Free The Dark Path by David Schickler Page A

nights later. There’s a welcome-back card from Mara taped to the outside of my dorm room door. I rip the envelope off and open the card to read a sentence written in Mara’s cursive, a sentence that I hoped for during all the dance recitals and water ballet concerts I ever attended.
    I love you, David
.
    I shout out loud and sprint to Mara’s row house two blocks away. When I come clattering through the door, she’s standing there, waiting for me.
    â€œYou wrote
I love you
.” I’m still panting.
    She blushes. “It took me forever to write that down.”
    â€œYou love me?”
    She nods. I start toward her, but she holds up a hand to stop me. “It was cancer.”
    â€œWhat was cancer?”
    â€œI had leukemia at the end of high school. I didn’t know it for a while, but then I started passing out everywhere. One time I blacked out at school and fell down some stairs and cut the back of my neck open, and that’s how I got my scar. When I went to the hospital for stitches, they ran tests and found the cancer.” She is blurting all this out quietly, quickly. “And I couldn’t tell you where I was going for Thanksgiving because I went to the town I grew up in back in New Hampshire to be in a protest and I didn’t know how you’d feel about that. Our house back then was by a toxic waste site—none of our parents knew what it was—and lots of neighborhood kids got sick. Then it happened to me. So I went with my mom and sisters over Thanksgiving, because we think that’s where my leukemia came from and we want that place shut down. We did a picket protest and got on the news. And I’m sorry it took me so long to say I love you, and I’m sorry if my rapids scar is gross for you to have to see. I’m sorry if touching it is . . . is gross.”
    I’m frozen in place with panic. “It’s gone?” I’m pleading more than asking. “The cancer, it’s—”
    â€œIt’s in remission,” she says.
    I should’ve been there. I should’ve been there in the hospital with her, and at the protest. It cuts me like shattered glass in my stomach that I wasn’t there.
    â€œIf you ever say that you’re gross again . . .” I’m unable to finish the threat.
    â€œI love you,” she says.
    I say that I love her. Then she kisses me and we go up to her room.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    IN THE COMING DAYS I skip more classes than I attend, unable to crawl out of bed with Mara. How can my father or anyone ever know what she and I feel for each other? Has my father or Father Prince or God Himself ever had leukemia and beaten it and then made love with someone to show the universe that they’ve chosen the opposite of death? No, but Mara has, and we’re sharing in the glory of each other.
    Over Christmas I drive to Maine to visit Mara and her mother and her four sisters. Her parents are divorced and her dad still lives in New Hampshire, so I don’t meet him. Mara’s is a family of women, like mine, and three of Mara’s sisters are older than she, each a New England beauty. One has two small daughters who call me Aunt Dave since they’re used to having only women around. Another sister of Mara’s looks so much like Mara that I have fantasies of sleeping with her, too.
    Though it’s December, Mara takes me walking on a beach just north of Kittery. In summer it caters to locals more than tourists and Mara is proud of it. She used to wait tables at the famous Witchmoor Inn nearby and she brings me there to meet the family who runs it. We drive up and down the coast and eat in dives, ordering steamed clams and beer in chilled mugs. We take beach walks through winter fogs that are touched by sun but that never burn off. We zip ourselves into a sleeping bag on her sister’s living room floor one night and we have sex clandestinely,