Sticky

Katie was gone three nights before Nelson found her. She slept at the campsite they used to go to when they were kids, when they would go with their moms, Lucy and Elizabeth (respectively) and their dogs, Patsy and Doodle (respectively).

Lucy would pack everything she could into the Subaru, “just in case,” she would say. Katie and Patsy would squeeze into the back seat together. Patsy would stick her head out the window and Katie would have to elbow boxes of Ritz crackers and jugs of Mountain Spring water out of the way the whole drive, which couldn’t have been more than an hour anyway.

“Mom, we’re going to the mountains. The water there is mountain spring water,” Katie would say, sitting crisscross-applesauce on the seat because of all the plastic jugs where her feet should have gone.

“Just in case!” Lucy would sing-song from the front, bug-like in her Jackie O sunglasses.

When they got there, Elizabeth and Nelson would have already pulled up in their rusty Ford truck and sat in the bed of it, legs hanging off and swinging, both of them eating pimento cheese sandwiches. Doodle would be nearby, a bandana tied around her neck, sometimes blue but usually red. They would pitch two tents side by side and Katie could hear Nelson breathing through the canvas. She could hear her mom breathing, too, and his mom. She could hear all the wild sounds, like the crickets and owls and sometimes a coyote. She smelled pine, and dirt, and campfire.

When she thought about growing up, she thought of lying there in the dark, the breathing. She thought of Nelson telling her to chew pine needles like he did because it gives you good breath. She thought of the first time they camped there without Doodle, how it felt so wrong to carry on even though a piece was missing. Like the equation wouldn’t work unless they had all the variables right.

“Do you remember the first time we camped here after Doodle died?” Katie asked Nelson when he found her, after she’d been gone three nights.

“Yeah,” he said, digging the toes of his boots into the dirt. He’d just gotten there. He was sitting down beside her, on the log.

“How wrong it felt?”

“I know, it sucked,” he paused. “Hey, Katie, can I drive you home?”

“No, thanks, Nel. Isn’t it weird to think how much stuff has happened right here, where we are right now, that we can never go back to? Even though we’re here physically.”

“Katie, are you drunk? Have you been drinking?”

“No, no, Nelson, but I appreciate your concern, really. But I mean, right here is where we had our first kiss, you know? Right under that tree?”

“I know, I remember.”

Of course he did. They were thirteen, which she thought was the perfect age for a first kiss. Their moms had been drinking red wine out of thermoses and fell asleep before sunset, and Nelson had just started to get facial hair that summer, his jaw had just begun to sharpen. His hand had touched hers in a warm, sparkling way and their mouths were sticky from s’mores. They had laughed afterwards, and during, because it was getting dark and he missed her mouth the first time. The sun was setting slow and melty like somebody spilled marmalade. Then, it became a ritual that they would kiss in the dark orange half-light when their moms were sleeping, or they would walk holding hands along the riverbank and he would tell jokes, or she would explain what she’d just learned in biology, and later physics. She told him about what she found inside a frog when she dissected it, and he pretended it was gonna make him sick. They counted fireflies.

It wasn’t until they were sixteen that they became Boyfriend and Girlfriend, officially. Then he would drive forty-five minutes every weekend in the Ford and they would watch cartoons in the basement while Lucy puttered around upstairs. Some weekends Katie would drive up to visit him instead and Elizabeth would pretend she had some dinner to go to, some PTA meeting, though nobody thought for a minute Elizabeth was in the PTA, and they would make pasta Puttanesca together and while they ate it they would talk about the nebulous future.

When they were nineteen, Doodle died, just of being an old dog, and when they were twenty, Nelson said he didn’t want to do long-distance anymore (if you could even call that long distance).

“I love you,” he told her, even though he was ending things, as if that was supposed to help somehow. It didn’t.

Every time they went camping that year, Katie pretended she was sick or had too much work to do, and Lucy had to make the drive up with just the dog for company. Lucy lived alone by then—well, with Patsy—so she was used to it and Katie didn’t feel too bad when she told her on the phone that she couldn’t go.

“I think I’m coming down with something,” she had said, and when she heard the disappointment in Lucy’s voice, she added: “I love you.”

“How’s Elizabeth?” Katie asked Nelson now, after she had been gone three nights and he was sitting beside her on the log, boot toes dug into the dirt.

“She’s pretty worried.”

“Oh well, that makes sense, I guess.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, not really.”

He’d always tried to be friends with her, after they stopped being Boyfriend and Girlfriend. He wanted things to go back to the way they were before, he had said.

“The way things were before?” Katie had scoffed. “You mean when we were twelve?”

That was almost a full year after he’d ended things, when they talked about it. It was the first time Lucy had been able to drag Katie back out to the woods. She had finished school by then and moved back home, so why wouldn’t she let herself get loaded into the backseat of the Subaru with the dog and the Ritz crackers again? She couldn’t have known that with the same fire pit and the same two tents side-by-side and the same trees and the same pimento cheese sandwiches, it would start to feel like a Spot the Differences puzzle. She kept going back though, every month or two, with Lucy and Patsy and Elizabeth and Nelson, and they all pretended that nothing had changed. But Katie could barely sleep because of the deafening sounds of four bodies breathing. The pinesap that used to smell like a first kiss was too sticky, all of a sudden, and it was always on her shoes.

“Hey, how’re you liking city life?” Katie asked Nelson now, on the log, three nights in, toes dug.

“I’m liking it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You know, it’s different. It’s good to get away from home.”

“I bet your mom misses you, though.”

“Oh, she’s getting along.”

“Well that’s good to hear.”

Katie looked at the cars, not the Subaru and the Ford but a Camry and a Civic. There was one difference, spotted.

“How weird,” she said, “to have our cars parked here and not theirs.”

“Your mom’s really worried about you, Katie.” He wasn’t listening, apparently.

“And only one tent, how about that?” Two differences.

“Katie.”

“Nelson.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I see my mom every day, she can live without me for a weekend.”

“Yeah, why didn’t you just tell her where you were going, though? You could have just said you were going camping and it wouldn’t have been this whole ordeal.”

“Yeah, sorry you had to come all the way out here.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. But I’m sorry you had to come all the way out here.”

“It’s fine, it’s good to see you.”

“I see you all the time.”

“Yeah but with our families. You know, it’s good to just see you. Like for old times’ sake?”

“Yeah, old times.”

“Listen, should I call your mom or do you want to?”

“I don’t really want to talk to her.”

“Did you guys get in a fight or something?”

They didn’t, but she didn’t say anything, and he got up off the log and went to go call Lucy.

His haircut was new and Katie liked it. The left side was shaved but the right was long enough for him to run his hands through while the phone rang. Three differences spotted. The shirt he was wearing was old, though, and Katie liked that too. It was faded and had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo on it. He’d had it since high school.

“Yeah, she’s here, she’s fine,” Katie could hear him saying. She could hear the indistinct warble of her mother’s voice on the other end but couldn’t make out her words. She was thanking him, probably. She was probably saying, I don’t know what we’d do without you. You’re a lifesaver, probably. Thank God.

“I don’t know why you scare her like that.” Nelson had hung up and was talking to Katie again. He came back over by the log but stayed standing up above her. He’d always been so tall.

“It’s not some big dramatic thing, I don’t know why you’re making it into one.”

“What do you mean? Katie, you just left home for three days. You haven’t answered your phone. She didn’t know if you were alive.”

“I’m an adult.”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“I’m twenty-two.”

“Yeah, I am, too.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Adults answer their phones.”

“I didn’t bring my charger.”

“You’re acting like a teenager.”

“I guess.”

“So, what, are you gonna stay out here? By yourself? What’s your plan?”

She didn’t know.

Another difference, a fourth, was that she used to be the mature one. He was the one who didn’t know, historically. She knew, always, that she wanted to go to college and then grad school and then get a research job. Biomedical, probably. He wanted to be a painter, no, an actor, no, a poet, no, a musician. And here she was, a college graduate, magna cum laude, not in grad school, living at home. And he was making enough money playing music that he could afford an apartment in San Francisco.

“Do you remember when you told me that story about the man with a hook hand?” Katie asked.

“Yeah.”

“That was like, what, seven or eight years ago?”

“Probably.”

“But right here.”

“Yeah, Katie, it was here. We were sitting on this log and Lucy and my mom were on that one.”

He was right. And the dogs were there, too. Katie didn’t remember where they were, but she remembered the comfort she felt from their presence. She remembered the flickering of the campfire and the sinister shadow it cast over Nelson’s face, the rosy glow that lit their laughing moms. The warm weight of Patsy’s head on her knee when she got really scared.

“Would you ever say you grew up here?”

“Here?”

“I feel like all the important stuff I did happened here, not at home. Like this is where I grew up.”

“I guess I could say that.” He was sitting down again now, beside her on the log. “I guess I never thought of it that way.”

“It feels really special,” Katie said. “Like this is hallowed ground. Some important stuff happened here. Big life landmarks.”

“Yeah.”

“So part of me is like, go hang out in this place where you grew up and just feel how it feels. But then there’s another part of me that’s like, get out of there. Hey, do you believe in ghosts?”

“What? No.” He was digging his toes into the dirt again.

“Me neither. Not like spooky ghosts. But sometimes I feel like things can hang in the air and that’s almost like a ghost.”

“Katie, are you actually okay?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what I’m saying. That’s just what I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of days. Like, what’s left over of something after it’s done happening.”

“I feel like when something’s done happening, that’s it, it’s just done. There’s nothing left over.”

“That sucks, then.”

She was rubbing her hands on her jeans while she said all of this. She had pinesap on them, from leaning up against the log.

“Have you thought any more about that grad program you got into?” There were two little dirt hills that he’d carved from digging so much with his boots.

“Oh, yeah, I turned that down. Did my mom not say?”

“No, she didn’t. Why didn’t you go for it?”

“I don’t know.”

She didn’t. It just felt wrong, suddenly, bits and pieces of it, like the campsite. She fit there too neatly.

“You ever feel like something’s too perfect?”

“Yeah, I’ve felt that way before.” He smiled a little, still not really looking up.

“I guess I should go back now, huh?” She said after a while.

“You probably should.”

“Yeah, okay.”

He helped her take the tent down and put everything back in her car. It was comfortable to do such familiar work with him. They lapsed into that content kind of quiet that feels easy and light, neither of them trying to think of something to say. Then they stood there, close together, between the Camry and the Civic, both twisting keys in their palms. Katie almost brought up the point she’d been trying to make earlier, about how ghosts could be hanging between them, thin and fragile, or maybe they were more like cobwebs.

“I guess I’ll see you sometime next month, probably.” Nelson said.

“Yeah, of course.”

He stepped forward and hugged her solidly, and they both smelled like the woods. Then he opened the door for her and she sat down in the Camry and let the air conditioner dry the sweat on her face. She watched as he got in his car and turned it on and waved, smiling at her, through the window as he peeled out. She followed him, down the bumping dirt path and left onto the winding highway. She lost sight of his car, after a few minutes, and let the solitude wash over her, bittersweet like good chocolate. The radio was on and the windows down, blowing her hair. There was nobody counting on her. How rare and lucky, she thought, to be alone.

She drove most of the way back, but when it came time to turn right to go into town, where she would have taken Main Street to Woodland to North and parked in the driveway and gone inside to her mom and her dog, she instead kept straight. She whizzed right by it, without even slowing down.

She imagined if Nelson was in the car, sitting in the passenger seat with Google Maps up on his phone, or if Lucy was there, shouting—where are you going, Katie?!

Even though she was alone, she took pleasure in answering out loud.

“I don’t know.”