Goodbyes
Somehow, despite her stubbornness, Taylor had convinced Shiloh to stay home from work the next day. Her contractions hadn’t returned, she kept assuring him, but it was obvious to him that she didn’t feel well. Taking one day off wouldn’t kill her.
He had to admit that he wasn’t surprised that, as he stood by the window sipping his coffee, he saw her walking outside, fully dressed, at the time she normally left for work. What did surprise him was that she didn’t walk to her car. Instead, she cut across his yard and up his driveway.
Taylor scrambled to move away from the window before she could see him spying on her. He splashed a little coffee out of his cup as he hurried to answer the ringing doorbell. He swung the door open and, not surprisingly, found himself face to face with Shiloh.
“I thought you weren’t going to work today,” he said.
“I’m not,” she replied. “Even though I’m fine. When was the last time you visited Charlotte’s grave?”
Taylor blinked at the way she had effortlessly switched subjects and took another sip of coffee in the hopes of speeding his mind up enough to keep up with Shiloh’s pace.
“Umm, I guess at her funeral,” he admitted.
Shiloh nodded. “That’s what I figured. Me too. I think we should go today.”
“Today?”
“I’m free, you’re free, and we need to do this. We need to say goodbye to her, Tay. We need this to be over.”
He couldn’t really argue with that. He let Shiloh into the living room to wait while he finished his coffee, showered and got dressed. Shiloh might have been right, Taylor decided, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a little scared of following through with her plan. Scared wasn’t really the right word, though. What grown man was actually scared of a cemetery?
He was ashamed, though. Ashamed that in a year, he hadn’t been to her grave even once. Ashamed that he had never said goodbye to Charlotte because he hated to admit she was really gone. Ashamed that his denial of reality had been so complete that he’d had to run away several hundred miles just to put some distance between himself and the truth. Just as Zac had suggested in his letter, the distance didn’t fix anything. Running didn’t fix it.
It was time to quit running, he supposed. It was time to really accept that his fiance was gone and say goodbye to her.
They drove to the cemetery in silence. Taylor knew the way; it was the same place where his grandparents had been laid to rest years before. When he was little, he had been forced to come along with his mother every year as she laid beautiful, homemade floral arrangements on their graves. Eventually, his career kept him away too often to always assist her, and he couldn’t even remember the last time he had been there – aside from Charlotte’s funeral, that is.
When he pulled into the parking lot and shut off his car, the silence was deafening. Taylor stubbornly didn’t want to step out of his car at all, and it seemed that Shiloh felt the same.
“Rock, paper, scissors?” Taylor finally asked.
“Only you,” Shiloh replied, shaking her head, but holding out her fist nonetheless.
She lost, and with a long sigh, she stepped out of the car and began to walk into the cemetery. Taylor watched her disappear behind the gate and make her way to the fancy marble headstone that marked Charlotte’s final home. It wasn’t the home she was supposed to have, but Taylor had spared no expense on it, in spite of her parents’ protests that he shouldn’t have been the one to pay for it. He didn’t care. It was the last thing he ever got to do for her.
Taylor realized now just how meaningless of a gesture it was. He supposed this was the sort of shallowness that Shiloh constantly objected to. Throwing money at his problems wouldn’t fix them, he knew, but he hadn’t realized just how true it was until that moment.
A few minutes later, Shiloh returned to the car. She slumped down in the passenger seat and turned her head away from Taylor to hide her tears.
“Your turn,” she said, the words partially obscured by a sniffle.
Taylor didn’t say a word. He just gave her a nod and stepped out of his car. Despite only having been to her grave once, he seemed to have memorized the way there. His feet carried him easily through the rows until he found himself in front of the large headstone that he realized truly was too much. What had he been thinking, Taylor wondered. He supposed he hadn’t.
There were flowers on top of the headstone and in the small vases to either side of it. Pink lilies; Charlotte’s favorite. They were weathered, but Taylor was sure they had been his mother’s handiwork that spring. It was strange to think how everyone else’s lives had just gone on, even when he wasn’t there. Taylor knew, rationally, that they wouldn’t stop living just because he was gone. It was like coming back from the dead, though, to see just how everything had changed and stayed the same in his absence.
After a moment, he knelt down and cleared his throat.
“Charlotte, I… well, I don’t know if you can hear me at all, but you know how much I like to talk. So if I’m going to say goodbye to you, I think I need to really say it,” Taylor began. “The truth is, though, I still don’t want to say it at all. I don’t want to you to be gone. I’m not mad at you, though. I think maybe I finally understand why you did it. I just wish you could have talked to me about it. I know I couldn’t have fixed it, but I could have tried to help. Maybe together we could have saved you. I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t do any of us any good to think about things like that. You dwell on this stuff and try to figure out how you could have done it differently and you just get more and more convinced that there’s no way to go on.”
Taylor had to pause there, feeling the tears welling up as he thought about Zac.
“I know what it feels like now, you know. To think there’s no way you can possibly go on. But I also know that everyone else has to, even if I decide not to. I’m not… I’m not saying you didn’t know that. Maybe you thought you were helping us by getting yourself out of the way. God knows that’s what I thought I was doing when I ran off to Chicago. I was wrong, though. And now I’ve got a chance to fix things. I couldn’t fix you, and I was too late to fix Zac, but… well, I can be there for Shiloh and our baby. And I can live my own life again. You’d want me to do that, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t want me to just stop because you’re gone. I think that’s why you left, in a way. I think you thought you were saving me from you. Now it’s time for me to save me from myself. And I don’t know… I don’t know if I would have ever learned that lesson if this hadn’t all happened. I think I could have been a good husband to you, and a good father if… if we had had kids. But I’ll never know. I’ve just to try to be as good as I can now.”
He paused again and wiped away a few more tears. They had really started to flow and with them, his breath was hitching and catching in his throat. He played with a few blades of grass while he tried to breath a little more slowly so that he could speak again.
“I know it probably seems like I’m moving on. This… this thing with Shiloh, and the baby, and everything. But I’m always going to love you, Char. Always. I think… I think Shiloh is the only thing of you I really have left. My last connection to you. And I’m her last connection to you. And to Zac. God, I fucked things up for him, too. And I can never fix that. But I can go on. I can make sure that everyone I still have knows how much I love them. And I hope that, wherever you are, you know that, too. Goodbye, Charlotte.”
Taylor didn’t even try to hide his tears as he walked back to his car and climbed into the driver’s seat. Shiloh offered him a crumpled tissue from her purse and he accepted it gratefully. After attempting to dry his face a little, he glanced over at her.
“You feel better now?”
“No,” Shiloh replied. “You?”
“Not really.”
She nodded. “I think we will, though. I think we’ll be okay.”
“Yeah, me too,” Taylor replied.
It was hard to really see how, but he could feel it. They were together, and they were stronger than they had any right to be. They would be okay.