Eversea A Love Story

house.
    I heard her hauling my bike out from the small woodshed as I made my way over to the window in Nana’s room. If you stood on tiptoes you could almost see the ocean. The view from this side of the attic, a floor above this one, was better. On a whim, I headed that way.
    As a small child visiting my grandmother, whenever I felt I needed to be alone, I went up to that spot in the attic below the dormer window to hide or read. Nana had allowed me to take a few items up there; seat cushions from a discarded couch, a small rickety wooden plant stand I used as a table, and a reading lamp. Nana had her craft and sewing supplies in the attic as well and after my parents and I moved in with her, we both worked up there on various projects alone or together. Or sometimes I lay in my reading nook for hours engrossed in a book with the sound of her working away on some sewing project behind me.
    I climbed the last few stairs and stepped into the crowded space. I walked the length of it, past the two worktables with my unfinished projects, and boxes of tools and books and things from my parents’ move that had never been unpacked. My nook at the end was hidden behind two old gnarly eight-foot doors propped up against the rafters, and behind that I had tacked up old curtains. You might miss it, unless you really looked. That’s how I liked it.
    I hadn’t been up here for over a year. I guess I had finally grown out of needing to get away. That was what happened when you were the only one still in a big house with no one left to get away from.
    If only I had known then I had such a short amount of time with those I loved, I would never have hidden away.
    It was an unrealistic and pointless notion, I knew.
     

 
    N I N E T E E N
    Everything in my little reading nook was just as I had left it. I sank down onto the old brown cushion that was tossed on the dusty wooden floor beneath the window and looked out at the view. There were two or three rays of sun still making it through the thick clouds. They sparkled on the water in the distance. It would be sunset soon.
    I pressed my fingers to my lips as I relived Jack’s kisses. My belly fluttered in remembrance. I wondered if any kiss in my life would ever be able to compare to the first feeling of Jack’s mouth against mine.
    “Oh, Nana,” I breathed. I missed her terribly. She had always seemed so wise and always knew how to make me feel better. I couldn’t imagine her being okay with me throwing myself at a boy like I had done with Jack, but I knew she was a romantic at heart.
    She’d met my grandfather right before he went off to Germany to fight in the Second World War. She once showed me the amazing letters they wrote to each other over the course of four years. You could feel the love pouring off the pages and his worry he wouldn’t make it back to her. With all my grandfather was enduring, he’d worried about her being alone. Never once had he thought she wouldn’t wait for him. They had such loyalty and unshakeable faith in each other. Did people love like that anymore? I’d asked her the same thing at the time. But no matter how hard I thought about it and wracked my brain to remember what she’d told me, as if it would be the one thing that would make me feel better, I couldn’t.
    I thought of my mother and father. The truth was I didn’t even know if they’d had a good marriage. I never asked Nana, I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because I knew they hadn’t. I did know my parents met when my mom was very young and she got pregnant with Joey and married right away. I couldn’t help the regret I felt wishing I’d paid more attention to my parents, spent more time with them, asked them as much as I could before they were gone.
    Had my mother been happy? Did she feel she had never fulfilled her destiny? The facts were she was a wife and mother who’d moved in with her husband’s mother. I knew Nana loved her, but whether or not my mom was happy with her life choices was a question I would never get an answer to. Joey and I were loved by them all though—we never wanted for love in our house. And how many people could say that?
    I thought of Jack’s mother taking her young son to another country and changing his name with no support system or other family to speak of. How lonely it must have been. I knew I only had Joey left, but I’d grown up surrounded by so much love.
    The rain started spitting against the window. I hoped Jazz had made it to my