Page 27 of Here We Go Again
Rosemary swallows. It’s almost painfully beautiful. She spent her early childhood in Western Massachusetts, her college years in Connecticut and New York, and a summer touring ten European countries after undergrad, but this is still her favorite view in the world. Other places aren’t this green. Or they aren’t this many shades of green. They don’t have this many hills or mountains or topographical variety. Every time she travels, she’s always surprised to discover how many places in the world are just flat. It always makes her feel ironically claustrophobic.
There is nothing better than seeing the trees and hills out an airplane window as she lands in Portland.
When was the last time she hiked into these hills to see this view? They’re on the other side of the river from home. If she looks northwest, she can see Vista Summit, but it looks like an insignificant speck from here. She turns her head east, the path of their drive, and catches Joe staring up at her with an appraising eyebrow furrow.
“Are you sure that prominent tendon in your neck doesn’t have less to do with detours and more to do with our car companion?”
“You mean the dog?”
“I do not.”
Rosemary scans the circular path, and there’s Logan, climbing up on the retaining wall with a red dog leash in her hand. A volunteer materializes to scold her into getting down. “Why Logan?” Rosemary wonders aloud.
“Because,” Joe answers. “It has to be you and Logan.”
“Cryptic.”
“I could ask you the same thing, you know. Why Logan?”
“Why do I hate her? Joe, it’s fairly obvious.”
“Why did you used to love her?”
That question hits her like a punch to her throat. Why had she loved Logan when they were girls? She hadn’t meant to. God, she’d tried so hardnotto.
But Logan was the first kid she’d seen since her dad died and her mother packed their bags and moved them to a tiny town three thousand miles away. And she fell in love with her because Logan said hi first, asked to sit next to her on the bus, brushed their shoulders together as she excitedly talked about a summer camping trip she’d taken to Crater Lake.
Because Logan was everything shewasn’t: tall and loud and goofy; brave and unfiltered, quick to laughter, quicker to tears, every big feeling worn boldly on the outside. The kind of girl who foolishly climbed on retaining walls for the thrill of it. For all of middle school, Rosemary wanted tobeLogan. She certainly didn’t want to be herself.
And at some point, those feelings twisted into something she wasn’t ready to deal with at fourteen. She no longer wanted to simplybeLogan; she wanted to bewithher. The love grew into something beyond the intense bond of female friendship.
Rosemary’s still not ready to deal with it. She doesn’t want to scrutinize why she was able to love someone so deeply at fourteen but hasn’t managed to feel that way since.
But she can’t explain all of this to Joe. She shares most things with him, but eleven-year-old Logan is best left tucked away in the deepest file cabinet in her heart. Instead, she says, “I hate Logan because she treats people like Barbie dolls and tosses them aside as soon as she gets bored with them.”
“Maybe she’s just afraid of being tossed aside first.”
She thinks about the sleepovers where Logan would wake up in the middle of the night in tears, calling out for her mom. “She’s reckless with other people’s feelings, Joe.”
“Reckless with your feelings?” he asks with another deft arch of his eyebrow.
Evenshedoesn’t touch that file cabinet. “We could’ve hired a nurse, you know. Someone else who could have done this trip with us.”
He shakes his head. “Like I said. It had to be both of you.”
At that moment, Logan bounds over to them. It’s hard to say who has bigger dog energy: Logan or the actual dog. “Can you fucking believe how lucky we are?” Logan shouts. “To live in a place this fucking gorgeous?”
She throws back her head and makes a show of taking a deep breath through her nose. Rosemary watches her chest expand and collapse. “Is there anything better than a sunny day in the Pacific Northwest?”
When Logan looks down at Joe again, she has a huge, goofy grin on her face. “Have you finished saying goodbye to this place, Joe?”
He looks out at the Gorge—at this river, these trees and mountains, that patch of blue sky—one last time.
“Goodbye,” Joe whispers. Rosemary feels the fist slam all the way down into her stomach, but she takes that feeling and files it away too. She glances over at Logan, and for a second, she thinks there are tears in the other woman’s eyes. But Logan is already putting her sunglasses back on.
They’re at a complete standstill.
I-84 East is down to one lane just outside La Grande, and all Rosemary can see over the steering wheel is brake lights. The minivan three cars ahead of them seems to have turned off its engine entirely, the bearded driver climbing out onto the freeway to do lunges. According to Google, a wildfire jumped its barricade and got too close to the freeway, stopping traffic until they can maintain it again.
