A life for a life, she thought. God’s cruel trick.
She suddenly flashed on the image of the two of them holding hands and wandering in a field of wildflowers. And when the tears finally came, she wept for Dawson, and for all of the days they would never know together. Until perhaps, like Tuck and Clara, their ashes somehow found each other in a sunny field, far away from the beaten path of ordinary lives.
Epilogue
Two years later
Amanda slipped two pans of lasagna into the refrigerator, before peering into the oven to check on the cake. Though Jared wouldn’t turn twenty-one for another couple of months, she’d come to think of June 23 as a kind of second birthday for him. On this day two years ago, he’d received a new heart; on that day he’d been given a second chance at life. If that wasn’t worth celebrating, she wasn’t sure that anything was.
She was alone in the house. Frank was at work, Annette hadn’t yet returned from a slumber party at her friend’s house, and Lynn was working her summer job at the Gap. Meanwhile, Jared planned to enjoy one of his last free days before his internship at a capital management firm began, by playing softball with a group of friends. Amanda had warned him that it was going to be hot out there and made him promise to drink lots of water.
“I’ll be careful,” he’d assured her before leaving for the softball field. These days, Jared—maybe because he was maturing, or maybe because of all that had happened to him—seemed to understand that worry went hand in hand with motherhood.
He hadn’t always been so tolerant. In the aftermath of the accident, everything seemed to rub him the wrong way. If she looked at him with concern, he claimed she was suffocating him; if she tried to start a conversation, he often snapped at her. She understood the reasons behind his ill temper; his recovery was painful, and the drugs he took often made him nauseated. Muscles that had once been strong began to atrophy despite physiotherapy, underscoring his sense of helplessness. His emotional recovery was complicated by the fact that unlike many transplant patients, who’d been waiting and hoping for a chance to add years to their lives, Jared couldn’t help feeling that years of his life had been taken away. He sometimes lashed out at friends when they came to see him, and Melody, the girl he’d been so interested in that fateful weekend, informed him a few weeks after the accident that she was dating someone else. Visibly depressed, Jared decided to take the year off from school.
It was a long and sometimes discouraging road, but with the help of his therapist, Jared gradually began to rebound. The therapist also suggested that Frank and Amanda meet with her regularly to talk about Jared’s challenges, and how they could best respond to and support him. Given their own marital history, it was sometimes hard for them to set aside their own conflicts in order to provide Jared with the security and encouragement he needed; but in the end, their love for their son came before everything else. They did what they could to support Jared as he moved steadily through periods of grief, loss, and rage to get to a point where he finally began to accept his new circumstances.
Early last summer, he’d signed up for an economics class at the local community college, and to Amanda and Frank’s enormous pride and relief he announced soon thereafter that he’d decided to re-enroll full-time at Davidson in the fall. Later that same week he’d mentioned over dinner, in an almost offhand way, that he’d read about a man who’d lived thirty-one years after his heart transplant. Since medicine was improving every year, he figured he’d be able to live even longer.
Once he was back in school, his spirits continued to lift. After consulting with his doctors, he took up running, working up to the point where he now ran six miles a day. He started going to the gym three or four times a week, gradually regaining the physique he’d once had. Fascinated by the course he had taken in the summer, he decided to focus on economics when he returned to Davidson. Within weeks of returning to school, he met another prospective economics major, a girl named Lauren. The two of them had fallen head over heels in love, and they’d even begun to talk about getting married after they graduated. For the past two weeks, they’d been on a mission trip to Haiti, sponsored by her church.
Aside from diligently taking his medications and abstaining from alcohol, Jared, for the most part, now lived the life of an ordinary twenty-one-year-old. Even so, he didn’t begrudge his mother’s desire to bake him a cake to celebrate the transplant. After two years, he’d finally reached the point where, despite everything, he considered himself lucky.
There was, however, a recent twist in Jared’s thinking that Amanda wasn’t sure how to handle. A few evenings ago, while she’d been loading dishes into the dishwasher, Jared had joined her in the kitchen, stopping to lean against the counter.
“Hey, Mom? Are you going to do that charity thing for Duke this fall?”
In the past, he’d always referred to her fund-raising luncheons as things. For obvious reasons, since the accident, she hadn’t hosted the event, nor had she been volunteering at the hospital. Amanda nodded. “Yes. They asked me to take over as the chairperson again.”
“Because they botched it the last couple of years without you, right? That’s what Lauren’s mom said.”
“They didn’t botch the events. They just didn’t go as well as planned.”
“I’m glad you’re doing it again. For Bea, I mean.”
She smiled. “Me, too.”
“The hospital likes it, too, right? Because you’re raising money?”
She reached for a towel and dried her hands, studying him. “Why are you suddenly so interested?”
Jared absently scratched at his scar through his T-shirt. “I was hoping that you could use your contacts at the hospital to find something out for me,” he said. “It’s something I’ve been wondering about.”
With the cake cooling on the counter, Amanda stepped out onto the back porch and inspected the lawn. Despite the automatic sprinklers that Frank had installed last year, the grass was dying in spots as the roots withered away. Before he’d gone to work this morning, she’d seen him standing over one of the dull brown patches, his face grim. In the past couple of years, Frank had become fanatical about the lawn. Unlike most of the neighbors, Frank insisted on doing his own mowing, telling anyone who asked that it helped him relax after a day spent filling cavities and shaping crowns at the office. Though she supposed there was some truth in that, there was also something compulsive about his habits. Rain or shine, he mowed every other day, making checkerboard patterns in the lawn.
Despite her initial skepticism, Frank hadn’t had a single beer or even a sip of wine since the day of the accident. At the hospital, he’d sworn he was stopping for good, and to his credit, he’d kept his vow. After two years, she no longer expected him to slip back into his old ways at any moment, and that was a big part of the reason things between them had improved. It wasn’t a perfect relationship by any means, but it wasn’t as terrible as it once had been, either. In the days and weeks following the accident, arguments between them had been an almost nightly occurrence. Pain and guilt and anger had sharpened their words into blades, and they often lashed out at each other. Frank slept in the guest room for months, and in the mornings, eye contact between them was rare.
As difficult as those months had been, Amanda could never bring herself to take the final step of filing for divorce. Given Jared’s fragile emotional state, she couldn’t imagine traumatizing him any further. What she didn’t realize was that her resolve to keep the family intact wasn’t having the intended effect. A few months after Jared came home from the hospital, Frank was talking to Jared in the living room when Amanda walked in. As had become the pattern by then, Frank got up and left the room. Jared watched him go before turning to his mom.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Jared said to her. “I was the one driving.”
“I know.”
“Then stop blaming him,” he said.
Ironically, it was Jared’s psychologist who ultimately convinced her and Frank to seek counseling for their troubled relationship. The tension at home was affecting Jared’s recovery, she pointed out, and if they truly cared about helping their son, they should consider seeking couples counseling themselves. Without a stable home environment, Jared would have difficulty accepting and coping with his new circumstances.
Amanda and Frank drove in separate cars to their first appointment with the counselor, who Jared’s psychologist had referred them to. Their first session degenerated into the kind of argument they’d been having for months. By the second session they were actually able to talk without raising their voices. And at the counselor’s gentle but firm urging, Frank began attending AA meetings as well, much to Amanda’s relief. In the beginning, he went five nights a week, but lately it was down to one, and three months ago Frank had become a sponsor. He met regularly for breakfast with a thirty-four-year-old recently divorced banker who, unlike Frank, had been unable to achieve sobriety. Until then Amanda had not allowed herself to believe that Frank was actually going to be successful in the long term.
There was no question that Jared and the girls had benefited from the improved atmosphere at home. There had even been moments recently when Amanda considered it a new beginning for her and Frank. When they talked these days, the past was seldom front and center; now they were able to laugh occasionally in each other’s company. Every Friday, they went on a date—another recommendation of the couples counselor—and while it still felt stilted at times, both of them knew it was important. They were, in many ways, getting to know each other again, for the first time in years.
There was something satisfying in that, but Amanda knew that theirs would never be a passionate marriage. Frank wasn’t, nor ever had been, wired that way, and it didn’t bother her. After all, she had known the kind of love that was worth risking everything for, the kind of love that was as rare as a glimpse of heaven.
Two years. Two years had elapsed since her weekend with Dawson Cole; two long years since the day Morgan Tanner had called to tell her that he’d passed away.
She kept the letters, along with Tuck and Clara’s photograph and the four-leaf clover, stashed in the bottom of her pajama drawer, a place where Frank would never look. Every now and then, when the ache she felt at his loss was especially strong, she’d pull those items out. She’d reread the letters and twirl the four-leaf clover between her fingers, wondering who they’d truly been to each other that weekend. They were in love, but they hadn’t been lovers; they were friends and yet also strangers after so many years. But their passion had been real, as undeniable as the ground she stood on.
Last year, a couple of days after the anniversary of Dawson’s death, she’d made a trip to Oriental. Turning in at the town cemetery, she’d hiked out to the very edge of the property, where a small rise overlooked a copse of leafy trees. It was here that Dawson’s remains were buried, far from the Coles, and even farther from the plots of the Bennetts and the Colliers. As she stood over the simple headstone, gazing at the freshly cut lilies that someone had laid there, she imagined that if by some twist of fate she was buried in the Collier plot of this very same cemetery, their souls would eventually find each other—just as they had in life, not once but twice.
On the way out, she made a detour to pay respects on Dawson’s behalf at the grave of Dr. Bonner. And there, before his headstone, she saw an identical bouquet of lilies. Marilyn Bonner’s handiwork on both counts, she guessed, because of what Dawson had done for Alan, and the realization left her wiping her eyes as she made her way back toward her car.
Time had done nothing to diminish her memories of Dawson; if anything, her feelings for him had deepened. In a strange way, his love had given her the resolve she’d needed to make it through the hardships of the last two years.
Now, sitting on her porch as the late afternoon sun slanted through the trees, she closed her eyes and sent a silent message to him. She remembered his smile and the way his hand had felt in hers, she remembered the weekend they’d spent, and tomorrow, she’d remember it all once more. To forget him or anything about the weekend they’d shared would be a betrayal, and if there was anything Dawson deserved, it was loyalty—the same kind of loyalty he’d showed her in the long years they had spent apart. She’d loved him once and had loved him again, and nothing would ever change the way she felt. After all, Dawson had renewed her life in a way she’d never imagined possible.
Amanda put the lasagna into the oven to bake and was tossing a salad just as Annette returned home. Frank walked in a few minutes later. After giving Amanda a quick kiss, he caught up briefly with her before heading down the hall to change. Annette, chattering nonstop about the slumber party, added frosting to the cake.
Jared was next to arrive, with three friends in tow. After downing a glass of water, he went off to shower while his friends settled on the couch in the den to play video games.
Lynn pulled in half an hour later. To her surprise, Lynn was accompanied by two friends of her own. All of the young people instinctively migrated to the kitchen, Jared’s friends flirting with Lynn’s, asking what the girls were going to do later and hinting that they might be interested in coming along. Annette hugged Frank, who’d returned to the kitchen, begging him to take her to see some tween girls’ movie; Frank chugged his Diet Snapple, teasing her with promises of seeing something with guns and explosions instead, eliciting squeals of protest from Annette.
Amanda watched all of it as a casual observer might, a bemused smile lighting up her face. Getting the whole family together for dinner wasn’t exactly rare these days, but it wasn’t all that common, either. The fact that there were others here didn’t bother her in the slightest; it would make dinner a lively affair for all.