Instead, I picture Ryan, blue eyes hemmed in by the dark frames of his glasses. I try to get excited about the wide-open possibility his arrival promises and I feel … nothing at all. I think of Mati, and how his presence fills me with curiosity and exuberance and a strange sort of nostalgia. Then I remember that he’s from Afghanistan—that he’ll almost certainly return to Afghanistan—and all that hope-anticipation-optimism disappears like a sandcastle overtaken by a wave.
Very late, when the world outside my window is quiet, I drift off.
In the morning, after a fitful sleep that leaves me groggy, Bambi and I are running behind. She’s wound up—she probably has to pee—and she’s the very opposite of patient as I throw a baggy sweater over a pair of leggings. My hair goes up in its usual twist and we’re out the door to the tune of a distracted, “Have fun and stay safe,” shouted from Mom’s library.
I nearly lose my footing as I step onto the porch; for once the sun is out, and it’s blinding. I debate going back for sunglasses, but Bambi’s turning excited circles and I don’t have the heart to crush her fragile doggy spirit by holding us up any longer. “All right, girl, let’s go,” I say, holding out a new tennis ball.
We’re headed down the cobblestones when Ryan’s head pops up from behind the box hedge. I jump back, slapping a hand over my racing heart.
“Oh, sorry!” He pulls off a pair of gardening gloves and grins. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s okay. You surprised me, is all.”
Bambi drops her ball to yelp about the delay.
Ryan turns his smile on her. His fair hair’s smartly combed, and he’s wearing a Texas-y plaid button-down. Combined with his glasses, it’s a cool look. “Where’re y’all off to?”
“The beach. Bambi fetches and I walk.”
“Sounds fun.”
He’s casting you should invite me vibes like the sun’s casting warmth, so I oblige, waving a hand westward, toward the Pacific. “Do you want to come along?”
He eyes his gardening gloves. “Forgo the weed-pulling? Man, I don’t know.…”
Bambi barks, picks up her ball, then drops it on the path to bark again.
He laughs. “Oh, all right. You’ve convinced me.”
The three of us make quick work of the walk, and when we reach the beach, we find it crowded. It’s Independence Day, the reason for the influx of tourists, but that doesn’t stop Bambi and me from doing our beach thing. I chuck her tennis ball and she retrieves, terrifying seagulls with her throaty barks. When Ryan takes a turn throwing, I allow myself a quick scan of the busy sand, wondering if Mati will appear. Hoping Mati will appear, because after yesterday, I have a wrong to right.
He’s nowhere to be seen.
Disheartened, I return my focus to Ryan, because he seems like the sort of person I need in my life right now: cheerful and easygoing. He tells me about his family (mom, dad, twelve-year-old twin sisters), Texas A&M (coolest school in the Lone Star State), and his ex, Jordan, who broke up with him the night they graduated from high school (yikes—real nice).
“That’s so shitty,” I say, giving Bambi’s ball another toss. Ryan’s clearly bummed about the split, but he still smiles, like, all the time.
“Isn’t it? So what if we’re going to schools in different cities? We’ll both be in Texas. We could’ve made it work.”
“Sure,” I say. “Long distance love ain’t no thang.”
He laughs. “Is that experience talking?”
“More like sarcasm. I was sort of seeing someone in San Francisco, this guy named Kurt, but I ended it the day my mom told me we were moving. It’s not like we were going to get married, so what was the point?” I weigh my words and realize I might be talking out of my ass. I mean, Kurt and I spent more time making out in his parked Camry than we spent bonding. Maybe Ryan’s relationship with Jordan was the real deal—I wouldn’t know love if it slapped me across the face. “Wait, sorry, do you want to marry Jordan?”
“Not anymore,” he says, “but I’m not entirely over it, in case you haven’t noticed. I wouldn’t normally go on about my ex while walking the beach with a cool girl. It’s just … I thought Jordan was special.” He lets go of a sigh so big, his shoulders slump.
I reach over to squeeze his arm. “Aww, I’m sorry you’re brokenhearted.”
“Eh, I’ll be okay,” he says, shucking his sadness. “And anyway, what about you? Sorry if I’m overstepping, but you were crying yesterday. You brokenhearted, too?”
“Oh … that. Rough morning.”
“Today seems better, though.”
“Yeah. It’s the Fourth of July. And the sun’s out—a rare delight.”
“Plus you have me for company.” He grins, and I can’t help but smile back.
By the time we’ve made it to the stairs, I’ve laughed more than I have since we moved to Cypress Beach, and Bambi’s paws are dragging through the sand. I’m about to tell Ryan he’s welcome to tag along next time we walk, but as we reach the top of the steps, my attention’s drawn to the grove of picnic tables where I sat with Mati yesterday.
Today, I’m living an alternate reality with an alternate boy, and it’s a little disorienting. I turn on the spigot to let Bambi drink and end up spraying my feet with water.
Ryan chases my stare to where it lingers on the tables. “Did you want to sit?”
“No, thanks.” I fasten Bambi’s leash to her collar and say, “I should get home.”
We move down the gravel path, but I can’t resist a last look over my shoulder. My gaze lands on the table Mati and I shared and … There’s something sitting on top of it. A bit of folded paper pinned down by an egg-size stone, planted purposefully.
My fingertips go tingly. That piece of paper, that message … It’s meant for me.
I stop, giving Bambi’s leash a little tug so she’ll heel. I make a show of patting my leggings’ nonexistent pockets through the knit of my long sweater. “Oh no,” I say. “I must’ve dropped my lip balm.”
Ryan turns around. “Do you have more at home?”
“Yeah, but this one’s my favorite. I’m going to check to see if I dropped it on the stairs.”
“I’ll help you look.”
“No, that’s okay. Go on ahead.”
“But—”
“Seriously. I’ll be two minutes behind you.” I give him an encouraging nod, praying he’ll cooperate. I can’t unfold that piece of paper with his peeking over my shoulder.
“You’re sure?” He knows something’s up—lip balm? who cares?—but it appears he might let me get away with my weirdness if I give him a gentle nudge.
I paste on a smile. “I’m sure. This was fun, though. Let me know if you want to walk with us again.”
“Yeah. See y’all later.” And then he turns and lopes away.
I feel a momentary pang of guilt as I hurry to the stairs. I’ve dismissed him, though he’s done nothing wrong. I’d like to make a friend my age, yet I just treated a super nice guy like he’s litter ripe for tossing.
Still, I don’t go after him.
I fake a quick search of the stairs (just in case Ryan doubles back), then hurry to the picnic tables. Bambi follows, mystified but up for adventure. My heart’s racing as I lift the stone and toss it aside. Clutching the message, I sink onto the wooden bench, praying it’s from Mati, hoping I’ve been granted a second chance, and then, carefully, I unfold the paper.
MATI
I said the wrong thing.
I must have,
because your manner changed,
and my heart stumbled.
I would take it back if I could,
but I wonder if it is
the quintessence of
me
which upsets you.
That … I cannot take back.
Last night I dreamt of you.
Your eyes like the moon,
a glimmer of light in a sea of dark.
Your mouth like a rosebud,
sp
eaking candidly, dreamily,
of loneliness and aspiration.
I woke up remembering you.
I like the way you smile,
as if with your whole self.
I like the timbre of your voice,
the confident soprano of your words.
I like your courage,
the way you fearlessly
return danger’s black gaze.
But there are things I do not like.…
The shape your shoulders make,
when they bow with sorrow.
The sad shuffle of your feet,
when they carry you away.
And the way my heart misses
a girl it hardly knows.
That morning,
on the beach with you,
I unfurled like a kite’s long tail.
I unfurled,
and I caught the wind.
elise
He wrote to me.
He wrote about me.
I keep thinking of him. Last night, while watching fireworks at the beach with Mom, Audrey, and Janie. Today, while hanging out in the yard with Bambi. And tonight, as I walk to Aud’s for dinner.
Mom’s stuck on a climactic scene in which her story’s hero must race on horseback to an abandoned mine, where his heroine is being held by brutes who demand gold in exchange for her safe return. Mom’s better left alone when she’s in book mode, so Aud offered to feed me. She fixes grilled cheese and tomato soup; she may work in a restaurant known for its fine food, but she’s culinarily inept. We eat on the living room sofa while Janie sits in a miniature chair pulled up to the coffee table, surrounded by toys.
I like Audrey and Janie’s cottage much more than the one Mom and I share. The walls here are a soft honey color, the sofa is overstuffed and upholstered in sage twill, and the TV is mounted over a repurposed library catalog cabinet. There are framed black-and-white photographs everywhere, mostly my work, mostly images of Janie, plus a few of Audrey and Nick when they were in high school, and a few from the day they were married, eating frosted cupcakes, grinning like they’re in on a secret the rest of the world would be lucky to know.
While my mom pays rent on our cottage, Audrey owns hers free and clear. Turns out there’s a big payout to army spouses whose soldiers are killed in action, plus, Nick took out a hefty life insurance policy before he enlisted. A long time passed before Aud touched that money—it sat in a savings account collecting pennies of interest the whole time she and Janie lived with Mom and me—but when her heart had scabbed over enough for her to face the windfall without anxiety attacks, she put a chunk of it aside for Janie and spent what was left on their home. I only know this because I am, for all intents and purposes, Aud’s closest friend.
When we’re done with dinner and the kitchen’s mostly tidy, I put Janie to bed so Audrey can study. We go through her elaborate bedtime routine (bath, teeth, song, books, music box, night-light), and then I pepper her face with kisses and flip off the lamp. When I return to the living room, I find Aud with her nose in a textbook.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” she asks, barely glancing up from the note she’s scribbling across a cluttered sheet of paper.
“I’ll hang out if you want.”
“Sure, but give me thirty to finish this study guide, okay?”
While I wait, I use her laptop to check my email. It’s spam, plus a notice from Cypress Valley High, reminding me, again, of the New Student Orientation.
God, no.
I sign out of my account and think of how lucky Mati is to be finished with school, free to live his life as he pleases. After his father’s treatments are over, he’ll probably head back to his country and … what? What do Afghan boys do when their schooling is done? There’s not a lot of industry in Afghanistan, as far as I know, and I can’t imagine commerce is anything to write home about. Maybe he’ll farm parched fields in a rural village. Or, maybe he’ll marry and reign like a lord. Or, he could join the Taliban and attack American soldiers—many of whom, like my brother, were deployed to Afghanistan to help.
But, no. Those are stereotypes propagated by surface-level journalism. With a jolt of shame, I realize that when it comes to Afghanistan, I don’t know anything but stereotypes.
I give Audrey a quick glance—she’s still wrapped up in her schoolwork—then type Afghanistan into an online search engine. A zillion links pop up, everything from war histories to harems, health care to housing. I dig deeper, scanning articles on poetry and proverbs, Islamic holidays, and popular Afghan cuisine—rice and soup, kebabs and lavash. I’m horrified to discover that the national infant mortality rate is dismal, and the literacy rate isn’t much better. I peruse paragraphs about the country’s complex tribal systems, the end of its monarchy, and the toll of the Soviet War. I learn about the subsequent civil war, the inception of the Taliban, made up in large part of Soviet War orphans, and the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
Since Nick’s death, I’ve pictured the arid South Asian country where he gasped for his last breath in monochrome shades of sinister and severe, but now, suddenly, Afghanistan is lit up in Technicolor. I’m not sure if my prejudice was ingrained in me by my mother, who’s feared Muslims since the Twin Towers fell—doubly after my brother was killed—or if I’ve chosen narrow-mindedness because it’s easier than acknowledging how utterly complex this world is, but I am certain of this: Nick would disapprove of complacent ignorance.
Once, when I was eleven, he took me to pick up groceries while our mom was in the weeds with edits. On our way home, laden with bags of food, he paused to fish a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket. He gave it to a homeless man—a war veteran, his sign declared—who loitered regularly a few blocks from our condo. I’d never seen my brother do such a thing, and I’d definitely never witnessed my mom giving money to the less fortunate; she always insisted we cross to the other side of the street when there were homeless people on the sidewalk. When I asked Nicky why he’d given his hard-earned cash to a stranger, he said, “Because he’s a person, Elise. Somebody’s son. Somebody’s father, maybe, and I see him. I see how we’re connected, him and me, to each other, to this great big world.” He bumped me affectionately as we continued to make our way home. “Don’t walk through life blind, okay?”
I’m thinking about connections when Audrey snaps her book shut. “Whatcha looking at?”
I close the website I’ve been studying and, nonchalantly, clear the computer’s search history, too. “Just a photography blog.”
“How’s your portfolio coming?”
I will the guilty staccato of my heart to slow; I hate lying to Aud. “Not bad. Should be ready by the time I need it for applications.”
“Sticking with the death theme?”
I wrinkle my nose and set her laptop on the coffee table. “The theme is life among death.”
She shudders. “Creepy.”
She doesn’t get my portfolio, and neither does my mom. I’m photographing cemeteries, yeah, but my goal is to capture the way lively subjects play off backgrounds of the grimmer variety. A black-and-orange butterfly perched atop a crumbling memorial, or a yellow pansy sprouting beside a marble headstone. Audrey and Mom think my work is morbid, but on good days, when the light’s just right and I’ve chosen the perfect aperture, capturing a blue bird roosting in the eaves of a centuries-old mausoleum, I think it might be brilliant.
“You’re creepy,” I say, nudging her foot with my own.
She laughs. “How’s the boy next door?”
“Hung up on his ex, which is fine by me.”
“Lissy, with that attitude, you’ll never find love.”
“I don’t want to find love—I want it to find me. I want it to crash into me. Knock me down. Seize me.”
“Spoken like a true Parker.” She twirls her hair between her fingers. She still wears her wedding band on her left hand, and its modest diamonds glint in the lamplight. “Your brother was a romantic, too, and we all know how obsessed your mo
m is with yearning and passion and devotion—fictional, of course.”
“Of course.” I nestle further into the couch cushions. “Audrey, how’d you know? With Nick, I mean? How’d you know it was real love?”
“It’s still real love,” she says, which makes my chest tighten. She places a hand over her heart. “I feel it here—a squeeze, a tenderness, a longing. It never goes away.”
“Do you think it’d be easier if you could stop loving him?”
“No. Would it be easier for you?”
“No,” I say, but my tone is unconvincing. Because honestly, sometimes I feel like a husk of a person, a milky-eyed zombie wandering a dark forest, capable only of missing my brother.
Audrey sighs, letting the curl she twisted into her hair fall to her shoulder. “Okay, maybe every once in a while, on particularly rough days, I toy with the idea of forgetting because, yeah, maybe it would be easier. But easier isn’t always better. I don’t ever want to not remember Nick or the way he made me feel, like I was something special—like I was everything special. Besides, Janie deserves two parents who love each other, even if one’s only here in spirit.”
I contemplate this, wishing I were as strong as my sister-in-law. “If you could go back and start over,” I say, “but with the knowledge that Nicky would die young … would you let yourself fall in love with him?”
She gives me a sad smile—the saddest smile. “A million times.”
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
—Rumi
elise
The following morning, Bambi and I make our walk to the beach. I’ve got my camera and she’s got her ball, and if I had to guess, I’d say she’s as eager as I am. As soon as we hear the sound of crashing waves, I sweep my surroundings for movement, a flash of color, a shock of dark hair.
I think, Please be here.
And then I see him, sitting at the picnic table I’ve started to think of as ours, writing in his notebook. Bambi’s spotted him, too, and she’s straining against her leash in an effort to get to him. She lets out an impatient whine, and he lifts his head, catching sight of us. His features go immediately slack, his eyes devastatingly impassive.
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