She was standing on the ledge. Before her, across the lawn and all its noise, the sun was burning. It floated lazily in the space above a bank of storm clouds that were weeping their slate gray shade onto the lake’s opposite shore. It was nearing its final hour before leaving her once more, before going to collect Tomorrow from wherever it was kept, and, though its reasoning escaped her, it deigned to spend the time roasting the side of her she had actually remembered to sunscreen. How thoughtful. It had spent much of the rest of the day following her around, irradiating, if rather pleasantly, those portions of her back and shoulders left uncovered by that old dress. It was as if, by handing down its sublime gifts of warmth and color—all sustenance and joy, it might remind her, or perhaps distract, from its supreme edict: time.
She shifted her weight and leaned forward to rest her arms upon the railing. Below her, lounging about in disparate groups on the lawn, clucked her classmates. The sound of their maudlin laughter drifted up to her in waves. She watched the lawn as the groups upon it drifted and disbanded, setting its delicate and restless contents swirling like lilies across a pond. A duo—one in a red and white striped rugby shirt, the other in a graphic tee with the logo of some heartland sports team—plodded up the lawn, but were soon accosted and absorbed by a short girl with close cropped hair and jean shorts who threw her arms around them each in turn. She exclaimed loudly before taking their wrists and pulling them in concert with the rest of her group.
She smiled. The sun didn’t, though it seemed to want to. It watched her on her watch
The girl—Lana or Lila or something—had been talking to Rebecca. God, it had been so long. Even from up on the balcony, she could see that her eyes were winged by the same swooping point she had taught Jane to do back in freshman year. Deep purple ink to match her flowing dress. Probably a waterproof variety for the occasion. She should go over and say something.
They had met during orientation on the optional hiking trip. It wasn’t the idea of a hike that had enticed her, Jane remembered. That had never really been her thing. But sitting alone in her bare walled room was worse. She had been staring at the little heart someone had carved into the faded paint beside her bed. The heart, the J+A—well, she thought it was an A—had taken on a strange face, some quality of obscene predestiny that grinned monstrously back at her. The maybe-A had been carved into the upper right corner of the heart above a section where the paint had been removed entirely. Perhaps it denoted a former occupant’s break up, or possibly a previous attempt to carve the maybe-A. Whatever it was, it failed to abate the coil in her stomach. So, out of desperation, she consulted the crumpled orientation schedule and abandoned the oppressive heat of her room for the alien Adirondacks.
The fellowship was small. No more than twenty. Evidently, others in her class had discovered better ways to spend their time, but these few seemed nice enough and the journey promised to be relatively short. What the hell, no harm in seeing a little of her new home, as her dad repeated ad nauseam over the phone.
Rebecca was in the front row of the van—might get car sick, she explained—chatting with the group leaders. They were seniors. Two members of the hiking club. They got up to count the hikers. Jane, last in line, sat down in the row opposite. Rebecca was wearing one of those trendy matching athletic outfits with the brand name prominently displayed. She looked over and offered a smile that Jane, surprised by its genuine warmth, returned a little shakily. Pleasantries exchanged.
“Where are you from?”
“San Francisco.”
“No way! Where in San Francisco? My cousins live there.”
Christ, she was getting sick of having the same conversation over and over. “Oh, the suburbs. Silicon Valley, really. Woodside—if you’ve heard of it.”
“Nice, nice. I’m from Richmond Virginia—well, just outside too. I’ve just gotten used to simplifying for the people way out here.”
Two fish out of water they had been back then; like everyone else, she supposed. Still, any connection was something to go off. By the end of the short bus ride around to the other side of the lake, they had exhausted the regular introductions. They unloaded from the van and set off. The serious hikers, easily distinguished by their boots, beat forward at an untenable pace, so Jane and Rebecca found themselves at a comfortable spot in the rear of the group. They climbed largely in silence, Jane conserving her breath for the maintenance of her own body.
The trail, rock-scattered, was treacherous going. It stretched out ahead, curving steeply up and here and there with increasing frequency large boulders pushed their way through the soil. To the left one drove up, lifting a tree ever so slowly from the earth such that its roots webbed over bare rock reaching for an anchor to keep it from its fate. What was she doing way out here? Maybe this would all be easier if she had gone somewhere closer to home. The trees were getting thinner now, parting for greater and greater stones until they came together and she trod upon the mountain’s spine that breached through the Earth like the skeleton of some ancient whale for whom time or God or happenstance made of the mountain a mausoleum.
As they neared the top, only the most resilient windswept dwarves remained to fill cracks in the rock. Then the mountain fell away into nothingness before the gentle curve of the cloudless sky which bent out into infinity. Each step drew up from behind the veil of the mountain a great green ocean, its rolling frozen forever by sun and stone. Even still, the September wind on leaf and limb granted to it, if only for a moment, the illusion of eternal movement. It flowed out into the unknown distance, blending into itself the houses and the roads, obscuring campus far below.
“This is why I did it.” Rebecca sighed.
“Did what?” Replied Jane, turning quickly, shaken from her reverence.
“Came all the way out here, went to college at all. Why I do it, maybe I should say. Live, I guess?”
“The mountains? The Adirondacks?”
“That’s America right there, but it’s more than that, you know? It’s like a need I guess—to be out here maybe or to have it nearby,” she said, drawing her hand in an arc across the sky.
“I get that,” Jane said. She paused for a moment and took a breath in. “It’s not like this at home, not usually. It’s much hazier.”
“I’ve never breathed fresher air,” Rebecca exhaled, smiling. “Think of all the people who depend on this place, living down there, or coming up for the weekend. And now it’s ours.”
A little blue and white bird alighted on a stone at the cliff’s edge. Jane watched it hop around from rock to rock before flitting over to the trunk of a small tree where it hung close against the bark upside down. To Jane, it looked as if nothing anchored the little bird to the world at all. It was nothing but a ball of velvet feathers, weightless and without tether.
“It’s all changing though, isn’t it,” Jane said at last.
The pair stood there for a moment until Rebecca sighed, “Yeah.”
The bird gave a soft squeak and darted off into the wind to join again with the melody of air. It glided down in quick bursts such that its soft body bounced in graceful arcs towards the lake at the base of the mountain. Jane watched the delicate thing, no more than a pale-blue speck now in the distance, continue its staccato dance off to that side of the lake she knew now, if not then, to be hiding the little stream flowing out of it. It built and built until, somewhere southeast of here, it joined with others like it, flowing down into the Hudson past vacation homes and dilapidated factories, drawing a border through the earth, a consummate no-mans-land between the line of rusted railroad tracks and the born-again woods. Commuters and cars, goods and geese, the river followed all of these south, pulled, like everything else, by the magnetic glow of the city, until, ignorant of the lives it passed, it tumbled eagerly into the waiting arms of the sea.
The descent went much faster. The pair chatted with each other the whole way down, and, as the forest and the earth rose up again to cover the stone of that ancient creature that split its own barrow mound, they discussed their goals for the next four years, the majors they were considering, the clubs they wanted to join, and all that they would experience. But all the creatures of the wood heard was the music of the moment following them down the mountain. When they reached the trailhead, Rebecca insisted that they take a picture with the sign. Bald Mountain, it read. Receding Hairline Mountain did not have quite the same ring to it, Jane had quipped. Rebecca had laughed and handed her a small stone.
“I stole this from the peak,” she said, grinning. “So we’ll always remember this trip.”
“Aww! We should do this again sometime,” replied Jane, admiring the grimy stone. “We’ve got to take advantage of this place while we have it.”
When she got back, she had placed the stone, held up by two push pins, over the J+maybe-A on the wall.
What times those were, Jane thought, as music wafted up from the lawn through the heat. Everything was so different now. Her graduation gown lay not in rags at her feet, as the boys at the far end of the lawn sang rather brutishly, but folded neatly on her desk chair, waiting to be donned tomorrow morning with all the pomp of a knight buckling on his breastplate to do battle at dawn.
They had not, after all, taken advantage of “this place” as they had once hoped. Although they had spent many a day together sitting under an ancient oak tree outside the library studying and, in an attempt to escape their roommates, watching movies in empty classrooms at night, she had failed to hike with Rebecca again. It had been a long freshman year—they had needed each other then—but come sophomore year, they were already seeing less of each other. Separate friend groups, Jane supposed, and then there were the rumors.
Who cares, really, what kind of hummus Rebecca was buying no matter where it was made. That kind of thing always got blown way out of proportion. The connection between hummus and actual genocide seemed flimsy at best, and after all, there were greater evils. The college’s anonymous message board did not agree. It was an absurdity—Jane had commented—that the burden of divestment should fall on individuals when the college itself was financially complicit.
It was, of course, out of care that she went to see Rebecca. She had only been trying to clear her name. A certain amount of defensiveness was to be expected, especially from Rebecca, but the antisemitic accusations…. That had been a step too far. They didn’t see much of each other after that.
The sun rested now upon the looming storm clouds, awakening in them, with its dying light, a darkness deeper than before. The shadow of Bald Mountain stretched far out over the lake, nearly touching the edge of the lawn. It was stalking slowly closer. She turned away, blinking golden apples from her eyes.
Below her, her classmates swirled in slow eddies. The sound of their voices crashed over the lawn in a steady rhythm. She checked her watch. Before long, they would all be gone, passing off into the night’s festivities, and then tomorrow’s, and the next’s, each touched and changed by moments she would never know. How many would still be there in a decade come reunion time? How many would be lost to time? Slowly, they were all being washed out to sea. If only she could divide that ocean into which they all were flowing. She could split it up and make its edges known. She longed to order it for them—to make neat their passage through the vast and borderless dark.
Standing still on the balcony, watching the tearful tumult swell, she sought in vain for an anchor to still the stamping of her heart. Her breath came fast now, and the world wheeled. The wind was in her face. There was an ocean in her ears. She could not—
“I thought it was you up here,” came a voice from behind her.
Jane whirled to find Rebecca standing beside her. For a moment, Jane could only stare.
“Rebecca.”
Rebecca smiled faintly, the corners of her mouth lifting as though unsure of her permission to continue. “Hey, stranger.”
Jane laughed once—too quickly. “God, it’s been forever.”
“Yeah, it’s been a minute,” Rebecca leaned forward to rest her elbows against the railing. “You look good.”
“I look tired,” said Jane, raising her eyebrows.
“That too.” Rebecca grinned. “But in a senior sort of way, you know. I think we’ve earned our exhaustion.”
Jane found herself laughing again, softer this time. “You always were good at spin weren’t you.” She looked down. “You used to get me to stay an extra hour in the library every time by saying—”
“—that we could really stick it to Dr. Vella by pointing out grammatical errors in his own book!”
Jane met her eyes again, beaming. “I don’t think I ever read more thoroughly for a class.”
For a moment, they were back there, utterly alone, laughing together. When all the sights and sounds and longings of life roared louder than they ever had before. It was too much to bear, and they loved it—when tomorrow bled into tomorrow, and each was fresher, more agonizing, more lonely and alive than any that had come before. The path was set, and she was walking it, and Rebecca was right there next to her, and more friends too—more than she had ever known. They could do what they wanted even when it hurt, and it always did. It hurt so much, but she laughed as she bled, and it was beautiful—full of the music of a thousand longings, hopes, and fears, immortal soon forgotten. They were free. But that was coming to an end.
The sun was slipping away. The shadow of the mountain was halfway up the grass.
“How could we have been so unburdened back then?” Jane said, letting her smile fade gently.
“Oh, I don’t think we were unburdened. We both knew what was coming. I’ve been thinking about it constantly since I got here.”
“No…I know. It just caught up to me so fast. What do we even do now?” She looked away again, out across the lake and the lawn, onto the party below, slowly draining of people.
“I know where I’m going next,” Rebecca said after a moment. She turned too; her eyes fixed on the horizon. “Army U, in Kansas. Officer training next fall.”
“Oh,” Jane let out before she could stop herself. Then, softer than she intended: “So it’s really happening.”
Rebecca raised an eyebrow, “Yeah. It feels right—to be doing something active…like we always talked about. I know that probably sounds crazy.”
“No,” said Jane quickly, a little too loudly this time. “Just…surprising.”
Rebecca gave a short laugh. “You mean disappointing.”
I didn’t—”
“It’s fine.” Rebecca’s voice softened. “You always hated the idea of it.”
“I never hated—” Jane began, whipping around to face her. “It’s just not what I had in mind. I don’t understand it, Beck. You of all people—who cried after they cut down the Library Tree.”
Rebecca shrugged. “Maybe that’s why. Because I still believe someone has to protect what we’ve got left. Land can’t do that on its own. People have to.” She gritted her teeth.
“But with violence? What’s that gonna fix! What’s it ever fixed!”
“You really think it’s that simple!” Rabecca whirled, staring directly at her now. “You think love is always gentle but it’s something you have to fight for. I want to protect my home—the places I love. I want to keep my people safe!” None of Jane’s muscles were working. Nothing was responding. Rebecca turned away. “I shouldn’t have come. I knew you wouldn’t understand. I just thought…I don’t know—it’d be nice to see you before you disappear again.” She hesitated for a moment, then swallowed once, and, before Jane could force her body into action, she was gone.
In the west, beyond the lake where the wild dancing of spruces and firs was wrought upon the waves, the world seemed to burn. The sun, expiring, scattered its final rays through the storm. It painted dying embers in the clouds. Great streaks of gold deepened to crimson in the wind then eased to amber. As the wall of cinders drifted closer, ashen whisps of cloud drifted over the lawn. The fire was in her head and in her eyes. It blazed over the water and in the faces of every passerby. She turned as each one passed. Her ears recoiled from the death rattle of the day.
The embers gave one last blood orange breath before fading to dust. Soon the rain would touch the edge of the lawn and wash away the day’s debris. It would sweep up over the empty dorms and lonely classrooms that had once been her home. It would fall on the library, on its windows, and over the stump of a tree under which she had spent so many irrepeatable days. It was falling now in great sheets over the lake, over the dancing trees, over millennia old stone and the back of a forgotten spirit. It wept on that place, a tomb now into which the sun had sunk, and taken youth with it, and all the screaming music of today.
