The Miles Between

Aidan is happy for the out. “Way better than the baboon heart.”

Mira smiles. “Bonus points. Beats all of ours.”

Seth doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me and nods, and I want to say something else that is light and distant to turn the attention away from what has just happened, so I can be invisible for just a moment longer, but that time has long passed and I feel the careful layering of their gazes warm and tight about me.

I look away, squinting to the west at the last pinch of orange sun between two hills, and in that same instant, the sun vanishes, gone from view but leaving in its wake brilliant streaks of pink. The breeze is still. The music quiets. Gone.

34

CHANCE. IT WEAVES THROUGH our lives like a golden thread, sometimes knotting, tangling, and breaking along the way. Loose threads are left hanging, but the in and out, the back and forth continues, the weaving goes on. It doesn’t stop, even if that is exactly what you want it to do.

The vagaries bunch up and change your life. And you adjust accordingly. You have no choice. But what do you do when chance comes along yet again and unravels the woof and warp of your existence that you’ve learned to survive by? How do you learn a new way of living? A new way of talking? A new way of thinking? Too much has been woven into you to leave it all behind.

And yet.

You must.

Because chance, a fair day, and three friends have made it so.

35

MY PARENTS AND GAVIN ARE DEAD.

Dead.

The word transforms me. Today, in an instant, in the nakedness of a moment, my life is changed. Just as it was ten years ago. Today chance has played with me again, but in a different way. An unattended car. Trash duty. Meticulous Miss Boggs miscounting her tests. A well-timed bloody nose. An annoying teacher who made me voice what I want. A fair day.

How would one fair day make a difference?

I had no clear answer for Mr. Nestor this morning, but my guesses all proved to be true. Hope, belief, justice, order, courage, power, redemption. But mostly it gives you wholeness. The broken and loose threads of your life finally blend in with the sound ones and create the texture of who you are. Tattered but whole. And maybe if you could see the back side of anyone’s life, they would all have a degree of fraying.

With the setting of the sun, the temperature has dropped. By the time we get to the bottom of the hill, it is dark. Mira shivers. So do I. I pull Lucky closer.

“There’s a place up there to pull over,” Seth says. “I’ll see if I can figure out how to get the top up.” I see a barn ahead, not far off the road, a lamp at the peak of the roof creating a circle of light below.

Mira is biding her time. I know. They all are. The questions will come soon. The space they give me won’t last long. Past protocol has been shattered. I have opened a door and explanations are necessary. I have already surmised they will be lengthy and painful and awkward. But necessary. I want them to know everything. I want them to know I’m not crazy. Seth turns at the dirt drive that leads to the barn and parks under the light. It casts a dim warm glow on us.

“Let’s go inside,” Mira says. She is already out of the car and venturing in before we can respond. A light inside flips on. Seth grabs Lucky and we follow. We find her sitting on a bale of hay, settled in like she is waiting for something. Waiting for me. The biding time is over. Better now in the light where I can see their faces and know what they think of me.

36

“I CAN’T IMAGINE what it must have been like for you,” Mira says.

We sit in a circle on a bed of straw, knee to knee, leaning against the bales of hay at our backs. I look at the past like I am looking at moving pictures of someone else, and I tell them everything—everything I can remember from my seven-year-old perspective and everything Mr. Gardian told me along the way too.

I watch their faces as I speak, looking for flinching, glances between them, or other signs that I should stop, but I see none, so I go on. I tell them how the doctors thought that seeing my parents die right before my eyes had left me a bit touched. I admit to them that for a time it probably had. The truth was too hard to accept. But I was never crazy. Not like I heard some nurses whisper. Poor thing, maybe it would have been better for her to be on the plane with them. All the things they thought I didn’t hear, but I did. And then all the defenses I created to help me cope, like saying my parents abandoned me.

“So you made up that story?” Seth asks.

“Not exactly. That version was just there in my head. A coping mechanism, the doctors called it. And that became the truth of my world. If my parents had only abandoned me, no matter how despicable, then maybe . . .”

“Then maybe one day they could come back,” Mira finishes.

“Something like that.”

Mira leans forward and picks at her shoes. “I know this isn’t the same, but I sort of did something similar when”—she looks up. “I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it, but my parents are divorced. It was a nasty one.” She looks back down at her shoes. “And when we were going through all the court battles, I actually pretended they weren’t my parents. I imagined that they were horrible fakes and that my real parents—the nice, reasonable ones—would come back and smooth the whole mess out. That all I wanted was for everything to be smoothed out and go back to the way it was.”

She looks up and smiles. “I pretended like that for about three months until they forbade me to call them Harold and Vivian anymore. Those weren’t even their names. I pulled them out of thin air. Names of strangers. Because that’s what they were to me.” Her smile vanishes. ?