Present
I stared down at my bright yellow toenail polish.
I’m running. No, sprinting up the stairs. Rain splashed down next to me. I didn’t see anything but my toenail polish.
“Morgan, wait.”
Bailey’s voice. She sounded far away. Then she sounded underwater. I saw the beach now, and I realized I’m standing on the top deck. It’s raining harder. As I looked over the ledge of the deck, I noticed the house below crumbling. The roof was ripped off, and rain poured into each room. I looked closer and saw Ryder swimming in the flooded house. He reached out a hand, called my name. Someone touched my shoulder, and then I’m falling off the top deck.
Falling into the flood.
Screaming.
Tossing.
The last thing I see before I hit the ground is Bailey standing on the top deck. She called down to me: “Now you know how it felt.”
When I shot up in bed, it felt like I had been asleep for five minutes. Allie was still next to me, her breathing calm and even. My heart pounded against my chest as I pushed the blanket off of me and climbed out of the bed, careful to not budge Allie. She groaned lightly and rolled over, blissfully unaware of the terror that I’d just experienced. I walked out of the room and into the kitchen. Uncle Daniel stood at the counter with the coffee pot brewing. He looked at me.
“Good, you slept in,” he said. He poured coffee into a mug and passed it to me across the kitchen island.
“Slept in? It’s barely light out,” I said.
He winked, “That’s sleeping in for you.”
I took a sip of the coffee to make room to add plenty of creamer. I gagged, which caused Uncle Daniel to laugh.
“I had a nightmare,” I admitted.
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
I paused, “I’ve had the nightmare before. Lots of times. I never knew what it meant.”
“How do you feel?” he asked.
I thought about it for a moment, “Empty.”
The terms Uncle Daniel shared with me were starting to blend together as he sat next to me on the back porch. Uncle Daniel had used words such as grief, bereavement, post-traumatic stress disorder, and—the icing on the cake—complicated grief. In my hand, I held a coffee mug so tightly that I could see the coffee ripple as I shook. Uncle Daniel had a bagel in front of him, from which he picked off pieces in between words. He’d turned some music on like he did every morning, and colliding with the sound of the crashing waves, Bob Dylan crooned about what the world needed in order to change for the better, posing questions about what we could do to help.
This morning, I’d looked back at my text messages.
In January, I sent an average of fifteen text messages a week to Bailey. By February, that number grew to twenty. In March, it dwindled, picked back up in April when it would have been her birthday, and was an embarrassing thirty-plus a week in May. Each one was left undelivered, the usually blue bubble turning a shocking green. It reminded me of ninth grade when Bailey’s older cousin Leah had told us that the new fad in dating was to just block someone’s number. She had sat with her long-term boyfriend, telling us horror stories of their friends from college and how they had handled dating, even telling us that their friends had coined a rhyme for whenever one of them went on a bad date.
“If it’s green, Cupid won’t intervene,” she had joked, hinting that if the bubble wasn’t that soft blue, then there was no chance of a reply.
I wondered if Leah had been at Bailey’s funeral.
Uncle Daniel hummed along to the music playing and looked at me.
“Your mom is going to come; she’ll be here later today.”
I remained quiet for a while, then swallowed hard. “Are you guys mad at us?”
He waved his hand as if to say what we’d done was old news now. My mom and him had always been proud that Noah and I were as close as we were, “thick as thieves,” they used to joke, so maybe it helped that at least we did this together.
The song that was playing ended, and it changed to the next song on the playlist.
Well, it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe…
The sound of Bob Dylan’s harmonica filled the air. I thought back to the video my mom had of Noah and me as five-year-olds singing to this song while we were playing, blissfully unaware of how heartbreaking it actually was.
“Did I ever tell you about the time your Nana and Papa caught your mom and me sneaking back into the house after seeing Bob Dylan in concert?”
I shook my head.
He smirked. “Man, we must’ve been sixteen or seventeen. He was playing right down the road from where we lived at the time, some venue in Tampa that was pretty lax about checking IDs.” He paused and looked at me. “Your mom is going to kill me for telling you this story.”
“My lips are sealed.”
He laughed. “We told your Nana and Papa that we were going to an overnight lock-in at school for physics. We even made fake permission slips for them to sign. We packed an overnight bag and made a plan to actually sleep under the stars after the concert.”
He laughed. “Anyway, it was the eighties, right? People didn’t really give a shit about teenagers going to concerts, but we were so certain Nana and Papa would have said no if we’d asked. So we just went. It was the most amazing concert I’ve ever seen, still to this day. Your mom and I left as soon as he finished, and as we were walking out to the car, you know who we saw?”
I shrugged.
“Nana and Papa. Your Papa even had a cigarette dangling from his lips.” Uncle Daniel was laughing now, hard, wiping a tear from his eye.
“Did you get in trouble?” I asked.
“No!” he said with a smile. “They were actually proud of us for going. They said everyone should see Dylan in concert once in their lives.” He paused.
“Do I wish you guys hadn’t lied about coming here? Sure, every parent wants to believe their kids are doing the right thing and making good choices, but I trust Noah. Hell, I trust him more than I trust myself sometimes. He thought this was the right choice, so I can’t be mad at the kid.”
“Was it the right choice?”
He inhaled, his lips pursing together.
“Probably not.” His expression turned pained. “But after watching your mother take you to countless therapy sessions and grief counseling, just for you to shut down—I don’t blame anyone for thinking it would be a last-ditch effort to help you. It’s good to talk about the memories, Morgan. That’s what I’m trying to say.”
I had been living in denial. Denial with a heart-shaped bow on top. I had spent the last seven months convincing myself that Bailey was going to come back to me. I had myself absolutely believing that if I had a chance to talk to her, I could make it right.
Dr. Mackintosh had told my mother to give it time, while my mother had told me to give it space, but in the end, neither had worked. The nights I had spent staring at my phone screen; the mornings I had spent sitting on the old leather couch in my living room while my friends went off to college, finished their semester, and made plans to move off campus for sophomore year—it all added up to the singular moment of realization. The moment everyone had waited for me to take a bow as if I’d been playing them all along, and this was my greatest performance to date.
I thought of Noah, who had never given up on me. I remembered him coming to my mom’s house and sitting with me on the couch. We would chat cautiously at the beginning. If I was having a Remembering Day, as he referred to the days on which I remembered Bailey’s death, we would ease into plans for my future. He was adamant about me going back to school. He even had an email out to an admissions counselor at UCF, with plans of us moving in together if I transferred there. If it was a day on which I didn’t remember, he would sit quietly while I stared at the television or asked about Bailey.
Now, the reality was settled in.
Bailey was dead. I was crazy.
“Being back in the house changed things for you, I think,” Uncle Daniel said. “I’m no expert, but I think it probably brought you back to the truth on a lot of things.”
“Like?”
“Like the truth behind your relationships. You guys are growing and changing. It’s not supposed to stay the same.” Uncle Daniel took a bite of his bagel as I loosened my grip on my coffee cup.
“But the same is comforting,” I said quietly.
He nodded. “After Noah’s mom left and we moved to Cocoa Beach, I was so scared of messing up. You might understand that one day: what it feels like to have an entire person to take care of besides yourself, and exactly how terrifying it is to know that one wrong move can ruin them for life.”
He leaned back in his chair.
“I had the same feeling when I brought Noah to this house for the first time as I did when we brought him home from the hospital. There was so much hope. I hated that his mom and I hadn’t worked it out, but I knew he’d be fine because he’s the greatest dude alive, right? Plus, he had you. And he found his tribe quickly. You know, Bailey was the first friend of his I remember meeting? Because she was the only one who didn’t call me ‘Noah’s dad.’”
I laughed, “That sounds like Bailey.”
Uncle Daniel had bags under his eyes that mirrored mine, a deep-rooted sadness that made itself at home in the deepest part of our stomachs.
“I shouldn’t have let you guys come here on New Year’s Eve. We wouldn’t be here right now if I hadn’t.”
We sat together in silence for a few more moments, watching as families started to crowd the beach. We were at the halfway point of the season with the impossibility of permanently freckled shoulders and icy lemonade on flowing refill at the front of everyone’s mind. In less than two months, everyone would be back in their cities—back in school, back in practice, back in reality. Dream worlds had to end, even if it was just a summer vacation.
Worse than that: in four days, we would be leaving The Highview and for the last time.
“I can’t believe you’re selling the house,” I said quietly. At least that was something we could all agree to be in denial about this summer, our last summer at The Highview. I looked over at Uncle Daniel, trying to see if there was any trace in his expression of him changing his mind, but he remained stoic.
Until he didn’t anymore.
“I always thought Noah would bring his kids here one day. A generational thing, you know? Noah was a little boy down in the dirt next to me when I bought the place, digging through soil and trying to plant a garden but having no clue what the hell I was doing. Very symbolic of life, I guess.”
He paused. After I watched him swallow down tears, he continued, “I thought I’d sit on this very porch and look out at our growing family: you kids with families of your own, tracking new sand into the house and sitting your wet bathing suits on my damn couch.”
His voice trailed off. When he spoke again, his words were hushed.
“It feels wrong to wish for that now. This house ruined so many lives back in January that, of course, I had to sell it.” He sipped his own coffee and picked at his bagel again.
I thought of the picture-perfect plans we had created for our lives: happiness draped in beach towels and post-beach naps, surrounded by dinners filled with laughter and rainy afternoons we could crawl into. As summer turned to fall, which eventually circled back to the summer after chilly mornings and wet Aprils, we ticked away at an invisible checklist, hoping for a healthy and long life. This didn’t feel like something a nineteen-year-old should know so deeply, yet here I was, settling into a life that proved we were all in a race against the clock.
If I knew anything from the last twenty-four hours of my life, it was that there was no point in holding onto hope against the inevitable.
The back door slid open, and Allie walked out onto the deck. She held a water bottle that was dripping in condensation and a bowl of fruit. She sat down in the chair across from me and sighed.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
I appreciated it, but I wondered how many times I was going to get asked that same question today. I shrugged.
“I slept like shit,” Allie laughed as she popped a strawberry into her mouth. Uncle Daniel smiled.
“It’s good beach weather today,” he said, “maybe I’ll wake the dudes up, and you guys can go paddle boarding.”
Allie looked at me.
“Morgan and I need to go buy our anklets before we go home,” she said. I smiled at her.
We were the first customers in The Barefoot Trader. At the counter, the two employees working were already drinking from cold bottles of soda, their own version of the same caffeine high that coffee gave Allie and me. One of them waved at us, and they went back to their conversation. Allie and I had walked here, the short half-mile stroll filled mostly with comfortable silence, especially when Allie led us the longer way that wouldn’t bring us by the bridge.
We walked over to the rack where the various jewelry hung. I turned it until the side filled with anklets was directly in front of us. I scanned the rows, looking for one that would stick out. Next to me, Allie laughed. She bent down to the very bottom row and picked up an anklet. She turned it around so I could see it.
A gaudy anklet filled with seashells and dangling turtle charms.
“I’ll do anything if you let me get this anklet.”
“God, I wish we hadn’t promised her we’d get this anklet this summer,” Allie said. She stared at it.
“It really is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.
Allie shrugged, “A promise is a promise.”
She grabbed three off the rack.
“Maybe we can go put it at her tombstone when we get home,” she said. I swallowed back tears and just nodded. Allie squeezed my arm and walked over to the counter. At the register, the same cashier Bailey had joked with last summer was. He smiled at us. Surely, he didn’t remember us, he saw thousands of customers a year, but he still felt like a connection to our last summer together. Allie swiped her debit card and smiled.
“Thanks, Owen,” she said. He smiled back at her.
Allie and I walked out of the store and stopped at the bench outside. I put my foot up on it, and she bent down, and, like always, tied my anklet on for me. We both looked at the dangling turtles and obnoxious turtles that now decorated our anklets.
“It’s so ugly,” Allie said.
“The worst thing that’s ever been on my body,” I agreed.
She chuckled and looked at me.
“I love you, Morg. We’ll get through this. Together, okay?”
I nodded, “Love you.”