“I think you’re doing it wrong,” Luke says. “This is the opposite of cleaning.”
“It’s kind of overwhelming,” Oliver admits.
He has spent a lot of time thinking about closure—lying in his bed, surrounded by the fallout of his too-short life—when sleep won’t come. What he can live with and what he can’t, and what he will regret leaving unfinished.
He has decided to tuck away a few of his things for Theo and Zoë and Luke to have when he is gone, and to write each of them a letter. The rest he will get rid of, spare his brother the pain of sifting through thememories, trying to guess what might be the thing he values in a year or ten or fifty.
But sorting through every scrap of paper in his apartment, every book, every photo, every cheap vacation souvenir and silly coffee mug and old birthday gift—and, and, and—has proven harder than he thought. It is admitting that he is going to die. More than that. It is accepting it. And even though he knows it is coming, knows he can’t change it—that it is completely and utterly out of his control—accepting it is something he can’t do. Not yet.
He has never realized before how everything is a piece of the past, how everything can hold a fragment of a memory or a piece of a story. How it all seems so fucking important when you are about to lose it.
He can’t put the things back, can’t pretend he’ll need them in six months.
Three.
Not even.
He can’t let them go, either. So they stay, the unwanted and wanted things, stuck between a past that mattered and a future that doesn’t. Like him.
Zoë’s gaze softens as it sweeps over the chaos. “Do you need our help, Oliver?”
He braces himself for that look of pity, the one that dulls the shine in her warm brown eyes, like a light going out. It’s not there. Did he imagine it, twist it in his grief? Maybe it has always been what is there now. What is mirrored in Luke’s eyes, too. Love.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice strained. “Yeah, I think I do.”
Luke pulls a lime out of the grocery bag. He tosses it between his hands. “So, drinks, dinner, and death cleaning?”
Oliver laughs. “In that order, please.” He hasn’t eaten all day, and nothing that compares with Zoë’s cooking in ages. Not since the night before graduation, when she cooked them one last meal before they helped her pack her pots and pans and life away into neatly labeled cardboard boxes destined for the other side of the country.
Zoë dices an onion—for what, Oliver doesn’t know. She refuses to reveal the night’s recipe. He guides the conversation away from himself. For a little while, at least, his friends oblige.
Luke cuts the lime into wedges for their gin and tonics. Oliver shifts the clutter from the counter to the floor and asks him about the elopement. Luke tells him they are planning on taking a honeymoon in the fall. London, maybe. They haven’t decided.
Would Beatrix still be in London? Riding on the tube, reading a book on the way to an office job in the heart of the city? Or teaching, making history come alive for her students? They’d all roll their eyes and joke, “Ms. Lancourt thinks she’s been there.” Or maybe she’s at St. Paul’s, giving guided tours to travelers, telling them all about the St. Paul’s that no longer stands but that she will always remember.
He doesn’t realize his mouth has tilted into a smile until Zoë asks, “What are you grinning about?”
Oliver ducks his head. “I was thinking Luke and Max should visit St. Paul’s if they honeymoon in London. Fantastic architecture.”
Zoë raises an eyebrow. “Fantastic?”
Luke hands him a tall gin and tonic and Oliver gladly takes it. But one sip and he’s back at the Frost Fair, back in that tent on the ice, back in that room at the inn thinking,What if I could stay?
He dreams about it sometimes, awake and asleep. About being with her, about finding her now. But the last time he saw her was 286 years ago. He could never leave her waiting that long.
“You all right?” Luke asks, setting a plate in front of him.
“Yeah,” Oliver says. “Sorry, just tired.”
He gathers the utensils from the drawer and tries to ignore the fact that Luke is watching him out of the corner of his eye. He asks Zoë about her new lab and new apartment in California. She tells him she’s thinking about taking up surfing.
“What about you? Anything you want to share with the class?” Zoë points her chef’s knife at him. It makes the question sound vaguely threatening.
“No.” Oliver slides onto the stool next to Luke at the counter.
Luke leans in and whispers, too loudly, “She knows. Don’t deny it.”
Zoë has an uncanny ability to read people. She joked that if her career in bioengineering failed, she could always pretend to be psychic. But even if she can read something in Oliver’s demeanor, there is no way she knows anything. He hasn’t told a soul about Beatrix.
