The Edge of Always

Epilogue

Fifteen years later

Lily

“Lily Parrish!” Mrs. Morrison calls out my name from the stage in the auditorium. I hear my friends and family shouting from the crowd, followed by whistles and clapping.

I reach up and hold my graduation cap on my head as I ascend the wooden steps. It fits oddly. My dad teased me, said it’s because I have an oddly-shaped head, and it’s my mom’s fault because I couldn’t have gotten it from him.

As I walk across the stage more whistles and shouting and clapping fills the auditorium. My heart is beating fast against my ribs. I’m so excited. I think I’ve been smiling this big for the past twenty minutes.

Principal Hanover holds my diploma out to me, and I take it from her hand. The clapping gets louder. I look down at the front row at my parents, standing next to their seats, bright-eyed and animated with excitement. My mom blows me a few kisses. Dad winks at me and claps. They are both so proud of me that it’s choking me up. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. I couldn’t have asked for better parents.

After the graduation ceremony is over, my boyfriend, Gavin, and I make our way through the crowds to find my mom and dad.

Mom engulfs me in her arms and kisses my head. “You did it, Lily!” She squeezes me. “I’m so proud!” I hear the tears in her voice.

“Mom, don’t cry. You’ll mess up your mascara.”

She rubs her finger underneath both eyes.

Dad hugs me next. “Congratulations, babygirl,” he says.

I push up on my toes and kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you, Daddy.” Then he pulls me around to his side and fits his hand on my waist protectively.

He gives Gavin the evil eye, looking him up and down, the same way he has every time he’s seen him in the two years we’ve been together. But this time, it’s all in good fun. For the most part, anyway. It took my dad a year to cut Gavin some slack and trust him enough to let me go out on a date with him without him or Mom going with us. So embarrassing. But the overprotectiveness never managed to run Gavin off, and I think that alone gave my parents more reason to respect him.

He is really a great guy, and deep down I think my parents know that.

“Congratulations, Gavin,” my dad says and shakes his hand.

“Thanks.” Gavin is still kind of terrified of my dad. I think it’s cute.

My parents throw a huge graduation party for me at home and everybody shows up. I mean everybody. There are people here I haven’t seen in a few years: Uncle Asher and Aunt Lea came all the way from Spain! Uncle Aidan is here, too, with my cousins Avery and Molly, and his new wife, Alice. My grams, Marna and Nana Nancy (she doesn’t ever want to be called anything with a GR in it) are here, too. Nana isn’t doing so well. She has multiple sclerosis.

“Oh my God, girl, you’re going to leave me!” my best friend, Zoey, says as she comes up to me. We grew up together, just like her mom, Natalie, did with my mom here in Raleigh.

“I know! I hate it, but you know I’ll visit!” I hug her tight.

“Yeah,” she says, “but I’m going to miss the hell out of you.”

“I told you,” I say, “you could always move to Boston to be closer.”

She rolls her eyes, her dark-colored hair falling about her shoulders as she steps away and hops up onto the kitchen bar stool. “Well, not only will I not be moving to Boston with you, looks like I won’t be staying in North Carolina much longer, either.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, surprised.

I sit down on the bar stool next to her. My uncle Cole walks into the kitchen with a few empty beer bottles in his hands. He chucks them in the trash.

Zoey sighs, props her elbow on the bar, and starts twirling a few strands of hair between her fingers. “My mom and dad are moving to San Francisco.”

“What? Seriously?” I can hardly believe it.

“Yeah.”

I can’t tell if she’s disappointed or just doesn’t know how to feel about it yet. “Well that sounds awesome,” I say, hoping to encourage her. “You don’t want to move?”

Zoey pulls her arm from the bar and crosses her legs. “I don’t know what to think, Lil. That’s a long way from home. Not like it’s just up the street.”

“True,” I say, “but it’s San Francisco! I would love to go there.”

She smiles a little.

Uncle Cole, in his tall, brooding glory, takes three more bottles of beer from the fridge and wedges them by the necks between his fingers. He smiles at me as he passes and slips into the living room with the house full of people.

He’s awesome. When he arrived, he slipped me a congratulations card with two hundred bucks in it.

“Zoey, I think it’s great. And honestly, I can’t wait to visit my best friend in California. Yeah. That even sounds good when I say it. California.” I gesture both hands dramatically.

She laughs. “I really am going to miss you, Lil.”

“Me too.”

Her mom comes into the kitchen behind her with her dad, Blake, not far behind. “Did you tell Lily the news?” her mom asks as she reaches inside the fridge.

“Yeah, I told her just now.”

“What do you think, Lily?” her mom asks.

Her dad kisses Zoey on the head, takes the beer from her mom, and heads outside, probably to smoke a cigarette.

“I’m excited for her,” I answer. “I’m moving to Boston for college. She’s moving to California. We may not be together like we have been growing up anymore, but there’s something about not staying stationary in the same place forever that makes it all feel right.”

“You are definitely the daughter of Andrew and Camryn Parrish, that’s for sure,” her mom says, grinning.

I smile proudly and hop down from the bar stool to follow her and Zoey back into the living room.

“A toast!” my dad says in the middle of the room, holding up his beer. He looks across the room at me. We have the same green eyes. “To our little girl, Lily. May you show everybody at college how it’s done!”

Everybody takes a drink. “To Lily!”

I spend the entire day, all the way until nightfall with my friends and family and, of course, Gavin, whom I love so much. We are so much alike. We met shortly after he moved here from Arizona. His locker was on the same wall as mine, and he ended up in almost all of the same classes as me. Zoey honed in on him first, which isn’t a surprise given her flirty personality. I remember her telling me on his first day of school, “That one will be mine. You watch and see.” And I never had any intention of interfering, but apparently Zoey was too much for someone like Gavin. I think maybe I can give Zoey the credit for Gavin and me ending up together, though. If it wasn’t for her, he might never have had an excuse to force himself to talk to me instead.

Zoey was over him as fast as he made it obvious I was the one he was interested in.

It’s really weird, too, because Gavin and I are so eerily alike that it almost feels like fate brought us together. We both had our sights set on the same college. We love the same music and movies and books and television shows. We both love art and history and have, during different points in our lives, thought about what it would be like to travel through Africa. Gavin is interested in archeology. I’m interested in archeological conservation.

Gavin wasn’t my first boyfriend, or my first kiss, but he was my first everything else. I can’t imagine spending my life with anyone other than him.

I hope we turn out like my parents did. Yeah, I really hope for that.

After graduation, I spent the summer with my parents. And I didn’t waste a minute of that time with them because I knew it would be short. In the fall, I moved to college, and Mom and Dad—well, their plans were as big as mine. I think they did an awesome job raising me, but I knew that once I moved out on my own and started a life for myself with school and with Gavin, my parents would be setting off to fulfill a life dream of their own.

I’m so happy for them. I miss them every day, but I’m so happy.

They never forget to mail me letters—not e-mails, but real handwritten letters. I’ve saved them all, from the ones stamped in Argentina and Brazil and Costa Rica and Paraguay to the ones that came from Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, and places all over Europe. I love it that my parents are the way they are, so free-spirited and driven and in love with the World. I admire them. From the stories they tell me about when they were a little older than me, I realize that their lives, even before they met, started out rocky, but eventually everything fell into place. My mom told me about her past and how she used to be very depressed. She didn’t go into too much detail, and I could always tell that she was holding things back. But she wanted me to know that she and my dad would always be there for me, no matter what happens or what decisions I make.

I think she was worried I might make some of the same wrong decisions that she made when she went through some hard times, but honestly, I can’t imagine ever being unhappy.

Mom told me about when she met Dad, too. On a Greyhound bus, of all things. I just laughed. But whenever I think about them and about the things they went through together, I can’t help but be awed by it.

According to Mom, my dad was a little wild back then. She said the way he used to be is the number one reason why it took him so long to warm up to Gavin. She didn’t go into details about that, either, but… dang, my dad must’ve really been… Yuk! Never mind.

But I learned so much from my parents. They taught me how precious life is and never to take a second of it for granted, because any second could be my last. My dad was big on me being myself, standing up for what I believe in, and speaking my mind rather than someone else’s. He told me that people will try to make me just like them, but not to fall for it because before I know it, I will be. My mom, well, she was big on making sure I knew that there is so much more out there in the world than crappy jobs and paying bills and becoming a slave to society. She made sure I understood that no matter what anyone says, I don’t have to live in a way that I don’t choose. I pick my path. I make my life one to remember and not one that will fade into the background of every other uneventful life around me. Ultimately, it’s my choice and only my choice. It will be hard at times, I may have to flip burgers and scrub toilets for a while, I will lose people I love, and every day won’t be as bright as the one before it. But as long as I never let the struggles pull me completely under, one day I will be doing exactly what I want to do. And no matter what happens, or who I lose, I won’t be sad forever.

But what I think I learned the most from my parents is how to love. They love me unconditionally, of course, but I mean the way they love each other. I know a lot of married couples—most of my friends’ parents are still married—but I’ve never quite known two people more devoted to each other than my mom and dad. They’ve been inseparable all my life. I can only recall a couple of arguments between them, but I’ve never heard them fight. Ever. I don’t know what it is that makes their marriage so strong, but I sure hope that whatever it is, they passed some of that magic onto me.

Gavin walks into my dorm room, shutting the door behind him. He sits down on the edge of my bed. “Another letter from your folks?”

I nod.

“Where are they now?”

“Peru,” I say, looking back down into the letter. “They love it on that side of the world.”

I feel his hand on my knee to comfort me. “You’re worried about them.”

I nod again, gently. “Yeah, as always, but I worry about them more when they’re over there. Some places are really dangerous. I just don’t want them to end up like—”

Gavin reaches out and fits my chin in his fingertips. “They’ll be fine, you know they will.”

Maybe he’s right. My mom and dad have been backpacking across the world for two years now, and the worst danger they’ve encountered—by what they’ve told me, anyway—was that my dad was robbed once and another time they had an issue with their passports. But anything could happen, especially being alone like that with only backpacks and the open road.

Apparently, I’m a lot like my mom when it comes to how much I worry.

“Two more years and they’ll be just as worried about you,” he adds, and then pecks me on the lips.

“I guess so,” I say, smiling up at him as he stands from the bed. “My mom will probably be up every night wondering if I got mauled by a lion.”

Gavin smiles a crooked smile.

We decided six months ago that we really want to go to Africa after college. When we first met, it wasn’t so much an idea as it was something we brought up in casual conversation. But now, it has become our goal. At least for now. A lot can change in two years.

I fold the letter and place it back inside the discolored envelope and set it on my nightstand.

Gavin reaches out his hand to me. “Ready?” he asks, and I take it and stand up from the bed with him.

I go to leave the room to celebrate Gavin’s birthday with our friends, and just before I step out into the hall, I look back once at the letter before closing the door softly behind me.