“Sorry.”
I look up. Some life has come back to Lizzie’s stare, and she turns to smile at me. There’s a pink mark on her cheek.
“The last thing you want is some stranger blurting out her melodramas here on your porch. How did we get onto this, anyway?” The laugh that follows seems more than a little forced.
“You’re not a stranger.” It’s all I can think to say.
And grief isn’t a melodrama. Not when it’s true and genuine.
“Shit!” I cuss, suddenly. I rub my eyes in shame, my fingers digging into my brow.
“What?” Lizzie asks in alarm, eyes wide.
I move my palm from eyes to mouth like I’m two-thirds of the see-no-evil monkeys, and close my eyes in self-deprecation.
“I was rude to you.”
This time, Lizzie’s laugh is far prettier. More natural.
“You wanna narrow down the instance you’re referring to?”
Somehow, I wince and smile at once. She has a point.
“When you told me you were sorry for my mother. I snapped at you.”
“You can’t truly be sorry for something you don’t understand.”
The words ring through my head like tolling bells of shame. She’d lost someone. A lover or—I swallow—a husband. Someone around whom her world had revolved. She knew exactly what it felt like to have someone taken from her. Two of them. And I’d disregarded her entirely.
“It’s okay.”
It wasn’t.
“I know how it is,” she reassures me. “The last thing I want to do is talk about it. I just felt like, I suppose that you deserved an explanation for my moment of lunacy? Or two moments, really. Today and when I jumped a plane out from New York.”
“That’s what you’re doing here,” I realize, piecing the mysteries of her actions together. “You’re running from the grief?”
“I’m not running. I’m building.” Lizzie looks out into the shadows again. She’s seeing them this time. It’s as if her vision is piercing through the forest, out across the main road, and on toward town. Like she’s watching the pillars and beams of the old Jessop house from my rocking chair. “I’m building something new here. Something that’s just mine.”
“Something that won’t be taken from you,” I add.
Lizzie’s gaze whips around to me, her breath now coming in little clouds of warmth on the air. She’s staring at me with a look of connection so pure and raw, I’m not even sure there’s a name for it. All I know is that I feel it down to my toes.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
I nod. I know the feeling. I know what she’s doing.
And now I’m even more convinced that Lizzie will never be a permanent inhabitant of East River.
Shemight think so. She might believe that she’s building a new life for herself here. But what she’s really doing is escaping. She’s leaving her pain and sorrow behind and coming to find something fresh and new. Something to bring her soul back to life and her heart back into rhythm after it’s been broken. Once she had that, everything she’d once loved she would love again. Her home would still be her home. And she would return to New York.
Which made my growing attachment even more dangerous.
I know what it’s like to have someone taken from you. But I also know what it’s like to watch them leave of their own free will. To choose a place, a person, or a life that is devoid of you. To be told you aren’t enough.
So far, I’ve survived every person who’s done just that over the years. But that wave of terror this afternoon. That level of panic and care? That told me the truth. Any longer in her company and watching Lizzie leave would cut so much deeper.
Which just proves you had the right idea in the first place, Walker. Distance.