I wait a moment, and when a response doesn’t come through, I get up with my plate and do the dishes. I’m halfway through drying my last dish when my phone rings.
Quickly, I wipe my hands, expecting a work call now that it’s past 8:00 p.m. However, the name on the screen isn’t my supervisor, it’s Lily. Thinking something could be wrong with my mom, I swipe to answer, my “hello” coming out breathless.
“Okay, so is hitting Clouds Rest via Sunrise Lakes a day hike?” she asks.
I release a breath, relieved there’s nothing wrong, then the corner of my mouth lifts. Her voice—low and raspy, like she’s trying to be quiet in bed and may have almost been falling asleep.
“You can summit Clouds Rest in a day, but I’d argue it’s most spectacular at night,” I say, turning off the lights in the kitchen and double-checking the lock on the cabin door before padding into the single bedroom.
The walls are stained a warm honey color and depict the queen bed frame in a broad shadow due to the bedside lamp. My pine frame bed is covered with a comforter—striped with earthy green, navy blue, and rust red repeating over a brown quilted material—and I sit on it, dropping onto the plush mattress with a grin on my face.
“Huh,” she says. “It’s on my Yosemite bucket list of hikes. I mean, who am I kidding, all the trails are on my list, but in the time I have here, there are a select few battling it out for numberone. Some people have TBRs, or to-be-read lists, while I have TBHs, to-be-hiked.”
“You going to share your top ones?”
There’s some rustling, and I imagine her pulling out a notebook with a handwritten list inside. It’d be messy, if my glimpse at her notebook in the hospital was any indication. I remember it—the sprawling jagged lines, swooping across the page like her words couldn’t keep up with her thoughts. I’ve noticed it on the grocery list she wrote last week, too. The first few lines of items will be pristine, quickly devolving into letters awkwardly spaced, some barely decipherable. For example, she’d written spinach, and somehow, I read it as spaghetti.
Focus.
I listen to Lily share her top hikes, carefully explaining her plan for each considering the season she’s here. She even mentions coming back in the summertime to attempt some hikes impassable in the winter, resulting in a hollow pit in my stomach at the thought she’ll leave and the premature worry she won’t come back.
Woven curtains hang over a single-pane window swishing in the slight draft, and I fixate on the thick fabric as it sways back and forth.
Lily continues on, and I’ve never heard her say so much in one breath. I nod in time with her passion, wishing I could see her face as she’s talking about this. Would her eyes be lit with zeal? Her eyebrows raised as she desperately tries to organize her hikes into her next five, or would she gesture wildly, anticipating the future trails she’s planning?
Max wanders in, his snout drenched from his water bowl, and he rubs his nose over the worn oval rug covering part of the wooden floor.
“I’m sorry,” Lily finally says. “I just word vomited to you, and you’ve probably heard this all before.”
I have—I meet many tourists and visitors, and they usually always ask my favorite places to hike, the safest, best for beginners, and on occasion those overzealous hikers prepared for anything—the hardest, most grueling hike they could possibly do. I nearly snort remembering Lily’s first reaction to me—she wanted to put as much distance between us as possible.
“I like hearing what you have to say.” I sit up, scooting off the bed to grab a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt from the dresser sitting to the right of the door threshold. The photo of my mom and me when I was seven years old at my first minor league baseball game tips over, and I right it. She’d taken off of work to surprise me with tickets and a Fresno Grizzlies jersey for my birthday after school. The memory is one of my favorites, especially now knowing how much extra money wedidn’thave growing up. It makes it more meaningful.
A dish in the shape of a paw print my mom gave me last year for Christmas sits near the photo, and I empty my pockets—loose change, the receipt from the groceries, and my utility knife.
“I’m sorry. You’re busy. I can let you go,” Lily tells me, her words slower and with a subtle hesitation, like she might be masking an undertone of sadness. Especially compared to the energy she had explaining her hiking plans.
“No,” I blurt out. “I was going to change into my pajamas and climb into bed is all.”
She sighs, and that tiny noise, the miniscule hitch at the end, has heat flooding my body.
She finally tells me about the dinner she made my mom—turkey burgers with sweet potato, and kale salad. I picture her beaming when she tells me she got my mother to eat several bites of her burger and the whole kale salad, though I’m still baffled by how she’s handling it.
We talk while I’m in the bathroom, brushing my teeth and washing up. It’s strange and intimate, especially for her notbeing here. When I strip down to her explaining how she used to go four-wheeling with her brothers, I can’t help my mind conjuring her and I getting ready for bed together, after we’ve been out hiking all day.
I’d peel each article of clothing off her petite frame, allowing it to drop to the floor, her labored breaths increasing as I trail kisses up her thigh. She’d grasp at my head, her own tilting back as her eyes roll behind her lids as I tease and taste the exhaustion of the day from her, wring pleasure that rivals any euphoria she’s ever experienced on a tumultuous hike.
I blink. Ashamed that I missed her last words due to my fantasies.
Folding back my blanket, I climb in, the chill from the cold sheets causing me to shiver. “Dang it’s cold. I just got in bed, and I feel like my toes are going to catch frostbite.”
She laughs. “Well, your bed here is toasty warm.”
I internally groan at the thought of her in my room from my awkward high school years, but then it morphs, twists into something bitter and sharp as I wish she were here instead.
First my dog, now I’m jealous of my old bed.
“I tend to settle into the dip on the side of the mattress you used to sleep on. It’s comforting.”
