Forever

    Lila hit her mom at full force and wrapped her arms around her, sobbing.  Mrs. Peters turned away from her conversation, surprised, automatically reaching to comfort her hysterical seven year old.

    “What?” she asked frantically. “What is it?”

    Lila sniffled, blowing her nose on the edge of her mother’s coat.  “That boy pushed me off the top of the slide!”  She wailed. “I was gonna slide down it and I was at the top and he was behind me and he pushed me and I was on the ground and my hand hurts and I’m dirty ‘cause I was on the ground and I hurt and it’s his fault ‘cause he pushed me when I didn’t even do anything to him!” Her words were a torrent of sound, some of it meaningless as syllables were slurred together and hidden beneath heavy sobs, but Mrs. Peters picked up the gist.

    She got down on her knees to look her daughter square in the eye.

    “Sweetie, don’t cry,” she said knowingly. “He likes you, is all. Little boys are mean when they like you, because they don’t know how to express their feelings.”

    Lila paused mid-sob, wiping snot off her upper lip as she considered that.

    “Boys suck at feelings,” she said decisively after a moment.

    “They sure do, baby,” her mother responded with a certain sadness to her tone that Lila was too young and too naïve to pick up on.

    Across the playground, John watched as the little girl with the wispy blonde hair and wide blue eyes dried her tears on her mother’s arm and returned to the playground to complete her turn on the slide. He hadn’t meant to push her, really, or at least he hadn’t meant to hurt her. In his mind, she had laughed.

    As her feet hit the ground at the bottom of the slide, this time ending up where they were supposed to, he approached her uncertainly.

    “I’m sorry,” he said, blunt in his awkwardness. It was the first time in his eight years that he had apologized to anyone without his mother forcing him to. The little girl’s smile dimmed when she saw him. She crossed her arms over her chest, trying to narrow her eyes like a grown-up. It was cute, and John laughed.  “You’re just a baby!” he told her. “What are you, six? You’re a tiny little baby girl!”

    Lila took her tiny little baby hands and slapped them across his face.

In spite of their rocky start, an hour later John and Lila were side by side tunneling through the sand pit. The sun was warm and golden as it started to near the horizon, shafts of light slanting through beautiful green late-summer leaves. Mothers and nannies started to call for their children and head out of the park as the setting sun set the sky on fire.

    It was a good day for a beginning.

…

    A sixteen year old Lila held her mother’s hand as the older woman broke down in front of sixty or seventy of their closest friends and relatives.

    Mrs. Peters couldn’t be blamed, really. It’s totally acceptable to break down, regardless of the number of friends in attendance, when your mother’s coffin is being lowered into the earth.

    Lila had a tear or two to spare, as well, mostly for her mother’s pain. She had never been close with her Gramma. The warm, fuzzy, homemade-cookies sort of grandmothers that other kids seemed to have were a myth to her. She had met Gramma Peters a handful of times to exchange pleasantries, and once at a baby shower. The stiff, elderly woman had expressed the opinion that Lila was a bit on the chubby side.

    They had all known it was coming, too. The cancer had taken months. However, as the funeral progressed and others stood up to say what they had to say, Lila felt her rational, carefully pieced-together self coming loose at the seams. A not-so-rational sense of loss struck deep into her heart, choking her up.

    She wondered, if she had tried to reach out to her Gramma, called or written letters or offered to spend an afternoon, if they could have had a relationship.

    Lila excused herself from the mob of faceless friends and relatives, ducking down a deserted hallway in the empty, echoing church. She leaned against a wall and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop the shaking, trying to hold herself together. She couldn’t do it.

    A second pair of arms wrapped around her. Lila looked up into a face she hadn’t seen in years. She remembered him, though, even though the last time she saw him they had been kids, playing together in the park for the last summer before John had gone away to boarding school.

    “You’re back,” she said, too surprised to say anything else. “You’re here.”

He nodded and shrugged off his fancy dress jacket, wrapping it around her like that might stop the shaking. Then he pulled her tighter against him, tucking her head under his chin.

“I’m here,” was all he said, but somehow the empty, echoing church no longer felt so empty.

…

    “Def Leppard?” John scoffed, tossing the CD on the pile with the others even though he knew full well it went on the top shelf, in the place of honor and easy accessibility deserving of her favorite band.  “Baby girl, we need to get you some music from this century.”

    He was lying on his side on her bed, going through CD’s from her music wall. She let him, even though he always left it a mess, because even though he teased she knew he would listen to them with her.

    “Music from this century isn’t the same,” Lila told him. She picked up the CD he’d discarded with the others, moving to put it back where it belonged, but he grabbed her waist and pulled her down hard.

    “You look beautiful,” he whispered against her lips. Lila laughed softly, curling up against his chest. She loved the freedom of her own space, and had picked this place out almost as soon as she turned eighteen. No overprotective mother here, no curfew, no rules. No judgment.

    She hated the judgment most of all.

    John kissed her, his hand tangling in her hair.

…

    The waiting room was white and warm and sleepy, full of elderly patients and worried mothers. All around Lila, people were caught up with their own worries, their own worlds. Outside, the night sky was too hazy to see the stars.

    Lila couldn’t feel her hands.

    She wondered if that was a symptom, or if she was just going crazy. Or in shock.

    She wished John was here. Instead, her mother was perched on the uncomfortable paisley chair next to her, her face molded into The Ice Queen. The Ice Queen was around a lot, ever since Dad had left years ago.

    The nurse came out into the waiting room to call for someone.

    Not me, Lila thought suddenly. Don’t call me. I’m not ready.

    The nurse looked around the room, searching. She looked right at them. Lila’s stomach dropped as a polite smile formed on her face.

    “Peters?”

    Lila’s mother stood, prepared to follow the woman out of the waiting room, through that door and into an unknown future. Lila stood up. She meant to follow her mother, she really did.

    Her feet flew across the tiled floor of their own accord, carried her out the door, across the street. Away.

    Her entire body pulsed with adrenaline, hot and cold, dizzy. The world was spinning. Freezing droplets of rain stung her face and arms, but she kept going.

    Lila passed the elementary school where she had spent her childhood, the Stop-n-Shop where she had shoplifted for the first time a year ago. She felt the sudden urge to go in there and apologize to a cashier she had never even met.

    She didn’t go in. What was one more missed opportunity now?

    She didn’t even realize where she was going until she arrived at the middle school, passed through the soccer fields to the woods behind.

    He was there, in their spot. She didn’t know how she knew he would be, but he was.

    John opened his arms to receive her without a word, and she threw herself into them. Tears were leaking from the corners of her eyes. It was the first time she’d cried since her Gramma had passed away nearly three years ago.

    “She was about to tell us,” Lila whispered, her voice broken. “She was about to tell us the results. I could have known by now, but I couldn’t do it.” She choked on her next words: “I ran away.”

    “Everyone runs away sometimes,” John whispered in her ear. His arms tightened around her, holding all the little pieces of her together when she threatened to self-destruct, the way he always had. His arms were the only safe place in the world.

    Lila squeezed her eyes shut, unable to look him in the face when she asked it, the ultimate question, the only question that really mattered now. Possibly the only question that would matter ever again.

    “What if it comes back positive?” She held her breath. “What if it’s cancer?”

    In that moment, she didn’t want him to tell her, “It won’t be.” She didn’t want reassurance or promises he couldn’t keep. She wanted an answer to her question.

    What if it was?

    “Then I will be here every second,” He told her, his voice firm. “Right next to you.”

Lila dared to open her eyes and meet his gaze. There was steel in him, she thought. Something hardcore, iron-clad and good. Even when it wasn’t always visible to anyone else. She had seen him drunk at parties, seen him fall apart, seen him high on drugs and high on life. He never lost that goodness, though. He was steel, and he was hers. The one thing that she knew was that John would be there.

    “What about our future, though?” she whispered. “What about everything we wanted to do?” What about our forever?

    “You are my future,” he whispered back.

This is our forever.