Where We Left Off (8 page)

I finished chewing my muffin and took a swig of orange juice as I looked at my grandma, feeling like I had the answer to her question, even though it was probably meant to be a rhetorical one anyway.

“You think I’ve grown too quickly? Time is relative, Nana. Sometimes it seems to drag on and then others it feels like it’s not moving at all. Like everything is frozen.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice.” She laughed. She filled up my glass with a pour of fresh squeezed juice. “To freeze time. A fountain of youth, if you will.”

“I don’t know about that.” I smiled and thought of growing old with the boy who’d stolen my heart, of our years together and memories made over a lifetime of love. “I think I just might like to live my life day by day.”

She gave me a pat on my back.

“I think that’s the only way to do it.”

Mallory

“Daylight savings is next week. I don’t know about you, but I’m done with this dark at five thirty nonsense.”

Nana had been flipping through the TV guide, circling the shows she wanted to watch for the upcoming week with a red Bic pen that was close to running out of ink so it skipped and stuttered on the paper. I never understood why she did this since she had her favorites set to record already, but people were nothing if not creatures of habit. And Nana’s habits were pretty harmless.

“Hoping for some extra hours in the day to paint the town, Nana?” I’d teased and she just offered me a mischievous smile in return.

I’d finished all my homework for the night, thanks to
Heath,
who offered to go to the library during lunch to help me find what I needed for my English paper on Flannery O’Connor. I’d checked out one of her novels,
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
, and held it up in front of my
face
just so my eyes peeked out over the top. “It is not!” I’d exclaimed, waggling my eyebrows and pointing to the title. “I found you pretty easily.”

“In all fairness, I found you.”

“Maybe we found each other.”

“Nope.” Heath was adamant. He’d been wearing dark jeans and a Rockley High hoodie with a bulldog in white ink drawn across the front, and as usual, he had his hair tucked under a gray wool beanie. “I’m taking the credit on this one. Remember, I walked two miles in the snow both ways to ask you out.”

“Fine. The credit is all yours.” I’d winked at him and he launched at me with a
hoomf
! The book dropped and clattered to the ground right as his lips smothered mine. We got the expected shushes and eye rolls from several nearby students and the librarian shot a deadly look of warning from behind her pretentiously tall desk, but that only encouraged us. Heath pulled me behind a bookcase and yanked me closer to his body. He was warm and solid. We kissed like that all lunch recess, sneaking away among shelves, pressed up in dark corners and hallways, his mouth on mine, our hands on each other.

Heath was never shy in showing his affection, and I was never hesitant in receiving it.

If someone had asked me that day how much Heath loved me, I would have said with his whole heart. I’d earned every portion, and he’d taken every bit of mine. It was an even and beautiful exchange, to care about someone intensely and equally.

I gave him all of my heart, knowing that I’d never want it back, hoping he’d never have the need to return it to me.

It was his.

I was his.

Heath

You didn’t remember all moments in life the same. Some held extra weight, others extra clarity, and the very few, significant ones became a part of you, embedded in you like the sharp sting of a splinter. Not just a recollection or a fond memory.

These were the memories that defined you. They intersected and disrupted the trajectory of your life, an unforgiving fork in the road that propelled you another direction, one so very far from the path you were comfortably traveling down.

My direction-changing memory occurred on March 23, 2004.

People called moments like
these life
altering, and I guessed that was true. But it was never just your life to be altered. There were always others involved. The deepest memories always included multiple casualties.

I often wondered what her memory would be. If we sat down, how would she tell it? What parts would she punctuate with expression? What moments would she gloss over? If I asked her to tell her story, would it parallel mine?

I was beginning to think I’d never know.

This was how I remembered things.

The clocks had changed that day. I always hated having to update every damn watch in our house. It seemed impractical to shift life either one hour behind or ahead every six months. Arizona had something going with their refusal to adhere to daylight savings. Whatever. It wasn’t as though my complaining was going to change the fact that I’d lose an hour that day.

I’d lose so much more than that.

Mom and Dad were at the hospital, Hattie at volleyball practice. Back in California, I’d been on the baseball team, but I didn’t go out for any sports this spring. In years past, my hands would ache for that familiar grip of the bat. The fresh and crisp smell of the field was a homecoming to me. Hours a day would be filled with the repetitive catch and release of the ball from my glove into my dad’s in our pasture by the big red barn.

Somehow I’d missed tryouts. It wasn’t really a
somehow
. I knew exactly why I’d missed them. I was with Mallory, helping her struggle through her latest pre-calculus assignment. Numbers weren’t kind to her brain. They’d jumbled together and when a few letters were thrown into the mix, it was migraine worthy. Her mouth would scrunch in frustration, the thick line of discouragement creased between her eyes. Shoulders hanging in surrender. She was failing. Sure, we were only juniors, but one failed class led to another and another and she didn’t have the luxury of many more semesters to catch up.

I knew what happened to small town girls without their diplomas. At least I’d heard stories, ones I could never match with my Mallory. She had so much potential, and potential was not measured exclusively by academic success.

For whatever reason, the day it happened I was out at the ball field. Mallory and her grandmother had plans that afternoon, and when the final bell chimed at the close of the school day, I began walking through the parking lot, right by my dad’s car. They carried me all the way to the diamond at the south end of the campus. There were metal bleachers erected behind the dugout, the yellow paint on them chipped and peeling like the polish on Mallory’s fingernails. I’d always loved how haphazardly put together she was. She was a jumble of intention, but never quite successful in matching the mold of her more popular and better-dressed peers. I loved her for that, for her originality in every aspect of her life.

I’d watched the boys play for an hour and a half. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a stab of jealousy. Of course I did. That pop of the ball into the glove could be felt in my own hands as I sat on the cold bleachers, a spectator rather than a participant. I knew what plays the catcher would signal before he called them. That had been my territory—in the squat behind home plate—and I was damn good at it. I’d winced at every passed ball that slammed into the backstop, knowing I could’ve blocked it with my knees, my chest, my body. I wore my pitcher’s mistakes and made him look good, helped him get the win. That was my job.

I fixed things. I knew how to shadow and pull my glove into the strike position when something came my way a little off center, out of the zone. I’d fool the umpire, the batter, the crowd into believing it was the perfect pitch. I’d changed the outcome by altering the way I received it.

I didn’t know how to fix what ended up happening that evening. I couldn’t fake out anyone, least of all myself. I’d received the news as anyone would’ve expected me to, and in truth, it didn’t matter how I’d received it.

It wouldn’t change the outcome.

The first thing to tip me off was Mom’s voice on the other end of my cell. She was working and never called home, not even to check in. My parents were excellent at what they
did
and wore a professionalism that came with years of practicing bedside manners with their patients. Mom would come home from work and talk without any
effect
to
her tone of a three-month-old flat lining or a teenager recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. It wasn’t cruel at all, just matter of fact. Because things happened in life, and that was the truth in it. The world needed people like my parents who could mask their emotions to hunker down to get the job done when the rest of humanity wanted to curl into a helpless fetal position and cry.

Mom’s tears that day did not match her hard-earned consistency.

“Heath,” her voice quaked out of her. “Heathcliff, honey, there’s been an accident.” Then she cried softly into the phone, and I knew this wasn’t any other patient. She couldn’t detach herself from this one. I knew how she’d grown to love Mallory as I had over these past months, and I instantly heard that reflected in her cry. Something in my blood and bones told me it had to be her.

The rest I remember as a blur, both her words and my actions. Something about a drunk driver. Hit and run. Broken windshield. Crumpled steel. Unresponsive Nana. Broken and crumpled Mallory.