“I made a New Year’s resolution,” she says. “This is going to be my new thing.”
“Some people find it hard to climb in jeans,” Nolan says.
“I do everything in jeans.”
“What else do you do?”
“Like, besides school? Nothing. That’s why I made this resolution.”
The mat compresses under their weight, and he keeps having to shift around and change angles. “Yes, yes,” she says quietly into his ear, and this positive reinforcement is what brings him to the end.
On Sunday, he drives them through China and heads south on Route 202. They pass all three of his old schools, one after the other, in opposite order: high, middle, elementary. For some reason, the buildings look unfamiliar to him. As if he were seeing them through her eyes.
In February, Heidi can climb only a couple of nights a week. She’s working on her honors thesis, something that’s optional at Winslow.
“In my mind, ‘optional’ usually means ‘mandatory,’ ” she says.
“I’ll probably keep doing the day camp over the summers, too,” he says. “What I have now is mainly from that. And from shovelling snow.”
“You have savings from shovelling snow?”
He looks out the window. “There was a lot of snow.”
But she didn’t read past the headline. She didn’t click the links. She had stopped clicking the links a long time ago. She didn’t think she knew anyone near Portland.
Dumped is the wrong word, of course, because they were never really a couple, not in any articulable way. It had lasted only a few months. She was graduating. It had to be her who cut it off. Why? And what if she never had? But she had. To save them both from the inevitable pain—that was what she told herself.
She has kept these memories close. There’s something different about them, the way they don’t fit neatly into her history, the way they still make her heart race. As if they were unfinished. As if someday she might return to him.
At her five-year reunion, maybe she cupped the glare from the window, scanned around the empty climbing wall. As if he would still be in there, where she had left him.
She could tell he was happy. He wasn’t smiling—nothing so obvious as that. Just something in his posture, the pride in his eyes.