About seven hours away from Seattle, we took a “wrong turn” away from our southern route at Grants Pass, near the California-Oregon border, We stopped for the night at Valley of the Rogue State Park. It was a small, gorgeous set of campsites, one part for RVs and another for tents, all set along the snaking Rogue River.

The tent site we’d reserved was only 150 feet from the river, and perfectly secluded. A big tree with low, wide branches concealed us from the campsite road. We had a metal picnic table and a fire pit.

“This is perfect,” I said, sitting at the picnic table and listening to the river while Andrew unpacked the tent.

“It’ll be perfect when we get the tent up, pardner,” Andrew said in a corny Western accent. “Now git to work.”

“Shore thing, sheriff,” I said sarcastically.

The tent went up easily, and we hammered in the stakes and rolled out our foam pads and sleeping bags and set the cooler up by the picnic table. We’d bought some firewood when we checked in, and the day was typically Oregonian, grey and cool, the sort of weather we were used to. In other words, exactly cold enough to justify starting a fire in the fire pit at 3 in the afternoon.

We set up the camp chairs by the fire, with the cooler between us serving as both beer fridge and coffee table. We put up the hoods on our SFD hoodies, creating a pocket for the heat from the fire to gather around our heads, and keeping the cold air off the backs of our necks.

“We could take a hike later,” Andrew said listlessly, sipping his beer and poking the fire.

“We could do that,” I said, shoving my hand deeper into a bag of Fritos before handing it to Andrew.

“Or we could go fishing with our hands. Stand in the freezing water and look for trout.”

“Are there trout in this river?”

“Fuck if I know,” Andrew said. We both laughed.

“There’s a horseshoe pit,” I said.

“That’s more like it.”

“Or we could just sit here and drink beer and eat junk food.”

“I think we pretty much already decided on that.”

I nodded. It had come on both of us at once, this incredible exhaustion. Our jobs required an edge, a fine balance between anxiety and alertness that couldn’t be upset. You couldn’t eat a huge meal and get all bloated and woozy and then get a cardiac call. You couldn’t quaff Mountain Dew and bite your fingernails waiting for the cardiac call, and then be so rattled you couldn’t start an IV.

And even when you were off for a few days? Unless you’re some kind of Special Forces super soldier whose heart rate returns to baseline just like that after a violent encounter? It takes at least three days for major stress to leave the body, for you to be able to get a good night’s sleep, wake up with a smile, relaxed and refreshed. By which time, of course, we were back on shift, pumping up the cortisol again.

Now we could just… sit here. There was no radio, no cell phone, no alarm, no sirens. We couldn’t be called in on a day off to cover someone else’s sick day. We couldn’t be expected to be the one to jump up on the plane or in the theater and offer assistance if there was no “doctor in the house.” Three days from today, we’d still be far from all that. Which in itself seemed to accelerate the destressing process.

Even my feelings for Andrew were on hold, right now. I was just content to be with him, in silence, listening to the sighing river, the crackling fire, the distant sounds of the occasional RV pulling in or out.

After about three beers each, Andrew chuckled. “You were faking it, weren’t you? Setting up the tent. You didn’t know what you were doing.”

“I faked it pretty good, though, huh?” I said.

“Yeah, for someone who looked like he’s never been camping before.”

“Well, you don’t get taken on a lot of outings when you’re in foster care. A lot of the foster parents want to collect the money, and if they spend it, you know, taking you to do stuff that other kids do, that puts a dent in the income. And even the good ones, well, you don’t find many rich people taking in foster kids.”

I couldn’t see Andrew’s face, concealed by the side of his hood, but from his frozen body language I knew that he was embarrassed. And then I was mad at myself, because the last thing I’d wanted to do was put him on the spot over what he’d said.

“It’s cool,” I said hastily. “You couldn’t have known that.”

“No,” he said. “I know that. I’ve been to some calls. Foster kids who’ve had ‘accidents.’ Broken arms from ‘falling’ or black eyes from ‘doors.’” The anger in his voice told me that he did indeed know, that I wasn’t talking to some innocent civilian, who’d just say the usual when you opened up to them, wow, that sounds terrible, the prepackaged sympathy all ready to dispense for an experience whose terribleness they couldn’t even guess at.

He opened the cooler and pulled out a pack of fat sausages. He tore it open and speared one with a stick, then handed it to me before spearing his own.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s cool. I should have just let it slide.”

“Why?”

“Just because… I don’t know. Why bring up shitty memories and ruin… this?”

Andrew pulled back his hood. His handsome face was open, his eyes locked on mine. “Dude. We’re friends. Telling me shitty memories is what friendship is about.”

Instead of crying, I chugged the rest of my beer. The cold foam did the job it had done for men for thousands of years – extinguished the blooming heat of feelings.

I wanted to reach out then and take his hand, I wanted to tell him everything. That I wanted more, but I wanted this, that I wouldn’t fuck this up for a shot at that. That I loved our bromance, that I’d kill it dead, the longing inside me, to keep it working.

Instead I just said, “Thanks, man.”

He nodded.

It didn’t take long for the sky to get dark in late September, at this latitude, when the days were already gray. I guess there was something about the night (and six beers, two brauts, and innumerable blackened marshmallows) and Andrew’s comfortable silence, that finally let me unlock the door and walk inside that place, and pick up what was in there, and carry it back out to show to Andrew.

Well, not until after Andrew went back to the Jeep and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels. We didn’t use cups, just handed the bottle back and forth, taking swigs and letting Dr. Jack warm us up from the inside out.

“I went into the system when I was seven.”

I waited to see if Andrew would ask a question, but he didn’t. Of course not, he’d been trained in “narrative medicine,” too – if the patient can tell you what’s wrong, let him.

“My mom and dad were both only children, so I had no aunts or uncles. Their parents were dead. So there was nobody to take me.” I said it matter-of-factly, because that’s all it was, just a fact. “It would have been worse, if there had been anybody to take me and they’d refused me. I thought about that a lot when I was in bad homes, you know? I reminded myself that there just wasn’t any other way it could have been.”

“What happened in the bad homes?” Andrew asked quietly.

“I never got molested or anything. But I ended up in some fucked up situations. There was this Super Jesus house where they used me for free farm labor, with all this bullshit about hard work cleansing my sins. I mean, what sins? I was fucking seven, you know? I couldn’t even jerk off yet.”

Andrew snorted. “Now that’s a sin deserving of hard labor.”

“I went hungry a few places, where they just wanted the money. Pinched pennies like you wouldn’t believe. You wanna know what’s a PTSD flashback trigger for me? Any box that says Great Value on it. I literally cannot walk into a Walmart. If we had a fucking call at a Walmart, whoever is in there is dead, tough shit.”

Andrew choked on his beer as he laughed, spitting some into the fire.

“But there were a couple of good ones. I was luckier than a lot of kids. I landed with a foster couple when I was thirteen, and stayed there till I was sixteen. Matt and Susan, they were… they were good. Good people. When I turned eighteen, I took their last name, Carpenter, and kept it.”

“Were good people?”

“Matt passed away. Susan still lives in Paso Robles. Shitty town.”

“What happened when you were sixteen?”

“That’s when Matt died, and then Susan came down with MS. She couldn’t take care of me anymore. At least according to Social Services. I mean, I was fucking sixteen, I could shop, I could cook, I didn’t need an adult to do for me. I could take care of her, and I did, until they got wise to us. But… that’s the system. It doesn’t care about the facts on the ground. It just covers its own ass before it does anything else. Everything else is secondary.”

Andrew said nothing, and I knew he could see it, the parting, the pain. I didn’t have to say it.

“Then, you know, some places after that. The older you get, the harder it is to place you, and I was a ‘troubled kid’ after they took me away from Susan.” I paused. “You stay somewhere three years, after all that time, and you think, this is it, I’m safe. I have a home. Then you’re not safe, all of a sudden. Not until you turn eighteen and age out of the system. So I had a lot of fucking anger, obviously, after they took me away from her. And I started doing shit, nothing major, but you know, tagging, shoplifting, underage drinking in 7-11 parking lots, smoking weed beneath the underpass.”

I tried to keep that anger out of my voice, but the anger wasn’t having any of that. “If I was some rich kid, I’d have been diagnosed with ‘affluenza’ and sent to counseling. But when you’re poor, it’s not growing pains, it’s a character defect. And of course it’s all in your chart. So there goes any chance of getting out of a fucking group home after that.”

I took another beer from the cooler. “I was home schooled by Susan, but after that, I had to go to high school. I was a C-average student those two years. I got A’s in science, biology, shit like that. But D’s in shit like American government, or algebra, when I didn’t just cut the classes. The counselor told me I wasn’t ‘college material,’ that I should go to a trade school.”

I wasn’t ready to tell the rest of the story, so I skipped ahead. “Then I turned eighteen, fucked around in retail for a while after high school, and now, here I am, twenty years old, and an EMT. Not so bad, you know, given what happened to a lot of kids I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

For some reason, when Andrew said it, it was okay. People were always “sorry” when they heard the story, which was why I didn’t tell it much. You get sick of people telling you how sorry they are for something they didn’t do.

Andrew’s voice was a little slurred when he spoke, a few minutes later. “You know what Carrie really hated?”

“No, what?”

“That I always talked shop. That I was always talking about you and me on calls. Or you and me hiking, how you couldn’t keep up that day at Mailbox Peak.”

I felt a wave of nausea that wasn’t just about the junk food and Jack. A queasy excitement, a creeping terror of what he’d say next.

“T’first she thought it was cute. So great you have such a good friend, la la. Then she started getting quiet, and I was like, whass wrong?” He waved the bottle around. “Fuckin’ women want you to read their minds. Like when they fold their arms and pout, it’s like that’s supposed to open some fuckin’ portal in their foreheads I can just walk through.”

I had to laugh at that. I wanted to hear what came next. I dreaded hearing what came next.

“Then she started getting pissed because I wanted to spend more time with you than with her, but why wouldn’t I? You never break my balls.”

He took a big swig of Jack and spit it into the fire, as if expelling some anger, sending it up in a sudden blistering flash. “We broke up because I told her I was going to LA. She was pissed I didn’t talk to her about it, just… fuckin’ took the MCAT and applied and didn’t say shit to anyone.”

“So was I,” I blurted out. “I was pissed, too.”

“Yeah, man, I get that.”

Then I was really pissed. I hated that. People who couldn’t say it, as if just stringing those two words together would make their heads explode.

“I don’t wanna hear ‘I get that.’ I wanna hear ‘I’m fucking sorry.’ I mean, why, Andrew, if I’m really your best friend? You weren’t just singing along to that song to sing along, were you? Why didn’t you tell me you were thinking about flipping over the table and changing your whole life?”

I heard it after it was too late, the need in my voice. The hurt.

Andrew turned to me, his face no longer obscured by his hood. His eyes were shiny with alcohol, but with… something more?

Or was I just too drunk, was I just seeing what I wanted to see?

“Yeah. You are. We’re best friends. Unless you have another best friend stuffed away somewhere.”

“No. No, you’re my first.”

He laughed. Then sobered, remembering the foster care thing. Realizing how hard it would be to forge that bond, when you weren’t anywhere long enough to build that trust with another person before… poof, gone.

“I didn’t tell anyone because… Because if I failed, I didn’t want anyone to know. If I couldn’t pass the MCAT, if I couldn’t even get an interview at a good school. I wasn’t… I wasn’t even going to tell anyone about that, because it’s still just an interview. But I… I had to tell you. I had to tell Carrie so I could tell you, I guess.”

It was on the tip of my tongue. Why didn’t you ask Carrie on the road trip? Why didn’t you save your relationship with her by asking her go to with you instead of me?

But I was selfish. Selfishly glad he had let her go. Only the next morning, with the booze filtering out of my system, would I look back at the blurry picture and see it – Andrew’s pain from the breakup. He’d been in pain, and all I’d done is rejoice that I was so important to him.