for it. Like even the most perfect things in life, it is what it is.
It wasn’t that either of them had ever called it the secret place. Never aloud. It was just what Lina called it in her head. In fact, it had a much simpler name, simpler even than river.
There.
I’ll meet you there.
See you there at ten.
Get off the bus, and there it was, only a quarter mile away, into the woods not too deep, off the two-lane highway that ran through the flatland.
There was a sort of path into the woods, not a real path but demarcated enough, a narrow clearing where the twigs and leaves were crushed by Keds and Timberlands.
Lina in her white sneakers wondered how much of the path she’d created, and about all the people before her who’d made the first dents.
There it was. There in a clearing where the wheatgrasses overgrew, a thin, snaking river in the half mist. The greatest part was seeing his pickup, old and beat-up and so gray as to be invisible, which made Lina’s heart thump like a bounced ball.
It was fall when they started meeting there but winter would come soon, so he said they should invest in blankets because it would be too expensive to keep the car running. That he had said this in September, when winter was so many weeks away, made Lina’s eyes water, that he foresaw his future with her in it. For a very long time, that was enough, that the object of her love even considered her a beating heart, a living thing, in his orbit.
Seeing his car already there, hearing the birds in the branches and the crunch of twigs underfoot. Smelling the wet earth and the exhaust and getting lost in a hologram of mist. Tucking her hair behind her ears the way she had practiced in front of the mirror, the precise way she looked the prettiest. All these sounds, smells, routines. It was her foreplay.
And there, in his car, staring straight ahead into the trees and ringed by a halo of his own smoke was this mythological man who was going to be hers, who was right at this moment waiting for her, so that the very entirety of her being was validated. He was the whole point of her existence, her mother and her sisters and the posterior side of her father be damned. There he was.
There.
One day Aidan is going to drink too much, he is going to have kids and a job that doesn’t pay enough to buy the propane for the grill for the birthday parties in the summer. One day Aidan is going to have a big gut and a good deal of regret. He will not be a marine or an astronaut or a ballplayer. He will not sing in a band or swim in the Pacific. Outside of his kids and his wife and the things he will have done for them (which count, but they also do not, in that way a man needs something in outer space to count) he will not have done anything anyone will really remember. Except for who he was to one woman. He was everything.
Dear Diary,
I’m in love with Aidan Hart and he’s in love with me!
And I swear I know this to be true. Nobody on this whole earth has ever been happier. I feel I could explode from the second I wake up. I am so happy I could die. I finally know what it means when people say that. I could die.
As winter approaches, the bucking ride of their love story decelerates. It makes Lina hate the season. She feels any loosening of her obsession as acutely as she would feel one of her limbs snapping.
School and its obligations weigh on her. Her mother’s nasty remarks fall more sharply. She doesn’t like her winter coat and she doesn’t feel like reading books or learning anything new.
Around this time, she hears that a friend of her older sister has a crush on her. It surprises her at the same time that it does not. It’s as if suddenly, because of Aidan, she is visible to the world. She’s popular. She knew it could happen this way. She’d always known. That realization is not calming but the opposite.
The friend is not terribly good-looking, but he is older and has many friends and goes to all the parties. In the hallway he comes up to Lina while she is at her locker.