Night Road(41)

Beside her, she heard Mia draw in a breath and quietly start to cry.

“Don’t cry,” Zach said.

Sadness rose up in Lexi, and before she knew it, she was crying, too. “We … we’re dorks,” she said, wiping her eyes, and although it was true, and it made her smile, she still couldn’t stop crying. She loved both of them and soon they’d be gone.

“I’m gonna miss you, Lexi,” Mia said. She rolled over and hugged Lexi and then rolled over onto her back again.

Overhead, the night sky loomed, as incomprehensible as their futures; beneath it, Lexi knew how small they were.

Zach pulled his hand out of Lexi’s grasp and said, “I’ll be right back.” Then he got up and hurried back to the house.

“You’ll call me tons, right?” Lexi asked.

Mia squeezed her hand. “We’ll be like Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox. Bffs forever.”

“Sam and Frodo. Harry and Hermione.”

“Lexi and Mia,” Mia said. “Just think: someday we’ll be old together and we’ll laugh about how scared we were to go off to college.”

“Cuz we’ll still be friends.”

“Exactly.”

Lexi fell silent. She’d learned a long time ago that there were things she might want but would never have, and it hurt less if she tried not to want what was unattainable. Was this friendship like that? Was this just a high school friend version of first love that would diminish into a fond memory with time and distance?

Zach ran back, slightly out of breath. He stood above them, a silhouette against the moonlit waves. “Get up.”

“What for?” Mia demanded.

Lexi didn’t ask why; she just got up and took his hand. She loved the way his strong, warm fingers curled around hers.

He held out a Ninja Turtles Thermos. “I have an idea. Move your ass, Mia, and quit asking questions.”

“Someone thinks he’s the boss of me,” Mia said as she got to her feet and brushed the sand off her backside.

Zach led them down to the big cedar tree that guarded their beach.

In the moonlight, he looked pale, almost ghostlike, but there was a brightness in his green eyes that shone like tears.

He held out the Thermos and opened it. “We’ll put something in here and bury it.” He stared at Lexi. “It’ll be … like … our pact.”

“For as long as this time capsule is buried here, we’ll be best friends,” Mia said seriously. “Going off to college won’t change that. Nothing will change it.”

“We won’t be like everyone else,” Lexi said, hoping her comment didn’t sound like a question, but even now, in this solemn moment, she had trouble believing. Everything came so easily to these two. “We’ll never really say good-bye.”

Mia nodded. “Not as long as this is buried.”

Zach held out the open Thermos. Moonlight caught a flash of the silver interior and made it glow. “Put something in here as proof.”

At another time, in another place, it might have been funny or melodramatic or just plain silly, but not here, not now, in this darkness that felt weighted by the future that was bearing down on them like an eighteen-wheeler.

“I love you, Lex,” Zach said. “College won’t change that. We’ll stay in love. Always.”

Lexi stared at him. It felt like they were connected, drawing one breath back and forth.

Mia dropped a pair of expensive gold earrings into the Thermos.

Zach took off the Saint Christopher medal he always wore and dropped it inside.

All Lexi had was the string friendship bracelet Mia had given her in tenth grade. Mia had long ago lost the one Lexi had made for her, but Lexi had never taken this one off before. She untied it slowly and dropped it in the Thermos. Her memento made no sound when it landed; it bothered her, as if she were the only one of three of them that left no mark somehow.

Zach screwed the lid back on.

“I don’t think we should ever dig it up,” Mia said. Behind her, a gust of wind came up from the waves and ruffled her hair. “Digging it up would mean … like good-bye, and we don’t want that. As long as it’s here, it means we still love each other.”

Lexi wanted to say just the right thing. The moment seemed magical, charged; she’d always remember it. “No good-byes,” she said, meaning it.

The look that moved between them was heavy with emotion: in their eyes, they passed around the sad truth that they would be separating soon and that they loved one another, as well as the sweet truth, or hope, that in this coming future some things would survive, that three teenagers could stand in the moonlight and promise to be friends forever and keep that promise.

They knelt in the sand, far above the high-tide line, and at the base of the old tree, they dug deep, deep into the cold gray sand and buried their Ninja Turtles Thermos time capsule.

Lexi wanted to keep it going, to keep promising to search for a future that felt slippery, but when the capsule was buried, the sand looked undisturbed again, and the moment washed away.





Nine





In early June, the garden was miraculous. This was the time of year that Jude—finally—could take a moment to sit back and enjoy the hard work she’d done. Everywhere she looked, she saw the rewards of her careful planning and judicious pruning. The beds were a riot of glorious color, with sugary pink saucer-sized roses, ruffled yellow peonies, spiked purple delphinium. The deep green English boxwood she’d taken such time with was well on its way to becoming the bones of the garden. Above it all, a lotus tree was in full golden bloom; it looked like a Monet painting, just slightly out of focus, against the vibrant blue sky.