Out of Nowhere (19 page)

A chill ran through my body as I imagined how much worse it could have been. “Doesn’t it bother you to drive past here every day?”

“No.” He shrugged and turned left, leaving the intersection behind. “It’s just a road.”

Just a road. For the millionth time I thought about how incredibly different we were from each other, and how much I envied his rational, level-headed take on life. If it were me who’d almost died here, I’d never be able to see that road as just a road, no matter how many times I saw it or how much therapy I received. The fact that he could dismiss it so effortlessly amazed me. He amazed me.

“What?” he said when he noticed me watching him.

I smiled and shook my head, switching my attention to the view outside my window. We’d now officially reached the area we city folk referred to as “the country”. There were no farms and cows and tractors around or anything, but the houses were set far apart and had actual yards and trees. It was the kind of town where you couldn’t even pick up a carton of milk without a car. I’d go absolutely mad if I lived this far from civilization.

Finally, we pulled into the driveway of a white split-level house with a yard the size of a city block. Cole parked the car in front of a large detached garage, where a man was maneuvering a power saw across a long board. When he spotted us there, he shut off the saw and removed his safety goggles. We got out of the car and Cole started walking toward him. I followed, breathing in the sharp scent of fresh-cut wood and pine trees.

“This is Riley,” he said to the man, who was obviously his father. He had that same trim, wiry build, even though he was well into his fifties. Like Cole, he must have spent most of his life outdoors.

“Hello, Riley.” He stuck out a hand for me to shake and I tried not to react when I saw his arm, which was covered from elbow to wrist with deep pink scars. His other arm looked the same. I quickly shifted my gaze to his eyes, which were warm and brown like Cole’s.

“This is my dad,” Cole told me. “He’s building a new deck.”

“
We’re
building a new deck,” his dad corrected him. He looked at me and smiled. “Only I do all the work while he sneaks off to the beach.”

I smiled back at him while Cole said in his good-natured way, “Who attached all those beams yesterday? I’m almost positive it was me.”

His dad lifted up the board he’d just sawed to examine the end. “Could’ve been.”

Beyond him, inside the garage, I could see Cole’s surf gear and what I assumed to be his motorcycle, which looked even deadlier in person. It was sleek and shiny and fast-looking, the embodiment of everything that appealed to Cole’s thirst for danger.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said when he saw me checking it out. “Later on, I’ll take you for a ride.”

“There is no way in hell,” I said firmly, “I am going anywhere
near
that thing.”

He laughed. “I’m just kidding. It’s not really meant to have a passenger. One big bump and you’d fly off.”

I frowned, picturing this, as he grabbed my hand and towed me toward the house. Inside the entryway, we were immediately accosted by a small, yapping dog with a so-ugly-it’s-cute pug face. Cole picked him up and held him against his chest, the same way I did to my cats.

“This must be Ollie,” I said, scratching the pug’s wrinkly head. Cole mentioned him once in a while. Technically he was his mom’s dog, but he loved Cole the best because he slipped him extra treats. Which explained why he was a little chubby.

“He gets a little hyper when we have visitors.” Cole set the dog back down on the floor. Offended, Ollie launched his tiny body into Cole’s leg, tail wagging at warp speed.

“He reminds me of you,” I said, only half-joking. They both shared the same kind of unbridled energy.

“I don’t jump on people when I get excited,” he said. Then he looked at me and grinned. “Well…”

Before I had a chance to formulate a witty comeback, a woman emerged from a hallway and moved toward us. She was short and had thick, wavy brown hair, like Cole’s, only hers was shaped into a bob. Cole introduced us.

“You’re a tall one,” his mother said, appraising me as she shook my hand.

“My father was six-three,” I told her.

“That explains it,” she said, nodding. The fact that she didn’t bat an eye at my use of past tense told me she already knew about my father being dead. I wondered what else she knew about me. “Come on in, Riley. Ollie, leave the poor girl alone,” she admonished the dog, who was anxiously circling my legs as if trying to prevent me from going any further. When he heard his name, he licked my ankle and sat down, which I guess meant he’d decided I wasn’t a threat.

“He likes you,” Cole said as we walked through the house, which was about twice the size of mine and more modern. “Usually he growls at strangers.”

In the hallway leading to the kitchen, the walls were covered in framed pictures. I paused for a minute to look at them. They seemed to be all family pictures—siblings and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. Big families fascinated me, probably because mine was so small, and I loved to look at other people’s family albums and photos. There were lots of pictures in my house too, but most of them were in a box in my closet because it hurt too much to look at them. But peeking at someone else’s memories? That was harmless.

“That’s April,” Cole said, gesturing to what looked like a college graduation shot of his sister, who was drop-dead gorgeous. Then he pointed to the one next to it, a posed shot of a young couple and a baby. “My brother Justin and his family. They come home about twice a year. The last time they were here, in December, Jack was just learning how to walk and now they say he’s running everywhere.”

“It happens fast,” I said, thinking of Tristan. “You must feel kind of like an only child. I mean, because they both moved away when you were still so young.”

We moved away from the pictures and continued down the hallway. “Not really,” he said, shrugging. “My parents say I act like an only child sometimes though.”

“He does,” his mother agreed when we entered the kitchen, which was warm and smelled like chicken. My stomach rumbled. “Sorry about the heat. It’s the oven. Ordinarily I’d use the grill, but as you can see we’re without a deck at the moment.”

I peered out the kitchen window, taking in the huge backyard and the woods beyond it. Now I knew why Cole sometimes felt a little claustrophobic in the city. My mother and I wouldn’t know what do with even a third of this property. I wondered who mowed all that grass.

An hour later we were all seated around the kitchen table, Ollie watching us from his dog bed in the corner. Cole’s parents bombarded me with questions as we ate, but in a friendly, interested way, not an interrogatory way like my mother. They asked me about school and my family and my job, his mom doing most of the talking. His dad was pretty quiet, but I got the feeling he was normally that way. His mom, on the other hand, went on at length about several different topics: her garden (wilting in this constant heat), her job (speech-language pathologist in an elementary school, which she enjoyed so much she dreaded the thought of retiring), what Cole was like as a child (a handful), and so on. By dessert, I understood why his father was quiet and why Cole always took my occasional rambling in stride.

Later, Cole and I went outside to walk off dinner. “Do you hear that?” he asked as we strolled toward the back yard.

I listened, but all I could hear were cars zipping down the road below and birds chirping in the trees. “I don’t hear anything.”

He smiled. “Exactly.”

“Hey, I happen to like city noise,” I said as we came upon a tall, ancient-looking tree on the edge of the yard.

“I used to climb this tree all the time when I was little,” Cole told me. He jumped up, grabbed on to a sturdy-looking branch, and pulled himself up.

“Used to?” I nervously watched him as he scaled the branch and then dropped back down, swinging for a minute before landing with a thump on the grass.

“Six years of gymnastics,” he said, proud of his dismount.

“Okay, Tarzan.”

He brushed the tree bark off his hands and wrapped an arm around my waist. We started walking again. “My parents like you,” he said. “I can tell. My mother doesn’t babble on like that to just anyone.”

“Really?” We passed the deck—or rather, the skeleton of the deck—and I bent down to pick up a stray nail. “Your father didn’t say much, so I wasn’t sure.”

“He never says much. That’s just the way he is. He doesn’t miss a thing though.”

“My dad was like that too. Sort of the strong, silent type.” I placed the nail on top of a stack of lumber, where no one would step on it. “My mother says it’s a sign of depth.”

Cole nodded. “I think that’s true.”

I thought about his father’s scars, constant reminders of a trauma he surely wished he could forget. Every time he looked at them he probably relived that night in his mind, trying to free his son from a shower of glass and then waiting, all alone, when he couldn’t.

Shaking off these morbid thoughts, I pointed to a narrow gap between the trees at the far side of the yard. “Is that where you ride?”

“Mostly. The other end of the trail comes out to the road, so I usually circle around. It’s a great trail for walking, too. You want to? You’re not afraid of bears, are you?”

“Are you just kidding again?”

He steered me toward the path. “Mostly,” he repeated. “I’ve seen a few black bears, but they leave you alone. Watch out for the squirrels, though. They bite.”

I snickered, even though I was more than a little nervous about presenting myself as human bait for ferocious wildlife.

“Come on, Goldilocks,” Cole said when I hesitated at the opening of the trail. “I won’t let the Big Bad Wolf get you.”

“My hair is black,” I said, stepping over a large crater in the ground. “And I think you’re the Big Bad Wolf.”

“I thought I was Tarzan.”

“Only during the day. At night, you’re a wolf.”

“I guess you’re safe then.”

I wasn’t too sure. It was past seven now and the sun was dipping low in the sky, giving the woods a dim, ominous feel. In order to navigate the uneven terrain, I had to keep my eyes on my feet, which made it hard to investigate every creak and snap in the trees. For all I knew, a pack of rabid coyotes could be closing in on us, hungry for blood. I held on tighter to Cole’s hand.

“You act like you’ve never been in the woods before,” he said after a bird suddenly took flight, causing me to shriek in surprise. “Haven’t you ever gone camping?”

Memories flickered in my head: sitting in my father’s lap, his unshaven cheek scraping against mine as we roasted marshmallows over a fire. The smell of wood smoke in my mother’s hair as she leaned over to kiss me good night. The warmth of my sleeping bag as I drifted off to sleep, lulled by the soothing hum of my parents’ voices. Even though I was an anxious child sleeping in the middle of the woods with a thin layer of nylon as my only protection, I’d never felt safer.

I stopped walking and crouched down, pretending to examine a small purple flower while I waited for my chest to stop aching. It was funny how one simple question could trigger such an onslaught of memories. “We used to go camping near Hiller Lake when I was little,” I said, running my finger over the flower’s silky petals. “My father loved camping and fishing and anything outdoorsy like that. He grew up in the city, but he was a real nature lover.” He’d loved Hiller Lake so much that Mom and I had spread his ashes there the spring after he died. We hadn’t been back since, but I knew whatever was left of him was happy there, forever united with the place that had brought him such peace in life.

“You’ve mentioned your dad a few times today,” Cole said when I stood up again, back in control. “Usually you don’t talk about him at all.”

“I know,” I said. It was true. I did avoid talking about him, but only because I should have been over it by now. I shouldn’t still miss him, or grieve for him, or feel that heaviness in my chest whenever an old memory decided to surface. “He’s just been on my mind a lot lately.”

Cole must have heard something in my voice—need or pain or something else—because he folded me into a hug and said, “You know you can talk to me, right? About your dad, I mean. I’d like to hear about him sometime. When you’re ready.”

I clung to him like a leech, fixing myself to him as if I could suck the courage from his body and store it inside my own. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

We broke apart and started walking again. Soon after, we came to a bend in the trail and decided now would a good time to turn back. The woods were getting darker by the minute, making it difficult to see where I was stepping, but luckily Cole could walk this trail with his eyes closed. He stuck close to me, his hand on the small of my back as he guided me past the rough spots.

Chapter Fifteen

“Do I really have to go?”

“Yes,” my mother said through gritted teeth. “You really have to go.”

Jeff glanced up from where he was sprawled out on the couch, Alice asleep in the crook of his arm. “Do
I
have to go?” he asked. Mom glowered at him and he quickly slapped on a smile. “Uh, I mean…woo hoo, can’t wait!”

Mom threw her arms up. “God, I ask you two to do one simple thing and all I get are complaints.”

With that, she spun around and marched out of the living room. A second later, the sound of a door slamming echoed throughout the house. Jeff and I exchanged looks. “She always gets like this right before going to her parents’ house,” I explained, going back to the book I’d been reading before my mother came in and ordered me to get dressed.

Jeff groaned and pulled himself up into a sitting position, disturbing Alice, whose ears went flat with irritation. “I guess I’d better go talk to her,” he said, getting up and stretching his back and arms, as if he were readying himself for a boxing match. “Wish me luck.”

“Good luck,” I said, because I knew he’d need it. Nothing disturbed my mother more than the prospect of several hours in the same house as her parents. For at least a day beforehand she’d be cranky and tense, liable to snap at the slightest provocation. Like me, for instance, still in my pajamas at two o’clock in the afternoon, only an hour before we were due at my grandparents’ fortieth anniversary party.