It had been only a couple of months before that Cade and I had had a similar reunion. On that day—the last Saturday in August, just a few days before the dorms reopened—I had run down the hill in front of the lodgelike main building of the camp where I’d spent the entire summer, racing to meet Cade as his Saturn churned slow clouds of dust along the dirt road. He’d stopped and gotten out of the car, opening his arms to me, and I had thunked against his chest with a force that made him stagger back against the car. “Missed you, too, babe,” he murmured against my hair. We had meant to see each other every other weekend, but he’d gotten so busy working on Bylina’s campaign for Congress, and time had plodded along until it was two months since he had visited me. I understood. With my jeans and stubby, plain fingernails, my total disinterest in ever again living in a city and my sketchy family history, I had little to offer as a partner to someone who wanted to be a congressman one day. But I did possess patience and devotion, and the very reason I loved Cade was that he could find his passion and follow the prize of it like a polestar. I couldn’t very well fault him for being himself.
All summer I had lived at Southridge, the camp I’d attended every year since I was thirteen—although now I was a counselor and teacher, no longer a little camper kicking around in the woods. My mother had first signed me up for the annual retreat for Alateen, the support group for teenagers with alcoholic family members. She was the alcoholic in question, although she had twelve-stepped when I was young enough not to remember it. Still, she thought it would be good for me to spend a couple of weeks in the woods with other kids whose families spoke the peculiar language of recovery, making friends, trying out rustic crafts and learning how not to turn out like any of my close relatives.
Once I outgrew the retreat, I signed on to become a counselor, and for three summers now I had lived at Southridge full-time. I loved being outdoors in the piney air at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains, teaching people much older than me how to survive in the uncharted wilderness. All kinds of people passed through—packs of Boy Scouts and troubled foster kids, hipster folk intent on learning to garden organically and brew their own beer, paranoid survivalists seeking the skills to live off the grid when the people finally rose up against the government. I’d learned to cheerfully tolerate all kinds, and did my work so well that Dave—the head guy at the camp and, next to Cade, my favorite person in the world—had tried to persuade me to stay on through the fall and do my semester online. I’d had to patiently explain to him, again, that online classes aren’t an option for agriculture majors.
Later that very day—the one on which I had run down the road to greet Cade, loaded my stuff into the trunk of his Saturn and sped back toward College Park—he had taken me down into D.C. and proposed to me in the nighttime glow of the Jefferson Memorial. The bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson loomed overhead, his knee bent as if to take a step forward; the lettered quotes from the Declaration of Independence curved all around and above us, giving me a sense of vertigo, but beyond it the Tidal Basin lay blue and softly rippling. I knew what it meant that he had chosen this place: that he was drawing me into the pantheon of the things he loved most, showing me that nobody less than his personal hero would be called upon to witness it. Of course I accepted, even though I knew an actual wedding would be a long time coming. We were only twenty-one. We had all the time in the world.
On the day Elias came back, after Cade had dropped me off at my dorm and driven off with his brother for a night of revelry, I flicked on the TV and settled onto my bed with a bag of Starbursts to watch
Midway through the program, the door swung open and my roommate waltzed in. I chewed a candy and braced myself for the inevitable comments. Erica and I had been living together only since September, and already she had a finely honed skill for needling me at any tender spot she could identify. As she stuffed her makeup into its little quilted bag, she looked over at me with one arched eyebrow. “How can you eat that stuff?”
“They’re Starbursts. Who doesn’t like Starbursts?”
“They’re pure sugar.”
“Yes. I know.”
She squeezed the makeup bag into her purse and turned toward the TV. “What is this,
“Is your boyfriend still at the office?”
“Nope. He went out with his brother.”
She smiled tightly. Her face was a mask of makeup. “Well, have a great Saturday night.”
I sighed through my nose as she left the room, failing to let the door close all the way. As I got up to shut it myself, I scanned the room and tried not to see it through her eyes: the small, chattering TV; the crumpled bag of candy on the bed; my phone, plugged in to its charger because I had no use for it tonight. Before self-pity could creep in, I picked up the landline phone and called Dave.
“It’s Blackbird,” I said as soon as he answered with a hearty “Dave Robinson here.” I had been using my camp name for so many years, and had developed such a good reputation around the place, that normally it was a point of pride. I was the semi-legendary Blackbird, the ragtag little city kid who had blossomed into a trail-guiding, scat-identifying swan. But alone in my dorm room it sounded a little goofy, like a kid playing spy.
“Hey, kiddo! Good to hear from you. I just found a sweatshirt you left here. Pretty nice hoodie. Want me to mail it to you?”
His face appeared in my mind’s eye with an expression to match his voice: warm brown eyes and easygoing, energetic smile, shaggy dark hair brushing his shoulders. He shaved maybe every couple of weeks, and then with haste and indifference. I smiled and tugged the phone closer to my wooden desk chair. “Sure. I was wondering where it went. Thought maybe I left it behind at Cade’s friend’s place.”
“I’ll send it out on Monday. How’s the semester treating you?” His dog began to bark, and he made a noise to shush her. “How was October?”
“I made it through okay. Kept busy.”
“You think about your mom a lot?”
“Yeah, but I tried not to dwell on it. It’s been three years now. I need to keep moving forward. One day at a time, and all that.” I shut off the TV. “I finally got to meet a member of Cade’s family today. His brother. He just got back from Afghanistan.”
“All this time and you
“Nope. They live pretty far away, you know. I think he finds them embarrassing. He says they’re nothing like him.”
Dave laughed ruefully. “We all think that about ourselves. Never as true as we want to believe.”
“His brother seemed fine. I’d been sending him all these care packages with snack food and Little Debbie cakes and stuff like that, and he thanked me for them. It has to be overwhelming when you first get home after three years, so I thought that was sweet that he remembered.”
“Gonna be a hell of an adjustment, I’m sure. I remember those days.”
I frowned and slouched lower in my chair. “I thought you got kicked out of Ranger school.”
“I did, but then 9/11 happened and they sent me to Afghanistan anyway. Coming back wasn’t much of a party. Why do you think I ended up living in the woods?”
“I never heard you talk about that.”
“Nope. One day at a time, right? Keep moving forward.”
I twisted the cord around my fingers, a strange cat’s cradle. “No fair using AA lingo against me.”
“Go easy on the guy, that’s all I’m saying. Around the holidays is the worst time to come back, with everybody wanting you to be all cheery when you’re not feeling it at all. What was he, a grunt?”
“Yeah. Infantry. He did roadside patrols and things like that. He got a Purple Heart for a leg wound a couple years ago—something exploded in a car that was driving up to them, or something like that.”
Dave gave a low whistle. “Get that guy into therapy, stat. I’m not joking.”
