Chapter 34

Chapter Thirty Four

COLE

August came and it was time.

I'd known it was coming the way you know all certain things — intellectually first, and then one morning you wake up and it's arrived and the knowing becomes something you feel in your chest rather than your head. Move-in was the fifteenth. I had twelve days from the first of August to finish packing, say what needed to be said, and drive two hours south to the life I'd been working toward since I was fourteen.

Twelve days sounds like enough. It isn't.

My mother moved through the house in logistics mode, which was her way of handling emotion, converting it into action. Labeled boxes appeared in the living room. A spreadsheet materialized on the kitchen table — I didn't ask when she'd made it — with categories for bedding and equipment and documents and things to do before departure. I followed it because following it was something concrete to do and concrete was helpful right now.

Mara came over Tuesday. Not for any scheduled reason. She just appeared, which she'd started doing in July the way I'd started doing it in the spring, the gravitational pull of limited time making the distance between our houses feel like something worth crossing without an agenda.

She sat on my bedroom floor while I packed and handed me things from the stack my mother had organized and we talked in the way we'd gotten good at, the kind of talking that moved through everything without needing to land anywhere specifically.

"Take the heavy blanket," she said. "Sacramento gets cold in November."

"I grew up in San Francisco."

"Sacramento cold is different. It's dry. It'll get you." She handed me the blanket. "Take it."

I took it.

She looked around my room with the expression she had when she was cataloguing something. The walls were getting bare as things came down, the specific sadness of a room being dismantled. "How long have you had this room?"

"Since I was nine. We moved here when my mom got the job at the hospital."

"Nine years."

"Yeah."

She was quiet for a moment, taking that in. "That's a long time to leave somewhere."

"I know." I folded something into the box. "It's also time."

She looked at me. "Yeah," she said. "It is."

My mother made dinner the last Friday before I left, a real one, the kind she made for occasions. She invited Mara and Elena, which surprised no one, and the four of us sat at the dinner table and ate and talked and I looked around at these three women who had all become, in different ways and for different reasons, central to the way I understood what it meant to show up for people.

Dex came by after dinner. He stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets in the way he had when he was feeling something he hadn't prepared remarks for and said, "So." Just that.

"So," I said.

He came in and we sat on the back steps and he talked about San Diego and I talked about Sacramento and we covered it the way we covered most things, indirectly and thoroughly. At the end he said, "You're my best friend," without looking at me, in the voice of someone completing a task they'd assigned themselves.

"I know," I said.

"I just wanted to say it out loud."

"I know that too." I looked at the back yard. "Same."

He nodded and we went back inside and that was that.

The night before I left Mara and I drove to the overlook. Third time. It had become our place in the way that places become yours through return, through choosing them again and again.

We sat on the hood again. The city below. The bridge.

She'd brought the bioluminescence book. I noticed it on the back seat when we parked and didn't say anything.

We sat for a while in the comfortable quiet that was one of the first things I'd loved about her, the ability to be with someone without filling the space.

"I have something to tell you," she said.

I looked at her.

"I know about the flight." She watched my face. "November. Jess told me. She felt bad about the non-refundable detail."

"Of course she did." I looked at the city. "Are you mad?"

"I'm the opposite of mad." She turned to face me on the hood of the car. "I've been thinking about it since she told me. About what it means that you booked it in April when nothing was certain."

"It was always going to be certain."

"You didn't know that."

"I knew you." I met her eyes. "I told you. Same thing."

She looked at me for a long moment. The city light caught the edge of her and I looked at her the way I'd been looking at her since October, the way I suspected I'd be looking at her for a long time, like she was worth paying full attention to.

"I love you," she said. "I want you to know that's not a small thing for me. I don't say things I don't mean and I mean that one so much it still surprises me sometimes."

I reached out and took her face in my hands the way I had in her kitchen the first time, careful and certain. "I love you too. I have since before I knew what to do with it."

She put her hands over mine. "Sacramento's going to be good."

"So is New York."

"And November's not that far."

"Three months." I pressed my forehead to hers. "I've done harder things."

"We've done harder things."

"Mara."

"Yeah."

"This isn't an ending."

She pulled back to look at me properly. Her eyes were clear and certain in the city light. "I know that," she said. "It's not even close to an ending."

She meant it. I could tell she meant it.

I held her face and looked at her for a long moment, storing it, the way you store things you're going to need to come back to when the distance is real and the nights are long and the two hours between phone calls feel like two hundred miles.

Then I kissed her.

The bridge lights held steady.

The city carried on.

Tomorrow was coming.

We were ready.