Page 7 of Never Landing

We’d been children, after all. It hadn’t been serious.

Nothing a fourteen-year-old ever did had the ability to be serious, it seemed.

The upstairs of the house was in even worse shape than the downstairs. I could smell mildew, and finally found the open window—not broken, thank goodness—in the previous main bedroom where my grandmother had lived and died. The window next to the bed was sitting open, and the rain must have been getting in for five years. I sighed and went over toclose it, but the damage was done. The carpet and mattress and everything would have to go. Not that I’d expected anyone to ever again sleep in the bed my grandmother had died in.

I’d never been able to make my therapist understand that Peter had been the most real, most serious person in my life. Closer to me than my parents, more important than any other friend or boyfriend or family I’d ever had.

That couldn’t possibly be true. Family was always the most important, I was assured again and again, by everyone. An absent, manipulative father and a mother more interested in wine night with her PTA friends than me—they were who I should care most about. That was “normal.”

And somehow, I had a hard time remembering what color my father’s eyes were. Everyone told me he and I looked exactly alike, so blue, I supposed. They would know better than me.

Peter’s clear, hazel eyes that had seemed to become more green or brown with his moods? Those, I could never forget. Especially filled with tears as he told me that if I really loved him, I would stay. I’d stay forever, and never leave.

They’d been so green that day; almost as green as a stormy, wind-swept sea.

I found myself in my own childhood room. The purple room, my grandmother had called it, and she’d argued with my father constantly about whether it was appropriate for a young man to sleep in a room decorated in purple. The purple had been why I’d loved it, even though sadly, most of it was so pale that it looked white now, bleached by the sun after so many years. Even when I was younger, it had been a pastel purple, which was never my favorite shade.

I ran my fingers over the windowsill, having to swallow down the emotion that welled up at the sight. It was still nailed shut. My father had done that when he’d caught me with a duffel bag of clothes, trying to squeeze myself out the window and downthe tree outside it, to run away. To stay with Peter forever, even though I still had no idea where he had lived.

Even more strangely, there I was, more than a decade later, with a college degree and a career, and still wishing I’d managed it. That I’d been able to sneak into the woods and stay there. At the time, I’d have lived in a freaking tree to stay with Peter.

I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t have been a better life, even now.

It wasn’t like working for James Warren was a prize of a life. No doubt my father would say something about how he warned me that being an artist wasn’t a real job, even if I dressed it up in marketing to make it look respectable.

I scanned the backyard as I stood there, but there was no sign of the young man from before. I’d been imagining it. He hadn’t looked like Peter at all. I’d just made a mistake in the dark.

Peter was gone, and maybe...maybe he’d never existed at all. Maybe coming back to Cider Landing had been a mistake, even for just three weeks. Already, it was making me long for things I could never have back.

4

Peter

It was strange, to watch the lights flicker on in Everett’s grandma’s house for the first time in years. Finally, the place was something other than a dark, empty nothing, a void surrounded by the full lives of everyone around it.

For the first time in years, it wasn’t my place. It fit in with their world again, not mine.

All along the street, houses had been draped in twinkling lights. The holidays were coming. Sometimes, people would sing in the streets.

Seeing people do something different, something silly, just for the sake of it, always made me feel a little lighter. I was looking forward to that—caroling or whatever. I’d never done it, but I watched most years, hiding in the trees.

It was just Everett in the house—not his parents or a dog or a friend. Not a...well, Everett looked like the right age to have a person he loved, to start a family, to have all that. But he’d come back alone, and a sharp, brittle shard deep in my heart wanted to laugh aloud. He’d left me, but he was still alone too! See? I wasn’t the only one. Nothing was wrong with me.

And then there was the other part that was sad, that felt lonely and forgotten. That part was afraid Everett had gotten losttoo. That...hurt. Everett’s smile was the brightest thing in the world, even on a clear summer day. I didn’t want him to have lost it.

I wanted?—

I wanted to snatch him off the sidewalk, fly high into the sky, and let him go so he’d know what it was like to feel like he was falling, doomed, helpless. And I wanted to pin up a blanket and crawl under it with flashlights and cheese crackers and apple slices andhim, and never come out.

Mostly, I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew what I had to do.

I had to sit right there in that old swing, the rubber dry and cracked with age, and watch him move around his grandmother’s kitchen. Watch him pace with his phone pressed to his ear, a furrow on his brow. Watch him argue with someone on the other end.

I had to watch him drink tea alone at his kitchen table and sit in front of a folding lit screen on the table for a long, long time and run his fingers through his hair in frustration.

I had to wait and hope that he saw me and pray that he never did. I had to know that he’d left me, that I wasn’t anyone to him, and that I should go back to the woods.

I had to sit there anyway, stuck.

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