26
And so I do. But when I return to Earth, something is immediately wrong. I waited with my mom for too long, and someone is about to cross over. There is no time to run from it, and so I simply accept it. It is Lily.
I visit the scene and lurk in the corner of the room. It is certainly a strange thing to think that the man I once wanted to marry may be a widower soon. Oh, how old we all are! I try to help, but I cannot. Death is in the stars. They are in Baptist Hospital downtown, where – as fate would have it – I also died decades before. He is old, but healthy, but he could never get his wife Lily to stop smoking, and a blackness has bloomed in her lungs. A blackness that is about to take her to the other side.
The thing that shocks me is that, even after all this, I love her. She gave love to my boy when she didn’t have to. She made his time on Earth bearable. And as she gets ready for the sendoff, I settle into the corner of the room. I am so grateful. And even though she never got Cooper to fully open himself to her, she lived a life full of love, and this is a massive success. I am even jealous of her wrinkles and greying hair. She is old, but she is still Lily, graceful and dignified to the end. And I am glad Cooper chose her.
At sunset, she realizes it will be a long night. As she frets in her bed, I scan the thoughts of the nurses outside to gain knowledge about her condition. She has descended swiftly over the last few months: a fall at home led to the hospital, and that led to her being admitted into the ICU. Her lungs are running at an alarmingly low capacity, and she is fading quickly. And she knows. She knows this may be a sleep she may not wake from, and there is something she has to get off her chest before it is too late.
Cooper is in the corner, reading a magazine on his tablet, and once she catches his eye, she waves him over with her failing arms. As I watch, his Guardian he loved and forgot all those years ago, I sense that something big is on the horizon. Waves are coming.
“Yes, sweetie?” he asks hopefully after he ambles over in his orthopedic shoes. “What is it? Do you feel any better? Do you want some tea again?”
She watches him. “Cooper,” she wheezes at last, her voice weak and halting. “I have to…tell you…something.”
His smile falters. He’d tried to prepare for this, but it didn’t help. Nothing could ever prepare a human for death. “Anything,” he says, and she does her best to clear her throat.
“I know you don’t…like to talk about this,” she begins, and he frowns. “But I…I know that whenever you looked at me, you saw…her.”
He just stares at her, but something in his shoulder fidgets. She slowly lifts up a hand. “We don’t…have to talk about…her. But I just want you to know that I…understand, and I…I forgive you.” She coughs before continuing. “She’s why you never wrote a book, isn’t she? She’s what came to mind whenever you…started to write, and you were too…uncomfortable with the truth that came, weren’t you?”
Cooper swallows, a thousand years of sadness in his eyes. “Lily, I…”
Lily reaches up and takes her husband’s hand in hers for the very last time, leather on leather, love on love. “If I could have given you one ounce of the…love she gave you, I would’ve been the happiest girl in the world. But I couldn’t. You never let me in. And…it’s okay. I’ve wasted enough of my life being upset about it. You were worth every tear, Cooper, as…difficult as that is to admit. I just wanted you to know that. The most beautiful thing about this life is that we have all the love in the world to give…and I regret none of the love I gave you.”
Liquid seeps down Cooper’s wrinkled cheeks and splatters on Lily’s papery hospital gown. He doesn’t know what to say, and what could he say? The moment has come, and neither of them are ready. His biggest fear has come to fruition: she knew that when he gave his heart to her, it had already been someone else’s first. She knew about his secondhand heart. She always knew. Not even I was aware of this.
As he watches her, he touches the Help button under the bed. In the break room two hallways over I see the nurse, Federica, frowning at the blinking notification light, annoyed, as she stirs her coffee. She will arrive in twenty minutes, but I know that by then it won’t matter. Cooper will have already been abandoned for a second time.
“Oh, Cooper,” Lily croak-whispers, looking up at her husband in wonder, as if for the first time, and he knew it was time to let her fly. “That summer got you good, didn’t it? It got you so good…”
As Cooper holds her hand and cries, she clears her throat, unsure of how to continue. And suddenly it slams into me: I see the season she never told a soul about, the pair of blue eyes she fell for in an instant, the motorcycle crash that took him to the clouds…
How could I have missed this? No wonder Lily was so good at spotting the removal in Cooper’s eyes, and was so terrified of being left all the time: she’d had a Summer of her own. She’d been loved and left behind, too. I see it all now: I see the blonde boy she fell for so many years ago, I see them meeting at happy hour at a local bar, I see them falling in love, I see him getting hit by that drunk driver on Fourth Avenue…
I knew she was hiding something from me. I had no idea it was this.
She clears her throat one last time. “And Cooper, darling…I need to tell you something else. You see, a very long time ago, there was this boy…”
I soar out of the room, over the sleepy sameness of downtown Jacksonville, to a place where I can think. Where I can undo myself and become even more of a nothing and even more of a nobody. I have seen enough, and the coming moments are theirs and theirs alone. Some things, I knew, were just better left unshared.