I went back through the rec room and said, “Good night, you losers,” to Thomas and Jack, like it was old times when they were building nerd labyrinths for their marbles, before death, and adultery, and secrets and betrayal and heroism and strip mines had come into our lives, and I climbed up the stairs, not giving a shit about my Wellies or my hair or my dirt.

28

That summer when I so desperately tried to reel us all in, I didn’t understand the forces spinning us apart. I didn’t know it was my last summer on the mountain, that I wouldn’t live with my mother or my siblings again, that Thomas and I would board with other families for the remainder of high school and that Ellen and Beatrice would start the next school year in a different state. I didn’t know that my mother would move with them, that we would all leave the mountain, and maybe for her it was to be closer to Bill, and maybe it wasn’t. We still didn’t know.

Even without knowing all that was to come, I already wanted to go back to before, to hold us all together in the car driving through Pennsylvania Dutch, so squished and inseparable I couldn’t tell where my skin ended and my sister’s began; I wanted to be in the back of Dad’s pickup truck, us and the machines, after a day cutting lawns, driving home and the air cooling us as we drove, grass blades and leaves in a swirl around us, or lying on the living room floor in our separate spaces, listening to old reel-to-reel tapes of a time when we were looking forward to who we would be in the future. I wanted to hold us there. Together. Summer evenings in the driveway playing kick-the-can against the dark, calling from azaleas and dogwoods, running the trails. I wanted to be on the moss hill in the Kingdom smoking Charlotte’s Kents with Sage or looking up through the canopy of a maple in October, wearing a sweater against the cold, wading through leaf fall. I wanted Beatrice in my bed curling my hair, needing something from me, Ellen coiled beside us, wound against the world; I wanted Marie back, across the room from me, making sense of it all, and Thomas in his room looking up at the spinning universe. Even now sometimes I want to be driving west down 252 and Ellen’s tired head falls on my shoulder, and I don’t shrug it off, and she stays there with us in the car; to drive, again, all of us together, through the covered bridge, to feel the wooden planks beneath our wheels, to climb the mountain, knowing the turns by heart by the feel of them, to be going home.