“Perfect.” His phone buzzed again, but he ignored it, pointing instead at each of the desserts in turn. “I have apple, coconut cream, pumpkin, and pecan.”
“We need more coffee.” I picked my way across the diner, which was cozy and warm and filled with students and those trying to escape the October chill. Those of us trying to escape reality, too.
I returned with the refills. “You never answered my question,” I said, setting the coffee on the table.
“Which one?” He took a bite of the pumpkin pie before sliding the plate toward me.
“Where you’re from.”
He shrugged. “Who knows? My dad’s in the Army, so we move around all the time.”
“Really?” I couldn’t imagine. I’d been born in the Middleton hospital and lived in Solitude all my life. “Where else have you lived?”
“Colorado. Florida. Germany.” He rattled these off like they were no big deal, but I envied people who’d actually seen the world instead of just imagining it. “Right now we live in Massachusetts.”
“You’re kidding.” I wanted to go everywhere, only I’d never really been anywhere—a fact I was planning on changing as soon as I graduated. “Why in the world would you come here?”
“My mom’s a nurse,” he said, “and she’s visiting a doctor friend.”
“She made you tag along?”
“Long story. But we’re leaving tomorrow.” His mouth turned down at the corners, and I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.
“Where was your favorite place to live?” I asked.
“Colorado,” he answered without hesitation.
“Not Germany?” I’d always wanted to go to Europe, and I imagined Germany was something out of a fairy tale, all dark forests and twisting castles. Florida would have been a cool place to live too. I’d only seen the ocean once, when I’d gone with my best friend Becca’s family to the beach two years ago, but I’d fallen in love with it—the way it smelled, the way it whispered, the fact that it reached out and touched the other side of the world. I loved that the ocean stretched from exotic places to wash against my feet, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine all the stories it carried.
“I was pretty young when we lived in Germany,” he said. “I only remember pieces of it.”
“Why Colorado?”
“It’s open and clean,” he said. “There’s so much to do there, and there’s not a whole bunch of people right on top of you. You can spread out in Colorado.”
It sounded amazing. I could see him there, framed by mountains, his eyes the color of the open sky. I couldn’t help being fascinated by this boy who had been to all the places I’d only ever dreamed about. I realized I was staring—and that he was staring back.
His phone buzzed again.
“I think someone is looking for you,” I said. I was surprised my mom hadn’t called yet. Hopefully Pops was better. Mom was probably too busy resenting Mops to realize I was even gone.
He picked the phone up and turned it off. “Maybe I don’t want to be found.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
We talked ourselves through all four pieces of pie. Ian let me have the last bite of apple. It wasn’t until a siren wailed around us that I realized it was getting darker. Time seemed to have raced past me instead of plodding along like it normally did.
“I’d better get back,” I said. I didn’t want to go, but Mom and Mops had probably started another war in my absence.
Ian’s hand hovered over the small of my back as we left the coffee shop, and I felt warm even though he wasn’t touching me. We crossed the street and strolled through the pines that covered the hospital grounds. There was a tension, a drawing out of the conversation as we realized we were soon going to have to go our separate ways. Tomorrow, he would be going back to Massachusetts, and I would be back in Solitude.
“Have you ever felt like you were standing on the edge of something?” I asked.
He leaned closer to me, his hair falling in his eyes. “I feel like that right now.”
My face flushed under his scrutiny, and I wondered if Ian and I could talk so honestly because we knew we’d never see each other again. “I just feel like I’m waiting for something great to happen. I don’t know what it is yet, but sometimes I wake up and I’m excited for no reason.” I smiled. “You know how you felt on Christmas morning when you were a kid?”
He nodded.
“You ever feel that now?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “And sometimes I feel like I’ve already stepped off the edge and hit bottom.”
His face was full of regret, and he sounded so much older than he was.
My phone rang. Mom. I didn’t answer it, but I knew my time with Ian was up. “I’ve got to go.”
Ian’s smile was sad. “Thanks for the company,” he said. “I needed it.”
And until he said it, I hadn’t realized how much I’d needed it too.
He reached out and grabbed my hand. His was warm and calloused, and a flush fanned across my cheeks. He turned my palm up and gently opened my fingers.
He dropped the whittled wood into my hand. It was still warm from his pocket, and I ran my thumb over the smoothed edge. He pushed my fingers closed until they were tight around the half-finished seagull.
“So you’ll remember me,” he said. And then he was gone.
Mom dragged Pops’s memory behind her like an overpacked bag. It was late May, seven months after his death, and she still wore her grief like a shroud. It changed everything about her. Sometimes, when I was alone, I forgot he was gone. I forgot that he wasn’t at home, puttering around in his shop, or sitting on his back porch, complaining about the heat. It was weird how someone so alive could suddenly cease to exist. But when I looked at Mom, I couldn’t forget. His death was etched in the stoop of her shoulders and the lines at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes, which used to be full of laughter, were empty.
It wasn’t that I didn’t love Pops, or that I didn’t miss him. I loved him to the moon and back, which was what we always said when I was little and would crawl up in his lap. And I missed the hell out of him. I’d always thought that those I loved were invincible, immune. I took his life for granted, thinking we had all this time, but I was wrong. Which was why I wasn’t planning on wasting any more of it.
While Pops’s body was in the Solitude Cemetery, his spirit was very much in our house. I didn’t believe in the kind of ghosts that rattled chains and appeared out of thin air, but I knew that memories could haunt. Pops wasn’t ever really going to be gone because he’d left so much of himself behind.
I was being hard on my mom, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. And maybe I felt a little guilty. I wasn’t with Pops when he’d taken his last breath. I didn’t get to say good-bye. It was a decision I couldn’t take back, a mistake that would haunt me for the rest of my life. But I couldn’t change it; I could only try to move on. Surely that wouldn’t be so impossible.
It was late when Mom came home from work, but I’d come to expect that. She had her back to me as I walked into the kitchen—heels, pencil skirt, responsible blazer. Mom had mastered camouflage. But she was chugging something out of her plastic glass, and I knew it wasn’t milk.
“Hey,” I said.
She jumped at my voice, then set her cup in the sink and turned around, throwing me a forced smile. She tried to pretend she wasn’t falling apart, but by the time she got home, the paint was beginning to peel. “Hey!”
“You hungry?” I asked. I opened the fridge and started pulling out leftovers.
“I grabbed something on the way home,” she told me. I wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth or not, but I shoved everything back in the fridge. “Becca got off okay?” she asked.
“As far as I know.” Becca was off touring Europe with some rogue aunt. She’d left this morning, the first day of summer vacation. I was trying not to be bitter about the fact that I was stuck in Solitude.
Mom made a small noise, like a wounded animal in a trap, and I closed the refrigerator door and looked at her. She was crying. Again.
I hated myself for being aggravated with her. What kind of horrible person was I? But I couldn’t stand it when Mom cried, and she had cried every single day for the past seven months. I missed Pops more than anything, but crying every day wasn’t ever going to bring him back, and I didn’t see the point. She needed to pull herself together.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, although I didn’t have to.
“I sold the house.”
“Pops’s house?” I asked. Mom flinched. “When?”
“Last week.”
She’d sold the house. I didn’t think she was ever going to. If we hadn’t needed the money, I guess she wouldn’t have. It would’ve just sat out there, lonely and empty, until it rotted to the ground. I tried sketching out a possible tenant, but it was weird imagining someone else in Pops’s house.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t feel like talking about it. But they’re moving in this week, so…” Her voice trailed off as she turned her back to me and stared out the window into the dark. “I’m an orphan,” she said.
I stepped closer and put my hand on her shoulder. It was shaking. “Mom, you’re thirty-five years old. And you still have Mops. You’re not an orphan.”
“But it feels like I am,” she argued.
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Ignore me,” she said, but she didn’t really mean it. “I’m just tired. I’m going to bed.”
She slunk into the shadowed living room, and I listened for the click of her bedroom door.
I needed out of the house. I put on my running shoes and slipped into the dark.
I ran out to the train yard. I couldn’t see more than a couple of steps in front of me, and I had to be careful not to trip over the abandoned tracks. Chains clanked somewhere in the distance, the ghost of a memory, of a time when Solitude was a place people came to instead of one they tried to leave. Back when the trains ran. Nothing ran here anymore. Just me, fueled by escape.
I’d always wanted to ride on a train. Pops had been full of stories about the railroad, and when he’d told them, I’d heard the metal heartbeat and shrill whistle, sounds that promised adventure or, at the very least, a change in scenery. But now the only thing that blew across the open space was emptiness, trailed by a stifling breeze that couldn’t even dry the sweat covering my skin.
God, I loved running at night. I loved the quietness of it, loved the cocoon it wrapped around me, loved that it was a two-way mirror, a way for me to view the world without being seen. That was one reason I always waited until dark to go running. That, and to escape the heat. To escape my mother. Sometimes I thought if I ran fast enough, I could escape everything, could step out of my own skin as easily as shrugging off a sweater. It hadn’t happened yet, but it might. I was getting faster.
I let my legs lead. That was another thing I loved about running—autopilot. There were several glorious minutes when I wasn’t thinking at all before I realized I was running a well-worn path out toward Pops’s. I hadn’t used the trail in a while. The paved road was the long way around. I had blazed a shortcut long ago, cutting the ten-mile drive to three on foot.
I stepped out of the trees at the back edge of the property and was surprised to see a single light on in an upstairs window. A shadow crossed briefly in front, and there was an odd tug in my chest. I wondered how long it would take me to get used to someone else living in Pops’s house, strangers eating meals in the kitchen and working in his shop. I couldn’t believe a person could build an entire life, so completely inhabit a place like Pops had, and then just disappear. Did the house remember him at all?
I stopped at the edge of the pond. Pops had all sorts of stories about this pond, like the catfish that swallowed his best hunting dog. He’d scared me with that one for years, until I was finally old enough to figure out he was pulling my leg. But the stories I liked best were the ones we’d written ourselves. Like the time Mops had fallen in headfirst trying to reel in a fish. She’d lost her balance and tumbled over into the water. She’d jumped up, sputtering and fussing, and Pops had laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. She was as mad as an old wet hen, and Pops had called her that for several weeks.
But mostly I remembered the quiet of the water lapping against the shore and the sweet smell of Pops’s pipe. I’d always liked it out here. It was a shame I hadn’t really appreciated it until it was no longer mine to enjoy.
The light in the window cut off, leaving me with nothing else to focus on other than memories and a small rock on the edge of the pond. There was a tiny silver-colored vein running through it, and if I eyed it at just the right angle, it looked like a heart. I scooped it up and held it tightly in my fist as I turned around and headed home. I didn’t want to get caught trespassing. It made me sad knowing I was no longer welcome on the land where I’d grown up. Such an inconsequential thing, but in a small town, the slightest disruption from normalcy could seem like a cataclysmic shift.
Mom was asleep on the couch when I got home, her knees curled to her chest, her hands tucked underneath her chin. Her red tumbler sat next to an empty bottle of wine, and she had washed away her ruined mascara. She looked like a kid. I pulled the blanket off the recliner and covered her up, kissing her on the forehead like she had when she’d put me to bed when I was small. It was much easier to love my mother when she was asleep.
I awoke the next morning to Shakespeare:
Bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible
. I stretched and let my eyes trace the words over and over again. I had sixty-seven quotes painted on my ceiling, all intended to inspire me to greatness in every aspect of my life. But mostly I waded around in mediocrity, thinking I’d found my way forward only to discover I’d circled back to where I’d started.
Mom was in the kitchen when I got there, still nursing her coffee. She was usually at work by now. “Get dressed,” she said.
“Good morning to you, too.” I looked down at my shorts and T-shirt. “I
am
dressed.”
“In something that doesn’t look like you fished it out of the trash.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re taking this to Mrs. McAlister.” She pointed to a huge basket that was taking up most of the counter. There was a bottle of wine in it, as well as fruit and nuts. I couldn’t see everything because there was an enormous pink and black polka-dotted bow covering most of it.