Larkin's Letters (12 page)

As you fished, I read more of my manuscript to you. You would frequently look over at me and listen carefully to every word that read off my lips. And as I would look up at you between sentences, you would give me a quick wink underneath that furrowed brow of yours. I am almost finished with it. Now that I am feeling better, I will be able to spend more time on it.

I wish you could see the way I see you. Your body is magical. Behind those soft brown eyes is an extraordinary man, one of God’s masterpieces. As I watched you move around on this boat, as I watched your muscles come alive with each cast or reel of the line, I was watching a perfect piece of art come alive before my very eyes. I ask you so often why you are so good to me. But today, I am going to ask God why He is so good to me. For sending me you, He has been good to me, and I will never understand why I have been so lucky to have received such a perfect gift.

Letter #26 - June 4, 2012

My dearest Ryan,

As you know, one of my favorite things to do as a kid was to go to the drive-in movies. There was just something about watching a
movie on a giant screen sitting inside the car eating popcorn and sipping on an Icee. My most favorite times were when Ricky would let you borrow the truck and we would go pick up Mary, Jennifer, and Nikki and whoever they were dating at the time; and your old friends, Scotty and Mike would come in Scotty’s truck, and we would make the ten mile drive to the Absecon Drive-In Movie Theater. Do you remember that? It was our little circle of friends. Nothing was better than sitting in the back of that ‘89 Chevy pick-up truck on that navy blue fleece blanket with a cooler of sodas and candy, feeling the breeze coming off of the Absecon Bay. You and I always sat next to each other with our backs propped against the back window of the truck cab, and you would always let me use your shoulder as my pillow because I could never stay awake long enough to watch the entire double feature. I remember you would get so frustrated with me when I would ask you on the way home how the movie ended. “If you were that interested in the ending, you would have stayed awake,” you would say to me, shaking your head.

One particular night at the drive-in I will never forget is when we went to see the double feature of “True Lies” and “The Mask” in the summer of 1994. The summer before my senior year. The summer after you graduated. I knew something was bothering you because you didn’t want anyone else to come with us. It was just you and me. You didn’t really say much to
me throughout the night until the intermission.

That was the night you told me you were moving to Los Angeles to pursue your dream of being an actor. I’ll never forget the feeling when I heard the words “I’m moving to LA, Larkin.” As I listened to you talk about how excited you were about this epic change you were about to take in your life, your words started to morph into mumbles, and then eventually, I couldn’t even hear anything you were saying as echoes of sorrow and anguish resonated inside my ears and my head. My heart dropped into my stomach, and my throat swelled up as if I was having an allergic reaction. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. I was so devastated to lose my best friend. To this day, Ryan, I still don’t know how I held back my tears. I never let you see me cry.

Unfortunately, drive-in movie theaters are pretty much nonexistent these days. It’s a shame, really. I feel sorry for all the kids out there who won’t get to experience those fun-filled nights with close friends hanging out in the back of a pick-up watching movies and forming bonds like we did. There’s nothing like the drive-in movie theater.

Last night, after dinner, you asked me to go on a date with you. Of course, I accepted, and you wouldn’t give me any hints as to where you were going to take me. When we got into the SUV, you blindfolded me so I couldn’t see anything. I know you had to have been just a little bit annoyed with me because I kept asking you over and over again where you were taking
me. You probably wished you had also put a gag in my mouth to shut me up!

You made one quick stop before you parked the SUV in a vacant parking lot overlooking the bay, and all I could hear was you fumbling around with something. I then heard you leave the front seat and get something from the back. My curiosity began to heighten after you came back and guided me out of the passenger seat and into the back seat of the SUV. You walked back around to the driver’s side, and you climbed in next to me taking my blindfold off. And right before my eyes was our laptop set up on a box you had placed between the two front seats with “When Harry Met Sally” playing in the DVD drive. My all-time favorite movie! The movie we watched countless times together. You handed me a bag of popcorn and an Icee, and we watched the movie together with my head on your shoulder the entire time. But I didn’t fall asleep. Not this time.

You are amazing, Ryan. You created our own little makeshift drive-in movie theater. You created another amazing memory for me to cherish, for you to cherish, too. Hopefully, you will keep making these memories, Ryan, because you may need them one day to help get you through the pain and sorrow. Know that these moments shared with you have helped to complete my life, and I want you to know you have made me the happiest that I could possibly be. Why are you so good to me?

Letter #27 - July 5, 2012

Dear Ryan,

Another great night last night. Ian and Linda, Sarah, and Justin and Amanda came to visit us for the Fourth of July holiday, and the seven of us spent the night in our pitched tent on the beach behind the house. We were in our own little world playing two-hand touch football and dancing and laughing as the fireworks lit up the black, endless sky. We had tiki lamps set up with a big bonfire, and we roasted hot dogs and marshmallows with songs from the likes of Norah Jones and Frank Sinatra in the background serenading the sultry summer air. We were on our own private island. An island where sickness and pain doesn’t exist. Only strength, love, and friendship. An island where the seven of us play endless games of two-hand touch football and dance underneath the fireworks.

Several times last night, I found myself imagining we were in heaven and nothing could touch us. I often wonder what heaven is really like. I can’t imagine it is any better than when I am with you. I imagine it with endless beaches surrounded by crystal clear blue waters and eternal sunshine and warmth. I imagine a place where sleep is nonexistent and love bears all. Heaven is our own private island. It’s ironic, don’t you think? For many people, heaven is a real, unimaginary place, but no one
knows what it really, truly is like. All you can do is imagine what it could be like. All I know is I can’t imagine it without you.

Letter #28 - August 1, 2012

Hey, lovely,

This summer has been extraordinary. I’m healthy. We’re happy and in love, and there is no better way to bring the summer to an end than you going back to work. This has what I have been hoping for. You have sacrificed so much for me. You put your life on hold, and now it is time to get back to it. You’re not going to be too far away. Atlanta. Not so bad. At least it is the same country this time.

I started to write to you when I found out I was sick. Well, I am not sick anymore, but I decided I am still going to write to you anyway. I don’t know when I will stop or when I will give these letters to you, but I imagine I will know when the time comes.

The summer of 2012 is one I will never forget. Married in our new home on the bay. Just like I had always dreamed of, and you made my dreams come true. I still don’t have that yacht I always wanted, but your Grady White is certainly not too shabby of a boat. Fishing, grilling, Jet Skiing, dancing, walking hand-in-hand on the beach with the water up to our ankles, enjoying frequent visits with Ian and Linda, Justin and Amanda, and Sarah,
feeding the seagulls at the dunes, watching the boats go by as we sit tangled together on our beach in front of the bonfire, making love as the rain pounds against the bedroom’s French door windows. A summer to remember. And hopefully, an illness to forget.

We leave tomorrow for Atlanta. I am so excited to see you get back to work. To see you in your element. I’m going to miss Jersey, but we’ll be back before we know it.

The steaming, hot water from the shower was becoming lukewarm as the droplets streamed down Ryan’s tired body. He was able to get a few hours of sleep in between the twenty-some letters he had read with an occasional dream about Larkin. He could never really tell if he was actually dreaming or if she really had been there with him. She felt real, and her smell was almost tangible.

As he towel-dried off, he was startled by the sudden music that had started to resonate throughout the house. It was fitting, really. Their song. Their wedding song. “Nice ‘n’ Easy”. He had installed a surround-sound system in the house for Larkin because she loved to listen to music when she would write or clean the house. But something was wrong with the stereo because it would just randomly turn on every so often. Larkin had left her “Frank Sinatra Greatest Hits” CD in the drive, and he didn’t have it in him to change it. He actually enjoyed it when it would start to play, and he would listen to the entire CD before he turned it off. It reminded him of her.

He finished dressing into a loose pair of gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt, and as he exited the bathroom, he saw her. She was standing there before him holding a white cyclamen out for him to take. Her favorite flower.

“I got your flowers. They’re beautiful.” She slowly walked toward him. “Dance with me?”

He took the flower from her hand and wrapped his left arm around her waist and took her left hand into his other hand and rested it on his chest.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered in her ear, and their bodies moved as one to the music. He pulled her close, capturing her scent. They danced close for a while before he pulled away to look into her eyes.

“I miss you, Larkin. I miss you so much.”

She smiled at him. He loved when she smiled at him. She ran her fingers through his hair.

“You’re beautiful, Ryan. My beautiful-faced boy.”

“Larkin.” He paused, struggling to push the words
through his mouth. “Larkin, I am so sorry. I am so sorry I wasn’t there with you. I promised you I would be there with you, and I wasn’t. I left you all alone.”

She stopped their bodies from swaying and pulled his face into her hands.

“You were there, baby. Don’t you remember? You were there. You were waiting for me. You were standing there with a bouquet of cyclamens. And you embraced me, and you told me you loved me. You wouldn’t let go of me, and I told you it was okay. Don’t you remember? You need to remember.”

“I remember wanting to stay with you. I didn’t want to leave you. I should have stayed with you, Larkin.”

“No, you shouldn’t have.” She wiped the tears from his face. “No, I didn’t want you to stay. You promised me you were going to keep on living. That’s the promise you need to keep.”

He pulled her close to him again and savored every touch, every breath, and every heartbeat as they danced together. He could feel her breath as she whispered she loved him in his ear.

And then she was gone.

Ryan looked over at the clock. It was 8:00 a.m. He felt like time had been standing still for the past two months. He never left the house. An occasional trip to the store was the only thing that would ever really pull him away. He felt that if he left the house, he was leaving her. He could still feel her presence inside the house. Her presence was so real to him. Every room he walked into, he could see her. In the living room, he would see her typing on her laptop as she sat on the couch in front of the fireplace. In the kitchen, he would see her preparing their dinner. In the dining room, he would see her preparing a vase for the fresh flowers he had brought to her that morning. In the bedroom, he would see her drying off just after a shower. Her ghost was everywhere, and he was afraid of the day it would no longer be there. He was afraid to move on because she would stop coming to him. And he wasn’t ready yet. He didn’t know if he ever would be.

The storm had passed, and it was an unusually warm morning for late March. Signs of springtime were ascending upon the Jersey Shore, and the letters had unburied memories of fishing and boating. It was the perfect weather for a boat ride, he thought. He hadn’t been back on the water since last summer, the last time being with her. He sat on the edge of the bed as the music continued to fill the empty, melancholy air,
and he thought about the encounter he just had with Larkin. He
had
made her a promise that night, the last night he was with her. And he wasn’t keeping it. He had already broken one promise to her, and he needed to find the strength to keep this one. He grabbed the rest of the unread letters off the nightstand, grabbed his sweatshirt, and headed downstairs to grab the boat keys from the garage. He needed to at least try. Try to ready himself to move on. That way, he could tell her that he was trying the next time she came to him. If there was a next time. It scared him to think there might not be.

He motored his
Grady White
along the medium-sized swells of the inlet through the Great Egg Harbor Bay into the back bays of Ocean City. He found a spot where no one else was close and let the boat drift in stride with the current while he continued to read her letters.

Letter #29 - September 10, 2012

Hey, beautiful-faced boy,

Leukemia is no laughing matter. It is terrifying, it’s daunting, it’s forbidding, and it’s intimidating. It is sinister, it’s devilish, it’s hostile, and it’s unforgiving. It is everything that laughter is not. Leukemia is a sharp knife that severs life. And you, Ryan, always do everything you can to help dull that knife. Cancer is a strange and unpredictable cell. You can go for
years in remission, and then one day it pops its head up again. If you ever have it, you will never be free of it.

We just got home from the hospital. Four days of IVs, dull hospital food, and nothing to look at but four white walls and nurses and doctors in and out of the room all day. It’s funny. I hate hospitals. I’m a nurse, and I hate hospitals.

You never left my side. You fought tooth and nail to be able to lay in the bed with me, and of course, you won. You’re Ryan Boone. Everything comes easy to you, remember? I’m just kidding. I actually think the one nurse, Julia, had a crush on you. She would have let you do anything.

I don’t remember anything. The last thing I remember is walking into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of milk, and the next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital. I haven’t been feeling well the past several weeks, and we thought it was just a bad cold. We had left for Atlanta so you could start filming the movie you had postponed when I was getting treatment. I finally was well enough for you to feel comfortable going back to work. I went with you the first two weeks, but I came home to see the doctor after I came down with a cold. I started to feel better after a couple of days, but I decided to stay home for another week to spend time with my parents and Laura since she came home for a few days to visit.

Shortly after, my cold came back and was actually worse. I was running a low-grade fever with night sweats, and I had no appetite. You were worried, as always, and made arrangements to come home, but you couldn’t for a couple of days, so you asked Ian to come stay with me for a few days until you could come. Thankfully, he is in New York so he was close by. I begged you not to call him, but you insisted, and like I said earlier, you’re Ryan Boone and you always win! Well, it also helps that I have a crush on you, too, just like Nurse Julia.

I guess you were right, though. Thank God Ian was there. Thank God because who knows how long I would’ve laid on the kitchen floor until someone found me.
I woke up in the hospital with you lying next to me. My parents, Laura, and Ian were by my side, too. I remember feeling very scared because everybody had such a look of worry on their faces. Everybody but you. You, of course, had that crooked smile that is so amazing. It made me feel less worried to see you smiling at me.

We visited for about an hour with everyone before they left. I was so tired, and I was having abdominal pain, and my head hurt but I didn’t know why. I said something to you about it, and you told me you needed to tell me something. You were lying next to me on your side, and you shifted your upper body up onto your elbow, raising you up so I could see your face better. You brushed my cheek and my forehead, and as I looked into your eyes, that crooked smile faded away. My heart sank into my stomach, and the tears that were building up in your eyes were enough to send chills down my spine.

You explained everything to me. How Ian found me on the kitchen floor and rushed me to the hospital. How he called you right away, and you came as fast as you could. How they had to remove my spleen because it was enlarged, and they had to put three stitches above my left eyebrow because I had hit my head when I fell. You explained that I was hooked up to IV antibiotics because I developed pneumonia. I was dehydrated, and that was why I fainted in the kitchen. My immune system wasn’t able to fight off my cold, and that alarmed the doctors because it should have been able to if I was in remission. My enlarged spleen and lymph nodes were also bad signs, so the doctors did some blood tests and a lymph node biopsy.

I remember when I first started writing to you. I had just found out that I had leukemia, and I hadn’t told you yet. It took me months to be able to tell you. And I am still writing to you. Eighteen months later. And this time, you’re telling me. You’re telling me I am sick again. But it’s worse, Ryan. It is much worse than eighteen months ago. What are we going to do?

Ryan thought back on that day in the hospital when he had explained to Larkin that she had acquired a very rare complication that can arise with her type of leukemia called Richter’s Syndrome. It can appear suddenly, even in patients that are in remission. The prognosis is generally poor. She had been assigned to the high-risk category based on her test results, which meant they didn’t feel she would respond positively to the treatment. Telling her that she was very sick and that she may only have several months left to live was the hardest day of his life. Even harder than when he found out she had leukemia. He had felt empty inside. He stayed every night with her in the hospital, and when she was sleeping, he would climb out of bed and close himself in the bathroom and cry harder than he had ever cried before. He never wanted her to see him cry. There was no way he could lose her. She had beaten the cancer. She had been happy, energetic, and vibrant again. Just like when they were kids. How could this have happened? These were all the things that had flooded his mind when he had found out she was dying. He had felt like he was dying.

As the weeks passed by, Larkin’s condition had remained stable. She was getting weekly IV antibiotic treatments to try to slow down the progression of the Richter’s Syndrome. Ryan didn’t return to work and had to put production of the movie on hold. They spent every waking moment together, and he never left her side except for half an hour every morning when she was still sleeping. He would walk to the corner of the main road to Harry’s Flower Shop to buy her a fresh bouquet of flowers, just like he had been doing every day since he moved back with her.

Some days she felt strong enough for them to take a walk on the beach or to go out to dinner. But it wasn’t often. They spent their days watching movies, playing cards and board games, visiting with her parents, Laura, his mother, Ricky and Bobby; and Ian, Sarah, and Justin would make frequent visits, too. She sometimes would try to write, but he could tell she had lost the motivation to finish. She would sit in front of the laptop for about thirty minutes before she would shut it and go upstairs and lie down. She was changing right before his eyes. The Larkin who was his childhood best friend, the Larkin who he was so madly in love with, was losing strength and courage. Her optimism was quickly fading, and he could tell she was becoming depressed. He did everything he could to make her smile and laugh.

Letter #30 - October 5, 2012

My beautiful husband,

I am sitting on the deck as you sleep not too far away inside on the couch in front of the burning fireplace. It is late, and the moon is heavy like my heart. This may very well be my last letter to you. I don’t know. I don’t know how much longer I have with you. I have been feeling sorry for myself these last couple of weeks. It’s pretty pathetic. I have never been one to feel sorry for myself, but I do, and I can’t help it. I need to write my feelings down because I can’t say them to you because I know I will cry. And I don’t want you to see me cry anymore.

There are too many things I haven’t done yet. Too many sunsets and sunrises I haven’t
seen. Too many dances I haven’t danced. Too many songs I haven’t sung. Too many books I haven’t read. Too many books I haven’t written. Too many miles I haven’t traveled. Too many “I love you’s” I haven’t said. Too many hugs I haven’t given. Too many tears I haven’t cried. Too many laughs I haven’t laughed. Too much love that I haven’t been able to give.

Love is home. Love is laughter. Love is an embrace. Love is the foundation of our soul. Love is the engine that keeps us motoring through life’s journey. You’re my love, and you have given me reason to motor on through life as long as I have been able to this past year.

I thought we were in the clear, that I had beaten this unrelenting enemy. But I was wrong. But I want you to know that I have finally made peace with the fact that I am going to die. I am going to die very soon. I now need you to find peace with it. I hear you get out of bed every night and lock yourself in the bathroom. I hear you crying. Ever since that night when you came to see me, when you confronted me about being sick, I have never seen you cry. You are too good to me to ever let me see you cry. Why are you so good to me?