To understand why I was standing beside Douglas's hospital bed at sixty, I have to go back to the summer when we were nineteen and neither of us had any idea how easily a life could be diverted.
Douglas and I had been best friends since we were seventeen. We met in the ordinary way people meet in small towns, through classes, mutual acquaintances, and the shared misery of being teenagers who thought everyone else had a better idea of what to do with themselves. At first, we merely spent time together. Then we began looking for each other without admitting that was what we were doing.
He knew which days I had history homework, which teacher made me nervous, and which songs I pretended not to like because I thought they sounded childish. I knew he tapped his pencil against his teeth when he was concentrating and that he hated being wrong more than he hated losing. When he was upset, he became unusually funny. When I was upset, I went quiet, and he always noticed.
People in town assumed we were destined to marry. The assumption irritated us so much that we became almost theatrical in denying it.
My mother, Brenda, was the worst offender. She would find us sitting across from each other at our oak kitchen table, surrounded by books and scattered pencils, and pause in the doorway with a smile that made me want to throw something at her.
"You two know," she would say, "that ordinary friends don't spend quite so much time arguing about whether the other one is eating properly."
Douglas would look up from his textbook. "Hannah's mother, are you suggesting I should stop being concerned about her nutritional habits?"
"I'm suggesting you should finish your homework."
He would grin at me over the top of his book. I would make a face, and my mother would leave the room looking pleased with herself.
We dated other people. There was no agreement between us, no secret arrangement, and no promise that either of us would remain available. I went out with boys who were perfectly pleasant, and Douglas occasionally took girls to the movies. Neither of us had the right to object.
Yet when my prom date's car refused to start in our driveway, it was Douglas who arrived with his old car and drove us both to the school. He waited until my date and I were inside before leaving, then returned near midnight because he knew I would need a ride home. He said he had been awake anyway.
I never asked why he had bothered.
He never volunteered the answer.
The summer we turned nineteen, our attempts at romance were becoming increasingly ridiculous. One evening, I went to dinner with a young man who talked about his car collection for nearly two hours. He could describe engine sizes with impressive accuracy, but he never once asked me a question about myself. When I mentioned a book I had enjoyed, he steered the conversation back to the horsepower of a car he hoped to buy.
Douglas had a worse evening. The girl he took to a movie became angry over the price of the ticket and spent the first half of the film complaining that he had chosen the wrong seats. She left before the ending, telling him that he was impossible to please.
We met afterward at the old high school football stadium.
The gate had been left unlocked, so we slipped inside and made our way beneath the wooden bleachers. The grass was damp from an earlier rain, and the metal supports smelled faintly of rust. Somewhere beyond the field, a dog barked. The stadium lights were off, leaving the sky wide and dark above us.
Douglas dropped onto the ground with an exaggerated sigh.
"We should stop trying."
I sat beside him, drawing my knees toward my chest. "Trying what?"
"Finding someone to date. We're terrible at it."
I laughed. "You had a perfectly good evening until your companion decided the movie theater was a personal insult."
"She thought I was cheap."
"Were you?"
"I bought the tickets, the popcorn, and the drinks."
"Then perhaps she was hoping for dinner too."
He looked at me sideways. "You're enjoying this."
"A little."
He pulled a blade of grass apart between his fingers. For once, he didn't immediately respond with another joke. The silence stretched long enough that I turned toward him.
"What is it?"
"Nothing."
"Douglas."
He looked up at the dark sky. "What if we never find the right person?"
I shrugged, trying to make the question seem less serious than it felt. "Then we don't. People manage."
"People manage a lot of things they never wanted."
There was something in his voice that made me stop smiling. Douglas usually approached the future as though it were a puzzle he could solve with enough time and stubbornness. That night, he sounded almost afraid of it.
"What if we both end up alone?" he asked.
"We'll still have friends."
"And when our friends are busy with their families?"
"We'll have books."
He laughed, but the sound faded quickly. Then he turned toward me and extended his right hand, his little finger held out.
"If neither of us is married by the time we're sixty, we'll find each other again."
I stared at him.
"Sixty?"
"Yes."
"That's ancient."
"Not if you intend to live that long."
I shook my head, smiling despite myself. "You make the strangest plans."
"I'm serious, Hannah."
That stopped me. He was looking directly at me, and there was no teasing in his face. I could not remember the last time he had asked me for something without disguising the request as a joke.
"Why sixty?" I asked.
"Because if we've reached that age and still haven't figured out what we're doing, somebody should probably intervene."
I laughed, but my chest felt tight. He held his hand steady between us, waiting.
I had a choice. I could ask whether he meant it as more than a promise between friends. I could tell him that the thought of losing him frightened me more than the thought of never marrying anyone else. Instead, I curled my little finger around his.
"All right," I said. "If we're both single at sixty, we'll find each other."
He tightened his finger around mine.
"It's a deal."
For a few seconds, neither of us let go. I remember the warmth of his hand and the faint dampness of the grass beneath my shoes. I remember thinking that I might be making the biggest mistake of my life by leaving the important words unspoken.
Two months later, Douglas packed for university.
He was going to a school three states away, where he planned to study political science and eventually work in city planning. I was staying home to enter the state teaching program. Neither of us considered the distance permanent. We talked about holidays, letters, and visits. We made promises about keeping each other informed of everything that mattered.
On the morning he left, I stood beside his car while his father checked the tires. Douglas kept finding excuses to return to the house for things he had already packed. At last, he came over to me with his hands in his pockets.
"Don't let your professors convince you that my opinions are wrong."
"I'll try to remain open-minded."
"And write to me."
"You write first."
He smiled. "You always have to negotiate."
I wanted to hug him longer than I did. I wanted to tell him that I was already missing him. Instead, I stepped back when his father called from the driveway.
The first semester apart was easier than I had expected. Douglas wrote long letters on blue stationery, filling pages with stories about his roommate, who apparently believed washing dishes was a form of government oppression. I wrote about my courses and my part-time job at the downtown library. We complained about food, professors, and the people we met.
His letters were full of small details. He described the sound of rain against his dormitory window and the terrible coffee served in the student union. He told me about a classmate who argued with every professor and another who seemed incapable of remembering anyone's name.
I treasured those letters more than I admitted. I kept them in a drawer beside my bed and read them again whenever the distance between us became difficult to ignore.
For a while, the arrangement worked. We were still part of each other's daily lives, even if the details arrived several days late. When something funny happened, I still thought of Douglas first. When he received a difficult grade or had an argument with his roommate, I was the person he wanted to tell.
Then, gradually, the letters began arriving less often.
A week became two. Two weeks became a month. His handwriting remained the same, but the pages grew shorter, and some of the jokes seemed to be written out of habit rather than genuine amusement.
I told myself he was busy. I was busy too. My teaching courses demanded long hours, and my job at the library left me tired by the time I returned home. I made new friends, accepted dinner invitations, and tried to build a life that did not revolve around waiting for the postman.
Still, whenever I heard the mailbox lid clatter, I looked toward the window.
During his second year away, Douglas began mentioning a young woman named Theresa. She studied nursing at his university and, according to his letters, had a quick mind and a sharp tongue. She challenged his opinions, laughed at his worst jokes, and apparently had very strong feelings about the proper way to organize a bookshelf.
He wrote that he thought I would like her.
I read that sentence three times.
For the first time, I allowed myself to consider what I had been avoiding since we were seventeen. I wasn't merely protective of Douglas. I wasn't simply accustomed to his company. I loved him, and the realization arrived with the brutal clarity of a door slamming shut.
I sat on my bedroom floor with the letter in my lap. Outside, someone was mowing a lawn, the engine rising and falling as the mower crossed the grass. I could smell the soap from the laundry basket beside me. Everything around me was painfully ordinary while my understanding of my own life changed.
That night, I wrote him a reply.
I told him I had loved him for years. I told him that I had been afraid to say it because I could not imagine losing him, and that hearing about Theresa had forced me to admit what I had always known. I wrote until my hand cramped.
Then I read the pages.
If he was happy with Theresa, what right did I have to ask him to abandon that happiness? I had waited too long to understand myself, and I could not make him responsible for the delay.
I tore the letter into small pieces and dropped them into the wastebasket.
The following morning, I went to work at the library and answered questions about overdue books. I smiled at patrons, reshelved novels, and pretended nothing had happened.
I never told Douglas what I had written.
By the time I understood the truth, I had already begun teaching myself how to live without saying it.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: The Last Letter Arrived Without His Usual Joke, and the Final Lines Changed Every Year That Followed
Forty-One Years After Our Last Goodbye, His Son Led Me Toward a Hospital Room I Never Expected to Enter
Part 2 of 12
