Avery and I walked from the gully to dump the wood on the wet shore of the China Spring. The snow had melted from most of the larger rocks and we sat together in the sunlight while dragonflies dipped and buzzed near the surface of the water. That was where she told me the things she wanted me to know and which she’d never meant to say.
With her legs crossed, her dark hair blowing in the breeze, she told me the story of two girls: one who wanted to save a boy but couldn’t, and one who wanted a boy to save himself but who wouldn’t. These girls, who met as lab partners in their senior-year science class, decided to help each other, in the way girls are wont to do. I pictured it happening like in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Only instead of murder, these girls charted their course to freedom through kindness. Reason, too. And so one was tasked with teaching the other’s boy how to hold on, while the second intended to help the first’s learn to let go.
“What did Archie need to hold on to?” I asked her.
“His life,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”
Of course, I didn’t. I knew nothing about Archie because I didn’t like him and I didn’t think he was funny or interesting or even very smart. But I guess Archie and I were of the same mind regarding the worth of his character, because according to Avery he’d been doing everything he could to destroy himself for the past two years. It was the reason he took so many risks. Why he stopped carrying his asthma medicine. And threw knives at his feet. He was waiting to succeed at failing.
Hoping, really.
“He was twelve the first time he was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning,” she told me. “I don’t know if he did that on purpose or not, but it doesn’t matter. He also overdosed on pills last fall—that was on purpose, although he’d never say so. And he stole shit. Drove when he was wasted. Got into fights. He tried to die or get himself killed in pretty much every way possible, which meant he hated himself the more he lived because being alive only proved he was a failure. But I loved him, and I worried about him because he wouldn’t talk to me or to anyone about any of that stuff. He knew I wouldn’t be able to stand it if he actually took his own life. But telling him that, all it did was make him feel worse. And I don’t know, it’s strange how loving someone can make them feel worthless, but that’s what sickness does. Abuse, too. But when Rose got a hold of him, it seemed like he was doing better. Because she’s not me. She didn’t waste her time telling him how great he was.”
I was baffled. “What did she do?”
“She made him want things.”
“What things? How?”
Avery sighed. “Ask her. I don’t know, really, other than getting him to join the orienteering club. But they share a certain kind of pessimism, those two. It’s like they’re both determined to see the world for what it is, not what they’ve been promised—even if it hurts. Or because it hurts. I don’t know that Rose even liked Archie. I’m pretty sure she didn’t, but she helped him anyway because they connected over the ways they’d failed the people who tried to love them. Every time I thought he was going to end it all—he started carrying that dumb gun around once he found out he wasn’t going to graduate—Rose gave him a reason to live. Even if it was just for one day, or one hour, it was something. Although, you know”—Avery blushed—“the ironic thing is that it was Archie who got Rose and me talking in the first place. I’d told him about you coming to see me at my dad’s shop this summer, and he could tell I liked you, I always have, I guess. But when Arch saw that Rose and I were partners, he told her how I felt. He was just being a dick, but the thing was . . .”
“. . . it’s what made you and Rose friends,” I said, without finishing the last of my thought: Because Rose wanted you to have me.
Avery nodded.
“So I was the boy meant to let go?”
“Yes.”
“Of Rose.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“That’s between you and Rose. But I think . . . but I think she doesn’t want to hurt you. And more than that, she wants you to know how to walk away from pain. How to choose what you need, not what you think you have to give.”
My head was spinning. “And us? What about us?”
Avery shrugged, at the same time reaching to slide off her camera’s lens cap. “There is no us, Ben. That’s just it. Don’t you see? There’s you and there’s me. But those”—she added with that easy smile of hers—“are both very good things.”
She lifted her camera then and snapped the picture you’ve all seen by now on the news, the one that’s come to define me and my motives. I don’t know how she did it, but Avery managed to capture everything about that moment: me, hunched on a rock in a small patch of sunlight, knees pulled tight to my chest, and there’s the most love-lost look on my face—an expression of heartbreak, bewilderment, and utter, utter despair.
45.
WE GOT TO work on the bonfire after that, because there wasn’t much left to say. Avery and I arranged the wood we’d gathered, first clearing the ground of snow, as much as we could, sweeping it off with our feet and with branches too wet to burn. When the pebbly shore below was visible, we positioned the dry wood we’d found into a shape that was ultimately my suggestion—and a petty one, at that: a pair of twin Xs.
The double cross.
It’s hard to remember what I was feeling in those moments. A lot of things, I’m sure. But as crushed as I was, what I kept coming back to, over and over, wasn’t Rose or Avery. Or even myself.
It was Dunc’s goofy smile and all the lonely suffering it hid.
It was Archie’s final march into the snow, which had seemed like suicide, but had also been an act that saved me.
It was, above all else, Mr. Howe’s undying determination, in the face of a future marred by disappointment and dreams unfulfilled, to stay at peace with nature, never at war. It was his boundless joy and unfailing wonder at every mountain climbed, every vista reached, every turn in every goddamn trail.
In truth, I’d envied so much of what he’d chased and found, but when I thought about it more, I realized Avery might’ve gotten the whole desire and want thing mixed up. Maybe desire wasn’t just about going after what made you feel good; maybe it was also about finding a way to feel good about yourself in the first place.
My skin tingled at the thought, the possibility. Could life really be that simple? It was a novel idea, to consider I might make my own joy, rather than waiting for the things I loved to be taken from me. To believe contentment wasn’t something to pursue, but something I could be.
A state of mind.
Yes, I told myself. But of course.
“Hey,” Avery said sharply.
I glanced up, a faint smile on my lips, but she was looking somewhere behind me. I turned to see Tomás running toward us, waving his arms frantically. He was calling for help, and I knew exactly what he’d say before he even said it. How could it have been anything else?
“It’s Rose,” he gasped as he reached us. “Something’s wrong!”