Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen - 48

I had held out hope that Seth might return again to talk to my father and give me some kind of resolution. But as summer dwindles, so, too, does that hope. For a moment, I worry that my relationship with Max might have angered his ghost, but I remind myself that Seth was never the jealous type.

Labor Day comes and goes, and the activity in Locust begins to ebb. My father has quieted as well, speaking less and less, eating less and less, walking less and less. One morning when he isn’t interested in breakfast, his favorite meal of the day, I take him to the doctor to have him checked out. This time, his MRI shows evidence of two additional TIAs.

“Likely in his sleep,” she explains. “They can be very subtle.”

For a moment, my instinct is to feel guilty about not noticing sooner, or not being more vigilant. But this time, I stop myself from indulging in self-blame.

“What’s causing them?” I ask.

“In his case, it’s likely a combination of age-related factors.” None of them are dire, she tells me, but none of them are good. She advises me to keep his stress level low, prescribes a few new medications, and sends us on our way.

On our drive home, my father hums softly as I roll down the windows to let in the last gasp of summer. There is a particular richness to early September, when the sunlight is broad and lazy. Everything is holding on to life, but not as resolutely as it did in the earlier months of the season. Even the birdsong that sparkles through the canopy is a little off-tune, as if the birds are relaxed and tipsy after a spring and summer of diligent work (nest building, egg laying, chick rearing). It’s the end of the party, and all of nature is stumbling home, spent and satisfied. A breeze rustles the ferns along the road, and every once in a while, I get a quick whiff of decay, a reminder of the inevitable.

For the next while, we carry on gently, taking things day by day, night by night. My father doesn’t seem to be getting worse, but he is more subdued than he was even a month ago. I hope the halting of our project hasn’t dampened his spirit.

One evening at dusk, I hear the crunch of tires in the driveway. Though we have stopped accepting visitors since my father’s first TIA, a few have showed up unannounced, and I’ve had to turn them away. This evening, I leave him sitting by the fire and go out front to shoo away whomever it is.

When I open the door, there is a woman getting out of a black pickup truck. She is pretty in a plain way: no makeup, comfortable-looking wrinkles on her face, and thick hair that is somewhere between blond and gray.

“Hi there,” I say. “I’m so sorry, but we’re not accepting visitors anymore.”

“Cricket?” She looks hopeful.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Oh,” she says, with a bit of apprehension. “I’m not here for the oracle. I’m actually here to see you.”

This is a shock. No one comes to see me.

“I’m Jill,” she says, touching her chest lightly. There’s something familiar about her, but the name doesn’t ring a bell. “Atwater. I’m Seth’s mom.”

My breath catches in my throat. With her wavy hair and simple features, there’s no question that this woman is where Seth originated. It takes me a minute to gather myself before I invite her in.

I offer her a seat by the fire and introduce her to my father, discreetly explaining that he isn’t doing very well lately. She gives him a smile, which he reciprocates before turning his attention back to the cat on his lap. I retreat to the kitchen to make tea and collect myself. Jill’s visit feels both unforeseen and inevitable. Maybe all this time, while I thought I was waiting for Seth to come back, it was actually Jill who was on her way.

When I return to the great room, I settle into a chair and set our tea down on the side table between us.

“Mrs. Atwater…”

“Jill,” she corrects me with a smile, as if I’ve told a joke that she appreciates.

“Okay. Jill. I barely know what to say.”

“I should have given you some warning, but honestly, this wasn’t something I planned,” she says, clearly trying to put me at ease. “I’ve always wanted to meet you, and I thought about seeking you out a few times, but I didn’t want to intrude on your life. I’m here this week to help my sister clear some things out of her house. Did you hear they finally sold it?”

“I didn’t know it was official,” I say. “So Gemma is really doing this…”

Jill wrinkles her brow, confused.

“The woman who bought it. Her name is Gemma Dwyer, right?”

Jill shakes her head. “I think she bid on it, but there was something about her funding falling through. In the end, it sold to a family who plans to restore it in the old Adirondack style.”

“Really?” I can’t hide my relief. “I’m so happy to hear that. It always had the potential to be really beautiful.”

“In the right hands.” Jill smiles knowingly. “Anyway, I found a few things I think might be yours. And I’m leaving tomorrow, so I finally mustered the courage to drive over here. I’m sorry I didn’t call first. We couldn’t seem to find a number for you.”

“That’s okay,” I say, reassured by her gentle manner. “I’m glad you came.”

Now she looks reassured by me. Memories start to slosh around my mind like waves, and I say, “I didn’t realize you and your sister were…”

“We weren’t close for a long time. But we reconciled—eventually—after she divorced her jackass husband.”

I smile. My father used to describe Rod Seavey the exact same way.

We begin to settle into what feels like a shared understanding. The thing that exists between us is delicate but defining. We dance around the topic of Seth’s death for a while, but eventually, it must be faced.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’ve gone over it a million times in my head. I’ve tormented myself with all the ways I could have prevented the accident if I had just done this or that differently.”

“Oh, Cricket,” says Jill. “Please don’t torture yourself with that. It was in no way your fault. It was a tragedy, plain and simple.”

“I know that’s what the adults have to say.” I keep forgetting that I am supposedly an adult now.

“Well, I’m saying it because it’s the truth. I hope you don’t think I came here to forgive you.” She holds my eye contact to make sure I’m listening. “I came here to thank you.”

“Thank me? For what?”

“I don’t know the extent of what went on between you and Seth that summer, but I know that it was something really special. It changed him, and I’m so glad he got to experience it.”

She hands me the box she brought with her, and I open it. Inside are a handful of photos: Seth and me in a canoe, Seth pulling me off our dock into the water, Seth and me curled up in sweatshirts by a bonfire. At the bottom of the pile is the Polaroid Seth took of me jumping off the boulder. I am airborne and ecstatic, plummeting toward the water below, my brown hair flying.

“I had never seen these until this week,” she said. “But they made me realize how far I’ve come, how well I’ve healed. Looking through them didn’t break my heart, like it would have years ago. Instead, it brought me joy. It gave me a glimpse of the happiness Seth experienced with you that summer.”

I look at her in near disbelief, searching for at least a modicum of resentment or regret, but there is none.

“And I found this.” She hands me a list, written in Seth’s scratchy handwriting. He must have scrawled it just before he left at the end of that summer.

We both laugh at the hesitation of the final line.

“But we never got to meet, because I broke up with him.” I put my hands over my face and shake my head. “I was such a mess.”

“Have you ever met a sixteen-year-old who isn’t?” asks Jill.

“I didn’t mean to break his heart.”

“Oh, Cricket. I know. He knew it, too, by the way. He was sad, but certainly not deterred.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was confident you’d find your way back to each other. You were his first love.”

“Oh, I don’t think I was. He was mine, but I wasn’t his.”

She bats my comment away. “Of course you were. You were the only one I ever heard about, anyway. And when I found this list in his cabin, it made me want to meet the person that Seth cared so much about. So here we are, and you’re everything I hoped you would be.”

I touch the ends of my unwashed hair and look down to see that I am wearing the cat-face shirt again. Damn it.

“I really admire that you are taking care of your father. It must be challenging,” she says, looking around at our house. “But this is love in action. You’re a good daughter.”

I feel the tears start to come. Jill is saying the kinds of things that I wish my own mother would say to me, or at the very least think about me. It’s so unexpected to receive this type of affirmation from anyone, let alone a stranger—though in some ways, she isn’t one.

We end up talking for over an hour. Jill tells me about the harrowing years immediately after Seth died, how she could barely function from grief, how she wasn’t sure she would be able to live without him.

“I had all this mom energy and nowhere to put it, and I felt completely stuck. I had had Seth when I was so young—just twenty-four—and hadn’t thought much about a career yet. I was an administrative assistant at a law firm for most of his life, and just assumed that’s what I would do forever. But at one point, Seth began to say, ‘Mom, you work just as hard as those lawyers. You might as well become one.’ It was sort of our joke, but once he was gone, I started to really consider it. Eventually I did go to law school, and now I’m a real estate attorney.”

“Wow. I really admire that,” I say. “I can’t seem to find my own professional footing.”

“It takes time. For me, it took a tragedy to really light that fire. Not that I wouldn’t give it all up to have Seth back, but in a way, his death forced me to reinvent myself. I had no choice. When something dies, something else needs to be reborn. I had to use all the love I had for Seth and turn it toward myself. And I realized that even though I will always be devastated, I can be happy, too. I can be both.”

“Wow,” I say again. Despite the unthinkability of losing her only child, Jill has used these ten years to heal more effectively than I have. “I could use a rebirth.”

“Who’s to say you aren’t having one right now?”

Initially, I’m not sure if I should tell Jill about my father’s visits from Seth, but now that she has shared so much with me, I see no need to hold back. I tell her everything—my father’s visions, my recurring dream. As I speak, Jill nods slowly and patiently. When I finish, I can’t tell whether she is convinced or concerned.

“You don’t have to believe me,” I say. “I know it’s far-fetched.”

“Of course I believe you. He’s here. I can feel it.” She doesn’t strike me as the woo-woo type, and she says this matter-of-factly. “It’s the energy. I can’t explain it, but I’ve been across the pond all week, and even though his stuff was there, he wasn’t. And now I know why.” She looks around. “My boy is here.”

I am overcome by a feeling of tranquility and completeness—the opposite of FOMO. In this moment, it seems everything that matters is coalescing in this room, only some of it visible.

Neither of us try to restrain our tears, and we laugh as we see that my father has fallen fast asleep despite our blubbering. When Jill finally leaves, she pulls me in for a long hug.

“Thank you for helping me connect to Seth in this way,” she says. “This was such a gift.”

As I watch her truck pull away, I know that she has given me a gift, too: the feeling of being both mothered and understood. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed those things, and I never knew heartbreak and healing could be so intertwined.