Chapter 7
Miles
Tuesday
The sun shone brightly through my unshattered window. And I got the disconcerting feeling I didn’t know where I was when I first opened my eyes.
Reality hit me in two seconds.
Good morning, Evermere.
I walked downstairs and didn’t find my mother.
It felt strange to walk around the house.
It was decorated and full of old furniture, the kind that had been sitting untouched for decades.
The pieces belonged to my grandparents, and they were visibly so worn out they had to be cleaned, fixed, or thrown away.
It felt like the place had been kept as a closed museum ever since they were gone.
I didn’t understand why my mother had never come here. She could have cleaned the house, made use of the furniture at the time, or even sold it.
A small piece of paper, cut out from some newspaper and left on the kitchen counter, caught my eye. “At the market. Be right back”, my mom had written.
The phone she had placed on a tiny table in the hallway, next to the living room door, rang, and I stared at it for a few sleepy seconds before stepping closer.
“Well, hello!” said Jett from the other side of the line.
Jett was a guy from my old school and part of my group of friends.
He lived in a huge apartment back in Wayneth, where he loved throwing parties with fancy themes and guest lists at the door.
The parties always ended up badly, but his parents never seemed to give him any consequences.
Jett believed there were no consequences for him in life.
We became friends when he got involved with the wrong crowd. I saw it happening and felt like it could go really badly. I stepped in, interfered, and defended him. After that, I started to be part of the guest lists.
I held the phone close to my ear and heard a bunch of loud voices echoing on the other end of the line. I guessed my group was out doing something, enjoying summer in the city, and that the call was coming from a street payphone.
Jett greeted me again in his usual casual tone, and a few other voices shouted hello too.
Then Knox yelled that I wouldn’t believe what bar had just opened on his street, and said something about what Jett had done to bet a hundred bucks on someone the other day.
Vivian asked, half-yelling from farther away, if I’d managed to find a way to escape back to the city.
I said no. And deep down, I wished one of them had cared enough to ask me more about it.
But no one said anything about how it was at this new place of mine. Or how I was.
Glass bottles clinked, laughs echoed, and the call kept going. Jett still held the phone, but they had too many distractions to pay attention to it. It was as if I wasn’t here, but also as if I was.
I was always content with the distance between our silly conversations and the real ones we never had. But at this moment, for some reason, it was all bothering me. So, after a few minutes of being a non-participating actor, I hung up the call.
They were out having fun. Great. But it all just made me feel cut out of the scene. Cut out of the movie. And most of all it made me feel… the loneliness.
I had already felt lonely before, even back in the city. Once, I tried to vent about it to Knox. He laughed and simply said that what I needed to think about was finding a girlfriend.
I’ve thought about girls before. I’ve had a few girlfriends back in the city, nothing serious, after all, I was only seventeen.
And everything in the city changed fast, the relationships, the restaurant names, the trendy bars, the places I called home.
I was okay with not living with much consistency... or so I thought.
My mom showed up at the kitchen door, carrying a bag of leeks, interrupting my jam-spreading breakfast moment. “Do you want to come with me on Friday to see your new school?” She came in and grabbed the least exciting topic.
“Yeah, I guess I’ll have to eventually,” I answered, leaning against the kitchen sink. “But I kind of have plans on Friday afternoon, if that’s okay with you.”
My mom’s smile widened. “Of course, yes, son.” She sat on a bench at the kitchen counter next to me. “What are your plans?” she asked.
And I told her. About Miss Amara and her lively personality.
About the Center, every corner I got to see, and every aspect Ella told me about.
And about Ella herself — not detailing much to my mother.
Her warm smile, her gentle voice, painted freckles, blue eyes — all that I simply kept just to myself.
I spoke as my mom nodded along with my words, smiling with them. She listened to me curiously and intently, laughed heartily, and saved her questions for last.
Wow.
My mom was surprisingly present for me at that moment. In a way I wasn’t expecting.
We got along. Imperfectly. But we did. She wasn’t a very easy person to deal with.
But actually, maybe neither was I. She was going through a hard period too.
I was grateful to be here with her, and grateful for her.
After all, she had been both a mother and a father to me.
For as many schemes as I’d thought about to escape back to part of my older life, I wasn’t going to leave her at this moment.
She needed my presence too.
When Ella told me about psychology appointments at the Center, I thought maybe my mom could schedule one. I knew she had been seeing a psychologist back in Wayneth, but I also knew she wouldn’t go on her own. I could check at the Center for her.
I’d just put the remains of our lunch in the fridge and asked my mother if she would like to come for a walk with me.
“I feel like staying inside and taking a nap,” she answered, heading to the living room. “But you go, take the car. The beaches around here are really nice. You should go.”
I nodded and accepted the idea. I would drive around again and try to find a nice place to… breathe? Think? Something.
I took a left turn, passed trees and more trees, until the tarmac ran out and the wheels of the car were now rolling over potholes, rocks, and dirt. I decided to pull over and walk.
I went to the trunk and took out my guitar.
The town was small compared to the mountains that separated it from the ocean. There was a lot of green before you reached the blue.
I knew where I was. Or… sort of did.
I saw the blue ocean, but I didn’t really know how to get there.
There were some horses far off in the distance that I didn’t remember seeing before. It was definitely a road I hadn’t taken. Still, I kept walking uphill, heading toward them.
I had never spent much time in nature. My friends back in the city didn’t either. They would go on vacation to their country houses or spend time on their small yachts. That was it. That was their nature time.
Usually, I didn’t make many plans for the summer.
There was a time my mom was dating a man who owned a boat, and we spent a whole August with him and his loud sailing orders.
I was ten, and aside from his yells and my mom’s nausea, I remembered actually enjoying it.
A year later, my mom dated a guy who decided we would all experience living in the wild.
He took us camping for a few weeks in a forest straight out of the Tarzan movie.
I didn’t remember her ever mentioning him after that.
My mom was never an adventurous person, but she always went for men you could call viral — or Vikings, even. I never understood that.
Despite those attempts of family vacations, I had spent most summers in the city.
I stopped and looked around at the infinite green. This place really did look like a beautiful postcard.
On the horizon, my eyes met a girl, with flowing hair in shades of sunlight.
She plucked leaves from the plants around her and fed them to the horses, who chased her movements on the other side of the fence that separated them from her and the road.
And I quickly realized who she was. It took me three seconds.
Ella was barefoot. But as I approached, I noticed that there were some shoes next to a handbag on the floor. Given that they seemed to be in perfectly good condition, it was as if she arbitrarily preferred to walk barefoot on that dusty, dirt floor.
She had headphones in her ears and moved serenely.
Her body was dancing to a calm song. One hand held the Discman, where her headphones were connected, while the other hand held plants, letting the horses take their time with it.
She wore a blue dress that matched the sky and twirled around with her.
There was a certain lightness around her — around that whole picture.
There was also an instrument lying on the floor. Next to it, she had a small notebook and some pens scattered around.
I got closer, and she noticed me. A warm smile spread across her face, and she took the headphones out of her ears, placing them around her neck. “Hi,” she said, her voice sounding surprised to see me. And my face must have mirrored the same.
“He—Hey, I…” I felt like I was stammering for a few seconds. “What a coincidence to find you,” I managed to say.
She smiled.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, not losing her smile.
“I just… I don’t know. I’m kinda lost, to be honest.” Why was I feeling nervous? “Do you live nearby?”
“Yes, I do,” she replied. “A five-minute walk from here, actually.”
“So, you come to visit them often?” I pointed an arm to the horse eating the leaves from her hand.
She grinned and nodded in response.
“I feed them grass from the outside, and in return, they listen to my out-loud life diary.” She bent down to pluck another branch. “It makes me feel less crazy if they’re here to listen when I talk to myself.”
“Oh,” I chuckled. “That’s a nice deal.”
“It is!” She stretched out her arm to me, with some leaves in her palm, and I accepted them.
I had never been so close to a horse, let alone had one with his snout glued to the palm of my hand.
It was interesting how such ordinary happenings could make you feel so present. A horse was tickling my hand, and my mind stopped popping questions. I was focused. I was here.
A few moments later, I had forgotten the restlessness or disquietude that I had brought with me.
“This place feels like a postcard. It feels like we’re living in a movie,” I said.
Her lips curved into a smile as she searched the horizon, her eyes focused in the distance.
“Yeah, I love this place,” she said, getting down and sitting on the grass next to the fence, observing the horses.
I sat next to her.
“It’s mostly empty. Sometimes a few people walk by. And this area here,” she gestured to the grass that stretched along the edge of the dirt road, “will be full of flowers in a few months when spring comes. And it’s beautiful that over there you can see the sea far away.”
She raised an arm and pointed to the horizon beyond the green hills of the mountains. Her lips drew a slight smile. “And at night, I love it when it gets dark and you can see this panoramic view of the city in the distance, with its thousand little lights flashing.”
It wasn’t my city, but I could imagine the night view she was talking about.
“I love high places because I love those night time panoramic views,” she said, looking at me and smiling again, as if to end her speech.
She went back to staring at the nature around us.
And I found myself staring at her.
The way her hair fell over her shoulders and arms, the way freckles dotted her cheeks. The way she seemed so serene.
“And you,” her blue eyes turned to me. “How did you end up here?” she asked.
“Here in Evermere? Or lost in this street?”
“Both! Tell me everything,” she said, repeating that amusing tone I had already noticed her using before.
She positioned herself, those blue eyes facing me, ready to listen to what I had to say.
“Only what you want to tell, of course,” she added quickly, as if thinking she was being a nosy stranger to me.
We were, in fact, complete strangers.
But something about the way she paid careful attention to my words moved my mouth to say things, my brain to analyze things, and myself to feel things.
I told her about living in Wayneth for as long as I could remember and how much I liked the busy, intense, energetic way of living there.
I told her about my mother’s decision to move, but I left out a lot of details in that part of the story — details that even I didn’t really know.
I told her a mere fragment about the argument that had led me to leave the house on the day I found Miss Amara at the village, and the day we later met.
It was probably the longest I’d ever talked about myself without being interrupted, either by my own thoughts or by the unfocused external factors around me: my listeners.
She stood there, raising some questions I knew I barely answered, and smiling with her lips and her eyes. Allowing me to utter words I hadn’t really thought about before.
And I felt the urge to thank her.
I felt heard.