“Come on, baby. I know it hurts. But you can do this. You can fight this. Please, don’t go. You can fight this, I know it.”
But he doesn’t. His eyes don’t open. His fingers don’t twitch. The beeps from the heart monitor grow further apart.
“Jake!” I call, shaking his hand. Tears stream down my face and fall onto him. I lift his arm and put his hand over my heart. “Take mine! Take anything you need. Take it all. Please…please, baby.” I hang my head, sobbing.
A hand lands on my shoulder. “Your mother is on her way,” Mrs. Williams says. She stays there, hand on my shoulder until the nurse comes back in, asking if we had more contact information for Jake. Always prepared, Jake had the proper documents folded and kept in his wallet that listed me as his emergency contact and power of attorney if need be. Seeing situations just like this in the ER made him prepare for the worst.
The worst wasn’t supposed to happen.
Mrs. Williams leaves the room to help the nurse get Jake’s mom’s number. I hug Jake tighter, willing him to come back to me.
“I’m not going to give up on you,” I whisper through my tears. “You can pull through this. I know you can. I love you so much.”
The heart monitor gives off a series of rapid beats. I shoot up and look at it. The line spiked three times. Oh my God. He’s coming back.
“Jake, baby!”
I wait. Come on…come on…
But nothing comes.
Nothing, except the last heartbeat.
My house is on our family’s property, same as my sister’s, but unlike hers, mine isn’t new. It’s the original Belmont farmhouse, the one all nine of my ancestors crammed into when they first took up farming and made a name for themselves. It’s not fancy like the historic plantation house my parents reside in. It has no ostentatious facade, no grand staircase or granite kitchen island big enough to seat a dozen people.
It’s small yet quaint, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. You can feel the history when you walk in, pressing on you from all sides of the brick house. The necessary updates have been done to make the space livable, of course. The entire first floor is modernized, with the latest update being a total kitchen remodel that Jake and I did ourselves this past Christmas. Well, mostly ourselves. And by that, I mean I picked out farmhouse kitchens on Pinterest and he approved the final design. We ripped out the old cabinets and let the professionals take it from there.
Walking into the house alone isn’t out of the norm. Jake stayed at school most weeknights when he was taking classes, and now that he is—was—in his residency, the drive to the teaching hospital was just too far to take on a daily basis. But this time, when I stick my key into the deadbolt, the weight of the world crashes down on me.
Jake will never walk through these doors again. I’ll never wake up in the middle of the night to a call from him, telling me he loves me or filling me in on the nightshift drama at the hospital. Some nights I’d be too dead asleep to hear the phone ring, the curse of a sound sleeper, I suppose, and would wake up to a wonderful message. I’d call him on my way into The Book Bag and leave him a message to listen to as well when he got done with his rotation in the ER.
I’ll never see his name on my phone again.
I’ll never hear his voice again.
Feel his arms around me.
Get annoyed with him for putting plastic in the garbage instead of the recycling.
I step into the house and a wave of grief washes over me, pulling me under the surface. I’m caught in the undertow and there’s no way out. And right now, I don’t want a way out. I’m drowning, but once the water fills my lungs, everything will end.
I make it to the couch and fall, curling up into a little ball. I bring my knees to my chest, pressing against my heart. It hurts so much I can feel it in my bones. I cry and cry and cry until there are no more tears left to fall.
And then I cry some more.
“Sierra?”
“Mom,” I choke out, looking up. The house is too dark, and my eyes are too swollen to see, but I know her voice. She comes to the couch and sits next to me. Doesn’t turn on a light. Doesn’t tell me things will be okay. She just holds me and lets me cry. She cries too, both over the loss and over my heartache. She stays with me until I fall asleep, and is there when the early light of the morning filters through the windows. My dreams of Jake kissing me escape me, leaving me naked and cold in harsh reality.
My heart, mended in my sleep by dreams that will never come true, rips in two again. The break is so deep it vibrates through my entire being, bringing pain to my whole body. My head throbs. My throat is sore and thick from crying. My eyes burn. My stomach is sick. Yet nothing is as bad as the heartache. The pain intensifies, and I feel like I’m dead too, yet they forgot to bury me.
Yesterday, my world ended. I lost Jake yesterday. Yesterday. And waking up, remembering it all, it’s like I lost him all over again.
It’s going to be like this every day for the rest of my life.
My sister grips my hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze as she opens the door to my little brick house. I’ve been staying with my parents the last week, just trying to survive. I feel like I’ve failed, yet here I am, still breathing. Heart still beating. My body is betraying me. I want it to give out and let the quiet peace of death surround me, taking me into the dark where I can be with Jake again.
But I’m still here.
“The cats are fine,” Samantha tells me, opening the door. “I came by every day to feed them and I scooped their box a few times too. You had a load of laundry in your washer that got a bit stinky from sitting there, so I rewashed it and put it in the dryer. And I loaded your dishwasher.”
I nod and for the first time am thankful for my older sister’s no-nonsense personality. Today is Jake’s funeral, and she’s come to the house with me to pick out clothes. Sam closes the door behind me, and my cats come running. I drop down and run my hand over a pretty calico cat who’s purring and pressing her head against me. Tinkerbell, a gray and black tabby, meows and twists around my arm.
“Hey, girls,” I whisper, voice shaking. Everything is the same. The house looks like it did that night. Smells the same. But it’s so very different. This house is no longer a home.
“Do you want me to pick something out for you?” Sam offers.
“I don’t care.”
“Okay. I’ll bring options.”
Dolly, the calico cat, nips at me as she demands more attention. I had her before I met Jake. He wasn’t much of an animal person, but he tolerated the cats for my sake. And it was him who brought home Tinkerbell, and the memory of him coming in the door with a little wet ball of fur makes me choke up. He found her shivering in a puddle along the driveway to our house, no doubt separated from its mother and littermates from the large barn behind my parents’ mansion.
“Do you want me to do your makeup?” Sam asks, voice coming from the bedroom.
“I don’t care,” I repeat. It’s been one of the few things I’m able to say. Because I don’t care. Clothes…makeup…what to eat for dinner…I don’t care. It’s all so trivial.
Both cats are meowing now, and I know they want treats. Using the coffee table to pull myself up, I shuffle into the kitchen to get them. I toss them on the floor, watching the cats playfully chase after them. Going on autopilot, I wash out their water bowl, refill their dry food, and open a can of cat food to split between the two. Then I go into my bedroom, eyes going to the bed that Jake and I shared.