MAY
And what came before it.
The air was so much fresher when you were somewhere your mom told you not to go. You’d sneak out the back door when she was in the kitchen, call up your friends, and go off to some place where there was cool clean air and nothing else. You’d sit up there with your friends and talk about girls and drinking and video games for a while. As you got older, someone would bring a pack of cigarettes from their dad’s drawer. That sort of place.
For me, that place was the meadow under the power lines on the hill.
The hill was big as a mountain, for an 11-year-old. Mom said not to go there because homeless people and drug addicts lived up there. We never saw any. When I went up to the hill, I’d usually go up with my friends to laugh and talk for a while without any adults for miles. But on the week before I graduated from elementary school, I brought April.
She wasn’t a crush. I didn’t think she was pretty at all, now that I think about it. April wore her hair short and cropped, played softball, and didn’t mind trekking through muddy forests once in a while. We’d met the year before but only talked occasionally, in the hallways at school or at lunch. But that day I’d been leaving school and she happened to be sitting in the seat across from me on the bus, drawing something in her notebook.
“What are you drawing?” I said. She didn’t hear me at first. It was kind of awkward, but then I was an awkward kid. So I asked her again.
“It’s a Ford Mustang from 1963,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s my grandpa’s car,” she said. “It’s really cool. And loud. And fast. See?” She turned her drawing to me so I could get a better look at it. The car looked like something a super-spy would drive. I told her I liked the drawing very much and she smiled, so I moved over across the aisle of the bus to sit next to her. We chatted for a while about class, life, mustangs, and cafeteria food. Her favorite were the breadsticks filled with cheese. I told her I thought they were gross. I liked the popcorn chicken. And, eventually, the topic of the meadow on the hill came up.
“There’s a place near my house, by the Safeway,” I said. “Me and Jason and Eva and Meghan like to go there after school. Wanna come?”
“I think I have some homework,” she said.
“You’ll have time for that after. And you don’t have to stay for long. It’s just somewhere we like to go and hang out and play Truth or Dare and Would You Rather and things like that.” She tilted her head, considering. And she said yes.
“Isn’t the view great?” I said to April when we reached the top.
“Wow, yeah. I didn’t know there was a view like this up here.” It was almost dusk and from the meadow on the hill you could see city lights blinking, on and off, some turning off for the evening and some just getting going. Behind the buildings were the mountains, just silhouetted in the evening light, standing watch over the valley. Somewhere in the distance, someone was making cinnamon rolls.
“Where’s everyone else?” April said.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I’ll send them a text.” I’d promised April a fun time with lots of people around and now we’d showed up and I looked like a loser and a liar. Or at least that’s how I felt in my head. When they didn’t reply I put my phone away and walked up next to April again, looking over the city.
“In my old city there weren't any views like this one,” she said.
“Oh? What old city?”
“Salem. It’s all flat there, no mountains, and the city’s tiny compared to here. But they do have a great movie theater where you can sneak in without buying tickets. Nobody notices.” I’d never thought about sneaking into a movie theater before. It made me look at her in a different way.
“I’m really sorry the others haven’t showed up,” I said.
“That’s okay,” April said. “It’s really nice here. Want to play truth or dare or something?”
“Sure.” By then it was dark and I could hardly make out April’s face from the city lights.
“I get to start, since I invited you up here.” My friends still hadn’t shown up or sent me a text message, but I didn’t mind it so much.
“OK,” she said.
“Truth or dare?”
“Dare.” I had been expecting her to say truth, so this meant I had to think for a minute.
But after a while, I came up with just the thing.
“Sneak into a movie theater with me. No tickets. And we’ll bring candy.” She laughed at this and asked me when.
“Tonight,” I said. “Like, right now.”
“But what if they catch us? I don’t know if it’ll be the same as my theater back home.”
“I don’t care.”
That was the year April became my best friend. And though we went to different middle schools our houses were nearby, and every day I’d hop on my bike and pedal as hard as I could until I rounded the corner into her cul-de-sac, showing up all sweaty, shirt sticking to my back. When it was warm out we’d go jump into the pool, get out, make milkshakes, jump back in again. She had this trampoline in her backyard that looked out over a meadow, which eventually gave way to a forest of pines.
One summer we went up into the forest of pines and built a treehouse. Her dad worked at Home Depot and he snuck us some pieces of discarded wood—the rest we built with sticks and twigs we scavenged. It was all good and fun until one day April climbed up and said, “Jackson, you gotta come see this,” and when I’d climbed up the rickety wood ladder I found a robin had made her nest in the treehouse.
We never went back. April and I decided quickly that we’d made our home in the robin’s, and they’d been generous enough to let us spend time there for a while, but that it was absolutely fair if the robin wanted to reclaim her home. We felt some pride in knowing that the robin was living in the treehouse we had made.
“Those robin kids are going to be the strongest, proudest robins in all the forest,” April said. I nodded and we walked, arm-in-arm, back home.
By the time we made it to high-school we weren’t walking arm-in-arm anymore, in part because we didn’t feel like it and in part because neither my girlfriend nor April’s boyfriend would’ve taken too kindly to it. High school was a different era for April and I, and we saw each other less, but we didn’t grow distant.
And by senior year we were both single and I took April to prom. It was nothing romantic, and in fact we both went home with different people we’d had our eye on most of senior year. We had a great time, though. April and I were going to different colleges, her out-of-state, me to UofO. So that summer we did a whole lot together, dips in the river and trips afterwards to frozen yogurt (and plenty of parties and drinking in-between all of it).
That August 27th she left for college was a Monday. And it was the last time I saw her for thirteen years.
* * *
Practically speaking, I first met Death in a local hospital outside my flat in Valencia. But in my mind I met him when I looked in the mirror after a shower one morning and realized those brazen early-20s days, shirt off in the hot summer sun, may have been a mistake. But hey, that’s how these things go, I told myself. You don’t get forever. My doctor, who was the nicest guy, an older man, told me 14 weeks at the longest.
And I sat there for a while and I went through all the stages of grief you might imagine. The list they give you, denial and anger and such, is really a poor way of describing how you handle bad news. When I met Death I felt like all the stages were happening all at once, all out of order, and I wasn’t even through one before the next came knocking on the door. After a while though, I settled down a little and began to think in practical terms. The first thing I decided to do was see all of my friends in Valencia. Go to my favorite restaurants. That sort of thing.
“Hell of a view, isn’t it,” Carlos said. We were looking out at the sea from a terrace on the edge of Valencia. It was late summer and so the Madrileños that flock the city when Hell visits Madrid were finally gone, and the city was quiet again. The bar we were in was about half- empty, and it was cold out so most of the patrons were inside. The breeze kicked up and pushed someone’s bill across the floor of the terrace.
“Should probably grab that before it blows away,” Carlos said. Juan went over and picked it up, twisted the butt end of his cigarette into it. “Anyway, Jackson,” he said, “you’re going to enjoy your trip back to the states. And you’ll be back here soon enough, no?”
“You know it,” I said. “Wouldn’t spend more time outside of Valencia than I absolutely had to.” And with that I covered the bill for the three of us and we tramped down the stairs and walked back home in the fading sunlight. I had taken a Norm Macdonald approach to the whole thing. What a strong thing to do, I thought, if nobody knew. Better that way. Nobody else worries until it’s all over—then there’s no worrying they can do.
And one week later I boarded my flight back to the United States. As we flew over the nuclear wasteland that is the Midwest and then over the Rockies, I got reflecting on my childhood. And I remembered, in a flood, that one friend I’d had called April. It was strange, I thought, that we hadn’t stayed in contact. She had been my life all through high school. And then that was it: college, jobs, life, and those hazy hallucinations of childhood, quashed in an instant. Friendships formed then existed in a different world where different rules applied. In the real world, we didn’t make it. I don’t know. But I could begin to see that hallucination again now, and the more I ruminated on it, the more I felt I needed to see April.
It was not easy to find her. She’d gotten married and her last name had changed. But after a while I did, through Facebook of all places, and she agreed to meet for a dinner. Lucky me that she was still living in Portland. We went to an Italian restaurant that hadn’t existed when we’d been kids. Something Trattoria, I can’t even remember the name of it.
“So,” I think I said, “what have you been up to?”
“Well, all sorts of things,” she said, and I realized it was a silly question. “I went to college, got married, got divorced, got married again, switched careers. Now I do interior design. And what do you do?”
I don’t know if it’s that I’d been living in Spain for so long where career is not seen as the centerpiece of life, but this question took me off-guard. But anyway I told her I’d started painting in Valencia, and I’d managed to stumble across a few wealthy patrons though that did not mean I was anything close to wealthy myself. She seemed mildly impressed by this but it wasn’t the reaction I was expecting.
The appetizers arrived at the table. “Know what you’ll have as a main?” the waiter said. I told him to give us more time, April told him she wouldn’t be having a main course. By default that meant I wouldn't be having one either, I guessed.
“Ever thought about leaving Portland?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said, in-between bites of bruschetta.
“Why not? Have you traveled at all, thought about checking somewhere else out for a little while at least?”
“Not really,” she said again. “I like it here. Plus, Jacob’s job means I have to be here. And now that we have kids, even more so. I’m not going to uproot them for a move. Feels selfish. Not that I don’t want to explore a little, but we can do that on vacation. No, I don’t think we’ll move. And you said you’ve been in Spain—that’s great. When do you think you’ll come back?”
“Oh, probably never,” I said.
“Really?” she said, eyebrows raised. “Doesn’t it feel strange, living in Spain but not being Spanish?”
“Not really,” I said. “In Portland you have three dozen different kinds of people, too. Even the native-born ones. There’s no such thing as a Portlander, and for my purposes there’s not really such a thing as a Spanish person. Just that some people were born there and act a certain way, some people act a different way. It’s not so complicated.”
“Hmm,” she said, considering this with a swig of wine. It didn’t seem like she was considering it much at all, as a matter of fact. I tried changing the subject again.
“Ever miss high school?”
“Nope. Not one bit.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“I do miss the treehouse we built,” she said. “That was fun. I’ve been thinking about building something similar for my kids. Though it’s probably my husband who’ll do all the work.”
“Come on, you think you’ve lost your touch?” She giggled and for a moment I saw the April I used to know. But it was a flash, a hallucination, quashed at once with a sip of wine. We continued the dinner for another thirty minutes or so, asking for the check when she hinted she needed to go back home to put the kids to bed. But it was in that moment, that laugh, that I think I really saw April for the last time.
After dinner we had an awkward hug and I sent her on her way. It had occurred to me, on my flight to Portland, to tell her about my condition. About Death. But it didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem like it would fit, somehow. And so I didn’t.
Later that night I climbed up the hill. The one my mom always said not to go out to, the one where I tried my first beer and my first cigarette and where I met April, who I will forever consider my first best friend, and perhaps my only.
And I watched the city lights twinkle like fireflies, and the cars like ants climbing the hills and rolling onto the main boulevards, joining the chaos of traffic into downtown. I looked to my right and to my left but nobody was there—April least of all. I let myself relax a moment and then I went to see a movie. After the movie I went to my hotel downtown and looked out over the city. This view was a better one. There was nobody next to me here, either, but I didn’t expect there to be. The truth is that you always know the places which are haunted by ghosts from the past. You could avoid going there, if you wanted. You could forget them forever.
The next day I cut my trip short. Booked a flight to Bangkok. I had friends there in the city. Friends who knew nothing about the past and, equally-important, thought the future for me and for them was ever-flowing, an infinite river of dreams. And for all of my days there we had beers near the water and heaping plates of pad thai and pigs’ blood stew from street food stalls. I’ll go out to the street food stalls in just a few minutes, I think. The air is so much fresher when you go somewhere the ghosts from the past don’t know how to haunt.