She put her phone on the nightstand and closed her eyes. She didn’t go to the master bedroom, not tonight, but she did leave the guest room door open, which she had never done before.
CHAPTER 12
Nina almost didn’t go. She almost didn’t go three separate times.
The first time was a week before, when she read the retreat brochure that Claire had found online. The air left her lungs. It was like it was sucked out by one of those really strong vacuum cleaners she couldn’t afford.
A weekend of guided grief work in a safe, supportive environment, journaling, sharing, and healing. The word healing made her want to close the laptop and drive to Elena’s house and eat as much food as she possibly could without ever thinking about this again.
The second moment was in the morning when she was in her disorganized kitchen, her bag packed, with cold coffee on the counter as she looked out the window at the marsh. The tide was low, revealing larger mud flats and herons searching the shallows. The landscape reflected her feelings - exposed and raw. The tide concealed this, turning it into something beautiful. Without it, the marsh was merely mud and bones. Nina had been living without the tide for nearly two years and wasn’t sure she wanted to face a room full of strangers and show them her muddy side.
The third time was in the car, forty-five minutes into the drive to the retreat center just outside Aiken, South Carolina. She turned to Claire in the driver’s seat and said, “I can’t do this.”
Claire just kept driving. She didn’t even flinch. She didn’t argue. She just kept her eyes on the road and her hands on the wheel.
“Okay, you don’t have to.”
From the back seat, Harper said nothing.
“Wait, so you’re not going to talk me into it?”
“Nope,” Claire said. “This one has to be your choice.”
Nina looked out the window. Pine trees, red clay, the Lowcountry giving way to the Midlands, the landscape flattening.
She thought about the pact. She thought about karaoke and them on stage, singing so badly. She thought about freezing in the Atlantic. She thought about cooking in Señora Morales’s kitchen. She thought about the speed dating and Sam’s kind face across the table and about the text she hadn’t answered three days later, saying yes to coffee.
She thought about all the edges she’d stood on in the last several months and all the times she had stepped off of them and survived.
“Keep driving,” she said.
So Claire kept driving.
The retreat center was a former farmhouse that sat on twenty acres of land outside Aiken. It was surrounded by longleaf pines, and there was a stillness that was so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat. It was a beautiful, uncomplicated place.
The farmhouse was white clapboard with a wide front porch and rocking chairs that nobody was sitting in because everybody was sitting inside in a large room that had been set up with folding chairs arranged in a circle. Everyone was looking at each other, knowing they had a shared wound and weren’t yet sure how to prove they trusted each other.
There were a total of twelve people, including Nina, Claire, and Harper. The others were strangers to them. There was a man who looked to be in his sixties, with a beard and very gentle eyes, sitting with his hands folded in his lap. There was a woman about Nina’s age who had short hair and a face that looked like it had been crying recently and would probably cry again soon. A younger woman, maybe in her early thirties, held her phone like a shield and wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone. A couple who looked to be in their seventies were sitting side by side but not touching.
The facilitator was a woman named Susie. She was petite, with silver hair, and had a calm, steady presence. She wore no jewelry except a thin gold band on her left hand. Nina noticed it immediately because she still wore hers, too, and she knew what it meant to keep wearing the ring even when there was not a matching one anywhere else in the world.
“Welcome,” Susie said.
She didn’t smile. It wasn’t that kind of a welcome. They weren’t having a dinner party. It was the kind of welcome that acknowledged you had come here because something terrible had happened to you, and that now you were brave enough to sit in a circle and not pretend otherwise. It was a welcome to grieve openly and not care if it made anyone else uncomfortable.
“The only rule here is that whatever happens in this room stays in this room. Whatever you feel is allowed and right. Whatever you need to say, you can say it here. And if you don’t want to say anything, well, that’s allowed too.”
Nina sat between Claire and Harper. Claire had her hands folded in her lap the way that she would fold them at PTA meetings. Harper sat with her arms crossed, which was her default position in any room where she felt vulnerable.
They were here because of their pact. Claire and Harper certainly hadn’t lost their spouses. They had no reason to be at a grief retreat except that they loved Nina. And the pact said you had to show up, so they had. Nina had told them they didn’t actually have to come. They had looked at her as if she had suggested they might just want to stop breathing. They had chosen to do this whole thing together, and they weren’t going to let her down now.
Grief was something that everyone would experience at some point in their lives. No one was going to get out of this world without it. Grief was just love with no place to go. That had been said many times by many people, and the only people in the world who don’t get the privilege to grieve are the ones who didn’t experience enough love.
So Harper and Claire had come in solidarity with their best friend, knowing that at some point in their lives, if they were lucky enough, they would experience grief because it would mean they had also experienced great love.
This morning was introductions. Each person said their name, who they lost, and how long ago it was. It was terrible, but necessary.
The man with the beard was George. He’d lost his wife, Barbara, three years ago to Alzheimer’s disease. The woman with the short hair was Diana. She had lost her son, who was twenty-four years old, in a car accident just eight months ago. She said almost nothing else, and nobody asked her to.
