27
Campsites designated “walk-in” are reserved on a first-come basis. Stake your claim by displaying your receipt on the numbered site post. Anyone caught tampering with reservation tags will be asked to leave the park. Because seriously, who does that?
—Sign posted at the John Bryan State Park camp office
A week to the day after Izzy’s brunch, Paul rolled tentatively down his driveway, successfully steered onto the street, and sat revving the motorcycle engine at the end of her driveway. He was wearing a bulky black leather jacket, narc-like mirrored sunglasses, jeans, and black boots she’d never seen before—and looking so much like he was playing the role of some parallel universe Paul that she had to laugh.
“Hello, Parallel Universe Paul,” she said before she could stop herself.
She let go of the walk-behind aerator she’d been pushing awkwardly through the soil and wiped her sweaty hands on her jeans. She might not have made any progress with Penny, or Josh, or even her parents, but she had read up on fall lawn maintenance, and thus here she was. Maintaining.
He laughed. “You could say that. Want to join me on a ride through the other dimension?”
She stepped back to take a better look at the machine rumbling beneath him. It was … well, she knew nothing about motorcycles, but this one was quite shiny at the moment. Beads of water trembled in the spots he’d missed wiping dry after its bath.
“Tempting. But this is the first day all week that it hasn’t rained, so I feel like I need to take advantage.”
He eyed the primitive contraption at her fingertips, its wheel of steel spikes poised to resume its laborious tilling. “I do enjoy a medieval torture device on a crisp fall day. It’s a close second to riding through the cool air, the colorful leaves all around you…”
“I’ll have you know this torture device is going to fortify my lawn before winter.”
He looked around. “It’s unfortified? I didn’t realize. Should I dig a moat while you push?”
She raised an eyebrow, trying not to waver. This of all tasks seemed so much like the sort of thing one should enlist either a husband or a lawn service to do that it somehow seemed important—symbolic, even—that she do it on her own. And she’d had a mind to do it now, today—to act on the conviction before it faded.
“I promised my mother I’d never ride on one,” she said. It was true—her mother loathed motorcycles—though she’d made the promise only because she’d been quite sure she’d never be tempted.
“Ouch. I should hope not,” he said, shrinking back from the aerator, and she laughed. Admittedly, when Randi and Rhoda had agreed to let her borrow the machine—evidence they really did have all the tools—she hadn’t been expecting something so lethal looking. Or so surprisingly difficult to push.
“I promised Kristin too,” he admitted, and he said her name so unflinchingly that Izzy managed not to cringe. “It’s one of the old toys I’m not allowed to play with anymore. I was just cleaning out the garage.” They both turned to look at his house, for no reason other than the fact that he’d mentioned it. “I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it’s been a month. Something about that benchmark makes it seem like they’re really gone. And if they are … I can’t hang on to this house. It’s too much.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant in the physical sense, as in the house was too big, or the emotional sense, as in too many painful memories resided inside, but she suspected both applied. Halloween was approaching, the Little Holiday That Could in that it spanned weeks of festivals and events here in small-town Ohio, and she imagined him busying himself to avoid thinking of a year without his own duo of costumed trick-or-treaters. Avoidance would be a hard trick.
“This might be its last spin,” Paul said, turning the grip so the engine revved again. “I should have sold it years ago, and I can’t start riding again now that I’m allowed to. It would look too much like I’m having a midlife crisis.”
“Are you, though?” He had reason enough.
“Yes, of course. But it would look like it.”
She laughed. He wasn’t as unlike her as she’d once thought, really. If nothing else, they were both misunderstood.
“Sure you don’t need a break?” he asked once more. “Or a hand? I don’t have to go.”
Again Izzy wondered if she should feel more hesitation about Paul. But what she felt was the opposite: the sort of compulsion toward forward motion that could finally pull her out of her funk. If she couldn’t do it herself, why not let some external force give it a try? And the only force that had been making itself available was again right here before her.
“I’ll get my coat,” she said.
*
The ride was exhilarating. It made Izzy feel alive. And not so much because of the wind tangling her hair or the road rumbling beneath them as they headed away from town, following the county highways that curved intermittently through expanses of farmland and patches of forest, but because of all the reasons she perhaps shouldn’t be doing what she was doing—her arms tightly wrapped around Paul’s waist, as he’d instructed—and all the reasons she had every right to do it anyway.
She’d always thought that a bicycle on a beautiful day was pure freedom. If that was true, then a motorcycle was a notch above freedom into the realm of danger. It was rebellion. No wonder every stereotype put a rebel at the handlebars and a gritty girl along for the ride.
Ahead was an overlook, a simple semicircle on the side of the road, and Paul slowed, pulling the motorcycle onto the patch of gravel and cutting the engine. They dismounted in silence, unstrapped their helmets—which Izzy had insisted they wear, in spite of his halfhearted grumbling—and walked companionably to the stone wall. Izzy must have driven past this spot a dozen times going to and from Springfield, but she’d never stopped. The drop was dizzying: Far beneath them, a rocky creek disappeared into a canopy of trees clinging defiantly to their brightest leaves. In the vacuum left by the sudden silencing of the motor, she could hear the calling of a single whippoorwill.
She said the word aloud, almost involuntarily. “Whippoorwill.”
Paul cocked his head to listen. “How can you tell?”
“It’s saying its own name.” The bird paused as if waiting for Paul to catch on, then started up again. She never heard one without thinking of the first time she’d noticed the bird’s song. Her father had pointed it out one summer evening as they’d been sitting around the campfire, just the two of them, neither her mother nor Penny having an interest in the overnight, and it had suddenly seemed so clear to her that the bird was relentlessly asserting its place in the forest. Whip-por-will, whip-por-will, whip-por-will … She liked to think that even if her father hadn’t been there at all, she’d have recognized the birdsong for what it was.
If only she had asserted herself so clearly in the landscape of her own life, rather than waiting for it all to fall into place around her, who knew where she might be now.
“So it is,” Paul said. The bird was hitting its stride, picking up steam. “And the song is long. Like Randy Travis promised.”
She smiled. “I had the same thought first time I heard it.” She’d felt gratitude toward the whippoorwill that night, her tired feet propped on the fire ring next to her dad’s, as she took in the reminder that knowing something existed wasn’t the same as experiencing it for yourself. Like reading about love: You couldn’t fully understand it, no matter how brilliant the prose, until you had your first taste.