AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We used to beg your dad to take us, remember?” Brea’s eyes widened.
“He blamed us for his weight gain that summer,” Oriana said with a laugh. “But he always ordered an extra scoop of ice cream.”
“I guess two nine-year-old girls aren’t great influences,” Brea offered.
Across the aisle from them sat an older woman with slight shoulders and a wide-brimmed black hat. Oriana had been surprised that she’d left it on throughout the entire flight. Now, she smiled at Oriana and Brea, saying, “I hope you don’t mind me interrupting, but it’s so rare and lovely to overhear women such as yourselves. You’ve clearly had a wonderful, lifelong friendship. Many of my friends abandoned their female friends after marriage and children, which was sad to see.”
Brea and Oriana exchanged timid glances. While this woman saw two fifty-year-old best friends, the truth was far more complicated.
“Just count yourselves lucky that you put one another first,” the woman went on. “It’s truly a gift.”
When the plane touched down, it was three in the afternoon, Boston time, which made it three in the morning, Thailand time. Because Oriana’s trip had been so brief, her body felt twisted and strange, like a pretzel. Brea constantly yawned as they moved through customs, her eyes dancing around the large room.
“When was the last time you were in America?” Oriana asked.
Brea winced. “I haven’t been back since I left. I was just thinking that it has probably changed so much over the years.”
“You’ll have to tell me what you notice,” Oriana said. “What’s changed, and what feels the same.”
“America has seemed like a dream to me all these years,” Brea offered, blinking back tears. “I can’t tell you how often I’ve woken up and wished that the Indian Ocean was the Atlantic. That the delicious Thai food I was eating was actually clam chowder. For so long, I’ve been living in ‘paradise.’ But all I wanted was to come back home. I just didn’t know how.”
Oriana’s heart lifted. She knew Brea would never have had the strength to come back had it not been for Oriana going to get her.
She should have done that years ago.
Once in the parking garage, Brea ogled the vehicles, which looked remarkably different since 2000.
“Everything is so much bigger than I remember it,” she whispered as she stepped into Oriana’s car and buckled herself in. “In Thailand, I’ve driven nothing but a motorbike for years.”
“Do you remember how to drive a car?” Oriana joked.
But Brea gave her an ominous look. “Truthfully, I’m slightly scared to try.”
“You can take it slow,” Oriana offered. “One thing at a time.”
Brea grimaced. “Thank you.”
As Oriana drove from the Boston airport to Woods Hole, where the ferry disembarked for Martha’s Vineyard, she was amazed to see the “new world” through Brea’s eyes. Brea clicked through radio stations, bouncing her head to songs she’d never heard before— even ones that were nearly twenty years old.
“What music were you into when you left?” Oriana asked, trying to remember.
“We both loved Sheryl Crowe, remember?” Brea said. “And Shania, of course. Kenny adored grunge music, but I could never get into it.” She paused, then asked, “Is that still big?”
“Not really,” Oriana said. “Although, now that I’m fifty, I can’t say I’m hip with the times.”
“You know more than me,” Brea said. “I’ve kept a wide berth from the real world. And right now, listening to all this new music and seeing all these new things, I sort of feel like I’m on another planet.”
“I can hardly imagine.”
Oriana parked the car on the bottom level of the ferry, and together, the two friends struck out for the top deck, as Brea wanted to watch the island grow bigger on the horizon line. As Brea leaned against the railing, she whispered, “Do you remember the first time our parents let us leave the island on our own? We must have been seventeen.”
Oriana did remember. They’d driven to Boston for a “girls’ trip,” but Chuck had demanded that they return to the Vineyard by nightfall. They’d spent the entire day running through second-hand clothing stores, eating delicious and greasy food, downing milkshakes, and pretending they were much older than they were— college-aged students with hardly any obligations, a little apartment in the city somewhere with their whole lives ahead of them. Once, a very scary older man approached them and asked them for directions in a way that creeped them out, and Brea and Oriana ran away from him, realizing they weren’t as brave as they’d thought they were.
“We thought we were something special,” Oriana said.
“I remember when we were on the ferry, returning after our big day in Boston,” Brea went on. “I felt almost the same on the ferry that day as I do today. The eight hours we spent alone on the island felt like a lifetime. They changed me, in a way.”
Oriana was amazed at the comparison, yet she understood what Brea meant. Every day as a teenager had been filled with innumerable possibilities, which ultimately died off as they’d gotten older.
