In the end, though, my curiosity will always win.
I hope you’re not too mad at me. In fact, I hope by the time you read this, you’re happy with the decisions I made.
Our lives are made of choices. We can’t get around it, no matter how many times I wished I could live in one of those Barbie worlds you used to build in my living room, with shop girls going dancing at night and being told what to wear and who to become. Alas, I was only able to live those precious moments with you, and my life was filled with forks in the road I never wanted to encounter. But I did, and I had to live with the choices I made. And despite it all, I don’t regret any of them because they have led me here, writing this letter to you.
I’m writing one to your sister, too, which she’ll receive through your mother at some point, but I have to admit, it’s a lot shorter and simpler. I had two hopes for her: to let you back in, and to recognize the love she truly deserves and go for it. I hope, through the books I left her, she will figure it out. But you, my dear, were a bigger challenge.
It all dawns on me then. The shared role of will executor. Naming me when I didn’t live there. Giving us all those exhausting, time-consuming tasks.
I laugh through my tears. That damn woman played us, and she won, too.
I hope I’ll have succeeded. As I said before, I have never regretted any of my choices, but letting you go was one of the hardest I ever had to make. I spent so many sleepless nights that first year wondering how you were doing, alone in a city so vast, it probably felt like an entire planet. I knew you had a better chance at happiness there, but I also knew your absence was a scab we had to be careful not to pull at in so many lives. Your parents. Your sister. Eli.
A sob catches in my throat.
Did you know he never forgot about you? Every time he visits me for dinner, he asks me how you are, and every time, I see a longing in his eyes I know only one thing could clear. I always tell him to contact you. He smiles, then says, “Maybe someday.” Well, I hope that day happened, whether he liked it or not. That man is there for everyone. It was time someone was there for him. Plus, waiting for him to call you almost killed me before my heart did!
My beautiful Cassie, the girl who kept me young when so many made me feel my years and more. I’ll never be able to put into words what you have meant in my life. I hope you see that all I did, I did with that in mind.
The best thing I ever did was tell you to go. I hope the second best was to get you to come home.
With all my deep, deep love,
Ruth
I can barely breathe as I bring the picture to my chest and hug it. Smell it, even, trying to find her lilac and vervain smell, but only finding rancid paper.
Wiping my tears with one hand, I turn the book’s page with the other, landing on a picture of Eli, Keira, and me. I never saw that picture, but I remember that day like it was yesterday. It was a stormy summer day, with clouds so dark, it almost looked like night. I was twelve, maybe thirteen. Keira was sitting under the porch, reading a teen magazine that would inform her who her celebrity husband would be, and I was bugging her to let me read it. She kept calling me annoying and wouldn’t budge no matter how much I whined. I was about to say I’d tell Mom she was being a bitch if she didn’t pass it to me when Eli came up behind me.
“Wanna go swim?” he asked.
I remember frowning. “The storm’s about to hit.”
“So?”
It was crazy. It was supposed to thunder all evening. Eli wasn’t even dressed in a bathing suit, his polo shirt and bermuda shorts freshly pressed, but the second he held his hand out to mine, I was a goner. I’m fully dressed in the picture, too, but I didn’t care much. At this point, we only had a few minutes before we risked electrocution in the water, so I pulled at his arm and started running toward the cliff. In the picture, Keira’s looking at us, the magazine resting against her crossed legs, her attitude giving off that of a fifteen-going-on-thirty-year-old. Meanwhile, Eli and I are jumping toward a blue-black sea. It should look nightmarish,but the happiness radiating out of the photograph is palpable. Or maybe it’s just the memories I associate with the moment that are magical.
He wasn’t going to go in the water. He probably walked over to come read a Garfield comic at Ruth’s. Now that I think of it, he must’ve seen my sister and me fighting and thought of a solution to reach peace. He didn’t want to get his clothes wet. That wasn’t him. But he did it, for me, even when I didn’t know I needed it.
He’s always there for others.
Ruth couldn’t have been more spot on. It didn’t matter that I didn’t ask for his help this summer. He was there regardless. So many people find excuses to bail or give you the bare minimum to keep you satisfied. Eli will do everything in his power to help, whether it’s detrimental to him or not.
He’s there for everyone, and yet people leave him all the time. His father, unwillingly. His siblings, when they left town to build a life somewhere else. His mother, traveling with her new husband. The mother of his child.
And me. Twice.
The man who would’ve given me the clothes off his back if I’d needed them only ever asked one thing of me; to stay. And still, I left.
It all hits me at once as I look around me; the aimless job, the empty apartment, the cold nook in my neck that’s missing Billie’s soft, round head. The selfies Zoe and I took on my phone I haven’t been able to look at again. The sister who needs to find her ownhappily ever after. The untouched pillow on the left side of my bed.
I want it. I want it so bad, it physically hurts.
And I allowed people who don’t even matter to push me away.
Last week, I told Ashleigh to grow up, but the truth is, maybe I needed to hear that, too. I’m still stuck in a limbo that’s tainted by childhood nightmares, but I’m no longer that child. I won’t be stuck in lockers for hours. No one will scare me in my own home anymore.
As if on cue, my phone vibrates beside my thigh, Eli’s name popping on screen. I bite my wobbling lip.
