By the time I left, I’d told Everett about moving my dad, and he’d said it was the right thing. Had told him about the flat and the rain and everything I wanted to do over the summer, while I was off. By the time I stopped talking, I felt lighter, more at ease—which could’ve been the vodka, but I liked to think it was Everett—and Trevor was passed out on the sofa beside us.
“Oh. I should go,” I’d said.
“Let me walk you back,” Everett had said.
My head was light as we walked in silence, and then my hand was on the doorknob and he was still nearby, and what were the grown-up rules for this? “Want to come in?”
He didn’t answer, but he followed me in. Froze in the galley kitchen, which looked out into the rest of my studio loft, one room with high windows and sheer curtains hanging from the exposed pipes, segregating my bedroom. But I could see my bed through them—unmade, inviting—and I knew he could, too.
“Wow,” he said. It was the furniture, I was sure. Pieces I’d mined from thrift stores and flea markets and had stripped down and repainted in bold colors to match. “I feel like I’m Alice in Wonderland.”
I slid off my shoes, leaned against the kitchen counter. “Ten bucks says you’ve never read it.”
He smiled and opened my refrigerator, pulling out a bottle of water. “Drink me,” he said, and I laughed.
Then he pulled out a business card, placed it on the counter, leaned forward, and brushed his lips against mine before backing away. “Call me,” he said.
And I did.
* * *
THE DRIVE THROUGH VIRGINIA had turned endless, with its white farmhouses in the hills and the bales of hay dotting the surrounding grass. Then the pass through the mountains—guardrails and signs issuing warnings to turn on the fog lights—and the static as the radio stations cut in and out. The longer I drove, the slower I seemed to go. Relativity, I thought.
The pace was different back home. People didn’t move as fast, didn’t change too much over the course of the decade. Cooley Ridge, holding you to the person you’d always been. When I pulled off the highway, went down the ramp, and hit the main drag, I bet I’d still find Charlie Higgins or someone like him leaning against the beat-up side of the CVS. Bet I’d still find Christy Pote pining for my brother, and my brother pretending not to notice, even though they went ahead and got married to other people.
Maybe it was because of the humidity and the way we had to fight our way through it, like syrup sticking to the bottom of our feet, sweet and viscous. Maybe it was from living so close to the mountains—a thousand years in the making, the slow shift of plates under the earth, the trees that have been here since I was born and would be here when I was gone.
Maybe it’s the fact that you can’t see anything beyond here when you’re in it. Just mountains and forest and you. That’s it.
One decade later, a hundred miles away, and I cross the state line—Welcome to North Carolina!—and the trees grow thicker, and the air goes heavy, and I’m back.
The blurred edges shifting back into focus, my own mind resettling, remembering. The ghosts of us gaining substance: Corinne running down the side of the road in front of me, holding out her thumb, her legs shiny from sweat, her skirt blowing up when a car passes too close. Bailey hanging off my shoulder, her breath hot with vodka. Or maybe that was mine.
My fingers uncurled from the wheel. I wanted to reach out and touch them. Have Corinne turn around and say, “Pull your shit together, Bailey,” catch my eye, and smile. But they faded too fast, like everything else, and all that remained was the sharp pang of missing her.
One decade, twenty miles away, and I can see my house. The front door. The overgrown path and the weeds pushing through the gravel of the driveway. I hear that screen door creak open, and Tyler’s voice: Nic? And it sounds a little deeper than my memory, a little closer.
Almost home now.
Down the exit, left at the stoplight, the pavement cracked and gray.
A sign freshly staked into the ground at the corner, the bottom streaked with dried mud—the county fair, back in town—and something flutters in my chest.
There’s the CVS with the group of teenage boys loitering at the side of the lot, like Charlie Higgins used to do. There’s the strip of stores, different letters stenciled in the windows from when I was a kid, except for Kelly’s Pub, which was as close to a landmark as we had. There’s the elementary school and, across the street, the police station, with Corinne’s case file stored in some back closet, gathering dust. I imagined all the evidence boxed away and tucked in a corner, because there was no place else to put her. Lost in the shuffle, forgotten with time.
The electrical cables strung above us on the roadside, the church that most everyone went to, whether you were Protestant or not. And beside it, the cemetery. Corinne used to make us hold our breath as we drove past. Hands on the ceiling over the railroad tracks, a kiss when the church bells chimed twelve, and no breathing around the dead. She made us do it even after my mother died. Like death was a superstition, something we could outwit by throwing salt over our shoulders, crossing our fingers behind our backs.
I took my phone out at the stoplight and called Everett. I got his voicemail, like I knew I would. “Made it,” I said. “I’m here.”
* * *
THE HOUSE WAS EVERYTHING I imagined those last nine hours. The path from the driveway to the front porch now overtaken by the yard, Daniel’s car pulled all the way to the side of the carport beside the garage to leave space for mine, the weeds scratching my bare ankles as I walked from smooth stepping-stone to smooth stepping-stone, my legs stretching by memory. The ivory siding, darker in places, bleached from the sun in others, so I had to squint to look directly at it. I stood halfway between my car and the house, forming a list in my head: Borrow a pressure washer, find a kid with a riding mower, get a few pots of colored flowers for the porch . . .
I was still squinting, my hand shielding my eyes, as Daniel rounded the corner of the house.
“Thought I heard your car,” he said. His hair was longer than I remembered, at his chin—same length mine was before I left here for good. He used to keep it buzzed short, because the one time he let it grow out, people said he looked like me.
It seemed lighter all grown out—more blond than not blond—whereas mine had turned darker over the years. He was still pale like me, and his bare shoulders were already turning bright red. But he’d gotten thinner, the hard lines of his face more pronounced. We could barely pass for siblings now.
His chest was streaked with dirt, and his hands were coated in soil. He wiped his palms against the sides of his jeans as he walked toward me.
“And before three-thirty,” I said, which was ridiculous. Of the two of us, he was always the responsible one. He was the one who’d dropped out of school to help with our mom. He was the one who’d said we needed to get our dad some help. He was the one now keeping an eye on the money. My being relatively on time was not going to impress him.