“Enter,” she says dramatically.
I smile as I walk in because I can’t help it. I like Joy. She’s a smartass, like Willa, with all the fun and a fraction of the bite. Unlike Willa, she’s incredibly blunt, but I am too, so it works out fine. She’s also whip-smart. Each time I read to her, Joy explains cultural contexts I never knew about in Pride and Prejudice and tells random funny anecdotes when something in the story jogs her memory. Not that Willa wouldn’t love her for the fact alone that Joy’s her mother, but I can see why Willa loves her so much. Joy Sutter is a good time.
“You’re giving me that look again.” She shifts in bed and sighs heavily.
“Am not.” Sitting down, I sweep up Pride and Prejudice. I frown when I open the book. “This is where we left off two days ago.”
“Willa was too tired to read last night. She just curled up on my bed and passed out.”
Tired my ass. Willa was a wreck is what she was. Guilt hits me like a kick to the stomach.
“It’s not your fault, Lumberjack. Willa’s an emotional minefield, which, to her credit, is with good reason.” Joy sighs again and raises the bed. “Willa never had a dad. She grew up being carted all over the country for my military career. The only constants in her life have been the soccer ball at her feet, and her mom whistling for her from the stands.”
Joy draws in a shuddering breath and betrays a rare window of emotion. “And she’s about to lose one of those.”
Reflexively, I wrap my hand around hers. Silence hangs between us as I search her eyes. “Does she know that?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t.”
“Ms. Sutter, you have to tell her.”
Joy’s hand grips mine hard as she blinks up at the ceiling. “I don’t know how. I don’t know how to break my daughter’s heart. One promise I have always made Willa is that I will never leave her, that in this world she could count on her mama being there for her.”
I stroke my thumb gently along her skin. “Due respect, you made a promise you could never keep. Parents always leave their children, unless horrifically their children leave them first. Willa knows this. She’s going to grieve and struggle, but not because you failed her. You’re not doing wrong by her, being sick, by…”
Tears paint her cheeks as she stares up at the ceiling. “By dying,” Joy whispers.
I swallow around a lump in my throat.
Silence lapses again as the sun hides behind a cloud, bathing us in shadows. Joy squeezes my hand and tugs me closer. “Promise me something?” Her eyes lock with mine. “Don’t give up on her, okay?”
I only nod, because I’m struggling for the right words. Joy releases my hand and lifts her pinkie. “I mean it, Bergman, or I’ll haunt you.”
I laugh through the thickness in my voice, blinking away tears as I lock fingers with her. “Deal.”
“Now.” Joy drops my finger and sits back, hands folded primly in her lap as her eyes drift shut. “Where were we?”
23
Willa
Playlist: “This Must Be The Place,” The Lumineers
With one ear pressed to a crack in the door, my eyes scrunched shut in concentration. That’s the first time I hear the words spoken out loud. My mother is dying. I’ve refused to acknowledge it, but I’ve known. Subliminally, I knew why she was leaving the hospital, but hearing it, thinking it is so much more painful.
I must be in shock because I’m not crying. I’m not even breathing unsteadily. My heartbreak is a white-hot knife, slicing down my sternum. It rips open my chest, and I feel as if I’m watching my heart tilt, then flop out of my chest, where it lands with a splat on the hardwood floor. Next, it’s as if my intestines unravel slowly, a steady, nonstop unwinding. There’s a sad, sick parallel to how I spun that scarf off my neck and unveiled my body to torture Ryder.
Ryder.
I hear his voice on the other side of the door.
My body is distant from my consciousness. I’m floating away, staring down at myself, slumped to the floor in a fragmented pool of parts. My lungs are the next victim. They collapse in on themselves. They tighten and shrivel as I gasp for air.
I see myself, balled up on the floor.
My sobs are silent. I’m airless, carved out, breaking, until—
Laughter. Mama’s belly laugh yanks me down to my body, jamming everything inside again, knitting me together. My lungs fill. My heart pounds safely inside my chest. My stomach tightens. Everything is where it should be, as I listen. The mood shifts in the room.
“Reread the first proposal, please,” Mama says.
“In vain I have struggled.” Ryder’s voice is deep and ragged. He reads Darcy’s voice with suffering that’s as believable as it is expressive.
He’s her gentleman reader.
Oh, fuck.
Hot, fat, tears slide down my cheeks. That asshole. That infuriating asshole lumberjack is reading to my sick mom and putting Colin Firth to shame.
“It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you…”
I listen, rapt, my ear pressed tight to the door. The famous heated exchange as Darcy stupidly degrades Elizabeth’s family, points out their every flaw. When he finishes I hear Mama sigh heavily.
“I always wish Austen wouldn’t have tortured us,” she says before a wet cough stops her. Finally, she catches her breath. “All that longing at Pemberley, the misunderstandings over Jane and then Wickham. I wish Lizzie and Darcy told each other what was going on. Then they could have gone straight to happily ever after.”
“I mean, in real life, I’m one hundred percent with you,” Ryder says. “I see no point in anything but direct communication.”
Mama coughs. “Amen. If everybody spoke their damn truth, we’d all avoid a hell of a lot of drama.”
“Agreed. But, it seems like it’s not that straightforward for most people. Saying hard truths takes time and courage, whereas for blunt, analytical people like you and me, it’s our hardwiring. It’s not a virtue, it’s just our nature.
“And of course, in the case of Lizzie and Darcy, this is literature. It’s meant to torture us, for lack of a better word, in a pleasurable kind of way. That dragged-out tension, it’s the best part.”
Ryder’s voice is low and extra rough. He sounds like he got maybe a cup of coffee in him before Mama was blowing up his phone to read to her. “You have to slog through their stilted ability to be vulnerable, their dogged fear of opening up which causes all those misunderstandings, before their reconciliation. That’s what makes it feel so gratifying and meaningful,” he says. “The sweetness of them admitting their feelings is only powerful because they’ve gone through so much to arrive at that understanding. They have to work past their insecurities and assumptions, to fight their way to uncover the truth. Then and only then do they realize what they mean to each other.”
Mama laughs quietly. “You talk like you have some insight into this, young man.”
I hear Ryder’s body shift in the chair. His throat clears. “It’s…it’s a good story. I’ve read it before, had to study it for a class last year. Anyone would tell you what I’m saying.”