The Long Way There

We left on a Friday, after class, the four of us and our bags crammed into Eli's truck. Mae rode shotgun with her feet on the dash, navigation app on her phone calling out turns in that calm, incurious voice that made everything feel far away and decided. Theo sat behind her. I sat behind Eli, my hand on the back of his seat, my thumb drawing slow circles against the leather while the suburbs thinned out into trees.

The cottage was three hours north, the last forty minutes on a road that got narrower with every mile until it was barely a road at all, just two ruts of pale gravel cut through the green. The lake was on the right. You could smell it before you saw it, a cold mineral smell under the warm air, and then there it was, dark water going flat to the sky.

Eli parked under a leaning pine and we all just sat there for a minute, the engine ticking, not speaking. There is a particular silence that belongs to arriving somewhere you've been looking forward to. It's full, not empty. We were breathing it.

Then Mae kicked her door open and ruined it, laughing, and the four of us spilled out into the gravel and the lowering sun, and the cottage was small and brown and had a porch that wrapped halfway around it, and a canoe upturned in the weeds, and a door that stuck, and Eli had to shoulder it.

Inside it smelled like pine sap and old cotton and the particular nothing-smell of a place nobody has lived in for months. Mae threw open every window and the lake breeze came through and billowed the curtains, and for a second the whole building seemed to breathe.

Theo carried the bags in one trip, all of them, because he was like that, efficient with his body in a way that was easy to overlook. Eli checked the locks. He always checked the locks. Front door, back door, the windows Mae had just unlatched. He went around the whole little house testing latches while I unpacked the kitchen, and when he came back he looked slightly less worried, which was as close to relaxed as Eli got in a strange place.

"We need groceries," Mae announced, inventory complete. "Real ones. Not the emergency crackers and the four cans of beans my uncle keeps for, I guess, the apocalypse."

"We could do beans," Theo offered.

"We are not doing beans."

So a grocery run was decided. Here is where the day forked. Here is where I would later draw the line in my memory, before and after, though I didn't know it was a line yet.

We debated who would go. The truck sat four, but the run was a twenty-minute drive each way and we'd just sat in a car for three hours, and besides, the cottage was a mess and someone should stay to air it out and someone should stay to keep an eye on our things in a place none of us knew. Eli said he'd stay. He said it easily, without making it a thing, the way he said most protective things.

I'll go, I said. With you two. I meant Mae and Theo. I wanted the ride and the store and the ordinary errand of it, the four of us splitting into two pairs, the way groups do on trips without anyone deciding it. I wanted to pick out the things we'd eat.

Eli kissed my forehead. "Don't let her buy the off-brand cereal," he said to Mae, meaning me, because he knew I was cheap about cereal and he found it funny.

Then he turned back to the cottage, and the three of us got in Mae's car because the truck was hard to maneuver on the lane, and we drove back out the way we'd come, the three of us, toward the little town and the little store, and behind us, in the gravel, the cottage got small, and in one of its windows a light came on, and I watched it in the side mirror until the road curved and it was gone.

I didn't know I was watching him disappear. You never do.