Free Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America by Brian Benson Page B

for help because he had no other choice, that help had arrived in a helicopter, that Sam Larsen had lost consciousness by then, that Sam Larsen had been in the near-freezing water for far too long, and that the rescue team had done everything it could but could not bring Sam Larsen back. That Sam Larsen had passed away, an hour before I called.
    I don’t remember what I said to Josh, other than “I love you” and “I’ll be home as soon as possible.”
    I sat there for some time, staring at the ratty grass between my feet. Eventually I got up and walked to the car, opened the door, slumped into the seat.
    “You all right?”
    I kept my eyes on the windshield. “Sammy was in an accident. He’s dead.”
    Vij drew in a sharp breath and rocked his head back. “Jesus, Bri.” He looked at me for what felt like an hour, then turned back to the road. “I can’t believe Sam’s fucking dead.”
    I cringed but couldn’t fault him those words. I was thinking the same thing.
    We’d just been talking about Sammy. An hour earlier, almost exactly.
    Over the years, Sam and I had drifted. There had been an initial falling-out, over some trivial shit I barely remember, and then a longer, deeper divergence. We still exchanged e-mails, still saw each other a few times a year, but our friendship was in a holding pattern. Sam was a vivid presence in my past, and I imagined there would be a point where we’d reconnect and build an even stronger friendship, one in which we were mature enough to appreciate the ways we’d each grown and changed. But we weren’t there yet. Given the distance between us—three hours, if you were pushing it, between Madison and Eau Claire, our respective college towns—we weren’t able to be in the present with each other. We were stuck in the in-between.
    I’d been feeling hopeful that Sam and I were on the verge of breaking out of this stasis. Just a few months earlier, I had visited him in Eau Claire, arriving late on a Friday and walking into an already packed party at his place. After giving me a big hug, wrapping his lanky frame around mine, he had grabbed me a beer and tossed his arm over my shoulder. “Bri,” he’d said, grinning and raising his voice over the deafening hip-hop billowing up from the basement, “I’m so glad you’re here.” He paused, his foot-wide smile somehow stretching further, his watery brown eyes locked on mine. He had clearly been drinking for hours, but I knew those eyes, knew there was something else going on behind them. Still, I was unprepared for him to say, without warning or preamble, “All this shit from the past few years, it’s so
stupid
, right?”
    I coughed out a laugh. Before I could respond, a few of his soccer teammates walked up, and then he was off to play party host, I to abuse my liver with his friends. We didn’t continue the conversation that night, or the next day. We didn’t need to. It wasn’t about a conversation. It was an opening. An invitation to take the yawning space between us and begin to fill it.
    I had missed that opening. That invitation.
    That point on the horizon, the place where we would use what we’d picked up to build something new, it had vanished. I was left with the in-between.
     • • • 
    R achel and I headed to the shore. I was hoping we’d have a view of the caves, or at least the bluffs above. I wanted this to hurt. But now, when I looked east, I saw only an evergreen tail disappearing into blue water.
    I sat down beside Rachel, who’d gone quiet after reading the sign. We’d talked about Sam before, but only briefly. I never knew quite what to tell her, beyond the rote details, and so usually she did what she was doing now, which was grab my hand and massage it and ask if I was okay. I was, I told her. For three years running, whenever I thought of Sam I’d felt not sad but empty. Even in the week after his death, spent at a lakeside cottage in the company of my closest friends, I had been unable