Brynn

Present Day

 

Brynn, any chance you’ll be able to complete the website by today? Was hoping to go live this weekend. Please advise. –Stu

I stare at the e-mail over the rim of my coffee cup, rolling my eyes. When I quoted Stu (of Stu’s Pools) a price of $1,200 to build his website, I was clear that it would take up to three weeks to complete. It’s been ten days and he’s already bothering me to finish?

“I hate people,” I tell Milo, my four-year-old Siamese cat.

Purring, he paces back and forth on my desk, between my forearms and the warm keyboard, before falling dramatically atop it. The screen quickly starts to fill with line after line of question marks.

“I can’t work if you stay there,” I say, taking another sip of coffee.

“Meow,” he answers, licking his paw. Oh, well. Too bad for you.

Milo has always been chatty. It was the reason that Jem chose him for me from all of the other kittens at the pet store that day.

“Now you’ll have someone to keep you company while you work,” he said, handing the cashier his credit card.

“I don’t need anyone to keep me company,” I pointed out. “I like working alone. Besides, litter boxes aren’t my gig.”

“I’ll keep it clean,” Jem promised.

“I don’t want the responsibility of a cat,” I insisted, whining a little.

“Just let him be your friend. I’ll care for him,” he said, his New England accent strong on the word care, which sounded more like “cay-uh.”

In the end, that’s what had swayed me—the way his sweet lips said care. It made my toes curl. I’d always had a thing for accents, and as a born-and-bred San Franciscan, I’d fallen for his at the first hello.

Jeremiah Benton was from Bangor, Maine, a place so far from the Bay area, it may have well been a different country altogether.

“What are you drinking?” I asked him the first time I ever saw him.

I was working behind the bar, blown away by the aqua blue of his eyes when he looked up at me, and determined to be nonchalant about how insanely, ruggedly hot he was.

“Whatever you have on tap there.” Thay-uh.

“Thay-uh?” I repeated, raising an eyebrow, my lips quirking up.

“Did you lose an r?” he asked, grinning at me through a scruffy beard.

“I think you did,” I teased, pulling him a pint of Go West! IPA.

He chugged down half the beer and swiped at his beard before speaking again, those aqua eyes darkening just a touch as they captured mine. “Sweet girl, I’ll wager I’m gonna lose more than just an r to you by the time this is over.”

Just like that . . . I was a goner.

He told me he’d just spent a month hiking in the Sierra National Forest on assignment for Backpacker magazine.

I told him I’d never been on a hike in my entire life.

He called me a city slicker and asked me when I was free to take one.

I had never dated a customer before that day, despite many offers, but I told him I was free the following Saturday.

He lost an r. I lost my heart.

“Meow?” asks Milo, pausing in his bath, his blue eyes demanding I return to the present day, which, unfortunately, includes building a website for Stu’s Pools.

I push Milo gently off the keyboard and delete four pages of question marks, toggling back to my e-mail account.

No, Stu. I’m sorry, but if you’ll recall, our contract gives me three weeks to build the site. It will be ready on June 26, as promised.

My fingers fly over the keys, my eyes always slower than the words I’m typing. When they finally land on the date, my fingers freeze and my breath catches.

June 26.

June 26. Jem’s birthday. Jem’s thirtieth birthday.

The sudden lump in my throat is so big and so painful, it almost feels like choking, so I reach up and massage it, pushing my rolling chair away from the desk, away from the date, away . . . away . . . away . . .

“Would. Have. Been,” I say aloud, the words more bitter than my coffee.

Would have been . . . would have been . . . would have been Jem’s thirtieth birthday, I force myself to acknowledge.

My therapist, Anna, told me it was like this when you lost a loved one in a violent or unexpected death: for years—or sometimes, in extreme cases, for the rest of your life—you might still keep track of the important days and milestones. It was because you never got to say goodbye or prepare yourself to say goodbye. Even if you are someday able to make peace with their passing, part of you may not be convinced that the loved one is actually gone. Some secret, hidden, yearning part of you might stubbornly hold on to the unconscious, irrational belief that they aren’t actually gone at all, just missing, just away. And when your brain forces you to realize that they are, in fact,

Dead

. . . for a moment—for that moment—you will lose them all over again.

It doesn’t happen to me as often now as it did in the first year . . . but it still happens occasionally, and it knocks me on my ass every time.

“Lean into it,” advised Anna. “Take a few minutes to remember Jem—what he meant to you, how much you loved him. And then take the time to say goodbye again. Ignoring it won’t make it go away, Brynn. Ignoring it will only keep you from healing. Leaning into it may help your mind, eventually, accept that he’s really gone.”

With burning eyes, I stand up from the desk chair and leave my office, listening to my slippers scuffle against the hardwood floor of the hallway as I walk past the bathroom and hall closet. Entering the bedroom I shared with Jem, I head for the walk-in closet and step inside, reaching for the shoe box on the top shelf.

Anna was also the person who helped me come to terms with donating Jem’s clothes to Goodwill and sending his books and albums back to Maine for his parents to keep. I’d sent his beloved backpacking equipment, maps, and guidebooks to his twin sister, Hope, who was also a hiker. I’d kept for myself only what could fit in a small box: a matchbook from the bar where we’d met; letters and postcards we’d written to each other during the two years we were together; pictures from the various hikes we’d taken, mostly in Yosemite; my engagement ring, which I’d stopped wearing on the first anniversary of his death; and his cell phone.

His cell phone.

It lay, as it had for almost two years, in a Ziploc evidence bag, uncharged, on the bottom of the box, his dried blood still caked in the crevice between the screen and the plastic body. It had been found several inches from his hand, under the hip of a Stanford undergrad who’d been at the concert with her sister.

Milo wanders into the bedroom, his face inquisitive and vaguely accusatory, as I sit down on the bed and open the box.

“Anna said to,” I tell him, wiping a tear from my cheek.

“Meow,” he answers, winding around my legs before lying down in a patch of sunlight on the carpet and giving me permission to grieve.

My eyes settle first on the matchbook, a shiny, fire engine red with “Down Time” emblazoned across the top in silver. Pushing it aside, I find a picture of Jem and me—a selfie taken at the Vernal Fall Footbridge in Yosemite. Wincing, I lift the pile of pictures and letters gingerly from the box and set them gently on my bed. Generally, I go through the photos at this point, crying as I remember good times, then tearfully replacing them and whispering, “Goodbye, Jem” as I recover the box and put it back in my closet.

But today, for whatever reason, I turn away from the photos and look back in the box at the two items remaining: my ring and his phone.

Impulsively, I reach for the phone and pull it from the box. Unsealing the evidence bag for the first time since it was given to me a year ago, I do something that makes my heart race so rapidly, my head feels light: I lean over my bed and plug Jem’s phone into the charger on my bedside table. After two years, it springs to life within seconds, the outline of a battery taking shape on the black screen.

And though the speed and ease with which I am able to bring it back from the dead strikes me as almost obscene, my tears have receded, and I bite my lower lip as a rare feeling of anticipation washes over me. I have no idea what I’m hoping to find on Jem’s phone, but it’s been so long since it felt like something mattered to me, I lean into the feeling of excitement just a little.

Two years ago, before the Steeple 10 shooting, I had lived a full and rich life. Engaged to Jem and planning our wedding, I got together with my parents in Scottsdale regularly and went out with friends all the time. Soon after meeting Jem, I finished my course of study in website design and started picking up jobs right away. It wasn’t long before I quit working at Down Time and spent most days working from home. I liked being on my own. Even though I was alone, I never felt lonely or isolated.

Two years later, however, that same job had become an easy way for me to separate myself from the world.

I rarely leave my house, have my groceries delivered, and exercise on a treadmill in my bedroom. My trips to Scottsdale are infrequent, despite my mother’s worried invitations to visit more often. Long ago, the friends that predated Jem grew tired of my ignoring texts and voice mails. They eventually stopped reaching out, finally telling me that when I was ready to hang out again, I should let them know.

I am a hermit, except for my twice-monthly visits to Anna. And while part of me knows it isn’t healthy, more of me doesn’t care.

Beep.

I look over to see Jem’s iPhone light up, an old picture of us filling the small screen, and a polite demand for his passcode.

With trembling fingers, I key in 062687, and the screen changes immediately, his apps lining up in five neat rows.

Calendar. Clock. Weather. Messages.

Voice Memos. Contacts. Safari. Mail.

Maps. Settings. Notes. Camera.

Photos. TV. iBooks. Kindle.

App Store. iTunes Store. Music. Shazam.

Though I’ve had the phone in my possession for almost a year, only now do I realize there is a smudge on the top corner of the screen, so faint it’s only visible because of the lit-up screen now shining through it. Brownish-red and slightly smeared, it’s all that remains of a bloody fingerprint, and my breath catches as I stare at it.

Slowly, so slowly, I run my finger over it, wondering when and how it got there, blinking at the screen in surprise as my unintentional keystroke opens Jem’s final text message.

The top of the screen reads “Brynn,” which means he was writing to me.

An unsent message reads simply, katahd

Gasping with the sudden, overwhelming realization that Jem had spent his last moment on earth trying to write me a message, the screen blurs as my eyes fill with more burning, useless, punishing tears. To anyone else, katahd might look like gibberish, but I’ve seen the full word too many times not to recognize it.

Katahdin.

Mount Katahdin.

The highest peak in Maine.

The place where Jem said his soul had lived until he’d given it to me.

Pressing his phone to my heart, I curl into a ball on my bed and weep.

***

“What do you mean you’re going to Maine? Brynn, if you need to get away, please come to Scottsdale. You can stay as long as you like.”

“Mom, please . . .”

“This doesn’t make any sense, sweetheart,” she says, her voice wavering between concerned and impatient. I picture her at my parents’ lavish mansion, sitting on a lounger beside the pool in a floppy hat, her youthful face marked with consternation. “We know how much you loved Jem, but it’s been two years—”

“Stop,” I demand softly.

Of all the things people say to you after you lose someone you loved, being told that you should “get over it” is not only unhelpful, it’s hurtful and infuriating.

She sighs, but her voice remains gentle. “Brynn, sweetheart, please. Come to Scottsdale for a week.”

How can I help her understand what finding Jem’s final message means to me?

After these painful, wrenching twenty-four months of grieving him, in the past two days I’ve felt something new galvanizing within me—a plan, a purpose, a reason to get up and actually leave my apartment. In a way I never saw coming, Jem is showing me, from the grave, how to say goodbye—he’s giving me a chance to bury him and move on—but I have to battle my comfortable inertia and start moving to make it happen.

“Mom, he was writing to me. His last thoughts were of me . . . and Katahdin. I know that because he was texting me. He was trying to type the name of the mountain in the last seconds of his life. Don’t you see? I have to go. I have to go there for him.”

“A few hiking trips with Jem several years ago doesn’t prepare you to walk up a mountain clear across the country!” she cries, all pretense of calm disappearing as her voice pitches to a level of near panic. “There are bears, Brynn! It’s the woods. I doubt you’ll have a cell signal. It’s so far away! If something happened to you, Daddy and I couldn’t get there for days. I am your mother, and I love you, and I am begging you to rethink this plan.”

“It’s already done, Mom,” I say. “Jem’s sister is picking me up at the airport on Sunday evening. I’m staying with her. She knows the mountain like the back of her hand.”

I hadn’t spoken to Hope in over a year when I called her last night, and I worried about opening up deep wounds when I dialed her number, but she was as warm as she’d been the two times she’d visited me and Jem in San Francisco.

“Brynn! How are you?”

“I’m okay, Hope. How are you?”

“I’m okay too. Good days and bad,” she admitted. “You?”

“Same.” I paused, breathing through my deep desire to weep. “I miss him.”

“Me too. Every day.”

“I, um . . . ” I cleared my throat. “I found something. In Jem’s things.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I sent almost everything to you and your parents after it happened . . . but one thing I kept was his cell phone. By the time the police returned it, almost a year had passed. I put it in a box and kept it. I don’t know why I never turned it on, but two nights ago, I did.”

“My God,” she said. “What did you find?”

“Not much. But I think . . . I think he was trying to message me as he died.” I bit my lip, willing my voice to stay even. “There was a fragment of a message. K-A-T-A-H-D—”

“Katahdin!” she cried.

“Exactly,” I said, that feeling—that get-up-and-start-moving feeling—making my stomach flutter.

“He was writing to you?”

“Yes.”

“You think . . . you think he wanted you to go there?”

“I do.”

“Just to see it?”

“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “I just know I need to go.”

“Oh. So you’re coming East?”

Her voice, which had been pretty warm until then, had cooled a touch, and I wondered, for a split second, if I was welcome.

Though Jem’s parents had hosted a small memorial service for their son, I hadn’t flown out to Maine to attend. At the time, I’d been staying with my parents in Scottsdale, taking significant doses of Valium just to get through the day. But in the two years since the service, not attending had been one of my fiercest regrets, and I’ve always wondered if I inadvertently offended his parents and sister by not being there.

“Mm-hm. On Sunday.”

Hope was silent for a moment before saying, “You’re welcome to stay here. Do you need a ride from the airport?”

My shoulders relaxed. “That would be really great. I get in at 6:20 in the evening.”

“Writing it down so I don’t forget.” Hope paused, but her voice grew cautious when she spoke again. “No offense, Brynn, but Katahdin isn’t for beginners.”

“Which is why . . .” I bit my bottom lip, then plunged ahead. “I’m hoping you’ll go with me?”

“I wish I could,” she said, “but I leave for Boston on Monday morning. I’ll be gone for a week teaching at BU. How long are you staying?”

“Only three days,” I said, wondering if I should have booked an open return, but I didn’t want to lose clients like Stu’s Pools who’d be expecting their finished work soon after I returned from Maine.

“You know what?” said Hope. “You’ll be fine. I’ll map it out for you. Saddle Trail to Baxter Peak. Sign in at the ranger station first. Take your time. There’ll be tons of AT hikers—”

“AT?”

“Appalachian Trail. I mean, if you need help, someone will be around to give you a hand. I’ll make sure you’re outfitted too, okay? I’ll lend you some of my stuff and get whatever else I think you’ll need so you’re all set.”

I’d really wished for Hope’s company, but even alone, I knew there was no turning back. I needed to do this. For Jem. And for me.

Sighing, I push my conversation with Hope from my mind and segue back to the conversation with my mother in which I’d just implied that Hope would be hiking with me.

“Stop worrying, Mom. This is a good thing. I promise. It’s going to be okay.”

“I don’t like it, Brynn. You were medicated for months. Your father and I—”

“Mom, I need your support right now. For the first time since Jem died, I feel . . . I don’t know . . . kind of excited about something. I feel . . . like I have some direction. A purpose. I promise I’ll be careful, but I have to do this. I need to.”

My mother’s silent for a while before asking, “Do you need spending money?”

“I’m thirty years old and you still treat me like I’m eleven,” I say, smiling down at Milo, who’s weaving in and out of my legs.

“I love you,” she says. “You’ll always be eleven to me.”

“I love you too.”

We talk about my dad’s latest golf tournament win, and she updates me on my cousin Bel’s new boyfriend. We end our conversation laughing, which hasn’t happened in a long, long time. And as I place the handset back in the cradle and head to my room to start packing, I feel grateful.

I feel ready.