He smiles, and the sunlight catches the green of his eyes, and that makes the choice for me.
“Okay. Just a day.”
“Good.” He grins. “Perfect.” He grabs his board. “I’ll just . . . I’m gonna go change then. I’ll be right back.” He rests a tan hand on my door, leans down, and hands me back the plate of brownies. “Here. Can you hold these?”
I take them from him, and he turns and jogs across the street to the kayak shop. Before he disappears inside, he looks back over his shoulder. “Don’t leave,” he calls. It makes me nervous and happy at the same time as I search for my dropped keys.
I couldn’t leave now, even if I wanted to.
Each heartbeat begins with a single, electrical impulse, or “spark.” The distinctive sound we hear through a stethoscope, or when we place our head on a loved one’s chest, is the sound of the heart valves opening and closing in perfect synchronicity with each other. It is a two-part rhythm—a delicate dance of systole and diastole, which propels the heart’s electrically charged particles through its chambers roughly every second of the day, every day of our lives.
CHAPTER TEN
I PULL UP alongside the curb behind Colton, and before I can put my car in park, he’s out of his and heading in my direction. I turn off the ignition and step out into the salty air, where the low sound of water crashing over rocks drifts up from below the bluff we’re on.
“It’s a perfect day,” Colton says, looking out over the water. “Wanna check it out?”
“Sure,” I say. I don’t really know what we’re checking out, but I’m more than happy to find out. We walk across a grassy area where a solitary old man sits on a bench reading his paper while his little dog sniffs around the ground beneath it, and when we come to the thick rope at the edge of the bluff, I get a real look at the water and rocks below.
Unlike yesterday there is no fog hugging the cliffs, not a hint of a cloud in the sapphire sky that stretches huge and wide. It’s the kind of day that begs you not to waste it. I feel a tiny hitch in my chest at the thought, because it makes me think of Trent. He never wasted a single second. For him it was like a clock started the moment his feet hit the ground each day. I can remember being with him and wishing that just once he’d slow down. Be still. But it wasn’t in his nature to be that way, and it doesn’t seem to be in Colton’s either.
His fingers drum on the post in front of us, and I can feel him standing next to me, feel the nervous energy that belongs to both of us. I try to think of something, anything, to fill the quiet, but it just keeps stretching. Instead I look out over the glassy surface that surges around the enormous rocks rising out of the water. They’re scattered in clusters just offshore and have always looked more like mini-islands to me than rocks. A group of territorial-looking pelicans covers the entire top of the rock closest to shore, with one taking off or landing every few seconds. My eyes travel down the craggy face of it toward the water, where it’s been smoothed out by the constant surge of the waves, and I watch the water rise against the rock and then recede.
Colton clears his throat, kicks at a pebble on the ground. “So . . . can I ask you a question?”
I swallow hard. Clear my throat. “Okay,” I say slowly.
He takes a sip from the water bottle in his hand and looks out over it all again, long enough to make me nervous. I think of a hundred different apologies/reasons/explanations for whatever he’s about to ask me.
“You don’t like questions very much, do you?” he asks, turning to me with a look that makes me fidget with my hands.
“No, questions are fine. What kind of question is that?” God, I sound as nervous as I feel.
“Never mind,” Colton says, “it doesn’t matter.” He gives me a quick smile. “It’s not a big deal, just a day. So what if we relax and enjoy it? Have one really good day?”
I flash on one of Shelby’s blog posts. An Emerson quote she put up that she said reminded her of Colton and his attitude, and how he treated life after his surgery:
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.”
I remember reading it and thinking how he and I had both learned this truth, that any day could be the end. But we’d chosen to do different things with it. He put it into practice as soon as he could. Got back to the things he loved doing—the life he’d had before. I did the opposite. For so long. But standing here with him right now feels like a chance to try things his way.
“Okay,” I say finally. “One really good day.”
“Good. Glad that’s settled.” A wide, happy grin breaks over his face, and he turns abruptly and walks back toward his bus. I watch as he goes, and notice something I somehow missed before. A bright-yellow, double kayak strapped to the racks on top.
A vague fear materializes in a corner of my mind as he reaches up to the strap at the front of the kayak. He undoes it quickly, moves to the back one, and lowers the kayak onto the pavement with a heavy plastic thunk. I glance behind me at the rocks and the swirling water down below, which doesn’t seem quite so peaceful all of a sudden. When I look back at Colton, he slides the back door open and pulls out two paddles, which he sets carefully on top of the kayak. I stay where I am, in denial of all the pieces adding up right in front of me. We’re not actually, he’s not thinking we’re going to, I’ve never—