Page 12 of Pictures in Blue
“How can you live in this town all your life, just a few miles from the mountains where there arethousandsof wildflowers nearby,multiplespecies, and not know a single name for them?”
“Wildflowers are wildflowers. They’re all the same,” he pushes his thick-framed glasses up his nose and returns his eyes to the paper. “It starts with a ‘b’ and ends with an ‘x’. How am I supposed to know that?”
“Blue Flax!” says a voice from the kitchen. Damnit, Ethan. I can’t count the number of times he’s asked the name of every plant we walk by on a hike. He loves nature and is a bottomless pit of questions.
“Hah!” My dad gloats. “At least someone in the family is willing to offer a helping hand. Thank you, my favorite grandson!” he shouts back to Ethan.
He giggles, “I’m youronlygrandson!”
“Well then, my favorite young man currently in this house.”
“Hey!” exclaims Elias. “What about me?”
“Ethan wins, sorry,” Dad says in a voice that doesn’t come across as apologetic whatsoever.
“Eh, he wins in my book too, I guess.” Elias looks over at Ethan with a fondness in his eyes that only a father can have for his son. A warm smile spreads across his features, followed by a sad one. A look that has been ever present over time. It has been that way for the last three years since Sarah died. My sister left a void behind in our family that can’t be filled. An emptiness we have all felt over the years. The kind that is always present. Never leaving. Waiting in the darkest corners of the room for us to let our guard down so it can creep in, reminding us of what we have lost.
Her breast cancer diagnosis was a shock to all of us. She and Elias moved back home from Seattle to be closer to family so we could help them. She died a year later.
When she and Elias got married, they moved to Seattle and she opened a coffee shop, a dream she had held onto since she was a kid. Her coffee could give Fran a run for her money. Then again, Sarah spent most of her free time, summers, weekends, any time after school that she wasn’t doing homework, atBooks & Beanslearning everything she could from Fran. Sarah wasn’t made for the small-town life. She always talked about leaving. Doing bigger things. Running her own coffee shop in Seattle was her bigger thing. Her dream. She lived that dream for four years until she was diagnosed. She was forced to sell her shop so she and Elias could afford the chemo she needed.
She was in remission at one point even, but it came back more aggressive, and she didn’t have a chance.
Her final summer, she spent as much time with us and Elias and Ethan as she possibly could. Small hikes, fishing in my lake, playing fetch with Ethan and the dogs, late-night scrabble sessions with me when she couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep either. Not while knowing she could be gone the next morning. Sleep still didn’t come easily for me. And when it did, it was often interrupted by nightmares of waking up that morning. Seeing her. Knowing she was gone as soon as my eyes opened. There was a change in the air and something in me just knew when I looked over, my sister wouldn’t be there anymore. And she wasn’t.
Elias spent the majority of his time taking care of her. A sick wife and a five year old weren’t easy to manage alone and Elias knew that. He wasn’t stupid. He knew the odds when the doctors told them it was stage four. Sarah knew the odds too, but all she said when her doctor listed them was, “fuck the odds.” And did everything she could to beat it. But in the end, the odds won out.
Images of that last night filter through my head, playing Scrabble, the black and white movie, the sadness, the laughs, the dark feeling I had when I woke up, and the nightmares that have plagued me ever since. Cold sweats, hyperventilating, and uncontrollable shaking take over and it takes hours to finally shake it off, and I am still never able to go back to sleep.
Ethan’s nearing footsteps bring me back to the present, drawing me out of temporary grief. “Uncle Hud, guess what?”
If he says “chicken butt” I’m throwing him over my shoulder and into the pool in the backyard. I raise my eyebrows signaling him to go on.
“I hid my flag and you’ll nevereverfind it,” he brags with the biggest, most mischievous grin on his face.
“Oh, really?”
“Really!” He says, confidently.
“I bet I’ll find it by Wednesday.”
“No chance! I’ll find yours by tomorrow morning. You probably haven’t even hid yours yet.”
“Hey, I still have,” I tip my wrist up and glance at my watch. “Two hours to hide mine, kiddo.”
“Well, you’ll never find mine. It’s in theperfectplace. Only Granny and Dory know.”
“Dory?” I ask. I know everyone’s name in town and there definitely is no one called Dory.
“Yeah, but she won’t remember, because she has short term memory loss.”
Thoroughly confused, I shake my head and make a mental note to visit Cordie sometime this week. Preferably at a time when Avery is out, but I’ll chance it.For the game,I lie to myself. I’ve been on a losing streak for weeks and it isn’t on purpose. Ethan is either really good at finding my flags or I am really shit at hiding them.
Either way, it’s a game that started a few months after Sarah died. Ethan was really struggling and he didn’t fully understand what happened, only that his mom was gone and there wasn’t a way to bring her back.
He always had an interest in hiding things. Elias often told stories about him hiding his toy cars around the house. He or Sarah would open drawers, cabinets, closets, and more often than not, there would be a little toy car nestled there, waiting to be found. It never bothered them to find the cars. They’d just find them and laugh like it was the most adorable thing in the world.
After a while, I knew Ethan needed some kind of distraction. Something to take his mind off of wondering where his mother went. And our ongoing capture the flag game was born.
