THE STARS ARE BEAUTIFUL - WATTYS AWARD NEW ADULT WINNER 2019

Callum | 32

FATE HAD A PLAN to meet me in room 708 of Atlanta Memorial. While I had been studying, years before in New York, fate had been courting a man who had a sincere crush on a woman who grew the finest tomatoes. By the time fate would infinitely connect us, charm and hope and love reshaped my spirit and expanded my hearing. It brightened my eyes and slowed me down, despite the constant, required, and expected need to rush.

Days still existed where I wished I was a slave to the blurring pace of medicine, but I had moments of clarity with a certain patient, too. Scout Everdeen became such a patient, and luckily for both of us, I had yet to spend all the coins of my inheritance.

The same couldn't be said for Truscott Zoe.

It was a rainy night in Red Pine when I returned home from my visit with Truscott in New York. I found Everly taping squares of powder blue, cotton candy pink, and lemon to the nursery wall, oblivious of what I had carried home with me. "Which one? Pick a color," she said, prideful.

Our house had become a stage production bearing none of the props that doomed Everly's childhood. Black and white sonogram pictures were strewn across our fridge, waiting for the finger-tap-kiss they received each morning as she reached for orange juice. Green soft blades of grass massaged her bare feet as she debated whether the swing set would go "right here under the oak tree for shade, Callum? Or should we put it in the sunshine and just slather sunscreen in the summer? A pool would be nice, too. We'll have to look into that. One with a waterfall." And of course the nursery was her main focus. She stared at me so full of unbridled bliss, I couldn't bear to break her heart with the news of that evening. But we didn't keep secrets.

"Yellow is pretty neutral," I answered. "I don't think our child will be dispassionate. Let's just hold off until I get a free day to help you out with this, all right?"

"But that'll never happen." She sighed. "I want to be ready."

My mind couldn't form a charming response to distract her from worrying because it was too hung up on the truth I had yet to reveal. Instincts running rampant, she faced me fully and wanted to know what my sourpuss face was all about.

"I need to tell you something," I said slowly, "but you have to promise me that you'll stay calm." I inched toward her and slid her hands from her hips to the bump. "The baby needs you to stay calm, all right?"

"What happened?" she demanded.

"Promise me."

"Fine. I promise." She hooked her fingers with mine. "Now what is it?"

I steadied my breathing. "Truscott."

She stared at me for a moment and then understood all that needed to be explained. Her eyes squeezed shut, shuddering away from my words. I took Everly into my arms and hoped that somewhere within her spirit she could find the truth: her life wasn't meant to inspire his—not in the way she had thought anyhow—but to comfort. And she had been brilliant.

"I promise we did everything we could for him, Everly."

Her voice squeaked, "How?"

"He went to sleep. That peacefully. That easily."

Truth was Truscott had slipped into a coma and been put on life support for ten weeks before Wanda decided her son had suffered enough. Her decision to remove life support wasn't swift or rash, but rather a tender gift of mercy to her child. I envied and watched in awe as she bravely bathed his pale, gaunt face in kisses she could never again offer, crossed his hands one over the other, and smiled at him for the last time as if looking at her newborn baby, not the ghost of the boy she watched wither into bones. Her bravery spurred a new sense of hope under my ribs. Goodbye could be peaceful. Goodbye could be quite beautiful.

I needed that kind of resilient hope in the midst of cases such as Scout Everdeen. While bruises and injury were common in my world with Everly, his bruises were not easily kissed away. He had a longjourney of scars ahead of him—like Truscott—if he managed to hang on long enough. As my life became painted powder blue, his stretched on as a crimson-filled nightmare while Earth spun its dutiful course, neither of us the wiser for what fate had in the works.

I naïvely reached into the plot of my life and dug out reserved coins I needed to find a home. A wish was granted as I employed Peter Everdeen to restore a memory of the summer Everly had been absent in my life. He came by to work secretly every Sunday at our house, never revealing to Everly what he was doing out in the woods behind our house. As I admired the train, it became harder to hate a man like Timothy Brighton, because he had unknowingly saved a part of his daughter's happiness before she had even spent her first cry.

The sun was high, the birds were on cue as they sang high-pitched cheer, and she was absolute perfection in a lavender dress as she followed me into the wildflowers that had overtaken our yard. She held a glass of cold lemonade in her free hand and sipped as we found the west side of our property.

"Okay, close your eyes and just follow where I lead."

"Kinda my signature move." She laughed.

Her eyes closed, I led her deeper into the woods and then kissed her hand. "All right. Open."

Peter sounded the whistle. At first, Everly dropped her lemonade and closed her hands over her ears. But then she lit up like the Fourth of July as she took in the brilliant boxcar gleaming jubilant red.

"Ho-lee-buckets."

Even a stiff like Peter Everdeen laughed.

"I think our son will prefer the color red," I said nonchalantly. "It's fiery, bold, and undeniably seen..., just like his mother."

She was too shocked to move or speak. She stood wide-eyed, beaming at the boxcar.

And then...

"Oh, God Bless America!"

And Then...

"Grandpa Wiley," she whispered. "This was the train!" Her hand clapped to her chest as if she was trying to keep every memory of him locked inside. Everly's eyes turned to me and asked why how where how long until I pulled her into my arms and told her I couldn't possibly think of a more deserved gift for the mother of my child. This was a thank you. This was the most outrageous I love you. This was—unbeknownst to me, Everly, and absolutely Peter Everdeen—the most profound discovery of prophetic fate locked inside of a memory. Our house was nearly forgotten as the boxcar became our preferred place for life-building. As our feet danced between the aisles to night-song crickets and our eyes spoke of hunger that wasn't easily satisfied, we began to unearth the prophecy one love-stirred moment at a time. The heat of my kiss on her mouth encouraged fate to carry out its mission, and the content hum in the ever after of love making solidified the choice: there was a heart that thumped so bravely—there was a heart that thumped so purely full of love—and there were two boys in the dutiful spinning world who greatly needed both.