“Oh. I, um...your mother didn’t tell you? I’m back. I moved back. Yesterday, actually. I’m staying with my parents. I don’t know for how long, but—” I force myself to stop rambling. “I thought my mom would have told yours...”
He stares at me silently and my eyes follow his long, tan arms to a six-pack of beer that he’s holding in his hand. I didn’t notice it before, probably because my eyes were too busy taking in the view of his face. I eye the bottles curiously.
“For Brandon,” he explains. “I come here sometimes.” He shrugs his wide shoulders. “I like to have a beer with him and...talk,” he says tentatively.
“Really? You do that?” I fight back more tears and force a small smile.
He nods and shoves his other hand in his pocket. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were—I should go.”
“You don’t have to,” I say impulsively. “You can stay, if you want.” As soon as I say it, apprehension replaces my initial shock.
“Um. Okay,” he says with equal reluctance.
My bewildered heart is doing laps inside my chest. It’s exalting and exhausting at once. I think I might be feeling every emotion, and maybe some that haven’t been defined yet. I eye the beer in his hand again, hoping alcohol might numb whatever unnamed feeling this is. “Mind if I join you?” I don’t mean to intrude on his alone time with Brandon, but I was here first. This is technically my alone time with Brandon.
He shakes his head and hands me a bottle. I take it and sit down on the bench, and I watch him twist the cap off another bottle and place it in front of Brandon’s headstone. I choke a little on the lump in my throat, but swallow it down. He sits beside me and opens a beer for himself with the comfort and ease of a grown man who probably drinks beer regularly—not only at parties, like when we were in college.
A man. So strange. He’s twenty-nine now. I didn’t expect him to look like he did the last time I saw him—it’s been seven years—but I can’t stop staring at him. His thighs are wide in his jeans and even his hands look bigger wrapped around his beer bottle.
“Want me to open that for you?” he asks in his deep voice, pointing to my beer.
“Thanks.” I hand it to him and he twists the top off with ease.
We take turns sipping our beers, neither of us speaking, until the silence is too much for me to take. I have so many questions, but I don’t know how to ask any of them. They’re too intimate to ask a stranger, someone I don’t even know anymore.
But he’s not a stranger.
I peek up at him. He’s Gabe. The boy I fell in love with when I was sixteen. The boy I thought I was going to spend my entire life with. The boy I nearly lost and spent the better part of a year taking care of and nursing back to health. The boy who broke every promise he ever made to me.
I take a few deep breaths to steady myself and then I turn to face him. His eyes meet mine and his lips part like he wants to say something. But, like before, he doesn’t. He just stares at me, making my stomach twist with angst that reminds me of the months I spent after the accident trying to coax him out of the depression he fell into. He was consumed with sadness and guilt over losing Brandon, but the shame he endured was more debilitating than his injuries. News stories that covered the accident made him out to be some sort of monster, disregarding his spotless record and high academic achievements. They only saw the mistake he made, and they didn’t allow for redemption.
Although most people in our small community offered words of sympathy and reassurance, Gabe was trapped beneath the weight of the occasional dirty look or unforgiving comment. Just as the media had done, Gabe allowed his mistake to erase everything good in his life. Including me.
As the sadness, guilt, and shame turned to embarrassment and anger, it was hard to find the line between depression and TBIPD. Traumatic Brain Injury Personality Disorder.
It was a risk we were all aware of, but as time passed, it became evident that Gabe’s personality had been affected. It didn’t matter how many times I told him that I loved him, that everything would be okay, that he would get better over time, he didn’t believe me. He didn’t want to believe me. He gave up on the hopes and dreams we shared, he gave up on college, and he gave up on me.
His injury affected more than his personality, though. It impacted his motor skills and his cognitive thinking. It was disheartening, to say the least, to see someone who’d aced all his college math courses struggle to solve a simple equation. But over time, it slowly began to come back to him. I was sure he’d be able to return to Raleigh and finish college, that we’d be able to finish college together...eventually. But he made it clear that he didn’t see a future with me anymore.
I’ve spent seven years quietly agonizing over what happened between us back then, wondering how he could stop loving me so suddenly, how he could cut me out of his life so abruptly, wondering what I did, or what I could have done differently. And now, after all this time, there’s a chance I might actually find out.
Part of me is terrified to ask Gabe anything. I don’t know how he’ll react and I don’t want him to leave. The fact that I feel this way, after everything that happened, scares me even more. But I can’t sit here with all these unanswered questions festering and eating away at me. I used to know everything about him and now I know nothing. It’s overwhelmingly frustrating. I don’t know if my Gabriel is in there or not, but that’s who I’m going to talk to, because he’s the only Gabe I know.
“You’ve changed since the last time I saw you,” I say, smiling softly over my nerves. “You look different.”
He gives me a tentative smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “You look different too.”
I look down at my lap. I’ve gained ten pounds since college, but I like being a little curvier.
He sips his beer and says, “You look good, Liv.”
I press my lips together and try to ignore the butterflies that flock to my stomach. “So do you.” I look at the place in his hair where he had surgery. “You can barely see the scar now.”
“Hence the longer hair,” he says, looking up toward his forehead.
“I like it. It’s different, but good.” I smile softly and look down at my lap again.
After a few uncomfortable seconds, we both say, “So—”
“Sorry, go ahead,” Gabe prompts.
“Oh, um, I was just going to say that I heard you’re working with my dad now.”
“Uh-huh.” He sips his beer.
“Uh-huh,” I repeat, looking up at him curiously. “What exactly are you doing for him?”
“I’m helping with a new furniture line.”
“That’s great, Gabe.”
“It’s not really what I thought I’d be doing. But as far as being a physical therapist goes...well, let’s just say that if I never see another PT for the rest of my life, that’d be just fine.” He laughs grimly and I let out a strangled sigh. He underwent so much physical therapy after the accident. Just thinking about it dredges up a lot of stressful memories.
“What about you? I heard you got your English Lit degree. You putting it to good use?”
“Trying.” I keep my answer short. The last thing I want to do is talk about how I went back to Raleigh and finished college without him.