Amir shrugged. “He makes you feel safe. You lived your entire childhood not knowing what the next minute would hold, and with him you can see your whole future. Who could blame you for wanting that? He’s giving you everything you think you want.”
“Will is smart and curious and kind, Amir. He’s a good person.”
His jaw hardened as he stared at the road ahead of us. After some time had passed, he said, in a voice more gentle than I expected, “Willisa good person. His entire family has looked after you—I see that now. But you can be grateful to the Langfords without owing them the rest of your life.”
I did not respond. Was it so wrong to love someone because they made you feel safe? Because you were grateful for how they changed your life? And if it wasn’t love that I felt for Will, what was it? I remembered my panic when I’d awakened in Venice to find him gone. I remembered watching Will with his sister and mother in that house in Osha, the glow that seemed to surround them and how I wished that it would surround me, too. I remembered the first dress that Rosalie had given me, the delight I had felt when she’d said I could keep it. It had swirled around my knees and my heart had swelled in response. I kept that dress wrapped in tissue, and when I looked at it from time to time what struck me was how simple it was, and how I loved it, and how much I hoped it would never be taken from me.
AT FIRST GLANCE,it appeared little had changed in Osha. The co-op still had a box out front labeledFREE, but when I looked closer, I realized it was no longer a cardboard box but a sturdy-looking wooden crate. I felt a jolt of pleasure at the sight of Little Earth Schoolhouse, which had been a respite for me for too few years. It had the same pretty slanted roof and porch, the same tidy yard, but a new sign now with crisp blue lettering and an illustration of Earth in place of theoinhouse. I thought of the journal that Teacher Julie had handed me, my first, telling me that I was “nearly bursting” with stories.
As we neared Horseshoe Cliff, I felt myself leaning forward in my seat. Amir swung the truck off the road, and right there in the middle of the dirt driveway, Bear’s truck—myfather’s truck, now stained with rust and pocked by broken headlights—glowered at us like an old blind watchdog. In a weedy plot of dirt just off the driveway hunkered a camper not much bigger than a one-horse trailer. I held my breath, waiting to see the door of the camper thrown open to reveal the looming silhouette of my brother. Behind the grimy window, the curtains did not move.
“Keep going,” I whispered.
Amir looked at me. “He can’t hurt us.” He put his hand on mine.
I laced my fingers through his and drew in a long breath. “Keep going,” I said again.
The truck dipped off the driveway into the scrub grasses as he maneuvered it around Bear’s truck. Immediately, the cottage came into view.
On the night I’d run away, the cottage had appeared to teeter on the edge of the world. Now, it looked sunken, less in danger of falling into the sea than of melting into the earth. Half of the porch had crumbled, leaving a dark pile of rotten wood that had not been cleared. Parts of the roof had crumbled, too, and what remained was covered in moss. Even in decrepitude, that cottage clung as stubbornly to the earth as the earth clung to the cottage. The sight made my heart clench.
I had never forgotten that when I was a child lying in my bed at night, the wilderness had seemed to creep closer in the darkness and howl against my windowpane. Nor had I forgotten that in the morning I would stand at that same windowand look out at the land that had filled me with terror the night before, and my heart would swell with love for it.
Amir stopped the truck in front of the cottage. In the distance, the gray satin blanket of ocean rippled. I stepped outside. The air smelled of the sea and of the land, exactly as it always had. The breeze against my cheek felt like a kiss; I was overwhelmed with the sense that my father and my mother were beside me. I looked up, searching for a red bird, but saw only the white blue of the vast coastal sky. The constant murmur of the ocean offered an inhale and an exhale.
“I know,” Amir said, coming around the truck to join me. He wrapped me in a hug.
I laughed, wiping away the tears that pricked my eyes. “I haven’t cried in years but suddenly it’s all I do.”
Amir looked down at me but did not wipe the tears from my cheeks. “Bear hated when you cried, so you stopped.”
Should I have been ashamed to feel as relieved as I felt to be in Amir’s arms, to feel both at peace and deliriously adrift, to feel my heart beating toward his? Maybe, but I was suddenly, overwhelmingly, sick of shame. Amir knew me, and I knew him. We had been connected from the moment we had first held hands in the darkness of my bedroom on the night he arrived at Horseshoe Cliff, when he’d seemed equally dampened by grief and brightened by hope.
He put his hand under my chin, cupping it, and the touch of his fingers sent a charge down my spine. I moved toward him. My eyes, locked on his, began to close.
In my pocket, my phone vibrated. I didn’t look at it, but the thought that it might have been Will calling made my eyes flick open.
“Let’s walk.” I stepped out of Amir’s arms and set off toward the ocean.
The garden had become a weedy tangle, too overgrown to see if the raised boxes that my father had built were still underneath. When we approached the shed, I was surprised to see that it had withstood the years of neglect better than the cottage and garden. The door creaked loudly when I opened it. The walls were bare, my father’s tools gone. A chunk of the ceiling in one corner had fallen, letting in a bright stream of dust-flecked light.
It was so small.
I stepped across the dirt floor, remembering how Amir and I had huddled together with Pal for warmth.
Amir looked around. When he spoke, his voice was laced with quiet anger. “I’ll never understand how he could have forced a kid to sleep out here.”
“We were always happier than he was. He couldn’t stand it.”
We left the shed and closed the door behind us. Where the chicken coop had once stood, there was a bare patch of earth. Amir said that Bear must have sold the coop, and I felt a stab of regret that another piece of my father was lost to us forever. The horse pasture fence and lean-to were still there, at least. On the side of the lean-to, my mother’s peace sign was so faint that at first I thought I imagined it. The ring of paint was warm below my palm.Someday someone is going to paint the peace sign thatdoes the trick,my mother had said.And who is to say that person won’t be me?
I remembered my father bringing me to the lean-to on my fifth birthday, the delight of finding Pal there, waiting for me. When I took a deep breath, I could have sworn I smelled the dusty warmth of Old Mister and Guthrie.
“We should get horses again,” said Amir. I looked at him in surprise. I didn’t answer, but the sun caught my eye, and when it did I saw two horses in that pasture. I saw children, too, though they were not Amir and I. They were Marty and Keira and Assim and all the children from Learning Together. How they would love to spend a day at Horseshoe Cliff, exploring, losing themselves in the thrill of adventure that the wild expanse offered.
I opened my eyes and jogged a few steps to keep up with Amir. The air grew blustery, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore more distinct.
“Oh!” I said, stopping. Where land had once been, it was no longer. The shape of the cliff had changed; the smooth horseshoe curve was now a jagged V with sudden ledges that made the cliff seem even more precarious than it had been during our childhood. I remembered running along that cliff, shouting into the wind, laughing whenever Rei told me it was dangerous to play so close to the edge.
