The one exception was the weeks after Dad got sick.
My mom spent every single day at the hospital for what felt like a long time. My sister Izzy made a lot of treats while that was going on. She made snickerdoodle cookies, which she usually burned, and chocolate chip cookies, which were always too flat, and she made oatmeal raisin cookies, which I think are a waste of good butter.
I didn’t bake. I didn’t take out the dishes, or unload the dishwasher, and I didn’t really help much with our little brother Gabe. I went with Mom to the hospital, and I held her hand while she watched Dad die.
Pancreatic cancer’s fast, as cancers go, but it’s much, much slower than a rock. In fact, it was so slow that I would sometimes see my dad dying in my dreams. He would scream in some, and in others, he would cry. But in all of them, Mom cried.
She did cry a lot, usually when she thought none of us could see her.
Or hear her.
But I did hear her more than she knew, and I felt terrible about it.
I didn’t have a rock that could help. I didn’t have anything that could help, not with Dad. Because when death decides it’s your time, there’s nothing you can really do to stop it. No teacher, no doctor, and no kid with a rock can keep it from taking you away. It was sad, and it was terrible, but it actually felt really honest. It may be the most honest thing in our world.
Where there’s life, there’s also death.
Ever since my dad died, I haven’t feared it.
Within a few weeks of Dad’s funeral, my dreams of him dying faded. In fact, I didn’t really have any dreams at all for quite some time.
Not until Cobalt Blue.
And oh boy, any time I brought that one up, Izzy and Emery would groan. I think I was about seventeen or eighteen the first time that dream came.
I was walking in a night so dark that there was no light.
Not many things scare me, but I was scared the first time I dreamt about Cobalt Blue. I’m still scared when I dream about him now, truthfully. I’m walking at the start of it, but as my fear grows, I transition to a run. And then, after running for a long, long time, I start to pant. My ragged, burning feet stumble, and panic overtakes me.
Every.
Single.
Time.
And then when I realize I’m about to run right over the edge of a cliff I couldn’t even see, strong, iron-tight hands grip my shoulders and pull me back. I twist then, turning upward toward a face so beautiful that my breath catches in my throat.
“No,” he says, his voice low and tight.
That’s it.
One word.
That’s all he says.
His eyes nearly glow in the darkness, a bright, cobalt blue. Not royal blue. Brighter than that, a light, bright, almost violet color of blue. I knew just what color it was, because I had painted one wall of my room that exact color a week before.
Every time it returns, I wake up, right after he saves me. Right after he says “no,” before I can learn anything else about him. For a long time, I kept the dream to myself.
But when my cousin Emery and my big sister Izzy were teasing me about another senior at school named Sam, I told them I didn’t like Sam at all, and that I was saving myself for Cobalt Blue.
Then I had to tell them about the whole thing.
They thought it was stupid at first, I could tell, but then I told them that although he only said one word, it was enough. I knew two things the very first time I had that dream and with increasing certainty every time it repeated.
First, Mr. Cobalt Blue was the love of my life—the only man I could love.
And second, he would cause my death, and nothing I did or said could possibly change that.
