Where We Left Off (7 page)

Heath

Stuff like school, work, and other daily activities were no longer important to me. It wasn’t like I hated doing those things, they just seemed to offer little in the way of any rewards. They were the things I begrudgingly did because I knew they got me one step closer to the reward. And that reward was Mallory.

The knowing smiles we’d exchange when passing in the school hallway were the reward. We didn’t have any classes together. She said I was on the smart kid’s track, and while I enjoyed school and it came naturally to me, it didn’t mean Mallory was any less intelligent. She just didn’t focus her efforts on her studies the way I always did. Well, at least the way I had up until I met her.

Her kisses were also the reward. Since our first kiss that wasn’t quite a kiss, the one Mallory claimed ended up so horrendously, she’d learned and a thing or two about the act of kissing. I swear it was like she had studied those silly teen magazines in her spare time. She would close her eyes a little and tilt her head as though rehearsing before she’d lean in. It was absolutely adorable. I could watch her all day, even though I would rather be making out instead.

Everything about Mallory was my reward.

And I woke up one December morning and realized that I had fallen completely in love.

It was weird how a change that I didn’t necessarily want to happen led me to a place in life I wouldn’t change for the world. When my parents said we’d be making the move from California to Kentucky, admittedly, I wasn’t thrilled. I was generally a happy, simple guy. Go with the flow. So I went with it. But my less than enthusiastic packing of boxes and loading of the trailer must’ve clued my parents in to my feelings. I wasn’t upset with them for plucking Hattie and me from our home and moving us to a new one, but I wasn’t stoked, either.

It was
merely
because I didn’t know how happy this
move
would end up making me.

You couldn’t project happiness. Life gave you the good and the bad, often in equal measure, and you never knew which one you’d get at any given time. Moving across the country was the bad, but Mallory was the good.

And I loved how good and happy she made me feel.

It was later that night that I told her. We had finished eating dinner with her grandma and her dad and we were snuggled on the couch watching Survivor together. We’d often do this thing where she’d have me sprawl out and bend my legs a little to create this empty space between myself and the back of the sofa. Then she’d curl her tiny body into that nook there.

“It’s like I’m
in
a boat,” she’d said, as though the carpet was water and I had to keep her from spilling over into it. It reminded me of a game Hattie and I used to play as kids that we’d called “lava.” Everything but the ground was safe and we’d hop from table to chair to ottoman to avoid falling into the molten and fiery floor below. Mom would get annoyed when she’d come home to find us on the kitchen counters or wedged in the doorway with our feet and hands propped against the frame.

“Why do you call it a boat?” I’d asked Mallory. My mouth was close to her temple and I’d pressed it softly there.

“Because I feel safe here. Like you’re my calm place in rough waters.”

“You don’t feel safe when I’m not around?”

She lifted her chin to look me in the eyes. “No, not unsafe, really. Just uncertain,” she’d said. “But I’m certain of you, and that makes me feel safe.”

Later that night Mallory led me down the hall. We were headed
toward
her dad’s den, and though I’d always wanted to know what he did in that room, I knew enough to wait until I was invited along.

“Want to see something?”

I nodded.

“Hey, Tommy.” She’d dropped a few light knocks on the door as she spoke. “Care for a couple visitors?”

Then she propped open the door to let me through. It was dark and musty. I could make out a wall with a large bookcase at the back of the room, and I studied it. There were hundreds of books, all haphazardly thrown onto their shelves. Some were upright. Others lay sideways. Some looked like they’d been tossed
against
the case and stayed where they fell. There was a small loveseat off to the side and it was covered in a deep red brocade fabric, the floral, swirling pattern interrupted with tears and snags.

“Go sit over there and I’ll see if he’s got everything he needs.”

I did as instructed and slumped onto the seat with a huff. The springs in the cushions were old and I could feel every individual coil. There was a lamp to my right that looked like it was made from stained glass and I wanted to flick it on, but I decided to wait on Mallory. She’d turn it on if it was necessary. It seemed like she had a routine in here.

“Oh, Tommy,” she said, bending to the ground to retrieve a paint tube. “You should’ve told me to buy more goldenrod. I was
just by
the store today.” The way you do when you squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, she rolled the paint between her fingers and a dollop fell out and onto Tommy’s pallet. “There, that’s all that you’ve got to work with tonight.”

The floor was speckled in every color of paint one could imagine, and there were stacks of canvases lining the walls the way music stores organized their albums and records to flip through. There must’ve been at least a hundred judging by the ten piles I counted along the wall.

Mallory came over and sat next to me. I wasn’t a guy with a particularly long attention span—I’d been known to sleep through movies and lectures and church sermons—but I swore I could’ve watched Mallory’s dad paint all night. The limited movement I was accustomed to seeing from him disappeared altogether. His hand swept across the canvas as though he was a conductor, the paints his orchestra. I almost wanted to close my eyes to take in the concert in front of me.

“Before the
stroke,
he was right handed,” Mallory whispered after an hour or more of silence. “Now he does everything with the left. The doctor says he should be able to speak, too, but he doesn’t try. I suppose he doesn’t need to speak audibly, though. His work says everything he needs to say.”

This piece wasn’t what I would necessarily call abstract—it wasn’t like Picasso where you’d have to stand on your head and squint with one eye to make out any kind of meaning, but it wasn’t realistic, either. There were swirls of yellow that crossed over the entire canvas like wheat or yarn or ribbon. It could have been anything, but the one unmistakable element was the eye that peeked out from under it. It was identical in tone to Mallory’s, bright and sparkling.

“What does this piece say?”

I dropped my palm onto her bare knee and left it there. Mallory’s eyes fell shut, briefly.

“That he misses her.”

Then she got up and padded across the room and came up behind her father, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I miss her, too.” She pressed a kiss to the crown of his head and he leaned back at the gesture. She pulled him closer to her and his brush fumbled from his grip and spread thick yellow paint across her arm. She didn’t care, she just hugged him tighter. “I miss her every single day. She sure loved the hell out of us, didn’t she?”

They stayed like this for a while, and though it was an exchange between the two of them, I felt like I was a part of it. There was a love so present it saturated the space around us. He’d painted more than an image, more than a memory. He’d painted a pure emotion, and in that moment, I couldn’t understand how this work of art wasn’t on display in the most prestigious of museums with the largest price tag possible. It was one of a kind in feeling and love.

We left him after that and I pulled Mallory into the bathroom off the hallway as we walked away from the den. I took her arm—the one covered in freshly drying paint—in my grip and looked her in her eyes, hard. She held my gaze as I reached around for the faucet and wet a washcloth with warm water and wiped it across her forearm, taking the paint with it.

I set the towel on the counter and stared at her reflection in the mirror for long enough that the connection of our eyes did weird things to my stomach. I didn’t know her story, but I knew there was loss—loss of so many kinds. “I’m sorry about your mom, Mallory.”

She spun around. I saw the tears well, the quiver of her bottom lip. Then she cried. It wasn’t a sob that wracked her body or one of those ugly cries. It was controlled, as though she’d cried this same cry every day. Like brushing her teeth or doing homework, this was just part of her routine.

I held her. My chin pressed into her hair and her cheek rested on my collarbone. She didn’t shake or shudder. The tears slowly and silently slipped down her face and landed on my shirt, soaking into the fibers there. She squeezed me back with her arms coiled around my waist.

I didn’t know Mallory’s history. I knew I could never take the pain she’d experienced away, but I knew I would be part of her future, and any pain she’d ever
face,
I would be there for. Be there to comfort her and love her through it. And I needed her to know that.

My voice didn’t feel like my own, and when I said it, I could hardly hear it, but I knew she could. I hoped she could. “I love you, Mallory.”

She didn’t act surprised. She didn’t pull back in shock or in excitement at my words. She just nodded against my shoulder and said, “I know. I love you, too, Heath.”

Mallory

Winter didn’t hold on as long this year as it had in the past. It was often well into March before the trees turned from brittle looking skeletons with their menacing and bare branches clawing toward the sky into living, budding plants that reminded me of the yearly promise of new life and fresh starts. It was only February and already the town had begun to thaw.

“Good morning, Sunshine,” Nana said one Saturday morning when I came down for breakfast. She’d outdone herself with the smorgasbord of baked goods that lined the old pine table positioned in the center of the kitchen. Cinnamon rolls, country-style potatoes, sausage, thick strips of bacon with ribbon-like curls of fat still clinging to their edges. My stomach growled as though letting its appreciation be known. I plucked a piece of bacon from the top of the pile and snapped it between my teeth.

My hair was split into two braids which hung down my back and I wore pink flannel pajamas that had cotton-tailed bunny rabbits patterned all over them. Nana caught sight of me and cocked her head. Her expression was mixed. There was a little nostalgia there, like she was seeing me as the young girl she’d always known me to be, but there was something more in those twinkling, yet unsure, eyes. There was a hint of goodbye.

I chose to ignore it and stuffed my face with a poppy seed muffin.

“Oh, Mal,” Nana said. “Why have you grown up so quickly?”

Not quickly enough
, is what I wanted to reply. Sixteen was a weird age. You weren’t given the benefit of being young enough to make mistakes and merely learn from them anymore, but you weren’t old enough to fully own your decisions, either. You were the legal responsibility of a parent or guardian, but the emotional responsibility of no one but yourself. You weren’t coddled. You weren’t given the benefit of the doubt. You just were.

It was weird that they called those who were ten or eleven in age tweens.
We
were the tweens. We were the ones caught in between childhood and adulthood. Those prepubescent kids were just stuck between being a little kid and an even bigger little kid.

I wasn’t a kid anymore. I knew what I wanted out of life, and who I wanted to share it with. We’d been together just over four months. That wasn’t a lot in the timeline of life, but my timeline wasn’t all that long yet. The space Heath took up felt huge.

For years, I’d wondered what it would be like to fall in love. What steps I would take to get there, how it would happen and who it would be with.

And then one day I was there. Thrust into the thick of it. I thought I was falling in love with him, like it was some process that happened gradually and methodically. But if I thought on those feelings I had when we first met, they were the same ones I had now. My feelings didn’t change. They just magnified. Exploded.

I’d burst into love with Heath.