Home > Heart & Soul (Lost & Found #5)(2)

Heart & Soul (Lost & Found #5)(2)
Author: Nicole Williams

I didn’t know how long I’d been sitting behind the wheel in Old Bessie, staring through the windshield and seeing nothing but my fears seeming to take real shapes and forms before my eyes. I saw tragedy blooming in the flowers lining the walkway to our new condo. I saw death shoving through the soil, growing into the grass edging the sidewalk. I saw a life void of love and color and laughter in the wisp of clouds dotting the blue Seattle sky. I saw death where there was life. I saw darkness where there was light. I saw pain and heartache and tragedy on a beautiful summer day . . . and I wanted it to go away. I wanted to believe the best and hold on to so much hope I was drowning in it, but even all my supposed optimism was struggling to see the good in this. From a husband’s standpoint, there was no good in finding out my wife had a heart condition that required surgery sooner rather than later. No good side at all.

I shifted in my seat and blinked a few times in an attempt to clear the images from my head. They were only flowers. Only grass. Only clouds. It didn’t work, so I turned my attention to the cab and took a few deep breaths. Everything would be fine. Rowen would be fine. She’d have the surgery, recover without a glitch, and we could go on with life as if this had never happened.

Instead of reassuring myself by focusing on the familiarity of Old Bessie’s cab, I saw Rowen sitting beside me, dangling her arm out of the window. That faded, and I found the seat empty again, but the image was still seared in my brain. I wondered if that side of the truck would one day go unoccupied, the spot where she sat never to warm again, the pictures she liked to scroll into the windows after spending a night steaming them up having been drawn for the last time. Rowen saw the world as her canvas, and she never wasted an opportunity to leave her mark, even if it was just on a plate of steamed up glass.

I shook my head, realizing it was hopeless. It didn’t matter where I looked or where I tried to seek solace. Even Old Bessie couldn’t provide a measure of comfort anymore. The threat of losing her was too real. I couldn’t find comfort when there was none to begin with.

Then something caught my attention from the corner of my eye. In an instant, the weight pressing on my chest lifted and I could breathe fully again. In the span of one breath, I had a flash that everything would be okay. How could it not be? To watch her casually pedaling down the sidewalk, her face angled toward the sky as the corners of her mouth pulled up . . . how could anything happen to her? How could anything happen to one of the earth’s greatest creations? It couldn’t. It wouldn’t be possible.

She lived in shades of black and gray—sometimes a dark purple will slip in in the form of shoelaces or a headband—but she painted the entire world with color. She painted my entire world with color. It was as if before her, I was going through life in black and white, not realizing there was this whole other world filled with texture and color and unspeakable beauty.

She painted the whole world for me, and if she was taken away from me, the color would leave with her. My world would go back to black and white, except this time, I’d know the difference. I’d know there was something so much better, and I’d want it back. I’d want it back, but if she were gone, I could never have it back. I could never have her back.

The weight heaved back down on my chest, spilling the oxygen from my lungs.

She still rode that same bike I used to cringe at when she first moved here, but I’d added so many bells and whistles and baskets to it that we’d managed to strike a somewhat happy medium. When we first found out about Rowen’s heart, I said the bike had to go and that we finally had to break down and buy a second car. Her tale of that story is that I flat-out ordered her, but I preferred the term “begged without abate.” Of course the harder I shoved my heels into the ground, the more she did, and really, she’s much better at heel digging than I am. She said it was because she’d had more practice, but I was inclined to believe it had more to do with my inability to say more than a string of a few nos to her before giving in, giving up, or letting go. In short, she won twice as many points of contention as I did.

She claimed she won the bike battles—all of them—but I preferred to see it as reaching a mutually satisfactory conclusion. Kind of. The bike remained her main mode of transportation because she agreed to wear a heart rate monitor and promised to keep her heart rate below sixty percent of her max. She said that was overkill and didn’t want to strap on some giant watch that read her pulse everywhere she went, but the doctor admitted my idea wasn’t a bad one, so with the help of what Rowen had dubbed her doctor’s and my “Dark Side,” she gave in and strapped on the giant, ugly watch before she went anywhere on her bike.

She said it wasn’t only a fashion faux-pas but a waste of money to boot, because she’d been riding her bike for years and hadn’t had any problems with it straining her heart. She’d likely been born with her condition and had managed just fine until she’d decided to give running a try. Two decades she’d been living with this, and it took trying to run wind sprints, followed by passing out, for a doctor to diagnose her.

The bike slowed as she neared our condo. I found myself glancing at her wrist to make sure she had it on. She did. It wasn’t so ugly to me. Yeah, it was big enough that it seemed to take up a quarter of her forearm, but that device would keep her from straining her heart. It would alert her if she was pushing herself too hard. It helped keep her alive. That made it worth every single hour of overtime I’d worked last month to pay for it.

   
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