Late one night, many years ago, a girl wearing tiny jean shorts and a daisy crown knocked on our door. We heard Daddy’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, heard the wet groan of the door swinging open. Then, we crept to the top of the staircase and sat watching.
Our house was isolated up on the mountain, except for one week out of the year. During this week the field across from the pond was used for a music festival and our world bloomed with sudden, proximate action—with music and people, with a pinwheel of lights and worldliness. The cars arrived in droves, rising suddenly over the mountain and setting onto things like honeybees, draining the fields of flowers, the tires making deep teeth marks in the mud. All day and into the night the music would rise through the trees, and festivalgoers would drink heavily, whoop heavily, take hallucinatory drugs—an unburdening, though from what I was never sure. And it seemed that at least one person every summer would wander babbling up to our house, the only structure within festival eyesight.
When Daddy had opened the door, our dog Sugar burst out into the yard, spasming with barks. The girl stared at him for a moment and then flinched, swaying backward. “Hey, so, I was just wanting to know—is this where the bathroom is?
“Shut up,” Daddy said. “I meant that for the dog. The Porta-Potties are on the other side of the stage, across the pond. Same place every year.”
When he said this, the girl considered this very seriously for a moment. “Jesus Christ,” she said, as if this was the most outrageous thing he could have told her, and then she began laughing. We could see why she’d laugh for a second because it was sort of funny—her ending up on our porch like this.
But she kept laughing. The laugh became overblown and hysterical, rising into the night like a sick bird. Sugar backed off the porch and slunk into the rhododendron bushes, whining. My father stood there for a moment and though it was dark, we knew he was stroking the rough patch on his chin. He turned, letting the screen door slam behind him, and then returned with a glass of water. The girl had stopped laughing and her face turned greasy beneath the porch light.
“I bet the kids woke up with all this noise,” he said loudly, handing the water to her. “I bet they’re listening.” He meant that for us to hear.
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” the girl said.
He pointed to the bushes. “You can get sick in them if you want. Ground don’t care.” She stood and then sort of sank to her knees and crawled to the edge of the porch, where she began heaving.
I was the child that my father was meaning to hear, not Hannah. It was the summer after her high school graduation. I was six years younger—sheltered, hot with shame at the sound of puking, inhabiting the minor humiliations of other people long beyond the time they might.
Hannah stood up from beside me and walked downstairs. “Don’t worry about it Daddy, I’ll take it from here,” she said, pushing the door open. “Just go get some more water. Maybe a Sprite, too.”
She crouched and swept the girl’s tangled hair away from her neck. “What’s your name, honey?”
My sister, pouring herself into everything: Capacious, curious, wry, probing, offering all of herself, and it took a long time for me to understand that she did not. If I was jealous of anything it wasn’t of the things that she had that I didn’t, it was of the parts of herself that she held back. My mother had been hit by a drunk driver and died, three months after I was born; because of my sister, I never had a reason to grieve.
“Brandy,” I heard the girl say, “Brandy. Oh, my god. I’m so sorry. This is so gross. This is like, the grossest thing I’ve ever done.”
When my father came back inside he stopped and made a low hissing sound through his teeth. I wanted to know what would happen—the caught, gurgling sounds kept coming from outside—and how the girl would get back to camp. I had very little to think about in those days; this incident alone could occupy me for weeks. But my father stood at the base of the stairs until I turned slowly, skirting back into the dark of my bedroom. With the windows open, I could still hear the consoling murmuring of my sister, below, and across the pines, the low wail of voices singing.
◆
Even as I willed myself to stay awake, I woke in the morning, a half-moon of drool on my pillow and when I came downstairs, my sister was already making breakfast. I’d gotten into the summer habit of waking when she did, at half-past six, and eating breakfast with her before going back to bed, sleeping for a few hours, and then rolling out to eat again.
It was nice, to eat that first bowl in the dark.
Hannah had gotten into NYU that year—a full ride. None of the adults around us were surprised. “Of course,” they said, because Hannah’s capability and academic successes were a source of general pride. She was the trusted one: the designated driver, the one found in the kitchen, thoughtfully running her hand along a counter as she spoke with the adults. Still, even with the promise of scholarships and city life ahead of her, she worked hard. She worked at the small farm down the road, where several of her friends were also farmhands. At the end of most shifts, they’d jump into the pond and come to our house, wringing out water from their jean shorts, raiding the porch fridge for the amber Coronas that Dad turned a blind eye to.
“Well?” I climbed onto the counter and curled my legs up.
Nights, when Hannah stole into bed and curled around me, confessional and sweet-smelling from a shower, were when we were most like sisters. In the morning she woke a new person: distracted, aged with responsibilities, and a to-go mug of coffee.
“What?”
“You know. What happened to Brandy?”
“I made her take ibuprofen and some water, and when she’d emptied her stomach I walked her back to her tent.”
“Oh my god. She was drunk?”
“Of course she was drunk, you drama queen, you already know that.” She rattled the coffee machine until it made a burping sound and then stepped back. “Eggs or cereal?”
“Cereal. What’re you picking today?”
“Ugh. Blueberries again. My hands are so frigging stained.” She set a box of Cornflakes on the counter, held her splotched hands up for me to see, and then, grabbing her mug, planted a kiss on my cheek.
Sometimes I came with Hannah and helped pick for a few hours, but, though I wanted to be around her friends, to be among their jokes and gossip, though I wanted that very badly, I hated the work. The heat, the light calligraphy of brambles on arms, the summer bodies sculpted weirdly by stooping—these things were not for me.
And all I’d be able to think about the whole time, was how much I’d rather be home. I loved television. Our TV was small, stacked on the floor upon three dictionaries, glossy and bulbous as an empty wine glass. I used it quietly by myself and because I did I craved bad things. To watch it, lying draped motionless across the pink carpet for hours like roadkill, was the most total way I knew of being alone. Like swimming, like being naked. I could strip bologna straight from the pack, pick skin off my feet, drink two or three or four Cokes and afterward chuck the evidence deep into the woods.
Sometimes I touched myself, compelled by currents beyond my understanding, cautiously letting my hand drift down my shorts and focusing very closely on the screen as if to pretend it was an accident, a more comfortable way of watching television. If I ever allowed myself to linger on the why—how I could be moved to spoon and twitch my hand between my legs—I was filled with disgust. And yet: a shock, a wave of alertness in my body, like touching cold water.
My television taste ran to the romantic and suburban, with occasional bouts of rapid-fire banter: I liked Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill. It was a source of consistent pain that no one in my school or home spoke the way that the people on the shows did, and not for lack of effort on my part.
But I was also careful. I always made sure that the television was shut off a full twenty minutes before Hannah and the others came back, the glittering heat hissing back into the screen. I would arrange myself on the porch swing with the copy of To Kill A Mockingbird that I’d been reading for three months. The book itself bored me.
◆
On this day, though, I heard a knock at 5:15, a full forty-five minutes before Hannah was due back. Panic flooded my body and I sprang up, flipping the TV off and the radio on—an alibi for noise—though when I turned the power on it sent a sonic boom through the house. Hannah wasn’t at the door.
There was only a boy/man—I was unsure at what point (seventeen, eighteen, nineteen?) boys began to be called men—waiting on the other side of the screen, barefoot. He was shockingly handsome, like someone on Dawson’s Creek, though his long hair was knotted into a bun. He wore a flannel shirt over baggy shorts. It was unbuttoned. I guess he saw me looking at his chest because he pulled it closed, looking embarrassed. His eyes were so blue they might’ve been white.
“Hi,” he said. “Sorry if I startled you. I just came by to thank y’all for helping my sister.”
“Your sister?”
“Yeah, my sister Brandy. I think she may have ended up here last night.”
“Oh,” I said. I stepped out onto the porch and shut the door behind me. “My Dad’s not here, but my sister will be back any second.” I said this because I knew from television that even handsome people could murder you. It was always best to let them know that they were working on borrowed time.
“I’ll just wait for her, then. Brandy would have come, but I think she was kind of embarrassed. And hungover.”
“Hungover! But it’s like, six.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sara.”
“Promise me, Sara, that you won’t drink. It’ll make your body feel like garbage. Mine still feels bad, and my tolerance is—okay, let’s just say it’s pretty dang high.”
“I’m not sure,” I sketched the outline of a loose floorboard with my toes, “I probably will drink margaritas when I turn twenty-one. Do you want lemonade?”
I went inside to make us glasses and when I came back, we sat down. His name was Blake, which surprised me, as he seemed like the kind of person who would be named like an animal, the way boys in old pioneer stories are always named Rabbit, Bear, Beaver. Never Blake, like someone who works at a golf course.
But he was nice. He was a few years older than Hannah but had skipped college to get his EMS license and participate, he explained, in subversive political communities. He was back home, staying with folks for a bit, and hadn’t gotten his EMS certification quite yet. Building community, he said—it was slow, it was radical, full of stops and starts. He told me that he didn’t believe in owning property, that he believed in being true to his thine own self. We had other things in common: he had a puppy and she was also named after a baking item. Ginger lived in Winston-Salem with his parents. Maybe, he said. Maybe he could bring her up for a visit one day.
It is fair to say that I was smitten. Well, I was. To be that age is unyielding; to feel things thick and distorted as underbrush, to possess an affection that doesn’t forget, that hooks on wounds that haven’t been created yet.
When his lemonade was finally drained and Sugar had fallen back asleep in a sun patch, he said, “I thought your sister was coming?”
“Any second, actually. Let me check the time.” I reached into the pocket of my red shorts and drew out my grandfather’s pocket watch. I actually did love and take great care of the thing but had also, it seemed, been waiting my whole life for this moment. I felt strongly that if he saw it he might catch on to a mystery in me that no one else had, yet. I hefted the cool, heavy gold in my hand and slowly lifted the cover, stealing a glance at Blake to see his reaction. But he wasn’t looking at me.
Hannah was walking down the driveway, alone, carrying a bucket of corn. One of the things I loved most about my sister was how tall she was: a full six feet, and unlike other tall women, I’d never heard her make apologetic gestures about her height or the sturdiness of her body. She’d never gone through phases the way others did: soccer, steampunk, horse girl. She just sort of glided from age to age without being worried or changing much. Her handwriting had been the same since she was ten; still those Teton 2’s and teardrop L’s. Each moment with her body made sense with the one before; she might gnaw at a hangnail or peel open a scab and still it did not compromise the whole chorus of her limbs and face. It was easy to see why he, why anyone, might be so taken with the sight of her walking toward us like this.
But when she reached the porch, she only looked concerned. “Who is this, Sara?”
“His sister was—is—Brandy.”
He stood up and held out his hand to her. “My name is Blake, ma’am.” Like the use of y’all, his introduction had an Appalachian affect that I could recognize, even at that age. But I didn’t care. On Blake, the words arranged themselves as pure, unalloyed.
“You don’t want to shake my hand, it’s filthy,” Hannah said.
But even as she stepped back, taking off her baseball hat and tossing it onto a chair, it seemed that some understanding had already passed between them and I could not prevent whatever was to come next.
“Look at me,” Blake gestured at his stained feet. “My sister said you were really sweet. It’s my fault, really. I thought she’d already gone to bed and if I’d known she was as drunk and high—sorry, she was like, super stoned—I would have kept a better eye. I’m sorry she woke you folks up.”
“No sweat, we’ve all gotten a little too drunk before,” Hannah said, with a sudden bit of worldliness.
“Right, but I’d still like to make it up to you.”
She walked past him and set the bucket down. “You already said thanks. It wasn’t a big deal.”
The month after she’d gotten her driver’s license, her keychain was swinging heavily from her carabiner, she had a rabbit’s foot, keys to half the neighborhood from dog-sitting, a friendship bracelet she said was kind of a joke. But even the bracelet was like something she’d had forever. I envied this. I threw out the pictures I drew and didn’t stick to sports and changed the names of my dolls at least once a week so that in the end, even without my meaning to, nothing I touched ended up being mine. Not really, no. Not the way things belong to other people.
“Yes.” Blake said, “But that’s a pretty big bucket of corn, you know what I’m saying? Maybe I could give you a hand with shucking.”
◆
Soon, he was back. That first visit he brought Brandy and she perched nervously on the porch with a sweet tea for an hour or so; the weekend after, he returned alone and stayed for many hours. We played cards for a while, the three of us watching the dogs chase each other in figure-eights around the yard. After a while, it grew dark so that the moon cut ragged paths across the grass, and Daddy came out.
“Sara. It’s after ten.” He jerked his thumb back toward the door, and then his gaze fell on Blake. “And you. What were your plans for sleeping arrangements tonight?”
Blake looked up mildly. “I got a tent in Wendell—if it’s alright with you I thought I might pitch it somewhere around here.” He scanned the field, then pointed to a cluster of trees near the pond. “Maybe there?”
“The fuck is Wendell.”
Blake grew red. “Sorry, sorry. It’s what I call my car.”
“Wendell.” Daddy repeated. He stood there for a long minute, still holding the door, then looked at Hannah. She was holding one of Sugar’s paws, examining it closely. “Fine.” The door slammed shut, and his voice came back briefly from the kitchen. “Too many roots over there, if you ask me.”
I trailed behind. There was a humid silence that seemed to suggest that we had been interrupted from some big thing, though we hadn’t—we’d only been laughing at the dogs running themselves dizzy. It was one of those nights, thin and blue, past twilight but still with the feel of it clinging on; June, but with something of the urgency of April or October. I was wearing Hannah’s jacket, too hot for the night, but the thick of it over my shoulders made me feel older. I waited for the two of them to make a case for me, to plead on my behalf. But Blake just reached out and gave a little fist bop to my knee.
“Goodnight, Sara,” he said.
◆
From then on he was at our house every weekend, making the four-hour drive from Charlotte without fail; Ginger’s jaw juddering out the car window. He said he wanted to leave the suburbs as soon as he could. He wanted to move to the mountains. He quoted John Muir. The mountains were calling him. Annoying, he teased. I don’t know they got my number, those mountains.
He also understood me. I felt that way and even though I can look back now and see with clarity the margins of his arrogance, of my childhood delusions—I still feel that that much was true.
Blake told stories about hitchhiking up and down the west coast after graduation. He told stories about taking a vow of silence for three months. All over his hands were tiny, crudely drawn tattoos some guy named Bubba had drawn on him in Nevada. My love for him was paramount to my love for Hannah, and because I believed then that I could not have him, I loved the two of them as they were together.
It was a good summer—the swimming and the trespassing and the long blue evenings on the porch, swollen with music. If Blake arrived before Hannah finished work—and he usually did, the car crawling dustily up the long driveway—we’d set at our routine: he taught me the harmonica, then the banjo, the guitar. Or tried, at least. We played scrabble, just me against him, until Hannah would come home and perch on the edge of my chair, making shrewd decisions with my remaining letters, even when all I had left were vowels. Hannah had a bigger vocabulary, could manipulate the alphabet in ways neither Blake nor I ever could.
But then he’d smile. It didn’t matter. He’d stand up, grab the beams of the porch and pull himself into a chin-up, say, Say-ra, won’t you help me roll this cigarette? And so I came to love the coarse grain of tobacco, the roughness slipping behind wax, and even the long perfume his cigarettes left on all our clothes, on Sugar’s coarse fur.
Hannah had always been proficient at many different things, but in many ways this summer was the beginning of my own desire to be proficient. That kind of desire ends up bigger than any kind of doing: it staggers and long and bleats but goes nowhere. People who are naturally good at being in the world don’t think so much about whether or not they can do all the things in it—stake the tent, bake the cake, wrench the nail. They just do them.
Daddy had planned to drive Hannah up to NYU himself—I know he had, I’d overheard him tell someone on the phone, his voice ticking up with rare eagerness—but when the time came, Hannah announced that Blake was moving with her. Daddy didn’t say anything for a while. Finally, he said, “You’re both gonna have to get better at parallel parking,” and then walked out back.
◆
Hannah called me when she got to New York and told me how, on the first night of the trip, they’d pulled off on the side of the road and pitched a tent in a field. A thunderstorm had blown through in the middle of the night, exposing a rip in the tent, and they’d had to quickly throw their wet things in the car and drive until they found one of those places with the spooky, lit-up MOTEL signs. She described how they’d lain on the thin gray carpet in their wet clothes, a cheap seashell comforter thrown over their beautiful bodies, and slowly eaten a whole jar of peanut butter, sharing a spoon. A whole jar. Just talking and holding each other, all night long, and never falling asleep once.
Erotic was not a vocabulary word that I was familiar with, at that age, but what I felt upon hearing her story was some great stirring, desire and a nameless melancholy that I could not put words to: a line of light straight through my body. It was a crush, I suppose, but also the beginning of something much more rotten. I wanted to die. I wanted to live, to curl up inside their bones. I felt unbearably proud that I knew them.
◆
Once away, Hannah began to call home less and less. The first few weeks were hardest. It was as if Daddy and I had forgotten, or perhaps never known, how to be around each other. My father could be a very intimidating man—his craggy, misshapen goatee and patches of neck hair, bits of gold glinting on his knuckles and around his neck; full of rules and sudden preferences—but his wildness seemed less glamorous, next to Blake. We lived cautiously, orbiting around the other person like ghosts. For a few weeks, I only was aware of his footsteps pausing at my door, and heavy breathing which meant that he had looked in to make sure I was still there.
In my loneliness, I joined the basketball team, made good grades, spent afternoons at the base of the mountain harvesting wounded apples and creating sour, lumpy sauces out of them. I tried to cook for Daddy, too, the way Hannah had, but it never worked: the rice was crunchy, the macaroni humid and slimy. Eventually, we both took to making sandwiches every night, and something, some friendship arose, finally, out of that—slapping mayonnaise and cold turkey onto bread, as lean bars of moonlight stole into the kitchen. We’d fill our plates and take them into the living room to watch UNC basketball games. Rules loosened.
I didn’t go a night without falling asleep thinking about him, crafting evil, lurid futures which could negotiate around my sister. Hannah could die in childbirth. Gradually, as I grew into a beautiful woman with incredible hair—helping to raise the orphan baby—he would begin, ever so slowly, to love me. Or, even better, perhaps she would leave him. She’d always wanted to go to Ireland. She’d go, slipping out in the middle of the night, and he would wake to hear Ginger barking, the door thrust wide open to the cold….a trail of footprints….he’d be so devastated. I’d comfort him, saying, you don’t deserve this, no, you do not. Spring would come, I’d turn eighteen, he’d look up one day as I came in, flushed with daffodils: My! God! How have I never known? And I’d be the dark witch, the one who wanted bad things; the one who ended up loved, anways.
There was both great imagination and no imagination at all to my fantasies. And as soon as morning came I pushed my thoughts back, became good again. I got ready for school and went to school. In my best basketball game, I scored seventeen points. Dad and I hung blue Christmas lights on the porch and in the trees, even before Halloween. And then it was Thanksgiving.
◆
When Hannah came home I was upset by the change in her body. These four months were the longest we’d ever been apart; still, four months seemed a short time to account for the damage. She’d gained weight and her sweatshirt and overalls hung on her body in weird places. Her face was blotchy and cystic. Dad, though, was elated to see her. He didn’t seem to notice a change.
So, then, I waited until she was curled in my bed that night.
She drew her knees up to her face and rested her chin on her knees. “It’s Blake.”
I sat up. “He broke up with you? No!”
“No, no, he likes me.” She looked down. “It’s just that sometimes it’s too much. You know? Nothing he does can be normal. No one else seems to care about that because they’re too busy being like, Oh, Blake, what a—solid dude! Even though I’m the one in school, no one on campus knows me apart from him, the freshman girl with the hot ponytail guy! This should’ve been the best semester of my life, I guess. I get invited to parties. Even ones thrown by juniors and seniors.”
“What kind of parties?”
“Oh,” she waved her hand. “Art parties. And it should be great, right? He isn’t afraid to kiss me in public, or shout “Hannah Greer—I’m in love with you!” really loud across the street. But he makes me feel bad.”
“Bad?”
“Yeah. About, like, random stuff. The books I’m reading. People I’m not really friends with but know, casually on campus in classes and stuff, who…I don’t really know what they do that’s so wrong. Wear flip-flops. Read Game of Thrones. He’s judgemental about me being pre-med and I don’t even know why. Do you know, he’ll take fifteen flights of stairs to avoid the elevator just because he thinks that elevators are like, basically immoral?”
This was exactly the kind of thing that made me obsessed with him but I nodded sympathetically.
“Once I tried to take a cab, really late at night, and he acted like I’d shot a dog. I mean, it was like two in the morning, and honestly, New York can get so sketchy. But he yelled and yelled. He couldn’t believe I’d take a cab. And he sold his car.”
“He sold Wendell? No!”
“Exactly! That’s what I said. He sold the car, and we had a big fight because I didn’t want to hitchhike down with him for Thanksgiving. Hitchhike! I mean, that’s insane. What’s the average hitchhiking speed? It’s maybe safe for boys, but what about me? He almost got into a fistfight the other night, because some guy at a party asked him what he did. “What do you do, man?” As if that’s such a crazy question!”
None of these things seemed all that terrible to me. Blake had made a low-stakes anarchist out of me. I didn’t know what most things he talked about meant, only that I also believed in them as I believed in my own skin.
Hannah matched her feet against the cold window, making glassy footprints. “I was so jealous of him, this whole summer, did you know? I thought he—I guess it was that he fit in too easily, that everyone loved him. I kept thinking, no, come on, this is my home, my family. I sometimes thought that you loved him more than you loved me, isn’t that stupid?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t even know where he is. Pennsylvania still, maybe? He doesn’t have a phone anymore. I always respected that about him—I didn’t think I was the kind of girl who minded that stuff—but now I have no idea where he is, or if he’s gonna make it to North Carolina at all. Am I too basic? Is he dead? Whatever.”
“Hannah!”
“What? How am I supposed to know? How does he expect me to care if he doesn’t allow a way for me to? It’s pointless. He could have a phone if he wanted. He could have a car. I’m not some Civil War girlfriend waiting for her soldier to come over the mountain.”
“Like Inman.” Hannah had read Cold Mountain aloud to me, the year before.
“Like Inman, minus the war part. Ugh, it’s just like, what am I gonna do? I’m racking up loans. The stuff with Blake is distracting. My grades are terrible. And my hips are huge. You’ve probably noticed.” She slapped them noisily, then sighed. “Or maybe not, you don’t care about stuff like that. I wish I didn’t.”
Again, I said nothing.
She rolled onto her stomach. “But he’s also the best person I’ve ever known, you know what I mean?”
She pulled the covers up, and I fell asleep with her spelling out words on my back: T-U-R- K-E-Y and C-L-A-S-P and R-E-L-I-E-F. Outside, we could hear the birds calling to each other across the wash of pine trees, and occasionally, the swift windfall of dry berries and sticks falling onto the roof.
◆
It has only been in my dreams, since that night, that I’ve allowed myself to nurture disloyalty. I think of my sister and the ease with which she moves through the world, from relationship to relationship, calmly finding value in each segment of her life, locking and unlocking, bound by no loyalty to the past. She is lucky, though it will never occur to the lucky ones to catalog the world in such a way. She is married now. Her husband seems no better or worse than anyone she has ever said “I love you” to before. He is a nurse. He is kind and sheepishly preppy, with curly blonde hair and an overbite.
“Timing,” she told me the night they got engaged and later I passed by and saw, through the doorway, her head resting quietly on his shoulder.
And then I think of Blake. I dream of him with radiance and purpose. I see him as he must have been, those last few moments before he disappeared: his long legs swinging alongside I-26, the dry thunderclap of his backpack instruments. They say that he was last seen by a driver somewhere south of Abingdon, in that stretch where the shallow woods beside the highway suddenly branch out and become confusing. They say that he was probably trying to take a shortcut, that it could have been the cold or some violence from hitching a ride, that maybe, simply, he decided he wanted a new life.
◆
I do know things. I think of something that happened another summer, many years after the one in which Blake appeared in our lives. I was working at a camp and had some kind of fever and remember slipping out of the dining hall early and walking to my cabin and falling asleep while it was still light out, burrowing in the musty half-dark of my sleeping bag. When I woke, hours later, I thought of a certain ledge in the swimming house. My cabin roommate—her name was Jenny, though that doesn’t matter—had a ring, a clunky antique from a boyfriend that had gone missing at the start of the summer; a loss which had been a source of much discussion and general bunk anguish. I hadn’t liked her boyfriend all that much and it wasn’t entirely clear if she did, either.
But the ring itself was wonderful and when I woke I somehow knew where it was. The revelation wasn’t a memory, exactly—we were rarely together—but if it was a memory, it was one on her behalf. I stumbled out of the cabin, still full of dark heat, as leftover fireworks from the fourth of July ballooned above the shoreline, the air glimmering with distant chatter. The ledge I’d dreamed of did not come to mind much. It was just above eyesight and you had to climb onto a bench to reach it, which I did, occasionally, to string swimming noodles across rafters. When I arrived at the boathouse that night I climbed the bench and swept my hand along the grainy ledge without doubt until it reached the pearly knob and my fingers closed around it. Mine. Delivered to me.
Do you think I wouldn’t have followed, given a chance? I look back now and it’s an image as sustaining as any I’ve ever had. It would have been a cold night, late fall, the air smelling nervy and earthy and clean as if something had got stripped away. And then I see him. I see a boy, or man, turning and diving off into the woods. I see the last red of his shirt bobbing between pine trees, then, an easy stillness the rest of that night interrupted only by a few pairs of eighteen-wheeler headlights that whip around the rocky shoulders and cut into the loose dark. After that, I don’t see anything.