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I wasn’t in Cousins. Conrad and I weren’t together, and Susannah was dead.
When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really and truly gone?
I’d thought I’d be in Cousins every summer of my life. The summer house was the only place I wanted to be. It was the only place I ever wanted to be.
Conrad wasn’t just my first love. He wasn’t some rite of passage. He was so much more than that. He
and Jeremiah and Susannah were my family.
This, this was heartbreak. The pain in your chest, the ache
behind your eyes. The knowing that things will never be the same again.
There are moments in life that you wish with all your heart you could take back. Like, just erase from existence. Like, if you could, you’d erase yourself right out of existence too, just to make that moment not exist.
On the day of his mother’s funeral, to the boy I loved more than I had ever loved anything or anyone, I said, “Go to hell.”
“I never want to see you again,” I said, and then I pushed past him, and I ran up the staircase so fast I tripped on the top step. I fell right onto my
knees, hard. I think I heard someone gasp. I could barely see through my tears. Blindly, I got back up and ran to the guest room. I took off my glasses and lay down on the bed and cried.
When I was near her, I just wanted to grab her and hold her and kiss the shit out of her. Maybe then she’d finally forget about my asshole of a brother.
I didn’t regret it. I never regretted it, not for one second. How do you regret one of the best nights of your entire life? You don’t. You remember every word, every look. Even when it hurts, you still remember.
The sky was pinky gold. I had the feeling that there was nothing more beautiful than this, that this particular sunset matched the beauty of anything in this world, ten times over. I could feel all the tension of the day drifting away from me and out to sea. I wanted to memorize it all in case I didn’t get to come back again. You never know the last time you’ll see a place. A person.
It took a minute for everything to sink in. Conrad didn’t just run away to surf. He didn’t run away for the sake of running away. He came to save the house.
“You didn’t lose her. You left her. You don’t know the first thing about what she would have wanted. You were never there. You
were a shitty dad and an even shittier husband. So don’t bother trying to do the right thing now. You just fuck it all up.”
“What kind of guy cheats on his wife and then leaves her when she has cancer? What kind of man does that? I can’t even stand to look at him. He makes me sick, playing the martyr now, the grieving widower.
But I had loved him. I loved him longer and truer than I had anyone in my whole life and I would probably never love anyone that way again. Which, to be honest, was almost a relief.
It wasn’t enough to know that deep down, he loved me. You had to actually say it to somebody, show them that you cared. And he just didn’t. Not enough.
“Go to Jeremiah. He’s the one who wants you,” Conrad said. “I don’t. I never did.”
I will never look at you in the same way ever again. I’ll never be that girl again. The girl who comes running back every time you push her away, the girl who loves you anyway.
