The Space Between Us (21 page)

Truthfully, my body was dying for some solid cardio. I’d been doing the handful of Pilates moves I knew in Bree’s apartment every night, but that crap wasn’t cutting it anymore. But the cold. I shook my head. “I almost froze to death last week. Remember?”

“So that’s a no.”

“That’s a no.”

“Where’s your sister?”

My stomach muscles tensed, bracing for the punch after it’d already come. Why did that have to be the defining
question in my life? I pulled my eyes away from his and looked up the street.

“Somewhere else,” I answered.

“Cryptic. So you’re coming?”

I took one step toward the car. “I don’t want to ski.”

He shrugged. “Okay.”

“And I don’t want to talk about my sister.”

“What sister?”

I was close enough to hear the music in his car now: a moody, indie rock song I didn’t recognize. “And no snowshoeing, or snowboarding, or ski jumping, or anything even remotely related to any of them.” One more step. The wind moaned and I leaned into it, my bones aching.

He nodded to the passenger side. “I’ll take you somewhere warm.”

Magical words. I forced myself to walk, not run, around the front of his car. I’d spent the last week replaying our conversation at the library, wondering how much of an idiot I’d really been. But it couldn’t have been that bad. He was here. I climbed in and dumped my backpack over the seat.

“How was school?” He pulled out into traffic.

“Um, fine.” His car smelled like the wintergreen air freshener hanging from the mirror.

“Really?”

I hesitated. Fine was the
leave me alone
answer for Bree. I
shrugged. “It’s just kind of nothing. Not terrible. Not good.”

“I hated that place.”

I played with the zipper on my jacket, waiting for him to elaborate. Different kinds of people hate school for different kinds of reasons. Dumb kids, social misfits, stoners. I didn’t want Ezra to be any of those. “Why’d you hate it?”

“Boring,” he said. “And people were always trying to pressure me into things.”

“Like drugs?”

“No. University.”

That was moronic. We drove on in silence, leaving town on a road climbing up, past cabins and more vacation properties, higher up the mountain.

I stole a glance to the side. Ezra was wearing a sky-blue T-shirt over a navy long-sleeved shirt and jeans. “Where’s your coat?” I asked, not hiding my smirk. “Don’t tell me you wander around in the winter without a coat on.”

“No coat is not above my skill level.”

“Funny.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “But my coat is in the backseat.”

I looked over my shoulder. It was.

“So what’s Florida like?”

I sighed and wished I hadn’t. I hated sighing, hated sighers. “Warm.”

“That’s it?”

He tucked his hair behind his ear, and I noticed the
cracked skin on his hands. Red and angry. More proof this place was uninhabitable for everyone. “No,” I said. “It’s just hard to describe. The people are different. Everything’s more . . . colorful.”

He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t jump in to deny the bleakness all around us. “I’ve never been there. Never been south of Colorado, actually, but the people didn’t really seem that different there. Probably because I was in Vail. Skiers are skiers.”

“I haven’t really traveled either, but I think it’s the South. People are really friendly in a loud way.”

“You don’t seem that way.”

I paused. Maybe it was an insult, but it wasn’t
not
true. “I guess I’m not. The town I’m from is small too, and it’s really insular, you know? Everyone knows each other’s business and goes to the same church and the same grocery store and the same doctor.”

“Same gene pool?”

“No, that’s Kentucky.”

He almost smiled. It was just that way with him, I was starting to realize. The
almost
smile was as good as it got. I wanted to keep looking at his face, at the way his upper lip curved and dipped, and the tiny scar above his left eye. But he glanced at me, and I had to look away.

“It’s insular here too,” he said. “Maybe small towns are just small towns.”

“It feels different being on the outside, though. Tremonton is suffocating, but being away from it is . . . I don’t know.”

“Lonely?”

I wasn’t going to admit to that. “Disorienting.”

Out my window, I recognized the bridge spanning the frozen river ahead. I took a deep breath and held it. Habit. In Grandma’s car, we held our breath for bridges and made a wish.

“Are you holding your breath?” Ezra asked.

I shook my head no, but kept my lips pursed, breath safely intact.

“Should I speed up or are you going to make it?” He slowed slightly and watched me, waiting for a reaction.

I puffed out my cheeks and waited. The bridge was short, so we were at the other side in just a few seconds.

“Southern superstition?”

I let the air rush out. “What, Canadians don’t make wishes?”

“We don’t need to. We’re Canadian, what more could we want?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Kidding. We throw pennies in fountains. What did you wish for?”

“You can’t tell people what you wish for. And everyone throws pennies in fountains.”

“I didn’t take you for the superstitious type.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t. I hadn’t even made a wish. I had a million things to wish for, but I didn’t believe for a second that I could make any of them come true. Not by wishing. Probably not by trying either. “When we were little, Charly always commandeered my wishes.”

“I don’t think wishes can be commandeered.”

“Trust me, they can. Once she ordered me to wish that the girl who lived across the street would fall into a hole or get leprosy before the
Wizard of Oz
auditions.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t work.”

“No, but she did forget her lines.” Why was I talking about Charly?

“So I should be putting wish requests in, then. Can you make it snow?”

I narrowed my eyes and smiled. “I won’t use my wishing powers for evil.”

“Of course not,” he said. “Wishing leprosy on a little girl—that’s not evil.”

“She was kind of a brat. Where are we going?”

“Surprise.”

I hated surprises, but at the moment it didn’t seem to matter. The car was warm. I was warm. Talking to Ezra was easy enough that I could almost forget how mad I was at Bree and Charly.

Ezra stopped at a stop sign, and without warning
he reached out and touched my cheek with his finger. “Speaking of wishes . . . ”

It felt like fire where he’d touched me.

“Eyelash,” he said, and he held out his finger. “You get another wish, just in case you squandered the one from the bridge on leprosy or something.”

“Let me think.”

I looked at my lash on his fingertip, a single black curl. The arc of his palm was so close I wanted to touch it. Why bother wishing for something impossible?
I wish Charly had never gotten pregnant. I wish I’d gotten into Columbia. I wish Will was full full full of regret for losing me. I wish I could tell my best friend the truth instead of having to cover for Charly. I wish Dad cared that I was gone. I wish Bree wasn’t a better big sister than I am.

None of that was going to happen.

So I closed my eyes and wished Ezra would touch my cheek again. Then I blew the lash away.

A horn blared behind us.

“Settle down,” Ezra muttered, and we started moving again.

• • •

My surprise: hanging in a glass pod over an icy crevasse.

“You lied,” I said.

“What?”

“You said you’d take me somewhere warm.”

“I think I said warm
er
. It’s at least a couple of degrees warmer in here than outside.”

The gondola rocked back and forth in the wind and I silently cursed myself for getting talked into this. “How far up do you think we are?”

“Not that far. Fifteen meters?” Ezra sat beside me, both of us backward, watching the town shrink as we moved up the mountain. Another gust of wind came and I tightened my grip on the metal bench. He glanced down at my hands. “You aren’t afraid of heights, are you?”

“No.” I wasn’t phobic—I just didn’t seek out gravity-defying experiences. Or enjoy them in the least. “And I don’t speak metric.”

“Oh. About fifty feet.”

I stared up at the cable. It was out of place, a skinny, man-made thing stretched across a chillingly vibrant sunset. We were suspended like a single pearl hanging from a chain. One tug and
snap
. Below us ice and rock waited. The gondola car would explode like dropped crystal. “Rock-a-bye baby,” I whispered to myself.

Ezra shifted his weight beside me, jostling the gondola. He was close enough for me to feel the warmth of his body, to smell the candy in his mouth.

He held out a Starburst pack. I took one.

“So what do you think?” he asked.

I looked down to the forest again, ice-crusted and
shimmering, then twisted around to the summit of Sulphur Mountain behind us. Pretty, but the magic was in the sky. The clouds were tangerine and violet and every shade in between, the sun smoldering behind the mountains. “The colors . . . ,” I started, then didn’t finish.

“I know. It’s like the sky is burning.”

“And the trees look purple. I hadn’t noticed that before.”

“Up close you only see the green. You need distance to really see them.”

Distance. He was right. From far away they looked entirely different, purple and gold shining beneath the green. I took a deep breath, forcing my muscles to relax.

Distance from Charly, distance from home, distance from
everything
—was that supposed to make it all less ugly? If so, it wasn’t working. Maybe I wasn’t far enough away. Maybe I couldn’t get far enough away.

“Look,” Ezra said, leaning across me and pointing.

I looked without leaning, trying to keep the gondola level.

“Elk. Do you see them?”

“No.”

“Down there.” He put one hand on my shoulder, the other on my hip, and slid me over to the edge of the bench. The gondola tilted and I willed myself not to gasp. I exhaled shakily onto the glass, my breath fogging a small
circle. He pointed again, but beyond his finger there was only white. White ice, white snow, white breath. Then I saw them. There were four, tan and brown, with broad grey antlers, ambling through the trees.

“Yesterday I pulled in a guy with a concussion, a Japanese businessman here on vacation. He didn’t know, or maybe just couldn’t remember, much English, but kept saying the names of animals he’d learned. He came to hunt.”

“What do people hunt here?”

Ezra knocked on the glass with his knuckle. “Those. And anything else that moves and that they can pull the skin off to mount on their walls and show how manly they are.”

“I take it you don’t approve.”

“That’s a nice way of saying it.”

I sat back as our car slowed. We’d reached the top, a station to disembark. Ezra twirled his finger in a loop and the attendant on the platform waved and nodded. “Unless you want to get off and wander around the mountain in the cold for a while?”

“No.” Then after a pause, “This is nice.”

His lips curved upward, but it was gone before it could become a smile. Our gondola car followed the cable track, making a U-turn and starting its way back down.

“You don’t like to smile, do you,” I said.

“Not true. I just save it for when I mean it. I know
people who smile all the time and it means nothing.”

Bree came to mind. “Some people say it’s the smiling that makes you happy. Endorphins or whatever.”

“Ah, the smile-
until
-you-mean-it people.”

“Yeah, them.”

“That seems like something people say to excuse being fake. You don’t smile all that much either.”

“Not out of principle,” I explained, suddenly self-conscious. “I just don’t have much to smile about at the moment.”

We sat in silence, gliding backward down the mountain. That side of the sky was ocean blue and darkening.

“Thank you,” I said.

He looked down, tapping his boot on the slushy metal floor. “Don’t thank me. Thank Yukon.”

Yukon. The dreadlocked hippie at the gondola ticket office who had given Ezra a hug and insisted we “ride as many times as you freakin’ feel like, eh?”

“No,” I said, feeling almost embarrassed, but not enough to stop. “Thank you for being so nice to me. I don’t really deserve it. I haven’t been . . . ”

Ezra looked at me, his face unreadable as always. Or maybe not. That blank calm was starting to mean more, like maybe he understood me. And maybe he was about to kiss me. I could imagine him leaning into me, putting his lips on mine. I wanted him to.

He didn’t.

We rode the gondola until the colors darkened and the sky turned black.

• • •

“Where’ve you been?” Bree asked. But she wasn’t even looking up. She was leaning over Charly, who was leaning over an open photo album at the island, her finger tapping a picture.

That was fine. I didn’t want to tell them, or at least not Bree, because it’d meant something. I didn’t want anything from the last two hours I’d spent with Ezra stolen in the telling.

A photo album.

“Are those pictures of Mom?” I asked, taking a step toward them. Hadn’t I been waiting for this, for Bree to lug out the evidence? I’d known she’d have pictures, stories, memories linking her to Mom. So why the dread? Or was it anticipation?

“No,” Charly said, and closed the book. “They’re from the adoption agency.”

I stopped, feeling like I’d been slapped. “You’re choosing parents.”

Charly didn’t say anything, but slid the book off the table into a bag by her feet. There were several more albums in the bag.

“We just picked up a few of these profile books that couples who want to adopt put together,” Bree explained.

“Oh.”

“Where’ve you been?” Bree asked again.

Charly was choosing people to be her child’s parents and she didn’t want me to see. I was too disoriented to lie. “With Ezra.”

Bree looked up, startled, then grinned. “Really? Doing what?”