“No, you go on,” Sienna says, sitting at the bar eating a bowl of cereal. “I’m a big girl. I can stay by myself.”
I grab an orange juice from the fridge and come around the counter toward her, leaning down and pressing my lips to her forehead.
“I’ll only be gone a few hours,” I say. “Do whatever you want. Eat and drink whatever you can find. Hell, you can even trash Seth’s room for fun if you get bored—I’ll tell him I did it.”
She laughs quietly and swallows her food before speaking up.
“I’m more likely to clean his room than to trash it,” she says.
“I’m sure he’d love that,” I tell her in jest and kiss her lips. “I’ll be back soon.”
“All right,” she says and kisses me back. “I’ll be making myself at home.”
Yeah, babe, you do that … I smile thoughtfully, kiss her one more time, grab my keys from the counter, and head out the front door.
Braedon needs me to work at the shop today, and since I’ve pretty much been on vacation since Sienna came here, I didn’t want to let him down.
On the drive to Big Wave Surf Shop not far from my house, I crank up the radio and sing like a loud idiot all the way there. Damn, it’s like I’m love-struck or something. And the funny thing is I’m not ashamed of it and feel like I could sing outside of the car, in the middle of the street in front of everyone and not give a damn that I suck.
This girl has made me crazy. Good-crazy. The kind that makes you want to do dumb shit and forgive all your enemies and not flip the guy off who cut you off on the highway. I can’t stop smiling. It really feels like my face is sort of stuck like this. I try to not smile and it only makes me smile bigger. What the hell?
I have the urge to paint all of a sudden. But with brighter colors. Sunlight. Blue water instead of gray or black. A breeze instead of a storm. A drizzle instead of a downpour. Sienna is a light in the darkness that my life has been since Landon died. I hoped that one day I could see it again, the light—I guess I just never knew how bright it could be.
TWENTY-NINE
Sienna
It’s so quiet here with Luke gone, quiet in the sense that I can hear everything else: the ocean, the breeze brushing through the trees, the birds. But mostly what I hear are a hundred thoughts in my head, trying to get my attention. I hear a few of them screaming, and I know they’re there, but I’m not sure what they’re trying to tell me, and a big part of me doesn’t want to know. I settle with the thoughts that make me smile. The ones of Luke and me and the amazing two weeks we’ve spent together, and the future I hope we spend together.
Eventually I go out onto the lanai and look out at the ocean for a little while. I text Paige and my mom to let them know how I’m doing. And then I decide to clean the place up, though I stay away from Seth’s room—it scares me to think of what might be in there. After an hour I’ve run out of things to do, and I go into the living room and sift through the DVDs stacked in and around the small entertainment center. Running my fingers over the titles, I eventually come to a section of jewel cases that have no labels on the spine and one by one I pull them out and read the Sharpie text scribbled across the front.
They’re all BASE jumping DVDs.
I shove them back down into a neat stack, along with those thoughts in my head that suddenly started screaming again.
Then I come to a small section of documentaries and stuff that originally aired on the History and Discovery and National Geographic channels. One in particular catches my attention—Journey to the Center.
When I first look at the plastic cover, something heartbreaking washes over me, something familiar—a great wall of rock climbs two thousand feet into the sky in a deep tunnel-like formation, blanketed by lush green that crawls the stone, gripping and tearing its way to the top, where beams of bright sunlight pierce the shadows cast by the scaling rock above. And at the top, three figures hang from a cable that stretches from one side to the other.
The image is the same as the giant painting of Luke’s that I saw on the wall at the community center, with just a few differences—the men on the cable the most noticeable. It’s also the same image as the one I saw Luke working on the night I came back here, and as many of the other paintings in that room just down the hall. Different angles. Different lighting. Different weather. Many differences, but all of them of the same thing, the place I privately called the Bottom of the World.
My heart sinks into my stomach.
It all becomes clear to me in an instant—I think all along most of it was there, digging through my subconscious, but I haven’t truly seen the full picture until now: the paintings of this fateful place where his brother died; how he fell back into their darkness and their colors and their power the moment I left him and went back to Oahu; Kendra telling me, Since you came here he’s changed. He’s happier … He’s just better around you, and Alicia telling me, Ever since you came around, he seems a lot happier … Instead of getting better, he just seemed to be getting worse up until recently, and I hate to see Luke falling back into that dark place once you’re gone.
That strange, unfamiliar, dark feeling I had before finally has a name—punishing bereavement—and those questions finally have devastating answers:
Is Luke latching on to me for the right reasons?
No.
Have I become something he needs for all the wrong reasons? Yes.
A deep, burrowing pain, like a fist in my chest, drills its way into the depths of my heart. I know it’s true, that Luke may care deeply for me; he may want to love me unlike he’s ever loved anyone—but not more than his brother. Because he hasn’t made peace with his brother’s death; he hasn’t forgiven himself, and until he can, Luke will live in darkness.