Here So Far Away

by Hadley Dyer

  I pressed harder on the accelerator and an oncoming car flashed its headlights at me.

  The first time I saw Francis, drifting through the fallow meadow like a life raft, a flare had shot through my chest. A beacon, I thought. Or a warning. That was how it began. Was this really how it ended, with seven words, three of them A?

  A memento. A promissory note. A ticket.

  When had he made up his mind?

  I just don’t want you planning your life around me, he’d said in the barn. I can’t promise to do the same. That was the last time I saw him. Maybe he never meant for us to go to the city together. Or he went to pack a weekend suitcase and kept on packing. Maybe he told himself that it was better to slip away because he didn’t want to hurt me. God forbid she cries! So instead of hitting me with it straight, he quietly hooked me up to the back of his car, got in, and started driving. That’s what it felt like, the not-knowing, the non-good-bye, like being dragged behind him.

  A small shadow darted in front of my wheels. I swerved and the car fishtailed wildly, hit gravel on the side of the road and skidded toward the ditch, stopping right at the brink. I could feel how close Abe’s tires were to the loose edge. I set the emergency brake, forced myself to breathe.

  Rabbit.

  It’s true what Nat had said, that I was both a liar and a fortress. Loyal keeper of secrets, promises, and lighthouses. But the real reason I didn’t tell anyone about Francis, the absolute truth, is that if I had, they would have pointed out the too-obvious. That there must have been something wrong, something broken inside him. That’s what Lisa would have said. She might try to put it nicely, but it would boil down to this: If he wasn’t broken, why here and why you? Did you really think your whistling was so damn charming?

  I’d been playacting at being a grown-up with this person I hardly knew and had turned into the very thing I’d accused Lisa of being: a girl who would sink everything for some guy who was always going to be a passing ship. Worst of all, it was that guy who’d shown me that I wasn’t cold-blooded. Now I was alone and felt like I was literally dying of heartsickness, like a karmic clobbering with a big cliché stick.

  I’ve never been able to make myself believe in any of the gods, but as I idled on the side of the road, gathering myself, I said a prayer. Please let it end now. Let me put this down and drive away. Let me forget, so that when I’m as old as my parents are, I won’t be sure whether this happened. Do me this favor and I will believe and I will behave and I will be forever benevolent toward all of your creations, even baby corn.

  For just a second, I thought the hum in my chest was gone, and then it began again.

  Carefully, I shifted the car into reverse and released the brake, inching backward with more caution than necessary until I was on the road.

  By the time I pulled onto the new highway, the western sky was a mess of Easter colors between the mountains. Every tree branch was in relief against the low clouds and dome of darkening blue above, like those delicate paper illustrations, the silhouettes you see in old children’s books with the funny German name. The woman in a rocking chair. The boy and girl under the apple tree.

  My exit was coming up, but I decided to keep going, head over the mountain and drive along the bay. I rolled down the window an inch, shrugging my jacket loose. The darkness was inkier now, the sun a gold thread hemming the horizon. I passed a pair of transport trucks without cargo, like insect heads that had lost their bodies, and a magnificent willow. Its canopy against the blue-black sky had such otherworldliness that you might have believed this was a road on a desert island or some other faraway place, not an ordinary rural highway that ran from here to nearly somewhere, then circled back on itself like an empty promise.

  Thirty-Six

  My friends and I never knocked at each other’s houses. When I let myself into Bill’s, it was quiet except for the shower running upstairs and his off-key singing.

  “Sometimes the snow comes down in June. Sometimes the sun goes round the moooooooon . . .”

  I waited in his roooooom.

  His robe was open when he came in, his wrist wrapped in a tensor bandage and swinging by his side like a club, and when he screamed, he found that note he hadn’t been able to hit in the shower. “Jesus,” he said, collapsing on the end of the bed. “Where did you come from?”

  “Sometimes it’s all a big surprise.”

  Thank god he had boxers on. He pulled his robe closed and took a good look at me. “Nice face,” he said.

  “Nice wrist. Is it broken?”

  “Just sprained.”

  “Thought you had a stomach thing.”

  “I did. And this. I came to see you when you were suspended, but your parents wouldn’t let me in, so I had this idea that I could get to your bedroom window from the garage roof.”

  “God, how did we not hear you?”

  “I did a trial run on our garage roof.” He picked up an old duffel bag from the floor and started rifling in it. “I wanted to bring you something. Two somethings.”

  “Aren’t we fighting?”

  “We had a fight.” Something One—small, hard, and plastic—sailed across the bed and hit me in the shoulder. Han Solo. I’d given him to Bill in seventh grade, after Han and I had grown apart. “Peace offering,” Bill said. This was followed by a baggie filled with five brown-and-green-flecked cookies. “Birthday gift.”

  “Gee, thanks. Pot?”

  “I’m not sure. Doug was clearing out his stash a few weeks ago. The cookie part is stale, but the other part should still work. Go ahead.”

  “Not right now.”

  “Why not? Did you drive over?”

  “No, I walked, but . . .”

  How could I get high, sitting in Bill’s room next to his gently bubbling fish tank, like it was an ordinary Saturday night?

  “I actually came to talk to you,” I said. “It’s kind of serious.”

  I took a breath, located that lower gear inside myself, and looked into Bill’s anxious face. Which is when I decided that getting high next to Bill’s gently bubbling fish tank was exactly what I needed that Saturday night. If it gave me the courage to say what had to be said, great. If it only gave me a few hours outside of my own head—well, that’d do too.

  As a wise man once said, if you can’t make it better, you can at least make it blurry.

  “How long before these kick in?” I asked, when we’d downed cookie number four. We were alternating between cookie bites and grapes, and the grapes felt like they were expanding in my stomach.

  “Beats me.”

  I stroked Han’s tiny black vest. “He was my one true love. Course, I was kinda confused about whether I wanted to be him or do him.”

  “Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You’ll find someone who’s not plastic.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  Or worse. What if I thought I found someone again, and I was wrong—again?

  “See, I don’t think you’re a person who doesn’t find it,” he said. “You’re a person who people fall in love with at first sight. Maybe it passes for some of them, but not all. Not me. You’re like an infection that keeps coming back. Are you crying?”

  “A bit.”

  “Fuck. I meant in a nonsexual way, right? No offense, but it’s all no-man’s-land under that sweater.”

  He scooched over. Then he scooched a little closer, a little closer still, and when he put his arms around me, I needed that, more than anything, more than oxygen. No one had hugged me after Francis died. No one except Francis had hugged me for a very long time. It wasn’t just being held; I needed to hold someone. To feel Bill’s curls and neck scruff against my cheek, his sinewy teenage boy undercarriage beneath the Dorito layer, his heartbeat, his breathing. I needed to feel someone I loved alive in my grip.

  “There, there,” he said. “There, there, there.”

  That was the moment to tell him. I meant to. I’d gone o
ver there to unleash it all because screw Francis. My grades were down, my body was shriveled, and nobody was there to sniff out my lies or squeeze me when I needed it most. If it hadn’t been for Francis, I might have made up with Lisa. I’d definitely have been a better friend to Bill, and I wouldn’t let Francis lose me the one friend I had left.

  I couldn’t do it, though. Confessing was supposed to make it all real, bring it out of the shadows, and shine a holy cleansing light. It always had with Lisa. But Bill didn’t want to spend hours dissecting the last year like a fetal pig. I could tell by the way he patted my hair and kept rubbing my face on the cuff of his robe. He’d never seen me full-on cry before and just wanted me to stop—which I did, because being with my buddy again made me feel human for the first time since they pulled Francis’s car from the ravine. For now, that was enough.

  “Look,” Bill said. “The grapes are breathing.”

  “No, they aren’t.” I looked at the grapes. “Ugch, they are.”

  “And the guppies are going dwoop-dwoop.”

  I put my hand up. “Stop saying things. You say things and then they happen.”

  When did he get so annoying, with all the breathing and the blinking and the arm hair? He’d started swatting at something that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there.

  “Oh my god. I forgot why it’s such a bad idea to get you high.”

  Where to start? With the night at Lisa’s cottage when we did hash off hot knives and I spent the whole night shushing everyone because I was paranoid that we were bothering the neighbors, the closest of whom were a mile away? The time we smoked pot by a bonfire at the shore and I was so terrified we’d set the whole beach alight that I kept running back and forth between the fire and the ocean, trying to put out the flames with handfuls of seawater? Some people turn into rock stars when they get high. I turn into your mother.

  “We need to go out so that I don’t have to deal with you alone.” His eyes grew wide. “The play!”

  “The plane?”

  “Lisa’s play! Tonight! Like, in less than an hour. Shit. Shit, shit. I’m calling a taxi.”

  “The taxi.”

  “George, this play is gonna be a disaster—really, really a disaster. After Lisa fired everyone, a lot of people said they were boycotting. We gotta fill the seats.”

  “Fired who when?”

  “Everyone except, like, six people. Couple weeks ago. She’s hardly left the auditorium since. Shit. Where are my clean pants?”

  So she’d grown a backbone and done what she needed to do, just in time to ruin it. Too bad none of her friends—not Christina or Keith or even Bill—had the nads to tell her the hard truth when there was still time to save her.

  “Buddy, we don’t need to go to this play,” I said. “We need to stop it.”

  I had my hand up, waiting for the high five.

  He was back to swatting the air.

  We arrived soaking wet after a long sprint in the rain. The taxi driver had ditched us a half mile away, disinclined to have anyone at the school see two frantic, stoned kids doing parachute rolls out of his vehicle.

  “This is what’s happening,” I said to Bill after we bought our tickets. “First, we go in through the front doors here and you cover me while I head down to the stage.”

  “And then what, you pull the fire alarm?”

  I had no idea what came second, but the fire alarm sounded good, which I said loudly enough to bring Nat and Doug running from the makeshift concession stand by the principal’s office.

  “What the hell, George?” Nat said.

  “We need to stop the play. It’s going to suck.”

  “We need to what?”

  Doug said, “Babe, check out their pupils.”

  Nat glared at Bill.

  “What? I thought she needed to relax.”

  “Most people get high to lose control,” she said. “But the possibility of losing control is exactly what turns George into . . . this.”

  I was looking at Nat, looking at Doug, looking at Nat, looking at Doug, trying to figure out how a person was supposed to figure out if they were together without being too obvious about it.

  “Oh, come on,” Bill said. “Let’s see what happens. She’s in a totally different movie from the rest of us.”

  Nat had never been a touchy-feely person, and she didn’t seem to know quite what to do with her hand when she reached over to me. She settled for brushing my wet hair away from my face. Then she brushed it the other way. Then she gave up. “George? Georgie Girl? I know you think you’re having some kind of a big moment here, but you don’t want to ruin this for Lisa.”

  “I’m going to save her,” I said. “Because it is going to suck.”

  “No, you’re going to embarrass her and get kicked out and the play will go on. You know why?”

  “Yes,” I said, hoping that would keep Nat from laying one of her truth nuggets.

  “Lisa doesn’t need you anymore.”

  I don’t know how long I’d been staring at her, my ears ringing, chest flaring spectacularly, when Doug said, “Let’s just go in. Maybe you guys will sober up by the time it starts. What did you take?”

  “The stuff in the blue baggie,” Bill said.

  “Oh no, you’re not sobering up.”

  Getting to our seats was challenging, seeing as the aisle kept stretching out to infinity no matter how far we walked. It felt like everyone was watching us, though I couldn’t tell for sure because my eyes were blurry with the sting of what Nat had said.

  She plunked me into a seat and turned to shush Bill, who was having a giggle fit on her other side.

  A long leg nudged mine. “You okay?”

  I started so badly at the sight of Joshua Spring that he jumped and hit his knee painfully on the seat in front of him.

  “Aw, why?” he groaned.

  “I’m sorry! Sorry. I’m a little, you know. Out of it.”

  He gave his knee a last rub, then reached under his seat for a thermos he’d stowed there, holding it out to me. I sniffed it: the infamous Spring family home brew. “I mean, this is going to suck,” he said. “I don’t think anyone here is sober.”

  The house lights dimmed and the curtains parted to reveal a single light on a bare stage. Keith stood in the center, wearing a pair of old-fashioned pants with suspenders and a white shirt. His feet were bare. “This is the forest primeval,” he announced to the half-empty auditorium.

  “No,” I said, apparently not just in my head.

  Beside me, Joshua chugged his home brew.

  As the pared-down cast spoke their lines, they leapt around, clamored over a moving set made of entirely of barrels and ladders, tossed one another into the air—athletic and forceful but also graceful and fluid. The stage lights went out and they somehow tumbled with lit candles in the darkness, and my eyes blurred again, it was so beautiful, and because it was so like Francis rolling down the mountain ridge with his flashlight the night I begged him to love me.

  And the soul of the maiden, between the stars and the fire-flies,

  Wandered alone, and she cried,—‘O Gabriel! O my beloved!

  Art thou so near unto me, and yet I cannot behold thee!

  Art thou so near unto me, and yet thy voice does not reach me?

  So close and yet so far away.

  I found myself thinking about how I would have described it to Francis, starting with how shockingly nimble Keith turned out to be. Then I remembered that if Francis were alive, he wouldn’t have been around to tell, and if he had been around to tell, I probably would have missed the play.

  The applause was as thundering as half an auditorium could be, especially when Lisa took her bow.

  “S’alright,” Joshua said. Dozens of white balloons had been released from the rafters and were now drifting down to the stage.

  “Yeah. S’alright,” I said.

  Nat and the boys were starting to make their way into the aisle, but I wasn’t in a hurry to return to real life. “Bac
k in the fall I saw these small hot-air-balloon-type things floating up the north mountain,” I said. “Out of nowhere. It was so strange.”

  “Paper lanterns. East Riverview science club does it every year.”

  We watched the cast kicking the balloons into the audience.

  “Well, whaddya know, Joshua.”

  “I didn’t know it was your birthday until after I left the rose. I just felt bad about how you got suspended.”

  “I deserved it.”

  “So did she.”

  He took a swig from the thermos, wiped a drip off his chin. “I never got why you lied about what happened between us, George. It’s not like there weren’t other girls who could vouch for me. But it seems like you paid for it five times over.”

  I was slow to work out what he was saying, and then I couldn’t believe it—he hadn’t believed it! All this time, he thought the bad kiss was something I’d made up, the one truth at the center of all those lies.

  I suppose I could have set him straight. Maybe his future girlfriends would have thanked me. Then again, Christina might have already sorted him out. And, you know, sometimes the truth is overrated. Years later I convinced Bill that I made out with Bryan Adams in the back of a Greyhound bus, and though he eventually clued in that I was pulling his leg, he still loves to tell people that story.

  “I guess I wasn’t ready for a grown-up relationship,” I said, which was as close to true as we needed to be.

  Joshua lightly touched a curl over my ear. Then he passed over the home brew. Unlike some of us, it lived up to its reputation.

  Thirty-Seven

  Doug dropped Bill and me off at Bill’s house before heading to the cast party at the Grunt. I started walking home, but decided to try sobering up first. Two seconds later I found the fifth cookie in my coat pocket, and decided to try not sobering up first. I must have walked for a couple of hours, through the old section of town, past the cat lady’s house and around the sawmill, looping back to Main Street, where I became fixated on the store windows. They were like museum exhibits, re-creations of eras gone by. The pharmaceuticals of yesteryear. The hardware of yore.