Picture Us In The Light(19)
My heart was still thudding as Harry rounded the corner out of sight. I had to stop walking to let it slink back into its normal patter. Which seemed like a massive overreaction, except that I think, when I try to re-create that flash of time, I’d done it on purpose for him to see—for a split second there I’d imagined the worst and then wanted it. Or brought it into being, at least, which in the end might as well be the same thing. I’d like to say I lost myself for a moment, and that’s why. But that’s the easy way out. It seems equally possible that in those moments you just let go, when you give in to your impulses, that those are the moments that are most you.
Originally, my parents weren’t going let me go on the eighth-grade science camp trip to Yosemite. My mom was too worried the bus would crash, or I’d get lost in the snow and freeze to death, or I’d slip off a cliff hiking and plunge to the rocky ground hundreds of feet below.
Besides that, things always felt unstable at home. My dad still wasn’t himself, although it was starting to feel like this faded version we had to tiptoe around was his real self after all. It’s hard living with someone who’s never happy—a dark mist hovers over everything that happens in the household and you feel guilty when you want to be happy yourself. I worried about him, and I worried maybe he was going to divorce my mom or that she’d decide to divorce him. I had my cycle down pat: I’d be sullen and quiet around them, upset I had to worry about any of this, and then at night lying awake I’d be guilt-stricken and resolve to do better in the morning. It was draining, and I was pretty close to desperate to get to Yosemite even if for no other reason than to get out of the house.
It was Auntie Mabel, my mom’s best friend, who talked them into it, saying science camp was good for my education and that I’d love going. I did love going. Sometimes even now it chills me to think how much of my life would’ve never happened if I just hadn’t gone.
I stayed in a cabin with Maurice Wong and Aaron Ishido and Ahmed Kazemi, other denizens of the group of us who hung out in the middle of the pavilion at lunch—loud, visible, sending ripples into all the peripheral groups gathered around the outskirts. After that drawing I’d kind of thought Harry would muscle me out of his circle, and he could’ve, too, but he hadn’t. Since last year we’d mostly ignored each other, and I always tried to avoid him, but middle school doesn’t let you do that; once earlier that year we’d walked into Geometry at the same time (I’d seen it coming and tried to change my pace, but it hadn’t worked), and he’d dipped his head in acknowledgment and held open the door and motioned for me to go ahead. I’d felt him watching me as I went past him, and sometimes in class I would’ve sworn I felt him watching me, too, although every time I checked he moved his head too quickly for me to see if I was right.
Daytimes in Yosemite we were assigned to hiking groups and we traipsed through practically frozen creeks and did trust falls and foraged miner’s lettuce and we were all given trail books to sketch what we saw (I drew portraits of all the other people in my group and gave them to everyone at the end of the week), and ever since then I’ve been pretty friendly with the random collection of people who were in my group, and I still think of them—Jinson Tu and Jefferson Choy and Helena Heggem and Serina Kim and Annie Chong—as a single unit.
We weren’t allowed to take cell phones out on the hikes with us, and Thursday, the day we hiked Yosemite Falls, when I got back to the cabin thirsty and sore before dinner there was a message from my mom.
“Hello, Daniel, it’s Ma. I’m taking your father to the doctor. Just so you know. He’s all right, but he’s very sad.”
He’s very sad. It isn’t fair to resent a dead baby, but in that moment I did.
I wished I didn’t have to go back home; I wished I could just stay here and pretend everything was fine. I didn’t see a way out of my dad just always drowning in his sadness, and I didn’t see a way out of me having to carry that with me my entire life.
It was Thursday night, the night before we’d all get up and stumble bleary-eyed out of our cabins by seven the next morning to get to the dining hall and then check onto our buses, that I couldn’t take the feeling anymore. All the guys in my cabin were asleep and it was after midnight, definitely after the nine p.m. curfew, but I figured there probably weren’t any chaperones wandering around outside and so I slid as quietly as I could out of my sleeping bag and grabbed my ski jacket and went out into the cold.
It was close to freezing outside, my breath puffing in front of me, the moon behind the clouds turning the whole sky a pale, glowing gray. There were small patches of snow under the eaves and on the ground where even during the day it was mostly shadow, and it was bracingly quiet—no wind rustling trees, no cars. The moon was bright enough to light the snow fairly well, and so I walked past the cabins. I had some vague idea of getting to the clearing by the dining hall, where there were some benches carved out of logs, but I’d only gotten twenty or thirty feet when, from the near dark, someone said, “Hi, Danny.”
I whirled around, my heart thudding, ready for I don’t know what—and then it was Harry sitting mostly hidden in the shadows on a rock, a scarf wrapped around his neck and his beanie pulled all the way down over his ears. It caught me entirely off guard. I said, “What are you doing out here?”
“Eh, I just couldn’t sleep.” I could see puffs of air when he spoke. He didn’t look as surprised to see me as I was to see him, which meant, probably, that he’d been watching me for a little while. “You?”