Finally he relented. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll take you with me if you call your parents and let them know.” She clapped her hands. “But we’re not camping.”
Joanna settled herself in the passenger seat and fastened her seat belt. They had ten hours, at least, to patch their friendship back together, piece by piece. Even longer if she could talk him into camping.
She slept a good part of the drive; she was exhausted, still shaky from the accident. They didn’t talk much, but she felt like it was a companionable silence, not an awkward one. Progress, she thought. They didn’t stop for lunch—just ate salted nuts straight from the plastic jug as they retraced the journey Joanna had taken the day before. Already it seemed like a lifetime ago.
They exchanged very few words. When they passed through a town, he asked if she needed to pull over. And when she put her hand to her head, he asked if she was feeling okay. No, no, she would say. She didn’t need a thing.
Her shout interrupted the cozy calm. “Stop! Turn around!”
Malcolm slammed his foot on the brake. “What?”
“We have to go back there.”
She made him turn around and stop at a restaurant on the side of the highway, nestled under pine trees. It was nothing more than a log cabin set up like a diner inside, with a few tables and a long counter. She’d been there with her dad once, when they were driving back from Portland after dropping Laura off at college. It was exactly as she remembered it, with a rotating glass case stocked with every flavor of pie imaginable. Joanna and Malcolm ordered four different kinds, washed down the blackberry and chocolate and banana and Dutch apple with cups of coffee. If only we could live on pie and coffee and salted nuts, Joanna mused. And Malcolm had smiled at her.
When they got back in the car the mood felt lighter, easier. “Since when are you so into camping?” he asked as they ventured back onto the highway.
She hesitated before answering, wanting to get it right. She had a few hazy memories of the whole family camping together, all snuggled up in sleeping bags in a big green tent. Hot chocolate on cold mornings, swimming in mountain streams. After the divorce they’d gone on trips with just their dad, then their dad and whatever woman he was seeing at the time, and then, eventually, Linda. Camping had lost its charms by then. It might have had something to do with adolescence—the indignity of finding a place to squat in the woods, scraping hard ground with a rock to make a suitable toilet. Smelling like a campfire, covered in a layer of dust, she’d spent those trips reading novels on a dirty canvas chair.
But if she admitted her history with camping, he’d never agree to it. And here is what she needed—she needed him to agree to it. It all hinged on his agreeing to it. She didn’t know why, exactly. The plan had arrived to her, fully formed, in her father’s driveway. Take him camping. That was it, the whole plan, but she knew it would work.
“I do like camping,” she said cautiously. “I just haven’t gone in a long time. Since I was a kid.”
“Well, if you knew anything about camping you’d know not to do it this time of year. We’ll go in the summer. You don’t want to die out there.”
“Sounds like you’re a real camping expert.”
“Somewhat.” He was smiling, but his eyes stayed on the road ahead.
“You went to art school. How much of an outdoorsman could you be? You wouldn’t last a day in the wild.”
He laughed and looked over at her. This was good. Engaging in ridiculous conversations. “And I suppose you would.”
“Sure,” she said. “If I had to. I’ve read Alive. I can identify ten kinds of edible mushrooms.”
“Sounds like a plan. So you’ll live on dead bodies and fungus.”
“At least I have a plan. You wouldn’t last a day out there.”
“I could last two weeks.”
Joanna regarded Malcolm. “Go on,” she said.
“It was this survival camp my parents sent me to one summer.”
“Survival camp? You went to something called ‘survival camp’? And you survived?”
“Two weeks. In the wild, as you say.”
“And how did I not know this about you?”
He shrugged. She spent the next twenty minutes grilling him. What did he eat? Where did he sleep? What did he do all day, by himself, a teenage boy wandering around the San Bernardino mountains, fending off grizzlies with a chiseled stick? “I just never saw you as the survival type. Two weeks, by yourself!”
“Okay. So maybe I didn’t make it for the entire two weeks.”
“Aha!”
“Maybe it was more like four days.”
“Well, still. You were a kid.”
“And maybe I wasn’t entirely alone. They had guides tracking us, keeping an eye on us.”
“This is making more sense now.” Her eyelids began to feel heavy. She pressed her thumb in the middle of her forehead, trying to make her headache go away.
“Take another ibuprofen,” he said. “Try to sleep if you want. It will help.”
Her eyes closed. Malcolm had said “we”—we’ll go camping in the summer. They’d never spent a summer together. He was gone for two years, and last summer they were barely speaking. If they were friends again in time for summer, he could build things in the garage while she gardened out back. At the end of a perfect July day, they could sit out on the porch swing (Malcolm could build them one), drink raspberry lemonade from raspberries she would plant along the fence. Garnished with some wild mint she would gather from the easements. Back and forth, they would swing, waiting for night to fall….
Her eyes opened when she felt the car pull to a stop. They were in a forest, with gigantic narrow pines towering above them. If she studied her surroundings hard enough, she could figure out where they were. It was better not knowing—how far from Reno, how close to home. The sun had already sunk below the horizon, but the sky was glowing, still infused with light. She sat up.
“Bathroom break,” Malcolm said, getting out of the car.
Joanna shook herself awake and stepped out onto the pavement. She shivered and took in a huge breath, that intoxicating smell of evergreens. She could gulp the air down, it was so clean. It forced every slumbering part of her awake. Her stomach was empty, and her muscles ached, but she was alive, the edges of everything crystal clear.
Malcolm found her waiting for him in the covered area between the men’s and women’s restrooms. “Hey,” she said, “are we going to camp here?”
“Here? Joanna, it’s a rest stop, not a camp ground.” He walked back toward the car, and she reluctantly followed.
“So?”
“So we’re not camping here.” They stopped at the car.
“Please. It’s perfect!”
“We’ll get buried by snow in the night. They won’t find us until July.”
“Come on. It’s not that cold. Burrow under a pile of leaves like you did at survival camp. Rub two sticks together and make a fire. Or just use a sleeping bag.” She hit the back of the car. “Open up.”
He shook his head, but then unlocked the back of the car. “We can stay here for a few minutes. Then we have to get back on the road.”
“Okay,” Joanna said, happy to have won a fraction of the argument. She found a sleeping bag, unfurled it, and presented it to Malcolm. “Bundle up.”
They walked down a narrow path behind the restrooms, into the forest. Malcolm wore the unzipped sleeping bag like a shawl around his shoulders.
Silently, they approached a picnic table in a small clearing. They sat side by side on the tabletop, their feet on the bench. Joanna gazed up into the darkening sky, glowing like blue glass, somehow dark and bright at the same time. It was so beautiful she couldn’t speak. She looked over at Malcolm and his face was turned up, too. She nestled closer to him.
He looked down at her, then reached his arm around her, enfolding her in the sleeping bag. This was all she really wanted, to feel his body warm against hers and look out at the sky. They sat t
here like that for quite some time without saying anything. She couldn’t tell if ten minutes or an hour went by. As the light faded the stars popped out, one by one. Maybe this was it, the resolution she had been looking for. They had muddled through different stages of their relationship to arrive at this, a silent communion.
He seemed to sense her looking at him and turned to her. It was now so dark, she could see him only because he was right there, inches away. His expression unsettled her. She closed her eyes, then leaned in and brushed her lips against his. They barely made contact, but her stomach dropped. She froze, waiting for his reaction. She thought she heard him exhale. He pressed his forehead to hers, and they sat like that for a minute before he seemed to make a decision. He pulled her in, roughly, and kissed her.
Joanna kissed him back. She grabbed onto the front of his shirt to bring him in and the sleeping bag slipped off his shoulders, collapsing onto the table in a heap. So this was exactly what needed to happen. This was her whole plan, even if she hadn’t realized it back in Reno. She simply needed to show him how much they needed each other. Then they could go back to Portland and live happily ever after. He could start his business, she’d do something. Go back to work, start that gardening show—something. She’d figure that out later. Whatever it was, they’d be together. They’d have their friendship or their romance or whatever he wanted her to call it.
So she kissed him back, hard, and soon she was reaching down to unbutton his jeans. His hands were under her shirt; she felt the pressure of them on her back.
She was fumbling with his zipper when he stopped her. She had known he would push her away a second before he did. It happened quickly. One second they were all tangled up in each other, the next there was a foot of space between them.
“Why are you doing this?”
She was surprised to hear anger in his voice. For a minute all she could hear was their breathing, fast and jagged.
She couldn’t look at him. Instead she focused on the picnic table. She ran her hands over the splintered wood, carved with the initials of all the travelers who had stopped before them. Her dad used to sleep on rest stop picnic tables when he traveled; he said they always provided a perfectly flat surface.
“Seriously,” Malcolm said. “I want to hear you say it.”
“Say what?”
“Tell me what you want.”
She knew what he wanted to hear. She opened her mouth to tell him. It would be easy. It should be easy.
Malcolm rushed in before she could say anything, his voice low and modulated. “And don’t tell me we’re just friends. I swear if I hear you say one more time—Let me tell you something, Joanna: we were never ‘friends.’”
“Of course we were friends,” she snapped. Suddenly she was angry, too. “We still are friends. Or we could be. You’re the one—”
Malcolm cut her off. “We made out within hours of meeting each other. You couldn’t keep your hands off me—”
“We were better than friends!” Joanna yelled. Her voice had nowhere to go. It rang out and disappeared into the woods. “Why can’t you get that? Why doesn’t anyone get that? So what did you want—you wanted to play house? You wanted to be boyfriend-girlfriend?”
Malcolm exploded. He jumped off the table, stomped around in the dirt. “Is that really such a bizarre idea? We lived together. Slept together. Why is that such a fucking stretch?!”
She took a deep breath in attempt to regulate her voice. “You want to know why?” Her hands began to tremble. She balled them into fists. “You left me. You slept with me, then you left me. The very next day.”
Malcolm took a step toward her, then stopped. “I should have known you’d hold that over my head. God, what do I have to do to make it up to you?”
“Apologizing might be a good place to start.”
“Listen, I’m sorry, Joanna. I’ve always been sorry. That should be pretty clear by now.”
“And you never even explained it.”
“I tried—”
“Just tell me why you did it. Why you left.” She held her breath, waiting for him to answer.
Malcolm ran his hands through his hair. “What do you want me to say? I wanted to be with you. I did. I freaked out. It killed me that it happened like that. I mean, you were crying about Nate. Drunk.”
“I knew what I was getting into.”
“You were wasted. Inconsolable.”
“But I wanted you,” Joanna said. Almost under her breath she added, “You have to know that.”
“Well, you have to admit, my timing sucked. I could barely face you the next morning. So I left.”
“Well, luckily you found Nina to make it all better.”
“God Joanna, I know I screwed everything up, but how long are you going to make me pay for it? We’re obviously in love with each other, but you want to go around being ‘just friends.’”
Her heart stopped for a moment. She tried to speak, but he wouldn’t let her.
“What do you want from me? I made your breakfast every morning, fixed up your entire house, built you that bench hut you wanted so much. What next? How long do you expect me to keep this up, for our precious friendship?”
Her throat constricted. It was difficult for her to gauge her own reaction to everything he had said, but she chose to focus on just the last part. That, she could manage. “Malcolm, we’ve been over this. I didn’t—don’t—want to lose you again, is that so difficult for you to understand? I didn’t want to ruin it.”
He came up to her. In the darkness, she could barely make out the features of his face, just inches away from hers. She felt heat come off of him when he spoke. “It’s ruined,” he said. “You ruined it.”
She reached up to him and succeeded in grasping the edge of his sweater. The fabric slipped out of her fingers.
Malcolm swiped the sleeping bag from the table. Its nylon fibers brushed over her as it snapped through the air. And then he was gone. She heard some rustling, his feet crunching over pine needles, and then it was quiet.
It was so dark out Joanna couldn’t see anything. The sky gaped above her, black and endless, glittering with stars. No moon. He had left her to survive on her own—or die trying. She put her hands out, feeling for the table underneath her. The trees swayed overhead, hundreds of feet above her, creaking in the wind. It threw her off-balance. If she left the table, she’d fall into nothingness. She was so unused to this darkness.
She took in a few deliberate, deep breaths, filling her lungs with the crisp forest air. Then, before she lost her courage, she stepped off the bench. Her hands stayed on the table; it would anchor her. Her eyes could not focus—only look up to see the sky. Where the stars ended, the tops of the trees began, cutouts that melted into the ground where she stood.
“Malcolm?” she called out. She craned her neck, listening for an answer. She couldn’t hear anything. A cold breeze picked up and the trees shuddered and groaned.
She was shaking now. “Malcolm!” she shouted as loud as she could. Then she took her hands from the table. It was like stepping into space. Above she could see the stars, but all around was nothing. She had no idea how to move forward, but she didn’t reach back for the table. She didn’t need the table anymore. She would survive out here on her own if she had to, fling herself into the great unknown. If she never found him she would be devastated, of course, but she’d get by. She’d be like that kid in My Side of the Mountain, live in a hollowed out tree, wear underwear made from rabbit hides.
But she would rather not. She could make it out here if she had to—she’d read enough survival stories by now—but she would rather not. She lurched forward, waving her hands in front of her. “Malcolm?” She wasn’t yelling now. She said his name softly. “Malcolm!”
She took another step, less shaky this time, and then she crashed right into him. He was standing not four feet from the table, waiting for her. Her whole body unraveled, trembled with relief. “I thought you’d left me out here to die.�
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She heard him sigh, and then she felt his hand on her face. “You wouldn’t die.”
“Right. I’d subsist on trail mix.”
Malcolm didn’t laugh. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew he wasn’t even smiling. She felt him press his lips to her forehead. Then his hand dropped away from her cheek.
“Malcolm.” She paused. “You asked me what I want.”
“Joanna—”
She needed to say it. Quickly, before she lost her nerve. “I want you. That’s what I want. I want to un-ruin it—us. I think we can. I think it’s possible.”
He didn’t answer, but she could hear him breathing.
Slowly, she pulled him in by the edges of the sleeping bag, still draped around his shoulders. She’d bring him back. He would fold his arms around her, wrap the two of them up in a fabric cocoon. They’d fall to the ground, sleep like that on a bed of pine needles, live off each other’s warmth, hibernate under the snow. They could survive out there. She knew they could.
acknowledgments
To all my early readers of Broken Homes & Gardens, many of whom read draft after draft—Coral Anderson, Abby Schmidt, Gina Kelley, Anne McKee Reed, Felisa Salvago-Keyes, Lynne Nolan, Angie Culbert, Andy Henroid, and Christi R. Suzanne—thank you!
Many thanks to all the members of Writers Anonymous, past and present, for their advice and encouragement over the last five years. I am so lucky to be a part of this supportive and somewhat drunken writing crew.
To my agent, Jennifer Chen Tran, without you, this book wouldn’t be published. Thank you so much, for everything.
And of course, I want to thank the team at Blank Slate Press, for believing in this book and making it happen.
about the author
Rebecca Kelley grew up in Carson City, Nevada, wandered for a few years, and eventually landed in Portland, where she teaches writing at Oregon College of Art and Craft. She is the co-author of The Eco-nomical Baby Guide. Broken Homes & Gardens is her first novel.
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