at me, Atticus.” My voice was a whisper, filled with hope and honesty.
(And I looked at her; a breeze blew a few strands of hair across her loving face.)
“It took bravery to give your mother what she needed in her final moments,” I said, squeezing his hands. “It took a man who still has hope in the world, to go on living, to have risked everything you had to save me, and to continue to risk your life for mine.” I squeezed more firmly in emphasis. “No matter what you believe, or don’t believe, the fact that we’re sitting here together, right now under the stars, alive, and still good in here”—I released one of his hands for just a moment, pressing my fist against my heart—“despite everything we’ve suffered together and apart, is proof enough for me that we were meant to find one another, and maybe even to change the world together—who knows!”
I laughed shortly, and then my smile evened out again.
“We’ve let the deaths of our families haunt us in different ways: you’ve been walking around with an unbearable burden on your back; I’ve been walking around without one, because unlike you, I was too afraid to carry mine. I left my guilt and my pain in the house I lived in with my mother before she died. I refused to take it with me. I left the picture on the wall. I am selfish.”
Atticus hooked his hands around my wrists and turned my palms up, resting the back of his hands on my thighs. He lifted the right wrist and kissed it. He lifted the left wrist and kissed it.
“Now that,” he said sharply, “is one word I would never associate with you—you’re the opposite of selfish. Tell me how you do it,” he went on. “Tell me how you were able to leave your burdens behind—I want to be as strong as you, Thais Fenwick.” He kissed both of my wrists again.
“Acceptance,” I answered. “Acceptance…and forgiveness. I accepted a long time ago that my mother was gone and that there was nothing I could do to bring her back. And I forgave her for choosing to leave. And…well, it’s hard to admit, but I don’t think of her much. Sometimes I go days, weeks, without thinking of her once, and I admit that I purposely try to forget about her sometimes, because it makes the process easier. But she’s always there in the back of my mind—she’s always there if I need her, just like Sosie, and my father. We choose our pain, Atticus. We choose to let it in, and we choose how long it stays there.”
Atticus inhaled a deep, contemplative breath.
“Of course,” I continued, “things are different now, and I know that if something were ever to happen to you, accepting and forgiving and forgetting, will never be possible. The pain would live in me forever.” I looked deeply into his eyes. “I already carry that burden on my back, Atticus—just thinking about it—and it’s the heaviest thing I’ve ever carried.”
He pulled me onto his lap and wrapped his arms around me from behind.
ATTICUS
We sat together in silence for a long time, listening to the water lapping the shore, the usual singing crickets and croaking frogs, and in that time, I decided, at last, to lighten the heavy burden of my load by taking Thais’ advice. Like Thais, I could only carry so much weight before being crushed by it all. And the thought of something ever happening to her was all the burden I could carry anymore, either.
“I’m ready to leave the cabin,” she announced. “You were right—we shouldn’t stay here; we shouldn’t have stayed here as long as we have. We should leave tomorrow.”
I kissed the back of her head and my arms tightened around her.
“What about Jeffrey and Esra?” I asked. “We can ask them if they’d like to go with us, but I have a feeling Esra is pretty set in his ways.” I propped my chin on the top of her head. “And even as much as Jeffrey likes you, I don’t see him leaving his grandfather behind.”
“I know, you’re right,” she agreed. “But with or without them, we have to go.”
“What about Jeffrey’s canoe? I’ll feel a little like shit not finishing it for him like I promised.”
“He’ll understand.”
Thais reached up and pulled away more strands of hair as the breeze blew them across her mouth; simple gestures like that made me feel a little dizzy with love for her.
“I think if you show him how to do the rest, he’ll be proud to finish it himself.”
“Yeah, he probably would.”
Thais smiled at me. “You’re going to miss him, aren’t you?”
I nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’m going to miss him.”
She kissed me on the mouth. I lifted her into my arms and carried her back inside the cabin and made love to her.
55
ATTICUS
Jeffrey made his grand appearance right on time the following day, pushing a rusted old wheelbarrow in front of him; it bumbled and swayed precariously on its one front wheel.
“What’s all that?” Thais asked as she went down the steps toward him.
I was sitting on the porch in a rocking chair.
“Your big surprise!” Jeffrey’s eyes were radiant, his smile enormous—his head had been bleeding, I noted.
“I found it! I looked all over Grandpa’s and found it!”
Jeffrey released the wooden handles, setting the wheelbarrow safely on the ground. In it was a small solar panel, a battery, and two black boxes wrapped in a cluttered swirl of black wires; some wires had been bound by electrical tape. Whatever the contraption was, I thought it looked like a fire hazard.