“Thank you.”
“OK, so until tomorrow, you and I will leave the real world on the other side of that door, knowing that we will face it soon. But . . . for now, we can let things be the way they were, once.”
“And then tomorrow we go home,” Jesse says.
“Yeah,” I say. “And we start to learn how to live without each other again.”
“You’ll marry Sam,” Jesse says.
I nod. “And you’ll probably move to California.”
“But for now . . . for one more day . . .”
“We’ll be Emma and Jesse.”
“The way we were.”
I laugh. “Yeah, the way we were.”
Jesse builds a fire and then joins me on the sofa. He puts his arm around me and pulls me into the crook of his shoulder. I rest my head on him.
It feels good to be in his arms, to be satisfied with this moment, to not wonder what the future holds. I relish the way he feels next to me, cherish the joy of having him near. I know I won’t always have it.
It starts snowing again, small flurries landing on the already white ground. I get up from Jesse’s arms and walk over to the sliding glass doors to watch it fall.
Everything is quiet and soft. The snow is white and clean, not yet crushed under the weight of boots.
“Hear me out,” I say, turning back to Jesse.
“Uh-oh,” he says.
“Snow angels.”
“Snow angels?”
“Snow angels.”
As soon as we step out into the snow, I realize the flaw in my plan. We will sully the unsullied snow by walking in it. We will crush the uncrushed just by being here.
“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Jesse asks me. “Imagine how good it will feel to watch a movie inside by the fire.”
“No, c’mon, this is better.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Jesse says, and from the tone of his voice, I now understand why people sometimes describe the air as “bitter cold.” The cold is not bitter. They are bitter about the cold.
I run ahead, hoping he’ll catch up to me. I try to remember what it felt like to once be a teenager with him. I trip and let myself fall. I drop face-first into the snow. I turn around. I see Jesse running to catch up with me.
“Come on, slowpoke,” I say as I stretch my arms out and widen my legs. I windshield-wiper them back and forth, until I hit the icy snow that has crystalized onto the grass beneath it.
Jesse catches up and plops himself down next to me. He extends his limbs and starts pushing the snow out of the way. I get up and watch him.
“Nice work,” I say. “Excellent form.”
Jesse stands and turns to look at his creation. Then he looks at mine.
“You can say it,” I tell him. “Yours is better.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” he says. “Some people just have a natural raw talent for snow art. And I’m one of them.”
I roll my eyes and then step lightly in the center of his angel where the footprints won’t show. I lean forward and draw a halo where his head once was.
“There,” I say. “Now it’s art.”
But I have made a rookie mistake, out here in the snow. I have turned my back to him. And when I stand up, he pelts me with a snowball.
I shake my head and then very slowly and deliberately make a snowball myself.
“You don’t want to do that,” he says, just a hint of fear in his voice.
“You started it.”
“Still. What you’re planning on doing would be a mistake,” he says.
“Oh yeah? What are you gonna do?” I ask, slowly sauntering up to him, savoring the very trivial power I currently wield.
“I will . . .” he starts to say, but then he swiftly leans toward me and knocks the snowball out of my hand. It hits my leg on the way down.
“You just hit me with my own snowball!” I say.
I gather up another one and throw it at him. It hits him square in the neck. I have declared war.
Jesse gets in a snowball to my arm and one to the top of my head. I get one that hits him straight in the chest. I run away when I see a huge one forming in his hand.
I run and I run and then I trip on the snow and fall down. I brace myself, waiting for a snowball to hit me. But when I open my eyes, I see that Jesse is standing right above me.
“Truce?” he asks.
I nod and he throws the last snowball far out in the distance.
“How about that warm fire and those blankets?” he asks me.
This time I don’t hesitate. “I’m in.”
When we’re thawed, Jesse heads to the stack of books and movies that have been sitting in this cabin for years. There are supermarket paperbacks so well-worn that they have white line creases on the spine. There are DVDs from the early 2000s and even a few VHS tapes.
We pick out an old movie and try to turn on the TV. It doesn’t respond.
“Is it just me or does it appear that the television is dead?” Jesse says.
I look behind to see if it’s plugged in. It is. But when I hit a few buttons, nothing happens.
“It’s broken,” he says. “I bet it’s been broken for years and no one thought to turn it on.”
“A book, then,” I say, walking over to the stack of paperbacks. “I’ve come to realize it’s a wonderful way to pass the time.” I glance through the spines of the books on the shelf and spot a thin detective novel that I’ve never heard of among the John Grishams and James Pattersons. I pull it out. “Why don’t we read this?”
“Together?”
“I’ll read to you, you read to me,” I say. Jesse isn’t entirely sold.
The sun starts to set and even though we aren’t in danger of being cold in here, Jesse adds logs to the fire. He finds an old bottle of red wine underneath the bar and I grab two jelly jars from the cabinets.
We drink the bottle as we sit by the fire.
We talk about the times we made each other blissfully happy, and we laugh about the times we made each other blisteringly mad. We talk about our love story like two people reflecting on a movie they just saw, which is to say, we talk about it with the fresh knowledge of how it all ends. All of the memories are ever so slightly different now, tinged with bittersweetness.
“You were always the voice of reason,” Jesse says. “Always the one stopping us from going just one step further than we should.”
“Yeah, but you always gave me the courage to do what I wanted to do,” I say. “I’m not sure I would have had the guts to do half the things I did if I didn’t have you believing in me, egging me on.”
We talk about our wedding—the ceremony by the lighthouse, our brief dalliance here, our reception down the street. I tell Jesse that my memories of that day aren’t darkened by what happened later. That it still brings me nothing but joy to think about. That I’m thankful for it, no matter where we have ended up.
Jesse says he’s not sure he agrees with me. He says it feels sad to him, that it represents a painful naivete about the future, that he feels sorry for the Jesse of that day, the Jesse who doesn’t know what is ahead of him. It feels like a reminder of what he could have had if he hadn’t ever gotten on that helicopter. But then he says that he hopes, one day, to see it the way I do.
“If I ever come around to your way of thinking,” Jesse says, “I promise I’ll find you and tell you.”
“I would like that,” I say. “I’ll always want to know how you are.”
“Well, then it’s a good thing you’ll always be easy to find,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The fire slows and Jesse moves toward it, rearranging the logs, blowing on it. He turns back to me, the calm fire now starting to roar again.
“You think you would have ever gone to school in LA if it wasn’t for me?” he says.
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe not. I know that I wouldn’t have been as happy there without you. And I wouldn’t have even applied to that travel-writing class without you. And I definitely wouldn’t have spent a year in Sydney or all those months in Europe if you weren’t with me. I think there were a lot of things I never would have done—good, bad, beautiful, tragic, however you want to describe them. I think there were a lot of things I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do if it wasn’t for you.”