(continued from 1.3.1)
Nora stood there, stunned. Her cheeks warmed with the humiliation of being abandoned by not just one, but both of the MacGowan brothers. She sighed and blinked back frustrated tears.
She was not going to spend any more time crying alone in this house. If Callum had anything left to say to her, he could come find her.
As she often did when Nora found herself alone, she heard her mother's words drift in on the breeze. After one of many short and heated arguments between her parents, Nora, six years old, had dutifully toddled into the forest after her mother. It made Nora feel better to see her mother in what was so clearly her natural habitat. In her house, Maria was a specter. In the woods, she was a goddess. The branch-broken sunlight wrapped around Nora's mother's hair and touched her olive skin and every day elsewhere felt closer to home. Her goddess-mother stooped down to impart advice to her six-year-old daughter.
"Nora, someday you are going to feel that you know what it is to be in love. It may make you feel that you owe someone your kindness. You may feel that you owe them your time. You may feel that you owe them your ear, or your heart, or your thoughts. But remember this, bonitinha: you never – you never – owe anyone a piece of yourself."
It was horrendous advice, and advice which her mother had fully lived by. It must've been what made it easier for her to leave Nora behind when she would not follow.
... maybe she should wait to hear Callum out.
Nora slid into the alcove and brushed her things into her backpack. She took the calculator from where Campbell had used it as a paperweight and the textbooks from where they had been stacked on the bench. She did not stride off into the mesa brush for Callum to come shouting after her. She resolved to wait here until he finished his sulking, and then they could talk through the hurt like two people who wanted to share a world together.
She was not her mother.
Nora turned her attention to Campbell's map, spread invitingly wide over the table, and she leaned curiously over it.
Its four corners were clamped down with various odds and ends – a cell phone stamped through Dinosaur; a coaster beneath a water glass covered Sterling and Holyoke; Durango was smothered beneath the brick of a laptop charger, cord swinging lackadaisically below the bench; Nora's calculator had been floating along the ebbs of the Purgatoire River, meandering off into Kansas. She pushed aside the paperweights and studied the map, Campbell's tidy pharmacist script squeezed small for maximum words-per-square-mile.
Nora took her hands from the map and brushed it flat, clamped a hand against it until the wind stilled for a moment. It was a road map of Colorado, a state with bounds made for maps, and it was hand-annotated with neat little lines that stretched out into the mountains. Hiking trails, Nora recognized. The tiny switchbacks gave it away. The trails were dotted with little drawings of tents, little trees, little bears, everything so little – an entire world of adventures squeezed onto a page.
Her fingers crept toward Soledad and the map reared to strike her in a gust from the windows, a plasticky whap against her knuckles. The wind carried the bite of mountains still white with snow. Nora had her thumb and middle finger pressed against those mountains: the Sawatch range to the north and the San Juans to the south. Many of her classmates had spent long weekends hiking and backpacking there with their parents who had moved to Soledad for its all-season outdoor recreation. But not Nora. Her father had moved here to take a job with a ski resort and her mother had moved here for him, and now they were rooted here like the spores of wind-carried weeds, far outside their native range.
YOU ARE READING
Closer to the Sun || A Fairy Tale on Hiking Trails
Fantasy🌲 🦊 🐭 Campbell was ten the first time he turned into a mouse. The only person he could tell was his best friend Shea, but on that same day, she vanished into thin air. And when she returned, she was... different. They both were. They'd seen place...
