Nick nods.
“I’ve had some really bad moments, as you know. Like setting off the smoke detector when I went all Firestarter on the condolence cards.” I stop when I see the confused expression on Nick’s face.
“You don’t know Firestarter? Drew Barrymore?”
He shakes his head. “Contrary to popular belief, firemen haven’t seen every movie about fires.”
I laugh.
“Maybe I wasn’t born yet?” he offers.
“And I was?” I pull out my phone and do a quick Google search. “Ha—it came out in eighty-four. I was born in eighty-three.” I show him the screen. “I’m thirty-three. How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Baby,” I say.
He smiles wanly.
“We’re both young. We have our whole lives ahead of us still.”
“I wish I could speed up mine. So I can be past this sooner,” he says.
“We’ll get there,” I say, wishing I knew when that aha moment would occur. When I wouldn’t feel like the wind had just gotten knocked out of me. I slide the Maui Hiking Tours brochure the concierge had given Nick across the table. “If I’m being completely honest, I’m having a moment right now when I look at this pamphlet. It makes my blood boil that they took this kind of vacation together. That it was all about adventures and fun and bonding.” I feel the tears threaten to well up in my eyes.
“I know. It sucks. I once wanted her to do this ropes course with me. Some guys at the station had done it with their spouses and were talking about it. And she said no. And now I have to stomach the fact that she did these things with him.” He says the word with such disgust, my first impulse is to defend James. But I don’t. Because I understand completely.
“Well, I guess we can sit here and continue to feel sorry for ourselves, or we can get up and go.” I stand, willing my legs to move.
“If this guide is anything like Adam, hopefully we’ll get more good info.” He stops, realizing his mistake when he sees my face. “I don’t mean ‘good’ info. Obviously their posing as newlyweds was not a good thing. I just meant insightful.”
I stare at him. Finding out they were posing as a married couple simply made me sick. It’s something I wish I could forget. If I could choose one thing, it would be that.
“And, hey, it says here we’re going to see stunning panoramas of the central valley, ocean, and neighbor islands,” he offers with mock cheer.
“Woo. Hoo.” I match his inflection.
“Fake it till we make it, right?” he says.
“Right!” I pump my fist in the air. “It also says we get to hike ten miles out and back! You know, someone on TripAdvisor said you need legs of steel to do the whole thing! Can’t wait!”
“Well, according to the concierge, James and Dylan only hiked the Maalaea side, which is five miles out and back,” Nick says.
We go on like this for a while. Offering up the irritating details to each other in singsongy voices.
We start to walk out to the lobby. “Extremely rocky and steep west Maui mountains, here we come!” Nick laughs.
I stop and grab his arm. “So, hey, how steep we talking?”
Nick laughs again but stops when he sees I don’t.
“No seriously. I kind of have an issue with heights.”
Nick gives me a look. He juts out his bottom lip slightly and frowns, his eyebrows nearly meeting as he wrinkles his brow. If his expression could be translated into words, it would mean: Can we just do this, please? Get through this experience like we said we would? Make the best of a horrible situation?
I know I should stop being so selfish and give him what he wants, but admittedly it’s in my nature to wrestle for what I want. With James, we each tended to put ourselves first and then fight about it later—the control shifting like a seesaw. I’m not used to someone else thinking of my needs before his. I wonder if Dylan paced her giving with Nick, or did she just take and take, like I’d been doing? I clap my hands. “I can do this. I know you’ll help me, right? Work your magic at the top of the trail if I need it?”
Nick nods. “But remind me never to go on The Amazing Race with you. You’d be a train wreck.”
I wave my finger in the air. “Correction. I’d be a producer’s dream. Freaking out on every task? That’s ratings gold!”
Nick rolls his eyes.
“I’m going to kick this hike’s ass!” I put my hand up for a high-five, smiling wide so he knows that I’m at least trying, even though it was difficult for me.
After locating our guide, Jacob, a fiftyish man with a shaved head, muscular shoulders, and a tiny waist, we take a short drive as he gives the group a brief history of the trail we’ll be hiking. He tells us that it’s part of the aloloa, or the long road, that once circled Maui and might be as much as four hundred years old. He says that the trail was built in the 1800s and every boulder in every wall and every paving stone was placed there by hand. When we arrive, we gather around a maroon sign with yellow writing. It says: Lahaina Pali Trail. Please do not scratch or move rocks or break tree branches or leave rubbish on the trail.
I whisper to Nick, “Scratch the rocks?”
“Well, they were placed there by hand!” Nick smiles.
As Jacob passes out our backpacks, he asks us to go around the group and introduce ourselves. There’s a young twentysomething couple that look like Malibu Barbie and Ken, with bright-blond hair and matching skintight T-shirts with Maui Honeymooners silkscreened across them. They tell us their names are Trish and Doug, but I can’t help but picture them riding down Pacific Coast Highway in a bright-pink convertible Corvette like the one I had when I was little. There’s also a man easily twenty years their senior, with dark hair and a thick New York accent, who says his name is George and points out his wife, Nancy, and their teenage son, Parker, who barely looks up from his smartphone to nod at us when he hears his name. When it comes around to me, I stammer. My identity for the past eight years has been intertwined with James’s. I’m not sure who I am without him.
Thankfully, Nick jumps in. “We’re Nick and Jacqueline—Jacks—and we just got engaged.” Nick smiles at me, and I can almost read his mind. If they can do it, we can too. And then, as if they won’t believe Nick’s story otherwise, I grab his hand.
About a mile in, Nick and I are in the back of the pack, and I’m still thinking about the way his hand felt when I’d laced my fingers through his—large and rough, but also like it would protect me from anything. George and Nancy are several yards ahead of us, pumping their arms like nobody’s business. And their son is right behind them, taking selfies every few yards, tilting his head until he finds the right angle. When I make a quip to Nick about Parker being obsessed with taking pictures of himself, Nick tells me he’s actually Snapchatting. When I give him a blank stare, he explains what that is.
“He’s texting a group of his friends while on this hike? Shouldn’t he be enjoying the view?”
“Shouldn’t I be saying the same thing about you?” Nick stops and puts his hands on my shoulders. It’s true. I’ve been hugging one side of the trail so hard I think it might be getting the wrong idea.
“I’m freaked out,” I say, but it comes out like a question.
“And you’re going to let that take away the chance for you to look at this breathtaking scenery?”
“No, it’s just that I’m concentrating on not falling off the side of the mountain.”
“What would you tell your students?”
“What do you mean?”
“What would you tell one of your fourth graders if they were scared of something?”
I realize what he’s doing the second I hear the question. Oh, the irony. That I’m a teacher taking care of nine-and ten-year-olds, yet I can’t talk myself off the literal ledge of my own life.
“Touché,” I say.
“That’s not an answer.” He stares at me.
“Fine. I would tell them that fear only lives where you let it. That they can do anything they set their minds to.”