Adam stands there fidgeting until a girl with a blond ponytail opens the door. “Can I help you?” she asks.
Adam wheels around. “Brittany!” He knows her, of course. They hug, and she tells him she’s taking a year off from college and she’d love to hang out sometime. She looks curiously at me. “Oh, this is my friend,” Adam says. “He used to live here. Can we come inside?”
She says, “Sure,” as if it isn’t an odd request at all.
Adam looks back at me and waits until I cross the threshold.
Right here in the entryway there should be flowers. The scent should be strong, almost overpowering. Instead it’s spicy, peppery, the smell of food that burns your eyes. Below my feet there should be flat green carpet. But it’s gone, replaced by red-brown tile. Just two steps farther into the entryway is where my mother’s piano should be, and above it one of my father’s paintings. But they’re gone. Everything is gone.
Without a word to Adam or the girl, I cross my old living room and step out into the backyard. I take in a deep breath, and blink back tears. This is my yard, my real yard. And it’s closer to what I remember, but it’s still wrong. It’s smaller, as if the fence has been squeezed in on all sides. The bamboo forest isn’t a forest at all, just two dozen waxy green stalks, most of them not much taller than me. I remember getting lost in them.
I walk the perimeter of the fence, and try to summon what I used to feel back when I thought I could bend time and spoons. I touch the red grains in the wood. I have a vague memory of doing that.
I freeze at the triangle-shaped garden in the corner. There are no flowers since it’s winter, but it’s still framed with red brick exactly as it was. I kneel in the grass and press my fingers into the cold soil.
I remember.
Waking up early on Saturday to the specific scent of morning and pure unfiltered joy. Grabbing a gardening shovel, eager to get outside, then being here in this exact spot. Black dirt on my fingertips. The sun and air clinging to my skin and my clothes. I remember looking over my shoulder, and there was my mother, still in her nightgown, standing on the back porch shielding her eyes from the sun.
“Are you okay?” Adam asks as we’re driving away.
I don’t really want to talk, and for once I don’t want him to talk either. I’m trying to capture more of the memory. What came next? Did she step off the porch? Did she say something? What did we do that day?
But the rest won’t come. I have just that moment, her on the back porch, me kneeling in the grass and feeling a sort of happiness I didn’t remember I could feel.
“Yes,” I finally answer. And even though it’s not enough, I add, “Thank you, Adam.”
THE BUS RIDE is quiet—boring. Everyone scatters in a million different directions the second we get to the museum, so I have to wander around alone—also boring. Then an elderly security guard yells at me for stomping. So basically this field trip sucks.
I explain to the old man that I wasn’t stomping, but my feet fell asleep and I was doing that thing where you jump around to wake them up. We end up talking and I find out his name’s Gus and he has four kids and nine grandkids. He shows me a private exhibit of swords that’s closed to the public, so okay, maybe things are looking up.
Gus and I are saying our good-byes when I spot Charlie and convince him we should go outside and find that labyrinth our teacher kept telling us about—the one modeled after the eight-hundred-year-old Chartres Cathedral in France, the most intricate labyrinth design ever created.
After a twenty-minute cold gray hike, Charlie and I reach our destination. “Well, this sucks,” he says.
I agree, the labyrinth is a little disappointing. I was expecting something from The Shining—you know, a complicated maze of tall green hedges with plenty of corners to hide in. Instead it looks like a massive pagan crop circle, only the swirls are made of red and black stone tiles winding until you reach the center.
“It’s not even a real maze,” he whines. “There’s only one way to go.” He’s right. There aren’t options, just a single path. After a minute of looping around, he yells, “This is dumb!” and stomps over the lines.
“Cheating!”
“I don’t care. I’m going back in. It’s cold.”
I ignore him and keep walking the maze. It’s impossible to tell how far I am from the center. As soon as I think I’m close, the path forces me back down and around again.
I hear soft footsteps behind me, and glance over my shoulder. Emerald. She doesn’t look at me and keeps walking, her shoulders back and her strides long. Maybe this is why she’s always fascinated me. She seems so perfectly contained, while I feel like I’m spilling out of every pore.