Ashes, Ashes

5 - Scatter

By the time we got back to the cabin, the others had finished unpacking the car. They were milling around outside, Richard poking experimentally at the fire pit with a stick he found somewhere. He had the look of someone trying real hard to look casual, like maybe he was trying not to start a fight. 

Not for the first time, I questioned the wisdom of getting all of us drunk. Richard used to have a nasty mean streak when he was drinking. It was one of the reasons things had never worked out with him and Laurel, or at least one of the reasons she'd given. It had been a short-lived relationship after a long period of on-again, off-again courtship; they'd been better friends than lovers, and better lovers than partners. 

Who you are when you're drunk is who you really are, Laurel had once told me, shrewdly, while draining an over-filled glass of wine, a teal-green eye focused on me in a defiant challenge to tell her otherwise. 

I hadn't argued with her, but I hoped she was wrong. At the time, pre-transition and out only to a few friends, conflicted and questioning everything, drinking had been perilous. Sometimes it left me free and open and funny and bold. Sometimes it left me weepy and empty inside, like a great wide sinkhole had sprouted somewhere in my gut and everything that made me a person had fallen into it. 

Which one of those was the real me, I had wondered. Am I just a hollow person, all packaging with no insides? 

I don't know if Richard's tequila-fueled anger reflected some deeper truth about his soul. I do know that he and Laurel had fought about it, at the end, me holed up in my room of our shared apartment trying to pretend I couldn't hear everything through the paper thin walls. 

"If it's the drinking that bothers you, babe, I'll stop. I don't care about it. I just want to be with you." 

"I don't want you to stop drinking," Laurel had said, angry and exasperated. "I want you to stop being an asshole." 

I remember thinking, at the time, that it sounded like bullshit, and if I knew it then Richard surely must have known it too. 

"Hey," I called out to them, there in the campground. "We doing this thing?" 

"Yep." Parker had a map, the kind that folds up like a brochure. It flopped over in his hand, half-limp from its well-worn folds. "We've got a bit of a walk, though, to get out into the actual woods." 

Dawn pulled from my side and went to Parker, pressing in close as if to soak up his heat. He pulled an arm around her shoulders, hand still loosely gripping the wadded-up map, and looked at us all as if to say 'ready?' 

We set off in a loose single-file, staggered like drunken ants. Parker and Dawn, pressed together, at the head. Abby behind, then me, then Richard, and Liza trailing by a few paces. She was carrying the ashes this time, and I didn't mind; they were a heavy weight, far beyond the seven pounds they'd measure on a scale. 

We didn't say anything, just walked. The trail was mostly clear, just a place worn smooth between the trees, the route covered in small stones and pine needles. It inclined slowly, creeping its way uphill in a way that left me breathless. I was panting hard by the time we stopped, my breath escaping in little bursts of fog, and the back of my calves burned. 

The trail, curving up and around a hill, opened out into a little clearing at the edge of a cliff. The exposed stone face was red-brown and worn smooth by wind. Beyond the edge, the mountains fell away into a tumble of treetops and scruffy brush. But the cliff afforded a beautiful view of the neighboring peaks in the mountain chain, like a cluster of stony giants huddled against the sky. 

I had to give it to Parker; this place, whether he knew it was here or not, was beautiful. 

I tried to think of what Laurel would say if she could see it, if she'd like it or if she'd have some wry comment for its beauty, but all I could think about