by Katy Regnery
And though the speed and ease with which I am able to bring it back from the dead strikes me as almost obscene, my tears have receded, and I bite my lower lip as a rare feeling of anticipation washes over me. I have no idea what I’m hoping to find on Jem’s phone, but it’s been so long since it felt like something mattered to me, I lean into the feeling of excitement just a little.
Two years ago, before the Steeple 10 shooting, I had lived a full and rich life. Engaged to Jem and planning our wedding, I got together with my parents in Scottsdale regularly and went out with friends all the time. Soon after meeting Jem, I finished my course of study in website design and started picking up jobs right away. It wasn’t long before I quit working at Down Time and spent most days working from home. I liked being on my own. Even though I was alone, I never felt lonely or isolated.
Two years later, however, that same job had become an easy way for me to separate myself from the world.
I rarely leave my house, have my groceries delivered, and exercise on a treadmill in my bedroom. My trips to Scottsdale are infrequent, despite my mother’s worried invitations to visit more often. Long ago, the friends that predated Jem grew tired of my ignoring texts and voice mails. They eventually stopped reaching out, finally telling me that when I was ready to hang out again, I should let them know.
I am a hermit, except for my twice-monthly visits to Anna. And while part of me knows it isn’t healthy, more of me doesn’t care.
Beep.
I look over to see Jem’s iPhone light up, an old picture of us filling the small screen, and a polite demand for his passcode.
With trembling fingers, I key in 062687, and the screen changes immediately, his apps lining up in five neat rows.
Calendar. Clock. Weather. Messages.
Voice Memos. Contacts. Safari. Mail.
Maps. Settings. Notes. Camera.
Photos. TV. iBooks. Kindle.
App Store. iTunes Store. Music. Shazam.
Though I’ve had the phone in my possession for almost a year, only now do I realize there is a smudge on the top corner of the screen, so faint it’s only visible because of the lit-up screen now shining through it. Brownish-red and slightly smeared, it’s all that remains of a bloody fingerprint, and my breath catches as I stare at it.
Slowly, so slowly, I run my finger over it, wondering when and how it got there, blinking at the screen in surprise as my unintentional keystroke opens Jem’s final text message.
The top of the screen reads “Brynn,” which means he was writing to me.
An unsent message reads simply, katahd
Gasping with the sudden, overwhelming realization that Jem had spent his last moment on earth trying to write me a message, the screen blurs as my eyes fill with more burning, useless, punishing tears. To anyone else, katahd might look like gibberish, but I’ve seen the full word too many times not to recognize it.
Katahdin.
Mount Katahdin.
The highest peak in Maine.
The place where Jem said his soul had lived until he’d given it to me.
Pressing his phone to my heart, I curl into a ball on my bed and weep.
***
“What do you mean you’re going to Maine? Brynn, if you need to get away, please come to Scottsdale. You can stay as long as you like.”
“Mom, please . . .”
“This doesn’t make any sense, sweetheart,” she says, her voice wavering between concerned and impatient. I picture her at my parents’ lavish mansion, sitting on a lounger beside the pool in a floppy hat, her youthful face marked with consternation. “We know how much you loved Jem, but it’s been two years—”
“Stop,” I demand softly.
Of all the things people say to you after you lose someone you loved, being told that you should “get over it” is not only unhelpful, it’s hurtful and infuriating.
She sighs, but her voice remains gentle. “Brynn, sweetheart, please. Come to Scottsdale for a week.”
How can I help her understand what finding Jem’s final message means to me?
After these painful, wrenching twenty-four months of grieving him, in the past two days I’ve felt something new galvanizing within me—a plan, a purpose, a reason to get up and actually leave my apartment. In a way I never saw coming, Jem is showing me, from the grave, how to say goodbye—he’s giving me a chance to bury him and move on—but I have to battle my comfortable inertia and start moving to make it happen.
“Mom, he was writing to me. His last thoughts were of me . . . and Katahdin. I know that because he was texting me. He was trying to type the name of the mountain in the last seconds of his life. Don’t you see? I have to go. I have to go there for him.”
“A few hiking trips with Jem several years ago doesn’t prepare you to walk up a mountain clear across the country!” she cries, all pretense of calm disappearing as her voice pitches to a level of near panic. “There are bears, Brynn! It’s the woods. I doubt you’ll have a cell signal. It’s so far away! If something happened to you, Daddy and I couldn’t get there for days. I am your mother, and I love you, and I am begging you to rethink this plan.”
“It’s already done, Mom,” I say. “Jem’s sister is picking me up at the airport on Sunday evening. I’m staying with her. She knows the mountain like the back of her hand.”
I hadn’t spoken to Hope in over a year when I called her last night, and I worried about opening up deep wounds when I dialed her number, but she was as warm as she’d been the two times she’d visited me and Jem in San Francisco.
“Brynn! How are you?”
“I’m okay, Hope. How are you?”
“I’m okay too. Good days and bad,” she admitted. “You?”
“Same.” I paused, breathing through my deep desire to weep. “I miss him.”
“Me too. Every day.”
“I, um . . . ” I cleared my throat. “I found something. In Jem’s things.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I sent almost everything to you and your parents after it happened . . . but one thing I kept was his cell phone. By the time the police returned it, almost a year had passed. I put it in a box and kept it. I don’t know why I never turned it on, but two nights ago, I did.”
“My God,” she said. “What did you find?”
“Not much. But I think . . . I think he was trying to message me as he died.” I bit my lip, willing my voice to stay even. “There was a fragment of a message. K-A-T-A-H-D—”
“Katahdin!” she cried.
“Exactly,” I said, that feeling—that get-up-and-start-moving feeling—making my stomach flutter.
“He was writing to you?”
“Yes.”
“You think . . . you think he wanted you to go there?”
“I do.”
“Just to see it?”
“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “I just know I need to go.”
“Oh. So you’re coming East?”
Her voice, which had been pretty warm until then, had cooled a touch, and I wondered, for a split second, if I was welcome.
Though Jem’s parents had hosted a small memorial service for their son, I hadn’t flown out to Maine to attend. At the time, I’d been staying with my parents in Scottsdale, taking significant doses of Valium just to get through the day. But in the two years since the service, not attending had been one of my fiercest regrets, and I’ve always wondered if I inadvertently offended his parents and sister by not being there.
“Mm-hm. On Sunday.”
Hope was silent for a moment before saying, “You’re welcome to stay here. Do you need a ride from the airport?”
My shoulders relaxed. “That would be really great. I get in at 6:20 in the evening.”
“Writing it down so I don’t forget.” Hope paused, but her voice grew cautious when she spoke again. “No offense, Brynn, but Katahdin isn’t for beginners.”
“Which is why . . .” I bit my bottom lip, then plunged ahead. “I
’m hoping you’ll go with me?”
“I wish I could,” she said, “but I leave for Boston on Monday morning. I’ll be gone for a week teaching at BU. How long are you staying?”
“Only three days,” I said, wondering if I should have booked an open return, but I didn’t want to lose clients like Stu’s Pools who’d be expecting their finished work soon after I returned from Maine.
“You know what?” said Hope. “You’ll be fine. I’ll map it out for you. Saddle Trail to Baxter Peak. Sign in at the ranger station first. Take your time. There’ll be tons of AT hikers—”
“AT?”
“Appalachian Trail. I mean, if you need help, someone will be around to give you a hand. I’ll make sure you’re outfitted too, okay? I’ll lend you some of my stuff and get whatever else I think you’ll need so you’re all set.”
I’d really wished for Hope’s company, but even alone, I knew there was no turning back. I needed to do this. For Jem. And for me.
Sighing, I push my conversation with Hope from my mind and segue back to the conversation with my mother in which I’d just implied that Hope would be hiking with me.
“Stop worrying, Mom. This is a good thing. I promise. It’s going to be okay.”
“I don’t like it, Brynn. You were medicated for months. Your father and I—”
“Mom, I need your support right now. For the first time since Jem died, I feel . . . I don’t know . . . kind of excited about something. I feel . . . like I have some direction. A purpose. I promise I’ll be careful, but I have to do this. I need to.”
My mother’s silent for a while before asking, “Do you need spending money?”
“I’m thirty years old and you still treat me like I’m eleven,” I say, smiling down at Milo, who’s weaving in and out of my legs.
“I love you,” she says. “You’ll always be eleven to me.”
“I love you too.”
We talk about my dad’s latest golf tournament win, and she updates me on my cousin Bel’s new boyfriend. We end our conversation laughing, which hasn’t happened in a long, long time. And as I place the handset back in the cradle and head to my room to start packing, I feel grateful.
I feel ready.
Cassidy
Six years old
When I was six years old, I happened upon my father in an old shed, back behind our house, dismembering a raccoon.
Lying spread-eagled on its back, it was affixed by its paws with nails to a wooden table taller than I was. Rivulets of blood ran from all four paws and dripped softly onto the concrete slab floor below.
After looking on with curiosity from just inside the shed’s open door, I didn’t make a peep as I approached the workbench, watching my father stare down in fascination at the dead animal, holding up what I have retrospectively identified as a bloody scalpel.
It was only when I was mere inches away from the animal’s face that I made eye contact with it and realized that it wasn’t, in fact, dead. Its eyes, glazed over in agony, stared back at me and blinked. I gasped loud enough to distract my father, who turned to me, his face furious.
“Get the fuck out, Cassidy!” he screamed at me. “Get out, boy! I’m working!”
I fell backward in my haste to leave the shed and scrambled to my feet, racing through the woods to get back to the house, back to the safety of my mother.
“Cass!” she greeted me as I ran, out of breath, confused and terrified, to where she stood in the backyard, hanging freshly washed laundry on a line. “Where you comin’ from, snow baby?”
Way-uh you comin’ from?
From somethin’ horrible, I thought, launching myself against her, burying my head in her skirt and wrapping my skinny arms around her slim waist.
Even at six, I knew something was terribly, terribly wrong with what I’d just seen. But instinctively I knew not to mention the incident to her. Some secrets, especially the darkest ones, were too black to verbalize, too awful to share.
“The woods,” I said, smelling the sweet goodness of her denim skirt, which was warmed by the summer sunshine.
“You know yore daddy is leavin’ tonight, right, honey? Won’t be back for ’bout a month, don’t you know.” She sighed. “Stay close, Cass. Don’t go wanderin’ off again. We’ll have supper together. He’ll want to say goodbye.”
My father was a long-haul truck driver. His normal route, he’d once shown me on a map, was from where we lived, in northern Maine, down the Eastern seaboard, to Florida, and back again. Up to 12,000 miles a month on I-95, on three back-to-back trips, in a rig he owned himself.
Which meant that we didn’t see him very often. He was home for two or three days a month between drives. The rest of the time, Mama and I lived alone in our farmhouse, on the outskirts of Crystal Lake, and spent our summers with my gramp, who had a cabin in the north woods, in the shadow of Katahdin.
As a result, I didn’t know my father very well, though my mother always prettied-up when he was home, wearing skirts instead of jeans and her hair down, instead of in a ponytail.
Humming with happiness for those few days every month, she said my father liked his woman to look like a woman, and she was only too happy to oblige. For the two or three nights he was home, I wasn’t allowed in Mama’s room, but I heard all sorts of noises coming from under the door at night: low-toned moans and groans and the rhythmic squeaking of Mama’s bed. It took me years to figure out what that meant.
By my eighth birthday, I’d probably spent less than a hundred days with my father. In my whole life.
My eighth birthday.
He happened to be home that day.
It was the final day of three before he was supposed to hit the road again.
It was also the day the Maine State Police knocked on our door to arrest him.
Brynn
“Brynn! Over here!”
I look up to see Jem’s twin, Hope, waving at me from baggage claim as I descend the escalator at the Bangor airport. She has the same cheekbones as Jem, the same aqua eyes, the same unruly golden-blonde hair that tumbles over her shoulders in sun-kissed waves. Her easy smile, so much like her brother’s, makes my heart clutch.
I hope that coming here isn’t a giant mistake that will set me back in my progress toward normalcy. Then again, I reason, I’m living like a hermit with only my cat for company. There isn’t much space in which to backslide.
“You’re here,” she says with a smile.
Hay-uh.
“Hope,” I say as I step from the escalator and into her arms, “it’s so good to see you!”
As she hugs me, tears spring to my eyes. Useless.
When she leans back, her smile has faded. “You’re skin and bones, Brynn.”
I shrug. “It’s the dead-fiancé diet.”
She cringes, jerking away from me, a shocked gasp escaping from her lips.
Fuck.
“I’m sorry,” I say, shaking my head frantically. “I’m so sorry, Hope. I don’t know why I said that. Fuck, I’m sorry. I’m not fit to be around people. God, Hope. I am so, so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she murmurs, though my thoughtless words have erased her smile completely. She takes a deep breath. “Any checked bags to pick up?”
“No.”
“Then, um, let’s head to the car, huh?”
I want to say something to make it all better as we walk in silence toward the parking garage, but nothing can take back my thoughtless words, and besides, I don’t really want to whitewash the way I feel. Not with Hope.
Jem’s gone. I know this. I know he’s never coming back. But sometimes my sadness and my anger still feel as hard as ice; that’s how I saw them for a long time, in fact. Sadness and anger, an infinitely wide, infinitely thick casing of frost around my heart. Many days, I didn’t know how my heart kept beating. And there were days, I’m ashamed to admit now, I just wished it would stop.
But it kept throbbing with life, like it knew that someday the ice would melt. I both dread and
welcome the idea of that day. Loving someone new will hold such immeasurable risk for me—how could I bear losing someone all over again?—but living like this for the rest of my life? In a constant state of grief? It’s the only thought more unbearable than moving on. Because this isn’t living. This is barely existing. And since I found Jem’s phone again, I’ve started to wonder if maybe I’m ready to start living again.
“I’m over here,” says Hope, pointing to a black SUV. She pops the trunk, and I lift my rolling bag into the back.
“Hope,” I say, placing my hand on her arm after closing the hatch. “I’m truly sorry.”
“I know,” she says, giving me a half smile, half grimace. While searching my eyes, she covers my hand with hers. “I haven’t seen you since he was alive. You look a lot different, Brynn. You sound different too.”
The words sting, but she’s right. That’s the thing about losing someone you loved as much as I loved Jem: I can never be the person I was before. Never. I’m still trying to figure out who exactly I’ve become.
I take a deep breath. “I’m hoping this trip will help.”
Hope’s eyes brighten a touch. “He would’ve loved it, you know—climbing Katahdin with you, sharing it with you.”
“I know,” I whisper, gulping over the lump in my throat.
“Come on,” she says, her hand slipping from my arm. “Let’s get you back to my place, and we can talk about the best way to get you to the top.”
For most of the plane ride to Maine, I read about Mount Katahdin in a tour book of New England I’d purchased in San Francisco.
Katahdin, named by Native Americans, means “the greatest mountain,” and for Jem nothing could have been closer to the truth. He’d climbed it the first time when he was ten, and if I asked Hope, she’d have no idea how many times he’d climbed it after that, because he’d practically lived there. During high school summers, he made money as a guide, leading hikes up and down the granite face almost every weekend and on weekdays for church groups and summer camps.