Page 19 of Cruel Summer
ELEVEN
Family vacation —six years ago
She couldn’t sleep, so she was up at dawn yet again, putting her tennis shoes on and getting ready to go for a walk. She was glad that they’d gone away for the vacation, but her mom’s cancer diagnosis felt heavy today.
There was no genetic link. That was supposed to make her feel safe, and it didn’t. It made her feel guilty, worrying about herself at all.
But she did.
She worried about her health.
She worried about what she’d do when she didn’t have her mom in her life, and she wasn’t ready to face that. She just wasn’t ready.
They were close. They always had been. She walked down the street to her childhood home almost every day just to chat for a while. The kids saw their grandma every day. It…
It didn’t seem real.
The vacation rental was huge. Big enough that Logan and Chloe were staying in the same house. The massive windows looked over Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, and they’d had a great couple of days enjoying the little town, the beaches, and the elk herd that slept in the field near the house.
She’d been taking early morning walks in the mist, trying to clear her head so she could put on a brave face for the rest of the day. This was a family vacation. She didn’t want to weigh everyone down with her worries.
With the statistics that lived in her head and told her that no matter how much she wanted to believe in miracles, climbing numbers this soon after the end of a top-line treatment were bad.
She opened up the front door and went outside. The air was sharp and cold, heavy with mist. She inhaled it deeply, closing her eyes.
She stuffed her hands in her pockets and had started down the road when she heard footsteps, pounding harder and faster than her own. She looked up and saw a jogger partially obscured by the fog.
Then he stopped. “Sam?”
It was Logan.
“Oh, hi. I didn’t know you were up,” she said, her shoulders going up to the bottoms of her earlobes.
“I get up and run every morning, and try not to wake anyone up.”
“I’ve been walking. I guess we usually miss each other.”
His mouth turned up into a half smile. “Yeah. I guess we do.”
“Anyway…just walking.”
But he turned and started to walk along with her, as if he’d been invited.
“Any particular reason for the early morning walks?”
“A reason for your run?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Oh.”
“How’s your mom, Sam?”
She breathed out, a short, painful sound exiting with it. “I don’t think very good. I don’t… I’m just thinking.”
“I get it. You know that, right?”
She paused. “Yeah, I do.”
“Remember what you told me about loss? It’s just shitty. So is stuff like this.”
“Thanks,” she said. It seemed insufficient, but it felt good to have someone say that. To have someone acknowledge how hard it was. “I’m just trying to be normal. I’m trying to have this vacation and be…happy and everything for the kids.”
“You can’t always do that,” he said.
“I want to protect them.”
“I get that. But who’s protecting you?”
They took five more steps. She counted the sound of their shoes on the damp ground. “Will.”
He cleared his throat. “He is my best friend. Has been since we were in our early twenties. But he isn’t good with this kind of thing.”
It was true. It was so true, and she felt disloyal agreeing with him. So she didn’t. “He just hasn’t had practice with it, but he tries.”
“He doesn’t know how to handle an unhappy ending,” Logan said. “Just letting you know. He’s one of those people that needs things to be a certain amount of okay, and if they aren’t, he can’t deal.”
“He’s my husband,” she said. “Not my friend. No offense. And nothing tragic has happened yet.”
“I know.” He paused for a second. “If you need anything, you know you can ask. You were there for me when Becca… You’ve been there.”
She let that settle over her like the mist. She didn’t want to be having this conversation.
He was right. Will was an optimist, and she felt like she needed that.
Most of the time. But she also felt like she’d been drowning in a sea of worst-case scenarios with no one to take her hand.
That wasn’t fair. She hadn’t asked Will to.
She didn’t know how to ask. That was her problem.
That she didn’t know how to ask for what she needed because she didn’t have any idea what she needed, and how was that Will’s fault?
“Thank you. If I need anything, I’ll let you know.”
She expected him to go back to the house, but he didn’t. He just walked with her. There was a strange sort of restlessness that she felt. An urge to move closer, and to move further away all at the same time.
But she just kept walking in a straight line, and Logan walked along with her.
By the time the walk was over, she felt less alone than she had before.