“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she says, working her paddles in a way that does exactly nothing to propel her forward. “You and Ren have a lot of history. I don’t know if your entire relationship is worth throwing away over something that happened over two years ago.”
I nod, mostly because I don’t want to keep having this conversation. Only danger lies on the other side of it.
“I’ll think about it,” I tell her.
We catch up with Sasha at the next bend and paddle the end of the river together, until we come around the final curve and the ocean spreads out across a sandbar in front of us, sparkling blue, boats bobbing out of the harbor in town a few miles down, the salty air brushing against my neck now that we’re out from under the tree cover.
“Want to go farther out?” Sasha asks, nodding toward the far end of the sandbar.
It’s calm here, no rocks or crashing waves to contend with, but it’s still the ocean. Hemsworth told us we could paddle a ways out into it if we were brave, which I am certainly not when it comes to aquatic sports beyond, well, the two-inch drop we went over at the onset of this whole adventure.
Luckily, Stevie’s outdoorsiness ends here too. “No way,” she says. “But I will so happily watch you be adventurous.”
“I’ll just go for a minute,” Sasha says before she heads off.
I turn my kayak to face Stevie and set my paddle across my lap, dip my fingers into the water.
“Hey, remember the bulletin board in the mailroom in our building?” Stevie asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Why?” It was meant to be a spot for tenants to post things like flyers for gigs, sticky notes about a free coffee table, but it more often turned into the apartment message board.If 4C canpleasestart keeping it down between the hours of ten and six, 4B would beveryappreciative. Blondie with a heart tattoo on your shoulder—u live here? Please stop leaving your dog’s shit on the sidewalk, Marcus. So on and so forth.
“I was just thinking that the kayak rental guy would totally vibe with whoever kept trying to start his pot business on that board,” Stevie says, eyes fixed on some far point on the horizon before she swivels them to me, mouth spreading into a wide grin.
I throw my head back, laughter hooting out of me. “Wasn’t that Derek?” I ask.
Stevie swats her paddle at the water, hitting me with a splash this time. “You knew who the pot guy was all along?”
“So did you!” I say, gasping with laughter. “He was the one who kept trying to ask you out, but you didn’t notice.”
“Okay, telling someone you’re ‘thinking about checking out the new Thai place’ doesnotconstitute an ask-out. You’ve got to put some intention behind it.”
I frown in solidarity with Derek. “He was nervous.”
“He was a drug dealer!”
“He was anaspiringdrug dealer.” This prompts a full-body laugh out of Stevie. She leans back in her kayak, eyes closed as giggles bubble out of her.
“Oh, man,” she says when she looks at me again. “Thank god we don’t live there anymore.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. I dip one end of my paddle into the water to straighten myself out. Our apartment wasn’t what either of us dreamed—smaller than we anticipated, a notoriously unreliable landlord—but it was ours, creaky floors, stuck windows, and all. “I loved that apartment.”
Stevie’s nose wrinkles. Between her hat and her braids, she looks so much like she did as a kid. “Did you?”
“Of course I did,” I say. “Did it not seem like I loved it?”
“I don’t know,” she says. She rolls her paddle across her lap, back and forth. “Sometimes you just didn’t seem all that happy in New York.”
“I mean—” I say, answers jostling for position in my brain. I go with, “I was a little stressed sometimes, for sure, but…” I shrug.
Stevie keeps an eye on me. “Are you happy now?” she asks.
The words escape me again, so many possible things to tell her right now but none of them seeming exactly true.I am happy therewould be a lie, especially in the last few years.I’m lonelywould get me closer to the truth, but it would mean having to dig into all the specifics of that, tell her about the hole I’m worried I’ve dug myself into.
When I look at my sister, the ready expression on her face, like she knows she’s providing an opening for this enormous piece of news, I almost tell her. That Ramona fired me. That I have no clue what I’m doing next. That I’ve been realizing, lately, that I’ve been lost for a lot longer than I care to admit. She’s not wrong—I haven’t always been happy in New York. Stevie seemed to enjoy her time there, but she’d always known it would just be for grad school, hadn’t planned on staying beyond that, and she’d stuck to her word.
The loneliness didn’t really settle in on me until she left. But even after trying harder, after making an effort to go out with people after work, exploring on my own and creating a haven for myself in my apartment, New York never felt quite likeminein the way Portland did. I’d watch other people falling in love with the city while I continued to feel some pull to the West Coast that I couldn’t sever. I told myself it wasn’t real: that it was just nostalgia. But then I was back, for one brief moment two and a half years ago, and I felt it. Some weight lifted off me, like I was back where I belonged.
