When We Let Go, Delancey Stewart [early reader books .txt] 📗

when Cathy died, but I’d been alone in my grief. Not for the first time, I felt thankful that Maddie and Cam had found their way back together just in time. They needed each other, and they were lucky to have one another.

I understood what Cam felt in some ways. How do you leave someone who has been such a fundamental part of your life? How do you walk away, leave the hospital and go back to your life? Just get in your car and drive away, leaving them there and returning to your life like you’d been on a visit to the grocery store or the barber? I didn’t know how to do it, and so I wasn’t much help to Cam. But I was there. And Maddie and I weren’t going anywhere until he did.

It was the tenacious nurse who finally pulled Cam away from Jess’s bedside and moved him backward so the staff could get close enough to do the things they needed to do.

“She’s gone, Cameron. And it’s time for you to let her go,” she said, standing in front of him with a practiced sympathy on her face. The fact that she had probably done this many times didn’t make her words sound less true, though. “There’s no need for you to stay here. She’s free to come with you now. She’s not bound by the body that was failing, or by the pain. Now she can stay right here with you. She’ll always be with you.” She put a small rosy hand on his heart, her fire red nails glowing against his black shirt. “She’s here now.”

Cameron stared at her, and then nodded. He thanked her quietly, placed a final kiss on Jess’s lips, and then walked out of the room.

Cam stopped walking and turned around, and Maddie’s shoulders fell. He was never going to leave the hospital. He headed back to the room.

We watched him, neither of us sure what to do.

Cam turned as he got to the door. “I forgot the book,” he said. He went inside and then reappeared, clutching the photo book to his chest.

That night was hard. We took Cam to his house, where Jess was everywhere around us. Her prescriptions were lined up on the kitchen counter, her green crocheted slippers next to the chair in the living room. Her knitting lay abandoned, a scarf half-finished, in the seat of the chair.

Cam sat at the kitchen table, turning through the pages of the book Maddie had given him. We sat with him, and I made coffee and pancakes. Cam ate a few bites and finally rose. “I’m going to get some sleep,” he said.

We both nodded.

Cam turned around a few feet from the table. “You don’t have to stay, Maddie.”

Maddie stood up. “I don’t have anywhere else I need to be. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Something softened in the lines around Cam’s mouth, and he turned without saying anything else, disappearing down a hallway. I heard a door shutting in the back of the house, and tried not to imagine how hard it would be for him to be in the room he shared with Jess, surrounded by her personal things, laying down in a bed that smelled like her. Then again, I wondered if that might be a comfort to him.

Once Cam was gone, Maddie seemed to crumble. She laid her head on her arms at the round white table and let the tears come. I sat next to her and stroked her back as she cried. After a while, I pulled her against my chest and held her.

“I can’t believe she’s gone,” she whispered softly, as if afraid that hearing the words could cause Cam any more pain than he must already feel. “I can’t believe I barely got to know her. I missed the wedding,” she said, looking into my eyes as I took her hands. “I missed everything. All the big moments. And my mom…everything.”

“You got to know Jess,” I said, knowing she felt guilty about missing her mother’s death, about letting Cameron handle it by himself. “And if your mother were here, I can’t see any way that she wouldn’t forgive you.”

She shook her head, unwilling to forgive herself the things she couldn’t change.

“Maddie,” I said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this.”

“About my family?” She looked confused.

“And mine. And you and me. The river, the past.” I took her hands and tried to channel warmth and love through my own. Her hands felt so small, so delicate. “I think we’ve made some mistakes,” I told her. “By letting the singular moments in our life define us. I’ve lived most of my life struggling with the failures I’ve known—my inability to save the people I loved. And so I let that day with you on the riverbank, and all the failures that followed, determine who I would be. I believed that those moments in time described me completely. Defined me.”

Maddie nodded, and I saw a light of understanding in her eyes.

“But I’ve been wrong. I think so many of us are wrong. The big moments in our lives? They don’t define us. What makes us who we are is the way we spend all those little moments in between. The things that we do every single day…those are our opportunities, and those reveal us in ways that our reactions in the big, adrenaline-fueled moments never could.”

She stared at me, waited for me to finish.

“I think what happened that day on the riverbank has been controlling both of us in some way. I live every day, hanging on to the one time in my life when I felt that I was in control…but if you look at the rest of my life, I’ve been in control all along. And I’ve been making choices each moment that left me where I was when we met. But I couldn’t own them. I was too busy focusing my energy on the things I’d done wrong, the places I’d left, the people I’d failed, and on that one moment where I believed I’d been a success.”

Maddie nodded. “I think I see what you’re saying.”

I smiled. “I don’t think we should forget the in-between time anymore.”

She leaned into my arms, and I felt lighter somehow. After a few moments, she stood and wiped her face. “I think there are probably some details that need to be handled.”

I nodded and we got to work.