Emotion knocked her right in the chest, stealing her air. Her breath. She turned and watched as the mother and father each lifted one child up off the ground, the mom stroking her little boy’s hair.
“Aw…that’s… It’s sweet,” she whispered. They continued walking up the trail, and she pressed her hand to her chest, a spot right at the center suddenly sore.
She looked down at her feet. At the trail.
She was looking now. At where the eroded parts were, the rocks buried halfway in the mud. She was paying attention to why she lost her footing sometimes.
They both knew why now. So why not be honest. Why not tell him exactly what she was thinking about.
It was what had drawn her to him. Before.
Before she’d gotten scared of that connection.
She could say things to him and he didn’t really try to solve the problem. He didn’t seem desperate to make it go away.
“Do you know…” she said. “Sometimes I see something like that. Families. Small children. I can’t tell if I ache for when my kids were little…or when I was little. It’s all the same thing. It’s time I can’t get back. It’s… I miss mothering in that way. Some days I really miss being mothered. Everything changes, always.”
“Yeah. It does.”
“It just feels sad sometimes. To know so profoundly that that part of my life is over. At forty. My kids are grown. My mother is gone. I just…”
They stopped walking, and he turned to face her, grabbing hold of her wrist. His grip was firm, not painful. Steadying. “You have life left. To be who you want. Whatever you want.”
He released his hold and walked ahead.
She felt…destabilized.
Whatever you want…
She felt like she was holding on so tightly to her idea of what her lifeshouldbe. It was all tangled up in those sharp moments that made her chest hurt. The things that she wished she could go back to.
She was accepting that her marriage wasn’t what she’d believed it to be. What she’d wanted it to be, so desperately.
They traversed the switchbacks of the trail until they came to the bridge. They stood there, the pounding falls so close that the mist brushed her face.
The mist felt like a metaphor in a way she couldn’t quite work out. All this water. Pouring down the rocks. There was always more water, but it wasn’t thesamewater. It couldn’t flow backward.
She was trying. Trying to meet Will back around again at the beginning. But the problem with a circle was that you ended up back where you started.
You might as well be going backward.
She took a breath. “We can go.”
“Let’s go up the trail. Come on. You came all this way. Let’s see the view.”
She was kind of over how deep every comment was making her think, but there was something to that too.
They hiked up a trail that went straight up the side of a hill, overlooking the valley below.
“You know,” he said. “A lot of people have this freedom on the front of their lives. With all that rashness of youth, like you were just talking about. But you…you have it now. No one gets to tell you what to do with it. Don’t leave it up to Will. The final decision. That’s all.”
He turned away from her and started back down the trail without waiting for her.
She couldn’t argue with him. Not this time. Not now. She just let his words play over and over again as they hiked back down the trail and got back to the car.
The Bel Air had been a special sort of nostalgia, the kind that they were both too young for, but that evoked strong imagery of movies they’d seen. The Ferrari was just pure fun.
They drove over the Bridge of the Gods, and traversed the narrow roads to Skamania Lodge, which was over the border into Washington.
