Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Jake
I DREAM ABOUT Sawyer that night.
She’s at the top of an enormous outcrop of rock that looks like the Cliffs, the place we’d gone to dive from that summer we met, except this rock is much larger.
It’s like a mountain, and with Sawyer standing at the top, she looks miles away, so far up in the sky that I can barely see her from my spot at the base.
There’s no water below, only dry ground.
I call her name again and again, shouting until my throat burns, but she doesn’t hear me.
She’s looking out into the distance, stepping closer to the edge.
My heart slams against my ribs, dread rising fast and cold.
I know what she’s about to do. I yell her name one last time, and then I’m awake, bolting upright, sweat streaming down my face.
I sit for a moment, trying to get my bearings, and then I realize that it’s not sweat, but tears.
I sit there in the dark for a couple of minutes, trying to figure out what the dream meant and why I would be dreaming such a thing.
I don’t let myself think about what would have happened if I hadn’t woken up.
Have I picked up on something in Sawyer that my subconscious is trying to warn me about?
It seems preposterous, and yet I can’t deny that something about this nags at me in a way I can’t turn away from.
I would like to call it ridiculous and chalk it up to my current state of mind, the difficulty of these past couple of months, living in quarantine and having terror stoked with every news report, but somehow I know this isn’t it.
I have a gut feeling that something is wrong, and I can’t give myself anything else to regret in this life.
I glance at the alarm clock on the nightstand next to the bed.
It’s just after five a.m. I know there’s no chance I’m going back to sleep now.
I get up and head for the bathroom. Hattie whines, questioning why I’m up this early.
“You go back to sleep, girl,” I say, but when I head downstairs to put on some coffee, she’s right at my heels.
I let her out in the yard, and after I pour my cup of coffee, I walk outside barefoot to join her. We head down to the dock and watch the sun rise, and as it ascends the horizon, a pink ball in the sky, I make my decision.
If I’m wrong, Sawyer will question my sanity and forbid me from setting foot on her property again. So I come up with a way to get in front of her without making it obvious.
I gather a number of tools from my garage and load them into the back of the truck. I pull into Sawyer’s driveway at just past eight. Lights are on in the house, so I’m assuming she’s awake.
I get out, Hattie bounding down beside me and trotting off to explore the yard. I walk to the front door, knock and wait with my heart pounding, aware that there’s every likelihood she’ll turn down my offer and send me on my way.
The door opens, and Sawyer is standing there, holding a cup of coffee, surprise on her face.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Good morning?” she says, a question mark at the end.
I wave a hand at my truck. “I had some extra time on my hands. I was wondering if you might want me to trim up some of the tree limbs in your yard. I noticed some of them are growing up against the house.”
“Oh,” she says, looking at the trees as if she’s seeing them for the first time. “Yeah, I think I have that on my To-Do list. And you don’t need to do that really. It’s a lot of work.”
“I don’t mind,” I say. “Like I said, I’ve got a few extra hours this morning, and it’d be nice just to be outside doing something productive.”
“Jake,” she says, and I can hear the reluctance in the utterance of my name, “I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”
“Trimming the trees?” I say, deliberately obtuse.
“No,” she says, looking at me poignantly. “You being here.”
“Sawyer, I’m not looking for anything other than to help out a friend. That’s it. I get it. You’ve got a life somewhere else.”
“I did have a life,” she says, dropping her gaze. It seems like I should let her continue, but something tells me it’s better to steer the conversation elsewhere.
“I’ve got the tools and a ladder in the back of my truck. You don’t even need to be out here. I can just get started.”
“I can’t let you do it by yourself,” she says. “I’m perfectly capable of piling up limbs. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Actually, that sounds good.”
“Come on, then,” she says.
I glance over my shoulder to see Hattie trotting toward us.
“And Hattie too, of course,” she says. Hattie creeps up on the porch and wags her tail at Sawyer, dropping to a sit and waiting to have her head rubbed.
Sawyer does so, almost reluctantly, as if it’s been a long time since she let herself show affection for anyone or anything.
She turns then quickly, as if the connection is too much, and slips away through the foyer and into the kitchen.
The house is as I remember it, the same furnishings, the same curtains.
The kitchen looks a bit outdated. It’s clean though, and obviously, someone has been taking care of it on a semi-regular basis at least.
Sawyer pulls a cup from the cabinet, pours coffee from the pot on the counter and says, “Do you take anything in it?”
“No. Just black.” She hands me the cup, and we stand, both sipping our coffee while Hattie flops down on the linoleum floor, panting from her exuberant exploring.
“Why are you here, Jake?” Sawyer asks then, her gaze fixed on me.
“I guess I’d just like to help you out. You seem like you might be in a place where help would be a good thing.”
“I appreciate that,” she says, “but your day is full with your own obligations.”
I lift my shoulders in a shrug. “Yeah, I can’t deny that. I believe friends are important, and that we have very few in our lives that end up being the real thing. But what I remember having with you, Sawyer, was real. The timing wasn’t the best, but it was real.”
I watch as she processes what I’ve just said. Her eyes widen as the words surprise her. They aren’t what she expected.
“We were so young,” she says.
“We were, I agree. But that doesn’t mean that friendship isn’t a real thing, even at that age.”
“I remember what I felt for you was more than friendship,” she says, looking uncomfortable. “And I remember wishing we were at a point in life I could act on that. Did you stay that honorable?”
And I can see she wants to know. She’s not being sarcastic.
“I think by my definition, I’ve tried. It was never my intention to do anything other than that, but maybe other people haven’t seen it that way.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“Just that sometimes people can have other motivations from what you might have assumed.”
She wants to ask more, but this isn’t a road I can take with Sawyer. I couldn’t stand seeing the disappointment in her eyes if she knew how my life had gone.
“Where do you think we should pile up the branches?” I ask in a deliberate attempt to change the conversation.
“We could do a controlled burn at some point, so it would be nice if they were all within a spot far from the house. Is that what people typically do?”
“Yeah, it’s what I did when I was cleaning up my place.”
“Okay,” she says. “That sounds like a plan.”
I set my cup on the counter. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“You’re welcome.” She puts her cup next to mine, and my gaze snags there.
I let myself consider what it would have been like to spend my life with her, what might have happened if we’d met two years later.
If we could have found a way to be together.
I wonder how many mornings there would have been where we would have set our coffee cups next to each other as we headed out for our individual days.
I lift my gaze abruptly back to hers and say, “Better get started.”
We head for the yard on the driveway side of the house. Hattie follows, her head up high, tail wagging. She’s excited to have something new to do today, and I reach down and rub under her chin.
“She’s beautiful,” Sawyer says.
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ve always loved Labs. Her absolute joy for life each day is a reminder to me not to be grumpy about things I shouldn’t be grumpy about. She’s happy just to get up every morning and walk across the dew-soaked grass, sniffing flowers.”
“People should take notes from that,” Sawyer says. “Including me.”
We’re at the back of the truck now. I pop the tailgate, pulling out my chainsaw and the limb clippers for the smaller branches.
“Why don’t you tell me, tree by tree, what you would like done, and I’ll cut what we need to cut, and then we can carry the limbs to whatever spot you choose for piling them up. ”
“I think there’s a wheelbarrow in the garage,” she says.
“That would be helpful,” I say. “I should have thought about that.”
She walks across the yard to a side door that leads into the garage. A moment later, I hear a click and then the raising of the doors. She rolls the wheelbarrow out. It’s the old-fashioned kind, metal and heavy.
“That should serve the purpose,” I say. She parks it next to the first tree, and we talk for a moment about which limbs need to be taken off and how we might shape the lower limbs.
The tree we attempt is a juniper that has grown wide and tall, right up against the house. I notice that a water spigot is behind the tree, unreachable because of how close to the house the tree has grown. “Would you like to shape up the back side a bit so you could get a hose in here?”
She sticks her head around the tree to see what I’m talking about. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. I didn’t realize that was there.”
I pick up the chainsaw, give the cord a tug. The engine makes a loud noise. I walk around the tree and set the saw against the lowest limb. I take that one off and then another nearby, step back and turn off the chainsaw.
“Think that’ll give you enough room?”