“Sorry” was all I needed to hear. That one measly word packs such a goddamn punch sometimes. Sorry for your loss. Sorry your life sucks. Sorry you live like you’re a zombie. Sorry I slept with the one woman who has seemed to understand you since the day Ellie died. Screw all the sorrys. Screw everyone.
I didn’t give him a chance to explain because as much as I’d love to hear every detail surrounding how he cheated on Alexa with Charlotte, at the same time I don’t want to hear a word about it. How did he even know her? The fucking Olsans’ job, her parents’ house—that must be how—Charlotte must have been there supervising one of the mornings I wasn’t there. Motherfucker. Why didn’t Charlotte tell me? Their stupid encounter at the bus stop that first day—it was a cover up. Why the fuck didn’t either of them tell me?
I’m through the front door before anyone has a chance to stop me. I know Olive is in good hands with Mom and Dad here so I’m leaving. I’m running away like I always do because, really, what other option do I have? I tried dabbling with facing reality this morning at breakfast, and that ended up blowing up in my face. If I keep running, maybe life will trip over its own feet and stop chasing me deeper into the gloom that closes in on me a little more each day I survive through this hell.
By the time I peel out of the driveway, Charlotte has one foot out the door and Dad has Olive in his hands, watching me from the window. Jesus. He couldn’t just distract her for a few minutes?
I have to put it all out of my mind. I need to breathe. I need to catch my breath away from all of them—away from everyone. With no direction in mind, I find myself at the one place I always instinctively end up when I run away.
I shove the gear into park and kick my door open as if I’m being suffocated. I am suffocating. With tunnel vision, I jog down the steps, but I slow my pace when I come closer to the tree. “Tell me I shouldn’t be thinking about other women, Ellie.” My heart is in my throat as I try to suck back in some of the wind that has pinned my lungs against my ribcage. “If you had a chance to tell me what you wanted to tell me before you died, would you have told me to move on or would you have wanted me to live out my life, waiting until it was my turn to join you up there? I need to know. I need to know that what I’m doing isn’t wrong, Ell. I need your blessing on what I do with the rest of my life.”
“You know that’s a tree you’re speaking to, right?” A soft voice pulls me from the darkness of my outspoken thoughts. I turn to face her, failing to recognize the woman at first glance. After a moment, though, I remember her—the woman plucking every last jasmine out of the pre-frozen soil.
“Uh,” I fall short of finding more words to fill the awkwardness between us. I was, in fact, speaking to a tree, very personal words not meant for anyone but Ellie to hear. I look past her and over to the pond, confirming that there is no trace of a flower left to be picked. “There aren’t any flowers here anymore.” What else is there to say to a complete stranger I shared less than a minute worth of conversation with?
She looks over her shoulder to where I was looking. “Nope, there are no more flowers,” she confirms.
“Yeah,” this is becoming more uncomfortable by the second. “Well, I was just venting away over here. Family drama, you know?”
She smiles gently, unveiling a perfect, glowing white smile. Every one of her teeth are perfectly even, and the tip of her nose is aligned with the split of her two front teeth. Her eyes, though, while incredibly symmetrical they are larger than her other features—sort of like an anime character—jade green disks floating in a sea of snowy white. Brushing away a strand of her wavy hair, she breaks her gaze from mine. “I know a lot about family drama. Trust me.”
“Who doesn’t, I guess.” I run my fingers down the side of my face, trying to inhale as much as possible in hopes of stretching out the aching muscles in my chest.
“Tell me about her,” she says, pointing to the root of the tree. “Your wife.”
I forgot I had spewed off this piece of information to her the last time we met. I must have gotten a lot off my tongue in a matter of sixty-seconds. Maybe the conversation was longer than that.
I take a few steps to the side, over to the bench along the stone-covered wall. Sitting down, I wonder if she’ll follow. She hasn’t moved from her spot, but she’s looking between the tree and me as if she’s contemplating a decision. “I don’t bite.”
With hesitation she makes her way over, taking up the spot beside me. “I’m Ari,” she says. “Ariella.”
“Hunter,” I respond, offering her my hand as a gesture, making this awkward meeting more official.
“So?” she urges me on, leaning forward, pressing the tips of her elbows into her knees.
“We were friends since five years old, never left each other’s side. We were inseparable until the day she gave birth to our little girl. That pretty much sums up the story.” My explanation of Ellie’s death gets shorter and shorter each time I repeat it. They’re like preprogrammed words that just roll off my tongue. It makes it easier to have an automatic response, saving me from digging into my rotting brain to retrieve bits and pieces of the why, what, when, and where of Ellie.
Ari doesn’t blink or react when she takes in my words. Her focus remains solid on the small patch of grass in front of us.
“Do you know that poem by Robert Frost? ‘The Road Not Taken’?” she asks, finally looking over at me. The look in her eyes makes my gut hurt, but not in a bad way. It hurts in a way that tells me my nerves are still alive, functioning at a normal capacity when I see an attractive woman; although she isn’t the definition of attractive, she’s more ethereal, dream-like. Her skin is smooth and flawless and I imagine it would feel like satin or silk if I touched it. I’m staring at her now and I should look away. I am sitting in front of my wife’s grave, for God’s sake. How much more disrespectful could I be?
With that last thought, I break our eye contact, moving my focus to the patch of grass she was hogging with her stare just seconds earlier. “Yeah, I know that poem,” I say, my voice coming out more stern and short than I intended.
“Well, he says that there are two paths to choose from and he took the one less traveled by. It really is a beautiful thought...” she trails off.
“Yup, it is. It’s a really great poem,” that I cannot remember the words to. Eighth grade English class was quite a while ago and I suddenly remember asking myself what I would ever need poetry for in life. My question has been answered—it’s so I don’t look like a complete loser when a woman asks me about a poem.
“It’s total bull,” she says, shocking the hell out of me. My focus swings back to her face, forgetting what Ellie may or may not be thinking of me right now.
“Oh yeah?” I ask, feeling intrigued.
“No one has a choice in life. No one really gets to choose what path they go down. Every single second of every minute of every hour, day, month, and year we are alive was predetermined for us the moment we were born.” Her voice is growing in volume as if she’s angry with Robert Frost himself. “I mean, how can one person say, ‘whatever is meant to be will be’ offer so much truth, only to be completely called out by Robert Frost, who’s talking about us having choices in life. No one has a choice. Everything that happens was meant to happen and we’re just passengers on this ride. Right?” Holy hell, this woman is fired up. She must have really been screwed over by fate, but this may be the most intelligent conversation I’ve ever had, or potentially the most therapeutic, at least.
“Who said ‘whatever is meant to be will be’ anyway?” I ask.
“Them, that person, whoever ‘they’ are—you know, the person with all the sayings,” she says. Her smile returns, accompanying a soft breath of laughter.
The longer I look at her, the more at ease I feel. I’m not sure why, considering the despise I normally have for being around other people, but something about her takes that distaste away, kind of like what Charlotte has done for me over the past few months. Except Charlotte was fucking AJ. “You may be the smartest person I have ever met,” I offer as a compliment in lieu of a response to her criticism of Robert Frost. In truth, nothing that comes out of my mouth could hold a flame to the intellectual thoughts she just shared.
“Why are you here?” I ask her, not only for the reason of moving away from the poetry discussion I will eventually stumble on but also because I truly want to know why a florist is here in a place where there are no more flowers. I have never seen anyone visit these flowerless gardens at the end of fall, besides a straggling elderly person looking to get his or her number of steps for the day accounted for.
“I...” she stammers on a response. “I just like it here. I feel connected to this place for a reason I can’t explain. It just makes me feel whole when I’m feeling a little broken, you know? So I come here almost every day.” How have I only run into her twice?
“And why are you broken?” I continue.
“I’m literally broken from the inside out. Trust me, it’s not something I’d want to waste your time explaining.”
“There he is!” Olive’s voice shouts from the top of the hill. I turn to find Dad holding her tightly in his arms as he stares down at me with sympathy. Always sympathy. “I told you we’d find him here.” As Olive is lecturing Dad, he takes the stone steps one by one. I want to tell him to turn back and let me have just a few more minutes here but he wouldn’t listen.
“Dad, I’ll—uh—I’ll meet you up at the car in just a minute,” I tell him, hoping he’ll stop coming toward me.
“Who is she?” Olive asks in a sing-song voice. “She’s pretty, like a Disney princess. You look like...” Olive pauses for a moment, tapping her little finger against her chin. “Oh, I know! You look like Rapunzel, but with brown hair.” Yes, Olive’s right. That’s exactly who she looks like.
Ari giggles in response and stands from the bench, making her way over to Dad and Olive. “Well, I’m not Rapunzel, but thank you for saying that. You are absolutely adorable,” Ari says.
A smile sprouts over Olive’s lips, stretching from ear to ear. “Thank you,” she says through a fit of quiet laughter.
“If you don’t mind me saying, Miss, you look familiar, but I can’t quite place my finger on where I know you from. Are you and Hunt friends? Did you go to high school together, maybe?”
Ari takes a couple of steps back, fussing nervously with her hair. “Uh—oh, no, she—we just see each other here sometimes—a common interest, you know?” I chime in.
Dad stares at me for a minute, looking between the two of us with a look I can’t decipher. “Huh, well then, maybe you just have a familiar looking face,” he follows up.
Ari’s cheeks have deepend into a dark shade of pink as she stammers over her next words. “Yeah, I—um—I—I get that all of the time,” she says. She does not get that all of the time. She’s exquisite, honestly—like no one I’ve ever seen before. A lot of it has to do with her eyes though, not just the way they look, but the way she looks at things like she’s exploring everything for the first time, seeing things with amazement. Or at least that is what I have noticed in the thirty minutes we’ve now known each other.
“You know, I really do think I know you from somewhere,” Dad says again.
Ari turns around, reaching for her bag below the bench. “I don’t think that’s possible,” she says, looking as if she’s about to run, yet again. “I just moved here from San Diego a few months ago.”
San Diego? Who would leave San Diego to come all the way across the United States to Connecticut of all places…to work in a flower shop?
“Ari, what is the name of your flower shop?” I say, reaching for her arm before she’s out of reach.
She shakes her head subtly and slips out of my loose grip.
“Dad, Charlotte is real-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-ly upset that you left her,” Olive says, loud enough that Ari turns to look at me once more as she jogs up the stone stairs. “She said it’s all a big misunderstanding. And a big, big, big, big mistake.”
“Olive, hush,” Dad says to her. And now her bottom lip is in place and Olive is officially pouting. “Oh stop it with the lip. I need to talk to your dad for a minute.”
“I’m sorry,” Dad begins. “I didn’t mean to scare your friend away.”
“She’s not my friend,” I reply coldly. But I would have liked her to be my friend, I think. What am I thinking? Saying? I haven’t dated anyone in the time Ellie has been gone because it didn’t feel right. Now I’m sitting here confused as all hell about how I got my emotions wound so tightly around Charlotte that I actually feel pain for what she did with AJ, and now this...a complete stranger has captured my attention in less than thirty minutes. This isn’t me.
“What’s going on with you, Hunt?” Dad asks. Placing Olive down on her feet, he then turns to her, saying, “Go find me ten little rocks by the bench over there. Ten.” Dad holds his fingers up one at a time for Olive to count.
“I know how much ten is, silly Grampy.” Olive skips over to the bench where she begins her search, counting out each rock slowly, one at a time.
“Hunter,” he begins again. “Talk to me, Son.”
“I don’t know, Dad.” I don’t. I don’t know what to think or feel. I don’t know what’s appropriate or what’s wrong.
“You’re scared of getting hurt again,” Dad says. His accusation is partially correct, but I’ve been more concerned with what Ellie would think if she could see everything I’m doing.
There were times in our life together when she would get this unsettled look in her eyes, a look worth a million thoughts. It would sometimes take me an entire day to crack the code. She didn’t like to vocalize her worries; instead, she would write them down. A lot of times I wondered if I had done something to make her upset or if I just completely messed up or forgot something, and I would have to pull it out of her if I had any hopes of figuring out what I did wrong. That was the only part of her that truly made me nuts sometimes. I’m a fixer. I like to fix problems, especially ones that I cause. The only thing I don’t seem to know how to fix is myself.
“Yes and no,” I tell him. “Do you think she can see me? Do you think she knows what my life is like, the decisions I make, and the feelings I have? Do you think she can sense all of it?”
“You know I don’t believe in that stuff,” Dad says, shifting his weight around to lean back against a tree. “I think once a person is gone, they move on to the next part of their life, and I don’t think that’s here on earth. She’s gone, Son, and it is okay to move on with your life. It’s okay to be happy.” Dad leans over to pick up a dirt-covered penny from beside his foot, bringing it back up to inspect it under the bit of sunlight poking through the trees. “Huh, will you look at that?” His attention is quickly diverted to the penny as he brings it up closer, flipping it from side to side. “This isn’t just a lucky penny, it’s a 1955 double-die penny. This thing is worth money.”
Dad has a thing with coins. Nope, not just a thing, an obsession. I spent most of my youth with a metal detector in my hand, combing beaches for pennies. The world could freeze around us, but if he’s looking at copper, nothing else matters. “Dad,” I say, trying to pull his attention back.
He slips the penny into his front pocket and refocuses. “I’m sorry. What was I saying?” he pauses for a second. “Oh right. If God forbid, you were the one who died and you had the chance to tell Ellie one last thing other than ‘I love you’, what would it be?” I would want her to be happy and to live a life that we could both be proud of. “You’d want her to be happy, wouldn’t you?”
Then it hits me. I promised her I would live for both of us. I have broken that promise in every single way possible. I have taken care of Olive and I have been a good dad to her, but when that little girl isn’t looking at me, I feel sorry for myself and I know it has taken over who I am. “Yes, I’d want her to be happy,” I reply simply.
“That is what she would want for you, too. I know for a fact that she would want you to be happy,” Dad says.
“You know for a fact? What—what are you talking about?”
“Remember the car accident you two were in?” Dad asks.
“I found ten, Grampy! Ten!” Olive shouts, running toward us with two handfuls of rocks.
“Good, now go find ten little sticks that are green inside.” Olive looks at him, puzzled at first but then runs to the grassy area, falling to her hands and knees.
“Yeah, I remember the accident.” Obviously. We both almost lost our lives that day. Some drunk asshole in an eighteen-wheeler sideswiped us on the highway, pushing our car down into a ditch. I was told the car had rolled four times before a tree stopped us. We were both airlifted from the scene and taken to Mass General.
“She woke up before you did, you know that right?” Dad continues.
“Yeah, I know,” I tell him. It may have been twelve years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
“I remember sitting with her right when she woke up. Her parents were in Scottsdale or something, I don’t know. Anyway, your mother was with you and I sat with Ellie so she wasn’t alone.” Dad pulls in a deep breath and sinks back against the tree a little harder. “One of the nurses came in to tell us you had woken up and everything looked like it was going to be okay.” He reaches over and places his hand over my shoulder, squeezing it during a pause in his story. “I cried like a goddamn baby, Son. You know that?” He laughs an uneasy laugh. “Anyway, within minutes, a doctor came in to tell Ellie that one of her ribs had slightly punctured her lungs and she needed emergency surgery. She was so scared when they were taking her away.” Dad closes his eyes briefly, smiling through silent laughter. “They told her she was going to be just fine, but she didn’t want to believe them, so right before she was rolled out, she grabbed my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, ‘If anything happens to me, I want you to tell Hunter to live a happy life. Tell him not to worry about me. Tell him I want him to live his life without regrets and to always keep that smile I love on his face.’ Naturally I told her not to worry about a thing, but her words hit me hard.” Dad takes another couple of short breaths before continuing. “Anyway, her parents finally arrived some time while she was in surgery and asked me to leave, so I wasn’t there to tell her ‘I told you so’ when she got out. Otherwise, I would have.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“Because she woke up from the surgery, survived just like you, and went on to live a happy life.” He pushes himself away from the tree, peeking around me to see what Olive is doing. She’s peeling sticks apart, looking for a green center, and appears to have now killed an entire tree with the pile she is creating. “Honestly, I hadn’t thought of it again until just now when you asked me what she would be thinking. I just remembered her saying all of that.”
“Do you think that accident had anything to do with Ellie’s aneurysm?” I don’t know why I never considered this before, but I have to wonder if that could have been the reason?
“I’m guessing it’s possible,” Dad says. “You both had head damage from that accident. Although I don’t remember hearing anything about her CT scans. She got all of those tests back after her parents came in so I don’t really know what those results were.”
“She would have told me though, right?” Surely she wouldn’t keep something like that from me. She wouldn’t. We told each other everything, unless she was mad at me, of course.
“I would assume so,” Dad says. “You ever ask her parents?”
“No, it never occurred to me that the accident could have affected her seven years later.”
“And it may not have. I don’t think it’s something you need to figure out at this point. It won’t bring her back,” Dad continues.
There’s no sense in arguing this with him, and it’s just another question that will nag at me until I come to the conclusion that there is no answer available. “Olive, how are you doing over there?” Dad calls out to her.
“Almost done!” she shouts.
“Look, my point here is that Ellie would want you to be happy. You got a great girl back there at home. Charlotte cares about you a lot. You shouldn’t be so quick to push her away.”
And just like that I remember exactly what brought me here. “Dad, she was sleeping with AJ.”
“Hunter, what have I always told you since you were a young boy?” I roll my eyes and throw my head back, focusing on the branch above us while waiting for what I know he is about to say. “Don’t you know what the word assume means?”
“Yeah, Dad. I know,” I tell him.
“Then don’t be an ass,” he says, thumping his hand against my back. “Go get Olive and let’s get back to the house before we miss lunch, too.”
Dad and Olive head up the stairs, leaving me to Ellie for just one more minute.
I dig my toe into the dirt, staring straight into the center of the etched heart on the tree. “Ell, is it true you want me to be happy?”
Now’s the time when the wind is supposed to blow or the sun is supposed to break through the branches and hit me in the face—any type of sign that she can hear me. But that never happens.
And I think it’s because her heart is still holding her soul captive somewhere in someone else’s body.