The Dead Enders

by Erin Saldin

  She looks away. “I didn’t know it was that obvious,” she says.

  “No,” I say, “that’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean to—I don’t think it’s bad. I just—I think the scar is beautiful.” I blurt the last part out.

  Her head whips around to me. “It’s not beautiful,” she says, though her voice doesn’t sound angry. “Not at all.”

  “It’s beautiful the way relics are beautiful,” I say. “The way they represent a time that’s passed, a way of being in the world. The scar does that too.”

  She looks at me for a long time. Then she nods, touching her arm. She pulls the sleeve up, and we both look at the beautiful river of it. “Before and after.”

  I reach out and touch the scar. “Before,” I say, following its path down her wrist, “and after.”

  She shivers, and I pull back. I can’t read her expression, so I say, “I don’t really know what to do with Georgie gone.”

  “What do you mean? She hasn’t left yet.” Ana shifts in her seat, covers the scar again.

  “I know, but she’s going soon. And she’s not in school. I just—I don’t know how to handle my time. What to do with myself.” I don’t tell Ana what I’ve actually been doing, which is driving around, looking for her. Parking in front of her apartment building and not knocking on her door. Bringing her name up on my phone and never hitting send.

  Ana nods. “I know what you mean. I guess I didn’t really know how much she planned our days. How in charge she was of everything.”

  “I keep waiting for you to leave too,” I blurt out before I can stop myself.

  “What?” She smiles and looks at me.

  “I thought maybe . . .” I shrug. “Everyone else is doing it.”

  “Where would I go?” She laughs, and then her expression turns serious. “Besides, there’s someone here I would never leave.”

  ANA

  I watch him for a reaction, but I can’t quite read his expression. For a second, he seems like he’s going to lean forward, but then he kicks his feet in the water, making tiny bubbles.

  “She’s not going?” he asks.

  Vera. He thinks I’m only talking about Vera.

  Okay.

  “Nope,” I say. “Abby agreed to leave her here. With me.” I lift one foot out of the lake and watch the water drip off of it before letting it fall again with a slight splash. “Turns out all it took was a little . . . pressure.”

  “That’s awesome,” Davis says. “But is that . . . ? Can you take all of that on?”

  “My mom and I have it all worked out,” I tell him. “Abby’s transferring the power of attorney to my mom. She’s going to help. If things get . . . as Vera gets older.” And I remember the way Vera looked at us when I brought Mom to meet her, finally. Sisters are a gift, she’d said, and we didn’t correct her. Before we left, Vera touched my hand. You’re her world, she said. Anyone can see that.

  Davis nods. “Will Abby visit, do you think?”

  “Honestly? No,” I say. “She says she will, but, I mean, how could they now? Besides, the sale’s still going through—the buyers were going to tear it down anyway.”

  The image rushes back, as it does ten times a day at least: the house burning and Erik falling. Falling as we watched. I close my eyes. Will this haunt me forever? “It seems pretty final,” I say, and I’m talking about more than just the sale. Then I add, “I don’t know. Maybe.” I look at him out of the corner of my eyes. There are so many things I want to tell him. So many. About Erik, and Georgie, and the summer. About us. “You got it, you know,” I say, pulling my feet out of the water and sitting cross-legged. I cup the tops of my feet in each hand, warming them. “The letter. Article. Brochure. Whatever you want to call it. You got Gold Fork.” A water-skier goes by in a full wet suit, backlit by the sunset, and the wake makes the dock bob and sway under us. “It wasn’t always nice, but it was honest. You let the town talk,” I say. “And it was my voice. Ours.” Then I add, “Everyone’s.”

  I read it twenty times.

  “Thanks,” he says, and stares hard at the water. “That means a lot.”

  “You sure didn’t hold back.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “but it was a letter, you know? That’s easier, in a way. Removed from the action. At least you call it like you see it. You’ve never been afraid to tell people when they’re being assholes.” He shakes his head a little. “I don’t know anyone else like you—like that.”

  “Thank you, I guess.” I laugh and turn back toward the lake. “It certainly hasn’t won me any love, that’s for sure.”

  “I bet it has.”

  I keep my eyes trained on the mountains across the lake, the lengthening shadows of trees on the far shore. I’ve hardly let myself hope until now. But. Something in his voice. The memory of the chapel comes back to me, but this time, it’s not smoke and flames that I remember. It’s the two of us, standing together in the chapel, shoulders touching, the whole world a bright, flickering spark of possibility.

  I turn to him quickly. “The Better,” I say, and let out a shaky breath.

  “Are we speaking in code?” He makes a show of looking furtively left and then right. “Are we spies here? Because I can see it: you all beautiful and shit in a trench coat, me trying too hard in a dark hat. Rainy streetscape, dim light. I could start another graphic novel, this one about how, minus any superpowers, the two of us fight for good and truth and—”

  I laugh. He doesn’t get it. Of course. And I’m tempted to drop it, to go back to our casual way of being. But. “No,” I say, “you. You’re the Better. Something my mom said once.” I keep my eyes on him. Take a big breath. “If I’ve learned one thing this summer, it’s that we don’t have time to keep things hidden. And—” I take a deep breath. “And I need you to know how I feel. In case there was any doubt.”

  I watch him get it. He looks confused for a second, eyebrows knitted together like he can’t trust what he’s hearing, and then his face just kind of clears—washed clean with certainty. He smiles at me. “Well,” he says, lifting his hand and staring at it a moment before letting it fall gently onto my shoulder, “your mom’s a wise woman.”

  His hand moves from my shoulder over to the back of my neck and rests there, and everything inside of me seems to lift up at once and answer the touch.

  “Besides,” he adds, “we can learn a lot from our elders.”

  “Like what?” I keep my face turned toward his. My voice sounds in my ears like I’ve just sprinted a mile to get here. And we both have, really. Miles and miles and miles.

  “One,” he says. “Always offer guests something to eat.” He leans closer, moves his hand up so that it’s cupping the back of my head. “Two.” His forehead touching mine now, and it’s not clear whose skin is hotter, mine or his. “You never know when someone’s going to surprise you. It’ll hit you like a truck.”

  “And three?” I bring my hand up between us like a wish and rest it on his cheek.

  “No three,” he says, so close that I can smell his hair, and it’s spruce and wood smoke, and I know that this is the one thing I’ll never forget, not in five years, not in fifty. “Just two.”

  WHERE SOMETIMES YOU WIN

  When we talk about it, we say that Gold Fork is a four-season resort town with only two that matter.

  But that’s just something we say to make sense of this place. Because we know that sometimes, sometimes there’s a fifth season. It might be as long as a week, as short as the breath that passes between two people. And most years, we miss it—turn our heads at the last second, lean over to tie our shoes, and it’s gone. Those are years of regret and chill, everything doused in gray. But when we do catch and hold and see it for what it is, we understand that no other town has it, and that, for this week or moment or breath, we’re the lucky ones. We hold it in our hands, there in the curve of our palms, and we feel the intensity of it burn clean through.

  Our season.

  The air: clean, cold, br
ight.

  The sound: a lake lapping against the shore, geese lifting off together in one lilting spray.

  And the smell: wood smoke. Spruce. Vinegar. Strawberries.

  GEORGIE

  I’m alone when the doorbell rings. I’m sitting in my room, feet propped on the duffel that’s been packed for weeks. My flight leaves tonight, and my parents are at Toney’s, stocking up on toothpaste and deodorant, as though maybe the place where I’m going doesn’t have basic necessities. When I hear the doorbell’s chime I whip my head around. Try to suppress the hope, a sudden plucked string. Maybe. I run down the stairs, two at a time, and throw open the door.

  It’s not him.

  She looks at me the way you look at the cashier who’s given you the wrong change. Doesn’t say a word.

  “Hi,” I say.

  She steps inside the house. Looks around. “I expected nicer,” she says. She’s wearing a thick coat that reaches toward her knees, even though it’s not even cold enough for a sweater today. Her hair is messy. I can see where she tried to put on lipstick and missed—a red slash at the corner of her mouth.

  When she still doesn’t say anything else, I start rambling. “I’m sorry I wasn’t at the memorial,” I say. “I heard it was nice.” I sound like a recording of someone who’s paid to say nothing real. But I’ve never really talked to Erik’s mom. I don’t know how to begin now.

  She ignores me and reaches into the deep pocket of her coat. I watch her hand fish around for something, distracted. “This is yours,” she says, and hands me a thick envelope.

  My heart trips. There’s my name, in his chicken-scratch handwriting. I glance at her.

  Her glare is a challenge. “I thought about it.”

  “I’d have read it. If it were me.”

  “Don’t worry. He left one for me, too. With—” Her voice cracks, and she swipes at her face with a puffy coat sleeve. “Do you know where he’d have gotten two thousand dollars?” She shakes her head into her sleeve. “I don’t even want to know. I don’t even—” She sobs once, quickly—a heaving, gasping sound—and stops just as suddenly.

  “He must have saved it,” I say. “For you.” It’s a lie, and we both know it, but I don’t know what else to say. I never understood Erik’s relationship with his mom, but I’m looking at her, tiny in that huge, ridiculous coat, and I know she will never be okay again. Normal—whatever it was—is over. The anger I feel is sudden and hot. How could he not see what this would do to her?

  “I’d have brought it earlier.” But then she doesn’t say anything else. Instead, she turns to go. Stops right outside the door and looks over her shoulder at me. “I never knew what he was doing with any of you.”

  And I know she means all the girls, but I say, “He was one of us.”

  She starts down the walkway, then turns. “Then you should have taken better care of him.” I watch her as she walks with uneven steps to her car and gets in. She doesn’t look at me again.

  I close the door. Davis told me that Erik’s mom knew his dad was back in town, and she and Erik never talked about it. She’s right. We all should have taken better care of him. All of us.

  But especially me. Especially, especially, especially me. And, like it does a dozen times a day, the crushing weight of this—the fucking endness of it—presses against my chest with a force that almost knocks me over. Ana and Davis will be okay. They’ll live with this, and eventually it’ll sew itself into the fabric of their memories, a strand of something that was beautiful, once, before it was awful. But I’ll always know that there were a million moments when I could have been brave. I could have tipped my face toward his that night at Fellman’s—feels like years ago now—when the air crackled around us and it was all still possible. I could have held on to him. I could have made a million different choices—for Erik, for myself.

  But I can almost hear him now, in that voice that was always resting this side of a joke that only he got: Stop taking yourself so seriously, George. It’s not all about you.

  I open the envelope. Money falls out: hundred-dollar bills. Ten of them. I stare at the money, run my fingers over it. Gather it together in my hand, feeling the insubstantial heft, the uselessness. Slowly, I curl my fingers around the money until it’s crunched together in a misshapen ball. I lob it toward the garbage can. Then I reach into the envelope and pull out a wrinkled sheet of paper. The handwriting slants across the page, written in a hurry, dashes everywhere. My name, then a dash.

  GEORGIE—

  YOU NEVER QUITE GOT IT—

  I stop reading and look up. Take a deep breath. Swallow, and start again.

  YOU NEVER QUITE GOT IT—

  WHAT I ACTUALLY THOUGHT—OF YOU.

  I’M OKAY WITH IT—NO, REALLY—I CAN SEE YOU SHAKING YOUR HEAD—BUT I AM. IT’S EASIER THIS WAY. ONE LESS MESS.

  IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW WHERE I’LL BE WHEN YOU READ THIS. DON’T KNOW WHAT I’LL BE.

  THAT’S FUNNY, ISN’T IT.

  BUT IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU KNOW ABOUT THE FIRES. ALL OF THEM—PROBABLY. (YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE TO HAVE A SECRET STASH, IT TURNS OUT.) HERE’S WHAT I WANT TO TELL YOU—I HAVE TO TELL YOU.

  I NEEDED SOMETHING TO ANCHOR ME.

  ALL THAT WIND. ALL THAT NOISE. I NEEDED AN ANCHOR—YOU UNDERSTAND.

  BUT I’M GLAD YOU WEREN’T THAT ANCHOR. YOU’D SINK WITH ME.

  I CAN’T LIVE HERE, GEORGE—NO MATTER WHAT—I CAN’T LIVE HERE. AND NOW I KNOW I CAN’T LIVE ANYWHERE—THERE’S NOWHERE THAT’LL HAVE ME. ALL I’VE EVER HAD IS THE ABILITY TO LIGHT THINGS ON FIRE AND WALK AWAY.

  BUT YOU’RE BETTER THAN THAT. YOU’RE THE FLAME THAT PEOPLE ARE DRAWN TO. I KNOW I AM.

  THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS I WISH I’D SAID.

  LIKE—THAT NIGHT IN THE CHAPEL. I WENT BACK IN. I DROPPED A MATCH. JUST TO SEE, RIGHT? BUT ALSO BECAUSE IT FELT SO PERFECT, SO RIGHT, THE FOUR OF US IN THERE. YOU PROBABLY THOUGHT IT WAS JUST ANOTHER NIGHT, ANOTHER CHANCE TO PARTY. BUT TO ME IT FELT LIKE—HERE ARE MY PEOPLE, FINALLY. THREE PEOPLE WHO DON’T CARE IF I RUN OR WALK. HE WOULDN’T BELIEVE ME, BUT YES—DAVIS, TOO. I THOUGHT, FINALLY I BELONG. AND I DIDN’T WANT ANYONE ELSE TO HAVE THAT. TIME RUINS EVERYTHING. I WANTED THAT SPACE TO CRYSTALIZE, BECOME A PERFECT ARTIFACT.

  GEORGIE, I’VE MADE SO MANY MISTAKES. SO MANY. AND I’VE LIED TO EVERYONE—

  BUT NEVER TO YOU.

  SO HERE’S THE TRUTH. I’M NOT WORRIED ABOUT YOU. NEVER WAS. YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BURN OUT. YOU’RE GOING TO BLAZE BRIGHTER THAN ANYTHING, AND EVERYONE WILL WANT TO STAND IN YOUR GLOW. I ALWAYS DID.

  ADVENTURE AWAITS, GEORGIE. WE ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT WAS GOLD FORK’S BIGGEST LIE. BUT I’M STARTING TO THINK IT’S THE ONLY TRUE THING ABOUT THIS PLACE.

  IT HAS TO BE. FOR YOU.

  —E

  I’m crying as I fold the letter carefully and place it back in the envelope. I know I’ll take it with me to my new life. I’ll read it thousands more times over the next few years, maybe by the light of a flashlight in my bunk at the therapeutic school after everyone has fallen asleep, maybe in a dorm room at college, maybe even in a small apartment in the city, my guitar leaning against the wall, friends—yes, maybe friends—knocking at the door. I’ll read it to remind me of what I had, and what I lost. What—if I ever find it again—I have to protect with everything I’ve got.

  I’ll read this letter every night, scanning the words for clues, some sense of why and how and maybe, maybe, where he is. Because I refuse to think he’s at the bottom of the lake. I refuse to think he lost so absolutely, so definitively. There has to be a version of this story in which Erik is taking plates of food out to customers at a restaurant, or sitting behind a desk at a bank, bored out of his mind. There has to be a version—there just has to be—in which he’s running across a ridgeline, the wind at his back, in front of him only mountains and space and freedom.

  GOLD FORK IS

  In the end, Gold Fork is everything I’ve made it out to be: fantasy, refuge, opportunity, impossible proble
m. Mirage or love story—take your pick. It’s all of these things, and none of them. The town is woven into our lives so intricately that even we can’t see it clearly. We have to leave to get the perspective that only distance and time can offer. We have to leave so that we can return.

  But what happens when you can’t leave? What happens when the only way to go is to leap into the dark?

  People will talk about this summer for years. They’ll wonder what we could have done differently. They’ll try to unpack the tangled contents of What Happened and Why. But maybe all they need to know, finally, is this: We were Gold Fork’s four-chambered heart. We beat for the town, for what it can and should be. We even beat for what it is, its heartbreak and joys. But a heart sometimes skips a beat. The rhythm gets lost; something shuts down.

  Because.

  When you love a place, you sometimes hate it too. Sometimes you feel strangled by your love for it—your complicated, grueling, enduring love. And all you want is to forget it. To get away. Forever. But when you love a place like we love Gold Fork, you’re never far from it, even when you are. Gold Fork is your firsts: first step in the lake, first sip of coffee at Grainey’s, first midnight swim, first kiss on the dock. The Weekenders get some of those firsts too, but not all of them, and not in the same way. That’s the thing the Weekenders will never understand, and what we’re here to tell them: You think you own this place, but you don’t. We don’t either. It owns us. And for those of us who really live here, no matter where we go, Gold Fork will be our lasts. Last memory, last word, last breath: home.

  SUICIDE PREVENTION AND AWARENESS RESOURCES

  National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

  1-800-273-8255

  suicidepreventionlifeline.org

  Crisis Text Line

  Text HOME to 741741 in the US for free 24/7 support.

  crisistextline.org

  National Alliance on Mental Illness

  1-800-950-6264