that no one ever used
under an awning
outside our front door.
Dad was here,
buried in the folds
of layers of Gore-Tex,
watching the rain,
waiting.
Tears streamed down my face.
Rain soaked into my shoes.
I wiped the snot away.
“Your friend was killed,” my father said.
“It was on the news.”
His voice was hollow and distant,
and he knew that I knew.
But he was
trying.
I went to open the front door.
“Xiaoling has dinner for you
on the stove,”
he said, and followed me inside.
My father never said much.
He couldn’t fully understand.
The chasm between us
was always
too great.
But he was here.
He had always been here.
When Mom was pregnant and unmarried.
When Mom was erratic and unkind.
When Mom was nowhere to be found.
My father never left me.
Teenagers didn’t die in avalanches
They died in
car crashes,
drunk-driving accidents,
drug overdoses,
gunshot wounds,
or suicide.
Their lives did not end
as arbitrarily
as getting caught
in Mother Nature’s wrath.
I spent hours in front of
the computer, alone
in my room.
I obsessively googled everything
about avalanches.
According to the experts,
a beacon, a snow probe,
a shovel, a helmet
are good precautionary measures,
but no matter the gear,
the force alone
of snow
sliding down a mountain
can kill you.
According to the experts,
in an avalanche
one suffocates after being trapped
in the snow
for thirty minutes.
In an avalanche,
you have a whole half hour of life
to think about
whether this was going to be the end,
or whether someone was minutes away
from digging you out.
I wanted to believe
that in those thirty minutes
we all would try to live.
That we would claw
at the coalescing crystals,
and we would struggle
until we couldn’t struggle anymore
to dig ourselves out,
already buried
six feet under.
A twig snapped
A branch fell.
Ben still died.
I wrote the essays.
I didn’t get caught.
Ben still died.
We got into Stanford.
We got into Princeton.
But who the fuck cares?
Ben still died.
Death happens
Death doesn’t give a fuck.
Death doesn’t care
who is left behind.
Death doesn’t care
if apologies were ever issued.
Death doesn’t care
about the status
of your relationship.
Death will just happen.
But so will life.
Life will just happen.
But here’s the other thing:
Life doesn’t care
if you ever apologize,
if you do the wrong thing,
if you continue
to screw up,
if your moral compass
remains broken.
Life doesn’t care either,
but you do.
You care.
The last time
Jordan, Ben, and I
were all together
before that night—
before Jordan had a party,
before the sound of tires
screeching around a corner—
we went swimming
at Meydenbauer Beach.
The sun was down, but the sky was still
light.
Jordan jumped off the dock first,
of course.
He did a single backflip in the air
before his entire body
came crashing down
to the lake.
Ben took a running start,
launched himself off the dock,
hugged his legs,
and somersaulted twice
in the air
before hitting the water.
I ran and leapt like the boys.
Once airborne, my legs kept pumping
the sky.
Momentum died quickly,
and force pulled me down.
Water slapped
against my skin, as if to punish
us for trying so hard
to defeat the gravitational pull.
We bobbed and backstroked
our way along the lakeshore
until we ended up
in front of my house.
“Want us to drop you off here?”
Jordan asked.
No lights were on.
I felt the loneliness
that waited for me
inside.
“Nah. I’ll swim back to the car
with you guys,”
I said.
And we backstroked our way
in the moonlight
beneath the materializing stars,
back to the public dock
and public beach
where we had left the car.
Nothing happened
that night.
We jumped. We swam.
We floated in the lake.
Nothing was perfect.
Nothing was right.
The woman who stood in front of me
On Sunday, the day after Ben died—
was killed in an avalanche,
froze to death,
suffocated in the snow,
whatever it was that happened,
suddenly,
tragically,
cruelly—
the doorbell rang.
The sound reverberated
off the sterile, marble
foyer.
The doorbell rang again
and again,
and no one seemed to want to answer it.
So I got up from my desk,
an unsuccessful attempt at doing homework,
and plodded over to the front door.
I opened it.
The woman who stood in front of me
wasn’t supposed to be here.
Mom?
I mouthed the word slowly.
Her nails were unmanicured,
her blondish-gray hair uncoiffured.
She looked different, yet the same.
She looked like the person who was supposed to be
my mom.
She reached across the threshold
into our house
and wrapped her arms around me,
not saying a word.
The rain came down like pellets,
drumming against the roof.
The rain came down like pellets,
drumming against her back.
The rain came down.
It was too much.
The way she touched me.
The way my skin felt safe.
The way I wanted to be in her arms
instinctively.
But I wanted nothing of it.
I hurt,
so much,
in that place wedged behind the heart.
I cried.
Big, fat tears,
like the rain outside.
“What
are you
doing
here?”
I knew why she was here,
but I needed to hear her answer.
“I heard.
About your friend.
Your dad called.
He was concerned.
I was concerned.”
“Dad
called you?
He has
your number?
“You were concerned?
“You can’t do this to me.
You can’t just walk back into my life
after two years
when you walked out
without a note,
a phone number,
a good-bye.”
I closed my eyes
so I could
breathe.
I didn’t want to be here,
in this doorway,
with my mother,
under these circumstances.
It wasn’t fair.
I didn’t want Ben to
die
just so I could get my mother
back.
That wasn’t the trade I was willing to make
in life.
My mouth opened
and two years’ worth of words
came tumbling out.
Chunks of anger,
hurt,
loneliness.
“The boy I loved
dies,
“and you think
now
is a good time
to reappear?
“You don’t suddenly
get to be
my mother.”
I couldn’t be here for you.
How am I supposed to love you
if I can’t love myself?”
she said.
“You just are.
You are
my
MOM.”
My heart fell onto the floor,
and I was staring at it,
beating.
The other woman
Xiaoling walked into the foyer.
She shook her head
and clicked her tongue.
Tsk, Tsk, Tsk.
She herded our bodies
out of the doorframe
and into the house,
then closed the door behind us.
She shuffled back into the kitchen.
A few minutes later
she reappeared
with a tray of cookies and tea.
“Come sit,”
she commanded.
Xiaoling was tiny
in comparison to my mother.
Her voice was not boisterous.
Her hair did not radiate
for miles away.
But she was fierce,
intense,
in charge,
just like my mother.
We followed.
Drinking with your mother
We sat in the living room
on the stark white
Egyptian cotton couch
that no one ever sat on.
Xiaoling poured us each
a cup of tea
and set them on top
of porcelain saucers.
She quietly left the room.
I watched my mom cool
her tea with her breath,
place the cup to her lips,
and sip
slowly.
I watched the hot water
evaporate off
the top of the teacup,
curling around in the air
before its shape
no longer existed.
I wondered if that was what
Ben’s soul looked like
as it melted away
from the snow.
Did it seep out,
curl around in the air,
before—poof—
he was dead?
I knew
“Why did you leave?”
I finally said
the words
I needed to say.
Mom shook her head.
She held the teacup
close to her chest.
“Not now, honey.”
I closed my eyes,
imagining the world
without Ben,
remembering
all the words
I never said.
“Mom, you abandoned me.
You walked away
from my life.
You tried to run away
from being a mother.
“You stopped
loving me,”
I said.
Tears crawled
down my cheek.
Mom set down her teacup.
“I never stopped loving you.”
“Then tell me why
you disappeared.”
She drew a long breath.
“I made a lot of mistakes, Nic.”
“Yeah, you left me,”
I said.
“I thought it was harmless at first.
Coffee in the middle of the day,
in broad daylight,
in places where people knew us.
I thought it was all okay
because the sun was still out.”
“Who?”
I said.
“You really don’t need to know.”
“But what if I do?”
Mom sighed.
“Fathers of people you know,
and men you never met.”
I nodded. I knew this.
We all did,
if we chose to believe
the rumors
that spread around town.
“But it was never harmless.
“I wanted to feel like
someone loved me
as the woman I wanted
to be.
“I wanted that
more than wanting your father,
more than wanting to be
your mother,
“and I did anything
to have that.”
I studied my mother’s sagging eyes.
She was wrong.
At seventeen years old
I had learned
that we couldn’t be
the person we wanted to be.
We can only be
who we are.
“You deserve a mother who—”
I stopped her.
“I deserve a mother.”
My mother is a pine needle
My mother is cold air
stabbing you
in the chest,
in your lungs.
My mother is bright orange lipstick
scrawled on a locker, vying
to break me.
My mother is a pine needle
trapped between the windshield
and the wiper blade.
But my mother
is still
my mother.
Eleven weeks
It had been eleven weeks
since Ben died.
We all continued to show up to class.
We sat through our AP exams.
Some of us sent in deposits
for college tuition.
But nothing else was the same
at Meydenbauer.
Passing periods became
a quiet shuffle of feet down a hall.
Weekends dulled.
The excitement of graduation
was reserved for parents and family,
while us seniors approached it
with apprehension and
a sense of relief.
For eleven weeks
Jordan continued to slide
into his seat in front of me
in AP Bio.
Neither of us saying anything.
Both of us averting our eyes.
But I wanted us
to no longer be broken.
I wanted to superglue
all of our broken pieces
back together.
I wanted to tighten
the loose screws.
I wanted us to change.
What Jordan carried
Jordan padded down the hall
wearing Ray-Bans affixed
to his face since the funeral.
He carried an unzipped bag
with papers and notebooks
and textbooks falling
at his side.
He kept moving,
not even acknowledging
his lighter load.
“Jordan, your shit
is coming out of your backpack.
You are literally leaving
a trail of homework
down the hall,”
I said, following behind,
gathering up
the debris.
He stopped.
I handed him back
his things.
Jordan stuffed the papers
and books
back into his bag.
“It’s not the person
that haunts you,
or the regrets,”
he said.
He zipped up his bag
and continued talking
as if talking
to no one
in particular.
“It’s the arbitrariness of death.
The searching and searching
in the weeks and months
that follow
for some sort of
meaning.”
He paused.
“I wake up every morning
and there’s a feeling
in my stomach that says
it’s different now,”
he continued.
“But I can’t make sense
of what different means.”
Jordan and I
had known each other
for years,
and I thought
I knew him.
But when I looked at Jordan today,
a week before graduation,
his face slightly puffy,
his left shoulder sagging,
his button-down shirt
wrinkled and worn
with the scent of musk
and perspiration,
I saw him as he was.
A young man
scared,
anxious,
confused,
sometimes desperate,
often lonely,
beneath an air of bravado.
“We fucked up royally, Nic,”
Jordan said.
Acceptance
“Did you know
that we are the only two students
in the entire region
who were admitted to Princeton?”
Jordan asked.
I shook my head.
“The acceptance rate is 6.4 percent
with thirty-one thousand applicants,
and the only other person
admitted to Princeton
from the area
is you, Nic.
“Of course it’s you.”