I do know. I haven’t forgotten the way my hands shook when I landed in New York at the start of the summer. Just being back there, even miles away from anyone I’d known in my old life, felt like a risk.
“We can leave anytime you want,” I tell him. “If it ever gets too much. We can fly home. Or we can rent an Airbnb on the beach and do whatever we want for the rest of the weekend. Okay?”
He finally looks at me, a weak smile curving at his lips. “Yeah. I’m gonna hold you to that.”
It’s a long drive from the airport to the coast, where Wyatt’s family lives. The land outside goes from lush and verdant to sandy and arid. Hanging one arm out of the window of our rental car in the heavy, humid heat, I feel like I can smell the ocean long before we’re even close. I’ve never felt anything like the air here. It droops over you like a damp blanket. Even when we close the windows to put the air-conditioning on blast, I can’t forget how hot it is. Every breath feels weighted.
Wyatt puts on music, and we spend most of the ride talking about concerts we’ve seen, stupid things we did in high school and somehow got away with, places we want to travel—good conversation but avoidant. We keep skirting carefully around the real thing neither of us can stop thinking about: what waits at the end of this drive.
“I still can’t believe you were in the Marines,” I say as we drive past what the signs tell me is a Marine Corps air base. I have no idea if Wyatt was stationed there or if anyone in his family was. “You don’t really strike me as the type.”
I’m not sure if the comment strays too close to sore subjects. Wyatt’s grip shifts on the steering wheel, but there’s no telltale clench of his jaw or tightening of his brow.
“The military would pay for college, if I wanted to go,” he says eventually. “And I did.”
My brows go up before I can stop them. This is the first I’m hearing of Wyatt being interested in college. After all, he never went—his artistry is almost completely self-taught.
“So why didn’t you?” I ask, and this earns me a huff of a laugh from Wyatt.
“Lots of reasons. I lost the chance when I got dishonorably discharged, for one. The Marines weren’t gonna pay for college anymore. And anyway, I got hooked on drugs shortly after that, so even if I could have afforded it, there wasn’t much of a future for me in school anyway. At least not as far as I could see at the time.”
It’s the same story I’ve heard a million times before. It’s my own story, in some ways, minus the military enlistment. I wish I could crawl back in time and find that fragile young version of Wyatt and show him an image of his own future. Maybe if he’d known that everything would turn out okay, that one day he’d be a famous artist, grown and happy…maybe it would have changed things.
But that’s probably just a flight of fancy. It wouldn’t have changed anything for me. Baby Ely was hell-bent on self-destruction, and finding out I eventually got clean would have only made me want to self-destruct faster to avoid the risk of my own future happiness.
It’s late afternoon by the time we arrive in Wyatt’s hometown. It’s one of those small beach villages with clapboard houses and a historical landmark sign posted at every corner, the waves lapping at the pylons of every aging dock. Charming, kitschy, but ever so slightly gone to seed, its best tourist days somewhere fifteen years in the past. We drive past rows of seaside cottages raised up on stilts with clover lawns and ornamental piles of seashells decorating their whitewashed porches. But we don’t stop at any of those. Instead we turn inland, following winding roads past an ancient cemetery, an abandoned gas station, a shell-shocked but still open video store, into a different neighborhood.
Here the houses are smaller, one story with peeling paint and pockmarked driveways. Overgrown grass creeps up through the cracks in the sidewalk, ancient oak trees curling gnarled branches toward the sky, window units dripping water down the sides of walls and staining the wood.
Wyatt’s house is at the end of the lane, huddled up against a brackish marsh. It’s two stories, unlike the rest on this street, but somehow still gives the impression of squatness. We pull in to the driveway right behind a rickety, half-rusted pickup. The house itself looks like it might have been painted robin’s-egg blue once upon a time. But despite the faded paint, the shrubs in the front garden are meticulously trimmed, and the mailbox is planted amid a bed of flowering pink begonias.
“This is it,” Wyatt says as he shuts off the engine. But he doesn’t get out of the car—just sits there with both hands still gripping the wheel.
I reach over on impulse and grasp his knee, giving it a brief squeeze. “Hey,” I say. “It’s not too late. We can still turn back. We can go find a shitty motel somewhere and pretend none of this ever happened.”
He lets out a brittle laugh. “Yeah. I suppose we could.”
But that seems to be enough to jolt him out of that frozen moment. He gets out of the car, and I follow a moment after.
30
WYATT
We don’t even make it all the way to the house before the front door opens and an ancient dog comes hobbling out on matchstick legs. It’s been almost fifteen years, so it takes me a second to recognize my childhood dog. Roscoe’s gone white around the nose, but when I kneel down to let him lick my face, his tongue is as wet and warm as I remember. And just for a second the fist around my heart unclenches a tiny bit, and I laugh as Roscoe snuffles at every inch of exposed skin. He even smells how I remember, like salt water and wet fur.
“Hey, buddy,” I say, scratching at his neck and resisting the urge to bury my face against his shoulder. If I did that, I might never be able to let him go again. “Did you miss me?”
“Roscoe!” a familiar voice shouts from the front doorway. I’ve been in the Northeast long enough now that her southern accent sounds foreign to my ears, like warm honey. “Roscoe, get off him!”
Roscoe limps obediently toward the house, only to change his mind halfway there and attempt a wobble back toward me. His tail is wagging so hard I have to hurry forward and grip his collar so he doesn’t fall over.
“Good boy,” I murmur, and twist my fingers in his fur as I gather the courage to look up.
My mother stands on the front porch, wearing one of her church dresses with the white collars. I’m too far away to see her face properly, but there’s no mistaking the way she grips the support beam on the porch, her body listing to one side like she can’t quite stand upright. She didn’t say anything about being ill—but then again, when Roscoe calms down enough to let me stand and move closer to the house, I realize her weakness isn’t due to illness.
My mother’s face goes through a complicated series of expressions, all equally uninterpretable—but then the spell breaks, and she staggers forward, half tripping down the front steps. She closes the distance between us, and before I can open my mouth to speak, to apologize or I don’t know what, she flings both arms around my shoulders and yanks me into the tightest hug.