Page 56 of Our Last Resort

I could insist.

I overheard,I should say.Why didn’t you tell him about that time you bumped into Sabrina? Or when you went to get a sweater?

That’s how we used to be, back in Émile’s world: our minds superimposed to the point of transparency, nothing we wouldn’t talk about.

Right?

Well.

Almost.

There was a place inside of Gabriel that remained out of reach, even to me. A mother would pull him away from a chore, and he’d return quiet, eyes down, shoulders sagging. The same thing happened sometimes when he came back from class.

Years later, I asked him about it. “When we were kids,” I said, “sometimes you’d get all…weird.”

“Weird?” he said.

“Yes. Suddenly, I couldn’t talk to you anymore. What was that about?”

Gabriel frowned. We were sitting in a McDonald’s, eating Quarter Pounders and fries. For a few months, after Émile and before Annie, we spent what little money and spare time we had trying out everything Émile had kept from us. Junk food. Meat. Candy. Movies, when we could afford tickets. Music, when it played for free.

“I got in trouble,” Gabriel said.

“What do you mean?”

He tsked.

“What do you think? We were always getting in trouble. All the time. It was the only thing that ever happened to us.”

I chewed a fry. That part, I understood. Émile needed us bad so that he could make us good.

Most of us had accepted it. But Gabriel, I realized the night of the Quarter Pounders, had woken up every morning of our childhood yearning to be perfect. Every time, he had made a promise to himself—that this would be the day when he made it to bedtime without messing up even once.

All Gabriel had ever wanted was to be blameless. Pure.

When he failed, he retreated into himself.

Early on, I’d tried to pull him out of his funk. I’d cracked jokes, thrown topics of conversation at him. Nothing had worked.In time, I learned: All I could do was wait for him to come back to me.

Gabriel’s mind like a Houdini trick: Struggle too hard against your restraints, and you’ll get nowhere. Relax into it instead. Let the knots be knots, and watch them come undone.

“There’s a group hike.”

“Huh?”

Gabriel has put down his book and is looking at a hotel pamphlet. There’s a picture of the Ara on the cover. Gabriel tilts it in my direction to show me a page. “Guided group hikes depart every Saturday at ten-thirty,” it says.

I check the time on my phone. That’s in twenty minutes.

A hike? Really?

Then again, what’s the alternative?

I can’t leave.

I don’t want to stay in the hotel with William Brenner.

And as of ten minutes ago, I don’t feel like being barricaded in a suite with Gabriel, either.

---