We let that sit between us for a long time. I move back toward the blanket and pull a thermos out of my bag and take a sip of the coffee I brewed before leaving. I offer it to Will who takes it and holds it for a while but never moves to take a drink. We both sit staring into the ocean as if we are going to see her at the end of it.
“You hurt me Will, not even just with the Lily stuff but everyday, with how you treated me. I shouldn’t have let you, but you knew I was vulnerable and you treated me like shit knowing I wouldn’t leave.” I shake my head to myself. “That I would have no one if I left.” My voice is calm but full of resentment and I hear him suck in a sharp breath before he finally speaks.
“This is going to come out like an excuse and I don’t want it to be an excuse. There is no good reason for the way I treated you other than that I was selfish.” He pushes his hand through his hair then drags it over his face trying to get ahold of his emotions. “You made me feel a lot better, Liv. When she died…” I note how he can’t say her name as he clears the tears out of his throat. “When she died it really fucked me up, like it was proof that everyone I love eventually leaves.” I swallow, tears now running down my own face, as he continues. “You were so good to me, Olivia. Too good. You helped cover up so much of thispaininside me.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t want it to hurt when you eventually left. I didn’t want to be surprised.”
My eyebrows scrunch together, tears fully falling down my face as I see Will for maybe the first time. This boy who's so lost and only wants someone who won’t let him go.
“Will…” I start, soft, comforting.
“No Liv— let me finish.” His voice is steady and I nod.
“I think deep down I knew you were never mine. That you would eventually leave just like Lily, my mom, Ben… so I pushedyou. It was never fair and it was never right. Hell, none of this is.” He gestures out toward the ocean.
I nod and then we sit there in silence, allowing the devastation that was our relationship, the ways in which we hurt each other and the lies it was built off of, to really seep in and even though I know I don’t want the answer, I ask him the second question that’s been plaguing me since I learned about him and Lily.
“Did you love her more than you loved me?”
He stills, his eyes a mess of emotions as they meet mine. “Don’t ask me that, Liv.” He shakes his head, his tone sharp. “Do you love him more than you love me?” He emphasizes the word me, almost desperate for me to respond and nods toward the pier where the cars are parked. I meet his eyes again seeing the pain in his gaze. The pain I caused him, too.
“I’m sorry, Will.” My voice is a whisper but I know he hears me as he grabs my hand squeezing it hard.
“Yeah, Liv. Me too.” The waves crash around us as we sit there holding hands, passing the thermos back and forth. The silence is eerie but comfortable like we are at the very precipice of a mountain we both have to climb. It feels like minutes pass but the way the sun seems to lower in the sky tells me it’s probably been hours. We both have gone through every item in the box, Will sharing moments about Lily that I haven’t heard before and me doing the same for him. A peace washes over me.
“I need to say goodbye to her, Will,” I say, my voice quiet. He nods.
“Can I stay, while you say goodbye?” he asks. His voice feels far away like maybe I made him up, like maybe this was all a dream and I’ll wake up next to Lily tangled in her hair and frustrated and we’ll get a coffee at our favorite cafe near campus and share a croissant. She’ll tell me the truth. She’ll tell meeverything.
I get up rolling my jeans to my knees and moving the items back into the box. “I think I need to do this alone.”
He stands wiping off his own pants and nods. It’s awkward, this new distance between us, like we need to relearn how to navigate each other.
“Thank you, Liv,” he says, rolling his lips together the emotion prominent in his features, “for everything.” I blink back fresh tears and watch him walk back up the pier. Alone, I pick up the box and suck in a deep breath looking at the expanse of water in front of me. I begin to wade out into the freezing cold water. I feel my body go almost numb as I begin to lightly set the different memories into the ocean.
Mothers teach their daughters about heartbreak, to protect their hearts from boys— but they don’t teach us how to shield our hearts from each other. The unencumbered invulnerable love that comes from having a best friend. The kind that hurts so much more when it ends because that person has gotten every little piece of you, every feeling, every truth and you don’t know yourself without them. I wade deeper, feeling the icy water hit the hem of my rolled up jeans, and finally let the wall that’s been shielding me from all of this grief, from Lily, fall.
35
Olivia
“Hope the company I sent your way was okay,” my dad greets me, his familiar smile doing more to warm me than the fire he must’ve lit while I was gone. I release the breath I’d been holding since the beach and sink into his embrace.
“Yeah, Dad,” I nod, breathing him in. Nantucket in the winter, my dad and I. Something I can always count on, regardless of what’s happening elsewhere. “We needed that conversation, I think.” And maybe it’s the gravity of that conversation, and the tidal wave of emotions that are still washing over me, but I have to ask if she’s here. Like maybe she’d have some kernel of truth to get me through this. “Caroline didn’t want to come?” I try my hardest not to let that inkling of hope seep into my voice.
“You know how Mom is, sweetheart. Never not on call.” He gives me a tight lipped smile before turning around to stir something on the stove. It’s only now that I register the scent of cinnamon and apples and realize he’s stirring the cider.
Caroline, who conceived me, nurtured me in her womb, and birthed me, had very little to do with nurturing me beyond the age of three. She comes from a long line of doctors, each known for either inventing or fueling the discovery of somethingmiraculous. By the time she’d conceived me, she’d “failed” to contribute to that legacy the way she thought she would. If you ask me, beingthetop surgeon in your field is a legacy making accomplishment in and of itself, but if you asked her, she’d say the long hours she spent in the OR, the lab, or conferences would one day be worth it if only she could… fill in the ever changing blank. I think I might’ve mourned her physical and emotional absence more if I didn’t have my dad. I know she loves me, in that way mothers must viscerally love their children, but she doesn’t know me. It didn’t really bother me, this apparent lack in my life, until I lost Lily.
Not that Lily was a mother figure to me, buthermom was, in a way. Grace Newhouse shepherded the both of us, as if we were sisters. I had a dad who showered me with love and believed in me so intensely, and a faux mother who mediated every best friend tiff, smoothed every heartbreak, swooped in when I felt the blood trickle down my leg in the sixth grade, compared dresses with me for prom— I really didn’t need anyone else.
When Lily left, when she died, I called Dad. He told me to come home. We’d find a therapist, I could take a gap year, and I could heal. I didn’t want that, though; what I wanted was to start my freshman year at Astor with Lily. Thinking back to that time I can see now how young I was. How emotionally naive and immature I was. I hung up on my Dad, furious that he’d even suggest doing something so rash. A few days later, I called Lily’s mom. When I’d seen her that awful morning, I’d known she was irrevocably changed. How couldn’t you be, after something like that? I just also thought there would still be space for me in her life.
When she picked up the phone, she sounded far away. She said she couldn’t bear to hear my voice, that I reminded her too much of Lily. That she knows I must be suffering too, but for hersake she needs me to leave her alone. That she’d reach out when she could.
It was only then that I realized I don’t really have a mother. Maybe my own mother would’ve been less partial to Lily. Maybe she would’ve shepherded me down my own path, parallel to my best friend’s but separate. Maybe my mother would have done these things if she saw me flailing in adolescence but she didn’t because… I had Lily.
“Where’d you go, Liv?” my dad’s voice cuts into my thoughts. I take a deep inhale of the warm aroma as he hands me a mug, steam rising from it.
“Just thinking about Lily,” I tell him, deciding not to say I just released a bunch of her stuff into the ocean.
