“These’ll be perfect for your website,” I say, my brows drawn in my “concentration face.” “And they don’t look anything like stills from a murder documentary.”
Ethan’s eyes grow wide. “I don’t need to beinthe photo. I’m sellingvans.”
“You’re selling a lifestyle. You need to show people the person they want to be.”
“And they want to be me?” He’s incredulous but seems to find the idea somewhat persuasive since he’s reaching for his guitar to complete the roaming-musician aesthetic. “Should I put a hat on or something?”
“And cover that nineties heartthrob thing you have going on? Absolutely not.”
I move him to the mattress and position his arms around the guitar like he’s an articulable Ken doll. The breeze kicks up, carrying with it florals and earthy notes of pine. It’s my favorite thing about Minnesota summers. It falls through your fingers like warm sand. The minute you think it might last forever—that summer might never end—you catch that whiff of pine and you’re transported to a dark December afternoon with the cold, crisp air scratching at your cheeks like a stray cat.
But I wouldn’t want to hold on to it even if I could. The hot, sweaty days and bitter cold nights visitors find punishing are magical. The stark changes from season to season and complete transformation of the landscape serve to remind me that time passes, disappears even. And I wouldn’t want to live in a place that would neglect its responsibility to gently remind me of how fleeting everything is.
It probably shouldn’t surprise me how much I enjoy being in nature. It’s how I spent so much of my time as a kid. I introduced myself to unfamiliar cities by capturing them with my camera. It didn’t matter if I was dropped into places where I didn’t belong. If I explored the woods, hiked along the shorelines, and traversed the unending city sidewalks, I could blend in. But whatever version of discovery this is with Ethan, I prefer it. It’s nice to be someplace new with no agenda.
It’s been so long since I could take a deep breath. I’ve beentoo busy with divorces and furniture sales and proving myself at work, all so I’d finally feel rooted to the ground. Somehow, I’ve neglected everything else I needed to flourish.
I move around the van, searching for the angles where the light hits Ethan through the open door exactly right. I frame up a few shots with his hoodie draped on the driver’s seat so perfectly haphazardly it would’ve looked staged if I had placed it there myself. The space is vibrating with that pre-adventure anticipation. I get why people follow this hashtag. It’s a fantasy of a new and improved sense of self. Van-life Charley would be patient, easygoing, and open to adventure. No partner would ever call me distant or guarded. I’d never be left for an idea, because I’dbecomethe idea. If I only had a van…
“Can I play something?” he asks, growing impatient. “Or will moving ruin the fantasy?”
“Please play something. You look constipated all still like that.”
He rolls his shoulders, his pre-performance tic that must connect him with his inner Bob Dylan. “Should I tie ropes to my wrists so you can more easily Jim Henson me?”
“Stop whining and pretend I’m not here.”
He grumbles for a minute before falling into a riff, playing it over and over, slightly different each time. He always used to play like this in his parents’ donut shop, building a song brick by brick until it sounded like an effortless explosion of melody. His lyrics were like that too. He’d start with something small—an interesting image or strange celestial metaphor that sounded right to his ear—then he’d build it out into something with meaning. It was beautiful to watch him work. It still is.
With a camera in hand and Ethan playing guitar, it finds me again: that feeling of being in a memory and bottling it withthe perfect image, as though it’s crystallized in amber light, so I might look back on it for years to come. His lips curl up in what isn’t quite a smile but something better. It’s awareness. Maybe he feels this too.
I know without looking that I’ve captured “the shot”—the version of this morning I’ll want to hold on to. The dreamy foreground of him in the rising sun with the rocky lake shore in the distance. The depth of field renders the rippling current just out of focus so that the water looms behind, haunting him. The click under my forefinger is too satisfying for this not to be it.
I jump up beside Ethan on the mattress and close the mosquito screen. “That thing you were playing earlier was nice.” I look up at him through my lashes. “It’s good to hear you writing again.”
“Chuck…,” he says accusatorily, his eyes on his guitar. “Did you snoop?”
My cheeks burn red hot. “I may have stumbled upon your secret songwriting notebook in our cop kerfuffle.”
I flick through the camera roll in search of a distraction from how Ethan’s face plunges my heart into a pool of warm water. I could drown in the bliss of being this close to him.
“You’ll stoop to any level in your quest for nudes, won’t you?” He sits there for a beat before putting the guitar down. “It’s not much of a secret at this point, but yes, I’m writing songs again.”
“Since when?” I ask. As far as I’ve known, Ethan’s been blocked since Lemonface’s epic rise and fall into the Velvet Nebula of stardom. His bandmate Benson, along with the slew of songwriters the label brought in, wrote their sophomore album, much to the dismay of listeners in possession of both ears and taste.
“The last couple of years.” He says it as though he’s not completely certain of the exact date he rediscovered his passion, and I don’t buy it for a second. “Not having you in my life the way you used to be, it was…a shock to my system,” he tells me, pulling a hand through his hair. “You’ve always had this way of shaking me by the shoulders and pointing me in the direction I needed to go, and without you, I forgot how to get up each day and breathe in and out. Just…exist. I was always a disaster when we were teenagers, imagining my future in that town—that slow life of waking up each day, clocking in and out at the shop, everything the same, day after day. I didn’t even recognize myself in it. Our friendship was the one good thing I had there, and you were the only person who ever kicked me in the ass and told me to go for what I wanted. I’d begun to rely on you for that, and then suddenly, you were gone.”
I suppress the impulse to jump in and soften his self-criticism. I stay silent, listening as he tugs me down onto the bed, our heads touching and our feet stretched on opposite ends like a bow.
“I flaked on a bunch of college shows and had to move back in with my parents to reset,” he continues. “But I started writing again. It was cathartic. Ivan used a few of the songs on his album with his new band, and I cowrote some stuff with Seraphina.” He gestures to the two women depicted in an artful line drawing on my boobs. “It’s been nice to create songs and let them take on lives of their own outside of me. Writing was the part I always loved. Those relationships also helped me rebuild a stable of steady gigs, but I love not having to live and die based on the whims of Division Three college basketball banquets.”
“I love that,” I say, though it feels so insufficient. He curves his body toward me, letting his arm slide around my waist to land at the small of my back. We’re so natural like this. It’s hard to believe that we’ll both be able to let this go in a matter of days.
“I was actually working on a song for Laurel and Pete. For a gift, kind of,” he starts, but something in my face stops him in his tracks. “Say it, Beekman.”
A small laugh spills out of me. “You cannotgiftthem a song. It’s so ‘oblivious guy at the bonfire with the acoustic guitar’ and you’ve somehow managed to never be that guy.”
“We have two hours to kill before Ted can take us out there. What am I supposed to do?”
