Home is a Four Letter Word

chapter twelve

Mid-April

The sun had started its slow descent down when Jake realized how far they had gotten. He estimated them to be about a mile from Connor's house based on the type of trees that surrounded them best aligning with the ones that led out of town. It was a detail so insignificant, but Jake had spent too much time in the woods as a kid to think every tree looked the same. Using nature as a refuge was half of what drew him to his college-bound career path. The other half was rooted in some far-fetched hope that he might be able to stop the exploitation of his refuge before it started. It was a long shot, but he thought one day he might matter enough to make the difference. His mother always said it was the thought that counted. Somedays, Jake wasn't convinced that was enough.

Jake had been walking on the inside of the tracks, trying to match his step every time so he skipped a slat before finding the next one. Outside the tracks, a couple feet away, Connor had been balancing out on the gravel side, trying his best not to faceplant with every misstep that sent him a little further down the incline. When he got especially pissed off, he would kick a rock out from underneath his Vans and watch as it tumbled down into the woods that lined the tracks with their pine needles and underbrush.

"Do you ever hear the trains at night?" Jake mumbled as he watched Connor sway out his arms to catch his balance.

"I used to... kinda tune them out now." Connor looked out in front of them, watching a squirrel jump over the tracks briefly a few yards in front of them. "The first year we moved here, when I was in seventh grade, they used to keep me up at night. It's really loud when it's two in the morning and everything in the world is silent except those damn trains."

Jake nodded a simple understanding gesture that led him to think of his own experience with the noise, sometimes catching a faint whistle through his cracked window when a dog woke him up in the middle of the night scratching at his door.

"Why did you move here?"

"My grandparents both got lung cancer around the same time. They were heavy smokers until they landed in the hospital." Connor looked over to Jake and shrugged. "It doesn't really matter where my mom lives for work, so we left Cleveland and came down here to live with them and help out until they died."

Out of instinct, Jake looked over to him and solemnly muttered "sorry for your loss."

Connor shooed away his sympathy in one swift motion. "Ah, don't worry about it. I was thirteen and they already hated me."

There was a pause that left Jake wondering questions he didn't know would cross their invisible trust boundary or not. He figured anything was on the table until Connor decided to swipe it off. Maybe if Connor opened up, he could too. It was an negligible thought, but it dangled in front of Jake's consciousness like a low-hanging fruit on a tree.

"Were you out at thirteen?"

A pinecone fell on the tracks a few feet in front of Jake as he said it. He couldn't contain his urge to kick it as they passed by, sending it spiraling further down the tracks they would eventually reach.

"Well, no. But at that point it seemed like everyone already knew, but me." Connor sighed, watching the spectacle with a disinterested stare. "That's not why they hated me anyways. I look too much like my dad. He was an asshole apparently."

The silence between them fell comfortable again for a few seconds as Jake decided against all his desires not to pry for more. He stared down at his feet awkwardly, thinking about his own upbringing and where he could've been if his father hadn't been in it. A part of him wished sometimes that would've been the case, but those wishes were often replaced by the sobering reality that his mother wouldn't have known how to survive with two children on her own. She was strong, but she wasn't that strong. Her feeling of failure as a parent would take over her before the weight of the burden she was left with would. Jake wondered how that felt for Connor. If he even noticed the gap in his life, or if it felt like a non-trivial part of survival that meant nothing in the grand scheme of existence.