thirty-five
This Summer
“What do you mean she’s gone?” I ask, pulse hiking.
Gabe shakes his head. “She’s not in her room, she’s not anywhere in the house. I drove us home last night, but—” He winces.
“Her car is gone.”
“What?” I say. Suddenly, I realize I’ve been strangling Everett’s fingers with mine. He just squeezes back, gently, when I loosen
my grip.
“Did you see it when you got back?” Gabe asks me.
My shoulders slump, guilt washing over me. “No,” I say hoarsely. I’d been so focused on Everett last night that I hadn’t even
thought to look around.
“Sutton,” Everett says quietly, like he can read my mind. I look up at him, surprised to find his face a little blurry. “It’s
okay. Why would you have even thought to check for her car?”
But that’s not it, I realize. It’s not just last night. I’ve been focused on Everett all week. To the point that it made Laurel angry. To the point that she and I fought. To the point that I told myself she was
fine, even when I knew she wasn’t, and that I waited to find her this morning in favor of talking to him.
“Wait,” I say, pulling my phone out of my pocket. “I think she’s still sharing her location with me.”
But Gabe stops me before I can even unlock my screen. “She left her phone in her room,” he says. “We tried calling and Davi found it.”
“Laurel,” I say, half growl, half sigh. I’m both annoyed she would be stupid enough to leave without any way to contact her,
and guilty that I didn’t see this coming.
“She can’t have gone far,” Everett says. “If she left her things here, she’s planning on coming back, right?”
I’m wracking my brain as Gabe and Everett discuss where she might be, why she might have left. Where would you go, Laurel? I think of her favorite places in town, but if she left sometime between Everett and I getting back last night and everyone
waking up, none of them would even be open. I picture her scrambling up the rocky incline of her favorite sunrise hike alone,
slipping on a loose stone and plummeting down the drop-off. Her speeding down the PCH and overcorrecting and—
I stop myself there. Going to the absolute worst-case scenario isn’t going to help us find her any faster.
“Did she leave a note or anything?” I ask Gabe. He shakes his head. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Just when we got back last night,” he says. “Davi saw her before he went to bed, I guess. Said they talked about the party
and our last night here for a minute, but . . .” He trails off, shrugging defeatedly, but something about his words rings
in my head.
“I think I know where she is,” I say. “Maybe.”
Poppy Cottage has fallen into even further disrepair since we last stayed here.
The succulents are gone from the flower boxes and the paint job they were promising when we first checked in clearly never happened.
Flakes hang on perilously from its weather-beaten, peeling siding, and for a minute it seems like quite the metaphor for us.
A once-steady foundation, left alone to rot for too long.
A shiny new place to stay that matches the surfaces of all our lives. But we’ll always have come from here.
The door is unlocked when I try it. It’s clear no one is staying in these cottages or has been in a while. When we walk in,
there’s a breeze blowing sand and salt air through the main room. It’s coming from the deck door, thrown wide-open by the
person sitting out there alone.
“Oh, thank god,” Davi says, drawing a hand down his face. He’d been white as a sheet when we went downstairs, gathering numbers
for morgues and hospitals at the kitchen island while Gabe tried to get him to stop.
We all start toward the door, one collective body, but I stop halfway, everyone pausing behind me.
“Can I—” I glance back at everyone. “Is it okay if I just talk to her alone for a minute?”
“Probably a good idea,” Davi, who needs approximately three business days to decompress after something high stress happens,
says. “If we all go rushing out there she might run off again.”
“She’s not a deer,” Gabe says. Davi shoots him a look. “But good point.”
Gabe and Davi start toward the front door. Everett pauses for a minute, hand finding mine.
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod. “I’m good.” I squeeze his hand—less violently this time. He lets go and gives me a small reassuring smile.
I wait until the front door has closed behind him to turn back toward the deck, where Laurel is sitting.
I realize I don’t have a great opening line, or really a place to start.
All I have is some jumbled approximation of what to say to her, or some point to get to.
But there isn’t time to get it perfect now. All I can do is be there for her.
Laurel is sitting on the steps that lead down to the beach, facing the water. I walk quietly over and sit down next to her,
looking out at the waves. During past trips, we used to sit like this when the sun was going down. Sometimes the other three
would be playing some game on the beach that we were either taking a break from or didn’t want to join. Sometimes they’d still
be talking on the deck behind us, Davi beating Gabe and Everett at Texas Hold’em, picking at the remnants of whatever meal
we’d made that night. Laurel and I would talk or not talk or drink or not drink. But the transition from day to night would
always go like this: the two of us, side by side, watching the color of the world change.
We sit in silence for a while until I finally look over at her, ready to say something, but she beats me to it.
“They’re tearing these places down,” she says. “Did you know that?”
I glance at the A-frame behind us, and I can see it, if I’m honest. A slight sag in the middle. A new hole in the deck. A
structure not useful to this place anymore. “I didn’t,” I say, looking back at her. “I’m sorry, Laurel.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “It’s just another thing that’s gone.”
“It matters,” I insist, the same feeling I had last night when we fought taking over me. Some desperate need to prove to her
that all of this is still important.
“Why?” she asks. “It’s just a house. It’s not like it’s going to save all of us.”
It is, again, so at odds with the Laurel Im I know that I’m startled by it, at first. This pessimism she’s never had before.
I’d thought it was a product of what’s happening, the divorce, but maybe it’s something I just didn’t notice about her.
Or maybe she’s not the same person I knew, in a half second, would be my best friend all those years ago.
But then again, none of us are who we were back then.
“It’s important because we grew up here,” I say. “It matters because it mattered to us.”
Laurel glances askance at me. Her makeup from last night is smudged under her eyes, some of the jewels missing above her eyebrows.
“It’s not our family home, Sutton,” she says. “It’s not even our college house.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I say. “It’s like . . .” I trail off, casting around for some comparison. “It’s like when your parents
would mark your height growing up, you know?” I can picture the place Hank did it in his house, long before I lived with him
full-time. A summer tradition when I first arrived every year, some tangible proof of my changing existence. That it was worth
something. “We came here every year, and we saw how much we’d changed.”
“Yeah, until we didn’t,” she says bitterly.
“Laurel,” I say, in as gentle a voice as possible. “If you hate this place so much, why did you come here?”
I see it happen slowly: a slight pinch by her eyes at first, a twitch at her mouth next, until she’s turning her head away
from me, until her shoulders shake.
“Laurel,” I say. I reach for her, but think better of it at the last minute. I hate it, but I don’t know if we’re those people
anymore. I used to hug her so easily. She used to lean her head on my shoulder, loop her arm through mine, but we haven’t
been like that in a long time.
“I don’t know what to do,” she sniffs.
“About all of us?” I ask. “About Stephen?”
She shakes her head, turning to face forward again, so I can at least see her profile. “About my life,” she says in a rough voice. She scrubs the back of one hand under her nose. “I don’t feel like I know who I am anymore.”
At this I do grab her free hand, dynamics be damned. Like Hank said, she’s still my best friend. She’s still Laurel, and no
matter how many steps we take away from each other, I have some belief that we’ll always find our way back. That maybe it’s
less about always being as close, as connected as we once were, and more about allowing the ebbs and flows of life to happen,
and to trust that we’ll be there for each other anyway. It’s what I’m hoping for, at least.
“I don’t even know if I like what I do,” Laurel says, finally looking at me. “I’ve built my whole life to look a certain way,
to make it something other people would want. And now I can’t even tell if I ever actually wanted it.” I reach over and brush
away a tear that’s run its course down her cheek and to her jaw.
I’d always thought Laurel was so sure of herself, of what she wanted, who she was. That I was the one who needed everything
to be a certain way for me to feel safe, steady. She’d always seemed so free, like the world didn’t rest as heavy on her shoulders,
but now everything she’s been holding on to is written plainly across her face.
“I think that’s why I came here,” she says. “This place was never for anybody else. It was only ever for us. And that’s—that’s
just gone now. I don’t feel like I have anything to anchor myself to.”
“You still have us,” I tell her. “You’ll always have us.”
“Everyone is busy,” she says. “I was busy. Now I just have this void to fill.”
“Stephen,” I say. She nods. “Laurel. What happened?”