“Sometimes,” he muses, “a little avoidance is healthy. But, I don’t think you came here to forget your life.”
I glance at him. The wind picks up tendrils of my hair and plays with the short strands of his.
“You don’t?” I ask, pushing the locks back so I can see him clearly.
David shakes his head.
“You were there for all of it, Liz. You didn’t run. You were there when your Dad was ill. You looked after your family. Helped your brother get into college. It’s not like you hid from the truth, you were right in the middle of it. Same with…” He has to swallow before he goes on. His cheeks flush and the coffee cup bends a little in his grip. “It was the same with Nick. You were there. You saw it, you were with him. Hell, Liz, you held his hand in the ambulance! And afterwards? Man, I was a mess. I couldn’t even look at the laundry basket without seeing his favorite sweater and wanting to cry. You helped me with all of it. The funeral…” David shakes his head and trails off like he’s giving up on listing the extent of my supposed heroics.
“You think I did too much,” I conclude, “and so I ran away from it?”
“No, that’s just it, I think you did so much, were so involved in every detail, that there was no way you could fool yourself.”
I frown, more than a little confused.
“Fool myself?”
David takes another sip of coffee and seems to roll it around in his mouth as he ponders his next words. “See… I reckon half of what makes grief hurt is denial,” he says. “At the start, I spent every moment I could trying to ignore the fact that Nick was gone. I just didn’t want to accept it. Which then made it hurt a thousand times worse whenever I was confronted with a reminder. His sweater in the basket, his stuff around the house. Heck, I had a customer service woman on the phone to me once, asking if she could speak to Nick about his subscription to some muscle car magazine and I broke down in tears. Right there, on the phone! All because, in between those moments, I kept trying to con myself into believing he was coming back.
“You never had the chance to do that, Liz. I think grief is different for everyone, but you’re an active kind of person. I think dealing with everything you did helped you process it all faster, in a healthy way.”
Leaning his elbows on the railing, David looks at me. Sincerity is stamped all over his face.
“You say this to the girl who nearly fell apart in your car last night?” I point out, but David is already shaking his head.
“Dealing with your grief, healthily or otherwise, doesn’t just switch off or erase the sadness. There are going to be times when it hits you for a moment and you need a sec to catch back up.
“But as for moving here…” David looks back out across the trees. I follow his gaze, spotting the sign for the Winters Autoshop a few blocks away. “I don’t think it’s unhealthy or selfish to close a chapter of your life and begin a new one. It doesn’t make the old life forgotten or unimportant. And it doesn’t make the new one fake,” he shrugs. “It’s all just life.”
By this time, I’m totally losing the battle against my tears. They’re rolling down my face faster than I can catch them, so I just give up. I accept my moment of sadness, have a little cry, and reach out for my friend. I wrap my arms around David and squeeze him hard, with all the love and affection I hold in my heart for him. I breathe him in and feel his warmth.
My voice is muffled against his chest.
“You have no idea how much I needed to hear that.”
It feels like I’ve just been given permission. Like a weight I hadn’t realized was there, has suddenly been lifted from my shoulders.
It’s as if everything I’ve been trying to build in East River has been a mere concept, not concrete, until now. If anyone was going to feel betrayed at my need to move away and begin somewhere new it would have been David. It was his husband we’d lost, it was his heart that had been broken, and our friendship that I’ve now ceased to be a daily part of.
And yet, here he is, telling me it’s okay to be okay. That I don’t have to be wallowing in grief to prove my love for those I’ve lost. I can move on with my own life, wherever I want to find it. And if that means moving away, it doesn’t mean I’m running. Or hiding. It just means I’m living.
“You know…” I grumble quietly into his chest, “if you weren’t gay, I would marry you right now.” Bouncing a little left and right, I turn the hug into a dancing wiggle on the balcony.
“Ha! If you were a guy you’d be lucky to have me,” he argues, bouncing with me. “But somehow I think you might have already found someone.”
I pull back from him and readjust my blanket. A bitter laugh is on the tip of my tongue.
After everything that had been said the night before, I can’t put a finger on where Caleb and I are at right now.
I admit as much to David, who seems to be holding in a smile.
“What?” I demand.
“Honestly, I think people give romance a hard sell. It really isn’t that complicated, Lizzie.”
“You didn’t hear Caleb last night.”
“Maybe not,” he admits. “Given the state you were in when you came back here, I’d say he was a grade-A jerk.