Page 28 of Sprog
"I love the ER." He says it simply. Not defensively. "It's where I belong."
"I know. And that's enough." I look over at him. "Just promise me you'll visit. Or I can visit you. Regularly. Like, annoyingly regularly."
He gets up and pulls me off the sofa and wraps his arms around me properly, the way he hugs when he means it. "I love you, Savannah. Always."
"I love you too." I hold on for an extra second. "Don't find another best friend while I'm gone."
"Impossible."
The next morning I hand in my resignation and I start packing.
This is really happening. After more than ten years away, I'm going home.
I sit on the edge of my bed that night with a half-filled box in front of me and I let myself think about it properly for the first time. Home is not what it was. I'm not what I was. The town will have changed. I've changed and most things will be the same in the ways that small towns are always the same. I can't wait to see my parents, my old friends, the streets I grew up on. That's whatI love about going home, that sense of belonging to somewhere specific, of having a place that knows you.
I left under horrendous circumstances and I know that bumping into Austin, if he's still there, is going to be complicated. But a lot of water has passed under the bridge. We were kids. We're not kids anymore. Once I see him I'm sure whatever I'm carrying will reduce to something manageable. Something I can smile through and walk away from.
That's what I tell myself on the edge of the bed in the dark.
I almost believe it.
The drive hometakes four hours and I do the last stretch with the window down even though it's cool out, because the air starts to smell different about thirty miles out, something I can't name but that's specific to this part of the world, green and open and slightly damp, and breathing it in does something to my chest that nothing in the city ever does.
The memories start around the same time as the smell. They don't announce themselves. They just arrive.
The way the road feels at dusk when you're on the back of a bike, the particular sensation of it, the wind, the vibration and the horizon going gold ahead of you. I spent enough of my teenage years on the back of Austin's bike that my body still remembers it without being asked. The way I'd rest my chin on his shoulder. The way he'd reach back and squeeze my knee at a red light without looking away from the road, just a quick sure pressure that meant I'm here, I've got you.
I don't want that memory. I didn't invite it.
It's there anyway.
Then the diner on Route 9 goes past on the left and I remember stopping there once on the way back from somewhere and Austin ordering for both of us before I'd even looked at the menu. Not in a controlling way. In the way that means someone has been paying such close attention to you for so long that they just know. Cherry pie. He'd known I'd want cherry pie even though I hadn't eaten it since I was twelve. He'd been right.
I turn the radio up.
It doesn't help. The next thirty miles deliver a memory I didn't ask for about every ten minutes. The particular silence he had that always felt like company rather than absence. The way he laughed at things that weren't that funny and made them funny anyway. The way he smelled in autumn, leather and cold air and something underneath that was just him.
I turn the radio up further.
I'm a doctor. I understand that the brain stores sensory information alongside emotional memory and that returning to a place triggers retrieval. I understand this. It doesn't make it less annoying.
The town comes up around the familiar bend in the road and my stomach does something complicated. I know these streets. I know the water tower and the church spire and the particular way the afternoon light sits on the main road in autumn. This is mine. Whatever happened here, this place is still mine, and I want it back.
My parents are standing outside the house when I pull up the drive and the complicated feeling in my chest shifts into something simpler.
Mom gets to the car door first. "I can't believe you've finally come home, Sav."
She gets her arms around me before I'm fully upright and she smells exactly the same as she always has and I almost break down right there in the driveway.
"Give her space to breathe, Rachel." Dad pulls her back gently and gets his own arms around me. "Good to have you home," he says quietly into the top of my head.
"It's good to be home."
And I mean it more than I expected to.
Inside the housethere's coffee brewing and it smells like every weekend morning I can remember from childhood, and I sit at the kitchen table with a cup in both hands and let it settle over me.
"Now," Dad says, sitting across from me with the particular expression he has when he's organised something he's pleased with. "We've spoken to the realtor and the building you want is available. You just need to sign the paperwork tomorrow."
