He goes into the gas station and gets her a bottle of water and a small snack. By the time we reach the graveyard, her pulse is significantly slower and her blood pressure is nearly back to normal.
“You seem to be okay,” I tell her.
She rolls her eyes. “I’d feel more comfortable if all this had come from a real doctor.”
I laugh.Yes, Carol, you and me both.
“We can always go to the hospital,” I offer.
She climbs from the car with her chin high. “I’m not going to the hospital.”
Betty and Mrs. Cabot walk toward the graves, leaving me behind to put everything away. “I’m sorry about that,” Elijah says.
“Me too,” I say with a grin. “Now I can’t continue to claim I don’t plan to save her life if necessary.”
He laughs and takes the kit from my hand to place it in the trunk. Together we head into the cemetery.
I’m not eager to be buriedanywhereat present, but it’s a beautiful place for it if you’ve got no option. Cypresses and oaks cast the whole cemetery in a pleasant shade, and I like the lack of uniformity, the way many of the graves are practically jumbled atop each other.
It reminds me of this cool cemetery I visited in London. I want to tell Elijah about it—Betty and Mrs. Cabot are far enough ahead of us that they wouldn’t hear—but it doesn’t seem like the time to be bragging about my European travels. Has Elijah ever even left the United States?
That night we were together, so long ago, he said he’d been saving all of it. “I want to do those trips with you or not at all.”
I haven’t thought of that in a long time, but...it doesn’t line up, does it? It’s not the sort of thing a guy says when he doesn’tsee you that waya day later.
But I shouldn’t be thinking about it now. Everything else can be all about me, twenty-four/seven, but not this.
“Is coming here hard for you?” I ask.
He gives me a forced smile. “It’s not hard anymore. But it’s still...strange. My brother would be thirty-two now, if he’d lived. It’s impossible for me to think of him being anything but a nine-year-old who wanted my baseball cards.”
My heart squeezes for that little boy, who apparently looked a lot like Elijah. I adore all of the Cabots, aside from his grandmother. I’d have loved him too.
“It was supposed to be me on the plane,” he adds.
My stomach drops. “What are you talking about?”
“We took turns, going up with my dad, and it was mine, but I had some Boy Scout thing at a retirement home. When I got home, Mom told me Dad and Campbell had crashed.”
I reach out for his hand. He grips mine and doesn’t let it go. I hear guilt in his voice, even if he hasn’t admitted to it.
“He deserved to live just as much as I did,” Elijah continues. “I didn’t even want to go to the retirement home. I half-assed the entire thing. And for a long time I told myself there must be some reason it worked out the way it did, but what have I done with all these extra decades? I renovate houses for rich people. There’s no reason I shouldn’t have been the one to die.”
Of course there is. The world would be so much emptier without you in it. And you saved me. You saved me a thousand times. You were the brightest spot in my childhood and my adolescence, and I have no idea who I’d have become if you weren’t there.
I love Kelsey and Judy with my whole heart, but it was Elijah who gave me the hope that I could wind up happy in a way the rest of my family would not.
We reach the graves and he’s still holding my hand—Mrs. Cabot notes it with a small flare of her nostrils.
I ignore her and turn to the headstones. Seeing their names, their ages...is a shock. In my head, all this time, Kelsey and Elijah’s dad was this adult who’d already lived his life, but he hadn’t. He was only a few years older than Elijah is now.
And Campbell. He was so small, but all I can think isit could have been Elijah instead. It was nearly Elijah.
Out of nowhere, my throat tightens. Mrs. Cabot is crying, and I’m struggling not to cry with her.
“Elijah,” Betty says, in a tiny voice, “I need to sit. Can you help me back to the car?”
He releases my hand and walks away, his arm linked with Betty’s.
