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"Wait," I said. "Come here." I reached my hand out for his. He took it, and we walked together into my backyard. The river was swollen, and you could hear it churning down there in the darkness somewhere. The air felt warm on the skin of my forearms as I lay down on the ground beneath the big ash tree in our backyard. He lay down next to me, and I showed him what the sky looked like from my house, all split up by the branches that were just beginning to sprout leaves.
He told me that he and Noah were moving, to Colorado, where Noah had gotten into some boarding school for troubled kids. Davis would finish high school out there, at a public school. They'd rented a house. "It's smaller than our current place," he said. "But on the other hand, no tuatara."
He asked me how I was doing, and I told him that I felt okay much of the time. Four weeks between visits to Dr. Singh now.
"So when are you leaving?" I asked him.
"Tomorrow," he said, and that kil
led the conversation for a while.
"Okay, so," I said at last, "what am I looking at?"
He laughed a little. "Well, you've got Jupiter up there, of course. Very bright tonight. And there's Arcturus." He squirmed a bit to turn around and pointed toward another part of the sky. "And there's the Big Dipper, and if you follow the line of those two stars, right there, that's Polaris, the North Star."
"Why'd you tell the cops to look down there?" I asked.
"It was eating Noah up, not knowing. I realized . . . I guess I realized I had to be a big brother, you know? That's my full-time occupation now. That's who I am. And he needed to know why his father wasn't in touch with him more than he needed all the money, so that's what we did."
I reached down and squeezed his hand. "You're a good brother."
He nodded. I could see in the gray light that he was crying a little. "Thanks," he said. "I kind of just want to stay here in this particular instant for a really long time."
"Yeah," I said.
We settled into a silence, and I felt the sky's bigness above me, the unimaginable vastness of it all--looking at Polaris and realizing the light I was seeing was 425 years old, and then looking at Jupiter, less than a light-hour from us. In the moonless darkness, we were just witnesses to light, and I felt a sliver of what must have driven Davis to astronomy. There was a kind of relief in having your own smallness laid bare before you, and I realized something Davis must have already known: Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.
And I knew I would remember that feeling, underneath the split-up sky, back before the machinery of fate ground us into one thing or another, back when we could still be everything.
I thought, lying there, that I might love him for the rest of my life. We did love each other--maybe we never said it, and maybe love was never something we were in, but it was something I felt. I loved him, and I thought, maybe I will never see him again, and I'll be stuck missing him, and isn't that so terrible.
--
But it turns out not to be terrible, because I know the secret that the me lying beneath that sky could not imagine: I know that girl would go on, that she would grow up, have children and love them, that despite loving them she would get too sick to care for them, be hospitalized, get better, and then get sick again. I know a shrink would say, Write it down, how you got here.
So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.
--
But underneath those skies, your hand--no, my hand--no, our hand--in his, you don't know yet. You don't know that the spiral painting is in that box on your dining room table, with a Post-it note stuck to the back of the frame: Stole this from a lizard for you.--D. You can't know yet how that painting will follow you from one apartment to another and then eventually to a house, or how decades later, you'll be so proud that Daisy continues to be your best friend, that growing into different lives only makes you more fiercely loyal to each other. You don't know that you'd go to college, find a job, make a life, see it unbuilt and rebuilt.
I, a singular proper noun, would go on, if always in a conditional tense.
But you don't know any of that yet. We squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. You stare up at the same sky together, and after a while he says, I have to go, and you say, Good-bye, and he says, Good-bye, Aza, and no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.
