where Cal had landed the second punch. At the same time, I felt an overwhelming, plaintive rush of gratitude toward him, and to the loyalty he had to our friendship, our brotherhood. “Can I at least thank you for coming? Can I acknowledge that I owe you more than I could ever put into words?”
“Fine, fine. Consider it acknowledged.” He leaned on the dashboard, looked sideways at me. “Now tell me you’re going back, and my work here is done.”
I didn’t respond one way or the other, but right then I knew I would go. And Cal knew it too, because he said, “And then what?”
“One day at a time. Let me get there first.”
He accepted my answer with a single nod, and his mouth fell open like he wanted to say one more thing. Then he shut his mouth. Then he almost spoke again. Finally, he spun his whole torso in my direction, leaned in, seemed to drop his voice an octave and said, “Confession: I left something out earlier. When I was telling you about my conversation with October.”
The air coming in through Cal’s open window didn’t feel especially cold, but I began to shiver.
“I wasn’t going to mention it because I have no idea what it means and I don’t want to get your hopes up, but it strikes me as pertinent at this juncture.” He scratched at the stubble on his chin. “Remember when I told you how I asked her if she thought I should forgive you?”
I nodded and tried to swallow, but my mouth felt like it was coated in breadcrumbs.
“Well, after she got all weird and quiet and said she didn’t want to talk about you, I pressed her on it. I said, ‘You mean to tell me you never think about him?’ and I swear over my life, Harp, this is what she said—and I quote: ‘Chris, I think about him every day. For a long time, he was the first thought I had when I woke up and the last one I had before I closed my eyes, and it almost destroyed me. I poured all of that into my work. I processed it and moved on. I don’t need to talk about it.’”
Cal waited for me to react, but I didn’t know how to interpret October’s words any more than he did, and I sat there in something of an emotional coma, watching the lady in the slippers. She was standing on the curb, holding the top of her robe together with one hand, waving to the man dragging the blue suitcases with the other. She kept waving, even as he turned his back and walked into the terminal, and something about that made me want to drown myself in Flathead Lake.
Cal checked the time on his phone and said, “I gotta go.”
He got out of the truck, shut the door, but stuck his head back through the window. “I almost forgot. Wedding’s gonna be in Maui on New Year’s Eve. Just a few close friends and family. And since you’re the only family I have, you better fucking show up.”
October once asked me if redwoods were my only tree obsession and I showed her a photo of a big banyan in Lahaina. One of the largest in the world, the tree is only about sixty feet high—tiny in relation to a redwood—but it spans outward over two hundred feet, a forest unto itself, its graceful branches stretching in wild, sweeping directions like a dancer’s limbs in motion.
I remember telling October that I wanted to have lunch beside that tree before I died and she’d said, “Me too. Let’s have lunch there together someday.”
“Harp,” Cal said.
I got out of the truck, walked around to the curb and hugged him as hard as I could.
“I’ll be there,” I told him.
I stayed at the airport until I saw Cal’s plane taxiing toward the runway. It was still pretty dark—the sun wouldn’t rise for another hour—and I felt a harboring silence inside the truck, even though a handful of cars and shuttles from local lodges were coming and going, dropping off travelers for the morning flights out of town, one to Salt Lake City, and the one Cal was on to Minneapolis, where he had a short layover on his way back to New York.
I was thinking about how I, too, often woke up with October on my mind and went to sleep hoping she’d show up in my dreams. Which she did.