Page 93 of Came the Closest
“You don’t want me to see—”
“Open your eyes, Collie.” She kisses my jaw. “Please.”
I open my eyes.
My breath ceases to exist.
The painting doesn’t have to be finished for me to understand her vision. Bold brushstrokes, drawn by a hand confident of its technique, paint the view directly out the window behind me. A sloping backyard of lush grass, shimmering gold-streaked blue water, and a weathered dock jutting out from a jagged shoreline.
On that dock sits two figures, one man with a broad back and one child, nestled into the man’s shoulder. A striped blue and white towel shelters the child, blond hair and the curve of the child’s cheek barely visible. The man is pointing at a large sailboat bobbing in the waves of a frothy blue lake.
“Fini…” I should know what to say, but I don’t.
For every word I’ve said in my thirty years, I have none. Not a single one will adequately convey how my chest feels too small for the beating organ it contains. A heart swollen with more love than I ever expected it to be capable of.
“I’m naming it Sailing: The Basics,” she says quietly. She shifts so her back is to my chest, and she lifts a hand to my jaw. “I think love—familial, friendship, or romantic—isn’t much different than sailing. You open the sails, and you stand at the helm, but only the Universe can sustain the wind billowing you forward. And you and Milo?” She inhales a shuddering breath. “You and Milo have billowed me forward, Colton.”
When Travis sees my face on the screen Saturday evening, I know he knows. Not because I’m wearing an expression that says hey, I’m retiring and I mean it!, but because you don’t work with someone for a decade without learning how to read them.
“You meant it,” he says. “Didn’t you?”
Swallowing hard, I nod. The sunroom fan whirs above my head, combatting the sweltering July heat, and sweat gathers at the backs of my knees under my light blue slacks. Cheyenne’s now-empty easel sits before me in the sun-streaked room, her painting having been delivered to the gallery safely, but the easel itself is a physical reminder of my choice. A choice I will stand by even when I don’t know how to.
Travis glances heavenward, and when he looks at me again, a tear stands in the corner of his eye. “I want to tell you to reconsider. That you can make a comeback, and you still have another year or two in you. If nothing else, I want you to have one last ride to go out on. I don’t want people to remember you from what happened in May; I want you to define your ending. Not be defined by your ending.”
“I can’t, Trav,” I say hoarsely. “I can’t put my family through that. I can’t put myself through that.”
Even though part of me wants it worse than I’ve wanted anything. But I’ve learned that you don’t always get a face-to-face goodbye. Sometimes it’s for the best. Because if you had that chance, that face-to-face ending, you might not take it.
If I could look at my mother once more, face-to-face, I wouldn’t say goodbye. Her faults would fade when I saw her wavy gold hair and heard her effervescent laugh and smelled her exotic jasmine perfume lingering on my skin after a dazzling embrace.
I wouldn’t want to say goodbye.
If I faced another bull in the chute, if I felt the rush of another ride and the pride of the applause and the pounding adrenaline, it would be no different.
I wouldn’t want to say goodbye.
Because that’s the truth of life—goodbye doesn’t want to be said. It’s why Midwesterners delay it by thirty minutes, why we cry at funerals, and why we mourn loss so deeply. Goodbye means losing that part of your life, and we don’t want it. Not when the goodbye means see you again, not when it means setting yourself free, not when it means moving onto something better.
This goodbye can’t be face-to-face.
“I know you can’t, Colt,” Travis says, his words thick with emotion. “I know.”
We’re both quiet. He’s walking on a crowded California street while sunlight dapples his face through thin tree branches, Airpods in his ears. I’m sitting on a decades-old wicker daybed, and my watch is telling me we need to leave for the gallery opening in twenty minutes.
My attention shifts back to my phone when Travis starts laughing.
“God, Colton,” he says, shaking his head disbelievingly. “I just… I can’t believe I’m saying this, but thank God that Rhodes was such an idiot in May. That sounds so freaking wrong to say, and maybe I’m just thinking that because Mere is pregnant so I’m not—”
“Meredith is pregnant?”
“—even thinking clearly,” he continues, blowing me off completely. “But so be it. If it’s wrong, then I’m wrongly very, very glad. Does that make me a bad human?”
“Meredith is pregnant?” I repeat.
I never, not in my wildest dreams, thought Travis and Meredith would have children. Between their ages of forty and thirty-eight and his erratic agenting schedule, it seemed unlikely. But apparently I was wrong.
“What?” Travis frowns into the screen. He notices my bewilderment and his lips form an O. “Oh. Yes. She’ll kill me if she finds out that I told you already, though, so please, please do not say anything.” He pauses, in deep thought. “Except, if she killed me, who would make eleven p.m. runs for her cravings? The other night, it was a very specific type of cracker. Do you know how hard it is to find thin corn crackers at that time of night? I don’t think you do. But let’s not risk my potential murder, okay? I am not going through nine months of sheer panic and joy only to…”