Page 17 of Fly with Me

She didn’t take photos with characters.

She didn’t look at anyone around her.

She just ran.

Thinking of Jake. Thinking about all she’d accomplished in the last year and all the things he would almost certainly never see again.

Olive didn’t start crying until mile ten. That was when it got hard. Jake said he kept going the entire time when he ran last year. She would too. No matter how much it hurt. No matter how much she ached to sit down and give up. He didn’t give up, so she wouldn’t either. She closed her eyes, and found herself back on the last long run she’d done with her brother. She was whining like a five-year-old and practically limping down the last run of trail that would bring them back to Jake’s house.

He leaned over with his paw-like hand and mussed her hair.

She pushed him off and gave him a tiny, petulant shove.

He laughed once, but then his voice softened like he knew his words would echo in her brain months later. “Fight through it. If I can do it, Olive, you can.”

Fight.

Was she fighting through this stupid half-marathon because she’d lost the other battle that counted?

With every step closer to the end, she found herself wishing against all hope for the scene in Jake’s photo from last year. The proud Murphy family waiting to cheer him on at the end. The smiles and hugs. He’d been the essential piece that brought them all together.

Olive’s feet faltered in their rhythm against the pavement.

“Keep moving,” she said through gritted teeth.

Talking to her feet might be a new low for Olive. Jake would have teased her endlessly for that.

He had been on a long run the morning of the accident. The last picture in her phone from Jake was of the new running shoes he bought after coming back from Disney. What had happened to them after he was brought to the hospital?

Such a weird, stupid thought.

Olive’s own worn shoe treads scraped against the pavement. Every step was a battle. Blinking away a round of tears, Olive scanned the festive crowd on either side of the racecourse. All unfamiliar.

The dumb crying meant she’d missed seeing the last distance marker. She checked her watch to see how much farther she had to go before she could collapse into a blob. Twelve point nine miles done. Just a few more turns and she’d be at that finish line.

Time was strange when you were running. It slowed down when it was hardest.

Olive checked her watch one more time partially out of habit, but her feet almost stopped moving when she read the numbers. That time. That exact time brought her back to the worst day of her life. She was sitting in a hard plastic chair with one hand in her brother’s and the other clenched in a fist. Time was ticking away on her wrist as if the universe didn’t realize how fucking precious every second was. An unfamiliar face appeared at the sliding glass door.

Olive checked her watch too often in those days, particularly when they knew a fresh specialist would be reviewing Jake’s scans. Olive, her mother, and her sister rotated care, so he was never alone, but on that day they were all together in the room. Her father had gone for coffee. Dad seemed to always have a reason for leaving. But after the accident the Murphy women became a three-woman army against a common enemy. That glass-walled ICU room with its stuffy air and constant noise became their base of operations. They faced each assault together. First, Jake would never walk again. That had been bad enough, but then the news became grimmer and grimmer until that goddamn day when Olive checked her goddamn watch and looked up to find that goddamn unfamiliar face at the door.

Heather had been nursing newborn Cody when the newcomer knocked, adjusting his scrubs as if he’d just gotten out of a surgery. Olive never thought much about how similar the Murphy women were in mannerisms until that moment. They each tensed their hands and leaned closer to Jake, as if some instinctual defensiveness told them of the coming blow.

The final blow.

Clinically speaking, Olive understood all the words the doctor said. Despite the tears and shattering breaths, she understood that the new test results were unequivocal. She let go of Jake’s hand, grabbed onto the bed to keep herself upright. Olive stared at the watch as she breathed against the crushing weight of the revelation.

Jake was gone.

In every way that mattered.

Heather left the room first, going to call her husband to come get the baby. The doctor turned to Olive, recognizing her role as medical power of attorney. He talked about choices and possible next steps.

“He wouldn’t want this.” Olive’s voice had been somewhere between a sob and a whisper as she gestured to the room. The machines. The tubes. All of it. “He’d want us to let him go.”

As the words left Olive’s mouth, Olive’s mom went rigid. Like the subtle vibration of a live wire, the air seemed to hum around her. After several speechless moments, she rose to stand beside her son and then erupted. She screamed until Olive’s ears rang, telling everyone that “nobody better touch my son” before she came back. She clutched her rosary so tightly in her fist, Olive was surprised the beads hadn’t broken.

The sudden pain in Olive’s chest beneath her safety-pinned bib had nothing to do with the miles of running, but it brought her back into the present.