May 1983
The night after graduation, Sasha and Autumn abscond to their tree house, accompanied by a flurry of fireflies and a tin of Autumn’s first batch of homemade weed brownies.
“Tell no one,” Autumn says with mock solemnity and pops the lid on the tin. Cocoa fills the air.
“I’ll take it to my grave,” Sasha promises.
Sitting cross-legged, facing each other in ritual, they toast the future with tiny squares.
It’s a celebration of two things: Autumn’s summer job at Ezra’s Bakery and Sasha’s imminent departure for art college. The idea of a Last Summer is difficult to swallow, but hopefully Autumn’s special brownies will be the salve. At the very least they are one last “first” that Autumn and Sasha can share before Sasha ventures into the wide world and forgets all about her. They’ve never had edibles; may as well try them together.
Senior year was nothing like the others. The pressures of the real world consumed all. College acceptances, marriage proposals, whirlwind travel plans: it’s the liveliest their graduating class has ever been. There are even a couple of hush-hush pregnancies in the mix, but the town is so small, everyone knows who got who pregnant. (Barb and Bobby; Johnny and Stacey.)
Even the Clearwaters, whose inheritance of the orchard has been assured since birth, aren’t immune to the hype and fervor. At the eleventh hour, their English teacher begged Lil to apply to the University of the South. Lil scoffed, of course. She’s attending the nearest college with an agricultural focus, for as few years as she can so she can return to the orchard. But Sasha’s lackadaisical extracurriculars—student council, drama, the photography studio—suddenly paid dividends in the form of a robust and well-rounded college application. She has caught her bright future like a falling star. Ever since her acceptance letter to SCAD arrived, she has glowed.
No one offers Autumn many options. Except Dad, who hopefully mentions the neighbor’s son, George, is single again. He says it like she doesn’t know George, like she didn’t attend all of her school years with him. George, who peed on the bus during second grade. George, who asked Lil to junior year homecoming (she went to spite everyone who laughed at him over it). She has no real college or marriage prospects, just a summer job at the bakery lined up. Everyone is changing around her. Except her.
“It’s not free, even with the scholarship,” Sasha admits. She’s scribbling out her financial options for the years ahead. “Mom isn’t really able to do much. But I think I can get a part-time job. Maybe a few part-time jobs. In a diner or something. I can wear an apron. Like you.” Autumn laughs. But as she watches Sasha calculate the fixings of her future, she is swept away with a now-familiar dread: soon they will be in very different worlds.
Autumn eats another square and flops back on the ages-old wood. It complains like an elderly man with bad knees. “I’d go if I had something I wanted to study.”
“Well, you’re good at everything you like.” Sasha reclines too so their heads brush.
“I don’t know. Our teachers said I lack drive.” She digs out her pack of cigarettes, flips it open, considers the neat cylinders within. “Maybe I’ll try to quit smoking. Develop some drive that way.”
“Great idea. Healthy.” Sasha steals her pack and pockets it, grinning. “I’ll help save you from yourself.”
“My hero.” Autumn rolls onto her side to look at Sasha. It’s the easiest thing in the world, looking at Sasha. Sasha is the favorite book she keeps on her bedside table forever, partly in case she wants to read it, partly to use as a coaster. She’s the smell of a favorite food Autumn wants to come home to after a long day. Food. Now she wishes she had fries, not just brownies.
On second thought, third thought, Autumn eats another square. Wind kicks up and Sasha’s shirt flutters. The top button is a tug away from coming loose, and Autumn’s fingers warm with the idea of pressing it safely back in.
Sasha moves her arm so Autumn can burrow against her shoulder.
She pats Sasha’s stomach. “I have a confession. These brownies aren’t making me feel anything.”
Sasha opens a toffee eye at her and grins. “We must just not have eaten enough.”
It takes under an hour for the tray to vanish, empty and discarded against the tree trunk.
A rookie mistake. Because when the brownies hit, it’s with a vengeance. “Am I ever going to see you?” Autumn is distantly aware that she is asking Sasha a question she has sworn to herself was the secret of her own heart. It’s not a burden she intended to place on Sasha. But it’s too late, and she can’t get her hands working well enough to scoop the inquiry back into her mouth. “What if you meet other people you like better?”
“Oh, poppycock.” Warm and fond, Sasha drags both hands through Autumn’s hair, wraps her fingers around the back of her head. “No one else would make me brownies this good. I think I feel them a little.”
“I’m serious,” Autumn protests, but she’s smiling as she socks Sasha’s shoulder. “Don’t be cute.”
“Can’t help it.” Sasha catches her fist, laughing. And then holds onto it.
“I mean, like—like—there will be people. To choose from. So many people who…study more. And you’re so…Bobby Kaplan is obsessed with you. And Chuck Harlowe.” She pauses suddenly, heated suddenly—and afraid. “You know that, right? They’re desperately in love with you.”
“That’s just talk.” Sasha laces their hands together. “Your fingers are so cold.”
“I have poor circulation.”
Sasha’s thumb plays over the back of her hand.
“But am I?” Autumn asks again. Her words taste like syrup. The air is so sweet, and heavy. Maybe this is why Van Gogh painted swirls in the sky; Autumn feels swirls all around her.
“Are you…what?” Sasha asks, eyes glinting with mirth. Her pupils are as huge as ponds. “A wood nymph? A scamp? A Pippi Longstocking? Yes. Yes, you are.”
“Am I ever going…?” Words are heavy too. “See you again. Am I ever going to see you again? Are you going to just…?” There are fireflies in the trees, and Autumn feels tender kinship with them because there is a light on somewhere in her too, and she cannot turn it off. It burns in her and is reflected in Sasha’s eyes. She props herself up so that she and Sasha are nose to nose. “Will you forget me?”
Autumn thinks Sasha says no. She thinks maybe she starts crying a little, and Sasha coos and wipes at Autumn’s eyes. And kisses her. Sasha kisses her mouth.
All Autumn knows is they are lying close, whispering, and then they are kissing.
They say things. They kiss more. Autumn has lain down in the red-hot embers of a banked fire and found them to be a warm bed. She has discovered that the thing that’s meant to burn her only wants to hold her.
And then Autumn floats, outside of time, above it, and also possibly wrapped inside it like it’s a warm blanket. Their conversation feels more like telepathy than talking, and Autumn can’t quite grasp what they’re talking about, but she knows it is as rich as fertile soil where good things grow.
Guess what I’m thinking, Sasha says and Autumn can’t remember what she said, but Sasha exclaims that you’re right, that’s exactly it, how did you know?
But after that critical moment—Autumn’s memory goes blank. The rest of the night is lost to her. Too much weed, Sasha would bemoan in the morning. We should have paced ourselves.
In the gray dawn light, they stumble out of the tree house, at once deadly ravenous and too nauseous to even think about food. The high flickers in and out like a faulty bulb for hours more. Autumn is shaky with fear and confusion. She half jokes that she doesn’t remember, she sees the effect of her lie—the mistake—flinch over Sasha’s beloved face, and they never talk about it again.
“I always wondered if I should tell you.”
December 1989
“I meant to ask,” Boris says softly. “About your…life.” They’re lying in bed together, closer to morning than evening. Autumn still tastes the expensive wine the other graduates shelled out for—because if graduating culinary school that day taught their cohort anything, it was how to long for tastes beyond their means. Bottom-shelf wine and discounted cheese may never be good enough again.
“What’s there to ask about?” she murmurs against his neck, too tired to move. “We’re all together for like…80 percent of my days, so you already know everything. School, work, nap, school.”
He graduated today too; they’re two of a close-knit group of five, bonded by gas-powered fire, the blue of the crème brûlée torch. It’s what she needed, after Mom and Dad retired and left town in an RV, after Autumn closed the doors of her bakery to see if she could cut it in the wider world. At twenty-five, she abandoned it all to finally do what everyone else she knew did at eighteen: better herself. Pursue higher education of some kind.
Culinary school can be a lonely and cutthroat place, but she met Angie. Boris. Bruno. Tabitha. Together, they survived, scrimping money, working night shifts at diners to get in all the real-life kitchen experience they could. Now, they are their own kind of family.
“Hey.” Boris nudges her. “Are you falling asleep on me?”
“Mmmmm no. What was the question?” She tilts her head up at him.
“I never asked about your life, before school,” he says. She sees, for the first time, a tiny freckle in his iris. His tone sounds like he’s angling toward something, but she’s too drowsy to figure out what.
“You know about the bakery.” She misses those ovens, the blue KitchenAid mixer from Lou. She misses the smell of sourdough. She misses the gruff noncompliments of Ezra, the former owner of the bakery and her first true culinary teacher. The swears he expelled when a batch didn’t rise, the shoulder pats he gave when her work pleased him. The kiss he dropped on her forehead when he left the bakery to her at twenty-one and moved to Florida.
“Oh my god, you’re going to make me ask.” He buries his face in the pillow. “I mean like…are you…? Was this…?”
“You want to know if this was my first time? You scoundrel!” Autumn pokes him, and he laughs, still a little tipsy, a little bashful.
“I know, I know.” He colors, the blush she now knows goes all the way down his chest. “Sorry. I just want to make sure I was a gentleman.”
“Oh stop. You know you were.” Boris and Autumn aren’t even the closest of the group, but tonight was a celebration. He has beautifully long eyelashes, and he loves her the way the rest of them love her: easily, without expectation. So there it is. With him, she hasn’t so much lost her virginity as crossed it hurriedly off the list with a sense of relief. They’d listened to a record. He kissed her out of her clothes and folded his futon back into a bed.
“I’m fine. I liked it. A good first,” Autumn says, a little surprised to discover it’s true. She has wondered if Sasha was the exception or the rule. But maybe love and attraction aren’t that simple.
“I know it was your first time with…a man.” He trails off, staring at the ceiling, where cracks branch off from the corner, like the roots of some spindly tree. “But did you ever…?”
“Ah.” Autumn rolls onto her back too. “No, this was my first time. I’ve never done that with a woman either.”
He watches her. “You’ve wanted to.”
Autumn nods. She isn’t ashamed. She refuses to be; she’ll paddle forever, keeping her head above that cruel cold water.
“Your friend. The one whose birthday you go home for.” Once again, Boris’s aim is startling and true.
“We only kissed once,” Autumn admits. His sheets smell like them. He still has an arm around her, and even though she’s lying on it, he hasn’t asked her to move. Just strokes her side, reassuring her that she isn’t alone. “We were high. I don’t remember it all.”
The trip went bad, Autumn hyperventilated and her paranoia took over the rest of the night—Do you hear that, Sasha? Someone’s out there, I swear I hear whispering in the trees—
“So she was straight all along,” Boris guesses.
Autumn laughs. It’s dry, cold. Unlike her. “Oh no. She went off to college. Had her great awakening. She’s out and proud. She has a real-life girlfriend and everything.”
While Sasha embarked on her self-discovery, what had Autumn done? Nothing. Autumn stayed. Once or twice, she returned to the tree house alone and tried to summon her memories, if only to understand it. She even kissed George, the neighbor’s son, and let him take her on five placid dates, not enjoying it, and wondering if it made her a—
For a long time, Autumn couldn’t even say the word for a woman who likes kissing women. Her parents proudly voted for Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis, and loudly proclaimed they had multiple gay friends they’d met on the road, and yet it took years for Autumn to say the word “lesbian.”
Meanwhile, Sasha is kissing more women—beautiful, smart ones with sharp minds. Sasha comes home, and Autumn is still her funny little friend who can only stammer that she isn’t really seeing anyone.
“Who needs it,” Sasha said breezily, like it was easy. “No one deserves you anyway.”
“So she’s gay. But you aren’t together,” Boris cuts in, his forehead creased with confusion.
Autumn can’t dispute it or explain it, so she pushes her face into his chest again.
Wait. Autumn wanted to burst the first time Sasha came home talking about the girls she was kissing—the first time one of them seemed to stick—the first time she had an official girlfriend. And the second time. And the third. Wait, I’m still in the tree house. You only just kissed me. How can it be too late when you only just kissed me? There’s a hint of new distance between them. They can’t lounge as carelessly on Sasha’s bed when there are girlfriends. But Sasha still tortures her with arms slung around her neck, like it means nothing to Sasha to touch Autumn so casually. And Autumn touches her too, helplessly. Why are they doing this to each other?
“I get it.” He brushes a tender kiss against the crown of her head. “I had a similar situation. My best friend growing up. Paul, he—he and I—we used to—” Boris breaks off, swallows, tries again. “He’s married, actually. Nice girl. Got a cute kid.” She reads in his face a multitude of heartbreaks, written in languages she doesn’t even know. “I don’t think he wants me in his life anymore.”
Boris is a great friend to her. They talk a lot after that because he also likes kissing boys as much as he likes kissing her. Maybe, he says, it’s not all that black and white for some people. Maybe, Autumn decides, she is an unfinished tapestry. Maybe she is free to keep unraveling and weaving as she discovers the new patterns of herself.
“I always wondered if I should tell you.”
April 1995
Autumn paces the tile floor, and perched on their kitchen counter, Victoria watches skeptically.
“I don’t get why it’s such a big deal. It’s just a birthday,” she tells Autumn. They’re in the apartment they share, their one-bedroom home high in the Chicago sky like a bird’s nest built in the tallest tree branches. It’s been a year together, and Autumn still can’t believe her luck.
Victoria wears earthy perfumes, magic, feminine musk that turns heads, and has sharp eyes, always slightly unreadable, her mind too fast to quite reach. She was top of her class in college, her future as landscaped as a French garden, the polar opposite of Autumn’s lackadaisical mix of hopes, distant inclinations, and spontaneous choices. When they met, they were certainly unlikely. Victoria was twenty-five, working in finance and stopping for coffee at the nearest bakery—where Autumn happened to work the morning shift. She came more and more often for the free pastries Autumn couldn’t help pressing into her hands. Autumn falls with her whole heart, captivated and honored just to be near her. It’s tangling with a dragon, beautiful, dangerous, clawed—beyond her. Autumn never understands exactly why Victoria picked her and can only be grateful for it.
“I like your silly T-shirts,” she’d tell Autumn, crowding her against the sink, wearing nothing but one of those T-shirts, She-Ra emblazoned on the front. “I like the way you bite your lip.”
But the more time they spent together, the more Autumn lost her sense of helpless enthrallment in favor of something far more dangerous. Because Victoria, she has discovered over the past year, is secretly shy under her intelligence and red lipstick. She’s like a cat, content to curl in Autumn’s lap and demand her fingers in her hair. Sweet and brittle at turns, and awkwardly goofy, like she’s still learning how to let go and be—Autumn is flush with first love.
And yet…she’s torn. The moment Victoria invites her to come to an important conference in Seattle, followed by meeting Autumn’s parents in Northern California…Autumn is torn. “You’re sure you need me at the conference?” she asks. “Maybe I could meet you after, when we get to Big Sur.”
Victoria’s lips are pursed. “It’s been, what, thirty years? And you’ve never missed the twins’ birthday? Surely they can spare you this year.”
“But that’s just it,” Autumn says. Again. This isn’t their first cycle of conversation over this decision. “It’s their thirtieth birthday. That’s such a big one.”
“It isn’t like they’re coming out here for your birthday.” Victoria catches her, hooking a finger in Autumn’s belt loop to reel her in. “I know. I was there.” She was. She’d gathered Autumn’s friends—all her Chicago people, even the culinary school crew flew in—and hosted a surprise party at an exclusive nightclub that Autumn had no chance of getting in alone. They’d danced all night, snuck edibles past the bouncers, and Autumn had glued Victoria to her side, unable to stop looking at her. It was as special as she’d ever felt, because Victoria didn’t like parties full of people only Autumn knew, and she must have hired a PI to track down as many of Autumn’s friends as she had. But she’d done it, all of it, for Autumn, and sent everyone home with actual care packages to alleviate the inevitable hangovers.
Victoria kisses her, a welcome, beloved interruption. “Autumn,” she says carefully. “When’s the last time Sasha came to your birthday?”
“That’s different,” Autumn protests, nudging their foreheads together. “It isn’t just about their birthday. It’s mostly their birthday. I make the cake. But it’s usually the only time of year I ever go back there now.”
But Victoria is too smart and she doesn’t buy it. “Your parents are in Big Sur. They sent you an entire disposable camera just to share their trip with you.” She arches an eyebrow. “Who else do you have to visit at home? Except…?”
Sasha is home this time, maybe even for keeps. She left New York and her New York girl and moved back into the Clearwater house. Back to the town and the tree house.
Autumn bites her lip. Face-to-face with Victoria, it’s so difficult to admit. But Autumn has always loved so easily. Too easily, sometimes, with no thought to guarding her heart. She’s felt it most keenly with Sasha, who was so far ahead of her for so long, confident in her college coming-out and her girlfriends. By the time Autumn knew what she felt, Sasha was comically out of her reach. Oh, it haunted her. Autumn dreamed of chasing after her through the trees, watching her strong, straight back as she vanished into the horizon. And now she wakes up in Victoria’s arms. She loves Victoria wildly, to distraction, and in secret, her love is twinned by tumorous guilt.
“What if she needs me?” Autumn asks finally.
“What if she doesn’t?” Victoria’s counter is cruel. But fair. “Also,” she adds. “I want my girlfriend with me.” Not unlike a dragon, Victoria has a little possessive streak. Sometimes Autumn hates it, and sometimes she wants to wrap herself up in it, in the proof of Victoria’s love, her desire.
It has crossed Autumn’s mind that Victoria might have known the birthday was coming. That Victoria’s work trip—some conference—for that exact week might not have been entirely innocent. But not even Victoria could force the whole world to bend, just to keep Autumn occupied during the one week of the year she is normally spoken for.
“You really want me there? I won’t be a distraction?” Autumn presses.
Victoria’s answering smile is slow and sweet. “Oh, you’ll be a distraction.”
Sasha is a tether, tugging Autumn southward, past-ward. But Victoria is her present. Precious, worth keeping.
So she kisses her again, smiles against her lips. She’ll do her best to keep what she has. In the morning, she’ll call Sasha. She’ll tell her then.
“I always wondered if I should tell you.”
August 2002
It’s late in the evening, a single june bug dazedly spinning itself against the front door light, when Autumn finally carries the last box over the threshold and closes herself up in her new apartment.
Everyone warned her that moving in the midst of summer heat—in Texas, no less—was a terrible, terrible idea. But Autumn is from the South; she knows all about heat. And breakups are a heat-death that consumes all.
The one-bedroom is very dark. She’s left the light on over the kitchen oven, and it floods over the breakfast bar, right into the tiny living space where the kind movers positioned her couch, the only piece of real furniture that felt like hers enough to take it from Victoria’s. It’s green fabric, a vintage fade that Victoria allowed because Autumn unapologetically loved it. Squashy in all the right places. Sturdy enough to hold the weight of two women and their love. Probably still had popcorn somewhere under the cushions, too deep to ever pull out.
Victoria is magnanimous, and much wealthier, so she offered Autumn her pick of their shared items. As ruthless as she can be at work, with subordinates and rude strangers, she still isn’t ruthless with Autumn. But Autumn didn’t want their things. Better to start over, with her clothes, her books—and overwhelmingly, her kitchenware. The last box is…
Autumn peeks. A weird mix of scarves, cheesecloth, and her favorite oven mitts. She dumps it on the couch, on top of the box containing her cookie press and her cake-scaping tools. The cushions wheeze.
Autumn feels empty. But the cleansing fire of the breakup hasn’t burnt her down, at least. Her leaves are gone, branches bare, bark scorched, but she stands anyway in the wreckage, still alive under the ashes.
This is her choice. She’ll stand by it.
With a nebulous plan after culinary school, Autumn jotted herself down into Victoria’s day planner. She spent seven years as Victoria’s most devoted high priestess, as Victoria’s shelter from a sharp world, letting her make all the biggest decisions.
But this cruel, final one, is hers.
“I don’t think you’ve changed at all,” Victoria teases her, the first time the two of them find a new little gray hair growing at Victoria’s part. Autumn says it makes Victoria look presidential. Calls her Madam President for days. It’s the first of the silver sprinkle of winter flowers that come with spring’s fervor during the last year they’ll ever spend together.
Months later, holding a glass of red wine, Victoria looks down at Autumn, who wears the same threadbare shirt she bought at their first concert together, who has the same job she’s had since she was twenty-nine and wooed this dragon with pastries. It’s what they’ve been fighting about: Autumn’s job, spurred by Victoria’s newest promotion. “I don’t think you’ve changed at all,” Victoria accuses her. “You’re not even over your first crush yet. Don’t you want more for yourself?”
And another time, in the dark butter of nighttime, one of Victoria’s hands slips around her hip. “Autumn?” Her voice is soft, like it hasn’t been in the weeks they’ve spent fighting. “You’re not… I don’t think you’ve changed.”
And Autumn, staring out the window, having swallowed a stone that sits in her stomach: dread in its purest form. “You say that a lot.”
“You see it too,” Victoria presses herself against her back and pleads. “It’s not just the job stuff. I don’t care—I mean, I do care about that, but it’s not what I mean. It’s you, your face, your body; it’s been seven years—”
“Stop,” Autumn cuts her off. It’s out of character enough that even Victoria, who would argue with God if given the chance, doesn’t respond.
Another night, one of the very final nights, watching Autumn cook: “You haven’t been back to your hometown in a while,” Victoria says. She still likes watching her work, even if she doesn’t understand why Autumn refuses to open her own bakery—the very smallest and meekest of Victoria’s ambitions for Autumn. “Maybe you should go there. See the bakery you used to run.”
Autumn barely listens, because risotto takes her whole attention, because she’s tired of Victoria’s need to hammer Autumn’s life into some more acceptable shape. (It’s Autumn’s life. Even if Victoria thinks she knows better.) “Where?” she asks absently.
“Your hometown,” Victoria’s voice rises above the mushroom-scented steam, baffled and suspicious. “Your childhood home, Autumn.”
And then the memories flood back. Not that Autumn has forgotten. She simply hasn’t thought of that old town in a while. Home, yes. Home, of course. The papery smell of pecans housed in the tall canopies, molten praline cooling in bunny rabbit molds so she can sell them at the Pecan Festival, Sasha’s hair slipping out of her ponytail. “Oh, right.”
She never went back. Ditching the thirtieth birthday turned into ditching them all. Or maybe Sasha stopped extending the invitation. Regardless, Autumn goes months without thinking about it, without even thinking of Sasha, other than occasional twinges of regret for how neither of them have reached out to the other.
“No,” Autumn says. She needs to stir less. She’s making the risotto too starchy, too gluey. But she has to have something to do with her hands, or she’ll turn around and spit at Victoria: If you don’t think I’m good enough for you, if you’re ashamed of your deadbeat partner, just say it. Put me out of my misery. “Maybe I’ll go next year.”
The end of her and Victoria’s relationship is marked with fights breaking out like lightning storms as Victoria’s patience fades and Autumn feels, once again, outpaced by someone more beautiful and capable. Sasha all over again. It’s too difficult to be outgrown, so Autumn, for the first time, made the decision for both of them.
“No more,” Autumn says softly one night. She’s bought Victoria an orchid. No idea why. What does one buy their girlfriend after seven years, to express their forgiveness, their desire to be amicable from afar, but to never be in the same room again? It sits on their coffee table, pink petals, a gentle, swan’s-neck curve in the stem.
Victoria doesn’t protest, because they both know Autumn is right. Victoria is fire and fury, growth and ascension. Time, years, love, fingerprints, bruises, tears, cities…and Autumn is unchanged.
As for leaving Chicago, it is the right choice. Even breaking all ties with her old life, her old friends, for a new apartment in some state she’s never lived in is right.
Because Victoria is correct about one thing: there are natural, normal ways Autumn should have changed.
She pushes enough boxes to the floor that she can curl up on her couch. It’s getting harder to ignore. When Autumn presented her driver’s license, the agent gave her a long, strange look, eyes flicking between the birthdate, 1965, and Autumn’s face.
“I have good genes,” Autumn jokes. “And hair dye.” Because she doesn’t know what else to say. She’s almost forty, starting over, but she doesn’t look it. Not a single gray hair. Not a wrinkle. Not a word from her best friend.
It’s dark in her new apartment, where in the cold light of the breakup, Autumn admits what she hasn’t been able to, surrounded by friends and wrapped in Victoria’s love: something isn’t right.
For the first time, on that shitty couch, in her lonely new living quarters, she does what Victoria always wanted. Autumn begins to consider her future. In case the impossible is somehow possible. In case she wakes up tomorrow and still looks twenty-five.
Outside, the june bug must still be tapping on the light.
“I always wondered if I should tell you.”
January 2015
“To New Year’s Eve!” Chloe screams over the noise of the club, about one shot and three minutes from climbing onto the table. “With the best people in the world.”
It’s cold out in Greenwich Village, where none of them can actually afford to live—but can afford to party, here and there—the first snow of the year already underway. Autumn is sandwiched in the middle of the booth, surrounded by her favorite people, and the year is turning around them. She doesn’t know the club; to her it is indistinguishable from all the other long, black-boothed bars in Manhattan with low lights, high-priced whiskey specialties, too few wooden stools, and ample spillover into the street. But Chloe knew the bouncer (she’s very like Victoria, sometimes), and so here they are, in a sea of the city’s queerest and most glamorous, full of optimism.
They toast, Matt and Autumn lock elbows and pour back their shots together. He kisses her on the cheek, a wet, limey smack.
And…Chloe is on the table. She’s gorgeous tonight, with most of her tattoos, including the Taurus under her collarbone, on display, in her element. Autumn always thought Chloe would have liked the Club Kid era. She’s the lightning rod of their little group: Matt, Autumn, Ellis, and the Ryans. She was the one Autumn met first, at the bakery where she’d become head pastry chef. It’s how she finds all her friends: luring them in with pastry.
And the countdown to a new year begins.
Autumn’s proud of what she’s found here. Chloe with her solstice parties and astrology charts. Matt and his constant search for antiaging skincare: fountains of youth found in plastic bottles. The two Ryans and their annual enthusiastic Super Bowl party (cats allowed). Ellis’s ever-changing video game obsession—and their insistence that Autumn would definitely like this one. Occasionally it crosses her mind: what Sasha would think of the little queer crew Autumn has found, these brightly colored birds of a feather flocking together.
“Another year,” Ryan P. demands of the world, of their friends. Tequila makes him loud, but it also makes him really cuddly, which is why he’s sitting on Ryan G.’s lap. “Another drink too, where’s my—” Ryan blinks at his empty hand and scours the club. “I think that guy stole my drink. Chloe, fight him.”
Obligingly, Chloe hops off the table, but before she can actually fight anyone, Matt slides Ryan’s dirty, dirty, dirty martini over the tabletop at him, eyes glinting mercury with mirth. Matt’s still agonizing over his smile lines, even though they all swear they make him distinguished. Autumn doesn’t bother picking through her hair for grays anymore. She knows there isn’t a point. Instead, she resigns herself to the odd, inexplicable truth.
If she really isn’t aging, there are worse fates. Technology, Pride parades, Friendsgiving, Pixar, Asian fusion donuts: there’s a lot to be grateful for, so much sweetness to love in life.
“Are we making New Year’s resolutions?” Ellis asks, scooting closer to Autumn so Chloe can join their booth again. “Or is that too much? Is that stupid?”
Matt looks up from his phone, where strangers seem to be messaging, and his eyes soften. “I’ll make a resolution with you.”
Ellis snorts. “I resolve to find you a boyfriend so you stop telling me about your hookups.” Matt’s cruising his dating apps, because he’s at the sweet, raw time after coming out when living itself feels new and he’s desperate to make up for lost time.
“Matt, you can always tell me about your hookups,” Chloe soothes him and turns, viper-quick to Autumn. “It’s Autumn who needs someone.”
“Hear, hear,” Ryan raises his glass, one arm still looped around Ryan, to keep him from sliding to the ground.
Autumn laughs, waves them off. “I’m fine. I like being single.”
“But you’re so cute,” Matt protests. “And perfect cuddling size.”
“I made her an account,” Chloe says, stealing an olive from Ryan’s martini. “Her profile gets lots of likes.”
Matt stares. Ellis stares. The Ryans stare. Autumn stares. “Are you…catfishing people as me?”
Chloe’s smile is slow around the olive. “It’s not catfishing if you’re the one who shows up on the date.”
Autumn tries to be careful about dating as she suspects that she can’t promise anyone forever. But there’s still love to be had and life to live. Victoria still checks in, here and there, still beautiful, her sweep of hair cut short into a silver bob. She’s married to a virtual goddess now, a celebrity in the baking industry. Autumn unironically owns all her cookbooks. They are fierce social advocates for gay marriage and tied the knot the very day it was legal. Victoria looks like she’s never lived a day in fear, but Autumn knows it isn’t true.
“Well…let me see my profile,” she decides.
“Later.” Chloe ruffles her hair and slips out of the booth. “Dancing first. Go into the year as you want to go out of it, yeah?” She’s a devastating dancer. Once, she’d told Autumn, she wanted to go to school for it, but she broke her ankle, lost her scholarship, and…well. “My mom didn’t really have the money.” Autumn still recalls the banked pain in her eyes. “But I still dance in my living room.”
The Ryans follow Chloe, and Matt and Ellis go to the bar for another round. For a moment, in the noise and pleasure of life, Autumn is alone, at a sticky table, covered in glitter because someone decided it was a good idea to celebrate midnight with glitter raining down from the ceiling. There’s a good chance she swallowed a lot of it.
Autumn has only known these friends for a few years, not long enough for anything about her to be noticeable. But New Year’s never fails to bring a cloud over her head. It’s a reminder of the passage of time and it causes all of her unanswered questions to well up again. Like: Will she die? Or is it only aging from which she is exempt? Though she suspects she’s not totally frozen, but aging very slowly. People guess late twenties now.
Autumn is afraid, sometimes, of being caught, whisked away to Area 51. It’s not unlike the ways she used to be afraid when she and Victoria would steal a kiss in a dark alley, not unlike the way she still fears for these friends, every time they catch a wrong look.
While she is mostly content to just live, it’s nights like this that her mind starts groping for answers in the dark. Her childhood was average, wasn’t it? There is nothing in her parents’ ever-quickening deterioration to suggest their lives are interrupted. They’re normal, aren’t they?
She’s been watching age consume Mom and Dad, year by year. They had to give up the RV two months ago. Once, when she was ten, Autumn tumbled almost a dozen feet out of the tree house into the creek below. She bounced back from a broken arm like she was made of rubber. Meanwhile, Dad trips on the stairs of their RV, falls a foot, and breaks his hip—and their second-life as hippie vagabonds is over forever.
It’ll be the same with her friends, even these ones. Again and again she’ll walk with friends and lovers to the edge of a wide river—marriage, kids, retirement, even death. One by one, she’ll watch them board a ferry for which she has no ticket. And she’ll turn back and start again, young as ever.
Who knows what Sasha would think? Autumn stopped calling a long time ago. It’s been so long since they’ve seen each other, Autumn wouldn’t know what to do if she was faced with the sight of Sasha’s graceful aging, while Autumn is still the unchanging little scamp. The Pippi Longstocking. The impossible. No. Autumn doesn’t want to see her. There’s no way she would be able to explain. If she thinks of it too long, the sadness might choke her; Autumn doesn’t want to be sad.
Ellis returns alone and smiles at her. Because Ellis is Ellis, their clubbing outfit is a loose knit sweater that isn’t even worn in a cool way, just in a loved way, and their hair probably hasn’t seen a comb in a year. They hand her a whiskey sour, unpolluted with glitter, and slide back into the seat beside her. “Want to not dance with me?” They’re always the one to find Autumn in the quiet moments, when the energy of the world is too much. That’s their thing: being quiet together.
“I’ll dance later.” Autumn leans on their shoulder. Even if Autumn loves dancing, tonight she just feels a little too aged for it.
Ellis hums an affirmative. “I can’t wait to be old enough that not dancing at a party isn’t weird. I want to be old and eat caramels and swear about ‘kids these days.’”
“I’m old,” Autumn admits, tequila-honest and warm in the company of someone she thinks would actually believe her. “Born 1965. Too old to be here, probably.”
Ellis laughs into her hair. “That’s the spirit, kid. Oh well. We’ll be geezers soon enough.”
Autumn picks glitter off their shirt and settles back in against their collar. Across the floor, Chloe and the Ryans are laughing in each other’s arms. Matt’s chatting with the bartender, who has a very sexy eyebrow piercing. Ellis is warm and solid against her cheek, chasing her melancholy away. Maybe one day she’ll tell them for real.
“I always wondered if I should tell you.”
June 2023
Dad’s last window is in a hospital. The leaves on the tree outside are flushed healthy and green. Nightingales made a home in the high branches, and in summer the hatchlings learn to fly, all but one, who falls to the grass on a sun-washed day.
And Autumn, mistaken by the nurse for a granddaughter, sits at his side. She didn’t correct the nurse.
Mom died five years ago. She and her dad are the only two left in the whole world that call each other family. It’s just age, coming for him. Nothing more sinister than that. Still, dread creeps up Autumn’s throat at night. Alone. You are one day closer to being alone.
“I brought you cannolis from the place down the street,” Autumn tries. Some days Dad isn’t all that lucid. It’s a blessing. He doesn’t notice that his daughter, who should be fifty-seven, is too young; in his mind, everything is all right.
Today, he is quiet, but he seems to be here. Death is not always the single cruel swing of a scythe; sometimes it takes in pieces, withdrawing senses and memories like small bills from a bank.
And then, out of the antiseptic silence, Dad speaks. “I always wondered if I should tell you.”
Autumn leans forward to hold his hand and try to rub warmth back into his fingers. “What was that?”
He’s lost weight. His arms are as small as a boy’s. His whole body is small. “Used to joke you just popped out of the ground,” he murmurs. His eyelids are practically translucent, like the mother-of-pearl insides of a shell. “Autumn baby with Autumn hair and sky in your eyes…”
“I know.” It’s the story behind her name. Her first barely red crop of baby hair had surprised her parents. Mom picked her up to examine her scalp, then looked out the window at the late-November leaves which gave the wind an auburn shape. Autumn was originally meant to be Marcia, but at the sight of that hair, Mom said there was suddenly only one name she could give her child. Autumn, for the apple-crisp cold, for pecans falling from crimson canopies. Autumn, for the season of her birth in that little pecan town. “You’ve told me that, Daddy. I love you.” Once, Autumn would say she loved him as a goodbye. Now, she says it as she breathes. Just in case.
Dad knows Autumn loves him. He must know. Autumn has said it enough, hasn’t she?
“Mom didn’t want to tell you. She didn’t think you needed to know.” Dad opens his eyes and they’re filmy. It may not be the good day Autumn thought. Maybe she’s— “You were so cold when he brought you to us,” he says dreamily. “Wrapped in his leather jacket. You cried so loud.”
Autumn feels her smile freezing. She can’t help it.
“Just a newborn…but it happened sometimes in that town. We all knew. No one talked about it, but we knew,” Dad sighs. “And god, we wanted a baby. We wanted you so much.”
Some great, terrible awareness falls into her, rips pieces of her off and plummets through her body, far into the ground. “Dad.”
“You were ours anyway.” His eyes are back, rolling on Autumn and away again, unable to focus. “We wanted you so, so much.”
“Dad. What do you—what are you saying?”
His eyes are closing again, the weight of the world too great on his fragile mind.
“Dad. Dad!”
“I always wondered…”
2024
How long has the road been closed?
Autumn stomps on the brake, and the rented little Nissan rattles to a stop. A collection of orange cones stands between her and the only route drivable into town. At first, she can’t fathom it. Her energy is sapped from days of driving. The interior of the car smells, and so does she; she hasn’t stopped longer than a bathroom break since the state line, and she’s only been eating Cheetos and KitKat bars. Blearily, she stares through the windshield and waits for the sight in front of her to change.
It doesn’t.
The road and bridge into town is nothing but weather-beaten rubble, undrivable. But the damage looks old. Settled into scars. It’s been closed long enough that kudzu has laid claim to the cracks. She steps out of the car, considers going forward on foot—but it isn’t her car. She can’t just abandon a rental.
This can’t be. She hasn’t been gone…that long…
But hasn’t she?
Unwanted, exhausted tears well up and she folds herself back in the driver’s seat, honks once—the sound barely echoes. It’s swallowed in that unerring still void.
Fine. This won’t stop her. There’s always another way into town, and Autumn knows it well.
She wheels around, the world’s messiest three-point turn, and drives on.
It took her months, agonizing ones, to settle Dad’s affairs and lay him to rest by scattering his ashes in the mountains. Months, with terrible, heavy questions in the back of her mind. And months, to get to know her grief and start to become comfortable with it. Because what is her grief but her love taking on a new form? God, it hurts. She was so afraid to lose Dad, and it’s every bit as terrible as she feared. But if she is truly an ageless woman, then grief is going to be a part of her life. She would rather have it as a friend.
Still, losing both parents has uprooted her more than any breakup, more than any move. Autumn knows she was lucky in her parents. Many of her friends were not; Chloe raised herself while her mom drowned daily in a bottle; Ryan’s father used a belt when he came out; Ellis’s family refuses to let go of their deadname and yet cries when Ellis doesn’t return home for the holidays. Autumn’s parents were a glorious exception to most of the stories Autumn knows. Even when she introduced a woman to them, they never wavered—at least, not where she could see.
So she will go back home, the place she knows where she may find answers and the place that the three of them once shared.
Within thirty minutes, she’s pulling into the parking lot outside the ferry stop. It’s empty, not a car in sight. It doesn’t look abandoned, but no one’s selling tickets or waiting on the rusted benches for the ferry to cruise around the bend of the river.
Worse yet, the other side of the river is a haze of green where she should see the town. Helpless, Autumn turns, scouring the area for some sign of life. It never occurred to her that she might arrive and find nothing. Autumn foregoes the dock and scrambles up the ridge of bank, muddy and messy, desperation driving her like a horse whip, thirsty for a glance of something. She stands there, awash in river air, scanning the far bank. But there’s nothing to see. Only endless green.
It cannot all be gone. Autumn can’t be too late. No town, no matter how old, simply vanishes, does it?
Autumn scans the tree line, the mottled choke of overgrowth. She holds her memories of the town in the warm hearth of her heart and summons it as best she can. The kitchen where Dad taught her to bake, the records Mom used to play. Her bakery, with ovens she always thought she’d return to once more, the Clearwater pecans, still the best Autumn ever tasted, the tree house, Sasha’s eyes in the darkness, her lips—
Dad’s strange words. Just a newborn…but it happened sometimes in that town. We all knew. No one talked about it, but we knew. The closest thing to an answer Autumn has to unlock the mystery of herself.
It cannot be gone.
“Come on,” Autumn says. Her voice is thready and unfamiliar, even to her. “Please. Come on.”
The air thrums and then blooms around Autumn. She smells an aroma any kid who grew up around orchards would know: the welcoming scent of a full pecan harvest. Greedy, she breathes it in, the only scant sign offered to her. Warm and earthy, it surrounds her, and between one blink and the next, the bank shifts, fuzzes, and she sees, somewhere in the distance, a light flicker on, marking where downtown should be. Then two. Then three. Autumn can only watch as it reforms before her eyes, the far bank becoming familiar to her again.
Wind pushes at Autumn’s back, pulls her forward, heavy with the rustling of trees. It whispers not with words that speak to her mind, but with impressions that speak to the innate understanding of all living creatures. Ours, our child, one of us, she is back, she returns—
And Autumn—
Feels the warm hum of the ovens. Sees the glint of her old bakery tables, where she prepped cheesecakes and cupcakes and cookies, once. The tree house, swinging low over shallow water. She is gathered up in the swell of those words, of that welcome and—
She returns to us.
Leaving the world behind, Autumn returns to town.