Departure
The morning Merritt left, the green car was packed by seven and the sky did nothing at all, only hung there flat and white and ordinary, which felt like an insult. Parker had taken the day. He’d quietly traded two shifts for it weeks before, in black pen, and never told a soul why.
Mrs. Flynn was crying the happy crying you can’t tell from the other kind. The neighbors came out onto their steps. It became a whole thing, a hometown send-off, and Parker’s family came too—his mother in her good cardigan with a foil pan of the lemon thing for the road, Dani sullen and red around the eyes and pretending it was allergies, Cole standing too close to Merritt and not asking the question all over his face, which was are you coming back, the question kids ask with their whole bodies and no words. Merritt crouched down to Cole’s level on the lawn and said something Parker couldn’t hear, and Cole nodded hard, twice, the way you nod when you’re not going to cry in front of people, and then Merritt gave him a thing out of his pocket—a multi-tool, the good kind, the kind Cole had wanted and Parker had said no to—and Cole looked at Parker over Merritt’s shoulder with a question, and Parker, who had taken a knife away from this boy in May, looked at the multi-tool and at his brother’s face and said, “Don’t lose it, and don’t show your mother,” and Cole’s whole year was made.
Parker stood at the edge of all of it with his hands in his pockets, because the truth of the two of them was still a porch-and-kitchen-table truth, a thing his family held and the street didn’t, and neither of them had decided to make it the street’s business on the worst possible morning to decide anything. His mother knew. She stood beside him and didn’t say it, only put her hand flat between his shoulder blades for a second, the spot you press to tell a person I’ve got you and I’m not going to make you talk, and took it away before anyone could read it.
Then the car was loaded and the goodbyes were said and there was nothing left but the part Parker had spent eight weeks not thinking about. Merritt came over to where he stood by the truck, a little apart from everyone, and for a second neither of them knew what to do with their hands—the very first thing about them and the very last, unchanged across all of it.
“So,” Merritt said.
“So.” Parker’s throat had shut. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t make it hard. He wouldn’t beg. There was nothing to beg for—there was no version where Parker found the right words and Merritt unpacked the car, and they both knew it, and the not-begging was the last gift Parker had left to give, so he gave it. He kept his hands in his pockets and his voice level and he did not ask for one single thing.
“I’ll call you from the road,” Merritt said. “Every time I stop for gas. I’ll call so much you’ll get sick of me.”
“You won’t. You’ll get up there and there’ll be all these new people and the four-o’clock dark and you’ll forget I exist for ten months, and that’s fine, that’s the deal, that’s what you’re supposed to—“
“Parker.” Merritt’s eyes had gone wet. “I’m not going to forget you exist. I have never once in my life forgotten you exist. That was the whole problem.”
Parker laughed, and it broke coming out, and he looked at his shoes. Then he took his hand out of his pocket—he’d put it there that morning on purpose—and held out the stone. The flat grey one off the dash, the good one, the kind that skipped. Merritt looked down at it.
“It’s a rock,” Parker said. “Before you make it weird. It’s a rock, Flynn.”
Merritt took it. He closed his hand around it.
“There’s water up there,” Parker said, and his voice was going now and he let it, just this once. “That lake the size of an ocean. So. For when you find it. You always threw like you were mad at the water, but you’ve got it in you—keep your wrist loose, it’ll skip. I’ve told you a hundred times. Keep your wrist loose.” He stopped. He’d run out of things to say about throwing rocks. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not a promise. I’m not asking you for anything. It’s just—it’s from here. So you’ve got a thing from here.”
Merritt looked at the stone in his palm, and then he looked up at Parker, and his face was wide open, no joke anywhere in it, nothing held back, and he stepped in and put his arms around Parker right there at the edge of the driveway in front of the neighbors and the crying mother and the flat white sky, and held on. Parker held on back. And for once Parker didn’t let go a beat early. He held on exactly as long as he wanted to. He’d waited his whole life to do that, and he got to do it once, in a driveway, while a boy he loved left town.
“Keep my wrist loose,” Merritt said into his shoulder, wrecked, laughing and not.
“Keep your wrist loose.”
“This isn’t goodbye,” Merritt said. “I don’t know what it is. But I’m not going to pretend it’s clean. I’m not going to drive off and pretend it didn’t—you matter to me more than the program does. I need you to know that I know that, even though I’m still getting in the car. Both things. I’m holding both things.”
“I know,” Parker said. “I taught you that one.”
Merritt laughed for real then, the wet kind, and let go, and got into the green car. He set the stone in the cupholder where Parker could watch him do it, on purpose, the same as Parker had once put a hand on a gearshift and not moved it—a thing said without a word in it. Then he backed out of the drive, and lifted two fingers off the wheel, and drove down the street he’d grown up on and turned at the end of it and was gone. The street went back to being a street. The sky went on doing nothing. And Parker stood in his mother’s driveway and let his mother put her arm around him, and did not, in the end, cry. He had the early shift in the morning. And some part of him was already, quietly, working out the arithmetic of how to carry this too.
After the First Week
A week is nothing and a week is forever. Parker worked it. He opened the store and closed the store and drove Cole to swim and balanced the calendar and let the days take him as days do, and the missing was a flat ache he carried under everything, present and quiet, the way you carry a healing rib—not a wound exactly, by then, only a thing you breathe carefully around.
Merritt called from the road like he’d said, twice the first day, then the signal died somewhere up in the pines and there were two days of nearly nothing, a text arriving hours late—made it. it’s so green up here you’d lose your mind—and Parker read it standing in the hardware aisle and put the phone away and helped a man find a propane fitting and did not think the thing he was thinking, which was I would. I’d lose my mind. Take me with you. He didn’t think it. He’d retired that thought on a dock. It was a thing you got to want and didn’t get to make true, and he’d made his peace with the shape of that, or he was learning to, which on a Tuesday is close enough.
He thought it would be the long fade from here. The calls getting shorter, the texts further apart, the slow honest disappearing of a thing that had no room to live in two states—it always went that way, when one of you stayed and one of you left. He’d braced for it. He was good at bracing. He told himself the kiss had been a true thing and a finished thing at once, like the float out past the drop-off, a place you swam to once and kept. He almost believed it.
The house was the thing. He hadn’t braced for the house. Merritt had only been there a summer, but he’d filled the space so completely that the space remembered him now—the porch step where the two of them sat was just a step again, the fourth chair came back off the table, the lemon thing went unmade. Cole asked on the third day, over cereal, not looking up, “Is Merritt your boyfriend now or did he just leave,” and Parker stood at the counter and thought about how to answer a question that had no clean shape and said, “Both, kind of. He’s far away and he’s still mine. People can be both.” And Cole considered that with the gravity of eleven and said, “That’s stupid,” and Parker said, “Yeah,” and meant it, and they finished their cereal, and that was the most honest conversation Parker had all week.
He drove past the Flynns’ once, the second night, not meaning to, ending up on the street the way his body had learned. The green car was in the drive—Mrs. Flynn’s, home from the long drive back without her son in it—and the house was lit and ordinary, and Parker idled at the curb a second feeling like a man casing his own past, and then drove home. He’d told Merritt he would. He just hadn’t told him it would feel like this.
Then, the Sunday, eight days out, his phone went off on the counter at the Lamplight where he’d come to bring his mother her lunch, and he flipped it over knowing and not knowing.
It was a photo. Cold water, slate under a slate sky, the kind of northern water that never warms, a shore of dark stones running out to a lake so wide the far side was only weather. And in the corner of the frame, held up too close to the lens and blurred for it, the flat grey stone off the dash. The good one. The kind that skipped.
Under it, three words, the punctuation filed off the way he always filed it, so it wouldn’t read as asking:
found your water
Parker stood at the counter with his mother’s lunch going cold in the bag and looked at the photo a long time. It wasn’t a promise. There was no plan in it. No come up here, no home for Christmas, no future he could hold in his hand and count on. It was a boy a thousand miles north standing at the edge of a cold lake holding up a rock from home, telling him in the only language they’d ever trusted, the one with the question marks scrubbed off—it wasn’t nothing. It still isn’t. I’m carrying it. Look. I’m carrying it.
Parker typed, and stopped, and typed again, and what he finally sent was the only true thing he had, the thing he could give across a thousand miles that asked for nothing and meant all of it:
keep your wrist loose
The dots came up. Went away. Came up again.
He put the phone in his pocket without waiting to see, and picked up his mother’s lunch, and carried it in to her, because that was who he was. And somewhere up north a boy he loved stood at the edge of the biggest water either of them had ever seen and sent a stone out low across it, wrist loose, and counted the skips.