The Leaving Season

by Cat Jordan

  “Oh, shit!” The dashboard clock lit up with the engine. “Emma!” I forgot to pick her up!

  By the time I rushed breathlessly into the house, Mom was in the kitchen preparing dinner, wearing a flowered apron and matching pot holders on both hands.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart. One of Emma’s friends dropped her off.” She smiled at me before placing a kiss on the side of my head. “You look exhausted.”

  I waited for the other shoe to drop, waited for a remark about my responsibilities as a sister and daughter and if I was going to be allowed to have the car then—

  “Why don’t you get washed up for dinner and help me set the table?”

  “But . . . that’s it?”

  She turned me around and gently urged me toward the stairs. “Your dad and I know this is a lot for you to deal with.”

  I resigned myself to being shooed from the kitchen and went up to my room, passing Emma’s along the way. She was on her bed, books spread in front of her, earbuds in her ears. I fell onto my own bed and let the pillow cave around my head.

  Middie, you’re tired. Middie, you’re sad. Middie, go home.

  When I looked at my friends, my teachers, my parents, all I saw was pity in their eyes. Their sympathy was too much—too trite, too saccharine. I knew they cared about me, about Nate, but they didn’t know what to do or say much beyond It’ll be okay.

  Only Lee treated me like a regular human being, not like a fragile glass figurine that would shatter into a million pieces if someone said the wrong thing.

  I pulled out my cell and texted him before I changed my mind: waterfall walk.

  Seconds later, he responded: when

  tomorrow

  To get to Devil’s Rock Falls, we had to leave the Vespa behind and hike.

  “Devil’s Rock?” I faux-shuddered as I followed Lee through the woods, glad I’d worn jeans and boots instead of shorts and sneakers.

  “That’s just some shit I made up,” Lee said. “Scares the pants off the tourists.”

  “But you told me. Does that make me a tourist?”

  He glanced at me over his shoulder. “Nah. You’ve still got your pants on.” I was about to respond when he grinned. “Kidding. Geez, Daniels, lighten up,”

  He turned onto a small path, leading me through a narrow passageway, and we emerged under the cliff in a dark recessed cave behind the water. It fell in sheets in front of us, splashing into the pool a few feet away. The sound of the water was like an intense storm, heavy and thundering, and it echoed all around us, deafening me to anything other than my pulse pounding in my head.

  Without saying a word, Lee took my hand and led me out of the cave and closer to the water. A thin fence ran the length of the ledge, the smallest separation between rock and water. The rock ledge was slippery, but I felt Lee’s fingers grip mine so tightly, I knew I wouldn’t fall in and drown.

  We were inches from the waterfall when Lee loosened his hand from my grasp and I balanced there on my own. It was incredible. The water was powerful and intimidating; the sound of it crashing around me was isolating, nearly terrifying, and yet . . . I felt calm, serene, the eye in the center of the storm. I could hear nothing, not even my own thoughts. I felt nothing, no fear, no anxiety, no sorrow.

  I closed my eyes and allowed myself to breathe in and out, to appreciate the beauty of the world that surrounded me. I smiled, trying to picture myself from the outside: Meredith Daniels standing under a waterfall in a forest far from home, with no worries in her head, no cares at all? That was crazy.

  We stood there for a little while longer—ten minutes or half an hour, I had no way of knowing—and finally, Lee led us back through the cave and to the side of the waterfall pool. I leaned back against a tree and glanced up at the falls. Had I really stood under all that water?

  “How did you find this place?” I asked him after we’d taken a moment to relax and refresh with bottled water. “It’s so far away from everything.”

  “I got lost.” Lee tipped his head back and poured the last drops of water into his mouth. “I was about thirteen. Ran away one night.”

  “You got lost? At night?” My mind raced, thinking of all the things that could have gone wrong for Lee. I shook my head from side to side. “It’s so risky.”

  Lee laughed as he crawled to the edge of the waterfall pool. “Some of the best things happen when I take a risk.” He splashed some water over his face and then flicked some at me with his fingers. “Haven’t you ever done something completely new and different?” When I gestured to the waterfall, he added, “Aside from today.”

  Risk was not part of my vocabulary. I panicked at the thought of being unprepared, of doing something wrong. “I don’t like to do things I can’t do,” I said, finally. I heard the words and started laughing. “That sounds lame, doesn’t it?”

  Lee laughed. “Yeah, it does. Look, at some point, you don’t know things. So you can’t do them. And then you do them and then you know how.” He stopped and tilted his head to one side, as if he were thinking about what he’d just said too. “Whatever.”

  “But what if I mess up?”

  “You’re gonna mess up the first time. Maybe even the second. Or third.”

  I groaned. Loudly.

  “So what? Who cares?” Lee plunged his reusable bottle into the pool and filled it with clear, cool water—and then poured it over his hair. “I live to fail!” He shook his head like he was Nate’s dog Rocky shaking water off his fur after a dip in the creek. “Failing is all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

  “You’re kind of insane,” I said.

  “Insane in a good way?”

  “There is no good kind of insane.”

  “Eh. Who cares what you think? You’re just a dumb girl,” he said, teasing me.

  I pretended to take offense. “You don’t care what I think?”

  “Nope. Don’t give a shit.” Lee ran his fingers through his wet hair, combing it down and away from his face. Pearls of water dripped down the side of his nose and he wiped them off with his sleeve. “Why do you care so much what other people think, anyway? No one’s perfect.”

  Nate was perfect, I thought. Lee caught my eye and his smile slipped as he read my mind.

  “Not even Nate,” he said. “I tried to get him out here once a couple years ago.” Lee rolled his water bottle in his hands; the rubber covering was torn in places and his fingernails picked at those spots that were coming apart.

  “He didn’t want to come?”

  “I think he was doing something with you that day.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  Lee frowned at me. “What are you sorry for? You’re always apologizing for shit that’s not your fault. Nate could have come if he wanted. He didn’t want to.”

  “You could have asked him another time.”

  “Nope.” Lee pressed his lips together into a line. This was obviously not up for discussion. I could tell by the set of his jaw and the firm way he held on to his water bottle that if you said no to Lee, you didn’t get a second chance to say yes.

  He flopped onto his back and stared up at the sky. The clouds were thin as wisps, translucent and slightly gray. I rolled onto my side and looked up too. “Why’d you run away?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “When you were thirteen, you said you ran away. . . . Why?” In the time I waited for Lee to respond, the clouds passed beyond the trees and the sky turned clear blue.

  “I didn’t like home,” he said simply.

  “Why not?”

  “Do you like your home?”

  “Yes—”

  “I don’t like mine.” He laughed sharply then and turned his head to look at me; leaves of wet grass tangled in his eyelashes and he blinked a few times. “You know, I was only half-right about Nate not being perfect.”

  I sat up. “What do you mean?”

  “He wasn’t, but his family is,” he said with a wistful sigh. “Even that old dog of his. A perfect family.” He brushed the
grass out of his face and mock-frowned at me. “And don’t tell me they’re not.”

  I smiled at Lee and shook my head. “Nope. They’re perfect.”

  He turned away and stared at the sky again. “I always wanted Nate’s room,” he said. “When we were kids, he got these glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars and planets and his dad put them on the ceiling for him. I loved sleepovers at his house ’cause those stars were the coolest things ever.”

  “Yeah, they were cool.”

  Lee lifted an eyebrow my way. “You saw them?”

  “Yeah, I saw them.”

  “You know you can only see them in the dark. When the lights are off. And the door is closed.”

  I giggled. “Yeah, I saw them.”

  “Well, well, aren’t you the tart?” he teased, but his gaze was sharply inquisitive.

  I felt my cheeks grow warm and I knew I was blushing, but I wasn’t about to divulge anything. Not to Lee. “I had a good time today,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Way to change the subject.”

  “You can say you’re welcome.”

  “Give me your phone,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Come on, give it here.”

  I was digging in my backpack even as I asked, “Why?”

  “You gotta commemorate your first trip to the falls,” he said. He took my phone and tapped the screen a few times. “Get over here and lean in.”

  “Why don’t you sit up?”

  “Because I have the phone. Now do it.”

  “Please.”

  “Please—now do it.”

  I scooted down on the grass, laying next to him so my face would be in the picture with his. He held his arm out in front of us and yelled, “Cheese!”

  We looked like idiots and I told him so.

  “Speak for yourself. I look dashing.”

  “And insane.”

  “Dashing and insane. The best ones are.”

  I teased him back. “Is that what your girlfriend thinks?”

  “I hope so.” He laughed and it sounded like the cackle of a wild man.

  I took my phone back from him and stared at the picture. Just behind our silly faces, I could make out a part of the waterfall. I tried to imagine Nate here, standing beneath the wall of water or hiking to the top. Would he have liked this place? Would he have been proud of me for doing this, for trying something new?

  At the end of the day, I made Lee drop me off at the community garden, where Abby had a huge list of chores for me. In spite of the hours I spent hiking, I felt refreshed, as if I’d just awoken from a long nap.

  It was the waterfall. It must have been.

  CHAPTER eleven

  Later in the week, Emma knocked on my door, wrinkled notebook paper in hand, pen tucked behind her ear. “Middie, can you read my essay?”

  Her story about Nate, I remembered, the one that would help her get her next badge from Brownies. While I read the paper, she wandered my bedroom, touching everything she saw: makeup on the vanity, books on my shelves, clothes in my closet. I allowed her free rein for just about everything, but when she got to my phone, I put the brakes on. “Nope. Not yours.”

  She didn’t turn the phone on, but she also didn’t put it down. “It’s not fair. Everyone else has one. Why can’t I?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her pretend to chat on the phone, turning her head this way and that, admiring herself in the mirror. I tried not to laugh, but it was pretty cute.

  Nate Bingham is my sister’s boyfriend, I read. He is very smart and very tall and very good-looking.

  My breath hiccuped and Emma turned sharply to me. “Is it bad? Did I write it wrong?”

  “Um . . . you used ‘very’ three times.”

  “Well, yeah, ’cause it’s important. Very, very, very.”

  “Uh-huh.” I kept my eyes on the page. Nate is really, really helpful to other people, and he always gives me a present when he sees me.

  “Um, Emma?”

  “Hmmm?” She glanced in the mirror at me. “I probably didn’t spell everything right. I get confused sometimes.”

  “Um, were you confused about present tense and past tense?” I asked carefully.

  Her expression was quizzical. “Huh?”

  “You know what present tense is, right? ‘I am.’ ‘She is.’ ‘He is,’” I said, holding tightly to her essay.

  “Oh yeah, I know that.”

  “So . . .” How was I going to put this delicately? “You wrote ‘Nate is.’ Instead of ‘Nate was.’” When she didn’t react, I added, “You know Nate’s not coming back, right?”

  I half expected her to roll her eyes at me but instead she said, quietly, “I know what ‘dead’ means.”

  I tried not to look startled. “Okay . . . so why did you write it in the present tense?”

  Emma tapped a finger at the side of her head; the nail, bitten and chewed to a nub, was covered in purple ink. “Because he’s alive for me up here.”

  “Emma!” Mom called up the stairs. “You left your science project down here.”

  “My volcano!” Emma’s mouth formed a little O and she dashed out of my room, dropping my phone on the bed almost as an afterthought. I turned back to her essay, almost afraid to read what she’d written, but it turned out to be a very sweet story about Nate showing her how to tie knots for—what else?—a Brownie badge. My sister had a one-track mind. No doubt that would change once she finally got a cell phone.

  I kept reading, making mental notes about spelling and punctuation errors, but then I got to the last line and I gasped: Nate was going to be a awesome doctor but he died and now I am inspired to be a doctor too.

  Tears clouded my eyes as I stared at Emma’s heart in my hands. I carefully placed her paper on my nightstand, right next to my computer. I tabbed open the application to Lewis & Clark. The incomplete application.

  Tell us about an experience that defines who you are.

  Emma had done that. She had told the story of Nate’s importance in her life; his death not only inspired her, it defined her. My nine-going-on-thirty-year-old sister. Part of me wondered if I could crib it for my own essay—without the knot-tying lesson, of course.

  I picked up the pen Emma had left behind and tapped it against the screen as I tried a few sentences in my mind.

  The death of Nate Bingham had a tremendous influence on my small town of Roseburg. I shook that one away. It was too cold, too impersonal.

  Nate Bingham was beloved in my small town. He had friends in every part of the community, in the high school, and . . . Ugh. Boring.

  Nate Bingham was the love of my life and his death crushed my world.

  No! I shoved the thought out of my brain as fast as I could. I couldn’t write that. I couldn’t. Although true, it was too intimate, too revealing. The pen in my hand trembled and I felt a wave of panic grip my chest as I thought about Nate.

  Unlike my sister, I didn’t find inspiration in his death. I found terror and sorrow and abandonment. How could I write about an experience that defined me when I had no idea who I was? I half wished I could use my sister’s story. It would be so easy to say, This is who I am now; this is who I will be. But I didn’t know.

  Was I the girlfriend Nate left behind? Was I the sister Emma and Allison wanted me to be? Was I the daughter my parents expected? As I’d told Lee, I was no risk-taker. I was neither adventurous nor spontaneous, two qualities he insisted Nate had possessed, which made me wonder: Had I been keeping Nate from doing things he wanted to do?

  I reached for my cell and tapped the screen until I got Lee’s number. He answered on the first ring. “Yo. ’Sup?”

  “What else didn’t Nate do with you?”

  “Huh?”

  “He didn’t climb the waterfall because of me.”

  “Well, no, he was busy—”

  “What else didn’t he do?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. “I dunno. Stuff. Why?”

  “I want to do it.�
� I stood and walked to the window and stared up at the sky. No stars tonight, just a half-moon covered in clouds. “Stuff you wanted to do with him.” I paced the small bedroom; where before it had been cozy, now it felt cluttered. I wanted to get out and do things. I wanted to be inspired. “I want to try things I’ve never tried before,” I told Lee. “I can be spontaneous too.”

  “Telling me you’re spontaneous is not being spontaneous.”

  “You know what I mean!”

  “Calm down, Yoko, I get it.”

  “And stop calling me that. I don’t want to be Yoko anymore.” I stopped, took a breath. “Look, you’ll think of something, won’t you?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll think of something.” He ended the call abruptly and I fell onto my bed, feeling suddenly wiped out.

  A moment later, my phone buzzed with a text from Lee: tomorrow tree fort

  “Tree fort? What the . . . ?”

  And then another: make sandwiches

  I started to text him back when a third came in: I like pbj

  What do you do in a tree house? At night? In the rain?

  “You brought the sandwiches, right?” Lee asked me when I’d climbed to the top of the tree in our neighbor’s yard. The fort had been forgotten when the last son went to college, but it was still (mostly) intact. Hidden away by thick foliage that had grown over the wooden supports, the fort’s floor was sturdy and sound, but there were some holes in its roof.

  Which we didn’t realize until the first drops of rain fell.

  I passed him a sandwich wrapped in Saran even as I searched my backpack for something to put over my head. “What’s wrong?” he asked when he caught a look of concern on my face. “You live in Oregon, for god’s sake.” He scooted to the open door and dangled his legs over the side, like a kid sitting on a too-tall chair. The ground was fifty feet down, but because everything was overgrown, I could hardly see the grass below. If either of us fell, we would disappear into the leaves as if we were diving through the surface of a pond.

  “You gonna melt in the rain?” Lee crumpled over. “I’m melting, melting. . . .” He whined like the green-skinned Wicked Witch.

  “No, but I’m usually inside at night.”

  “Well, that’s your first mistake right there.” Lee unwrapped the sandwich and inspected it. “What kind of jelly is this?”