I love you too, Sadie (May) Elizabeth Kingston.
Max
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: June 26
Subject: Will you
come over tonight?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: June 26
Subject: Of
course.
At eleven that night, Max tapped on my window.
“You’re wearing my T-shirt?” he said as he crawled inside.
Tennessee blazed at him, but I willed myself to keep my thoughts elsewhere. Which wasn’t hard. Max was shirtless and in a pair of athletic shorts.
“I’m glad you came,” I whispered.
“I’m glad you asked.”
My eyes drifted to my phone. “Where’ve you been?”
He faced me. “With Callahan.”
Max sat down on the edge of my bed. “Wanna play a game?” he asked, without a hint of play in his voice.
“Something you’ve never told me?”
He nodded and handed me a creased and grainy photo of a chalk drawing. The work, if you could call it that, was clearly mine. Before they dismissed me from the hospital, one of the nurses gave me a bucket of sidewalk chalk and told me to use it all before my follow-up appointment. She told me to draw and then hose, draw and then hose—she repeated that more than twice—that the water would wash away more than chalk. She also mentioned, more than twice, that I should trust her.
“I’ve been giving away chalk buckets for longer than they’ve made chalk buckets,” she’d claimed.
That first week, I had slipped out our back door after midnight and drawn dozens of elementary school–level drawings—emotional outbursts—on our back patio by moon-and streetlight.
“How did you get this?” I asked.
Max didn’t answer, and I examined the photo again.
In the middle, there was a crudely drawn caricature of me, lying on my side, a brown-and-gray cape covering me. I’d written Superhero down in green chalk. There was a string tied around my pinkie toe that stretched toward a huge peach-colored hand.
Below the hand was another line. Don’t let me go.
“I love this drawing,” Max said, taking it from me and holding it like a talisman. “I snapped a picture before you hosed it off.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I was in the hammock when you drew it. You kept repeating a phrase. Do you remember what it was?” he asked.
I didn’t remember, but I knew.
“‘Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.’”
“That’s right,” he said. “When you were drawing that, you had steel in your eyes. You had . . . mettle.”
“I didn’t have a clue.”
“You did to me.”
“I don’t even remember this moment,” I admitted.
“You don’t have to, because I do. That’s when I knew you had pain that looked like mine. We were in that car together. We lost Trent together. I didn’t have to go through the rest of life alone.”
“You’ve always seemed like you were okay. Sad, but okay.”
“Sadie, I was a thousand miles away. You can’t say everything in an email.” Max folded his body in half, practically burying his forehead in his knees as he spoke. “There are things I never told you, too. Like . . . I woke up one day in El Salvador, and I couldn’t breathe.”
He exhaled so hard that it felt as if it bounced off all the walls. “I just lost myself. I took off running, and I ran until I collapsed. I couldn’t get back up. My dad found me lying in a street. He carried me back to the compound in his arms.”
We were months past this pain in his life, and it sounded as if it had occurred today.
“You could have told me,” I whispered.
“I wanted what I gave you to be the good stuff. That’s why I disappeared this weekend. Stupid. I was angry and hurt and . . .” He stood up and looked at me and then focused again on the photo. “I forgot how strong you were. I’ve been forgetting for a while. The picture reminded me.”
I wanted to ask about Big. If that’s what he meant when he said he’d been forgetting for a while, but I didn’t want to ruin this moment.