The Summer I Learned to Fly (17 page)

“Yes, sir,” Emmett said. “Thank you.”

The man nodded and took a few steps ahead of us, where he bent down to pick up Emmett’s crumpled map like he was
collecting a thoughtlessly discarded candy wrapper. He tucked it under his arm and continued around another bend in the path, out of sight.

We started to run. Back down the hillside to the valley floor. We ran along the side of the creek. We ran west, chasing the slipping sun.

I hadn’t had time to consider what the man meant when he said soon enough we’d smell it, but out of this valley of wildflowers and blossoming trees came the scent of rotten eggs. Strong enough to stop us in our tracks.

“Wow. What died?” I held the sleeve of my sweatshirt up to cover my nose.

Emmett took in a deep, greedy breath. He broke into a grin.

“Sulfur,” he said. “We must be close.”

And we were. In front of us, a dense cluster of trees, gathered as if protecting something. Something that the world might eat up whole. And no more than a hundred paces into these trees we came upon the spring. Steam rising from the dark waters. A boulder to the side. A place from which to leap.

It was smaller and less majestic than I’d imagined. I think I’d confused my fantasies of visiting Hawaii with finding these waters; I’d convinced myself that this faraway place I longed to reach would be like something on a postcard. But the creek and the wildflower-strewn valley were far lovelier than this dark, smelly, steaming, watery hole, sheltered in a knot of tangled trees.

Emmett’s eyes brimmed with tears.

“This is it,” he whispered. He kicked off his shoes. He took off his shirt. Even in this moment, I was able to admire the smoothness of his skin, tight over the muscles just starting to push their way out of his lanky torso. The patch of hair underneath each of his armpits.

The smell of his sweat mixed with the smell of sulfur. It was an earthy, natural smell. The smell of life.

He scrambled to the top of the boulder.

He looked down at me and reached out his hand.

I sat and unlaced my shoes. I took care removing my sweatshirt and the long-sleeved T-shirt I wore over a tank top. I folded them both neatly and placed them next to my balled up socks. I proceeded slowly, with caution, not for the sake of caution itself, but because I wanted this moment to last forever.

I rolled up my jeans to my knees.

I climbed up the boulder and stood next to Emmett and I took hold of his outstretched hand.

“Thank you,” he said to me. “A million times, thank you.” He wiped at his eyes with his free hand. “I wouldn’t be here without you.”

“Don’t forget,” I said. “Hold on tight.”

He nodded.

We stood like that for a minute. Squeezing each other’s hands. His eyes were clenched shut. He was concentrating. He was praying. Hoping. Dreaming. He was begging for his miracle.

I closed my eyes too.

I pictured Nick in his hospital bed. His surfboard sketch. I thought of Swoozie and all the love in each embrace. I
thought of Mom and her closet of sweaters and the secrets she hid there. Her calculator ribbon. Her ledger book. Her blossoming romance. Her life. I thought of my own life. The start of eighth grade. The ways I might begin again. Find real friends.

Though I didn’t know him, I thought of David. Of Emmett’s father. His mother. I imagined them together. Happy. I heard the faintest sound of laughter.

Emmett squeezed my hand tighter. I opened my eyes. He was looking at me.

“Are you ready?”

I nodded. “Ready.”

“I’ll hold on. I won’t forget.”

We stepped to the edge of the boulder. We took a long look at each other.

And then we leapt.

epilogue

I’m guessing that when you think back on your first kiss, it doesn’t involve a 76 station on the side of Interstate 5, the sound of passing eighteen-wheelers, and the glare of four eyes belonging to two angry mothers. But that is where my very first kiss happened. This wasn’t even a
real
first kiss, as it didn’t involve my lips. Emmett kissed me between my eyes, just like the boy in the legend did to his soon-to-be bride as she clung to life, a kiss to say don’t leave me, don’t slip away, I will make everything right.

It also turned out to be a kiss goodbye. It was the last I would ever see of him.

I thought he might kiss me as we sat shivering on the bank of the spring with our clothes soaked through and our feet dangling in the steaming water. We looked into each other’s eyes the way I’d always imagined people did right before they leaned in closer and touched lips for the first time.
But that was all we did. We looked at each other. Into each other. We were still clutching hands.

When we finally walked out of the woods that night, cold, damp, and unsure of what we had done, of whether any of the miracles we shut our eyes and dared hope for might come true, it was late. The sky was dark and full of stars. I was tired and hungry and stinking of sulfur. I felt profoundly happy.

At Gus’s General Store Lila helped me place a call to my mother, who unleashed a whiplash-inducing array of reactions. But the strongest sound in her voice was relief. I was safe. My phone call spelled the end of her worst nightmare.

She asked me for Emmett’s home number. She said no mother should ever have to go through what she’d been through over the past twenty-four hours. I cupped my hand over the phone and asked him. He took a pen from the store’s countertop and wrote it on my palm. I read it aloud to my mother.

“Don’t move a muscle,” she said. “I’ll be there as fast as humanly possible.” She hung up, dialed the number I’d given her, climbed into her car, and drove through the night.

Lila gave us cans of soda and slabs of beef jerky and some Kraft spreadable cheese that came with little red sticks and stale crackers. Eventually she had to lock up and go home, and she left us out front, on the bench, with a few blankets she found in the storage room to protect ourselves against the creeping cold.

My mother pulled up around three in the morning. She didn’t turn off the headlights or close her door. She jumped out with the ignition still running and raced over to me and
pulled me into her. She leaned back and looked at my face. She stroked my cheek. She reached over to Emmett and she touched him too, because despite everything, he was still a boy and she was still a mother.

“Get into the car,” she said angrily, but then, in an act of kindness, she opened the back door for us both. She might not have understood why, but she knew that we’d need this last time together. To sit next to each other with our legs touching, listening to each other breathing. Emmett reached over and he took my hand again, and he didn’t let go for the entire five hours it took to reach the interstate turnoff halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, where Mom had arranged to meet his mother.

After the sad, silent wave we gave each other as we climbed into cars that would drive us in opposite directions, Mom didn’t say a word to me. Talk would come later. Fury and scolding, about how I’d aided and abetted a fugitive. Questioning, about whether I’d let him do things to me that I wasn’t ready for. Reprimanding, about the way I’d put myself in danger. Reminding, about how the world was an unsafe place I wasn’t yet old enough to navigate without her guidance.

And then, finally, understanding, when she was able to stop talking and really listen to why I’d run away. Why, after being such a reliable kid for so long, I’d gone and done something so reckless. So crazy. So completely irrational.

Because, I told her, I wanted to believe.

Every day for the first two weeks after getting back home I went to the bus station to look for Hum. I’d bring along a bag of macadamia nuts and sit in the grass, throwing one after
the other after the other, waiting for him to come bounding toward me with one of those nuts between his teeth. He never did, and eventually I stopped going to the bus station.

Emmett’s number remained on my palm for days—it turned out to be a permanent marker he’d reached for that night—but I never called him. I never did for the same reason I stopped going to the bus station to look for Hum.

It was easier to invent my own ending, like the way Mom had always told me my father’s heart stopped working, that he was
all done living
, so that I wouldn’t have to know that he died in fear and in pain of a disease that ravaged his young body in a matter of months.

I chose to imagine that Hum had found a better life. To imagine that David could hear and understand and even laugh at Emmett’s stories of Conan the Barbarian, that their father returned to live with the family, and that come the following spring, they would plant a cucumber patch in their backyard.

I chose to believe in miracles.

I’m eighteen now, and soon I’ll be able to see that magician’s trick, the sudden appearance of the Golden Gate Bridge on any day I choose. The University of California at Berkeley is across a different bridge, but San Francisco is close enough that I can go into the city whenever I like, and I can take that walk, and find that bench, and tear into a piece of bread. Something tells me I’ll do that often.

My mother still owns her shop on Euclid Avenue. She was ahead of her time, and the rest of the world finally caught up with her. The Cheese Shop is now one of several gourmet
stores in town doing a thriving business, but you can ask anybody. They’ll tell you hers is the best by far.

She lives in the same small house by the beach, but she’s threatening to turn my room into her yoga studio where nobody will be allowed, not even her husband, Fletch, to whom I must officially apologize for the way I thought the worst of him when I didn’t know him at all. He has been nothing short of wonderful to her, as he was to me, during the not-always-easy years of my adolescence.

Nick finally made it to college, but it took another year to fill out those applications. He returned to work and Mom rode him until I think he did it just to shut her up, and when he went, he put an ocean between them. He and Becca will graduate from the University of Hawaii next May, and they plan to stay in Honolulu, where they hope to open up a surf shop one day. Nick has yet to perfect his one-legged surfboard, though not for lack of trying. Occasionally he’ll send me a package with a box of Good News bars, since Hawaii is the only place left where you can get them.

I can’t believe I’ve never been to visit. I still dream of going to Hawaii, and I know I will, someday.

Miracles happen slowly. Not overnight. Not with a leap from a boulder, or a plunge into hot water.

There are the days when I think I don’t believe anymore. When I think I’ve grown too old for miracles. And that’s right when another one seems to happen.

Like today, when I looked into the mailbox and found his letter.

It had no return address, though as soon as I opened it, I knew it was from Emmett. I reached inside the envelope and pulled out a perfectly folded paper crane.

It took a while, but I want you to know

that because of you, things are better
.

So, thank you
.

For feeding me
.

For helping me find where I was going
.

For letting go of something you loved so dearly so you could come along with me
.

For holding my hand and saving me from drowning
.

If I could make my own paper bird and send it out into the world so that it might find its way to him, or if those numbers hadn’t washed from my palm all those years ago, I would pick up the phone and call him.

Can you hear me, Emmett Crane?

You were my first real friend, the first person I really knew, who knew me too, so it doesn’t surprise me that I want to say to you the very same things you said to me.

Thank you.

You saved me from drowning.

Because of you, things are better.

Dana Reinhardt lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two daughters. She is the author of
The Things a Brother Knows, How to Build a House, Harmless
, and
A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life
. Visit her on the Web at
danareinhardt.net
.