I shower and shave and try to make my hair look presentable. There’s a sailor’s knot in my throat. I’m supposed to walk to the park, toward Vivi, and that part’s fine. It’s the walking away from her that I can’t imagine.
On my way, I think about how Isaac is obsessed with archaeology. I get it. The dinosaur bones and ancient artifacts and excavated graves—it’s cool. It comes to mind because Vivi climbed into my life with her fossil brush, and she swept away the dust. She rediscovered me under all that rubble, and that means I’ll always be a little bit hers. How am I supposed to say good-bye to someone like that?
I’m still yards away from the park when I realize she’s not here. You can feel a girl like Vivi. She shifts the ground under your feet. And I don’t sense them, the tremors beneath me.
There’s a note pinned to the oldest tree in the park—a tree scratched with her name. So this is how it will be. She gets to say good-bye. I don’t. I should have known.
Dear Jonah,
I lied. “Good-bye” is my least favorite word in my entire vocabulary, much worse than even “squish” or “protuberance,” and I just can’t say it to your handsome face. Give your family kisses from me, will you? I think I fell for all seven of you a little more every day. But mostly you, Jonah. Mostly, madly, beautifully you. Don’t tell okay? He’d be crushed.
Maybe in my next life, I’ll be a wave in the ocean, and you’ll be a mountain, and we’ll spend years and years brushing up against each other. You’ll shift so painfully slowly, and some days I’ll crash right into you and other days I’ll approach gently, licking your sides. That sounds like us, doesn’t it?
Or maybe we’ll meet in this same life. Maybe I’ll be working as a costume designer for a movie that’s filming in a city where you’re the chef of your own restaurant, and our eyes will lock in the middle of a busy street, and I’ll whisper, “It’s you.” Maybe I’ll sneak into your little bungalow house while your fiancée is out of town on business, and we’ll make love like we have in past lives and in this life. That doesn’t sound like something you’d do, but a girl can dream.
Either way, Jonah, I simply cannot wait to see who you become.
Until someday,
Vivi
P.S. I left something for you on the restaurant patio. Took me all night. I call it “How We Say Good-bye.”
I blink, taking in the sharp lines of her name and, next to it, a red lip print, kissing me good-bye. Of course she’d make a dramatic exit, even without being here. We can’t keep each other—I know that. But I wanted to see her one last time. I wanted to say thank you; I wanted to make one last attempt at memorizing her.
I hurry to the restaurant, clutching her good-bye note. What would she leave for me? What would take her all night?
I don’t even bother going into the restaurant itself. I cut through the side alleyway to the patio, and I stop dead in my tracks. I expected that she left something for me on the picnic table. But it’s not that.
On the wall opposite the patio, she painted me a mural.
My heart beats like tripping feet. I try to imagine her, balanced on a ladder all night with a sling on her arm. The patio lights are on—I never leave them on—so she must have painted by the light of them. She did this for me. How We Say Good-bye.
The Verona Cove lighthouse is in the right foreground. Beyond it, there are ships in the harbor—seven of them—all with white sails. I’m not sure how she gave a flat wall so much movement, like each sail is flickering. I can almost hear them beating against the wind. There’s one bigger boat in the distance, sailing toward the upper left corner. The horizon, gold and blue, looks inviting and limitless. The lone boat’s sails puff out in pride, a pioneer to the unknown. The seven boats in harbor seem to be waving good-bye, cheering Bon Voyage! Vivi crammed all her vivification into this one painting, right down to the nautical flags on the biggest ship.
I learned the letters associated with nautical flags when I was a kid. The first is a “D.” The second, blue and white: an “A.” Wait. My eyes skip down the mast. They spell out D-A-N-I-E-L-S. It strikes me like whiplash—there are also seven little ships in harbor. One for every living member of my family.
This is not a painting about Vivi and me saying good-bye.
The large boat sailing away for new adventures . . . it’s my dad. Oh my God. She painted a family portrait. She painted us as sailboats. I see it now—how could I have missed it at first?