The Last One(9)

I wonder if he’s scouting right now. Working late but really scrolling through Petfinder or checking the website of the greyhound rescue organization we saw at the farmers’ market a few weeks before I left. Or maybe he’s finally getting a drink with the new guy, who he keeps saying seems a little lonely.

Maybe he’s sitting home in the dark, thinking about me.

Standing alone in the gray night, watching leaves whisk in the wind, I need him. I need to feel his chest beat against my cheek as he laughs. I need to hear him complain of his hunger, a pain in his back, so I can put aside my own discomfort and be strong for us rather than for just myself.

Out here I have nothing of him but memory, and each night he feels less real.

I think of my last Clue. Home Sweet Home. Not a destination, because I can’t imagine they intend for me to walk the almost two hundred miles home, but a direction. A taunt.

My stomach rumbles—louder than the crickets or the frogs—and suddenly I’m remembering what it is to feel hungry instead of just knowing I should eat. Glad for the distraction, I fish the bag of trail mix from my pack and open it. I pour about a hundred calories’ worth of nuts and dried fruit into my palm. A pathetic amount, a toddler’s handful. I twist the bag closed and slip it into my jacket pocket. I eat the stale raisins first, pairing them with peanuts, almonds, and shattered cashew halves. The four chocolate candies I save for last. I place them on my tongue all together, press them to the roof of my mouth and feel their thin shells crack.

I used to fear that my need for him was weakness. That any concession of independence was a betrayal of my identity, a compromise of the strength I have always used to propel myself away from the familiar and toward the unknown. Out of the sticks and to the city, out of the city into a foreign land. Always pushing—until I met him: an easygoing, athletic electrical engineer raking in six figures while I scrambled for forty grand a year explaining the differences between mammals and reptiles to packs of shrill, ever-squirming schoolkids. It took me two years to recognize that he didn’t care, that he would never lord the difference in our incomes over me. By the time I said “I do,” I understood there’s a difference between compromise and cooperation, and that to rely on another takes a distinctive kind of strength.

Or maybe that’s just what I needed to tell myself.

A fragment of candy shell jabs my gums, almost painful, then melts away. I taste cheap milk chocolate, more a sense of sweetness than actual flavor. I bend over, stretching my hamstrings. A knotted mass of hair that was a ponytail once upon a time falls over my shoulder, and my fingers stall about twelve inches above my feet. It’s been years since I’ve been able to consistently touch my toes without bending my knees, but I should be able to get closer than this. My inability to reach even my ankles feels like failure, and in a weird way like unfaithfulness. Every night for weeks before I left home, my husband and I held “strategy sessions,” curled together in bed, brainstorming what I might do to succeed. Stretching was one of the things we discussed—the importance of staying limber. Tapping my shins, I tell myself that I will take the time to stretch each morning and evening from now on. For him.

I wanted to do something big. That’s what I told him last winter, the statement that started it all. “One last adventure before we start trying,” I said.

He understood, or claimed to. He agreed. He was the one who found the link and suggested I apply, because I like wilderness and once said that debris huts were cool. Offering a solution, as always, because the mathematically minded think all problems have solutions. And even if it’s growing ever harder for me to feel him, I know he’s watching. I know he’s proud of me—I’ve had my moments, but I’m doing my best. I’m trying. And I know that when I get home, the distance I feel now will evaporate. It will.

Still, I wish I had my ring.

I crawl back into my shelter. Hours later, as I watch the sky gradually lighten through the opening of my debris hut, I know I didn’t sleep—except that I remember a dream, so I must have. There was water in it; I was on a dock or a boat and I dropped him, my squirming, gurgling baby boy who didn’t quite fit in my arms, and why did I have him to begin with? He slipped out of my hands and my legs wouldn’t move and I watched him drift into the depths, bubbles rising from his mouth as he cried a sound like static and I stood by, helpless and unsure.

Exhausted, I ease out of my shelter and rekindle the fire. While the water heats I eat what’s left of the trail mix, stare at the flames, and wait for the dream to fade, as they always do.

I was in college when I first started having nightmares about accidentally killing accidentally conceived children. I was new to sex, and underscoring every experience was my worry that the condom would break. A one-night stand would result in weeks of sporadic dreams in which I forgot my newborn child and left it somewhere like the baking interior of a car, or it rolled off a table onto a concrete floor while I wasn’t looking. Once one tumbled out of my sweaty hands on a mountaintop and I watched it fall all the way to the worm-sized road below. It was worst when I was actively dating someone, when it wasn’t a one-night stand but an act of love, or at least affection. The nightmares grew less frequent as I entered my mid-twenties and stopped altogether within a year of meeting my husband, the first person with whom I’ve ever thought I might someday be ready.

They resumed the night after the cabin Challenge. Not every night, not that I remember, but most. Sometimes when I’m awake too. I don’t even have to close my eyes, just lose my focus, and I see him. Always him. Always a boy.