Taking a deep breath, working to disperse the ache and the image of Abram, I brought Poe back into focus. His smile had turned wry and he shook his head, a faint movement. We never spoke about it, about how I wasn’t over a guy who I’d known for a blink of an eye, but I was almost certain my friend knew what—or who—I’d been remembering just now.
Poe, his smile slowly giving way to a thoughtful frown, reached forward and picked up the snow globe on my desk, shaking it. “Don’t worry, I covered for you at the reception. I told everyone you had a flight and couldn’t stay.”
I knew he’d cover for me. We always covered for each other, which was why I’d left the reception. When I returned from my memorable one-week trip to Chicago, Poe Payton had been the shoulder I’d cried on the one night I’d allowed myself to cry.
It happened two weeks before the fall semester. I’d been nineteen and drunk at a grad school mixer. He’d told everyone I was on flu meds. I’d bawled in his car, telling him the entire story on the drive back to my condo between self-recriminating sobs and rants. He stayed over, spending the night on the couch. He also made me breakfast in the morning, told me a story about his oldest sister’s disastrous love life that made me feel better about mine, and then we went for a silent, oddly cathartic walk on the beach.
I shoved the ghost of Abram from my brain and allowed myself to be distracted by the floating bits of white swirling around the snow globe Poe had just given another shake.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go with us? To the cabin?” I asked, hoping he would change his mind. “It’s not too late to get you a ticket.”
“Nah,” he said, bringing my attention back to his face. “Who wants to spend a week surrounded by snow, skiing in Aspen when one could be here, surrounded by ocean and sunshine, surfing in Southern California?”
I made a face. He’d tried to give me a surfing lesson once and it hadn’t gone well.
“You know I don’t ski. Or surf,” I added quickly, just in case he offered to teach me again. “And the allure of being surrounded by snow has more to do with the beverages and hermit life than the activities.”
“The beverages?”
I began ticking off my fingers. “Hot cider. Hot chocolate. Hot, mulled wine. Hot—”
“I get it. You like it hot.”
“Yes. But only in the snow.” I didn’t mention that the other main attraction was the snow itself.
Hushed, gently falling snow was the closest I would get to the quiet of space without visiting a sensory deprivation chamber. I’d tried that once and had something like a panic attack after two minutes. The walls had been too close, claustrophobic. It had felt oppressive, suffocating.
But I’d grown a bit preoccupied with the concept of complete silence, a recent occurrence after testifying before Congress on climate change last summer. There’d been subsequent interviews on cable news outlets during the fall and everyone had been so loud. Why did reporters shout on TV? Didn’t they know viewers could turn the volume up if needed?
Stressful.
Summary: The quiet isolation of the mountains, cut off from the world by distance and snow, felt like the only place I could draw a complete breath these days. Whenever I had free time, I went to Aspen.
“So noted.” Poe reached forward again, arranging the snow globe on the desk so that the front of the little model cabin within faced me. “Does the cabin actually look like this?”
“Not exactly.” My attention flickered to the rustic little log structure encased in water and glass, a memento I’d picked up on my previous return trip from Aspen. “And I don’t think ‘cabin’ is really the right word for it. It’s more like a—”
“Mansion?” he asked dryly, making me smile.