There must be a way to get what Tobin has. Buy it, borrow it. Steal it, if I have to.
I reach for my phone. It’s predictably on-brand for me, but I can always count on a spreadsheet, schedule, or list.
I pull up a new note, stabbing my thumbs into the screen in all-caps fury.
GET MAGIC.
Chapter Two
Hearing and listening are two different things. When a player is given an initiation, they must let the words resonate, so they can decipher the underlying meaning. Listen with your emotions.
—Truth in Comedy
It doesn’t take long for the “get magic” fever to cool off. A walk across two damp lawns in my now-clammy indoor shoes douses my righteous fire. An undignified amount of jiggling my key in the front door smothers the ashes.
I could oil the lock. It would take five minutes and only a little bravery to get the oil from the spider-infested basement storeroom. I’d save a locksmith visit and a hundred bucks on the (inevitably winter) day when I finally snap the key off in the lock.
But I have a stubborn, pointless wish not to be the only one who notices the broken things. Everyone glides by, not seeing the problems, not seeing the one who fixes them.
Like when Tobin and I started dating. He was the river guidewho got all the tips, and I was the ex-guide demoted to camp chief and invisible work doer, keeping the guests comfortable so they were rested and ready to bask in his attention.
Like the guests, I knew being seen by Tobin was the greatest sensation on earth. He used to watch the breeze in my hair the same way he watched the wind toss centuries-old red cedars—and I knew how he loved those damn trees, because I loved them the same way. I’d do anything to have him look at me,seeme, the way he did that first summer season.
All through river guide training camp, when most people gravitated to the loudest, boldest, drunkest personalities, he sought me out. He watched me so intently, like he was enjoying a particularly challenging puzzle. No one had ever listened to me the way he did as I unpacked my dreams from across the campfire.
You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you,he said.
So do you.To save up for the day he started his own tour company, Tobin was guiding summers while working the winter high season at his mom’s indie clothing business in Grey Tusk Village, which wasn’t a village so much as an outdoor tourist shopping experience. Its winding streets and timber-and-stone chalets were a charming, shameless photocopy of the French Alps.
Not like you do. Tourism degree, two years in the field, five years in management with promotions at years three and five, then leadership with a specialization in niche ecotours,he quoted. Correctly, I noted.What happens if it doesn’t work out? The industry’s pretty competitive in Grey Tusk.
True. But I know what I’m up against. Most of Grey Tusk’s twenty thousand locals made their living serving its one million annual visitors. Not many of those jobs were above entry level. Few expedition companies—besides local behemoth Keller Outdoor Epiphanies—could evolve fast enough to survive in alpine tourism. Take mountain biking, which wasn’t even an Olympicsport until 1996. A dozen years later, Grey Tusk Mountain was filling chairlifts with mountain bikers from May to October, and every company without backcountry bike tours was feeling the heat.
I shrugged.If I don’t succeed, I revise the plan and try again.
You’d never quit? Like…never?he repeated at my head shaking “no.”
Please don’t say I don’t know when to quit. It was my sister’s favorite phrase, often put together with words like “annoying” and “weird.”
I wouldn’t say that,he murmured, the moment before he kissed me under the shelter of ancient cedars.
Back then, every possibility hovered near, like I could pluck them from among the stars. Now? I’m nothing like the partner he thought he was getting when we made promises to each other. My heart hurts thinking about it.
What would I have done then, if I could’ve seen the future? That knowledge wouldn’t have neutralized his kindness, his gentleness, his gifts of tiny wild things only he would notice—the smallest seashells, the most delicate flowers. A four-leaf clover tucked in the zip of my tent almost every week we were on the river.
No, nothing could have saved my heart from falling.
But it might have hurt less when I hit the bottom if I’d seen it coming.
Something warm blocks the evening breeze from biting my ankles. I look down: Yeti, our geriatric ginger cat, twines around my legs. “Hey, handsome,” I tell him. He breaks out his broken old purr, butting his head against my knee. He’s a sucker for compliments.
“Don’t give me that. Who were you with last night? The lady with the salmon? Or the guys with the cream?”
Yeti is the biggest himbo in my hometown, Pendleton. Technically, he’s mine, but he’ll crash anywhere the snacks are popping.At least four houses on our block think he’s theirs, including my sister and niece three doors down.
The lock grinds open. Yeti zips between my legs, off to make sweet, sweet love with his food dish.
“Liz! Liz, wait. I got away as fast as I could. Are you okay?” Tobin jogs across Marijke’s yard, shrugging into a fleece sweater flecked black with sparks from a million campfires. I’ve seen tourists beg to trade their brand-new gear for his battered stuff, hoping to take home his air of being the real thing. His guiding buddies have stealth-stenciled “LOST AND FOUND” on every tent he owns, on account of how many clients “accidentally” end up at his campsite after dark.
