“I get it,” he said. He was looking out the giant windows at the traffic rolling up the ramp toward the interstate. “I know I’d leave if I could.”
“You could,” I said to him. “You could go anywhere you want. You’re smart. You could make it.”
He shook his head and laughed. “You make it sound so easy. Trust me, if I could run away I would. But sometimes I think about my mom and my dad and my sister and I think about how they all ran away and how it didn’t do any of them any good. The scenery might change, but you’re still the same person deep down inside. You carry that shit with you.”
He looked at me like he wanted to make sure I understood this. I nodded in solemn agreement and looked down at my cup of coffee.
“And I think about my grandmother,” he went on. “I couldn’t do that to her. It’s not her fault that life is complicated and filled with tough decisions and painful good-byes. All she’s ever done is try and protect me from that. I think some love you can stand to let go of because it’s ultimately for the best, but other types you have to stick with until the day you die even when it’s hard. You have to think about that before you run away from wherever you are. And then when you know, you either stay or you go and pray that you’re making the right decision.”
We spent the rest of the time in silence. The other patrons buzzed around us and one soft rock track faded into the next over the speakers. At one point he smiled at me sadly and I smiled back and then I looked out at the traffic. I was one of them on the on-ramp heading toward the interstate. I wasn’t leaving. I was gone.
On my way out of town I had my mother stop at Cedarville High. I told her there was something I had to see. The football team had already started practicing for the fall, and the sight of them running around the field in their blue and red uniforms made me think of Pablo. I got in through the rear gymnasium door and went straight to the last stall of the first-floor boys’ room where I’d drawn the giant heart on the night of our senior prom, the one with our initials in the middle, but when I got there all I found was a giant square of paint just a shade darker than the original orange. A janitor had painted over it.
My roommate at Fairmont ended up being a Jewish kid from Chicago named Howie. On our first day of living together I found out that he loved the Vas Deferens as much as I did, and that was the beginning of what would become a close friendship. He was an inch shorter than me, built like a wrestler, and had shaggy dark hair, sleepy eyes, and a deep voice. He was majoring in religion and philosophy and was a writer like me. He was working on a nonfiction book about anarchy called Recipe for Rebellion. I rarely saw him in anything other than tight jeans, a white T-shirt, and an old pair of black Converse high-tops that were held together with duct tape. He wore fancy glasses, always had a tequila and pineapple juice just within his reach, and he liked to tell stories about the all-boys high school he’d attended in Chicago. It was only when I was very drunk that I found him even remotely attractive, but otherwise he was just my nerdily handsome roommate who spent an hour each night on the top bunk talking to his girlfriend in Vermont, the conversation falling to a whisper as it wore on and dissolving into a million soft proclamations of his love for her.
I told Howie I was gay our fourth night in the room together. We’d just crashed a frat party on the hill and we were drunk and listening to music in the room.
“Both my brothers are gay,” Howie said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who gave less of a fuck than me.”
Four weeks later he was eagerly trying to set me up with a guy in his bio class. By second semester we were like brothers.
Three weeks after I started school my mother called me to tell me that her and my father were getting a divorce. It was one of the most anticlimactic conversations I’ve ever had. If I felt anything, it was only a sense of relief that it was all over. I was vaguely worried about how they would cope with wandering the desert of adulthood without the other’s hand to hold, but then I remembered that they never appeared to give each other that much comfort in the first place, or at least if they had, those days were buried so far in the past that it was hard to consider them a meaningful part of their life.
My mom stayed in the house in Cedarview Estates. Sometimes its largeness made her lonely, but I think she stayed there with the secret hope that someday she would use every inch of it again, that maybe she would have another husband, maybe even another kid or two, and the house would have a life again. There would be splashes in the pool, bikes lying on their sides in the yard, and rubber balls rolling down the gentle slope of the driveway. Every few months she sent me checks with subtle commands written in the memo line. For Healthy Snacks they sometimes read or New Winter Coat Money. Once it even said To Take a Nice Boy Out to Dinner. I called her after that one to tell her that I loved her.
My dad became the merry bachelor. He started dating, which filled me with sympathy for the single ladies of Cedarville. He bought a condo in a new development across town and furnished it with nothing but a treadmill, a king-size bed, and a giant flat-screen television. Sometimes I pictured him walking on the treadmill and talking on his headset to some legal secretary across town while he watched a basketball game on mute.
Every now and then he’d drive up to Fairmont for football games. We’d drink hot chocolate in the stands and I’d stand up and cheer whenever he did. One night after a game we got drunk at a pub on campus and afterward when we were walking through the snow he stopped and held me and told me he was sorry. I told him that it was okay, that I knew he always did the best that he could, and then we trudged on back toward his hotel with icy tears sticking to our cheeks.
Lucy came to visit in the spring. I showed her the buildings where I had classes and the little nooks around campus where I would sit and write. I told her I was working on a book called The Vast Fields of Ordinary. She begged me to let her read the first chapter, but I told her it was better to wait until it was finished, until all the little pieces fit together to make a whole picture.
I took her to the Laguna Lounge on a Wednesday, which was Lesbian Night. We sat at the bar with fruity cocktails and talked about the previous summer while the DJ played a string of ridiculous Fleetwood Mac remixes that reminded me of my mother. We talked about Alex and what would happen to him. We talked about Jenny Moore and how her and her family moved from Cedarville to get away from all the attention they were getting after what happened. One rumor was that they were living in a cabin in Maine. Another had them living on a reservation in New Mexico, where Jenny was receiving mystical training from a shaman. A few people even said the whole family had disappeared just like Jenny had, that she’d taken them to the place she’d been because it was so much better than this world. We never said Pablo’s name, never once talked about the “accident,” but he was there as much as we were, a ghostly listener a couple of barstools down who finally understood all the things he couldn’t when he was alive.
I stopped wanting to float away from my life, because in the end my life was all I had. I’d walk the Fairmont campus and look up to the sky and I wouldn’t see myself drifting off like some lost balloon. Instead I saw the size of the world and found comfort in its hugeness. I’d think back to the times when I felt like everything was closing in on me, those times when I thought I was stuck, and I realized that I was wrong. There is always hope. The world is vast and meant for wandering. There is always somewhere else to go.
Nick Burd, The Vast Fields of Ordinary
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