by Karen Rivers
“Ha.” You roll your eyes. “Who talks like that?”
He shrugs. “I guess I do.”
Sometimes, like now, you feel like Josh Harris is reading a script but you aren’t sure what your next line is, or if your next line matters. Whatever you say, he’s going to say the right thing in response.
“Elyse Schmidt,” Josh Harris murmurs, and your heart stutters like it always does when he says your name, the Elyse-part, not the Schmidt-part. You wish he would drop that part. On the other hand, you can’t seem to drop the Harris.
“Yes, Josh Harris?”
“I thought you might not be awake,” he says. “I thought maybe I lulled you to sleep with my gripping conversation.”
“Nope, I’m not sleeping. But I’ve got to say, this World’s Greatest Meteor Shower might have been oversold a little. I’ve been counting, and I’m at . . .” You pause for dramatic effect, and then make a circle shape with your fingers. “Zero meteors. So far.”
“I’m also at zero,” he admits. “But maybe it doesn’t start until later. We could demand a refund. Let’s call Ticketmaster.” He takes his phone out of his pocket and pretends to dial. This is as close as Josh Harris comes to being funny, so you laugh harder than it warrants.
“Totally,” you agree. “They owe us front-row seats to something else. We paid good money for this! If by ‘good money,’ I mean ‘nothing.’ ”
His quieter laugh rumbles through his chest. When it stops, you can hear his heart beating through the thin fabric of his T-shirt. It is so quiet that the wind whistles like a flute through the empty stands.
Neither of you plays the flute anymore.
The flute belongs to a past that doesn’t seem real.
You don’t even know if there’s a band at this tiny high school you’re starting at next week, here in Wyoming.
But you know if there is a band here, you won’t play in it.
You don’t know who you’ll be yet, and that thought is so big, it feels as big as the whole night sky, as big and impossible as space itself.
“I wonder what it will be like,” you say instead.
Josh Harris shrugs. “It will be like school is always like, just in Wyoming instead of California. It will be the same.”
“I guess,” you say, but you don’t believe it, not for a second. Nothing is the same as it was. Nothing ever will be again.
9.
When you wanted to move to Wyoming, your parents laughed at first. You remember that part, the way they looked at each other, confused, like they weren’t sure how to respond. In a way, it felt good. It was something they were on the same page about, your craziness. But only briefly before it devolved into fighting about if they would sell the farm, if one of them would stay, if they would move together. And then you begged—you weren’t above begging because it mattered so much, in a way you couldn’t even articulate—and they’d figured it out somehow, as though you were some kind of puzzle that—if only they could solve you—would make sense.
“Maybe you lived there in your past life,” your mom had guessed. “Maybe it’s your spiritual home.”
“There’s no such thing as past lives,” your dad said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“How do you know?” your mom snapped back. “Are you an expert on past lives now?”
“How could anyone know? It’s not like anyone actually remembers anything from another life.”
“Yes, they do!”
“Oh, sure, on reality TV.”
“STOP,” you told them. “I just know it’s where we have to go. I can’t explain it. But it’s home. Please.”
“You probably just saw it in a movie or something,” your dad said. “You’ve never even been there! I’ve never been there! Neither has your mother! It’s a lot to ask, to move. And it sounds . . . cold.”
You’d shrugged and just kept insisting.
It matters, you said over and over again. I know it matters.
And it must have worked, because here you are. You knew it was the right thing. The only thing: Wyoming. A pony. Seasons. Snow. Mountains.
You convinced them.
You have a hazy recollection of people walking through the peach farm, with a real estate agent who wobbled alongside them in inappropriately high-heeled shoes. A man with a beard. A woman wearing a kind of suit.
Then there were packing boxes lining the front hall, your dad grumbling the whole time, “Shouldn’t we go there first? For a vacation? Look around? Just moving there seems awfully excessive!”
When you were almost all packed, ready to leave, a man had broken into the farmhouse in the middle of the night and woken you up. You opened your good eye and he was standing next to your bed, mumbling a prayer while he touched your face, his fingers running over your empty eye socket. You didn’t scream, instead you took a glass of water from your nightstand and threw it hard against the window. The shattering of the glass was what woke your parents. It was the end of your dad’s resistance to the idea. That strange man had really done you a favor, even though he did it in an incredibly creepy (not to mention illegal) way.
You still sort of wonder if he got what he came for, if it worked, whatever he was trying to get from you. It’s funny how you can’t remember so much, but you can remember every detail of his face, the silvery stubble pushing through his skin, the creases around his eyes, the way his hair was wet with sweat.
“I’ll be better there,” you’d promised. “I’ll go back to school. I’ll talk to people. I’ll make new friends. The touchers won’t be there. I know they won’t. It will be a fresh start. I need this. I need it.”
And now you live here and you’re Josh Harris’s girlfriend and you have a dog, something your dad would previously have never considered, from a senior dog rescue, a big silky golden retriever named Rumpelstiltskin. He’s meant to be a guard dog, but he’s not very good at it, not that he’s had to be. And you have a pony. Although he’s a horse, technically. The dividing line between horse and pony is 14.2 hands. Midi is 14.3, so he’s barely a horse, but he’s perfect, even though if Kath saw him, she’d say, “You can’t convince people that you aren’t a dwarf if you insist on riding a Shetland pony. He makes you look smaller, if that’s even possible.” Standing next to Kath, Midnight would look ridiculous, shrunken, but his proportions are perfect and his scale is just right for you. He’s a white horse. Whoever named him had a sense of humor. You call him Midi because you don’t appreciate it when other people laugh at his name.
Your connection with Midi was what you imagine falling in love at first sight is like—you recognized him as soon as you saw him. You knew that you’d just fit together. He looks exactly like the horse you’d always imagined.
And you do fit. You fit perfectly.
You are happy.
This is happiness.
You are sure, lying on the blanket, listening to the haunting flute-whistle of the wind, your hand lightly resting on Josh Harris’s stomach, that nothing could possibly ever change that.
“The wind sounds like a flute,” Josh Harris says, reading your mind.
For a split second, you can see him standing there in Paris, the flute pressed to his lips, his eyes half-closed. You remember the rush of vomit from the wine, the way you had to push past him to get to the potted plant, the way he must have seen you.
What must he have thought?
And then, of course, you can’t think about that without thinking about Kath and the past slams into you like the mountain and you disintegrate on contact.
“I’m going to—” you start to say, but then your breath gets tangled in your ribs and your lungs are tatters and it’s too late to stop the adrenaline that floods through you so quickly that you can’t remember how to breathe anyway, even if it were possible.
In, out, out, in.
Which way, which way?
/> You are gasping, a fish out of water, you slap your hand against your leg, bare in the shorts you don’t remember buying, denim shorts, frayed along the bottom, white threads trailing partway down your legs, brushing your skin like insects’ legs. Slap, slap, slap.
“Schmidt, stop it! Hey! What are you doing?”
You make a humming sound in your throat. Your brain starts to feel heavy and magnetic, like it’s being pulled into the ground.
“Schmidt. Hey.” He grabs you. Then he is shaking you, your whole body is vibrating. “Breathe. Just breathe.”
“I am breathing,” you manage to mumble.
You sit up and pull away from him. You suddenly don’t want to be touched. You can’t be touched. But you also do want him to touch you. It’s confusing. “I’m fine.” You gulp down a few lungfuls of air, hungrily.
“Oh my god. Sorry.” You clear your throat, once, twice, three times. You’re thinking about frogs. You wish you could stop. That frog couldn’t move, pinned in place on the specimen tray. You feel similarly paralyzed. “I don’t know what happened.” You don’t want to cry. You won’t. He’s staring at you now.
You try again. “I must have just choked on something. Maybe a bug.”
“A bug?”
“Just . . . well, forget it. This was supposed to be romantic, remember? World’s greatest meteor shower!” You cough again. You can’t clear your throat. He looks so worried and so adorable when he’s worried and he’s worried about you, which is everything, all you ever wanted. You take a long, slow, deep breath.
“Did you know that a meteorite killed a bus driver in India when he was driving? There’s no way he went to work that day and even considered the possibility that he might be hit by a shooting star. He got ready for work the same way as always. Packed his lunch. Tied his shoes. Just a normal day. Then a fireball and bam.”
“Well, no. People don’t ever see it coming. We didn’t.”
“I kind of did, though. I sort of wondered, ‘What if it crashes?’ Just like I always wondered if I had a brain tumor or Zika virus. I used to have all these pulse apps on my phone and I’d take my pulse about twenty times a day, like it might stop beating if I wasn’t paying attention. So maybe I’m not normal, but when I got on the plane, I thought, ‘I sure hope we don’t crash.’ Because crashing on a plane is something that could totally happen. No one expects a meteorite, though!”
“I don’t think most people expect the plane crash either. I sort of feel sorry for you! It’s like you live every second expecting life to stop soon. That’s weird, Schmidt.”
“Yeah, well, at least I wasn’t that surprised when the plane started to fall.”
“I was very, very surprised,” he says quietly.
You close your eye again. Sometimes it feels impossible to keep it open, like when you’re on a roller coaster and you know the big drop is coming and your eyes slam shut in spite of how badly you think you might want to watch this time. Only you aren’t on a roller coaster, you’re on a field. But even so, the ground is tilting under you, trying to roll you right off the surface of the Earth, trying to pour you up into the sky—like everyone else—so maybe you should look, but you can’t. You rub at your good eye with your fingers. “OPEN,” you command, but it doesn’t.
“Schmidt, you should consider thinking less about death and more about life. I do.”
Life.
Death.
Choose.
You see a flash of bright blue sky. The front of the plane cleaved off the rear section. Your feet dangling over empty space. It’s like you’re right there. You are there. “Josh Harris?” you say.
“Yes?”
“I think I’m having a panic attack.” Your voice only comes out in a whisper. “I need an anchor.”
You lean forward and press your face into the crook between his shoulder and neck and take in a lungful of his laundry soap, body spray. You touch his smooth scalp, freshly shaved. Your hand is shaking. You open your eyes. You see him. You look at him. Right into his eyes. You stare into Josh Harris’s eyes with your one good eye, which you hope isn’t red.
I am the leaf, you think desperately, because you can’t help it.
I am the leaf I am the leaf I am the leaf.
You look at the seat next to you and realize that it is empty and that Josh Harris is gone. You unclip your seat belt and make yourself lean forward, like that time you went bungee jumping with Kath and her brothers. They all did these amazing aerial dives that made them appear to be Cirque du Soleil acrobats and all you could manage to do was lean and fall, your eyes squeezed shut, anticipating the cord snapping. You once saw on the news someone bungee jumping off a bridge without a cord. The operator had neglected to attach it at the platform so at a certain point in the jump the entire cord passed by the jumper’s body. He must have seen it. He must have thought, “Uh-oh.” He died, of course.
You lean.
You roll.
You don’t die.
10.
You are not on a plane. You are on a field in Wyoming with Josh Harris, wildflowers that smell like a memory scattered around you.
You are alive.
You are happy.
“Fuck,” you mumble, spinning through space and time.
From far away, you hear Josh Harris say, “Schmidt?”
You put your hand on his arm.
For a while—After—your mom tried to tell you to avoid Josh Harris. “You remind each other,” she said. “He keeps you stuck there. He’s making you anxious.”
“No,” you’d said. “I need him. He’s the only one who understands what it was like! You don’t get it. You can’t get it. He’s my safe place. It’s true. Mom. You have to believe me.”
“I thought Wyoming was your safe place,” she sighed.
“I have more than one safe place!” you said. “It’s a metaphor! Or a simile! Or whatever!”
Eventually, somehow, you can’t remember how, he won her over.
Josh Harris wins everyone over. And then after his dad sold his bookshop in California, he bought one here in Wyoming, a café-bookstore combination where Josh will work after school, making cappuccinos and charming the shoppers. They live in a house at the end of the same long, gravelly road where you live because Wyoming has no touchers and Wyoming is far enough away to be starting over and Wyoming is safe and somehow even Josh Harris’s dad could see the possibilities of Wyoming.
Wyoming is happy, or at least contains the chance of happiness.
It’s like you wrote it into being.
Of course, if you’d written it, you would have written that no one else got hurt. That no one died.
Wouldn’t you have?
You for sure wouldn’t have killed Kath.
No one should have died. But they did.
Everyone did.
The enormity of that is bigger than anything, a crater left by a meteor, carved out of the ground you are lying on.
You swallow around the lump in your throat. Your breathing has stopped sounding like an asthmatic wheeze, so there’s that.
“You okay now?” says Josh Harris.
You nod. You try to think about something else. Anything else.
Somewhere up behind your new house, your dad is thinking of planting Christmas trees. “Why can’t you stop with the trees?” your mom had asked. “Trees are so much work. Trees take over everything. You don’t have time for us when there are trees to grow.” She clenched her jaw, you could see it working back and forth. “And we don’t have to do anything right now. We just have to be here for Elyse. We just have to help her find her flame. Be a family.”
“Christmas trees are my favorite,” you’d said, suddenly wanting to be on your dad’s side for a change. “I like Christmas trees. I love them. You should do it. My flame is fine. I’m totally okay.”
&n
bsp; When you survive a plane crash, it turns out that the airline gives you a check, especially when the plane crashes because the pilot decides he wants to end it all. A really, really big check. No one in your family has to work. Not now. Not ever. All day, every day, the family can sit around the kitchen table, looking at you, waiting for you to figure out how to survive, how to be the Elyse Schmidt with the huge glasses and blue-tipped brown hair who you used to be. The girl with the crooked smile who preferred to draw people instead of talking to them, who imagined a lot more than she lived.
“You should plant the trees,” you’d said. “Please. Do it. Or get a hobby. Take up quilting. Both of you. Either of you. Take a cooking class. Do something. Get a job! God. Anything except all of this me.”
“But you are us,” they’d said. “We made you. You are our everything.”
“That’s too much responsibility,” you’d muttered. “Both of you need to get a life.” Then you’d stormed out.
You breathe in, hold it, breathe out.
When the people at school—including the kids at that party who are whooping into the night sky—find out who you are, they will tilt their heads slowly to one side, like perplexed puppies. Then their eyes will widen when they recognize you from People magazine or even the local news. Even in this small town in Wyoming, it was a big story: two teenagers surviving a plane crash that killed two hundred and sixteen other people on impact. You know it was because you went to the website of the local paper and pulled up the date that it happened, to see if there was some chance that Wyoming was immune from news, a secret pocket of the world that was unreachable by CNN or Reuters or supermarket newsstands or the internet. But of course, it was there. Front page for days and days. Photos of you and Josh Harris, taken from the group band photo shoot, one of his eyes partly closed like he was caught mid-wink, your mouth slightly open like you were talking. A blurry shot of you on a stretcher. A picture of the hospital in France where you were both taken.
And the rows and rows of photos of the dead.