Danny looked to see who I was talking about. His eyes widened when he saw the man and he coughed loudly.
The man I was almost one hundred percent sure was Jake whipped his head around, stared me right in the eye, and then moved quickly out the side of the tent.
That had been him. It definitely had been.
“I’ll meet you at the car,” I told Ryan. I sidestepped Danny who had suddenly moved in front of me and slipped out of the tent before anyone could say anything.
I lost him within the first thirty seconds. Where the hell could he have gone?
Damn, he was one slippery bastard. Of course, I’d known that already. He’d slipped from my life and disappeared in a way I hadn’t thought possible in this electronic age. As embarrassing as it was to admit, I’d had a PI look for him about three years ago when things were starting to look bad for me.
I don’t know why I’d done it. We knew he was alive. Momo got cards every Christmas and Mother’s Day and her birthday. Sammy was lucky, he got phone calls. If he’d wanted to talk to me, he easily could have. Obviously, he hadn’t.
But for some damn reason, I’d still wanted to talk to him. To yell at him. To have him yell at me. For him to tell me how amazing my future was going to be, no matter how bad it looked right then.
That was something Jake had always done for me, ever since we were kids. Jake’s imagination was boundless. He could see whole worlds where others only saw walls. Whenever our moms were visiting, we would sneak out and find someplace private and Jake would tell me stories.
Those stories had saved me when we were twelve and my mom had gotten sick the first time. When I hadn’t been able to talk about it, couldn’t even find the words to say how I felt, Jake spoke for me. He had the words.
He didn’t tell me everything was going to be all right, because even at that tender age, we both knew that was a promise no one could make. What Jake gave me was a future. He painted a picture of a life of tomorrows. He told me about the places we would visit—Rome and Paris and Disney World—the things we would do—win the Stanley Cup, hike the Appalachian Trail—as if they were absolutes, as if he were a visitor from the future recounting things we’d already experienced.
And I’d believed them. I needed to. They painted a picture beyond the pain and fear and banality of my day-to-day existence.
Then, three years later, my mother’s cancer came back. We got the news in May. Four weeks later, she’d moved into hospice. School had just ended when she died.
The bottom fell out of my world and Jake saved me again. That time, when neither of us could find words for this all-encompassing loss, he spoke to me in the new language of the body we had only tentatively begun to learn.
For better or worse, those first innocent and not-so-innocent explorations of feelings and desires we’d only sensed the edges of in our younger years would forever be intertwined with my experience of my mother dying.
We had been sixteen. It was the summer between tenth and eleventh grade, we had no responsibilities, and we’d been left completely and totally alone.
My father was lost to his grief, consumed with his dying wife.
Jake’s mom, ever the caretaker, had set aside her grief at the loss of her best friend since childhood to deal with three lost boys and one lost man. She’d had to explain over and over again to a devastated thirteen-year-old Sammy why his aunt Bitty wasn’t going to be around anymore. She managed the army of women and extended family keeping us all fed and clothed.
She sat with my mother for hours going over the details of things my father couldn’t face. Things like her will and memorial service, writing out Christmas and birthday cards for me for the next decade. (Oh, how I’d cried that first Christmas, almost as hard as I’d cried the first Christmas without a card.)
She’d transcribed long, tear-splattered letters from my mother to each of us about how proud she was of us, the people we were, and the people we would become. How much she loved us and how grateful she was to have been allowed to spend