Wednesday, January 16, 2019 // The Statement
7B
Wednesday, March 13, 2019 // The Statement
7B
Between us and the sun
T
he outer planets don’t have phas-
es. The moon has phases, and
Venus and Mercury have phases,
because they sometimes come between
us and the sun. To us, they are sometimes
made partially of shadows. But the outer
planets are too far away. They could care
less about us, let alone what lies between us
and their sun. They don’t want our perspec-
tive of them. They’re immune to our label-
ing of phases and our view of shadows. It’s
worked out for them so far.
That’s the thought that put me to sleep.
I’d never thought of the planets much, but
for some reason — maybe it was sleep-
ing outside or the edibles we’d stacked on
our s’mores — that night the planets were
my new obsession. I closed my eyes on the
stars, so many more than I’d ever seen in
the city, and rolled onto some sharp twigs
and let myself feel them for all they were
worth through my sleeping bag. Ezra was
already snoring, his fingers intertwined
with Nicola’s, asleep beside him. Her beanie
had slipped halfway off her bald head. I was
tempted to pull it back on, but she’d been
having insomnia lately and it would’ve been
cruel to wake her. Chemo fatigued most
people, but it’d just made Nicola nocturnal.
I woke up before the others, those twigs
finding new spots on me to prod me in dur-
ing my restless sleep until I had to give it
up. My breath shone like the morning dew
I had to shake off with my sleeping bag. Fog
rose from the lake, or maybe it was steam,
or maybe those two were the same thing,
but, either way, I was pulling off my quar-
ter zip and fleece pants and walking down
to the water’s edge, naked but for a pair
of spandex, the only thing that would dry
afterward. I felt a twinge of guilt for dis-
turbing the glassy surface of the water, but,
damn, was it warm. Was it warm or was I
cold? It didn’t seem to matter as I walked in
up to my breasts, goosebumps adding to the
imperfections of my skin, crawling across
the surgical scars on my neck. I paused to
consider the contrast of the temperature
above and below the meniscus, the differ-
ence in the kind of soft the air was and the
kind of soft the water was. As an experi-
ment, I leaned forward and dipped one
frozen nipple into the lake. It softened. The
lake was warm.
You’d think all the good stories come
out of freezing, stormy water that wrecks
ships and destroys island nations, but there
are stories about calm water, too. They just
always involve the water getting disturbed
in some way. Like, in Greek mythology,
there was this guy called Tantalus who was
an amazing cook, and the gods made him
cook them a feast. Tantalus wanted to put
all he could into the meal, so much so that
he sacrificed his own son and made him the
main course. The gods hated human sacri-
fice, which you’d think Tantalus would’ve
known, and once they realized what they’d
been served, they damned Tantalus never
to be able to eat or drink again. Tantalus
was forced to stand in a pool of fresh, clear
water under a tree hanging with ripe fruit,
but whenever he reached up or down to eat
or drink, the fruit would shrivel and rot
or the water would recede from his out-
stretched hand. Water is an agent of ven-
geance.
Another myth was about a god called
Alpheus who fell in love with Artemis, the
goddess of nighttime or something, and to
hide from Alpheus, Artemis ran into a river
and covered her face with mud so that he
wouldn’t be able to distinguish her from
the nymphs and dryads. Then Alpheus was
turned into a river himself for being a creep
and was used by Hercules to clean horseshit
out of some stables. Water is a place of ref-
uge (and nature’s poop scoop).
Lifting my knees to my chest, I slipped
down under the water. It was murky, but
not in a way that made it too dark, and I dug
below the rocky bottom to where the sand
began and pulled a handful up with me to
the surface. I rubbed it into my face, just
like Artemis, scrubbing away the oil that
had accumulated overnight on my cheeks,
my forehead and behind my ears. For how
warm the water was, the sand was cool, and
it felt as though it drew all the heat from my
head.
I blinked open one eye and looked back
to our campsite. Elio had woken up and he
was standing over at the edge of our clear-
ing, facing the woods, peeing. His nest of
curly hair was all flopped over to one side
and his scrawny back hunched forward. He
finished and turned around. We blinked
at each other for a few moments, and Elio
raised a hand. I waved back, toward myself
— join me. He pulled off his sweater and
T-shirt, leaving just his boxers, and dubi-
ously picked his way around the still-sleep-
ing couple down to the water. He waded in
slowly as I had, but once the water reached
his knees, he dove under. I dipped my face
in to wash off the scrub and opened my eyes
underwater, watching him swim toward
me until he had his hands on my hips and
was kissing my waist.
We sat together around the breakfast
campfire. Ezra and Nicola looked suspi-
cious through their sleepy eyes but I didn’t
address it. Better to let them make their own
assumptions. I fried eggs in a little stone
pan over the tiny flame while Elio sliced
the tops off strawberries with his hunting
knife. Ezra unscrewed his water bottle for
Nicola while she counted out her pills and
swallowed them one by one. Ezra had the
types of hands that boys can have, the kind
with impossibly long fingers that seem as
though they could wrap around an entire
basketball or reach across four octaves on
a piano and the tiny orange pill canisters
were lost in them like a fly trapped in a spi-
der’s web. While the eggs fried, I laid back
and rested my head on my rolled up pants.
Above us, pine needles danced in the
morning wind and considered raining
down on us, only to send flecks of sap in
their place. The sky was gray, nothing but
clouds, but the sun was all the brighter
for it, diffracting across its entire domain,
looking like the mouth of a tunnel that was
already behind us.
Nicola scooted toward my side of the
fire and rolled down next to me while Ezra
took over my egg duty. She laid her head
on my chest, facing me, the tip of her nose
tickling my chin. I felt her warm breath on
my neck, the breath that always seemed
to smell like nothing at all. Sterile, like the
hospital rooms she’d been in and out of for
the past five years warding off a particu-
larly stubborn bout of leukemia. I’d joked
before that her breath was due to her never
breathing fresh air anymore, and I’m sure
she must have only invited me camping to
make me watch her take deep breaths. I felt
her blow on my neck, then laugh at herself.
She reached up and slapped her hand to my
forehead, let it slide down my face, pulling
my lower lip down my chin. I licked her fin-
gers and she snatched back her hand, wip-
ing it on my sleeve. She rolled her head to
face down to my feet. Nicola didn’t like to
look up. I think she was afraid of the sky.
It rained during our hike. Like an idiot,
I wore a fleece jacket and my fleece pants,
and by the time we were halfway up the
mountain breaking for lunch, I was soaked
through. The others had spare clothing
and were all smart enough to wear wind-
breakers, so I assembled a new outfit and
wrapped a tarp from my pack around my
shoulders as a sort of rain resistant cape.
Elio picked me up by the waist, “Dirty
Dancing” style, and ran a few paces while
I kept my arms stretched out, the Super-
woman of the Rockies.
We paused on an overlook, the lake vis-
ible a mile or so away from our vantage
point. It was sunny over there, the cloudline
breaking just over the beach. A strange sort
of promised land in the direction whence
we’d come. The stretch of damn forest and
rock that separated us from that sunny
oasis felt impassable, a horizontal expe-
dition equivalent to trying to reach outer
space, only with more obstacles stand-
ing in the way.
I tossed a rock experimentally off the
cliff. It was lost in the fog and made no
sound over the din of the rain drumming
on the earth. Ezra came up behind me and
handed me another rock the size of his fist. I
lobbed that one, and we both tracked it with
outstretched hands until it was lost in the
trees. Ezra swore he heard a thud. I swore
I heard my shoulder pop out as I’d thrown
that one, but he didn’t believe me, either.
At the summit, the rain stopped. Or
maybe we were above the clouds, but that
seemed unlikely, given how easily even Nic-
ola could breathe. The air hung with that
post-storm tension, unsure whether it could
relax, exhale. We padded across a compos-
ite of pine needles and dirt and pebbles all
glued together with sap in a cross-stitch of
browns and greens, absorbing the sound of
our footsteps and leaving no tracks. I won-
dered if animals could still smell we’d been
there, whether the damp ground trapped or
masked our scent.
Would Nicola be detected at all? Riding
on Elio’s back? I’d been hunched over for
the past few miles, staring at her dangling
ankles to keep on course, watching them
swing limply, parentheses around Elio’s
scrawny legs doing their best not to drag
his feet. Ezra led our pack, walking stick in
hand, a fallen branch he’d picked up at the
base of the mountain. Ezra was easily the
strongest of all of us, but was still getting
used to balancing on the new leg, a gift from
his sarcoma in exchange for the original
leg, and he leaned heavily on the stick on
his right side. It looked as if he was rowing
a gondola. I told him that and he reached
back to whack me with the stick.
Four kids (or, I guess, young adults), all
who’d been closer to dying than to living
lately, unsupervised in the middle of nature
with absolutely no means to get help should
it be needed, allowed to go off for a week
and tempt their odds. Test nature. We were
all climbing for a different reason. Ezra to
prove he could do it, Nicola to find some
sort of absolute silence to forget her world
of beeping monitors and whirring genera-
tors, Elio because I’d asked him to, and I to
shorten the distance between me and the
sun. It wasn’t as romantic as it probably
could’ve been, but we’d never had great luck
with how things could be.
My own story had begun and ended
within the course of nine months. I never
really counted myself among the others, I
hadn’t suffered for it, really. Hodgkin’s lym-
phoma. I’d felt the swelling in my neck and
had a few months of treatments before the
doctors went in and pulled out what hurt.
Now, I just had gnarly scars that I planned
to adorn with tattoos after college and an
annual checkup.
BY ELLA JOEL, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR
See BETWEEN, Page 8B