Two days after our phone call, Theo and I decided to meet at the train tracks. I'd asked him to buy me the same weed we'd smoked weeks prior—hoping to surprise Jay with a treat—and he'd agreed, claiming he had the rest of the day off anyway.
"You're 21, Moe," he said, zipping up my backpack pouch where he'd stashed the item of interest. "You know you can buy this stuff on your own, right?"
"I've never been to a dispensary before. They intimidate me." I handed him the cash. "Can't you just be my drug dealer?"
"Do I have a choice?"
It was sunny out today, and most of the ice had melted from the streets, leaving the world clean and crisp in its absence. Theo wore a thin black hoodie, his obligatory beanie, and skinny jeans, and with my pink headband and jet black winterwear, we looked like two matchsticks burning from the wrong end.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and peered at me with an unreadable gaze. "I want to take you on a drive. You free?"
A drive?
"Yeah, I just wrapped up for the day." My eyes roamed his face, searching for clues, scrounging for ulterior motives. "Where are we going exactly?"
"You'll find out when we get there." He moved for his truck, but he only made it a few strides before he realized I hadn't budged. He tilted his head back at my rigid form. "What, you don't trust me?"
I frowned at the cryptic slant of his lips. "I don't...not trust you."
"Then don't not move your ass. I want to get there before dark." He kept on walking toward the parking lot, confident that my hurried, frustrated footsteps would follow.
And they did.
"You're gonna murder me, aren't you?" I muttered as we drove higher and higher into the pine trees, kicking up mud, splitting overgrown branches.
"If I wanted to murder you, all I'd have to do is offer you coffee," Theo said. "You wouldn't taste any poison with all that fucking sugar."
He had a point, but it didn't ease my mounting suspicions any. We'd been driving uphill for close to an hour, and despite living in the Sierra foothills all my life, I'd never wandered up this canyon road before. If you could even call it that.
"Are trucks even allowed up here?" I asked, scrutinizing the rocky terrain that more closely resembled a creek bed than any mountain pass.
"My truck is allowed everywhere," he dismissed, as any true Nevadan would.
My eyes narrowed on the bird shit all over the windshield. "Everywhere except a car wash, maybe."
He snorted and took an abrupt left turn, sending my skull into the passenger window with a heavy thump. I gasped, leaning across the center console to swat at him, but violence did nothing to squash his snickers.
He drove about thirty more feet and then parked in the middle of a grassy glade. Pine trees and manzanita bushes bordered the clearing, and in recent history, someone had built a firepit in the corner of the space, leaving behind a pile of rocks and frosted charcoal.
I didn't blame them for making camp here—it was just far enough from town to escape the claws of urban life and close enough to civilization that you were bound to cross paths with a hunter, hiker, or a four-wheeling enthusiast. But Theo's truck bed was empty, and he didn't ask me to bring a sleeping bag. So if he didn't intend for us to pitch a tent, then what on earth were we doing here?
When I turned to beg my driver for some concrete answers, my heart dropped to my stomach. All joy had vanished from Theo's face, and he looked like he was about to cry.
"Theo," I whispered, gently touching his shoulder. "Where are we?"
He passed me a limp smile and shut off the ignition. "It's my mom's tree."
My bewildered gaze flew to the giant pine tree to my right, then the dead flowers and memorabilia piled atop its protruding roots. "...Her tree?"
"Yeah. It's the tallest tree on this side of the hill. According to Mom, that is. We buried her ashes here."
He exited the vehicle without another word, and my mind spun off its axis.
My mattress mate had taken me to his mother's grave site, and I had no idea what to think about it. We weren't that close, were we? Had our intimate phone call inspired this? Had he been too distraught to make it out here on her anniversary, so he chose to visit her today?
Did he expect me to join him out there? Or was this just a pit-stop on our journey west?
With a distressed sigh, I followed Theo to the designated pine tree, choosing to stand a few feet behind him, lest I disturb him and his mourning ritual. His mother's memorial took the shape of a massive, healthy ponderosa, and I caught a pleasant whiff of its vanilla resin—one of my favorite scents in the entire world.
"She loved hugging trees. Always made an effort to hug the oldest ones," he explained. "When the cancer started getting bad, she asked me to mix her ashes in the soil of the Steeple. That's what she called it." His posture wilted. "She said she wanted to feed the growth of a giant, and she told us to come visit her anytime we wanted. Give her a squeeze."
I swallowed the lump in my throat. "...That's beautiful, Theo."
I loved the concept of visiting a growing, breathing monument to work through your grief, not just a block of concrete. It had to be therapeutic for surviving family members to speak to something that could sense the vibrations of their voice, to weep before an ancient creature, to tend to a piece of the earth as if it embodied their loved one.
How amazing it must have felt to have a living thing to hug.
As I studied Theo's neutral expression, I wondered if he brought me here for emotional support or to illustrate how much he valued the nature of our strange, complex friendship. To entrust someone with a special place like this, to expose them to such a vulnerable side of yourself...it said a lot.
"You haven't told me much about her," I offered, casting my bait into deep, muted waters. "Only that she was a music teacher." I moved a little closer to him, but still, I refused to enter his periphery. "Is she the one who taught you how to play guitar?"
He nodded, crouching at the base of the tree to place a stone of clear quartz at its tangled roots. "Yeah. She got me playing early. She used to say I knew my strings before I knew addition."
I waited for him to say more, but he didn't. He just slowly rose to his feet again, staring at the pine tree like it might speak to him if he waited long enough.
I hadn't experienced debilitating grief before, but my professors taught me how important it was to keep someone's memory alive through storytelling and rumination. In their fields, they'd found that grieving patients often yearned for an excuse to talk about their loved ones again, to breathe life into the past, but a few months after a tragedy, most people stopped uttering the names of the deceased altogether. As if reminiscence would shatter the illusion of recovery and send the bereaved down a spiral of depression.
But I wanted Theo to know he could keep me up with emotional late night conversations, and he could talk to me about his past; that was the genre of human connection that fed my soul. So I cleared my throat, and I said, "Tell me more."
He didn't seem surprised by my request. If anything, he looked relieved to share something about the woman who raised him. "Her name was Lilah, and she wore these bright bandanas all the time. She also owned a bunch of stupid rocks and crystals that she claimed brought good energy and peace. Turned them into beads and earrings." He side-eyed me. "A hippy born a decade too late."
"She sounds like the life of the party."
"Yeah. Her positivity was addictive, and I think people flocked to her for that reason. Friends, family, students. They loved her." He let out an amused huff. "But she also cried super easily. Like, she cried at every movie, play, and concert. Even the news. It didn't even have to be a sad news story, and she'd still cry."
I examined the towering canopy above me, mesmerized by the grandeur of Mother Nature and her ability to defy gravity. The setting sun sliced through trembling needles and painted the tree bark a splendid shade of auburn, and I tried my best to picture an older version of Charlie with a banana and a guitar slung over her shoulder. And apparently, two bright, glistening eyes and a stuffy nose.
Theo grinned a little, his eyes swimming with a treasured memory. "I remember when I was fifteen, she found out I'd been smoking weed. And this was back when pot was still illegal, so she had every right to flay me alive."
I smiled at the prospect of High School Theo swapping out hoodies before going home and gargling Listerine in the driveway. I couldn't relate, of course. If my Catholic parents ever caught me doing drugs, they would have sent me to boarding school. Or rehab.
Honestly, Mom probably would have shipped me back to Guatemala if I gave her the opportunity.
"But instead of confronting me about it, like a normal person," Theo went on, "she called her brother...who happened to have connections at the police station. And then this psycho sent five cops to our house to conduct a fucking raid because the neighbors smelled it from their balcony. Allegedly." He shook his head, still impressed with his mother's feat after all these years. "I mean, they went through everything. The cabinets, the drawers, the goddamn cookie jar. Meanwhile, my mom is putting on the act of her lifetime. She's yelling at them the entire time, insisting they can't search the house without a warrant."
I couldn't contain the laugh that tumbled from my lips. "And you believed it?"
"It was convincing as shit, okay?" He ignored my snickering, but his lips twitched at the ridiculous tale. "I'd stashed my weed in an empty deodorant stick in my bathroom, and when the cops moved upstairs, I was about to pass out. They were talking about jail time and federal laws and my permanent record. I was scared out of my mind! But they didn't find anything, and a few minutes after they left, I burst into tears and showed my mom where I'd been hiding the stuff. I apologized and begged her not to turn me in." Despite the amusement in his voice, his eyes turned glassy. "She comforted me for hours, making me promise that I'd be transparent about my drug use so that nothing like that ever happened again. It wasn't until a few years later that I realized she'd been in on the whole thing, and no one was coming to arrest a white kid for half an ounce of marijuana."
"She must have laughed her ass off that night," I said, imagining how much fun she'd had sharing the story with her husband.
"Oh, without a doubt. She probably dedicated a whole scrapbook page to it." His grin wavered, and he squinted up at the sky, his body stippled with golden sunlight. "...It's been years, but it still feels so wrong that she's not here, you know?" The tears slowly trickled down over his cheeks, and the sight of him openly crying robbed my lungs of oxygen.
When I'd seen him upset on New Year's Eve, he'd been drunk and angry and bruised. But I'd never witnessed a grieving Theo, not in person. And it made him look so...small.
"It doesn't hurt as much as it used to, but nothing ever really filled the hole she left," he whispered. "There's still an emptiness there. There's still a gap. And I think there always will be."
I couldn't hold myself back any longer.
Surrendering to my throbbing heart, I stepped forward and slid my hand into his, threading our fingers together. "I'm sorry, Theo."
He nodded, appreciative of my presence, even if my words meant nothing.
"She also really liked Alyssa," he blurted, only to process what he'd said a moment later. He glanced at me with aching red eyes, embarrassed. "Sorry. I just...I remember how well they got along. It's one of the reasons I felt like the relationship was worth saving, even when we had our issues. I guess...it sort of felt like I had my mom's approval."
Ah.
So that was why he'd taken this anniversary so hard. It wasn't just that Alyssa was gone, it was that she'd had his mother's blessing—and no other girl ever would.
I raised my brow. "Well...I don't think she likes Alyssa very much anymore."
He let out a startled laugh—the kind of sound that bursts from tightly closed lips—like he hadn't expected me to just come out and say it.
"You're right," he agreed. "But...if she's watching over us right now, she's probably not very happy with my life choices either."
I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but I stomped on the notion before it could fester. "I dunno. I think she'd be proud of you for letting go of someone who wasn't good for you. That's not an easy thing to do."
Hell, I was still flailing in my family's breakaway snare, too afraid I'd crash and burn without my blood relatives. Because that was the toxic mindset they'd nurtured for twenty years.
Family was all I knew, and when Baker left, it would be all I had.
My comment drew a dubious, wounded gaze, and I sighed, peering up at the Steeple.
"I mean, how could she not be overjoyed with her son pursuing a career in pharmacology? And working his ass off to make it happen? Not to mention you're looking out for your little sister at university, and you're living on your own in a sweet studio apartment." I lifted a shoulder. "I don't know. It seems like a successful college experience to me."
I glanced back at his face, and the astonishment in his eyes made me falter.
"Sorry," I murmured. "...Overkill?"
He shook his head and squeezed my hand, facing his mother's tree with a small, tender smile. "...Nah."