Pondering

Ava Zayn - Part Eighth
11:02 p.m. on 2005-08-09

The spring was beginning to warm up, blushing and giggling from the flirtatious kissing games with summer.
As Ava Zayn and Cade began to spend more and more time together, they found themselves more often than not drawn outdoors, to the whispery tastes of nature that could be found in New York. Picnics and volleyball in the park, a trip to the zoo, and one Saturday rendered heady and breathtaking for Ava Zayn when Cade took her for a long drive outside the city. It had been a long time, too long, since either of them had been out of the city.
She was dazzled. She was enchanted.
She was drowning in obsession. Cade's existence had been poured into her mind like the finest honey, and clung there now like the same sticky-sweetness, suspending her in perpetual giddiness. Ava Zayn spent as much of her free time with him as possible...
...And yet, she did not know him. She knew his hobbies, his classes at the university, the stories of his professors and friends. She knew his favorite color and food and cologne, about him giving himself a concussion while learning to sail as a young boy. But she did not know just what was going on beyond the sunny façade.
Cade Dougherty was, by all appearances, a fairly simple man. He seemed at first glance to be sunlight made tangible. At second stare, once the dazed appreciation for such gleaming golden glory had faded, he still seemed to be a simple creature, composed of pure light, air, good moods...and family wealth.
For Cade was indeed that oft-despised stereotype, a young man from a wealthy family, blessed with astoundingly good genes, intelligence, and a generally friendly and positive nature. He had attended a prestigious Catholic school for boys from his first to last year of his primary education, and had then gone on to Columbia, as his family members had for years. His resumé was impressive, his academic record astounding, his criminal record nonexistent. This information rolled off the tongues of those who spoke of him, frolicking like an attractive and well-maintained fountain in a golf course.
But that did not tell the whole story of Cade Matthew Dougherty, and in truth, merely described the shining glass of which the coffin of his adolescence and dark secrets was made.
He carried many secrets, Cade did. He never spoke of them; in truth, he had trained himself not to think of them. When so many things, so many fleeting things--quick whispers of perfumes, soft laughter, songs on the radio--could have and easily would have reminded him, he blocked them out. It had become second nature to him, as much a part of him as his forest-glade green eyes. He wasn't even aware of doing it anymore.
His happy-go-lucky attitude, his optimism and casual, friendly manner, was a gleamingly beautiful façade, as delicately lovely as sunlight reflecting off soap bubbles blown by a little girl on a breezy summer's day.
But it had become a part of him. It was, in many ways, a mask, but it had set roots into his being, and had grown into him, the bright luminous colors melting into the dark misery beneath, the grief that had never healed, the pain that was relentless, yet numbed by pretense.
So, as he walked to class during the sunny and cool days of that spring in New York, as he spent increasing amounts of time with a delicate, fragile, glistening rose of a young woman, Cade was happy. Or at least, everyone believed he was, and he had convinced himself of it, as well.
No one suspects. When Cade looked back on that spring, between the time when it was colored too vividly from being too recent and the time when it softened and fogged from being too far away, he would see the smooth contrast and, at the same time, the sleekly aligning similarity between himself and Ava Zayn. No one suspected the dark misery that lurked in him, the endless rippling midnight sea of grief. And no one suspected the crystalline fragility and dual intensity of her emotions that sang within her shell, the desperate need to be loved.

* * * * * *

Her name was Bianca. Bianca Mancini, to be precise, a sleekly dark girl of Italian and Polish descent. She had a smile--it was her smile, brilliant and as warm as the gently lapping waters of the Caribbean, that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
And--yes, he loved her. Cade had heard many people say that teenagers didn't know what love was. They spoke scornfully of the impassioned hormone-driven feelings of youth, dismissing what they felt, the ecstasy and agony they could experience, the pleasure so intense it defined divinity for them, the pain so vivid it seemed physical, a knife that slashed through skin and muscle and lodged in their pulsating hearts, their tears pouring like blood.
But Cade knew without a doubt that what he felt for Bianca was love. It was love like a supernova, explosive and intense, gripping him in it like a newborn star, stripping away his identity as he knew it, and replacing it with something new--the boy who loved Bianca.
And somehow, somehow a star fell from the sky and caused a miracle--Bianca loved him, too.
Or so it seemed at first.
He met her in the warm breezy summer after his high school graduation. He was eighteen; she turned seventeen that same summer. The anniversary of the day she came into the world was, in fact, the day Cade met her, a glorious hot windy day upon the beach in lazily humid Georgia, where he went with his family every summer, all summer--and where she was, somehow, by a miracle, living on the island with her aunt for the summer, working in the the cozy real estate office parked in the middle of the village. She was without any traces of shyness on that warm summery day, his Bianca was, starting up a conversation with him as they plunged into the frothy breakers that rolled in steadily from the moody heart of the Atlantic.
Cade was, for all his wealth, social status, and sophistication, still young enough and innocent enough to be dazzled by her. She was vibrant, warm, alluring, a tiger lily bursting into lush bloom before his very eyes. It was a only a very short, breathless matter of time before he asked her on their first date, a dizzying evening of laughter and conversation, before his lips found hers in a sweet, dreamy union at the end of the pier, their warm sunkissed bodies pressed hesitantly against each other, his hands in her sleek dark hair.
And it was only a matter of time before they shyly, sweetly became lovers, inexperience and adoration making them both clumsy and careful, tender and gentle, leaving them shuddering and trembling beneath the stars that stood in silent glittering witness over the deserted dunes. Lips pressed to bare skin, hands slid slowly over sunkissed flesh, and Cade straddled the spider-silk line between heaven and earth, as he cradled Bianca close beneath the stars.
But heaven is a fleeting thing when one is still alive, when one is still roaming the earth that one must tread before walking the still, dusty path of death. And that was the most keenly-felt lesson Cade learned that summer, the summer of Bianca--that first love is the most vibrant of short-lived flowers. For as surely as autumn would come in an increasingly short amount of time, so it became apparent that in Bianca, there was an agony as piercing as her beauty was dazzling, a pain that could bring a young woman to her knees when it was fully realized.
Her moods were volatile, her temper explosive. Bianca's joy was the most blinding ecstasy, her melancholy darker than the deepest and loneliest of mountain hollows. Cade didn't understand it--he had never known such vivid emotions to occur in such rapid explosive changes, for deep midnight and stiflingly hot high noon to be just moments apart.
He didn't understand the downward spiraling, the slender slicing wounds he felt on her thighs in the dark, wounds she concealed from him with jeans and flowing skirts and sarongs around her hips when they were on the beach. He didn't understand when she poured her passion and uncontrollable emotions into him, her slender body a conduit for a force too powerful for an eighteen-year-old girl to understand or contain. Cade couldn't understand the bitter tears she wept, the aching silences she maintained, the growing instability.
But he understood all too clearly that misty, muggy morning when the police came to his family's sprawling beach house, their knock on the door echoing through the dawn. He understood each and every question they asked, each hesitant, awkward silence before he could answer, the excruciating ache as he struggled to contain his tears and lost, so bitterly lost, that particular battle.
Cade Dougherty, eighteen years old and so deeply in love it hurt, understood so well he almost doubted his understanding, when the island police came to tell him his first girlfriend and the first girl he'd ever loved had committed suicide, slashing her wrists so that her blood spilled over the salty worn wooden boards of the far end of the pier, the pier where he'd kissed her for the first time. He understood, keenly, when they told him that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, that her depressive phases simply got the better of her.
And Cade understood the sympathy, the silent awkwardness as his family tried to comfort him. He understood the peaceful expression upon her breathtakingly beautiful face as she lay in her coffin at the small, simple funeral.
And he understood, as he began to calmly and systematically bury the memories and the feelings from that summer, that teenagers can indeed love, and that they can have their hearts shattered so efficiently that it would take a miracle, a once-in-a-lifetime fountain of magic for them to ever be able to love again. For the kind of grief that formed the ocean in which he swam, the kind of self-blame he laid upon himself, for not recognizing her illness, was intense enough to cripple.
Cade did not, however, understand his own resilience, or his capacity for love. And he didn't realize that he could, and would, love again.

Pondered - Pondering