Page 82 of Lost and Found

I blink and my feet are in stirrups. I blink and Silas is smiling softly at me, letting me crush his hand. I blink and it’s done. I’m instructed to lie there for at least thirty minutes more. Silas gabs about things that don’t require my participation but keep me company. His fingertips trace patterns into my hand.

“Silas?”

“Yeah, Ruby?”

“Tell me about your eight things?”

His color heightens. Sooty, unfairly nice eyelashes tipped in gold lower over his eyes. “Oh, you know. A lot of things blended together. Food and memories. I thought about Thanksgivings and Christmases. Lasagnas and pizzas. Think the rest of the food things were probably pastries or desserts. The first time I held Sam and could see he was a perfect combination of two people I loved. First time I hit a home run in Little League. Other firsts I won’t share.”

“A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell,” I tease.

Something about the smile he gives me now feels hot on my skin, searing right through the meds. I’m branded by it, I’m sure. “As far as colors?” His gaze travels up my face and over my hair. “I pictured eight shades of red,” he says.

And this is the most brilliant and confounding trick that Time has in her repertoire. How the most immeasurable changes can be measured in moments.

One night can tie you to someone in a way that eight years doesn’t sever.

One dance could exhilarate you more than a year of defying grief could not.

One moment your best friend is here, and with an exhale, she isn’t. An entire force of nature that my life shaped itself alongside, gone. Yet I’ll carry the marks of her for as long as I live.

I remember thinking that, walking out of the hospital the day she died. I stepped into the parking lot, where two doctors were smoking cigarettes, laughing. They’d looked at me and smiled, and all I could think was,Do they not know? Don’t they see what I’m carrying now? How could they not? I’m immeasurably different.

I am wheeled back into the parking lot with Silas, today—wheeled, due to something about Valium and liability—and this time, I spot two women having lunch at the table next door. Oneof them smiles at me, and I think,Does she know? Can she see what I’m carrying now? How could she not? I’m immeasurably different.

All it took was a moment for my life to change, and the world kept spinning on.

CHAPTER 31

Now

Bea

In addition to last weekend, the next twenty-four hours might be the happiest of my life. Maybe it’s that they all stand out in such stark relief against the last few years, but the syrupy goodness I feel persists.

Silas sets us up in his room with about twenty-seven pillows and a marathon of movies and meals. I learn that the second movie we would have watched on his birthday, if we’d ever gotten to it, would have beenFantastic Mr. Fox. I don’t know why I fall a little bit further in love with him over this.

In the plot twist of the century, Cali won’t leave my side. She purrs like an engine and snuggles into me, rubs her head against my hip. Makes biscuits on my chest. I silently mouth “Oh my god!” to Silas, and he pumps his fist in the air.

When my twenty-four hours are up, I change into a clean hoodie-and-sweats set and borrow Silas’s mustard-yellow beanie again. He drives us for just under two hours to the quaintest train station I’ve ever seen, where we board for a coastal tour. The cabin where we sit is all polished wooden benches and open air, and somehow, we’ve got the whole thing to ourselves. Silas packed us each a blanket, but we layer them and huddle together on a bench seat.

“I’ve lived here my whole life and never knew about this,” I tell him at some point.

“Yeah?” he asks. “I done good, huh?”

He’s beautifully rumpled today. The untidy curve of his mouth, the cowlick sticking up toward the back of his overgrown hair. I can’t wait to cut it for him again. He’s two days past needing a shave, and I can’t stop myself from running over his scruff with the back of my hand.

“You done good, Silas.”

“Ellis took us to ride this a lot after my dad died,” he says. “It’s cheap, so he could afford it, and I think he liked that it kept us all in one spot and semi quiet for a bit.” His arm curls around my shoulder, his thumb gliding down my hair. “I came here pretty frequently when I was on medical leave, too.”

We chug along through a copse of Sitka spruces with their branches stretched by the wind. The way the trees reach for each other makes me think of two girls on a dance floor, arms extended, fingers waving. Sometimes the wind whistles and it sounds like someone singing along to a song. I feel Merritt here with us and it feels right. “Seems like a good place to do some contemplating,” I say.

He nods. “It was.”

“Did you ever think . . . did you ever think you wouldn’t go back to work? Weren’t you scared to?” Merritt had been the one who heard about his accident, first. She’d heard from her mom who’d heard from someone who’d heard from Martha O’Doyle, and so on. The unofficial Spunes phone tree. Merritt was in the earlier throes of her second round with cancer that summer, and I couldn’t ask her to go with me to visit him. It was only two months before that I’d run into him at Savvy’s and he’d told me about Sage’s new neighbor for the season, Fisher, and all I could think about was howvitalhe’d looked. Animated and insouciant at the same time. Always more than one thing.

The first time I went to see him at the hospital, he’d been in a medically induced coma, so after only briefly laying eyes on him, Micah had kindly sent me away.“He wouldn’t want you to see him like this, Bea.”