Ember Boys - Gregory Ashe Page 0,8
see my breath inside the tent. It was time to move on.
Rosie squatted in the sand, two more wieners spitted and roasting over the flames. When she passed me one of the sticks, I accepted it. She held up a Thermos; I shook my head. The marine layer was thick today, woolly fog stitched so close to the cliffs that I could hear the ocean but couldn’t see it. I had read somewhere that fog isn’t about what you can’t see; it’s about what you can. I could see Rosie. I could see the fire, its orange glow reflecting in layers of the fog like a nimbus. My breath streamed out, like I was part of this cloud that had washed ashore. Tiny tracks made a ring around the fire pit; something had visited us during the night. A fox. A feral cat.
The thing about being transient, which is a nicer word than homeless, was that I missed running water to brush my teeth. First thing in the morning, all I could taste was the inside of my mouth. I dry-brushed with a little tube of Crest, spat into the sand, and shook my head when Rosie offered coffee again. But when the wieners were ready, I ate.
“Ok,” I said. “Today’s the day.”
“San Francisco?”
“God, no. Santa Barbara. Maybe San Diego.”
“Hitching?”
“No, I’ve got my car.”
“Good luck.”
Fire crackled; I poked at the driftwood, and embers flaked up and away.
“It’s about time,” I finally said. “I’ve been here long enough.”
Rosie nodded. She was eating the wiener in slow, careful bites; the grease shone on her fingers and trickled down to her elbow.
“And Emmett will be fine.”
“Course.”
“I didn’t even mean to stay this long.”
“It just happens.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it just happened. I was driving. I heard Emmett was here. So I stopped, and we talked, and I stayed a night, and I guess I stayed longer than I intended and. . .”
“And now it’s time to move on.”
“Yeah.”
A seagull swept low, dive-bombing out of the fog, pulling back sharply as though startled by the sudden appearance of ground. It veered off at the last minute; the tip of one wing drew a vee through a tide pool.
“God, I can’t tell him. That’s ok, right? I can’t. It’s better if I just go.”
“Lots of people just go,” Rosie said; she’d finished the dog, and now she was licking each finger in turn. “Sometimes you just gotta go.”
“That’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to go.”
I packed my tent. I lugged my gear up the steps. I said goodbye to Rosie, who was trying to put on a sweater and got caught, so I helped her get her head through the neck, and she kissed me on the cheek. An Oscar-Mayer kind of kiss. I could still smell it when I got to the top of the steps. I stood there, hands over my eyes, my face wet, and wondered if this was it, if I was finally having a breakdown. Or maybe I’d had the breakdown weeks ago, months ago, when I’d driven away from a job and a mortgage and a life and just . . . kept driving. Because I couldn’t stop, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t breathe until I got here and a pair of very dark eyes made me feel like the world was finally holding still.
“All right,” I said to the fog, to the street, to the damn seagull who wouldn’t stop talking, and I wiped my face. “So I’m going. He doesn’t need to know; better if I don’t even see him.”
And then, instead of getting in the car, I walked the mile and change to the hospital. I signed in at the visitor’s desk. I waited until they cleared me and sent me in. The day was cold and dreary; no one was in the garden. But the rec room had twenty or twenty-five people, and one of them was Emmett.
For the first time in the months that I’d been visiting him, he wasn’t sitting alone. He sat at one of the window tables—our table, I thought briefly before drawing a thick black line through the thought—with a girl. Ashy-blue hair, thick-framed glasses, pretty, but the kind of pretty like she’d want you to stop using deodorant and maybe move into a commune before she could take you seriously. They had chutes and ladders set up between them, but they weren’t playing. They were talking. It took me a minute to realize that Emmett was smiling. He even laughed