Free Almost Home by Jessica Blank Page A

pouring its late-night grocery-store light onto the sand. I’ve never been up this far before, but I know if you go much farther the beach starts being private property and you’ll set off alarms just by walking. Here it’s still free. We plop down on the sand, and right away Tracy lies back and starts counting stars. She only knows a couple. The waves crash in front of me and cars rush by in back, but the noise and moving feel really far away, like there’s a cocoon of quiet and dark around us. After a long time she turns to me. “So where’d you come from, anyway?”
    I realize we never talked about any of that: we were brother and sister from Fresno, it was all made up. “Bakersfield,” I say.
    “That’s not too far,” she goes. “What’re you doing here?”
    I start to say something but it stops in my throat like a plug. Jim made me promise not to tell and I haven’t, not the whole two months I’ve been here waiting. That’s what keeps me tied to him: the cords from me to Jim, from here to Bakersfield, are made up of a million little sparkling threads like spiderwebs; those threads are built from promises between us, the only thing that keeps me from floating away. If I tell our secret I know I’ll cut those cords, and come untied, and I don’t know where I’ll go.
    But Jim hasn’t answered his phone in two months and I can’t remember the sound of his voice. And Tracy is here, right here, and she is the only one who I could ever tell. And the night around us is quiet enough to keep a secret. So I do it. I tell her I am in love and I explain who Jim is and why I had to go, and that he said he’s coming, but that he hasn’t yet. I try to explain to her the feeling of locking together with someone like a puzzle piece, and it’s not just your outsides that fit or the way you seem to the world, but all the inside parts of you that you didn’t even know had a shape until they matched up so perfectly with his. Tracy’s looking at me like she doesn’t quite believe what I’m saying, like she’s not sure it’s possible for a person to feel that way with someone, and I understand: lots of people don’t believe in love. And you have to believe in it before it will let you see or touch it, so if you don’t make the leap you might not ever see it. But it’s there.
    Tracy doesn’t know that. I can tell. But she asks me lots of questions, and it feels so good to answer. Jim’s been more important to me than even myself for almost a year, and all of it has only happened in two places: inside of me or in the space between me and him. Telling Tracy’s like opening a faucet.
    It comes out of my mouth like water: the things he said at the beginning, what it’s like to know a person’s smell, the anxious catch that now has dulled to normal when I hold the pay phone and it rings and rings. How underneath I don’t believe he’s coming anymore, and I wish I could turn the air beside me into something solid to fill the hole he leaves. How sometimes when he’d touch me I’d go out onto the very edges of myself, far like on a tightrope or a plank, and balance knowing there was only air to catch me; how he’d hold me there till it got scary, sometimes longer, and it was realer and more raw than any thing I’d ever felt. How he would always close his eyes and seem so comfortable, casual even, and I was always amazed at that: how brave he must be for it not to scare him at all. How sometimes it broke me into two pieces, and I’d lie there under him naked and stretched out past my skin, and another me would watch from the ceiling. Even if it was too much I had to grow to hold it, because it belonged to me now, and I belonged to him, and if I let any of the pressure of it spill like water from my faucet mouth, it would all leak out and be gone from me forever. That’s what he always said.
    And he was right: now the words go out of me, and Tracy catches them, and somehow the swelling of the secrets shrinks