Never Coming Back(29)

“Well,” Sunshine said, and I could tell she was searching for words. “It’s not all bad. I mean, she got you out of the deal, right?”

Brown clapped his hands. “Yes! She did! And you’re awesome!” he said, in that way he had back then, when suddenly something struck him as full of happiness and he lit up with the joy of it and said words like awesome and fantastic and cool and they all ended with exclamation marks. ! ! ! In those moments Brown was like a trick birthday candle, the kind that relit themselves by magic even after you blew them out. He could still be that way. Just not as often.

It had been fourteen years since that night, when we were all eighteen and we used to go to parties together and drink spiked Kool-Aid out of plastic-bag-lined garbage cans with enormous straws poking out of them. We used to dance together at The Excuse, the three of us holding hands and hopping around the tiny dance floor. We used to go on long bike rides to celebrate the end of exams, bought tubes of cookie dough at the grocery store and baked them late at night in the disgusting basement dorm kitchen, backpacked part of the Appalachian Trail for a few weeks each summer with the goal of finishing the whole thing eventually, a goal that had not yet been reached.

A year or so after graduation we started going to the weddings of our college friends. We made toasts and clinked glasses and Sunshine had flings with groomsmen and Brown had flings with bridesmaids and I had flings with no one. We danced and drank and laughed and cheered. We got hotel rooms next to each other and in the mornings we got up and drank pots of coffee, cream for me, sugar for Sunshine, black for Brown.

We were all living in Boston and I was with them the night it finally dawned on them, and me, that they were in love with each other, and we laughed and laughed, in relief and surprise. I was “friend of honor” when they got married on that pretty hill by the orchard north of campus, the orchard where we had picked apples every fall of our four years together. My friend-of-honor toast was structured like Jeopardy!, our favorite game even back then: six categories and five sentences for each. It was long and complicated and everyone loved it and laughed, not because it was funny, even though it was, but because we were all so happy. They had figured it out, Sunshine and Brown, they had figured out something essential about themselves and about each other, which seemed to mean they had figured out something essential about this world, and that meant that the rest of us could too.

We didn’t know that cancer would come to Sunshine so young, that she would lose all those baby-making essentials, as she called them, and that within a few years the two of them would flee Boston for the mountains—right here in Old Forge, where we had all three spent that summer before our junior year working, the summer they had fallen in love with my Adirondacks—to live more deeply, as they told people when asked, because if it worked for Thoreau then maybe it would work for them too. We couldn’t have predicted that the day would come when I, who had not once considered moving back to the land from whence I sprang, would be living in a cabin a mile away from them, here in this tiny town perched on the edge of these old, old mountains.

That’s the thing, though. You think you can predict, but you can’t.





* * *





Sunshine and Brown and I talked about flying once—the topic was the first time each of us had ever been on a plane—in another of those long get-to-know-one-another conversations our first year of college. Sunshine had been seven, an unaccompanied minor going to visit her grandparents in Florida. Brown had been a baby, moving from Missouri to Boston with his parents. I listened to them talk about those first flights and all the myriad flights they had been on since, to the Caribbean, to Europe, Brown to Africa and Sunshine to Japan, which airlines were best, which had direct flights where, which logo looked coolest painted on the side of the plane. How Sunshine always had to remember to book her flights now under her legal name, which was Samantha; otherwise it was no end of trouble at security.

I said nothing.

I had been on one flight in my life at that point, when a college in Ohio that liked my early test scores flew me out to visit in the late spring of my junior year at Sterns High School. Tamar had made me go, despite the fact that I had told her I would not go farther than a half-hour drive from Asa, who had graduated the year before. She drove me to the Syracuse airport and parked in short-term parking and she waited with me at the gate—this was before the Twin Towers—until I was onboard and looking out the tiny oval window, trying but unable to find her through the huge glass window of the concourse. Where was my mother? Had she left the minute I headed down the passenger ramp? Was she already in the station wagon, hauling exact change for the thruway toll out of the glove compartment? Or was she still there, in the terminal, waiting to make sure the plane that I was on took off safely and made it up into the clouds before she relinquished her hold and turned to leave?

I was seventeen years old.

I stared out the tiny oval window and watched the ground crew load the suitcases and duffels into the belly of the plane I was sitting in. I fastened my seat belt when the flight attendant told me to. A boy with big orange ear protectors waved the plane away from the terminal. The runway markings rolled beneath my window as we lumbered our way to the line of planes waiting at the end of the runway. It was just like waiting at an intersection for the light to change, I remembered thinking.

Then it was our turn. The engines groaned and roared as they revved up, and the plane rattled and rumbled and then smoothed out as we gathered speed down the runway. At a certain point, when I sensed we were about to leave the earth, the earth that I had never left before, the earth that I had always been firmly attached to, I held my breath for luck. And then the snub nose of the plane pointed skyward and we were borne aloft.