Page 125 of Here We Go Again
The emails and the phone calls after they graduated. The feeling of always having an adult who believed in them.
At four in the morning, Joe wakes himself up with a terrible coughing fit. They try to turn him onto his side to clear a pathway to his lungs. They squeeze droplets of water into his mouth from the pink sponge. Tonight is the night, and they try to make him comfortable.
They adjust the bed so he’s sitting up a little. He’s facing the wall of windows and even from here, they can all see the stars.
Joe doesn’t sleep again, but he’s not awake, either. His eyes stay open, but they’re not really his eyes.
The sky begins to shift from black to purple, from purple to dark blue. Joe manages to lift his hand off the bed just enough to point to the windows.
“It’s almost morning,” Rosemary says.
Joe makes a choking sound and points again. Rosemary knows itprobably means nothing—he’s not really here—but she has to make sense of these last moments. “The ocean? The patio? The sunrise? What, Joe?”
He uses his last ounce of energy to jab his finger once more.
“I think he wants us to take him outside so he can watch the sunrise,” Logan translates.
“But we can’t.”
But they do.
Logan moves all the furniture out of the way. They unlock the brakes on his bed and guide it slowly and carefully toward the sliding glass door. Guillermo helps them seesaw the bed over the raised tracks of the sliding glass door, and out onto the patio.
They position Joe so he has a full view of the sun beginning to rise over the ocean. Rosemary grabs his Pendleton blanket and positions it over his legs. Logan drags out the record player and cues up Van Morrison. “Someone Like You.” As apt as ever.
They grab two chairs. Logan on the left, Rosemary on the right, each holding one hand. Odie is always there, curled up at Joe’s feet.
The orange rims the horizon, lighting up the clouds, turning the purple and blues into textured bruises. It gets lighter. More orange, the smallest dusting of yellow. The blues are now violet, the purples now a luscious pink.
Rosemary watches Joe watch the sunrise, and for a moment, she does see him in those brown eyes. He opens his mouth. “So many colors,” she thinks she hears him say. But that’s probably not possible. Joe closes his eyes.
“So many colors,” Rosemary says.
The sky continues to lighten. She counts the distance between Joe’s breaths, then stops. For the last few minutes, she closes her eyes and chooses to remember the version of Joe from the first day of ninth grade, Joe from the original bathtub painting, Joe from the Grand Canyon, so full of awe.
His grip loosens in her hand. She chooses to remember the feeling of him squeezing back.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
LOGAN
That’s how Joe dies.
So many close calls, and then it’s like flipping a coin. One minute he’s watching the sunrise.
Flip. And he’s gone.
Odie starts whimpering at the foot of his bed.
The sun keeps rising, keeps spilling its lush colors across the sky, but Joe isn’t here to see it anymore.
Most people die in beige rooms. But Joe… he dies in technicolor.
He dies as the sun rises over the Atlantic on the patio at the cottage by the sea. He dies on his own terms, and Logan feels the tension go out of her like the tide. She’s awash with relief. He’s not in pain. He’s not suffering. He finally let go.
But the tide comes back in, like it always does, and Logan is suddenly filled with anger and grief and heartbreak. The frantic, restless need to push, to run away, to do something reckless. To do anything to escape the incoming hurt.
She looks at Rosemary quietly crying on the other side of Joe’s body. Logan wants to go to her, to wrap her arms around her so theycan ride out this pain together. She wants to run, wants to be as far away from this moment as possible.
