Page 93 of Lost and Found

We attend our town festival in August but only have one local team competing in the canoe race this year, and they come in second to last. Still, when Ian Carver and his wife reach the finish line, I realize something about the Byrds. If you’re theirs in any way, they’re going to cheer so loud for you, you won’t even notice who isn’t. I feel like I hit the lottery to have these people be both my friends and the family I chose.

We go to Silas’s burn group campout over Labor Day. We hike a mountain and float in those turquoise pools he told me about, and it turns out healing sometimes looks that way. Walking and moving alongside people who know the pain you’ve been through. Who will stop with you when you need to rest and who will even carry you when you get too tired, like Silas does for Mila. Cap and Mila work together to convince us to host a monthly poker night. Mila has Silas so wrapped around her finger it gives me a toothache. Saul and Garvin convince Silas to join their bowling league, and it is one of the greatest joys in my life to watch him become freakishly good at it. The alley in Gandon has the best popcorn I’ve ever had, and it unfortunately becomes my most consistent pregnancy craving.

We have Bonnie and my mom and Kurt over a few times throughout August and September, until Bonnie finally convinces Devin to meet us all for dinner out in Portland. I recognize how my mindset managed to shift over the months, because I go into it fully expecting it to go well. I think Devin willhave come around by now. That she will be happy for me, excited to be an aunt, and will be thrilled that I’m with a partner, too.

It does not, and she is not.

“That’s great. You’re having the baby my sister never got to have, and you get to raise him with the guy she never got, too,” she says, voice trembling with fury. “Isn’t this him? Isn’t this the guy she liked for, like, half her life?”

The punch lands how she meant it to, and I struggle to get a full breath. “It wasn’t exactly like that, Devin. There’s a lot more to it.”

“And it’sher,” says Silas, his hand cupped over my thigh beneath the table in a firm squeeze. “The baby is a girl.”

Bonnie sucks in a small gasp. These are the first people we’ve told. “A girl?” she says.

“Oh, even better!” Devin yells, incredulous now. “The first fucking granddaughter. How special. I guess we’re all just supposed to move on and be hunky-dory about everything, huh?”

“That’s enough,” Silas says quietly, the words clipped and vicious.

Devin breaks into an angry sob and puts her face in her hands. Bonnie cries silently beside her.

“You know I was the first person to hold her after Mom?” Devin says through a downpour of tears and fractured, coughing wails that I feel in my chest. “I held her even before Dad. Andyou.Yougot so much more of her in the end. She heldyourhand while I had her fucking ankle. I wanted more time with her. She wasmysister. My baby sister!”

Silas gathers me up out of my seat and leaves some money on the table. He tucks me into his side, and I see Bonnie pull Devin’s head to her shoulder before he turns me away and takes me to the truck.

I don’t cry because I think what Devin said about me and Silas is true or that I should feel guilty anymore. I cry because I know her hurt and that anger, and I understand it. I even admire it a little. Devin is me a year ago, all that rage so big it’s a relief to aim it anywhere else. Devin is just grieving out loud. She’s who I’ll be when grief decides to pull me under again, except I’ll have someone at my side who is ready to find me when I get lost.

Silas is the right kind of rough with me that night. He wraps my hair around his fist and puts me on my knees in front of our couch, takes me in slow, slamming strokes because I can take it, and because they force me to stay in my body and out of my head. It’s messy and it’s hard and it’s so good. It’s life. We laugh with tears running down our faces when we’re done.

It’s late October when Micah bursts into the salon one day and asks me to shave his head, which is met by the collective gasps of the entire salon. He tells me he’s off to a new start down in the Lake Tahoe area and wants a clean slate. I haven’t shaved anyone’s head since Merritt’s, and my emotions get the best of me before I’m finished. Still, it’s another full-circle moment, and it’s another strange honor, preparing someone to step into a new unknown this way.

I continue to get bigger, and my capacity to love and hope grows, too. It feels like there is always something to look forward to, something I’m fighting to memorize as it’s happening. Like when Sage and Fisher have a surprise wedding on Thanksgiving in their sunroom. Fisher shocks Silas by asking him to be his best man, and I want his expression burned into my retinas. It’s that exact smile of his that has become my favorite, and I know it always will be. It’s the crimp that forms at one corner of his mouth before the rest of him catches up, when he realizes he’s someone’s first pick. When he’s someone’s favorite. The windows around us all fog until we’re cocooned in love and laughter. Sam throws together a playlist, and we dance in theirkitchen, with the furniture pressed up against the walls, the baby kicking inside me like she’s dancing, too.

Silas and I dance to the same song I cried to all those months ago. It’s a song about unpredictability and turning points and having the time of your life even so. Instead of holding me up while I cry, he rests one hand on my small belly while I laugh, and the other one on the curve of my lower back. Instead of any space between us, we’ve got life binding us close.

“You know it, right?” he says to me. “You know this is forever.”

I look around the room at stacks of dirty plates and one dish that got broken still piled up in the corner. At mismatched furniture and flowers that are both dead and alive, the empty spaces missing people who still feel present, anyway. I see every single person still here, all marked by tragedy, every one of them smiling . . . none more so than the man holding me in his arms. It’s exactly what forever looks like. “Yeah, I do.”

CHAPTER 37

The Following Spring

Bea

“I told you it would work,” Silas says over my shoulder. He digs his knuckles into my back, and I let out a guttural moan.

“You want a fucking medal?” I snap before my temper slingshots out of me, trailing after the words like a kite tail. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean it at all,” I whimper. I do a cumbersome pivot and let my forehead fall into his chest.

“I know, baby, it’s okay.” He kisses a small smile into the part of my hair, then rubs harder and helps me sway from side to side. “Glad I got to make you feel good before this, at least,” he says. “Wish I could help more.”

When I look up, I see some of my pain mirrored in his expression. His mouth pinches beneath his mustache. Until this morning, and despite his newly adopted Dad Look workingextremelywell for me, I have hardly wanted to be touched for the past two weeks. I’m nine days overdue and a month beyond feeling like anything miraculous.

But Silas started investing in foreplay via foot rubs and leaping at every one of my food cravings all week, then kissed and massaged and whispered compliments at me all morning until I was stretching beneath him and pulling him into me. Two orgasms and one breakfast later, contractions started. Fivehours later, I was admitted. My water broke at hour ten—two hours ago, now.

I tilt my head to press a short kiss to his lips, but a contraction swells up before it bears down on me again. It builds and builds and builds, and I wonder if this is how they came up with the name forthe jaws of life. It has to be. That is what is happening inside of me, I’m positive. The pain rises until I’m sure it’ll take me under, my head won’t ever break the surface again, and then suddenly, it does. I babble to myself while Silas makes affirming noises. “See, just have to remember that when the next one comes. They’re waves. They break every time. I’ll think it won’t break, but it suddenly will, and I’ll get a breather.”

Selina, my labor and delivery nurse, walks in at one point when Silas and I are wrapped in the world’s worst slow dance, and jokes about this being how we got into this ordeal in the first place. It provides a quick moment of reprieve. Silas and I share a private, mirthful look.