People We Meet on Vacation

I DON’T KNOW HOW Alex got Sarah on board with the Vail trip, but he did.

Asking how strikes me as dangerous. There are things we talk around these days, to keep everything aboveboard, and Alex is careful not to share anything that might embarrass Sarah.

There’s no talk of jealousy. Maybe there is no jealousy. Maybe there’s some other reason she didn’t initially like the idea of the trip. But she changes her mind, and the trip is on, and once Alex and I are together, I stop worrying about it. Things feel normal between us again, that fifteenish percent of what-if shrunken back to a manageable two.

We rent bikes and rumble over the cobblestone streets, take a gondola up the mountain, and pose for photos with the vast blue sky behind us, wind blowing our hair across our faces in midlaugh. We sit on patios, sipping chilled green tea or coffee in the mornings before it gets hot, take long hikes on mountain trails during the day with our sweatshirts shed and tied around our waists, only to wind up at different outdoor patios, drinking red wine and sharing three orders of fries with pressed garlic and freshly grated Parmesan. We sit outside until we’re goose-bump-covered and shivering, and then pull on our sweatshirts, and I draw my knees up to my chest inside mine. Every time I do this, Alex leans over and flicks my hood up over my head, then tugs the drawstrings tight so that only the very middle of my face is visible, and most of that is blocked by tufts of wind-tangled blond hair.

“Cutie,” he says, grinning, the first time he does this, but it feels almost brotherly.

One night, there’s a live band playing Van Morrison hits while we’re eating dinner outside under strands of globe lights that remind me of the night we met as freshmen. We follow older couples onto the dance floor, hand in hand. We move like we did back in New Orleans—clumsy and rhythmless but laughing, happy.

Now that it’s behind us, I can admit that things were different that night.

In the magic of the city and its music and smells and glimmering lights, I felt something I’d never felt with him before. Scarier than that, I’d known from the way Alex looked into my eyes, smoothed his hand down my arm, eased his cheek against mine, that he felt it too.

But now, dancing to “Brown Eyed Girl,” the heat has gone out of his touch. And I’m happy, because I never want to lose this.

I would rather have one tiny sliver of him forever than have all of him for just a moment and know I’d have to relinquish all of it when we were through. I could never lose Alex. I couldn’t. And so this is good, this peaceful, sparkless dance. This sparkless trip.

Alex calls Sarah twice a day, morning and night, but never in front of me. In the morning, they talk while he jogs, before I’m even out of bed, and when he gets back, he wakes me up with coffee and a pastry from the café in the resort’s clubhouse. At night, he steps out onto the balcony to call her and shuts the door behind him.

“I don’t want you to make fun of my phone voice,” he says.

“God, I’m an asshole,” I say, and though he laughs, I do feel bad. Teasing has always been a big part of our dynamic, and it’s felt like our thing. But there are things he won’t do in front of me now, parts of him he doesn’t trust with me, and I don’t like how that feels.

When he comes inside after his jog and morning call the next day, I sit up sleepily to accept the proffered coffee and croissant and say, “Alex Nilsen, for whatever it’s worth, I’m sure your phone voice is amazing.”

He blushes, rubs the back of his head. “It’s not.”

“I bet you’re all buttery and warm and sweet and perfect.”

“Are you talking to me or the croissant?” he asks.

“I love you, croissant,” I say, and tear a piece off, lowering it into my mouth. He stands there, hands in his pockets, grinning, and my heart swells, Grinch-style, just looking at him. “But I’m talking about you.”

“You’re sweet, Poppy,” he says. “And buttery and warm and whatever. But I still would just rather talk on the phone alone.”

“Heard,” I say, nodding, and hold my croissant out to him. He tears off the teensiest piece and pops it between his lips.

Later that day, while we’re sitting at lunch, something brilliant occurs to me. “Lita!” I cry, seemingly out of nowhere.

“Bless you?” Alex says.

“Remember Lita?” I say. “She was living in that dumpy house in Tofino. With Buck?”

Alex narrows his eyes. “Is she the one who tried to put her hand down my pants while she was giving me a ‘tour’?”

“Um, one, you didn’t tell me that happened, and two, no. She was hanging out with me and Buck. She was leaving soon, remember? Moving to Vail to be a rafting guide!”

“Oh,” Alex says. “Yeah. Right.”

“Do you think she’s still here?”

He squints. “On this earthly plane? I’m not sure any of those people are.”

“I’ve got Buck’s number,” I say.

“You do?” Alex gives me a pointed look.

“I haven’t used it,” I say. “But I have it. I’ll text him and see if he has Lita’s number.”

Hey, Buck! I write. Not sure if you remember me, but you gave me and my friend Alex a water taxi ride to the hot springs, like, five years ago, right before your friend Lita moved to Colorado? Anyway, I’m in Vail and was gonna see if she was still here! Hope you’re well and that Tofino is still the most beautiful place on this whole entire planet.

By the time we’ve finished eating, Buck has written back.

Damn, girl, he says. Is this sexy little Poppy? Took you long enough to use those digits. Guess I shouldn’t have kicked you out of my room.

I snort-laugh, and Alex leans over the table to read the message upside down. He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, you fucking think, pal?”

No, no, no worries about that, I tell him. It was a great night. We had an amazing time.

Sweet, he says. I haven’t talked to Lita in years but I’ll shoot u her contact info if u want.

That would be amazing, I tell him.

If you ever make it back to the island r u gonna tell me? he asks.

Obviously, I say. I have no idea how to operate a water taxi. You’ll be invaluable.

Lol, he says, ur such a freak I love it.

By that night, we’ve booked a rafting trip with Lita, who does not remember us but insists on the phone that she’s sure we had a great time together.

“To be fair, I was on, like, a ton of drugs back then,” she says. “I was always having a great time, and I remember almost none of it.”

Alex, overhearing this, pulls a face that reads as anxiety with a side of unanswered questions. I know exactly what he wants me to find out.

“So,” I say, as casually as I can, “do you still . . . use . . . drugs?”

“Three years sober, mama,” she replies. “But if you’re looking to buy something, I can send you my old dude’s number.”

“No, no,” I say. “That’s okay. We’ll just . . . do . . . the stuff . . . we brought . . . from home.”

Looking beleaguered, Alex shakes his head.

“All right, then. See you two bright and early.”

When I hang up, Alex says, “Do you think Buck was on drugs when he drove our water taxi?”

I shrug. “We never did find out what he was ranting to no one about. Maybe he thought Jim Morrison was hovering on the water just in front of him.”

“I am so glad we’re still alive,” Alex says.

The next morning we meet Lita at the raft rental place, and she looks almost exactly as I remember her, but with a wedding band tattoo and a small baby bump.

“Four months,” she says, jogging it in her hands.

“And it’s . . . safe? To do this?” Alex asks.

“Baby number one did just fine,” Lita assures us. “You know, in Norway, they stick their babies outside to take naps.”

“Oh . . . kay,” Alex says.

“I would love to go to Norway,” I say.

“Oh, you’ve got to!” she says. “My wife’s twin sister lives there—she married a Norwegian. Gail sometimes talks about legally divorcing me and offering to pay a couple nice Norwegians to marry us so we can both get citizenship and move there. Call me old-fashioned, but I just don’t feel right about paying for my sham marriage.”

“Well, I guess you’ll just have to survive on Norwegian vacations, then,” I say.

“Guess so.”

Out of an abundance of caution, we opt for the beginner route, and we soon discover that this means that our “rafting trip” consists largely of sunbathing and floating with the current, sticking out our oars to shove off of rocks when we get too close, and amping up our rowing whenever a rapid crops up.

Lita, it turns out, remembers a lot more than she let on about Buck and the other people she lived with in the Tofino house, and she regales us with stories of people jumping off the roof onto a trampoline, and drunkenly giving each other stick-and-poke tattoos with red ink pens.

“Turns out some people are allergic to red ink,” she says. “Who knew?”

Every story she tells is more ludicrous than the last, and by the time we drag the raft onto the riverbank at the end of our route, my abs ache from laughing.

She wipes laugh-tears away from the just-starting-to-wrinkle corners of her eyes and heaves a contented sigh. “I can laugh because I survived it. Makes me happy knowing Buck did too.” She rubs her tummy. “Makes me so happy every time you find out how small the world is, you know? Like, we were in that place at the same time and now here we are. At different points in our lives but still connected. Like quantum entanglement or some shit.”

“I think about that every time I’m in an airport,” I tell her. “It’s one reason I love traveling so much.” I hesitate, searching for how to pour this long-steeping soupy thought into concrete words. “As a kid, I was a loner,” I explain, “and I always figured that when I grew up, I’d leave my hometown and discover other people like me somewhere else. Which I have, you know? But everyone gets lonely sometimes, and whenever that happens, I buy a plane ticket and go to the airport and—I don’t know. I don’t feel lonely anymore. Because no matter what makes all those people different, they’re all just trying to get somewhere, waiting to reach someone.”

Alex gives me an odd look whose meaning I can’t interpret.

“Ah, shit,” Lita says. “You’re gonna make me cry. These damn pregnancy hormones. I react worse to them than I did to ayahuasca.”

Before we part ways, Lita pulls each of us into a long hug. “If you’re ever in New York . . .” I say.

“If you ever feel like taking a real rafting trip,” she answers with a wink.

Several silent minutes into our drive back to the resort, with worried creases shooting up from the insides of his eyebrows, Alex says, “I hate thinking about you being lonely.”

I must look confused, because he clarifies: “The thing about how you go to the airport. When you feel like you’re alone.”

“I’m not really that lonely anymore,” I say.

I have the group text with Parker and Prince—we’ve been planning out a no-budget Jaws musical. Then there are the weekly calls with both my parents on speakerphone. Plus there’s Rachel, who’s really come through for me post-Guillermo, with invites to exercise classes and wine bars and volunteering days at dog shelters.

Even though Alex and I don’t talk as much as we used to, there are also the short stories he’s been mailing me with brief hand-scribbled notes on Post-its. He could email them, but he doesn’t, and after I’ve read each hard copy, I put it in a shoebox where I’ve started keeping the things that matter to me. (One shoebox, so I don’t end up with huge plastic bins of my future children’s dragon drawings like Mom and Dad have.)

I don’t feel alone when I read his words. I don’t feel alone when I hold those Post-its in my hand and think about the person who wrote them.

“I’m sorry if I haven’t been there for you,” Alex says quietly. He opens his mouth as if to go on, then shakes his head and closes it again. We’ve made it back to the resort, pulled into our parking space, and when I turn in my seat to face him, he angles toward me too.

“Alex . . .” It takes me a few seconds to go on: “I’ve never really felt alone since I met you. I don’t think I’ll ever feel truly alone in this world again as long as you’re in it.”

His gaze softens, holds steady for a beat. “Can I tell you something embarrassing?”

For once, it doesn’t occur to me to joke, to be sarcastic. “Anything.”

He runs his hand over the steering wheel in a slow back-and-forth. “I don’t think I knew I was lonely until I met you.” He shakes his head again. “At home, after my mom died and my dad fell apart, I just wanted everyone to be okay. I wanted to be exactly what Dad needed, and exactly what my little brothers needed, and at school, I wanted to be who everyone wanted, so I tried to be calm and responsible and steady, and I think I was nineteen years old the first time it occurred to me that maybe that wasn’t how some people lived. That maybe I just was someone, beyond who I tried to be.

“I met you, and honestly . . . at first, I thought it was an act. The shocking clothes, the shocking jokes.”

“Whatever do you mean?” I tease quietly, and a smile winks in the corner of his mouth, brief as a beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

“On that first drive back to Linfield, you asked me all these questions about what I liked and what I hated, and I don’t know. It just felt like you really wanted to know.”

“Of course I did,” I say.

He nods. “I know. You asked me who I was, and—it was like the answer came out of nowhere. Sometimes it feels like I didn’t even exist before that. Like you invented me.”

Heat rushes to my cheeks, and I adjust my position in my seat, pulling my knees into my chest. “I’m not smart enough to have invented you. No one’s that smart.”

The muscles along his jaw leap as he considers his next words, never one to blurt anything out without first weighing it. “My point is, no one really knew me before you, Poppy. And even if . . . things change between us, you’ll never be alone, okay? I’ll always love you.”

Tears cloud my eyes, but miraculously I blink them clear. Somehow, my voice comes out steady and light, and not like someone reached into my rib cage and held my heart inside his hand just long enough to run a thumb across a secret wound.

“I know,” I tell him, and, “I love you too.”

It’s true, but not the full truth. There aren’t words vast or specific enough to capture the ecstasy and the ache and love and fear I feel just looking at him now.

So the moment sweeps past, and the trip goes on, and nothing is different between us, except that a part of me has woken up, like a bear emerging from hibernation with a hunger it has managed to sleep through for months but can’t ignore one second longer.

The next day, the second to last of the trip, we take a hike up a mountain pass. Near the top, I step to the edge of the path to take a photo through an opening in the trees of the deep blue lake below and lose my footing. My ankle rolls, hard and fast. It feels like the bone jabs through my foot to hit the ground, and then I’m sprawled in mud and leaves, hissing out swear words.

“Stay still,” Alex says, crouching beside me.

At first I can barely breathe, so I’m not crying, just choking, “Do I have a bone sticking out of my skin?”

Alex glances down, checks my leg. “No, I think you just sprained it.”

“Fuck,” I gasp from beneath a wave of pain.Belonging © NôvelDram/a.Org.

“Squeeze my hand if you need to,” he says, and I do, as tight as I can. In his giant, masculine palm, my own looks tiny, my knuckles knobby and bulbous.

The pain lets up enough that mania rushes in to replace it. Tears falling in great gushes, I ask, “Do I have slow loris hands?”

“What?” Alex asks, understandably confused. His worried expression judders. He turns a laugh into a cough. “Slow loris hands?” he repeats seriously.

“Don’t laugh at me!” I squeak out, fully regressed into an eight-year-old little sister.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “No, you don’t have slow loris hands. Not that I know what a slow loris is.”

“It’s kind of like a lemur,” I say tearfully.

“You have beautiful hands, Poppy.” He tries very, very hard—perhaps his hardest ever—not to smile, but slowly it happens anyway, and I break into a teary laugh. “Do you want to try to stand?” he asks.

“Can’t you just roll me down the mountain?”

“I’d rather not,” he says. “There might be poison ivy once we get off the trail.”

I sigh. “Okay, then.” He helps me up, but I can’t put any weight on my right foot without a lightning bolt of pain crackling up my leg. I stop shambling along, start to cry again, and bury my face in my hands to hide the snotty mess I’m crumbling into.

Alex rubs his hands slowly up and down my arms for a few seconds, which only makes me cry harder. People being nice to me when I’m upset always has this effect. He pulls me in against his chest and hooks his arms against my back.

“Am I going to have to, like, pay for a helicopter to get down there?” I get out.

“We’re not that far,” he says.

“I’m not kidding, I can’t put any weight on it.”

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “I’m going to pick you up, and I’m going to carry you—very slowly—down the trail. And I’m probably going to have to stop a lot and set you down, and you’re not allowed to call me Seabiscuit, or scream Faster! Faster! in my ear.”

I laugh into his chest, nod against him, leaving wet marks behind on his T-shirt.

“And if I find out you faked this whole thing just to see if I would carry you half a mile down a mountain,” he says, “I’m going to be really annoyed.”

“Scale of one to ten,” I say, leaning back to look into his face.

“Seven at least,” he says.

“You are so, so nice,” I say.

“You mean buttery and warm and perfect,” he teases, widening his stance. “Ready?”

“Ready,” I confirm, and Alex Nilsen sweeps me up into his arms and carries me down a motherfucking mountain.

No. I really could not have invented him.