"This novella is beautifully heartbreaking. I felt like I was holding someone's diary.
I can't wait to read more by Stephanie."
Brooke
YES. EVERY SINGLE DAY.
THE BONUS CHAPTER
When It's Just Me and You
Fresh from the Presbyterian sermon Dad grew up listening to every Easter and with full bellies, thanks to Mom and her ham and creamy scalloped potatoes, you and I thank my parents for the afternoon (Dad offers you a curt “mmhm”, but drops a kiss in my hair) and we head out before anyone clocks that it's still early for a couple of kids to be ditching out on a family holiday.
As you drive away I set the huge Ziplock bag of chocolate eggs and jelly beans my mother handed me instead of sending home ham. She’d gone overboard, gifting us more candy than we could consume before summer, but she knew you wouldn’t see your family this year and get Easter goodies. Part of me wonders if Mom baited you with candy to keep you coming back to her table, but I shove her hopeful face into the back of my mind and open the bag for you instead.
Without looking, you dip your hand into the candy stash, and a hard-shelled candy egg slips between your fingers before it gets to your mouth. The jellybeans do not share the same fate. “You wanna go fishing?”
A golden-wrapped chocolate egg catches my eye, and I peel the wrapper off in one piece. “It’s April.”
“We haven’t gone fishing since September.”
“You have.” I pop the small egg in my mouth and delight in the chocolate sliding against my tongue.
“That’s ice fishing. Entirely different.”
I look out the window to the Easter Sunday around us. You’ve slowed and the landscape isn’t zipping by now, so much as trotting along. We’re on the northwest edge of town, and though the clouds hang low and are as gray as the earth, I don’t think there’s rain in the forecast. Another block or two and we’ll see the line where the sky meets the land, and with you, that vastness is bearable. Even inviting.
Or at least easier to breathe in. “Yeah,” I say. “Let’s go.”
“Good.” You grin. My heart does that thing where it wants to float away, but stays rooted because being anywhere else is unfathomable. “'Cause I have bait, tackle, and poles in the back.”
I spike an eyebrow. “You’ve had live bait in the truck since before church?”
“They’ve had water in the bucket and it's plenty chilly.” You shrug and turn onto the gravel road you’d been slowing for while I was hemming and hawing. “I knew you’d say yes. I just thought I’d have to beg more.”
Our fishing spot is well established, but I still revel in how you call it “ours”. We cross a bridge over the narrowest part of the lake and pull into the weeds a few yards out. You grab the minnow bucket and our poles, I pluck your tackle box from the backseat and follow you to the steep incline to the cement slab we always perch on. As is tradition, I hold my breath as you do a sideways sneaker slide down the dirt path until you land on our ledge, set your handfuls down, and turn to offer me a hand. I always feel so breakable, my hand in yours, like you could break me, and I’m just going to have to trust you won’t.
“How deep is it here again?” I ask it every time.
“Pretty deep.” You know the script. We both know it's about fifteen feet deep this time of year, give or take the snow melt. And I’m the one who can swim. “But be careful.”
I’m so caught up in that, the script, that my heel slips on loose gravel. We cling to each other, and I only focus on the next step. The third step is easier, and I’m at eye level with you, safely planted on solid ground. “You made it,” you say.
“I had help.”
Your gaze flutters up over my head to the truck. “Shit. Forgot the - ”
I swivel my hips to open my hoodie pocket up wide. One ginormous Ziplock bag of Easter candy sits nestled at my abdomen.
The sun peeks out as you grin. “That’s my girl.”
After taking down another handful of jelly beans, you get to work sliding a squirming minnow on the hook. You hand me a pole and I sit on the ledge. You join me, bouncing the back of your heels into the retaining wall we’re on as you drop your line in. Our sneakers dangle over the water, the reflection of our soles dancing back up to us.
In the middle of the lake, a turtle swims by, his mission identified, his speed slow but mighty. Faint ripples his little arms create stretch out in circles for yards around his shell.
We take the cue from the lake, and sit together on the ledge in peace, and quiet. Every so often we murmur something one way or the other (you sneak a Cadbury egg from our stash and offer me half, I wonder aloud if my minnow escaped to freedom) and we lapse into companionable silence again. You catch a fish. After a mock struggle to reel it in, you lift its lip from the hook and hold it up for me to see the dusty rose and murky blue scales. “Colors of the rainbow,” you say. “Just like a Skittle.” You lean over the water and let the fish squirm away. The fish’s splash ripples make it out to meet the turtle.
The lake is the color of the sky. The sky is the color of the lake. A mirror, really. I think about what came first. The water or the sky? Logically, it was the sky, but the real riddle is this: does the water know that? Is it content to be a reflection and serve as a compass of sorts? Or does it really, quite simply, wish to be the destination?
No matter. Not really.
Behind the clouds, the sun peeks through, hazy, weak, like even it knows not to try that hard today. What does get through turns the flat lake water golden. The spring weeds, the new, small leaves on the trees, the reflection in your eyes are all the same copper as a penny. I sigh.
You look at me with your re-baited line. “Do you want to go home?”
“No.” For effect, I bounce my line a few times. “Can I tell you something?”
“Yeah.” I have your full attention, and I think you’re waiting for some great epiphany. “Let’s hear it.”
“The light right now, it reminds me of a dedication I read in a book once.” A bird coos somewhere nearby. A morning dove, in the late afternoon. “Wake with a light heart, my dear, and when you do, look up. I do believe the sky is turning blue.” I shrug, my heart banging out an extra beat too quickly. It's one thing to tell you how I feel about you — it's another thing entirely to show you how I feel about the world. “I liked it.”
You smile, small, but complete. “Me too.”
We sit here, our fishing poles in hand as the sun drifts closer to the horizon. I catch a fish and you catch another. Both are released. We discuss your mother’s impending engagement to a guy she met - you like him, and how your dad is dating again, and that’s a start. I tell you about a silly debate in my Media Law class, and we laugh about how my dad will probably never get over your tattoo. You tell me about the truck you’re considering to replace the beat-to-hell Ford you’ve been driving since senior year. I don’t understand anything about the horsepower or whatever, but I rest my head on your shoulder and breathe you in as you breathe out.
There’s never enough time or words or skin.
A canoe floats toward us to slip under the bridge we sit beside. At first, it looks like there’s only one person in the boat. He sits in front as it drifts along, his own fishing pole in hand. As the canoe gets closer I see another person — a woman, reading. The man says something, but we’re too far away to hear what, and she laughs, eyes on him.
Beside me, you laugh too.
“What?” I murmur, sitting up.
“That’ll be you.” You nod to the canoe. “On the water, surrounded by things to look at, fish to catch, and you’ll be sitting there, reading your book.”
I scoot to the edge of the wall so I can see his whole face. “And that’s the way you’ll be, fishing until the sun is so low in the sky you can’t see the pole in front of you.”
“I know.” Your voice is soft. “That’s the way it should be, the both of us.”
I can’t look away from you. “You’ve thought about that?”
“Some. You?” You look at me as if you don’t already know the answer.
“Yes.” I don’t say that I think about that all of the time. I find those thoughts in the middle of College Algebra as the TA drones on about imaginary numbers. I find those dreams on every car ride home to see you, or while I’m brushing my teeth or standing in line at the grocery store with an arm full of groceries. They’re foggy, but we’re there, in the clouds.
I have my bachelor's and I’m working on my master's. You’re a mechanic, making things that are broken work again. We live in the Hills, near your family. The trees are tall and the shadows are deep and something about the west river air smooths the anxiety I’ve always felt scaling my veins. We’ll have a small house on a quiet street with neighbors who don’t mind it when you tear around a corner too loudly on your four-wheeler because they do the same thing. I’ll write and I’ll read and I’ll figure out how to write something that’s not about you. Eventually, there will be kids. One or two. They’ll climb the trees and breathe the air and fix what’s broken and write what’s not. My parents will retire and move a town or two over, and my peace will be yours, and yours mine. Come summer, I’ll bring home bouquets of cornflowers, and wonder why their blue makes my heart seize in the best way. And I will get your smile every single day.
“Yes,” I repeat. “I do.”
We wave at the couple on the canoe as they float under the bridge.
When the sun slips behind its cloud cover again and the mist begins in earnest, we decide to pack up. I take the poles and the tackle box and you grab the minnow bucket. We climb up, me first.
You open the tailgate to set our stuff in. “Want taco salad tonight?”
“That sounds good.” I slide the poles into the truck bed and lean back to kiss your cheek. You wrap your fingers around my wrist and pull me in closer. It's been a minute since you kissed me like this, and I sink into it, into you. Lately, we’ve been reduced to pecks as I run up and down the interstate between my college life and you. You must know, I think, my hands winding behind your neck. That I don’t want to do this without you. That I cannot imagine a day without you in it. That you are everything.
Your thumb presses into the knobs of my spine under my hoodie, and your lips glide over the tip of my nose and back to my lips. You do know. You must.
The sun’s gone now. You flip the hood on my sweatshirt up over my hair and playfully tug the strings down tight. “Taco salad it is.”
In the truck, you crank the heat and I shake my damp hair down. Soft rock floats from the speakers and we head for home. A thin fog set in around the lake with the mist and you take the corners easy, even though they’re long since memorized. As we drive in the warm truck, the windshield wipers squeezing along the glass, I see us again in the fog. You’re sitting with my parents at my college graduation, clapping proudly when they call my name, relieved because the long-distance thing is done.
I see you pulling up in front of the house we just bought in that truck you told me about. I see myself reading our children to sleep. I see us at a bonfire you started in the backyard while I got the kids down, your face glowing in the copper light. I see me snuggling into your lap and pressing kisses into your skin until sleep comes.
But it always happens, a math teacher asks for an answer, or a cash register dings or a noisy windshield wiper startles me from what I see, close enough to touch by the end. It all fades away.
As if you know, you reach for my hand to take to your lips. You kiss my third knuckle, right where you always do, and turn onto the state highway to take us home, and that's enough today.
THE BONUS CHAPTER
When It's Just Me and You
Fresh from the Presbyterian sermon Dad grew up listening to every Easter and with full bellies, thanks to Mom and her ham and creamy scalloped potatoes, you and I thank my parents for the afternoon (Dad offers you a curt “mmhm”, but drops a kiss in my hair) and we head out before anyone clocks that it's still early for a couple of kids to be ditching out on a family holiday.
As you drive away I set the huge Ziplock bag of chocolate eggs and jelly beans my mother handed me instead of sending home ham. She’d gone overboard, gifting us more candy than we could consume before summer, but she knew you wouldn’t see your family this year and get Easter goodies. Part of me wonders if Mom baited you with candy to keep you coming back to her table, but I shove her hopeful face into the back of my mind and open the bag for you instead.
Without looking, you dip your hand into the candy stash, and a hard-shelled candy egg slips between your fingers before it gets to your mouth. The jellybeans do not share the same fate. “You wanna go fishing?”
A golden-wrapped chocolate egg catches my eye, and I peel the wrapper off in one piece. “It’s April.”
“We haven’t gone fishing since September.”
“You have.” I pop the small egg in my mouth and delight in the chocolate sliding against my tongue.
“That’s ice fishing. Entirely different.”
I look out the window to the Easter Sunday around us. You’ve slowed and the landscape isn’t zipping by now, so much as trotting along. We’re on the northwest edge of town, and though the clouds hang low and are as gray as the earth, I don’t think there’s rain in the forecast. Another block or two and we’ll see the line where the sky meets the land, and with you, that vastness is bearable. Even inviting.
Or at least easier to breathe in. “Yeah,” I say. “Let’s go.”
“Good.” You grin. My heart does that thing where it wants to float away, but stays rooted because being anywhere else is unfathomable. “'Cause I have bait, tackle, and poles in the back.”
I spike an eyebrow. “You’ve had live bait in the truck since before church?”
“They’ve had water in the bucket and it's plenty chilly.” You shrug and turn onto the gravel road you’d been slowing for while I was hemming and hawing. “I knew you’d say yes. I just thought I’d have to beg more.”
Our fishing spot is well established, but I still revel in how you call it “ours”. We cross a bridge over the narrowest part of the lake and pull into the weeds a few yards out. You grab the minnow bucket and our poles, I pluck your tackle box from the backseat and follow you to the steep incline to the cement slab we always perch on. As is tradition, I hold my breath as you do a sideways sneaker slide down the dirt path until you land on our ledge, set your handfuls down, and turn to offer me a hand. I always feel so breakable, my hand in yours, like you could break me, and I’m just going to have to trust you won’t.
“How deep is it here again?” I ask it every time.
“Pretty deep.” You know the script. We both know it's about fifteen feet deep this time of year, give or take the snow melt. And I’m the one who can swim. “But be careful.”
I’m so caught up in that, the script, that my heel slips on loose gravel. We cling to each other, and I only focus on the next step. The third step is easier, and I’m at eye level with you, safely planted on solid ground. “You made it,” you say.
“I had help.”
Your gaze flutters up over my head to the truck. “Shit. Forgot the - ”
I swivel my hips to open my hoodie pocket up wide. One ginormous Ziplock bag of Easter candy sits nestled at my abdomen.
The sun peeks out as you grin. “That’s my girl.”
After taking down another handful of jelly beans, you get to work sliding a squirming minnow on the hook. You hand me a pole and I sit on the ledge. You join me, bouncing the back of your heels into the retaining wall we’re on as you drop your line in. Our sneakers dangle over the water, the reflection of our soles dancing back up to us.
In the middle of the lake, a turtle swims by, his mission identified, his speed slow but mighty. Faint ripples his little arms create stretch out in circles for yards around his shell.
We take the cue from the lake, and sit together on the ledge in peace, and quiet. Every so often we murmur something one way or the other (you sneak a Cadbury egg from our stash and offer me half, I wonder aloud if my minnow escaped to freedom) and we lapse into companionable silence again. You catch a fish. After a mock struggle to reel it in, you lift its lip from the hook and hold it up for me to see the dusty rose and murky blue scales. “Colors of the rainbow,” you say. “Just like a Skittle.” You lean over the water and let the fish squirm away. The fish’s splash ripples make it out to meet the turtle.
The lake is the color of the sky. The sky is the color of the lake. A mirror, really. I think about what came first. The water or the sky? Logically, it was the sky, but the real riddle is this: does the water know that? Is it content to be a reflection and serve as a compass of sorts? Or does it really, quite simply, wish to be the destination?
No matter. Not really.
Behind the clouds, the sun peeks through, hazy, weak, like even it knows not to try that hard today. What does get through turns the flat lake water golden. The spring weeds, the new, small leaves on the trees, the reflection in your eyes are all the same copper as a penny. I sigh.
You look at me with your re-baited line. “Do you want to go home?”
“No.” For effect, I bounce my line a few times. “Can I tell you something?”
“Yeah.” I have your full attention, and I think you’re waiting for some great epiphany. “Let’s hear it.”
“The light right now, it reminds me of a dedication I read in a book once.” A bird coos somewhere nearby. A morning dove, in the late afternoon. “Wake with a light heart, my dear, and when you do, look up. I do believe the sky is turning blue.” I shrug, my heart banging out an extra beat too quickly. It's one thing to tell you how I feel about you — it's another thing entirely to show you how I feel about the world. “I liked it.”
You smile, small, but complete. “Me too.”
We sit here, our fishing poles in hand as the sun drifts closer to the horizon. I catch a fish and you catch another. Both are released. We discuss your mother’s impending engagement to a guy she met - you like him, and how your dad is dating again, and that’s a start. I tell you about a silly debate in my Media Law class, and we laugh about how my dad will probably never get over your tattoo. You tell me about the truck you’re considering to replace the beat-to-hell Ford you’ve been driving since senior year. I don’t understand anything about the horsepower or whatever, but I rest my head on your shoulder and breathe you in as you breathe out.
There’s never enough time or words or skin.
A canoe floats toward us to slip under the bridge we sit beside. At first, it looks like there’s only one person in the boat. He sits in front as it drifts along, his own fishing pole in hand. As the canoe gets closer I see another person — a woman, reading. The man says something, but we’re too far away to hear what, and she laughs, eyes on him.
Beside me, you laugh too.
“What?” I murmur, sitting up.
“That’ll be you.” You nod to the canoe. “On the water, surrounded by things to look at, fish to catch, and you’ll be sitting there, reading your book.”
I scoot to the edge of the wall so I can see his whole face. “And that’s the way you’ll be, fishing until the sun is so low in the sky you can’t see the pole in front of you.”
“I know.” Your voice is soft. “That’s the way it should be, the both of us.”
I can’t look away from you. “You’ve thought about that?”
“Some. You?” You look at me as if you don’t already know the answer.
“Yes.” I don’t say that I think about that all of the time. I find those thoughts in the middle of College Algebra as the TA drones on about imaginary numbers. I find those dreams on every car ride home to see you, or while I’m brushing my teeth or standing in line at the grocery store with an arm full of groceries. They’re foggy, but we’re there, in the clouds.
I have my bachelor's and I’m working on my master's. You’re a mechanic, making things that are broken work again. We live in the Hills, near your family. The trees are tall and the shadows are deep and something about the west river air smooths the anxiety I’ve always felt scaling my veins. We’ll have a small house on a quiet street with neighbors who don’t mind it when you tear around a corner too loudly on your four-wheeler because they do the same thing. I’ll write and I’ll read and I’ll figure out how to write something that’s not about you. Eventually, there will be kids. One or two. They’ll climb the trees and breathe the air and fix what’s broken and write what’s not. My parents will retire and move a town or two over, and my peace will be yours, and yours mine. Come summer, I’ll bring home bouquets of cornflowers, and wonder why their blue makes my heart seize in the best way. And I will get your smile every single day.
“Yes,” I repeat. “I do.”
We wave at the couple on the canoe as they float under the bridge.
When the sun slips behind its cloud cover again and the mist begins in earnest, we decide to pack up. I take the poles and the tackle box and you grab the minnow bucket. We climb up, me first.
You open the tailgate to set our stuff in. “Want taco salad tonight?”
“That sounds good.” I slide the poles into the truck bed and lean back to kiss your cheek. You wrap your fingers around my wrist and pull me in closer. It's been a minute since you kissed me like this, and I sink into it, into you. Lately, we’ve been reduced to pecks as I run up and down the interstate between my college life and you. You must know, I think, my hands winding behind your neck. That I don’t want to do this without you. That I cannot imagine a day without you in it. That you are everything.
Your thumb presses into the knobs of my spine under my hoodie, and your lips glide over the tip of my nose and back to my lips. You do know. You must.
The sun’s gone now. You flip the hood on my sweatshirt up over my hair and playfully tug the strings down tight. “Taco salad it is.”
In the truck, you crank the heat and I shake my damp hair down. Soft rock floats from the speakers and we head for home. A thin fog set in around the lake with the mist and you take the corners easy, even though they’re long since memorized. As we drive in the warm truck, the windshield wipers squeezing along the glass, I see us again in the fog. You’re sitting with my parents at my college graduation, clapping proudly when they call my name, relieved because the long-distance thing is done.
I see you pulling up in front of the house we just bought in that truck you told me about. I see myself reading our children to sleep. I see us at a bonfire you started in the backyard while I got the kids down, your face glowing in the copper light. I see me snuggling into your lap and pressing kisses into your skin until sleep comes.
But it always happens, a math teacher asks for an answer, or a cash register dings or a noisy windshield wiper startles me from what I see, close enough to touch by the end. It all fades away.
As if you know, you reach for my hand to take to your lips. You kiss my third knuckle, right where you always do, and turn onto the state highway to take us home, and that's enough today.