Meet Me at the Summit

by Mandi Lynn

“Find your best photo, print it, put it in a frame, and bring it here. If the owners like it, they’ll hang it. When it sells, you get paid.”

  I glance back over to the blank space on the wall and try to envision one of my photos there. It feels hard to imagine. Every photo I take feels special, but only because of the memories that are attached. Other than the memories, my photos feel no better than any other photographer’s. And if I can barely sell a stock photo for $0.25, what makes me think I can sell a printed photo for $50?

  “Hey guys, my name is Liz.” Our waitress is chipper as she walks over, smiling at me when I break my gaze from the blank space on the wall. “I’ll be your server today. Can I start you both off with some drinks?”

  I turn to Dylan, but he gestures for me to go first.

  “Orange juice,” I say.

  “Make that two,” Dylan says.

  “Did you want to order now, or do you need a little more time?” Liz asks.

  Dylan glances over again, and I nod. “Short stack of pancakes,” he says.

  “Plain, blueberry, or chocolate chip?”

  “Chocolate chip.”

  The waitress turns to me after writing down his order.

  “Make that two,” I say, glancing back at Dylan.

  “Coming right up.” The waitress smiles and walks away.

  “So why couldn’t I just meet you here? I mean, do you live out here?” I ask, trying to ignore the blank space on the wall.

  “Stacey lives out in the Rockies. I used to. That’s where we grew up, but I have an apartment with Trent out in this area. I used to travel a lot more, sort of like you. I was hopping around from place to place just to explore. I did strictly online classes for college, so I could bring the work wherever I went, as long as there was Wi-Fi.”

  “But I bet you didn’t travel in a VW bus,” I say, raising an eyebrow.

  “No, that’s for sure.” Dylan laughs. “I was a little more spoiled. I floated around to different Airbnbs and hotels. Stayed in some really cool places. Got to see a lot of different things.”

  “Stacey said you hiked in New Hampshire?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I made it my goal to hike the Presidentials.”

  I cock my head, impressed. “And did you?” I ask.

  “Regretting it the entire way? Yes,” he says with a low chuckle.

  It’s only a few minutes until our waitress comes over with our food. We both eat, only talking occasionally between bites. I come to find out Dylan is a couple years older than me. Freshly out of college and still hasn’t settled down in Colorado, which is why he made it his mission to get a job he could work remotely. Six months into working remotely for a marketing agency, and he has yet to leave Colorado. At some point, our discussion circles back to hiking, and I can hear Lori coaching me in the back of my mind, telling me to talk about anything other than hiking.

  “You never really answered my question,” I say once we’ve both finished our food. Dylan cocks his head to the side, confused. “You live out here, but I still could have just driven here to meet you.”

  He chuckles while he listens to me talk. “I’m trying to make it as much of a date as possible,” he says. “If that’s okay with you.”

  He looks up at me with a grin, and I glance away. “That’s okay with me,” I say.

  §

  The date lingers on after we leave Snapshot Café, and Dylan stays at the campground after dropping me off to explore some of the local walking trails. I’d started the day nervous, but the longer I’m with Dylan, the more I ease into our conversations and fall into step with him.

  I remind myself this is only the third day we’ve seen each other, but it’s a hard boundary to set in my mind when we’ve spent countless hours together hiking and talking. I also remind myself of the obvious: I don’t live here. Dating Dylan cannot and will not turn into anything serious, because any day now I’ll be leaving.

  “You used to travel around and go to all these places, why don’t you anymore?” I ask.

  We’re walking in a piece of forest that feels more like a fairy garden, moss coating every tree and rock in sight. There’s a small stream that runs along the trail, just big enough to make a quiet trickle of noise as we walk.

  “Trust me, I want to. I just can’t afford it anymore. I saved up money when I was working part-time in high school, but as soon as the money ran out, I was stuck back here. At least until my job funds my travels again.” He turns to me and smiles. “And then you’re over here, living out my dream.”

  He laughs as we walk, and I try to smile, but it feels forced. “The trip was kinda my family’s idea. They thought it might be good for me to travel for a bit,” I say, feeling a little guilty for my lack of heart. “The bus used to belong to my mom. She was supposed to travel cross-country when she was my age, but she never did.”

  “And now you’re living out her legacy?” Dylan asks.

  “Not exactly. My mom became much more… serious over time. It was her dream once, and then it wasn’t anymore.” I like to think of my mom and how in some other time, long before me, she had wanted to travel. But how was it that she could lose that dream? How is it that all I want is to hike, yet every time I go searching on those mountains for answers, I get none and I question whether my own dreams are slipping out of my fingers?

  “And how are you liking the trip?” he asks. Dylan stands off to the side of a trail and leans against a tree with moss growing on the side of it.

  “Good,” I say, the word a little too breathy to be believable.

  Dylan makes a face and shakes his head. “How is it really going? Honestly?”

  I lean on a tree opposite him and rest my head against the bark. It feels like I’ve been searching for something, and every time I look, I’m left more empty-handed. Every new place I explore, I expect to feel something, but I don’t know what. Maybe a sign that I’ll be okay, that my parents are watching over me, or just that one day the pain will become less. But the pain only grows, and with it, so does my exhaustion.

  I take a breath, trying to sum everything into words. “Sometimes I want to go home, but I’m not sure where home is anymore.”

  Dylan thinks about what I said before responding. “What do you mean?”

  I shift against the tree and try to think of a way to explain it. “In an ideal world, home is where I grew up. It’s the house I know like the back of my hand. It’s the house where I wake up in the morning, and when I go downstairs, my parents are already up making breakfast. You know the saying. Home is where the heart is. The heart is gone now.”

  Dylan nods his head like he understands. He reaches out to take my hand and pulls me from the tree until we’re both back on the walkway of the trail.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, glancing down at our hands.

  “Distracting you,” he says. “Whenever you get upset, you freeze. My guess is you freeze because you’re thinking about whatever it is that upsets you. I can’t stop you from thinking about these things, but what I can do is try to keep you moving to prevent you from overthinking.”

  “Easier said than done,” I say, keeping pace with him. He lets go of my hand and steps behind me to place his hands on the tops of my shoulders to guide me where to go.

  “So let’s talk about it,” he says. “If you really wanted to be home, you’d already be there. Bus or no bus, you’d hop on a plane and go right back to where you were. But you’re here because you want to be, even if you’re not sure why. Something tells me that the real you, the one before she lost her parents, would have loved any excuse to travel across the United States in a converted VW bus. Am I wrong?” The last sentence is a whisper, close to my ear.

  I’m smiling as we walk because he knows what he’s doing when it comes to distracting me.

  “You’re not wrong,” I say.

  “Okay,”
he says, putting his arms down and coming to walk beside me. “Is it the bus you don’t like? Colorado? Me?” he says, putting his hands up in mock surrender. I smile a little at the joke and shake my head. He watches me for a moment. “I want the full and honest truth. What’s keeping you up at night?”

  He probably means the words casually, but it hits closer to home than he realizes. The only nights I fall asleep easily are the nights I spend most of the day crying. I can count on one hand the number of nights I’ve slept well: after my parents’ funeral, and yesterday. Every other night has been staying up late watching TV until I eventually sleep, my brain buried deep in some fictional world.

  “I don’t like being alone with my thoughts,” I say, wondering if that’s the best explanation.

  “And what are you thinking about?” he asks.

  “Dylan,” I say, coming to a stop.

  He reaches out his hand and takes mine, pulling me to walk beside him.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asks again. He doesn’t release my hand as we walk this time.

  “I miss them,” I say, hoping he’ll leave it at that, but he doesn’t.

  “What do you miss?”

  I can feel the cloud of anxiety sitting there, at the edges, just waiting to overtake me. But it doesn’t feel suffocating. Not yet, at least. I stare at my feet as I walk, focusing on the tree root reaching out from the ground and across the path.

  “I miss fighting with my mom about what courses I was going to take in college. And I miss my dad always asking me to go hiking with him on the weekends. And I miss planning trips with him, only to have them canceled last minute because of the weather. I miss just being able to see them whenever I want.” My pace slows until I come to a full stop.

  Dylan stills beside me, watching my face.

  “Were you thinking about your dad when we were on Mount Elbert?” he asks, giving me a small tug on the hand to keep me walking.

  I stumble a bit before catching up to speed with him. The anxiety feels closer now, like it will only take one wrong word to throw me down.

  We continue to walk, but he slows his pace and pulls me closer to him, so our arms are brushing up on each other as we walk hand in hand.

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I say, and I’m embarrassed by how whiny the words sound as they come from me. I want to walk in the other direction, but another part of me just wants to sit on the ground and wait it out.

  “Marly,” Dylan says. He stops this time, and he comes to face me, putting his arms on my shoulders. I look down and try to focus on the ground. “Look at me,” he says, and when I don’t, he lifts my face with his hand. He’s watching me, perhaps closer than anyone else has before. I blink, fighting the tears at the edge of my vision. “Don’t you want to hike without having to go through this?” His voice is gentle, and I know I need to answer him, but I don’t want to face the emotions anymore.

  I shift my gaze to look at anything but him, but he just steps closer until all that’s left is him. “Yes,” I finally say, lifting my chin.

  He drops his arms, but grabs my hand to lead me to walk again. “Tell me about your dad. A favorite memory or something.” His voice is lighter now, less serious. It makes me want to ease away from the dark clouds of my mind and closer to him.

  I follow him, feeling dizzy, but also eager to be closer. A tiny part of me fears the moment when he’ll let go of my hand.

  “We used to go on a hiking trip every year. We’d hike Mount Washington. We always took the same trails because they were my favorite, and it was the way we’d end the summer before I went back to school.”

  “Did you do it last year?” he asks.

  “It was a few weeks before the car accident.”

  “And what was the hike like?” Dylan asks.

  I try to go back to that summer, the last summer I had with my parents. Most of the hikes to Mount Washington blur together because we had been going for so many years, but that one stood out. It’s the memory that rolled through my mind for months after my parents died. It felt like the last thing I had left.

  “My dad likes to blow bubbles,” I say, the words feeling silly. Dylan smiles, so I continue. “He always packed bubbles, and we’d blow them at the top of the summit. It was a weird little tradition that he started. He always said it was our way of saying goodbye to summer before the school year started. Since it was my last Washington hike before college, my dad made me carry them in my backpack. He said he was passing on the torch.” The memory of it leaves a pit in my stomach.

  “Are you going to do the hike this year?” Dylan asks.

  “No,” I say without giving it much thought.

  “Why not?” Dylan asks, seeming genuinely curious.

  “Because there’s no point anymore,” I say.

  Dylan shakes his head. “I think there is. It’s tradition. You have to keep going, even if the details change.”

  “It was meant to be my dad and me,” I say.

  “So you’re telling me that your dad wouldn’t want you to do that hike again this year?”

  I focus on the roots in the ground, how they curl up from the dirt and reach out into the air.

  Lifting my head, I look at him. “No, of course he wouldn’t want that. He’d want me hiking that trail every year for as long as I’m physically able to.”

  “Then why don’t you want to do that?”

  There’s a pause between us where neither of us is willing to look away. “Because then he’s really gone,” I say. “Because once I do that, there’s no denying that my parents are never coming back.” The words come out fast, harsher than I mean them to. I’m angry, not at Dylan, but at the situation. I’m angry that my parents are gone, and the only person I can blame is myself because if I hadn’t been so damn insistent that they had to come visit me on that day, they’d still be here. “There’s nothing I can do to fix how this feels,” I say, my words getting louder and louder. I’m shaking, and Dylan takes my hands, and he pulls me to him.

  “It’s okay,” he says, hugging me to him.

  I wrap my hands around his torso, and I cry. I can’t stop crying, and I’m mad that once again, I’m falling to pieces, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. No matter how much I push the memories away, they keep coming back, crushing me in their wake.

  “I don’t want to feel this way anymore,” I say in between breaths. My face is buried in his chest, and I think about pulling away, avoid the humiliation a little, but Dylan just keeps holding me, rubbing my back.

  The emotions pour out. I’ve spent months trying to forget about the pain and move on like nothing ever happened. I hoped that if I ignored it long enough, eventually I would forget, and it wouldn’t hurt so much to think of my parents. But it doesn’t matter how much time passes. The emotions are still suffocating.

  Eventually my crying quiets, and I lift my head enough to get fresh air. Dylan loosens his arms, but he doesn’t let them fall.

  “It wasn’t a very good date, was it?” Dylan asks to break the silence.

  I’m not sure if it’s a joke or not, so I hold my tongue.

  “I have an idea, if you want to hear it,” Dylan says.

  I shift in his arms and look up at him, trying to read his expression. He’s waiting on my reaction. “Sure,” I say.

  “I want you to hike Mount Washington like you normally do with your dad, but I want to do it with you.”

  I raise an eyebrow, a little shocked at his offer. “You can’t go all the way to New Hampshire just to hike a mountain.”

  “I’ve done it before. I used to travel a lot in college for lesser reasons. And besides, there’s a few other reasons to go besides hiking,” he says, making me aware of the fact that we’re still wrapped around each other. I unfurl myself from him and take a timid step back, embarrassed for myself and how mu
ch I crave being around him.

  “What about your job?” I ask.

  “I’ll bring it with me. Remember? I work remotely. I assume you have some Wi-Fi I can borrow while I’m in the area.”

  I nod my head because I’m not sure what else to say.

  “When do you usually do the hike?” Dylan asks.

  “The end of August, unless the weather says otherwise.”

  “Perfect,” Dylan says; he grabs my hand. I’m half-stunned as he walks away, taking me with him.

  “Wait, what?”

  “In three weeks I’ll come fly out to New Hampshire. I assume I can depend on you for a ride from the airport?”

  “Of course, but, Dylan, I—I really don’t want to.”

  “You have to face this, Marly, and that’s the only way. If you want, you can do the hike alone, or if you’d rather hike with a friend or a family member, you can do that too, but I think this is something you have to do.”

  “But why do you want to come?” I ask, still a little lost for words.

  “Because I’ve been looking for an excuse to start traveling again.” He glances over at me, a small smile lighting up his face. “Plus, I want my new hiking partner to show me an easier way to hike Mount Washington.”

  Chapter 17

  The plan is in place. The last weekend of August, Dylan and I will hike the route my dad and I take every summer. Dylan has his plane tickets picked out, though he’s using an app to track the flight and waiting for the prices to drop. If worse comes to worst—he promised he would drive out if needed. Lori, of course, is thrilled.

  “Oh my God!” she screams when I tell her. I called her on video chat almost as soon as Dylan left. “I knew it! I knew it had to be the reason you haven’t been texting me as much!”

  I tell her everything in one swoop, trying to get the words out as quickly as possible before she can interrupt me. “Calm down, you act like I’ve never gone out with a guy before,” I say. I’m sitting on the bench seat of the bus, my laptop resting on the table. The bus windows are open to let some of the fresh summer air in, even if it is a little muggy today.