Tristan
WHY WE TRY
“Can't you see it in my eyes
All the reasons you are mine.”
Performed by Matthew Mayfield w/ Chelsea Lankes
Written by Mayfield / Jones / McKee Barnes
The party flew by in ablur of people, games, songs, and cake. Hannah was beaming from the start of the day until the very last visitor left. She’d had a good day, and that fact filled me with happiness. I wanted my daughter to have only sunshine kind of days. No more loss. No more heartache. It was ridiculous to assume I could give her that, but for a few more years, I hoped I could at least minimize the sadness.
I placed the musical note pin in tri-colored gold Brady had given her on the dresser. It was to hold her shawls together so she didn’t have to grip them while she played. It was beautiful and thoughtful and made my chest hurt in a different way. Not quite sadness but a whirlwind of unknowns.
Seeing Brady at the party today, smiling and joking with people who were not only my friends but his, had made all the feelings I’d been having for him come whooshing back in. I’d tried to bury them behind my wall of memories of Darren, but it seemed that Brady had started his own wall in my heart. He hadn’t broken Darren’s apart.He hadn’t overshadowed it. He’d just started laying a new one, brick by brick, right next to the one already there.
I kissed my girl, rolled her blankets around her tight, and said, “Love you to infinity and back.”
Her eyes were already drooping as she said, “I love you more, Mommy.”
I walked out of her room and stopped at Grams’ door. The mural I’d painted for her was going to be hanging in the college theater. Dean Torkelson had caught me as she was leaving and told me there’d be a plaque under the piece saying it was made in loving memory of Elana Johnson. Just that was worth giving it to them. Like I’d told Brady, the money was secondary, even though it was important, too. It would allow me to keep Grams’ store for at least another year.
William’s harsh words came back to me. He was right that I wouldn’t be able to keep it going forever. I wish she was here to tell me what to do, what she would have wanted me to do with her dreams that were crumbling around me.
I opened her bedroom door with shaky hands, and the smell of peppermint washed over me. The same as the day I’d found her. It hurt so profoundly. The loss of her. The loss of Darren. The loss of Brady. I’d avoided him today because I hadn’t known how to tell him goodbye. I hadn’t learned how to say the words to someone who was living. I’d only learned how to say them to a grave.
I stood at Grams’ dresser, staring down at the dozen or so pictures scattered over the surface. I’d never really paid attention to any of them before, and I realized for the first time there was one of Brady and Grams. He was young, maybe fourteen or fifteen. Skinny and more arms and legs than anything else because he hadn’t grown into the man he was yet. They were sitting at the piano in the practice room. They were both smiling, hands on the keys as if they were dueling it out, and Grams had a look of great affection on her face.
She’d loved him as much as she’d loved me.
A touch on my shoulder brought me back with a start. Mom put her arm around my shoulder. “Sometimes I think once I grew up and left Grand Orchard, I forgot who she really was,” Mom said sadly. “She was all about the music. Like Hannah. Like you are about your art. I understand now why you felt more comfortable here with her than with us, and I understand why she left you everything. She wanted you to be able to stay if it was what you wanted.”
I didn’t want to cry, so I choked back the tears and whispered, “Sometimes, I think she knew who I was better than I did myself. For so many years, I was just Darren’s wife. The Navy SEAL’s wife. Now, I’m Hannah’s mom. And here, I’m Grams’Cari, a granddaughter she loved. But I’m still not sure who I am or what I want.”
Mom shook her head. “You’re wrong. You know who you are, Tristan. You’re an artist, and a friend, and a woman who loves the people in her life deeply. It’s not your fault that either of them died, and you don’t owe either of them the rest of your life. Go after what you want because it will be the best way tohonorthem. They’d both want that for you.”
The word honor scorched itself through me. I couldn’t imagine how my mom had heard about the question the reporter had thrown out at me that had sent me spiraling for two days now. But her emphasis on the word made it clear she had.
“How’d you hear about it?” I asked, still trying to hold the tears at bay.
“That lovely woman, Cassidy, told me.”
I didn’t know if I was mad or relieved.
Mom picked up the picture I’d been staring at of Brady and Grams. “Do you love him?”
Did I? I felt like we still had so much to learn about each other, but I did love the way he smiled, the way he made me feel, the way he looked after Hannah. The tenderness he gave me and his sister. The way he gave of himself without thought or care to what it meant for him. The possibility of loving him was there like a thought just beyond reach. Lurking. Hovering. Wanting to be known.
“I think I might have blown it with him,” I told her, because ghosting him the day before and then all but ignoring him today was not exactly a way to show someone you cared about them.
“If the way he was looking at you during the party is any sign, I would say that is definitely not the case.”
I smiled at her weakly. “That’s just Brady O’Neil’s normal look.”
“No, sweetie. He didn’t give that look to anyone else in the room but you. It was the look of a man who’s found someone he can’t live without.”
I swallowed hard. There was still so much that might not work with us. He had to know it as well as I did. My life was here, working in a store and painting a few pictures. His life was in New York and all over the globe, making and singing music, filming a TV show. Things that had nothing to do with me or Hannah or this sleepy little town.
