It was months before they had sex or even kissed, but Valerie slept in Edith’s bed that first night in Alabama. Val could make anything seem natural. Questioning it made you the weird one.
In the morning there was cereal and life updates. Coffee from the battered machine Valerie took everywhere. They sat on a small porch out back with their bowls of soggy Cheerios and watched birds mutter between trees.
So. The tattoo artist.
Val waved her off. Tale as old as time. Girl meets girl. Girl wants to tattoo something on the other girl. Something small, like a bumblebee. Other girl feels daunted by the prospect of permanence. It becomes, as they say, a whole thing.
A real fairy-tale ending. “And it was a whole thing, forever after.” Sips of coffee beat back the late-winter cool. Sorry to hear that, Val.
Don’t be. I learned my lesson. Gaggles of hungover undergrads tramped through the yard. Val called out, Helloooo boys! and they all waved back. I hardly recognize you without the beard, she said. And your nails. Valerie studied the plum lacquer on her fingertips. Grad school, though. You’re surviving?
I’m—okay.
Oh god, you hate it.
I’m doing good work.
You can always leave. More stragglers passed through the yard. Several of them wore clothes made of tablecloths, notebook paper, duct tape. Weird that people still go to college, Valerie said. We were never that young.
Not like they are. Edith taught a discussion section of American literature. She saw nothing of herself in their tired, disappointed child-faces.
Term papers in the library. Giving up sleep for dance practice. Giving up food. It was all the most important thing in the world.
Yeah, now we only give up sleep and food for the right reasons: because we’re miserable.
Do you remember when you got kicked out of the library because that children’s lit paper upset you so much? What was it about?
The paper had been about whether or not the narrator of Lois Lowry’s The Giver died at the end. It was Tessa’s. I don’t remember.
After showering, Valerie insisted they go hiking. The largest natural bridge in America is like an hour from here. I plan to stomp on it.
Edith still had the minivan, but she drove Valerie’s forest-green Subaru. The backseat was carpeted with fast-food bags and pairs of jeans. It smelled like a Dave & Buster’s. Valerie kicked her legs up on the dashboard, queueing pop songs on her phone. No one mentioned Tessa.
Leaves in Alabama didn’t change color but died suddenly. The knobby, ugly trees left Edith homesick. There was no sign marking the path to the natural bridge. You could walk by it every day and never notice. Since when do you like hiking?
I’ve always liked hiking. You’ve just never lived anywhere worth exploring.
The woods were still in a way that Tuscaloosa never was. On her back porch, any given night, Edith could hear Rae Sremmurd blasting from the undergrad bars on the Strip. Every other Saturday the streets filled with drunken revelers of all ages, decked out in crimson and houndstooth, eager to see bloodshed on the colossal football field. It was ugly out here in the woods. Life out here wasn’t somehow more real than life in the city; but interjecting your humanity, the superficiality you carried everywhere with you, reminded you how little it mattered. Whatever you made of yourself would be buried like everything else.
On a treacherous slope of wet leaves, Valerie took her hand. God it’s empty out here. If you ever need to hide a body, this is the place to do it.
Oh yeah? You gonna help me dig the hole?
For you, babe? Anything.
The natural bridge was unassuming. It was less the span of land than the ten feet of emptiness beneath it, weathered away on an inconceivable timeline. As promised, Valerie stomped on it. Jumped up and down. The bridge, uncaring, carried on.
Everything you dreamed? Edith watched from solid ground below. Why hadn’t she asked Val to visit before? Here she was: a beacon of home, pirouetting in red Keds. She could survive any question, any answer, with Valerie nearby.
It’s perfectly meaningless. Come up here. Edith stumbled up the damp hills. The bridge had a proper majesty once she was dangling her legs over its side. The earth’s generosity holding you. And Valerie beside her, so light that even if the bridge crumbled beneath them, Edith knew she could not fall. You know what I wanted to be when I was young?
A dinosaur. A mailman. A big rock.
Not that young. I wanted to be Nick Carraway. Val rested her head on Edith’s shoulder. The visible world ended a few yards away at the treeline. You could hide an entire life in there. I wanted to be a person who was adjacent to the real story. Witness to it. I was tired of being the person things happened to.
What changed?
I’m not sure anything did. At any moment, Valerie would brush the water from her palms and walk away from this subject forever. It was the thing I liked best about dancing, you know. Being one performer in a sea of them. What’s extraordinary isn’t when you stand out, it’s how you all come together. Organic, almost. You could live in that if the music never stopped. Edith had heard versions of this before and dismissed it. Everything about Val’s life seemed desperate for the extraordinary. But there was no twinkle in her eyes, no hint of ironic performance. There was only the trees, the vast noise of insects and leaves, the two of them nowhere near the center of the world. There was the water soaking through their jeans. Valerie had been a wonderful dancer. Her body turning in perfect time, each limb in the place it needed to be. Edith never missed a performance. I want a place where I fit the puzzle. But somehow I never do for long.
Edith didn’t say, Stop moving around so much you asshole. Didn’t say, Stay here with me. It wasn’t a problem with solutions. There could only be new, deeper problems, complicating it until there came something like a state of grace.
And now there were their clammy hands, damp with leftover rain, entwined. In a perfect world, they would still be there: emptiness below, the sky threatening rain above, and the two of them between. Baffled but not alone.