Eden comes to sit beside me on the couch, curling her legs under her and tucking her hands between her knees to warm them. I inhale the clean smell of her shampoo and the lightly sweet perfume or body lotion that she wears. Whatever it is, the scent suits her perfectly.
“Seriously, what’s the matter? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
My smile is more bitter than anything. “That’s the problem. Only reverse.”
“The reverse? What’s that mean?”
I sigh and let the paper drift out of my fingers to settle silently on the wooden coffee table in front of me. Like letting go of a memory and watching it drift off into nothingness. Only I don’t want to do that.
“Everybody in this town thinks I’m crazy,” I begin. “Did you know that?” She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t need to. The answer is right there in her expressive eyes. They tell me more than what she’d be comfortable with sometimes, I think. “I’m not surprised. It’s probably a juicy topic of conversation in a place like this. If gossip had headlines, I’m sure they’d read, ‘Ex Football Pro Talks to Dead Daughter On Beach’.” I pause, gathering my thoughts, choosing my words carefully as I toy with one edge of Emmy’s picture. My fingers are drawn to it over and over. “I’m not crazy, Eden. I wanted to see Charity. I wanted to hear her voice. I wanted it so badly that I could see her. And hear her. But I knew she wasn’t really there. Not even in ghost form. It was just my way of keeping her alive. Of never forgetting even one small detail about her, like the way her voice sounded.”
I take a deep breath and rub my hand over my face, forcing myself to sit back and let go of the paper. “It was always strongest at the beach. Making those sandcastles. Until today.” I close my eyes. My chest feels tight just thinking about this. About losing Charity.
Eden’s voice is whisper quiet. “What do you mean?”
I don’t look at her. I can’t. “I didn’t hear her today. Didn’t see her. I wanted to. I did everything right. Just like I always do. The flowers. The castle. The pocketful of sand. But she wasn’t there. In my mind, she just wasn’t there.”
“Why? What happened?”
I roll my head on the cushion and look at Eden. Her features are as beautiful as ever in the flickering firelight. I’m glad she’s kept it going. I don’t know why, but I am. It seems to be…symbolic somehow.
I study her. As always, her eyes tell the tale. There’s trepidation in them. Dread. “You happened. Emmy happened.”
“Cole, I–”
I interrupt because I need to get this out. Now that the guilt is eating me alive. “I wasn’t looking for anybody, Eden. I wasn’t trying to move on or get over her, to find something more in life. I was content in my misery.” I pause. “I had no intention of pursuing you, even though I felt like I’d been hit with a sledgehammer when I saw you on the beach that day. But still, I wasn’t going to do anything about it. Only I couldn’t stay away.”
“Cole, I never–”
“I know, I know. I didn’t either. But I did. You did. We did. And now…today, all I could think about was you. How I didn’t want to leave you this morning. How anxious I was to see you again at dinner. To see you with Emmy. To see her smile and maybe hear her voice. Just once. And because I took you with me, there was no room for my daughter.”
I sound bitter. Resentful. I don’t mean to. It just came out that way. I should apologize. But I feel like that would be an even bigger betrayal to Charity.
I’m filled with dread as I wait for Eden to respond. I wouldn’t be surprised if she told me to leave.
“Cole, did you consider that maybe you’re just finding some healthy middle ground?”
I turn to look at her. She doesn’t appear mad or hurt. She just seems…calm. She sounds calm, too. Calm and practical.
“How can forgetting my dead daughter ever be healthy?”
“You’re not forgetting her. You’re sitting here talking about her. You went to the beach today to honor her memory. That’s not forgetting her. But Cole, I doubt it’s a healthy coping mechanism to imagine seeing and hearing her. Don’t you think that maybe this is the healthy way to grieve? To think of her, talk about her. Visit places she loved.”
I study Eden. Why am I angry right now? Is it because I feel like she’s trying to replace my daughter with her own? Or is it because she and Emmy are disrupting the delicate balance I had between living and grieving? Or am I just mad at myself?
Eden reaches for my hand, laces her fingers through mine. I jerk slightly, my first instinct to pull away because of what I’m thinking, how I’m feeling. But she won’t let me. She just tightens her grip. Like she’s tightened her grip on me.
“She wouldn’t blame you for being happy, you know.”
And there it is.
The guilt.
This is what’s eating at me–guilt. The guilt of finding someone, of moving on when I had no intention of moving on. Of letting anything other than Charity be the focus of my life.
I pull away and stand, pacing to the other end of the living room. “You wouldn’t understand,” I tell her coldly. That’s how I feel–cold.
“I’ve never been through what you’ve been through, Cole, no, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand. She was your child. She would want you to be happy. She would never want you to sacrifice your life to somehow memorialize her. Accidents happen. Even if she were here, she wouldn’t blame you.”