Picture Us In The Light(96)
I hadn’t quite let myself form those thoughts. But they’ve been kindling, because as soon as he says it they catch flame. What if it is her? And what if she only knows a false version of the story and I tell her the truth, I tell her what really happened and how they’ve never stopped wishing for her back—can I balance that, somehow, that and all those years they lied to me, the anger I probably shouldn’t feel but do, against my guilt?
“It doesn’t change their situation,” I say finally. “Even if it somehow makes up for some of it—they’re still in the same boat. It doesn’t change anything.” This is the part I’ll have to carry alone, though: that a part of me will always resent them for this. Always.
“That’s literally been your dream for as long as I’ve known you, Danny.”
“It has.”
“You really think you can fix anything by not going? You honestly think that’s better?”
Of course I don’t think it’s better. But you don’t always get better—sometimes you just get less bad. Sometimes you just get right. “I don’t know if I can fix anything no matter what. Neither one of them are perfect options, but if I just bail on my parents I don’t think I can live with myself.”
A lesser friend, I think, would try harder to talk me out of it whether or not he believed it, unfurling a safe, attractive future I could map myself into in order to make me feel better in the moment, so he could duck away from how it feels. Harry doesn’t, though. He says, “Is.”
“Excuse me?”
“Neither one of them is a perfect option.” He reaches out and claps his hand against my thigh, and leaves it there. “Subject-verb.”
Then he grins, holding it until, in spite of myself, and in spite of the fact that his eyes are sad, I smile back.
And I almost tell him then. I almost do.
I don’t, though. He puts his hand back on the wheel, and the letdown that floods me, like a wave receding and then crashing back, makes me wonder if maybe I can’t. Maybe I just won’t ever. I try to tell myself I will, that I still have time—but time always almost feels like it belongs to you, like you can stretch and sculpt it to make it what you need it to be, but that’s a lesson I hope I never need to learn again: you belong to it, and not the other way around.
In Burney—a stretch of flat buildings lining the side of the road, a section carved out of the forest—we stop to get gas. A white woman in a pickup truck at the pump behind us scrutinizes us, leaning against her truck with her arms crossed, and I feel that old mixture—maybe it’s not justified, but a lot of times it probably is—of defiance and pity and shame. She lifts her cigarette to her lips and I watch her cheeks hollow and then fill back in as she inhales.
Everything feels different when we start driving again. The clumps of trees thicken, mostly pine now, and as you climb higher sometimes you come through a bend and the trees open up and you can see small valleys spread out below you, blanketed in a green that stretches across to the tree line, peaks rising up bluish in the distance. The air’s thinner up here and the sunlight streams through the sky differently, landing on the windshield in a way that looks clearer than how it does at home. Mostly, though, I think it feels different because I know that was our last stop, because the next time we get out of the car it’ll be to find Joy.
My pulse has been higher ever since the gas station. I try to tell myself it’s that there’s less oxygen up here, but I know I’m just nervous. I can’t quite sit still, either—I fiddle with the radio, tap my hands on my knees. I wish I’d brought my sketchbook, even though trying to draw in the car always makes me carsick. I would draw us, though, I think: me and Harry in the car. I’d draw the way the light keeps glancing off the rearview mirror and the way the world outside the window looks like a painting and the way inside the car we feel kind of buffered from it all, how really everything that matters is right here inside. For now, at least.
“So,” I say, when we drive through Fall River Mills, a flat stretch with mountains that rise up in the distance, “I still haven’t exactly put together a solid game plan. I was going to just kind of show up and try to talk to her.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Does it really? Because it’s starting to sound pretty bad to me.”
He shrugs. “If it’s her, do you really need a plan?”
My pulse picks up again, thudding in time to the bumps on the road. Outside a cluster of cows is grazing in a grass clearing. The sun is so bright it makes the grass look almost neon.
We could still turn around, I tell myself. There’s nothing stopping us. “I don’t know. Who knows. It could end up not being her. Or who even knows.” Then I tell myself: I’m going to do it. Now. “Hey, Harry?”
“Yeah.”
My heart is pounding so hard it feels impossible that he wouldn’t hear it. My vision goes soft around the edges.
“Ah—never mind. Forgot what I was going to say.”
You see Alturas before you reach it. You come to a peak and there below you is the whole city clustered together in a pocket of valley, and as you drive into it you lose sight of it until you’re practically there. The sky out here is huge. The land goes on and on, tall grasses that wave in the wind and pull your eyes along the horizon line, drawing them up the mountains hovering in the near distance. When we see a sign for Alturas, population 2,827, the nervousness hits me. My mouth goes dry and my hands are sweaty against the wheel. Harry reaches over and taps my knee; he can feel it, I think, what that sign means to me. Maybe it didn’t feel real before this.