Poppy sighed and rushed to catch up with me. I slipped my hands into my pockets as we made our way, in silence, to the grove. Poppy was looking all around her on the way. I tried to follow what she was seeing, but it only ever appeared to be birds or trees or grass swaying in the wind. I frowned, wondering what had her so transfixed. But this was Poppy, she’d always danced to her own drumbeat. She’d always seen more going on in the world than anyone else I knew.
She saw the light piercing the dark. She saw the good through the bad.
It was the only explanation I had for why she hadn’t told me to leave her alone. I knew she saw me as different, changed. Even if she hadn’t told me so, I would have seen it in the way she watched me. Her stare was guarded sometimes.
She would never have looked at me like that before.
When we entered the grove, I knew where we would sit. We walked to the biggest tree—our tree—and Poppy opened her backpack. She pulled out a blanket to sit on.
When she had laid it out, she gestured for me to sit. I did, resting my back against the wide tree trunk. Poppy sat in the center of the blanket and leaned back on her hands.
The wind seemed to have dropped. Untying the bow from the hood’s strings, she let the hood fall back, showing her face. Poppy’s attention turned to the brightening horizon, the sky now gray, with tints of red and orange pushing through.
Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my smokes and brought one to my mouth. I struck the lighter, lit the smoke and drew in a drag, feeling the instant it hit my lungs.
The smoke billowed around me as I exhaled slowly. I caught Poppy watching me closely. Resting an arm on my raised knee, I stared right back at her.
“You smoke.”
“Ja.”
“You don’t want to stop?” she asked. I could hear in her voice that this was a request. And I could see by the flicker of a smile on her lips that she knew I was onto her.
I shook my head. It calmed me. I wouldn’t be quitting anytime soon.
We sat in silence, until Poppy looked back at the rising dawn and asked, “Did you ever watch the sunrise in Oslo?”
I followed her gaze to the now-pink horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear in a fan of light.
“No.”
“Why not?” Poppy asked, shifting her body to face me.
I took another drag of my smoke and tipped my head back to exhale. I lowered my head and shrugged. “Never occurred to me.”
Poppy sighed and turned away once more. “What an opportunity wasted,” she said, waving her arm toward the sky. “I’ve never been out of the US, never seen a sunrise anywhere else, and there you were, in Norway, and you never rose early to watch the new day roll in.”
“Once you’ve seen one sunrise, you’ve seen them all,” I replied.
Poppy shook her head sadly. When she looked at me, it was in pity. It made my stomach turn. “That’s not true,” she argued. “Every day is different. The colors, the shades, the impact on your soul.” She sighed and said, “Every day is a gift, Rune. If I’ve learned anything from the last couple of years, it’s that.”
I was silent.
Poppy tipped her head back and closed her eyes. “Like this wind. It’s cold because it’s early winter, and people run from it. They stay inside to keep warm. But I embrace it. I cherish the feeling of the wind on my face, the heat of the sun on my cheeks in the summer. I want to dance in the rain. I dream of lying in the snow, feeling its coldness in my bones.” She opened her eyes. The crest of the sun began to inch into the sky. “When I was getting treatment, when I was confined to my hospital bed, when I was in pain and going crazy from every aspect of my life, I would get the nurses to turn my bed to the window. The sunrise each day would calm me. It would restore my strength. It would fill me with hope.”
A trail of ash dropped onto the ground beside me. I realized that I hadn’t moved since she started talking. She faced me and said, “When I used to look out of that window, when I was missing you so much that it hurt worse than the chemo, I would stare at that breaking dawn and I would think of you. I would think of you watching the sunrise in Norway and it would bring me peace.”
I said nothing.
“Were you happy even once? Was there any part of the last two years where you weren’t sad or angry?”
The fire of anger that sat in my stomach flared to life. I shook my head. “No,” I replied as I flicked my dead smoke to the ground.
“Rune,” Poppy whispered. I saw the guilt in her eyes. “I thought you’d move on, eventually.” She lowered her eyes, but when she looked up again, she completely broke my heart. “I did it because we never thought I would last this long.” A weak, yet strangely powerful, smile graced her face. “I’ve been gifted more time. I’ve been gifted life,”—she breathed in deeply—“and now, to add to the miracles that keep coming my way, you’ve returned.”