“Or I’d be hanging off a ledge of rock with a broken leg and a deadly snake bite.”
“Both of them, huh?”
“The snake bite is what caused me to fall.” She frowns and holds up a finger as her eyes brighten. “Or maybe I fell and landed on the snake and that’s when it bit me.”
“Better story. But one of those fantasy novels. I’d take you more for a reality story. Where the girl safely climbs down to the bottom.”
“Does she cry Eureka?” She bats her eyelashes.
“No. She hugs the guy who helped her get there. And then she feels him up.”
She rolls her eyes. “So that’s what this is about.”
“Maybe.” I shrug, but it’s not. I love sitting here with her, how easy it is to talk to her, to tease her. But deeper feelings are bubbling up, and I can’t help when my voice lowers, turns serious. “Or maybe I want to prove that you can.”
She turns the can of juice around in her fingers. “Why do you care?”
I feel my dad standing next to me, his hands braced against his back, his dreams sighing out, lost in the heat-soaked air. “I guess I want to see Maya Senn, who can do anything, do the one thing she doesn’t think she can.”
“There’s a lot of things I can’t do,” she says. “No matter what you want to believe, I’m not adventurous, Anthony.” Her gaze drifts off to something I can’t see. “At least not anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I was more daring when I was little. I always wanted to explore everything.”
“What happened?”
“I got lost.” She smiles to take the sting out of the words, but it still makes me want to hold her. “I was more careful after that, but it wasn’t just being afraid of snakes. I told you it was hard on my parents. They’d picked me out of the orphanage thinking I was this sweet, quiet little baby. And then I got home with them and started running off and doing stupid things.”
“Not stupid,” I say. “Kid things.”
“Ethan never did those things.”
“Ethan is a freak of nature.”
“In some ways. But he’s also been a really good brother.” She smiles to herself.
“What?” I ask.
“They called me Roo when I was little. I thought it was because I was always jumping from one thing to another like a Kangaroo. But then my mom told me it was because I attached myself to Ethan. He was eighteen months when I was adopted. I don’t remember this, but Mom says he was very protective. They had a room for my nursery, but Ethan said I was used to sharing a room at the orphanage, that I might be scared if I was alone. So they moved a toddler bed into his room, and I slept there for two years until he started kindergarten.”
The one lamppost flickers on, though the sky is still hanging on to the last bit of sunlight. “Do you remember what it was like, before you were adopted?”
She sips from her can of guava. “Not consciously. But there are studies about that…how it can…stick with you.” She runs a finger along the uneven wood of the table, pressing the small broken edges as if she can knit them back together. “I think about it a lot, though. How they could have adopted any of those babies and they chose me.”
“They lucked out.”
“I’m the one who lucked out. They’re really good people. At first, they were just my parents. Then I went from feeling lucky to thinking I’d won the lottery.” She shrugs. “I grew up knowing that I didn’t look like my parents on the outside, but that made me want to be more like them on the inside. To really be a Senn.”
“How do you do that?”
“You don’t wander off, for starters.” She smiles, but something about that bothers me. She takes another drink of juice. “I have goals. A direction in life. College. My doctorate. A profession.”
“And someone like Grant Ellison?”
“And someone like Grant Ellison.” Her gaze lifts to mine, not a sliver of apology in them. “This is me. This is who I am, Anthony. I don’t do rock hop trails. I follow the road that’s already been paved. I like that. It’s safer.”
I shake my head, a familiar lump filling my throat. “We’re never safe. That’s a lie we tell ourselves when we make plans.”
“You mean your dad?” Mai shifts forward on her bench. “You never told me what happened.”
“Prostate cancer. It’s supposed to be an old man’s disease, but turns out it isn’t always.” She reaches for my hand. Squeezes. It feels nice, better than words. I thread my fingers through hers. “He would have liked you. He was big on planning. Had lots of his own he never had time for.”
“Like what?”
“He and my mom were going to travel around. She was going to write a novel, and he was going to bike trails he’d marked up and down the coast. He had a whole map laid out.”
She frowns, and I know her mind is piecing together more than I want her to. “Is that why you’re traveling up and down the coast? Tracing his path?”
What the hell. Might as well tell her the rest. “More than that. I’m taking him with me. His ashes.” I’ve been talking to her hands, but now I look up to read her expression. I’m not sure what she’s thinking, but she doesn’t pull back. “He’s been sitting in an urn in our house for almost three years. He should be out in the world, the places he wanted to go.”
She nods like there’s nothing strange about that. “Where are you going exactly?”
“Not sure yet. I’ll head up north Friday night, set up a camp, and be ready for coffee at sunrise.”
“I guess you don’t mean Starbucks.”
“Nope. Instant coffee made with water cooked over a camp stove. It doesn’t taste as good, but coffee at sunrise was one of Dad’s favorite things.”
She wrinkles her nose. “But why leave at night? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Not really. It’s…well…” I turn away, a sharp heat gathering behind my eyes.
“You okay?” she asks softly.
I take a slow breath in and out. “Saturday is the anniversary of his death. I want to set up somewhere the night before so I can start the day the way he would. The way we all did when we were together.” I swallow the thickness of tears, glad for the heavy shadows. “You asked why I care about you doing the rock hop? I couldn’t do anything about my dad. I couldn’t show him the places he never got to see. But I can show you this. Take you down that trail. Nothing should be off-limits, Mai. Not for you.”