Emily Hunt Kivel


We left San Francisco, five of us, three girls and two boys, split into two cars, both low to the ground and in different states of disrepair relative to the amount of money their two respective owners (the two boys) were making at the time. One was full of food scraps and little camps of spiders and ants; the other piled with funny hats and sunglasses and made a grinding sound when we turned the ignition. We left San Francisco because it was unrecognizable to us, had been for a while.

We drove up the coast in search of redwoods. We passed the places where we always said we’d move (we were always moving as a collective in these future scenarios; the idea of children or divorce or illness or death being unthinkable; the notion that any one of us would want something different an inane, cynical impossibility). That was part of it: those places were now on fire. Acres and acres of char and flame through Vacaville, houses drowning in orange and red and yellow in Sonoma. By then, children had started to come out of their homes and make a game of it. They ate popsicles and chased the embers. We passed a group of them, standing in a circle, sucking on their cherry popsicles and watching as one of their fathers sprayed a flaming Manzanita bush with a hose. We got out at a gas station for chips and water. One boy (he was married, his wife sat next to me in the back) pumped and the other went in for the supplies. When he came back, ash started drizzling from the sky like morning mist. Like fog.

“I’ve got an array of chips,” the boy said. He liked me. “I didn’t know what flavor everyone would like.”

I ate a sour cream and onion. I let it dissolve on my tongue until it was like paper, like plaster melded to my mouth. I swallowed while I watched the ash fall.

Who we were: Sheila and Joey, who were married and had been for almost ten years. They were from Texas and it showed. It made them popular. Michael, a boy who’d befriended them when they first moved to San Francisco. I suspected that he loved me though I’d never slept with him. I know it might sound like we were a free-loving collective, moving here and there in a caravan of trash, but it wasn’t the case. I was a prude. I was raised by two sophisticates, a conductor and his first flautist, who lived beyond their means and taught me that my body was a gift. So there was me: a prude. And then there was Jess, my best friend since high school. She was raised by her grandmother. It’s sad, Jess is always left for last.

We had decided to settle in a rental house along the border of Oregon, not exactly in Oregon (we couldn’t) but not really in California either. It should have been its own state, we decided, it should have a name. To the West was the ocean, below us was a creek and if you followed it for a mile, you found a river. We figured we would live there and swim and watch the birds and plant our own vegetables until the earth burned up. We’d have babies there too. If friends or family wanted to see us, that’s where we’d be.

When we arrived, the man who owned the house sat on the porch and waited for us. He kept sitting on the porch, silent, as we gathered up our things (suitcases and food containers and water and portable dressers, a jewelry hutch and wine glasses and six cases of beer). It took a long, awkward time. He finally stood up when we were two feet away from the bottom of his staircase.

“You’re here,” he said. “Hallelujah.”

“We’re here,” I said cheerfully. I shook his hand and introduced myself as Holly. I was the only one of us with any manners.

The house smelled like sawdust and pine. The kitchen was huge—a cracked linoleum floor stripped bare after so many cleans. The copper sink was blue and turquoise in its corners. Our large window looked out at the ocean beyond. A spider twisted down its silver thread in the near corner. We put our stuff down and stared around.

“I’ll give you the tour,” the man said. His name was Lewis.

We followed Lewis along the tour. I walked beside him, being the only one with manners. Jess followed, then Sheila and Joey. Michael was in the back but he worked himself slowly up the line and eventually walked beside me.

“There’s a master bedroom, you could call it,” Lewis said. “It’s got its own bathroom. Closet’s adjoined. The knobs on the door are loose, we could fix it but it’d just go back to the way it is.”

“Moisture,” he said. “Moisture. I guess you’re gonna take it, right?” He looked at Sheila and Joey.

“Then you don’t need doors,” he said. He laughed though it was clear he thought it was the truth. He showed us the rest of the rooms, which were small with white, shiplap walls.

“There’s a vegetable garden out back,” he said. He crossed through the kitchen and opened up the door for the mudroom. We descended down a series of steep, plank stairs and into the tundra of the yard. “Right now, pumpkins and zucchini. Last of the tomatoes. Last of the eggplant. The carrots will come soon. And the green beans. They won’t come until the eggplant’s gone. The eggplant’s a son of a bitch.

“He’s just a mean, pushy son of a bitch.”

We nodded at this, having heard as much about eggplant though we’d never seen him in action.

“What else is planted?” asked Michael. Lewis walked Michael through the garden. “I’ve been working on it all summer,” said Lewis. “I can come over once a week and help out a little.”

“We’d like to do it ourselves,” said Joey. “If that’s okay.”

“You don’t want me to help it grow?” said Lewis. He was a big man, with huge hands, and rings. “They’re really sensitive. They’re cranky little fuckers.”

“We’re okay,” I said. I smiled at him again because I could tell he was upset.

We settled into the house. Twice a week we would drive into the nearest town for groceries, and we’d cook together in the evenings. We’d cook together in the morning and afternoon, too. We all worked on our computers during the day, all except Sheila and Joey, who were rich. What they did during the day was anybody’s guess. They went on hikes. They slept late. They joined us for lunch.

It was idyllic for a month. We ate the last of the tomatoes and eggplant, picked Lewis’ basil. The eggplant’s meanness became sweet with enough oil. There was a lot of spaghetti and ratatouille while we waited for the pumpkins to ripen. Every day one of us went out to give the green bean beds a good soak. We waited for the artichokes; it was said they were shy.

When the green beans were ripe and four inches above the soil, Michael picked them and we ate them for dinner. I steamed them in garlic and lemon. We all sat down to eat and were silent for a bit, chewing.

“It’s—slippery.” Sheila stared down at her green beans.

“It stinks,” said Jess, who doesn’t spare my feelings.

“How did you cook them?” she said.
“You sure they were ready?” Joey asked Michael.

Michael scoffed. “I soaked them every day. I waited until the fourth week of the season.”

“They’re rotted,” I said. Everyone looked down at their plate, or spit their vegetables out, and agreed. Sure enough, the green beans’ faces were folded into grumpy frowns. Their green skin puckered. Like they’d aged about 100 years prematurely. Just two Xs for eyes. “Maybe we soaked them too much.”

After that, Lewis started coming once a week to help but he wasn’t happy about the food we’d wasted. “Poor guys,” he said about the vegetables. He wasn’t happy with any of us. He began walking around the garden with the rotted green beans in his arms. I thought he was going to say a prayer but he suddenly dropped them all in a heap near the far corner of the yard. “You’re all worm food now,” he said.

He knelt down beside the raised beds. “Come out, come out,” he said. “Talk to me, where do you hurt?”

We watched this. He turned back, caught us looking, informed us that it was all normal.

The next day, Michael and I went on a walk. There was a small, dirt road behind the house that led to the edge of town, passed a few neighbors along the way. We didn’t know these neighbors, never would. Their houses were ornate, creaking things sitting far back from the road. Their porches were enclosed in mosquito nets. Their windows were often buried in trees.

“I’m sorry I ruined the vegetables,” Michael said. Lewis had confirmed, they were almost all inedible. Soldiers executed in a pointless war.

“We’re learning,” I said. “What did we think would happen?”

About a mile down the road was a shack full of young people, people younger than us. Their relationships were unclear. Their behavior suspect. Looking at them, in this time, was the dirty work of looking in a mirror, and we often rolled our eyes and complained amongst ourselves when they lit off fireworks in the middle of the night for no good reason. Sometimes, through our second floor windows, we could see them coasting down the road at top speed on bicycles made for fat ten-year olds.

“Hell yeah,” one of them might say, after doing some sort of wheelie.

It wasn’t all young people. There was a kind of matriarch. What her business was we never figured out.
A member of this crew was trying to lose some weight. That week, he’d been riding around and around and around the two mile-loop of dirt road that went from our house to their shack to mansions to wood to town. Michael and I continued walking. The road grew shady. The same guy came zooming up to us, children’s bike blazing, and screamed “On your left! Get out of the way!”

We got out of the way and he zoomed off. I ducked under the knotted bow of a candelabra redwood and Michael stared at me. He followed.

“I guess I just wanted to do it right,” Michael continued our conversation. “I wanted to prove something.”

“We’re all friends,” I said. “You’ve got nothing to prove.”

There was also a cat that lived in the woods around the area. She was thin and wild like a barn cat. I wondered where the nearest barn could be. Oftentimes we saw her trotting away, a dead and bloodied thing in her maw. A bird. A frog. Once she left a field mouse on our doorstep (the only neighbor who had given us any sort of welcome at all). I’d walked outside one morning and found it, a severed head on the doormat. The cat was waiting in the shade of the porch stairs, watching. She didn’t leave until I had buried the thing in the dirt, and after that she promptly and haughtily dug it up.

Ahead in the road, we spotted her. She was licking her paws. When she saw us coming, she ran to greet us.

Michael scratched her chin. I rubbed her side and she flopped over, exposing her large rabbit feet. The tip of her right ear was missing, shredded forever in some nocturnal brawl.

We sat and played with the cat for a while.

“But we aren’t really friends,” Michael finally said. “I haven’t known you for all that long.”

“You wanted to prove something to me?” I asked.

I looked up at his face, small and rather avian but attractive. He was staring at me so earnestly I had to look away. I focused on the cat. Stroked the ragged tip of her ear.

“That would complicate things,” I said. “You know that.”

“Sheila and Joey are doing it,” he said.

“Sheila and Joey have always been that way.” I said. “They’re part of the ecosystem.”

“What would happen to Jess?” I asked.

“Nothing would change,” he said. “And why would it matter?”

The man on the children’s bike zoomed by again, screaming with joy. He did this four or five times before our walk was over.

“Who cares what Jess thinks?” Michael jumped out of the bike’s path. “Who cares what anyone thinks?”

“I love you,” he said finally. He was walking a little behind me. He called it out. Bravely. Like he just had to tell me.

I didn’t say anything yet. All this talk of ecosystems—the point was that I wasn’t quite sure what to think. In the moment I felt like it was all a big mistake, like I should leave.

The next day, Michael had a surprise for us.

“We’re going boating in the river!” he said. He sat atop his car, which was caked with dirt from our drive away from San Francisco, from the many small journeys between here and town.

Sheila squealed. “Really?” she said. “Really?” she said again.

“I borrowed a boat,” said Michael, proudly.

“This is great,” said Joey. “This is fantastic.” “From who?” Jess said.

“A friend of Lewis. He lives in town. I went over to his house last night to arrange the whole thing. He’s a great guy. Younger. Closer to our age. He’s a really cool guy. We spent all evening eating chips and drinking whiskey and listening to records. He’s been here for fifteen years and has got a wife—but his wife lives in Santa Barbara. They only see each other once a month.”

“He says it works for them. He’s great. You’ll love him.”

We piled into one car this time and drove to the river. We could have walked but it was a hot day. Most mornings were greeted by a cold, grey fog that lasted until evening, when the stars came out. It made everything sweet. But today was hot. I could feel the ground beginning to swelter.

We’d gone swimming in the river only twice since we’d arrived. (It’s always that way with rivers, with beaches, with bodies of water. They sit there, outstretched, waiting while you busy yourself with far less welcoming things. They’re so near they almost kiss you, yet most days the distance is just a little too far. It could be a couple meters, five miles or fifty, the distance is always a little too far.)

We hiked down to the mouth of the river and there were a few small boats docked, bobbing slightly on the water. We walked out onto the plywood. Michael led us across the plywood. I walked in back, watching him, wondering if I could love a man who looked such a way on plywood.

“There it is,” he said. Pointing to a small motorboat with the name Barbara painted in white on the side.

“Barbara,” Jess said. “What, his wife in Santa Barbara is named Barbara?”

We all thought this was very funny, that a man had a wife in Santa Barbara who he saw once a month, and that this woman’s name was Barbara, and that his motorboat’s name was Barbara, that he had made his own reality and docked it in the river. Michael grimaced, untied the boat and climbed in. I had brought a picnic basket full of sandwiches and mashed pumpkin with cinnamon and maple. Jess had a cooler of beer. Sheila and Joey had blankets. Michael pulled the motor, a pleasant roar emitted from the engine, and we were off into the river.

Once we were far enough out, we took our shirts off and let the sun hit our faces, our necks, our chests. Joey brought out a sandwich and started eating. It was a lovely sound that surrounded us there. The rippling waters, the rustling of the far-off trees, the slipping of the road, the steaming rays of the sun, the quiet munching of Joey’s mouth.

Jess was a girl who did not give compliments regularly and mostly withheld all praise. Michael shaded his face with his baseball cap and smiled with satisfaction.

“Ouch,” he said suddenly. We were 100 meters off the dock. It was a big river. The kind that made you shocked and dismayed to realize that there were thousands of them all over the globe, reflecting the stars and hugging the fish.

The mosquitos were out. It was warm, like I said, and they were happy about that. “Can I have the bug spray?” he said to Sheila, who looked at Joey, who looked hopelessly inside his bag knowing that there was no insect repellant inside of it.

We decided to make the best of it. We all lay across the boat, eating our sandwiches and drinking beer, slapping each other intermittently to kill a bug. We were getting bitten up, but those bites don’t feel like anything once you’ve resigned yourself to them. They’re bugs, so what, the lightest things in the world. Lighter than a feather, smaller than a fly, get over it.

We drifted farther and farther along. It came to the point that the dock was a pinprick in the horizon. The car blurred and invisible between the blue above, the green between, the brown swelter of the ground. We took a dip every once in a while. Despite the summer heat, the water was ice. At a little past noon, Jess passed around the beers and we drank until we were hot and stupid. Michael pushed Jess into the water and she poked her head out, sputtering. We all jumped in. A few of us lost our cans of beer in the water, and we waited until the cans popped back up, poking their aluminum tops out from the surface like messages in a bottle.

Emily Hunt Kivel

Emily Hunt Kivel

Fiction

Summer 2021

The Leaving