The Space Between Us

by Jessica Martinez

  It felt like fire where he’d touched me.

  “Eyelash,” he said, and he held out his finger. “You get another wish, just in case you squandered the one from the bridge on leprosy or something.”

  “Let me think.”

  I looked at my lash on his fingertip, a single black curl. The arc of his palm was so close I wanted to touch it. Why bother wishing for something impossible? I wish Charly had never gotten pregnant. I wish I’d gotten into Columbia. I wish Will was full full full of regret for losing me. I wish I could tell my best friend the truth instead of having to cover for Charly. I wish Dad cared that I was gone. I wish Bree wasn’t a better big sister than I am.

  None of that was going to happen.

  So I closed my eyes and wished Ezra would touch my cheek again. Then I blew the lash away.

  A horn blared behind us.

  “Settle down,” Ezra muttered, and we started moving again.

  • • •

  My surprise: hanging in a glass pod over an icy crevasse.

  “You lied,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You said you’d take me somewhere warm.”

  “I think I said warmer. It’s at least a couple of degrees warmer in here than outside.”

  The gondola rocked back and forth in the wind and I silently cursed myself for getting talked into this. “How far up do you think we are?”

  “Not that far. Fifteen meters?” Ezra sat beside me, both of us backward, watching the town shrink as we moved up the mountain. Another gust of wind came and I tightened my grip on the metal bench. He glanced down at my hands. “You aren’t afraid of heights, are you?”

  “No.” I wasn’t phobic—I just didn’t seek out gravity-defying experiences. Or enjoy them in the least. “And I don’t speak metric.”

  “Oh. About fifty feet.”

  I stared up at the cable. It was out of place, a skinny, man-made thing stretched across a chillingly vibrant sunset. We were suspended like a single pearl hanging from a chain. One tug and snap. Below us ice and rock waited. The gondola car would explode like dropped crystal. “Rock-a-bye baby,” I whispered to myself.

  Ezra shifted his weight beside me, jostling the gondola. He was close enough for me to feel the warmth of his body, to smell the candy in his mouth.

  He held out a Starburst pack. I took one.

  “So what do you think?” he asked.

  I looked down to the forest again, ice-crusted and shimmering, then twisted around to the summit of Sulphur Mountain behind us. Pretty, but the magic was in the sky. The clouds were tangerine and violet and every shade in between, the sun smoldering behind the mountains. “The colors . . . ,” I started, then didn’t finish.

  “I know. It’s like the sky is burning.”

  “And the trees look purple. I hadn’t noticed that before.”

  “Up close you only see the green. You need distance to really see them.”

  Distance. He was right. From far away they looked entirely different, purple and gold shining beneath the green. I took a deep breath, forcing my muscles to relax.

  Distance from Charly, distance from home, distance from everything—was that supposed to make it all less ugly? If so, it wasn’t working. Maybe I wasn’t far enough away. Maybe I couldn’t get far enough away.

  “Look,” Ezra said, leaning across me and pointing.

  I looked without leaning, trying to keep the gondola level.

  “Elk. Do you see them?”

  “No.”

  “Down there.” He put one hand on my shoulder, the other on my hip, and slid me over to the edge of the bench. The gondola tilted and I willed myself not to gasp. I exhaled shakily onto the glass, my breath fogging a small circle. He pointed again, but beyond his finger there was only white. White ice, white snow, white breath. Then I saw them. There were four, tan and brown, with broad grey antlers, ambling through the trees.

  “Yesterday I pulled in a guy with a concussion, a Japanese businessman here on vacation. He didn’t know, or maybe just couldn’t remember, much English, but kept saying the names of animals he’d learned. He came to hunt.”

  “What do people hunt here?”

  Ezra knocked on the glass with his knuckle. “Those. And anything else that moves and that they can pull the skin off to mount on their walls and show how manly they are.”

  “I take it you don’t approve.”

  “That’s a nice way of saying it.”

  I sat back as our car slowed. We’d reached the top, a station to disembark. Ezra twirled his finger in a loop and the attendant on the platform waved and nodded. “Unless you want to get off and wander around the mountain in the cold for a while?”

  “No.” Then after a pause, “This is nice.”

  His lips curved upward, but it was gone before it could become a smile. Our gondola car followed the cable track, making a U-turn and starting its way back down.

  “You don’t like to smile, do you,” I said.

  “Not true. I just save it for when I mean it. I know people who smile all the time and it means nothing.”

  Bree came to mind. “Some people say it’s the smiling that makes you happy. Endorphins or whatever.”

  “Ah, the smile-until-you-mean-it people.”

  “Yeah, them.”

  “That seems like something people say to excuse being fake. You don’t smile all that much either.”

  “Not out of principle,” I explained, suddenly self-conscious. “I just don’t have much to smile about at the moment.”

  We sat in silence, gliding backward down the mountain. That side of the sky was ocean blue and darkening.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He looked down, tapping his boot on the slushy metal floor. “Don’t thank me. Thank Yukon.”

  Yukon. The dreadlocked hippie at the gondola ticket office who had given Ezra a hug and insisted we “ride as many times as you freakin’ feel like, eh?”

  “No,” I said, feeling almost embarrassed, but not enough to stop. “Thank you for being so nice to me. I don’t really deserve it. I haven’t been . . . ”

  Ezra looked at me, his face unreadable as always. Or maybe not. That blank calm was starting to mean more, like maybe he understood me. And maybe he was about to kiss me. I could imagine him leaning into me, putting his lips on mine. I wanted him to.

  He didn’t.

  We rode the gondola until the colors darkened and the sky turned black.

  • • •

  “Where’ve you been?” Bree asked. But she wasn’t even looking up. She was leaning over Charly, who was leaning over an open photo album at the island, her finger tapping a picture.

  That was fine. I didn’t want to tell them, or at least not Bree, because it’d meant something. I didn’t want anything from the last two hours I’d spent with Ezra stolen in the telling.

  A photo album.

  “Are those pictures of Mom?” I asked, taking a step toward them. Hadn’t I been waiting for this, for Bree to lug out the evidence? I’d known she’d have pictures, stories, memories linking her to Mom. So why the dread? Or was it anticipation?

  “No,” Charly said, and closed the book. “They’re from the adoption agency.”

  I stopped, feeling like I’d been slapped. “You’re choosing parents.”

  Charly didn’t say anything, but slid the book off the table into a bag by her feet. There were several more albums in the bag.

  “We just picked up a few of these profile books that couples who want to adopt put together,” Bree explained.

  “Oh.”

  “Where’ve you been?” Bree asked again.

  Charly was choosing people to be her child’s parents and she didn’t want me to see. I was too disoriented to lie. “With Ezra.”

  Bree looked up, startled, then grinned. “Really? Doing what?”

  “Riding the gondola.”

  “Seriously?”

  Did she think I was lying? I nodded.

  “Nice,”
she exclaimed. “So, since when has this been going on?”

  I sat on the bench by the door and unzipped my boots. “I don’t know. I guess it’s just starting now.” What was I saying? Was something really starting? My insides swirled at the thought of Ezra, his sinewy arms and black eyes, his silence.

  “Ha. You’re blushing.” Bree elbowed Charly, who didn’t respond. “Look, she’s blushing.”

  “My cheeks are red from the cold.”

  “Sure they are. So what happened?”

  I glanced at Charly. A few months ago she would’ve cared that I’d spent the last few hours with a guy. She was staring across the kitchen, avoiding eye contact.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I mean, we talked.”

  “So did he call or something, or did you guys just bump into each other?” Bree pressed.

  “No. He picked me up while I was walking home from school.”

  “Like he just happened to be driving by, or he knew you’d be walking home?”

  “I didn’t ask him. He didn’t say.”

  Bree shook her head. “I did not see that coming. You and Ezra . . . ”

  Did she not realize that was insulting?

  “Ezra’s a good one, by the way,” Bree said. “He’s a genius, not to mention the sweetest kid in the world. Naomi would totally be in the loony bin without him.”

  “Sorry, a genius?”

  “Yeah, he had a scholarship to University of Toronto last year. Some math or engineering thing, but he turned it down to stay here in Banff.”

  “What? Why?” I asked, watching Charly slide down from the stool, collect the bag of adoption binders, and head up to our room.

  “His mom. I’m guessing he didn’t tell you about Quinn.”

  “No. I mean, I know you dated him.”

  “Dated.” Bree rolled her eyes, opened the fridge, and pulled out a bowl. “I don’t know if that’s how I’d describe it. Tabbouleh? Charly and I already ate.” She placed the bowl on the island and retrieved a clean plate and fork for me from the dishwasher. “If sitting in his basement, smoking weed, and occasionally making out counts as dating, then sure, we dated. That was before he started doing the serious stuff, though.”

  “Serious stuff.”

  “Meth. Crack too, but mostly meth. I can’t say I emerged unscathed, but at least I got out. No thanks to my mom.”

  I took the seat Charly had just left, the rush of being with Ezra draining out of me with every word. Too many questions cluttered my thoughts. No thanks to my mom—I knew almost nothing about her mom, my grandmother, the woman my own mother had moved across an entire continent to get away from. I knew what Grandma muttered under her breath about Fiona Goodwyn when asked about her—words like “tramp,” and “manipulator,” and “princess.” And on the one occasion that I asked him, Dad had described her as “difficult.” Then he’d changed the subject. He was excellent at not speaking poorly of people.

  “Why? What did your mom do?”

  “When I was seventeen I got busted trying to buy drugs and she used it as an excuse to kick me out.” Bree dumped a few spoonfuls of tabbouleh on my plate, then pushed it toward me. “But it wasn’t about the drugs. That was just good timing. Her boyfriend wanted her to move to Montreal with him, and I was cramping her style.”

  I took a bite so I didn’t have to look Bree in the eyes, so she wouldn’t see me looking horrified. What kind of mother would do that? Hopefully I’d inherited only a bare minimum of her genetic material. And as for Bree—sitting around smoking weed, busted for buying drugs? Seriously?

  “They’re still together, surprisingly enough. They live in France though, and I see her about once a year. That’s plenty. You like the salad?”

  I did. The mixture of garlic and lemon and mint was different, but good. “I’ve never had it before.”

  “It’s Mediterranean.”

  I nodded, my mind pulling back to Ezra. “But Quinn . . . ”

  “Quinn’s just . . . ” She paused for words. “Sad. He’s a cautionary tale, you know? Total junkie, in and out of rehab and jail since high school. I heard he just got kicked out of some intense detox program up north of Edmonton. He stops by his mom’s every once in a while to beg for cash or steal something, but luckily he doesn’t come find me anymore. Not since I moved in here. Not since Richard.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said, thinking aloud. “Ezra staying, I mean. Why wouldn’t he want to get as far away as possible?”

  Bree took a wet rag from the sink and began wiping the countertop. “He stayed for his mom. Not that she didn’t want him to go, but she’s kind of, um, unstable. Depressive. After Quinn got sent to jail for grand theft last year, she had some kind of mental breakdown and ended up in the hospital. She’s sweet and all, but—”

  “I met her,” I interrupted.

  “Naomi? Really? When?”

  “Last week at the library.”

  Bree stepped back from the island and put her hands on her hips. “Wow.” Her face was a mixture of surprise and admiration. “So you guys really have been hanging out, then. I’m glad he got over Taylor so quickly. They’ve been on-again, off-again for so long.”

  The mention of Taylor made me feel queasy. Had I forgotten about her or had I consciously pushed her out of my mind? Or maybe it was the digging into Ezra’s secrets that made me slightly nauseous. He was so private. I knew I should let it go, but curiosity pushed me onward. “Back to last year. What happened with Naomi?”

  Bree sighed and tried to look like she didn’t love having all the answers. “She took a bunch of pills.” Then she stared into my eyes and paused for effect. “And it was Ezra who found her.”

  I was too stunned to hide the revulsion that rolled through me. I shuddered. He’d found his own mother trying to kill herself.

  “That was last winter, so probably right around the time he was offered that scholarship to U of T,” she continued.

  I tried to hold on to the words, but they slid by me. All I could think of was Ezra finding Naomi cheek-down in vomit, calling 911, doing CPR, riding in the back of the ambulance. Anyone would’ve been out of their mind with fear, but what did a terrified Ezra look like? Did he cry? I couldn’t even imagine it, but clearly I didn’t know him at all.

  “After that he wouldn’t consider going to school anywhere, not even Calgary. He barely got through that last semester of high school, and supposedly, the teachers just let him graduate out of pity or—”

  “How do you know all this?” I interrupted.

  She shook her head. “Banff is small.”

  Yes, it was.

  “It’s one of those things. Everybody knows what happened.”

  And now I did too.

  “You’ve really never had tabbouleh?” Bree asked. “I got the recipe from Richard’s sister. She’s a real chef at this swanky restaurant in Bragg Creek, which makes impressing Richard impossible. Once I tried to make this soufflé . . . ”

  She nattered about eggs and air, while I pushed tabbouleh around on my plate. My mind turned Bree’s words over and over, looking for something to grip, something that made sense, but it was all too slippery. If Ezra’s too-cool-for-school persona was just an act, if Ezra was a mathematical genius tied to his unstable mother and screw-up brother, if he spent every day wondering if his mother was going to commit suicide—then he had to be the most miserable person on earth. And I hadn’t seen any of it.

  “ . . . and he’s super excited to take us all there this weekend.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, suddenly sick of her voice.

  “I said Richard’s coming again on Friday. And he wants to take us to his sister’s restaurant. The one in Bragg Creek.”

  “Oh. Sure. I’ve got homework I should be doing.”

  Bree bit her lip, covered the bowl with Saran Wrap, and put it back in the fridge.

  Why did she have to be so needy? I just wanted to be alone, and to think about Ezra. “I’m excited to go to the
restaurant too,” I said.

  She gave me a sunny smile. “Good.”

  “Night,” I said over my shoulder.

  “Good night.”

  • • •

  The light was off. Charly had burrowed under the covers as part of her pretending-to-be-asleep routine, so I sat at the desk and flipped on the reading lamp. Then I stared at the cover of my photography textbook.

  Ezra had beautiful eyes. Dark and warm.

  Except I had no idea what was behind them. I thought I knew, but clearly that was only what he’d wanted to show me. Or what I’d wanted to see.

  But Ezra the math genius, Ezra the dutiful son, Ezra the dream-broken hero—why hadn’t I been able to see any of that on my own? Was I that bad at figuring people out?

  I forced myself to do the photography questions, then put on my pajamas and got into bed. Charly’s breathing was louder now and her foot and arm hung off the side of the mattress, which meant she wasn’t faking anymore. I stared at the back of her head in the dark. She’d forgotten to take her hair clip out.

  Charly. I sighed, gently removed the clip, and placed it on my bedside table. Then I got out of bed to tuck her limbs back in, and finally went to sleep.

  Chapter 15

  Throwing the CALM personality test had been stupid. Fun, but stupid. Now I had a list of careers I was supposed to research that looked like serial killer day jobs: coroner, lighthouse operator, medical transcriptionist, security guard, pathologist. Clearly, my file had been tagged DOES NOT PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS.

  I pushed the stupidity of my school situation from my thoughts as I left the building after the final bell. Bree had the day off school, which meant she was at the apartment, which meant there was no way I was going there. So I was going to the library, as long as I didn’t chicken out before I got there and end up at Rocky Mountain Coffee House instead.

  Charly had an after-school study group with some people from her biology class. That’s all she’d said. Probably the girls I’d seen her talking to in the hall before class this morning. Or maybe the tall guy with the glasses I’d seen her outside the cafeteria with yesterday. I guess she didn’t have Ms. Lee every lunch hour, but I didn’t really know. I was still sneaking lunch in the library.