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Post-Epilogue


Till my body is dust
Till my soul is no more
I will love you, love you

Till the sun starts to cry
And the moon turns to rust
I will love you, love you

But I need to know
Will you stay for all time
Forever and a day
Then I’ll give my heart
Till the end of all time
Forever and a day

Till the stars fill my eyes
And we touch the last time
I will love you, love you
I will love you, love you
I will love you, love you

- “I Will Love You” by Fisher


The sanctuary of Bayview Christian Church was filled with roses. The cheerful yellow blossoms lined the intricately molded pews and adorned the altar, where a little wooden box rested, its stained glass front turned towards her. A red rose was set into the golden stained glass, and it stood out among the real yellow roses that framed it.

Perfect, she thought, remembering the bouquets Nick had given her on each of their fifty anniversaries. Always the same thing: a mass of yellow roses with a single red blossom in the middle. “Yellow roses represent friendship,” he’d once explained. “And red means ‘I love you.’” On their fiftieth anniversary, he had actually given her a bouquet of fifty-seven yellow roses, one for each year he’d known her, surrounding the biggest, most beautiful red rose she had ever seen. One red rose, for his one and only.

For years, Delaine, who had an artistic eye, had tried to convince him to bring in more variety, incorporating the brightly colored tropical flowers her mother loved. But Nick never wavered on their anniversaries, always going back to the yellow and red roses they’d had at their wedding. “Your mom’s always thought flowers are overrated. Why give them if they’re not meaningful?” he would say.

She had always found the tradition endearing, and now, the sight of the altar practically overflowing with arrangements of sunny roses filled her eyes with tears. She had known this day was coming, but that didn’t make it any easier. Her throat felt tight, and her chest ached, not only with the grief of her own loss, but with the sad realization that two souls who had journeyed through life together for half a century were now parted by death. She hadn’t felt this kind of pain, this crushing sadness, since her divorce, but now she understood.

She was heartbroken.

They all were. She could see it in their faces as they filed into the sanctuary, heads bowed, looking up only to catch the eye of a friend or a loved one and offer a grim smile of condolence. They were all mourning not only the death of a friend, or a family member, but the death of a beautiful relationship.

In her younger years, while attending funerals for children she’d known through her work, she had thought the memorial service for an old person shouldn’t be a sad affair. Eighty years was a long time to live, especially for someone whose life had almost been taken away far sooner. They shouldn’t mourn, but celebrate a long, happy life.

It was easy to think that way, until she was the one sitting in the pew, beside the broken soul death had left behind. If her heart was aching this badly, she thought, pushing a strand of her graying red hair out of her eyes as she turned to look at him, she couldn’t imagine how much pain was in his.

He’d remained stoic so far, giving a nod of acknowledgment to those who had come forward to offer their condolences, laying comforting hands upon his stooped shoulders. And they had all come. AJ, removing his hat to expose the bald head he’d been shaving clean since he was forty, whispering a few words in his old man’s rasp. Brian, bald but for the wisps of flyaway white hair around the sides of his skull, his normally cheerful face a mask of sadness as he bent and clasped his wrinkled hands around his friend’s. Howie, his steel gray hair cropped close to his scalp, and Kevin, looking younger than his eighty-eight years with a full of head of hair left, offering hugs and their prayers.

AJ, Brian, Howie, and Kevin. They had been his closest friends for most of his lifetime, and they felt like family to her. It meant a lot to her, as she knew it did to him, that they had made it here.

But then, lots of people had. The sanctuary was full when she turned around to look. She could not see one empty pew, and there were still some stragglers coming in. Between the two of them, Nick and Claire Carter had a large family and even more friends. As the last few guests took their seats in the back, she saw the pastor emerge through a side door and take his place at the altar.

With a lump in her throat, she leaned into him, resting her hand lightly on his leg, or rather, the stump of it, which she’d never known to be anything different. “I think it’s about to start, Dad,” she whispered into his ear.

Nick, her stepfather, whom she’d regarded as “Dad” for as long as she’d known the word, gave a short nod of understanding. He didn’t speak, but she saw his gnarled finger go into his ear to adjust his hearing aid and knew he wanted to hear every last word that was spoken about her mother, his beloved wife of fifty years.

The sanctuary fell silent as the pastor began to speak. “Before many of you were born,” he began, and she smiled, for he was probably younger than she was, “a movie called Braveheart was made. Now regarded as one of Hollywood’s classics, it tells the story of the Scottish patriot William Wallace. There are a lot of memorable lines in the film, likely none of which were actually spoken by Wallace in his lifetime, but one that I found especially fitting, after hearing family and friends tell about the life and spirit of the person we’re remembering today, is a line delivered by Mel Gibson near the end of the film, when his character, Wallace, is facing his execution. The line is this: ‘Every man dies. Not every man really lives.’ Of course, the same can be said of a woman, and especially of a woman like Claire Carter.”

At the mention of her mother’s name, Cait Breckenridge, born Caitlin Turner, Claire’s eldest daughter, who was like her both in looks and personality, felt her eyes mist over. The pastor’s face blurred before them as she sat gazing up at him from the front pew, her stepfather on her right and her oldest son on her left. Three generations, they represented, gathered on that day to say goodbye to a wife, a mother, and a grandmother.

“Anyone who knew Claire, as you all did,” the pastor went on, “could attest to the fact that she was a woman who really lived, who took God’s greatest gift, the gift of life, and lived it to the fullest. We’re here today to remember and celebrate that life, the life of Claire Aileen Carter.”

With tears in her eyes, Cait listened to his brief sermon, in which he emphasized all that Claire had seen and done in her long life, calling death and the ascension to Heaven merely “a new adventure” for a woman who “wasn’t afraid to take risks.” She smiled; that was true. Her mother had been a brave, strong woman. It had been Claire who had taught her how to water-ski as a kid, how to change a tire when she started driving, and how to file for divorce when she found out her first husband had been unfaithful. Cait and her mother had battled over the years, too alike in personality for their own good, but to Cait, Claire had always been a hero. In the last two decades, they had been especially close, with Cait as the only daughter still living in Florida. She missed her mother already.

“Claire’s last name was Ryan when I first met her,” said her mother’s childhood best friend, Dianna, when she got up to deliver the first eulogy. At eighty years old and about eighty pounds heavier than she’d been when she first met Claire, Dianna still suntanned and still dyed her gray hair back to its natural black of her youth. Her wide bosom heaved beneath her black dress, as she leaned against the podium, and her leathery hands trembled, but the quiver of emotion in her voice just added to the heartfelt message of her speech. “She was my best friend in high school… graduated right alongside me in the Chamberlain High School class of 1998, probably with a much higher GPA than I had.” She paused, wiping her sparkling brown eyes, while a few chuckles rang out through the sanctuary. “Just a couple of years ago, she and I went to our sixtieth class reunion – I know, I couldn’t believe people actually had sixtieth reunions either, but apparently they do – and we looked at our old yearbooks. There was a quote that was popular among us girls back then. It went, ‘Work like you don’t need money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like no one’s watching.’ A lot of girls included that as their senior quote in the yearbook, but Claire… she lived it.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Cait saw Nick nod. She looked over, and although his light blue eyes were filled with tears, he was smiling.

“Even when life was cruel to her, Claire appreciated it. She looked for the humor in any situation, and she didn’t care what other people thought of her. If she was ever afraid, she rarely showed it. She was brave in the face of every bad card life dealt her. When she got leukemia in college, what should have been some of the best years of her life, she fought it. She went through all of the treatments, even though they made her sick, and when she lost her hair from the chemo, she had me take her shopping for bandanas – every bright color, every crazy pattern we could find – and she wore them around without being self-conscious. I’m still the kind of woman who can’t leave the house if my hair’s not set, so I always admired her for that. She had a great attitude about life. She knew what really mattered, and she didn’t sweat the small stuff. If she could see us now – and I think she can – she’d probably tell us all to dry our eyes, go back to her house, crank up the music, and dance like no one’s watching. Except, knowing her, she would be up there watching and laughing her butt off at all us old farts trying to dance.” Dianna laughed through her tears, blurted a choked “Thank you” into the microphone, and left the podium to appreciative laughter.

Even Cait had to smile, knowing that if her mother was watching them somehow, she was surely smiling too.

She let her mind wander through the readings and hymns that followed; she always had been a little attention-deficit. She blamed it on her premature birth – not that she used it as an excuse. School had always been hard for her, as it had been for Lainey, but Cait had enjoyed it. What she’d lacked in academic ability, she had made up for in talent on the athletic field. Sports were her thing; throughout her school years, she’d played soccer, volleyball, even done cheerleading. The school teams required her to maintain good grades, so she had worked hard in her classes and gotten into the nursing program at the University of Tampa, where her mother had begun her degree a generation earlier. After working as a nurse for a few years, and after a painful divorce from her husband, she had gone back to school and gotten a second degree in physical therapy. Now she worked as the director of Camp Lucky Fin, the greatest legacy her parents would leave behind.

The camp had been Nick’s brainchild. On hiatus from the Backstreet Boys, he had developed the idea with Claire: a camp and water park just for children with physical disabilities, everything from cerebral palsy to quadriplegia to amputations. The idea had brought together his inherent love of the water with the feeling of freedom swimming had given him not long after the loss of his leg, along with a desire to help young people who were going through the same kind of struggles he’d once faced. He had financed the project himself and broken ground in Tampa Bay when Cait and Lainey were still in high school. Decades later, Camp Lucky Fin, named for Nemo’s “lucky fin” in the movie Finding Nemo and run through charity, was an astounding success. The camp had been featured in news stories and magazine articles, and just a few weeks prior, Cait had been contacted about the demand for more camps in other parts of the country. She had meant to discuss with Nick the possibility of a sister camp for children with cancer, but then Claire had gotten worse, and she hadn’t had the chance.

For most of Cait’s life, her mother had been the picture of health and strength. She took good care of herself, and when the girls were young, she’d had seemingly endless reserves of energy to take them on their father’s tours across the country and around the world. At thirty-five, with her twin daughters in the first grade, she had even begun to talk of having another child.

Though Cait was oblivious to it at the time, Claire had known that, of course, having a child with Nick the natural way was an impossibility. But that hadn’t stopped her from wanting to be a mother again, and wanting Nick to have a child of his own. So they had explored their options, finally deciding to try for a child using donor eggs. Claire had insisted on carrying the child herself, but it hadn’t been as easy for her to get pregnant a second time around, using eggs that were not her own. After months of trying, she’d finally achieved a pregnancy, only to miscarry a few weeks later. Devastated, she and Nick tried again, promising each other that if she lost another baby, they would adopt instead. But, to their joy and relief, the next pregnancy was a success, and Claire carried a baby girl almost to term, giving birth to her third daughter and Nick’s first (in the biological sense) on April 18, 2019, just over a month after her thirty-ninth birthday.

Adrienne Rose Carter, Cait’s half-sister, was now forty-one years old and just as beautiful as she’d been in her twenties. She had inherited Nick’s features – blonde hair, blue eyes, great eyebrows, and a smile that could drive men wild – and his singing talent as well. Like Claire and Cait in personality, outgoing and fun-loving, Adrienne had had no trouble landing work on Broadway, even without Nick’s influence, though, surely, the last name had helped. She had kept her name, Carter, even after marrying her husband, and won a Tony the following year for her performance as Glinda in the Broadway revival of the musical “Wicked.” She’d ended her long run in the role just a few months ago and moved back to Los Angeles to do voiceover work while she was expecting her first child, a little girl. Cait peeked down the pew at her and saw her younger sister’s hands clasped tightly across her six-months-pregnant belly in prayer, her curtains of long, blonde hair hiding her face.

Next to her sat Delaine, so alike her in many ways, yet so different. Lainey, too, had shown promise as a singer, a talent inherited from the twins’ biological father, Jamie. (“Definitely not from your mother,” Nick had always joked, teasing his wife good-naturedly.) But she had always been quieter, more reserved, than Cait and, later, Adrienne. In high school, she’d designed costumes and lighting effects for the musicals, while Cait had hammed it up onstage. For awhile, Lainey sang lead in a garage band with a sound similar to Evanescence. Nick had helped them out as much as he could, even signing them to his record label and producing their first album, but the music venture had flopped. Lainey had the talent, but not the charisma to be a performer, and so she got a degree in production design and landed a job designing costumes and sets for Broadway. For a time, she and Adrienne had lived together in New York, even working on the same musical once. Now she lived there with a boyfriend. It was a shame that Cait rarely saw her either of her sisters, except for in cases like this.

Oddly enough, of all her siblings, including her fraternal twin, Cait was closest to the youngest of them all, her brother, Casey. He had completed their family in 2025, when she and Lainey were fifteen, adopted from Russia by Nick and Claire. Claire had been forty-five at the time and knew that another pregnancy was not an option for her, but she and Nick had wanted one more child, a son. Casey Ryan Carter had neither Ryan, nor Carter DNA, but he had all the love both sides of the family could offer. As Claire joked with Nick, their family was finally complete… “yours, mine, and ours.” Caitlin and Delaine, born out of her eggs… Adrienne, born of Nick’s sperm… and Casey, adopted by the two of them. They viewed it as the best possible solution to the dilemma of having children together.

Just a few months old when they’d brought him over from Russia, Casey was now thirty-six, married with a seven-year-old daughter named Lara, and enjoying a successful career their parents took special pride in. He was not a musician like Nick, nor an actress like Adrienne, a designer like Delaine, or even a physical therapist like Cait. He did work in the medical field, though, as an oncologist at Tampa General Hospital. In a way, he’d brought Nick and Claire’s story full circle.

Now he sat between Delaine and his wife, Mackenzie, his hands folded in his lap, staring blankly past the altar in a way that made him look lost. Cait’s heart went out to her younger brother. It had been a rough few months for the both of them.

The only two who had stayed in Tampa, Cait and Casey had been the ones left to watch their mother’s steady decline over the last few months. Claire had suffered from congestive heart failure for years. Her doctor told her it was likely a late complication of the heavy regimes of chemo and radiation she’d received in her young adulthood, as was the osteoporosis that left her aging body stooped and frail. In the last year, her health had deteriorated.

Nick had paid for home health care to avoid having to move her into a nursing home, for he wasn’t able to take care of her by himself. His own health was failing, though not as rapidly as hers; still, he relied on oxygen much of the time to support his battle-weary lungs, and he had been wheelchair-bound for several years. At eighty years old, he just didn’t have the stamina needed to walk on a prosthetic leg anymore.

Cait knew that the loss of his mobility had been difficult for her father, but not nearly as hard as the loss of his wife. He’d spent long hours, even whole nights, sitting in his chair by her side, holding her hand while she slept, drifting in and out of consciousness. Even with her body slowing down, Claire’s mind had been as sharp as ever, right up until the end, and she had made her wishes clear. No more hospitals, no breathing tubes, no resuscitation. She had known her dying was inevitable, and as she’d made Nick promise, “When I finally kick the bucket, Stumpy, you’re to let me go.”

She’d died on a Sunday afternoon, without any sappy deathbed speech, just closed her eyes for a nap and never opened them again. Nick had been by her side, as always, stroking her hand as she drifted off to sleep… the sleep of eternity, it turned out to be. He had nodded off too, and when he’d awoken, her hand was cold in his. As he’d told Cait later, he had known right then that she was gone.

The last few days had been a blur for Cait, trying to make the funeral arrangements while consoling her heartbroken father. They had honored her mother’s wish to be cremated, and now the wooden box on the altar, set with a stained glass red rose, held her earthly remains.

Nick reached out and touched the box as he was wheeled to the altar to deliver the final eulogy, laying a single, long-stemmed red over its cherry-finished top. Then he put his trembling hands in his lap, steepling them tightly as he bowed his head, took a long drag of air from the oxygen tubes in his nostrils, and tried to collect himself.

In the days after their mother’s death, the four siblings had debated over whether or not their father should go up to speak at her memorial service. “I know he wants to, or thinks he should, but it’ll just be too hard for him,” Adrienne had told the others, her face twisted with grief. “I just worry about the emotional strain it would put him under, having to deliver a eulogy for his wife in front of all those people. One of us can get up and talk about Mom.”

But the twins had jumped to Nick’s defense, overruling their younger sister. “Let Dad do what he wants,” Cait insisted. “She is his wife, and he deserves the chance to say goodbye the way he wants to. If he wants to give a eulogy, then let him. He’s not as frail as you think.”

Nick did look frail, though, hunched in his wheelchair at the base of the altar. His broad shoulders were slumped, and his once notable height seemed diminished in the chair. He was hardly recognizable as the playful man shoving wedding cake into Claire’s laughing mouth in one of the photographs that lined the altar. Over the years, the laughter lines had become entrenched, until his tanned face was as wrinkled as a prune. His once blonde hair was now a silvery gray, though he still had a full head of it. The weight he’d always struggled to keep off had piled on in middle age, his youthful pop star’s body hidden behind a rounded beer belly. The last prosthetic leg he’d owned no longer fit comfortably, and though he still had it, he never wore it, choosing instead to simply tuck his empty pant leg up under his stump as he rode in his chair. There was a time, he’d once confessed to Cait, when he had been self-conscious to go without his leg, but those days were long gone. In his old age, he no longer cared about how he looked or about what people thought. And surely, no one was thinking about his missing leg today.

It wasn’t just his leg that was missing, anyway. Nick’s whole body looked deflated, as if all the life had been let out of him. And in a way, it had. Claire was his life. She’d been his life for the last fifty years of it, and without her, Cait didn’t know how he could go on. He would, somehow, she was sure, for she knew her stepfather was strong. But it would be the hardest leg of his life’s journey, that final stretch without Claire by his side.

In front of all of his family and friends, from a two-year-old great-granddaughter (Cait’s own grandbaby, Kristine), to his oldest “brother” Kevin, Nick seemed to gather the strength she knew he had in him and lifted his head to address them at last.

“My wife…” He croaked through his first words, his voice breaking, and he paused to clear his throat before trying again. “My wife Claire and I watched a lot of movies in our time. She loved ‘em. She would always put on a dress and let me take her out to a fancy restaurant or some red carpet event, but that was never really her style. Her favorite way to spend an evening was just to order a pizza, put on her rattiest, comfiest sweats, curl up on the couch with a beer, and watch a movie. Between the two of us, I think we had just about every DVD ever made… back when they made DVDs, that is.” A genuine smile stretched across his lined face, and he added, “I bet my youngest granddaughter, Lara, doesn’t even know what a DVD is.”

People chuckled, and Cait leaned forward to look down the pew again. Casey’s daughter Lara giggled up at her grandfather and offered a baffled expression, shrugging her thin shoulders.

“Yep… they’re as obsolete as records were in my day. Bet you don’t know what those are either, Lara.”

And Lara shook her head, grinning.

Nick smiled again, seeming to relax into his eulogy. He had a crinkled piece of paper clutched in one of his gnarled hands, but he didn’t refer to it at all. He didn’t need to. He’d always said he wasn’t good with words, but when it came to her mother, Cait thought his words were beautiful. They were heartfelt, and that’s all anyone wanted to hear.

“Anyway… one of her favorite movies was a romantic comedy called The Wedding Singer. In the end of it, the wedding singer writes a song about wanting to grow old with the woman he loves, and he sings it to her on a plane. Claire once told me she thought it was one of the sweetest gestures a guy could make, so when we finally got married, I sang the same song to her at our wedding reception.” He paused again, and Cait could see him beginning to choke up, but he pressed on. “On that day, my greatest wish was just that: to grow old with her. And here we are, fifty years later. We made it, Ren.” His voice broke as he used the pet name Cait had heard him call her mother for as long as she could remember, and he reached out and rested his hand upon the box that held her ashes.

It took him a few moments to compose himself this time, and in his silence, Cait could hear sniffles behind her and on all sides. Her own eyes were brimming with tears, but in a way, they were happy tears. We made it, Ren. Even though her father – all of them, really – had every reason to be sad, they should also be honoring a long and beautiful relationship, which had been broken only by death.

No, she thought, watching her father finger the rose petals he’d lain upon her mother’s urn, not broken. Only interrupted. In time, he would die too, and his soul would reunite with Claire’s once again. Cait was not a deeply religious person, but that much, she wanted to believe.

“A lot of people don’t know this,” Nick finally continued, his voice tremulous, “but Claire and I shared our first kiss at the movies. We went and saw King Kong. And no,” he chuckled weakly, “not at its first release. I ain’t that old.”

Again, laughter throughout the sanctuary.

“It was a favorite of hers, though… she liked those classic horror flicks, and so did I. The end of that one always made her cry. I used to make fun of her for it, ‘cause Claire hardly ever cried, yet she would let out the waterworks for a silly-looking giant gorilla. The last line of the movie is one of those classic lines of cinema: ‘It was beauty killed the beast.’ Claire… Claire was the beauty who killed the beast in me and made me the man I am today. I know that sounds corny,” he said, swallowing hard, “but those of you who knew her best know that she had a beautiful spirit, and when she met me, there was a lot of ugliness inside me. I viewed it as ugliness on the outside, but Claire helped me get through that, go on with my life, and learn to appreciate it for what it was. She could always see life’s beauty, and to me, that was the most beautiful thing about her. She was one of a kind, the only woman I’ve ever been in love with, and I miss her more than life itself…”

Nick’s voice faltered again, and he could barely get through the end of his eulogy. Yet somehow, he found the strength. “I know she’s okay though,” he choked, stroking the top of the urn. “That wherever she is, she’s at peace. Like I said, she always was a homebody… and like ET, she’s finally gone home.”

***

Back at her parents’ lovely, waterfront home, Cait and the rest of her family served food and mingled with the many friends who had come to offer their condolences after the service. “We should just have the whole thing catered,” Adrienne had suggested impatiently, in the days of planning beforehand. “The last thing we need to be worrying about now is being hostesses.”

But Cait found that she didn’t mind; in fact, she enjoyed the task. It gave her something to do, something to take her mind off of her mother. She liked being able to flit among their guests, making sure everyone had enough to eat and drink, saying hello to people she hadn’t seen in ages, without having to stand and talk to any one of them too long. She liked sharing happy memories of Claire, but, like Claire herself, she couldn’t stand all of the tears and sympathy. Her mother wouldn’t have wanted that. Hell, if she’d had her say, they would probably be out on the beach by a huge bonfire, toasting her long life with bottles of Corona. That was the kind of funeral reception more suited to Claire.

But those who did have a say had seemed to think a beach party would be tacky, and so here they were, holding a quiet open house instead.

She wondered, as she looked around, what would become of this house now that her mother had passed. It seemed unreasonable for Nick to live there by himself, and she thought that maybe now, they would be able to convince him to sell the house and move into a retirement community, some place where he wouldn’t be alone. Not only did she worry about him falling when there was no one around to call for help, but she thought he needed companionship. She didn’t want to see him turn into a recluse now that Claire was gone.

Looking over at him, she knew that’s all he felt like doing right then. He had been sitting in his chair in the corner of the living room the whole afternoon, not saying much, although Kevin, Howie, Brian, and AJ had been with him most of the time, just staring into space, fiddling with his hands. He looked lost, broken. When people came up to him, as they had been doing all day, he would take their hands and nod at their words of sympathy, thanking them for coming, but when they retreated, his eyes would glaze over again, and he’d go back to looking lost.

She stood and watched as Laureen, an old friend of her mother’s, went over with her husband to talk with Nick awhile, and when they left, an old woman named Veronica, who had introduced herself to Cait as “a friend of AJ’s ex-wife from way back… and I once dated your dad too,” took their place, hand in hand with her own companion.

There were a surprising amount of little old couples present, from her mother’s girlfriends and their husbands, to Brian and Leighanne and Kevin and Kristin. Watching them, Cait couldn’t help but feel a pang of longing. Even though her father was heartbroken now, he was really lucky, she thought, to have found his soulmate and stayed married fifty years. She, herself, had been alone for twenty, ever since she’d divorced her husband. Like her mother, she had married impulsively in her twenties, and it had been a mistake. She didn’t regret being with her ex-husband, for without him, she wouldn’t have her two grown sons, Jordan and Nickolas, and her little granddaughter Kristine. But she wished their relationship had worked out differently. She saw happy couples like her pregnant sister Adrienne and her husband, or Baylee Littrell, who had been like a big brother to her when they were kids, walking around with his wife, and secretly, she envied them.

But then, not everyone was happy.

“Caitlin?” said a low voice behind her, and she turned to look into the round, wrinkled face of her real father.

“Hi…” she said, leaving the greeting at that. She had never known what to call Jamie Turner, her mother’s first husband. When she and Lainey were little, they’d called him “Dad” when they’d seen him, once or twice a year, but the older they got, the more they considered Nick to be their true father, and the more they resented Jamie. Claire had never kept it a secret from them that Jamie was their real father and that Nick, while much more of a father figure to them than Jamie, was legally their stepfather. But they had been teenagers before they’d learned the whole story, how their biological father was really nothing more than a sperm donor who had been too afraid to hold them when they were preemies, and who had abandoned their mother when she needed him most.

In defense of Claire, she had never set out to trash-talk Jamie; in fact, for as long as Cait could remember, her mother and father had been friendly with each other on the rare occasions they were together. But like all children of divorce, Cait and Lainey had wanted to know why their parents had split up, and when they were old enough to understand, Claire had explained why.

It was around that time that Cait had stopped calling Jamie “Dad.”

She didn’t hate the man; he had given her life, and he had been her mother’s high school sweetheart. She’d seen the pictures from their prom, along with the pictures of their wedding. But that didn’t stop her from resenting him at times.

Today, though, there was no room for resentment. There were too many other emotions tugging at her soul already. She offered her father a smile and a warm embrace.

“How are you doing?” he asked, hugging her.

She shrugged. “Alright, I guess, considering. You?”

Jamie gave a noncommittal jerk of the shoulder as well.

Life had been hard on him, these last few years especially. He had fought a bout of prostate cancer, which would have been easily treatable, had he gone to a doctor sooner. As it was, he had waited too long, and the cancer had spread to his rectum and colon. Radiation and surgery had put it into remission, but he now wore a colostomy bag as a constant reminder of it.

The unpleasantness of the cancer treatments had been too much for his third wife, who was only a few years older than Cait, and she had left him for a man in his fifties just a few months ago. At eighty years old, Jamie Turner was alone again, with little hope of marrying a fourth time. Cait felt for him, but not as badly as she felt for Nick. Her mother, while sending a card with a few words of consolation, had muttered something about karma as she sealed the envelope.

“How’s Nick handling everything?” Jamie asked, and Cait watched his eyes drift over to the quiet corner of the room where Nick had placed himself.

“He’s heartbroken,” was her simple reply.

Jamie nodded. “Your mother was something else,” he said. “I miss her too. You think he’d mind if I walked over there?”

“I think it would be a nice gesture,” said Cait, not at all sure what Nick would think. She knew that in their younger days, the two men hadn’t cared for each other. They had always been civil to each other around Lainey and her, but it had never been any big secret that her biological father resented Nick, the man who had taken his place as their dad and Claire’s husband. Nick, though, had gotten over it, she thought, and why shouldn’t he have? He’d gotten the girl, in the end. Whatever little duel they’d had with each other, he had won. He had no reason to be bitter. “I don’t think he’ll mind.”

Jamie nodded, and she watched him slouch over to Nick and say a few words. The men shook hands and spoke for just a minute or so before Jamie shuffled away again. There was no resentment between the two of them now. They were just a pair of old men who were there to remember a woman they both, at one time or another, had loved.

***

He had talked to everyone that day, it seemed. Kevin and Kristin, Brian and Leighanne, AJ, Howie… they had all been there to support him on this, the hardest day of his life. Even some of their children had come – Baylee Littrell, looking just like Brian had in middle age, and Brayden Richardson too, each with families of their own. He’d shared a few tears with his brother-in-law, Kyle, who thankfully hadn’t had far to travel with his wife, Amber, for they were both aging terribly. His nephew Kamden had come as well, bringing his own wife and teenaged children.

Then there were Claire’s friends… Dianna and Laureen, of course, each married, with husbands still living and families spread across the country. Even Jamie, who had retired to Florida after the death of his mother, had made it over to pay his respects.

He was the last one Nick spoke to before turning in for the evening. “I’m just going to lie down in my room for awhile,” he told Caitlin, wheeling his chair slowly from the room. Looking so much like Claire had in her early fifties, Cait just nodded, offering him a smile of understanding. He hoped she would tell the others for him. Delaine might worry about him – she always had been a worrier – and Adrienne would want to check on him, to see if he wanted to talk. But Cait, who saw him at least once a week, would know that he wasn’t sick or in pain, unless one counted the pain in his heart, and that he didn’t want to talk. He just needed to be alone for awhile.

Alone. He would have the rest of his life to be alone, now that Claire was gone.

In the privacy of his bedroom, the thought came, and so did the tears he’d been trying hard to contain. For the sake of his family, he hadn’t wanted to cry, and he knew that Claire wouldn’t want him to either. But she would understand. Even she had cried when things were really bad. And for Nick, things had never been worse.

He’d been through many ups and downs in his eighty years, but he’d gotten through the worst of them with Claire by his side. Now that she was gone, he didn’t know how he could go on living. He would, of course, because she would have wanted him to, but god, it was going to be hard. Life would never be good again. Its last real joy had been taken away from him.

Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. He still had a lot to live for. This he knew, as he wheeled himself across the room to his bed, taking his time, looking at each of the pictures that lined the dresser and hung on the walls. They were a visible reminder of each of his blessings.

Caitlin and Delaine. He’d had the privilege of raising them as his own daughters, and he took pride in the unique, accomplished women they had become. Cait was continuing his dream of a place where young people like he’d once been could escape the confines of a physical disability and get back their freedom in the water. Camp Lucky Fin was a success story, and with her in charge, he knew that it would continue on even after his life ended. Lainey shared his love of music and art, and he was pleased to see her put her talents to use behind the scenes of Broadway. He had a box of programs featuring her costume work tucked beneath the bed, and here was the framed playbill for the show on which she and Adrienne had worked together.

Adrienne. His own flesh and blood, she was everything he could have asked for in a daughter. Beautiful and talented, with the kind of charisma that sparkled on stage, he had known she would find success in the business, even without his help. And she had. He was so proud of her and couldn’t wait for her to have her first baby. He had three other grandchildren – Cait’s sons Jordan and Nicky (jokingly, they’d always called him Nick Jr.) and Casey’s daughter Lara – but Adrienne’s baby would be the first to share his DNA. Not that he would love her any more than the others… but in his mind, she was already someone special.

And then there was Casey. His only son. Tucked into the corner of the dresser mirror was the faded Polaroid taken by the adoption agency in Moscow on the day he and Claire had laid eyes upon their baby boy for the first time. They had taken plenty of pictures of their own, and Claire had a scrapbook filled with them all, but this one had always been special to Nick, for it was the first one of the three of them together… Casey in her arms, and his arms around her. Though the photo was old and blurry, he could still see the excitement and love shining in their faces as they beamed for the camera. He would never forget that moment, the moment his family had truly felt whole.

Casey had seemed to complete the circle in every way. Intelligent and driven, he had excelled in school and gone into medicine. Whether he’d realized it or not, his choice to specialize in oncology had been a way of honoring not only Nick and Claire, but also his namesake. Dr. Casey Ryan Carter was going to make a difference, Nick was convinced. Maybe in his lifetime, a cure for cancer would finally be found, and no one would have to suffer like Nick, like Claire, like Casey Brenner, or like so many others before them had. Maybe he would even be the one to find it.

It was with that thought that Nick managed to smile, as he eased his wheelchair into place next to his bed. Gripping the armrests, his wrists shook as he pushed himself up, his right leg bearing all of his weight momentarily, before he shifted it onto the edge of the bed. Adjusting the tubing of the portable oxygen tank he was seldom without anymore, he scooted slowly into an acceptable position on the bed and lay his head down on his pillow, crossing his arms over his chest.

He stared up at the ceiling for a few minutes, just thinking, remembering, and then he turned his head. On his nightstand, among the prescription pill bottles and the albuterol inhaler for when his lungs got especially bad, was a picture of her, bound in a silver frame. He had taken it on their silver wedding anniversary, the twenty-fifth. At fifty-five years old, she’d looked so like the way Cait looked now… no longer a young woman, with streaks of silver in her fading red hair and wrinkles around her blue eyes, but not yet an old lady. At fifty-five, she’d still been full of life, ready to travel around the world with Nick just for the fun of it now that the Backstreet Boys had retired and their youngest was in college.

They had celebrated their anniversary in Australia that year, spent the whole month of May there, in fact. In the temperate fall weather, they had toured the cities, played on the beach, scuba dived on the reefs, and explored the wildlife. Just the two of them, with no kids, no bandmates, no shows, and no schedule. It had been an amazing vacation, probably the best he’d ever been on, and as he stared at the photograph of his Claire, with the sunlight brightening her face, making her hair shine and her eyes dance, he wished he could go back to that place, to that time, and leave behind this coldness, this emptiness that filled his heart.

Her image blurred before his old eyes as they filled with fresh tears, and he forced himself to turn away. The tears squeezed out as he shut his eyelids, wishing for sleep as a reprieve from this reality, this life without Claire.

It found him quickly, for he was exhausted. Of course, he was always tired these days… that was just part of being eighty, he supposed. But this was a different kind of exhaustion, an exhaustion of the body and the mind, the heart and the spirit, and only the gentle sea of sleep could carry him away from it for a time and offer some relief.

Yet even in sleep, he dreamed of Claire.

She was standing in his doorway when he awoke, and at first, he mistook her for Cait.

Normally, it was the other way around; he would see Caitlin and call her Claire. It had been happening more and more often lately, and sometimes he wondered if his mind was starting to go, but then, Cait did look so much like her mother. Same soft, red hair, which she’d worn long in her youth but now cut short. Same blue eyes, lines of laughter crinkling the skin at their corners. Even the same figure, naturally slim, but made wider through pregnancy and heavier with age.

He saw her silhouette, the light shining around her into his darkened room, and thought she was Cait. After all, he wasn’t senile yet; he knew Claire was dead.

But then his aging eyes adjusted to the light, and Nick saw that he was wrong again.

“Claire…”

Whispering her name, he forgot all rational thought, forgot that she was dead, forgot that he was old and crippled. He sat up slowly in his bed, unable to take his eyes off her, and swung his legs over the side. He stood up without swaying or needing to reach out and grab the nightstand. Pushing the wheelchair aside, stepping over the tangled oxygen tubes with ease, he walked across the room on his own two feet. He wanted to run to her, but the part of him that was old and wise stifled the childlike impulse, and he approached her gradually, subconsciously afraid that if he moved too quickly, she would disappear.

She didn’t.

As he got closer to her, she reached out her hand, and he took it. A strange surge of light and heat seemed to radiate from her palm as he grasped it. It was warm again, and smooth, youthful and unblemished. She squeezed his hand in that same, reassuring way she always had, and offered him a radiant smile, her eyes dancing in the light as she turned her face toward it.

Feeling the warmth of the light on his own face, Nick smiled and squeezed her hand back. She didn’t speak, and neither did he, for all the questions had faded from his mind. Suddenly, it seemed, he had all the answers. He knew where she was taking him, and he held his head high as he walked away by her side.

***

At 6:04 that evening, when the house had been cleared of guests, the kitchen cleaned, and all the leftovers put away, Adrienne Carter announced to the family, “I’m gonna go check on Dad.”

At 6:05, they heard her scream.

“Cait!! Lainey! Casey! Come quick!!”

They all jumped up from their seats in the living room, where they’d been sitting together, wondering what to do next, and raced into Nick’s bedroom. Adrienne was standing by the bed, her pretty features contorted with anguish, a shaking hand covering her mouth. Their father lay in it, sleeping the way he normally did, flat on his back, with his arms crossed on top of his chest. When they came in, Adrienne peeled her hand from her mouth and flailed it towards him.

“Dad’s… I think he’s dead!” she burst, and they saw that her wide and fearful eyes were filled with tears. “I don’t think he’s breathing…” She wrung her hands and paced in a little circle, apparently lost as to what to do. To Cait, her younger sister looked like a scared little girl again.

Her own heart had leapt into her throat, but Cait stayed much calmer. She dodged Adrienne and moved quickly to the bed, leaning closer to Nick. She picked up his left arm, fearing the worst when he didn’t even stir in his sleep, and extended it, turning his hand palm side up. With the expertise of a nurse, she pressed two fingers to the inside of his wrist and felt for a pulse in the radial artery beneath his wrinkled, papery skin. She found nothing.

Heart sinking, she turned and caught Casey’s eye. He met her gaze, and the truth passed between them, but in his youth, he wasn’t ready to accept it. He turned and ran from the room, returning a minute or so later with his stethoscope. The three sisters stood around in shock, reality sinking in as their younger brother shoved the stethoscope into his ears and leaned over their father, pressing its end to his motionless chest. He listened carefully, moving the stethoscope around to all the right places, but after a few moments, he sunk down onto the bed and pulled the scope from his ears, a defeated look upon his face.

Adrienne began to sob, loud, racking sobs that filled the room. She’d always been something of a drama queen, but Cait knew these weren’t just dramatics. Feeling her own eyes fill, she went to her sister and took her in her arms. Casey sat still on the edge of the bed, raking his hands through his hair in way that was reminiscent of Nick. Her dad had always done that when he was upset.

Lainey, the quietest of them all, was the first to speak, and the words that came out were not what they had expected.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” she murmured.

Adrienne jerked her face up off of Cait’s shoulder and shook her head wildly, but Cait nodded, understanding exactly what her twin sister meant.

“We should have known this might happen,” Delaine went on. “It happens a lot with couples who have been married as long as they were. When one dies, the other dies soon after. I think it’s kind of tragically romantic.” She turned to look at Nick, lying still and peaceful on the bed, and offered a sad smile. “He’s with Mom now.”

***

Nine months later, they gathered on what would have been Nick and Claire Carter’s fifty-first wedding anniversary.

They picnicked on the lawn of Myrtle Hill Memorial Park, near a bench made of blue pearl granite that looked like the waters of Tampa Bay in a thunderstorm. The back of the bench was shaped like an abstract heart, whose sides rolled into flourishing waves. In the center of the heart, the word Carter was engraved, and below, on the front edge of the bench, were the names of their parents, side by side.



Nickolas Gene
January 28, 1980 – August 18, 2060

Claire Aileen
March 15, 1980 – August 12, 2060



On the back of the bench, off to one side of the heart, a pair of roses were engraved, and below them lay the date of their marriage, May 14, 2010, and an epitaph. “God could not have made earthly ties so strong to break them in eternity.”

It was that thought which made Cait smile on this day, as she enjoyed the warm, Florida sunshine and the presence of her siblings’ company, watching Adrienne’s six-month-old daughter, Claire Nicole, crawl in the soft grass. She hoped her parents really were together somewhere in their own version of paradise, a place where there was no pain and no suffering, and where they could look down upon their beautiful new granddaughter from time to time.

They sat upon the hill together for a long time, sharing laughs and memories until the sun sank low in the sky and the mosquitoes came out for their evening smorgasbord. Then they packed up their picnic supplies and headed to their separate cars, leaving behind a simple bouquet of roses laid across the bench. Five yellow blossoms, one for each decade their parents had been married, and in the middle, a single red rose for the undying love they had shared.

Underneath the bouquet, the seat of the bench was inscribed with a line of lyrics that Nick Carter had once penned for his only true love. It read,

“When I felt I couldn’t walk any further, you’re the one who helped me carry on.”

And beneath the seat of the marble bench sat a pair of wooden urns, set with stained glass, which held the ashes of the musician and his inspiration. Those who had known them would walk by this place and smile, imagining their two souls dancing together in eternity. Yet it was here their bodies could finally rest, side by side.


The End