We only got lost—like, scary-and-we-might-get-mugged-and-or-eaten-by-rats lost—twice, and we felt pretty good about that. Of course that was just Monday. On Tuesday, after Cole took his homework assignment seriously and studied maps until he felt confident we could proceed safely, we decided to give the subway a try.
Here’s what you need to understand about Adelaide Springs, Colorado. There’s nothing wider than a two-lane road for miles around, and we refer to that two-lane road as “the highway.” Not because we’re trying to be funny or ironic or anything, but because it is the actual highway. It’s also Main Street, and for the little chunk of space in which it cuts through the middle of downtown (for about four blocks), we call it that. And then the buildings go away and it’s “the highway” again.
Remember in Cars when Sally took Lightning up to that higher viewpoint and showed him the big picture of what Radiator Springs had looked like in its prime? How cars used to have to drive through town on Route 66 in order to get to their destination? Well, that was basically Adelaide Springs too. Except instead of an interstate system giving everyone an easier and faster way to bypass us, it was mountain cut-throughs. And, of course, there was interstate, too, farther out, for those who wanted to avoid the mountains altogether.
And look, I get it. Think about how much easier it would have been for Maria and Captain von Trapp to escape the Nazis if they could have just gone around.
But I digress. The point is, in Adelaide Springs, our existence is not about getting anywhere quickly. Shortcuts consist of not stopping to talk to Maxine Brogan unless you have time to hear about the sweater she’s knitting for Prince Charlemagne. Rush hour is actually rush three minutes, and it only occurs once or twice a year when Joan Parnell’s precocious grandson, Hayden, is visiting from Oklahoma City. (Because Joan thinks it’s adorable to let him hold her safety cop stop sign during morning drop-off at the school, you see.) And the only overpass in the county was built for wildlife. Seriously. It’s about ten miles outside of Adelaide Springs town limits, and when you drive under it, you can practically hear the deer and elk lobbying for a new tax levy so they can put in a roundabout and maybe a Starbucks.
I say all of that to say this: while Cole and I were certainly more well traveled than a lot of people in our town, and I liked to think we were both pretty savvy, in general, nothing we’d experienced in our lives had prepared us for the New York City subway system.
“The local ones are faster,” he told me as we stood by the rails, looking up at the signs in the Canal Street station.
We’d started out the same way as yesterday—past John-John, left at Ghostbusters toward other stuff—but with just a couple of non-Friends-related turns, we’d found ourselves in Chinatown. So we’d explored around there a bit and eaten at a great little Chinese restaurant where, sad to say, Cole ordered sesame chicken and I got the beef and broccoli, just like we would have at Panda Express in Colorado Springs. (We were both very disappointed in ourselves and our lack of adventurous spirit, though we had no complaints about the taste of the food.)
And then we decided to conquer the subway. So there we were. Staring up at signs as people all around us exhibited knowledge and know-how that the elk-traffic-is-crazy-this-time-of-day kids just didn’t possess.
“I don’t think that’s right,” I told him. “Why would the local be faster than the express? Doesn’t ‘express’ carry an expectation of speed, right there in the name?”
He contemplated this. “Yeah, that makes sense. But I really think I remember reading that the local was the one you wanted to take if . . .” He stopped talking and turned around, looking back at the sign over the stairs we had just come down. “No. I take it back. I think you’re right. But this one has us heading downtown. Do we really want to go downtown?” He looked back to me. “Where even is downtown in New York?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s downtown, like the part of town where the city is. Not like downtown Denver is the part where the skyline is and stuff. I think it’s down. Like, south. So if you’re heading downtown you’re going south, from wherever you are.”
Again, he contemplated. “You realize this calls everything I thought I understood about ‘Uptown Funk’ into question.”
I chuckled. “Absolutely. And don’t get me started on ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark.”
“Although . . .” Cole held his finger up philosophically to signal the epiphany he was in the middle of. “‘Downtown Train’ by Rod Stewart makes much more sense now. In fact, if we were smart, we would have gleaned the lessons being taught by ‘Downtown Train’ and not even have to have this conversation right now. The Metro Transit Authority should just be piping it in over the announcement system.”
He looked across the rails at the people standing on the other side, and then back up at the sign over the stairs. “So do we want to go uptown or downtown, local or express? J . . . Z . . . N . . . Q . . .”
Highlights of the next few minutes after that included Cole running up the stairs on one side of the tracks, intending to hurry down on the other to see what that sign said, but quickly discovering that the unlimited Metro cards we thought we’d been so smart in buying didn’t allow us to use the same card at the same station for eighteen minutes. It was another day, another version of my fabulous multipocketed cargo attire, and his money was sealed up in my pants because we’d thought it would be too easy to pick his wallet out of his pocket. Cole’s fear of being unable to get to me on the other side of the turnstile if a subway hoodlum targeted me while I rifled through all my pockets, trying to track down his debit card so he could buy a pay-per-ride pass, caused us to reevaluate our mugger-proofing strategies moving forward.
Anyway, he finally got to the other side, and we spent a couple minutes yelling across the tracks at each other, attempting to understand what the other was saying as trains rushed by and buskers busked. And then there was the classic moment when I had to take one contact out so I could pull my phone up as close to my eye as I could get it in an attempt to make sense of the subway map I was studying.
“It’s possible . . . just possible”—Cole looked to me after we had both collapsed, winded, wide-eyed, and laughing harder than I could remember us ever laughing—“that after thirty years, your prescription needs updating, Sophia.”
And then I popped my contact, which had been precariously balancing on my fingertip as life flew by all around us, back into my eye as we sped away on the N toward Astoria–Ditmars Boulevard, whatever that meant.
* * *
And that’s how we ended up in the Bronx. Well, not right away. The N took us to Queens, as some people may have already known it would. Needless to say, we had not known that. We mistakenly got out at Broadway, thinking it was that Broadway (it was not), and then got on the first train that was heading back the way we came, since as little as we knew about Manhattan, we knew even less about Queens. (Cole did not seem to think my ability to say, “Oh, Mr. Sheffield!” in a Fran Drescher voice was going to help us out.) At some point soon thereafter, we switched trains because our train was becoming another train, which made zero sense, but we decided it was a good moment to disregard our mothers’ advice and carry out the New York subway equivalent of jumping off a bridge because everyone else was.
And that’s how we ended up in the Bronx. It was a local train, so not the faster one, and stop after stop passed us by—or we passed the stops by, I suppose—until we’d been on the train so long that we were afraid to get off.
“It’s like that episode of Friends,” Cole said.
Now, just to be clear, Cole’s relationship with Friends was not like his relationship with Gilmore Girls. He liked Friends. He may not have obsessed over things the same way I did, so he wasn’t one to reference moments or throw out quotes very often, but in my opinion, that made it even better when he did. Like when Mr. Darcy told Elizabeth her good opinion was more difficult to get, and therefore more worth getting. Except less backhanded compliment-y.
“You mean when Ross was dating the girl from Poughkeepsie and fell asleep on the train and ended up in Montreal?”
He deflated. “Oh. That’s good too. I was thinking of when the guy at Chandler’s work thought his name was Toby.”
I laughed. “Yes! No, that’s better. This is exactly like that.”
That was about the time we were ready to give up and commit to riding the rails for the rest of our days. We’d been on the train so long that it was too late to tell it our name was really Chandler.
And that we didn’t want to go to the Bronx.
But then the train voice lady (whom we had named Dorothea) said something that caught Cole’s attention.
“Did you hear that?”
“What?
He pointed up toward the PA system and whispered, “Listen.”
I strained to hear as well as I could. “Next stop is 161st Street and Casey Kasem? Is that supposed to mean something to me? Apart from the obvious,” I added. “That I’m going to be sending ‘Downtown Train’ out to you as a long-distance dedication.”
He was too distracted to laugh at my joke. (It must have been the distraction. Because the joke was hilarious.)
“Not Casey Kasem. Yankee Stadium.”
“Oh. Cool.” And I guess it was. Cool, I mean. To steal a quote from Sleepless in Seattle and make it my own, I don’t want to watch baseball. I want to watch baseball in a movie. Baseball movies are awesome. Baseball movies make me believe baseball is interesting and exciting and fun and romantic, and that the last play of the game is worth sticking around for because it will always win or lose the game and, quite often, determine whether or not the final batter retires as a legend / reunites with his true love / gets to be a father figure to some fledgling teen he may or may not have sired.
But real baseball? Real baseball sucks.
“Come on. We’re getting off here.” Cole grabbed my hand as the train screeched to a halt and pulled me toward the door and out onto the platform, through all the people who were pushing to get onto the train.
I stood close to him and tapped up and down my legs to make sure my phone and little zip wallet with my ID, credit card, metro pass, and twenty dollars cash were secure in my pockets, and then I looked up at him. His eyes were darting around frantically, trying to figure out where he was, I figured. Or maybe where he was going.
“Do you want to go to a game or something?” Were there baseball games in September? In the middle of the day? And could you just walk in? Kevin Costner had not prepared me for this moment. For that matter, a lifetime with Cole Kimball had not prepared me for this moment. I could remember when he and Wes wanted to play baseball and had begged their moms to drive them to Del Norte twice a week so they could join Little League. That had lasted about a month (I’m being generous) before they declared baseball to be boring and unworthy of stealing their precious bike-riding and video-gaming time.
“This way.”
He began leading us toward the left, and I followed, and then there was a clearing in the trees and signs and people, and a giant ivory building that reminded me a little of the Roman Colosseum came into view, with Yankee Stadium in huge gold letters at the top. I have to admit, even caring as little about baseball as I did, there was a tiny bit of a holy-ground feel in the air. I may not have cared about being there, but I knew that Roy Hobbs from The Natural and Ray Kinsella from Field of Dreams and Crash Davis from Bull Durham and Dottie Hinson from A League of Their Own all would have stood there in reverence, so I sort of did too.
“My entire life he talked about coming to a game here.”
I snapped out of my reverence and looked up at Cole, who was staring at Gate 6 wistfully . . . bitterly . . .
“Who?”
“My grandfather.” He cleared his throat and kept his eyes focused straight ahead. “The man’s entire life . . .” His voice trailed off, and he swiped angrily at his eyes. “In ninety years, he left the Colorado western slope once. One miserable road trip to Houston, and all he did the entire time was complain about how awful everything outside of Adelaide Springs was. I don’t want that to be me.”
“That’s not you.” I laced my fingers through his, and he held on tightly. “That’s not you, Cole. Look where you are right now. You’re at Yankee Stadium. ‘The House That Babe Built,’ right?”
He shook his head and chuckled, then looked down at me and smiled. “Close. ‘The House That Ruth Built.’ And it wasn’t actually this Yankee Stadium, I don’t think. I think they built this one in about—”
“Okay, I don’t care.”
He laughed, but I didn’t want to make him laugh too much. I wasn’t trying to make him laugh. It was the first time he had broached the subject of his grandfather, and I didn’t want to lose the thread.
“You’re in New York. You’ve traveled. And it was Bill’s choice not to do that. That’s not on you.”
His smile faded as he sighed. “The thought of not seeing you every day kills me, Lai. It does. But the thought of leaving Adelaide Springs . . .” He looked away from me, back to Gate 6. “I’m not panicking, and I’m not having a midlife crisis. I’m ready. I’m pretty sure I need this. It’s . . . it’s what I want.”
“Oh.”
That was all I could really say. Because that changed everything, didn’t it? He’d taken away my opportunity to playfully slap him and scream, “Snap out of it!” like I was Cher in Moonstruck. The pain on his face robbed me of my chance to play the martyr and beg him to stay for my sake if not his own. Any argument I put out there now would be asking him to choose what I wanted over what he wanted, and that put us in new, foreign territory. I couldn’t remember the last time we hadn’t wanted the same thing.
“Then I’ll come with you.”
At the words, he turned back slowly to face me again, and it was my turn to pretend I cared about looking at Yankee Stadium.
“Yeah.” I nodded, diving straight into a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach. “It’ll be fine. Surely fancy Brooklyn chef lady—what’s her name again?”
“Laila . . .”
“No, that’s not it.” I forced myself to laugh at my lame joke. “Sylvia! That’s it, right? Surely Sylvia needs servers, right? If she wants you so badly, maybe you can tell her we’re a package deal? That’s how Stevie Nicks got into Fleetwood Mac, isn’t it? Lindsey Buckingham told them they were a package deal. Package deals can work. If not for package deals, we’d have no ‘Landslide.’ The defense rests, Your Honor.”
“Laila!” His voice was behind me now, and his hands were on my shoulders, forcing me to stop walking. When had I started walking?
“I want to be where you are.” The words caught in my chest as all the air propelling them escaped through my mouth. I pulled my eyes away from Yankee Stadium and turned to face him.
I’d always been indifferent to baseball. But suddenly I hated it. I wasn’t even sure if I would like watching baseball in movies anymore. And that really sucked. Even more than the tedium of baseball itself. But from now on, when I thought of baseball, I would think of this moment. I suddenly and instinctively knew it, beyond the shadow of a doubt. This moment that, just a few minutes ago, had been laced with humor, buoyed by positive significance, and sprinkled with adventure. Now it was sad. Still significant—probably in positive ways that would reveal themselves later. But for now, the moment (and therefore baseball) was flashing big, neon signs of negativity.
Because there was no chance on God’s green earth that he was going to sit back and let me sacrifice what I needed for him any more than I was going to ask him to sacrifice what he needed for me.
He shook his head slowly and smiled sadly down at me.
“I know.” I stepped out of his grasp, needing just a moment of separation. “I really did mean it when I said there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you, though.”
“Right back at ya, Olivet.” His voice was a croaked whisper.
I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have fought harder before Shake Shack. Fought for him to stay in Adelaide Springs. Fought for us to stay together. But when possibility no longer existed . . .
It wasn’t like I’d been working some long-con bait-and-switch sort of thing. My entire lifetime of friendship with Cole hadn’t been based on a belief that someday he would see what had been right there in front of him all along and fall madly in love with me. I didn’t think of it like that. Truth be told, I usually didn’t think of it at all. He was my best friend. And had there been moments through the years when I had looked over at him and felt something in the pit of my stomach? Something akin to butterflies, but with a lot more weight. Like bats, maybe? Yeah. Sure. Of course.
And did I find him attractive? Well, duh. He was handsome. A good-looking guy. He was the most beautiful person I’d ever met, truth be told. In addition to the more superficial stuff that he didn’t really have any control over—dark, soulful eyes and thick, gorgeous hair and other things that his mystery birth parents had left with him as a first and final gift—he always smelled really good. I liked that. And I already went into how much I always liked his style. And the way he looked at me—or whoever was talking, really, not just me—with his full attention. And the protectiveness that never made me feel weak but that somehow made me feel stronger, because Cole’s strength was my strength too.
The way he laughed. That one was just for me, I was pretty sure. He laughed with other people, but with me there was a freedom in it. And a history. Like every joke was layered upon another upon another, and ultimately, he wasn’t just laughing at one funny thing I’d said but rather the backstory and warm-up act and the jokes yet to come, all at once.
People tried to make distinctions all the time. Attractive but not attracted. Love but not in love.
I’d never made distinctions with Cole. I’d never tried to justify or defend our relationship, and I didn’t like that, for the first time in my entire life, I was finding myself doing that.
And for the first time, I couldn’t help but think of how awkward it might be for him or for me or for some girl in Williamsburg. In our Williamsburg, all I’d have to worry about was one of the prison mannequins coming to life and going all eighties Kim Cattrall on me. But in Brooklyn Williamsburg? There were undoubtedly beautiful, sophisticated, living, breathing New Yorkers on every corner who would instantly recognize what a catch Cole Kimball is. If I was with him, and he met someone, I wouldn’t be his friend who lived a few streets away in the same small town, and I wouldn’t be his friend who occasionally visited on weekends while he was in culinary school. I would be the clingy childhood best friend who had followed him across the country, had no career of her own, and came over for breakfast every morning because she forgot to buy milk for her cereal.
I wouldn’t want to be that other girl.
Of course, that wasn’t the biggest problem, was it? The biggest problem was that now that I knew he’d ruled out the possibility of us together, I had to consider that other possibility. The possibility of there ultimately being another girl. And I hadn’t had time yet to come to terms with being me when that happened.
“So that’s it, then? You’re really leaving?”
We’d had this conversation already. We’d had various versions of this conversation over the course of the past few days. But I knew this was the one that counted.
He stepped between me and Yankee Stadium so that I had no choice but to meet his eyes. His red, strained eyes under those dark lashes of his. His jaw rippled and released as he chewed on the inside of his cheek and nodded. “And you’re really staying.”
Leaving and staying weren’t the correct words to use as we stood on a sidewalk in the Bronx, but Adelaide Springs was at the center of our conversation, the center of our lives, and the center of who we were together. And as much as I knew we loved each other, and always would, for the very first time I wasn’t sure that we would be okay if we no longer had home in common.
“Yeah. I am.”
His eyes stayed locked with mine, and it was his turn to lead the fake-eventually-begets-make brigade. “It’s not as if we’ll never see each other, you know. Wherever I end up, it’s not like I’ll never go home.”
Home.
“Brynn and Seb are only there part time, you know. I mean, you’ll see them here more than you would see them at home, so—”
“I don’t know for sure that this is where I’ll end up. Look, I’ll check out Denver too. Okay? And Boulder. I know it’s been a while, but I got to know Boulder pretty well. I liked it there.”
I began having to work a little more at getting each breath I took to fill my lungs. All those pretty little words coming out of his mouth—the ones meant to give hope of being able to count the miles between us in hundreds rather than thousands—didn’t provide any comfort whatsoever. I could see the writing on the wall.
“This is where you’re going to be, Cole.” My brain was a confusing amalgamation of desperate desire to sabotage his NYC opportunities (an impulse I would never consider acting on) and the instinctive compulsion to make sure nothing stood in the way of him getting absolutely every good thing (an impulse I was pretty sure I’d been born with). “Have you called Sylvia?”
“I’ve texted her. Don’t worry about that right now.”
“Okay, but you need to make sure she knows you want the job so she doesn’t give it to someone else.”
“Can we just not worry about that right now?”
Not worry. Not . . . worry. Yeah, sorry. My self-destructing brain couldn’t compute. “And even if you end up somewhere else—which you won’t—it’s not exactly easy to get back to Adelaide Springs, you know.”
He sighed. “Yes, I know.”
“And when you only have a weekend off of work . . . Although, come to that, I doubt trendy Brooklyn hotspots close on the weekends. And since your mom’s never there anymore, and now that your grandfather is gone, and—”
“You’re there, Laila.” His brow furrowed as his elevated voice caused even a few usually impassive New Yorkers to glance our way. “Don’t act like you don’t know that’s all I need.”
If only it were.
“Yeah.” I nodded, then turned and looked at baseball fans snapping photos. Of Yankee Stadium. Not us. “And now that I’m an expert traveler who has conquered all of New York City’s boroughs—”
“Except for Brooklyn and Staten Island, of course.”
“Those don’t count.”
Out of my peripheral vision I saw him tilt his head, and then his entire body swayed until he was in front of me again. “Because you haven’t been there?”
“Exactly.”
His brow relaxed, and a grin spread across his lips. “I’m sorry. I interrupted you. You were saying? Since your cumulative ninety steps in Queens and the Bronx make you an expert traveler . . .”
He was in my face, trying to get a smile out of me, and as much as I didn’t want to give it to him, I couldn’t help it. “I was going to say I could come visit you, but now I’m not sure I want to.”
“As if you have a choice.”
He nudged my elbow with his, and once again I resisted the relaxed environment he was attempting to create. Until he nudged again. And again. And then he had to wrap his arm around my waist and pull me back after an angry New Yorker yelled, “Hey, watch out! I’m walkin’ here!” exactly as he would in a tourism commercial for New York if it were written, directed, and produced by a group of filmmakers from Provo, Utah. It was stereotypical, hilarious perfection in every way.
“I’m so sorry!” I called after the short, balding, heavyset man I was just sure made his living playing scummy landlords in Dick Wolf television shows. In response to my apology, he lifted his hand over his head and flipped me off.
I gasped, while Cole just started laughing.
“Did you see that?” Clearly he had. “I have half a mind to—”
“Not happening, tough stuff.” He held on to the back of my jacket as I tried walking in the direction of the man, and his laughter grew as I continued walking in place. “I’m pretty sure that stories that begin like this end with the words, ‘and she was never heard from again.’”
I stopped attempting to pull away but kept my eyes on my new Bronx nemesis until he got lost in the crowd. Then I sighed, turned back to face Cole, who had released me once he felt the danger had passed, and found him with his teeth holding on to the half of his bottom lip that wasn’t turned up into a smile.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
He reached out and brushed aside a strand of my hair that had fallen in front of my face. “We’ll be fine, you know. A little distance is nothing. Nothing is changing between us.”
I resisted the urge to lean into his hand and exhaled a held breath when his hand fell away. “Oh, gosh, yeah, I know. Nothing is changing.” I smiled at him. “So what do you say? I don’t know about you, but unless Yankee Stadium and Yankee Candles are part of the same co-op here or something, I’ve seen what I need to see. Ready to move on?”
He nodded and wrapped his arm around me as we walked back to the train station.
You know, it’s funny. Until yesterday, I’d never imagined that there would come a time when I would keep things from Cole. Not until I did. And now, apparently, I didn’t have any qualms at all about straight-out lying to him. Whether or not we’d be fine remained to be seen. But somehow, everything had changed. And the best thing we had going for us was that he didn’t seem to have any idea.