In Phoebe Barr’s “Leaving Home,” the narrator packs up and moves out of her Boston apartment during a bleak February while still grieving the death of her boyfriend. Deeply atmospheric and quietly tender, this story teases out how it might be possible to move on—or at least move through—an impossible loss.
I ended up staying in Boston late that year.
Most sensible people left around the beginning of February. They stuck it out through January to see if there’d be any snow this year, even a dusting to whiten the old church steeples and Christmas wreaths; they staved off the freezing dry air with spiked apple cider, sang carols, kept bonfires burning at night, helped prove Boston was still a real, living city for one more month. But by the thirty-first, wanting to avoid a last-minute rush, they had called in contractors to ensure their houses were sealed up tight, or else settled up with their landlords and terminated their leases until August, then piled their worldly goods into suitcases or minivans and headed west.
I stayed until Valentine’s Day. At first I just needed a firm deadline, so when my friend Ellie called up pestering me about making the move, I’d have something to tell her. A date for when I’d be showing up at the door of her little community shelter, a summer refugee from the half-sunken city. But eventually the day itself came to feel significant. A romantic gesture, or a tragic one. Maybe both.
One by one, the other tenants emptied out of my little apartment building in Porter Square. My landlord called me up on February first, asking when I was leaving; when I told him not until the fifteenth, he threatened to charge me extra. He’d already be out of the city by then. But when I agreed, numbly, to pay whatever extra he charged, he seemed embarrassed and said not to worry about it.
I was living off my savings. Abstractly, I wanted to get back to work; I’d started a half dozen new grant applications since September. But each time I’d tried to write a statement of purpose, the weight of the sky had felt like it was pressing down on my chest, keeping me stationary, protecting me from thinking about the future.
On Valentine’s Day I went down to our preferred taco place in Harvard Square. I had a vague idea of buying Dylan’s order, enjoying it with his favorite coffee from the shop next door, and feeling close to him that way. I didn’t trust the buses this late, so I walked, dragging my feet along empty sidewalks studded with bare trees, wondering if the sun would come out a final time before I was gone. I tried to cheer myself up by picturing the square as it had been when we were happy; warm days in September and October, streets crowded with students so the cars had to sheepishly crawl through, guitarists and drummers on every corner, the scents of a dozen eateries competing for our attention.
But when I arrived, most of the shops were already closed. The taco place had shut and glass-sealed its doors until the fall. The coffee place was open, but deserted, a single young barista on duty who seemed shocked when a customer came through the door. Nothing was brewed except plain drip coffee, so I took a mug of it, pitch-black, and sat in a corner sipping it slowly. The barista went back to watching Netflix on her laptop.
Happy Valentines, I wrote in pencil on the table in front of me. I love you. It didn’t cheer me up at all.
When I returned home, I went through the last of the food and alcohol in my apartment, a few eggs and some bagels and cream cheese and two mealy apples, plus beer and the remains of a bottle of white wine. I packed haphazardly as I went. I’d put off until now the agony of deciding what things of Dylan’s I would take, what I could make room for in my little suitcase, and what I’d be sealing away in waterproof boxes to stack in my closet.
In lieu of any of my own winter gear, I packed his jacket, which still had his scent clinging to the collar and cuffs. I left behind his books, the wall art he’d purchased for our place, feeling sick to my stomach. I took the worn spiral-bound notebook full of his marine biology notes. I was still combing through it, seeking out statistics and insights I could use to continue the work we’d begun together.
The next morning, I opened my eyes to a damp smell and the sound of a hundred car horns blaring outside my window, and I knew it was time to go.
I hauled the suitcase down five flights of stairs and out onto the sidewalk. The streets were packed. The rush had started; the procrastinators, those without solid arrangements, the unhoused and the unemployed, were all fleeing the city at once. A storm was forecasted for tonight.
* * *
Dylan and I met in college. He was a solitary figure hunched over his laptop in a corner of the library while Ellie and Faith and Ada and I giggled together in an alcove. He approached us a half dozen times to tell us to keep our voices down. We made fun of him mercilessly, the dark circles under his eyes, his unwashed blond hair that drooped below his ears. But halfway through the semester we made it our mission to get him to smile. We left little gifts for him on his library table, red and pink candies and plastic convenience-store toys. The first time he just scowled at us. But we kept at it, buying gift after gift, scrawling funny notes to accompany them.
One day, we had no ideas of what to give him, so I left a blue ceramic bird that my aunt had sent me for my birthday, with the note, We couldn’t think of anything else to get you this week, would you just smile already? If not please give this back. Love, Liz.
He stormed into the library that day looking furious. But when he picked up the gift, read the note, I finally saw the transformation take place. His scowl softened. He shook his head, and then he started laughing. And peering at him over the table, while my friends high-fived, something inside me softened, too.
It’s not like we set out to save him. He was just an asshole we thought was cute. And he never stopped being an asshole, even a year later when he was coming with us to bar trivia, when he’d grudgingly agreed to let us throw him a birthday party, when he and I had discovered we were both studying marine biology and started doing study sessions together. Even the night we made love in his bedroom, all he could do after was grumble about how it was too hot to spoon. When we went on dates he complained about the people walking too slow in front of us. I thought it was funny; we all did. And we savored the glimmers of light we managed to weasel out of him.
Of course I wonder, now, if there was something we could have done to prevent what happened. If we’d really been making the effort. They say you can’t save anyone who doesn’t want to be saved, but that blue ceramic bird was magical in its effect; could I have conjured up another miracle like that, if I’d known I needed to? What could be more capable of saving anyone, anything, than stupid fleeting gestures like that?
* * *
The Red Line filled up as we trundled toward South Station. Students started piling on, backpacks bulging, sitting on their suitcases and holding on to each other when the train started moving. At the MIT stop, a girl in an oversized hoodie shuffled up next to me, clutching a little rolling suitcase in each hand. She looked uncertainly around, checking her phone, then scanning the train map on the roof of the car.
“Hey,” I said. “First time making the move?”
She looked up at me. Relief broke over her face. “Yeah, it is.”
“You’re headed to Lowell, right?” I’d heard MIT housed their spring campus up there. A sprawling complex of glass buildings, state-of-the-art; probably better air conditioning and acoustics than the old brick buildings in historic Cambridge.
“That’s right,” she said. “I’m going down to South Station to catch the commuter rail.”
I shook my head. “You want to go to North Station, not South. The commuter rail doesn’t go to Lowell from South.”
She frowned. “Really? But I thought…”
“I know, it’s confusing. Don’t worry, you’re still on the right train.” I pulled out my phone and showed her my T map. “See, just get off at Park Street, take the Green Line from there to North Station. Then board the commuter to Lowell.”
She squinted at my map, making notes on her phone. “Where’s Park Street?”
“Couple more stops.” You couldn’t blame these students for not knowing anything about the T. How were they supposed to learn, coming to Boston for the first time in their lives, spending only a few months in the city each year before the ocean snatched it away from them? I doubted this girl would ever really know Boston, not like we did, the last generation to have been whole children here.
“Thanks,” said the girl, running back over my instructions. “I’m Nadia, by the way.”
“Liz.”
The train passed out of its tunnel, onto the bridge where it crossed over the Charles River. We both fell silent—the whole train car fell silent—to watch the river pass. It was already swollen to twice its autumn size. The gray water lapped at the massive concrete barriers erected as a last futile stopgap against flooding. The current rushed fast, whitecapped, only three or four yards beneath the tracks. In a few weeks, the water would rise above these tracks, above the barriers, and Boston would be reduced to a cluster of spire islands in the sea, an underwater city to be explored by fish and crabs.
A decade ago, Boston had commissioned a bevy of artists to paint murals on these concrete barriers. They were faded now, flattened by the years of salt water rushing over them. And they were already half-submerged, so the people depicted singing and dancing, holding boxes of tea above their heads, waving Red Sox banners, all looked like they were drowning.
“I’ve never seen this much water in person,” Nadia said when we were over the river and conversation started up again. “It still feels crazy to me, that they’re just letting all this water flow out into the ocean.”
“You from out west?” I asked.
“Yeah, Sacramento.”
Everyone knew about the water rationing in Sacramento. It had ceased even to be a news story, settling into simple common knowledge the same way Boston’s flooding had. Unhoused people dying of thirst in the streets. Daily protests outside luxury hotels, where high-paying guests got to sit in Jacuzzis while ordinary people had to keep their showers to three minutes and run their dishwashers only twice a month.
“Which do you prefer?” I asked her. “There, or here?”
She shrugged. “It was cool to see it rain, I guess. Last time it rained in Sacramento I was sixteen and they closed school for two days. But I wish I didn’t have to leave the second the rain got heavy.”
“Yeah.” I stared up at the gray sky. “That makes sense.”
Nadia’s brows drew together. She tilted her head, like she was trying to catch my eye. “Hey, are you all right?”
I blinked. I tried to summon up a question, like, What do you mean? with a note of surprise, or a, Just thinking, or a reassuring smile. My face struggled with its expressions. She looked at me steadily. For a terrible moment I thought I was about to let incoherent grief pour out of me—He’s dead, I loved him and I still love him and he’s dead, I’m still carrying him, he’s gone but I’m still carrying him—flooding the train car, deluging this poor first-year student who didn’t even know the difference between North and South Station.
But I got hold of myself and dropped my eyes to my lap. I found something simple to say. “The move was hard this year.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Thanks.”
The windows went dark; we were back underground.
* * *
In the heart of the city, everything still smelled like Dylan. The Irish pubs and karaoke bars I took him to on Friday nights, the indie bookstores where we bought candy and hot chocolate to accompany our books, the stately trees and rippling pools of Boston Common.
We used to spend hours on the Common in the warm September afternoons. Drinking in the red-orange explosion of foliage, watching dry leaves spiral in the wind. We talked about marine biology, about our work studying the crabs and oysters that populated Boston during flood season. We debated whether the city could ever be fixed—buildings sealed, sewage diverted, graveyards covered—so toxins wouldn’t poison the oysters every year, leave them in massive rotting piles when the water receded. As the years passed, those debates turned into ideas, plans, research proposals, city grants; but out on the Common they were always dreams.
On some afternoons we’d watch protestors march through the park. They held signs like Boston is Drowning, Save our City, Justice for Climate Refugees. Sometimes Ellie, sporting one of her many union t-shirts—undergraduate workers’ union, grad students’ union, local teachers’ union, year by year adding a new one—would drag us along. She gave me a plastic bucket to use as a drum. She cajoled Dylan into helping her come up with chants, which he was astonishingly good at.
The legislature had a spate of productive years when we were right out of college. A couple of general strikes forced bill after bill through, finally halting oil expansion, cracking down on pollution, guaranteeing flood insurance for rented apartments. It was enough to send a buzz of hope reverberating through the city like the sound from a plucked guitar string. On those September afternoons we could feel that reverberation in our chests.
After the sun went down, we’d lie out on the warmed grass and look for stars. Dylan told stories about the constellations, surprising me with his knowledge of Orion, Ganymede, Perseus and Andromeda. I interrupted with jokes about Zeus’s sex life.
“Jesus,” he huffed, his voice impossibly warm. “Has anyone told you that you’re fucking stupid?”
“No way,” I said. “I’m fucking you. You’re fucking stupid.”
And he laughed, turned over on the grass and wrapped his arms around me and laughed into my shoulder. With him so close, the whole world smelled like him.
“Tell me another story,” I said, taking his fingers in mine, kissing them.
“You don’t even want to hear them.”
“Yeah, I do.” I wanted to hear everything his voice ever said. I wanted to sink into that bottomless sky with him, wanted to hear his laughter shake the cosmos.
But mostly I wanted to stay on the grass with him. He made us leave when it got too dark, when the park emptied out and the night breeze started up; he said theft and drug deals and muggings happened here at night. I knew that was smart, safe, but I couldn’t shake the dream of spending all night out there. Hearing the wind rustle the reddened treetops, the occasional shhh of a passing car, feeling surrounded by the office-building and movie-theater lights of our city. I was so full on those nights, full of all of it.
* * *
South Station was mobbed. I swam through confused first-timers, craning my neck to find the signs pointing to the Worcester-bound line. The high ceilings echoed with a hundred voices. We moved like a single living organism, blind to its direction, twisting and turning.
Only now did I remember that I hadn’t bought a ticket. I always forgot you still couldn’t use your credit card for the commuter rail. I tried to open the app, but it wouldn’t load; too many people here on their phones at once. I couldn’t afford to wait for the crowd to die down. Instead, I sidled toward the emergency exit. A few people, fighting the flow of foot and suitcase traffic, were exiting through it; I made ready to squeeze past them.
One noticed me and held the door open, averting his eyes. I glanced toward the nearest vested official. He was pretending not to see me. Mumbling a thank you, I rushed toward the train as it pulled in.
I spilled onto the nearest car with twenty other people. These trains had overhead storage, and the minute the crowd of us stopped moving, forty arms were in the air, lifting suitcases up to slide them into place. I probably wouldn’t have had the strength to lift my own suitcase over my head, but with two people pressed close on either side of me, with the collective momentum of the crowd, I just managed it. Once the suitcases were all tucked away, we crowded in twos and threes into the train’s padded seats.
I ended up seated by the window. I pressed my head against the vibrating glass.
The train pulled out of the station, back into the gray February light.
The sky was so heavy. It was always so heavy these days; rainclouds seemed to always be brooding overhead. They leached the color out of everything, made people look sick as they passed me by, muffled sound as though damp cotton balls were stuck in my ears. These days I felt like I had to raise my voice to carry on conversations. Walking felt like wading through feet of water. Sometimes I wondered how other people didn’t see it, how they went about their days so normally under that endless, intolerable weight.
Searching for a new distraction, I tuned into a phone conversation someone was starting up near the front of the car.
“The lease on my spring place doesn’t start until March,” the person said, his voice low and urgent. “I don’t start the job until then, either. I can’t afford to stay in a hotel for two weeks. All the cheap places filled up months ago. I’m on the train right now, don’t you have any contacts in Worcester I can talk to?”
“Trying to find a place to stay?” said someone behind him. “I’m getting off in Framingham. There are some good Airbnbs there.”
The guy on the phone shook his head. “I searched the whole area already. No vacancies under $300 a night, as of this morning.”
Two others in the car swore softly.
“I should have just stayed,” someone groaned. “I have nowhere to go.”
“No, it’s good we left,” said the person getting off in Framingham. “I tried to stay three years ago. Floods came up over the sea wall, and before I knew it my house was totally submerged. I had to camp on my roof for three nights before a rescue boat found me.”
The discussion reminded me to call up Ellie. I dialed her number slowly, leaning further into the window to gain some illusion of privacy.
She picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hey, Liz,” she said breathlessly, over what sounded like banging pots and pans. “You finally on your way?”
“Yep,” I said.
“You’ll be at Union Station in, what, two hours?”
“Just about.”
“It’s in the other pantry,” she shouted, voice drifting away from the phone. “No, the other pantry. Look, I’ll help you find everything in a minute.”
“Busy over there already?” I said, but she didn’t hear me. From far away I listened to her explain the layout of the community kitchen. Of course, I was probably the last one to arrive this year; the house was surely already packed with Boston families.
At last I heard her breath on the other end again. “Sorry about that. So, two hours?”
“Mmhm.”
“You doing okay? How was moving out, in the end?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. How to answer such a question? How to convey anything of what I felt on a train car, surrounded by people trying to make living arrangements? What could I tell her that she didn’t already know?
It felt like saying goodbye all over again. Knowing that fresh plot of earth, where I’d left flowers only yesterday, would soon turn into muddy sea floor with him beneath it, it felt like burying him a second time. It felt like the weight of the whole ocean was pressing down on me along with the sky. I’d spent the past five months carrying his presence with me through Boston, and that had been too much to bear already; I’d expended every ounce of my strength just to keep getting out of bed and eating. I didn’t know how I was going to survive the next several months.
“It was hard,” I said.
A toddler’s wail, harsh and desperate, sounded from the other end of the phone.
“There’s a closet with some toys on the second floor,” Ellie called. “See if there’s anything she wants. Watch out for the LEGOs, I had five different kids try to eat them last year.”
I managed a little smile. Ellie’s world always seemed governed by chaos; for most people, moving out of the city was a recipe for a quieter life, but the quiet life had never been for Ellie. She’d immediately started raising money for a down payment on a great sprawling house. Now she hosted Bostonians there every spring, friends and friends of friends, collecting from us the money she needed for the mortgage. It was always just slightly more people than the house could really handle. She always seemed to spend February and March in disarray, working to contain the mayhem of a dozen upended lives.
But I was lucky to know her. Before this house, I’d scrambled every February to find somewhere to stay, like the others on the train with me now. I’d spent my share of spring months in the tent cities that appeared around Massachusetts during flood season. Despite everything, Boston springs were still frigid after sunset, and I shivered through plenty of long nights in a flimsy sleeping bag on the outskirts of Leominster. Rain pattering on plastic above me. Dylan’s body, when he was there, was the only thing that kept me warm.
“Liz, I’ll have to call you back,” said Ellie. “Or I’ll just see you at Union Station, yeah? Two hours?”
“Sure,” I said. “Yeah.”
There was a clatter and another shout just before the line went dead.
The elderly woman sitting next to me was writing on a slip of paper. She passed it to the person sitting in front of us.
“Would you give that to the man on the phone up front?” she asked. “It’s my son’s number. He’s interning at an association that helps displaced Bostonians find temporary housing—maybe he’ll know how to help.”
The person in front took the paper, passing it further up and repeating the woman’s explanation.
* * *
There were times in college when Dylan plunged into some black hole. Stopped answering my texts, didn’t come to the library, wasn’t seen for days on end. I’d go around to his dorm, and he’d always be asleep. With no other way to reach him, I’d send him long voicemails where I did impressions of as many cartoon characters as I could think of, hoping one would cheer him up enough to call me back. But I never really knew how long it would go on. A few days, a few weeks; eventually he always emerged again, pale and mumbling apologies. Then Ellie and I and the others would drag him off to an open mic show or something. Ply him with drinks and jokes until he smiled.
In those last years, when he and I lived together, sometimes he shut down like that too. Suddenly his laughter would vanish and he’d lose interest in everything. I knew a little more by then, about his twisted and shattered family, about the drinking and the fights; I knew it was usually after a bad phone call that the black holes came on.
At least then I could see him, talk to him, bring him food when he wouldn’t leave his bed. I could keep him up to date on our work; by then we were far along on our project of saving the oysters, meeting with other scientists, testing new street treatments in advance of each spring flood.
“Fifty percent of oysters are surviving in our simulated environment,” I said. “Get excited! That’s a solid F.”
“Sure,” he mumbled, staring blankly at his unopened spiral-bound notebook.
“Ten more percent and we’re in D minus territory.”
“You’re really selling this.”
“Come on, Ds get degrees.”
But it always felt like pushing a thousand-ton boulder up a hill. It hurt, seeing his eyes retreat into his face, his shoulders curl forward little by little like boards warped by water. Hearing him re-listen to drunk voicemails from his brother threatening to kill him. I wanted to feed him cheesy lines, tell him I’d be his family instead, but that didn’t really change anything, did it?
Ellie once asked if I thought he’d ever get better. She came around to our apartment one day, two months before her big move west. Five days out from when Dylan had last smiled or slept. He was in our bedroom, and she sat at our little kitchen table, hands curled around a mug of tea.
“Do you see a future with him?” she asked me. “One where all this isn’t so hard?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Then, when she didn’t stop looking at me, I said, “I’m not holding my breath.”
“But you’re staying.” It wasn’t a question.
I shrugged. “Would you leave if you were me?”
She didn’t reply. I knew she understood anyway. I didn’t have any clear idea of what a future with Dylan would entail; I didn’t expect him to offer me an easy life. But none of us had befriended him because we expected that. He was always there, that was all. He was part of all of it. And we didn’t want to lose him.
I thought that would be enough. That no matter how far Dylan strayed into dark places, he’d always find his way home to us. Maybe I did think I could save him after all.
* * *
The commuter rail swept west. The tracks in and around central Boston were smooth, slick, built to withstand the most extreme weathering; the farther out we got, the more they transformed back into ordinary tracks, sometimes bumpy, warped from heat and cold, sometimes rusted and screeching. I sat facing east, so I could see the full Boston skyline slowly expand into view as we raced away from it.
It hadn’t snowed this winter. Like every year where it didn’t snow, it had caused people to speculate whether Boston would ever see snow again, whether last year’s January dusting had been the final one. Some irrational corner of my brain was certain this was true. It would be fitting for the snow to have left this place at the same time Dylan did, for the city to be irreparably altered in his absence.
I thought about how no one in Boston had known which spring would be their last in the city. I hadn’t known, during my last spring, when I was six years old. Some of our sensible neighbors were already fleeing the city in February, but my family stayed that year. I played in the empty rain-muddied streets. I watched in awe as the trees put forth pastel pink and yellow buds; I cherished the newborn sun on my skin, the frigid breeze that still blew in when the sun set.
Then came a bad rain in March, more in April, and the first floor of our house flooded. My parents started having conversations in hushed voices. Frightened, I hid in the boughs of a blooming birch tree and fingered the soft flower petals, praying I would see them again in years to come.
I never did see them again. And no one in Boston ever would now. No one but the left-behind, the dead.
Above the receding bulk of Boston’s skyline, I saw the gray sky darkening. The forecasted storm was hours away. Maybe, out in Seaport, it was already beginning; maybe by tonight the rain would be falling over Dylan’s grave. The flowers would crumple, their petals float away.
My eyes burned. I pressed my palms over them. I wished I could hear him laugh again, wished it with the desperation of thirst in Sacramento.
A sob shook my chest like a thunderclap.
I slid my hands down to cover my face. My cheeks were hot, and my palms were like ice against them. Tears scalded my fingers when they slipped through. A second sob built up behind the first, and my lungs shook as I tried to breathe in; my ribs felt ready to crack open.
How could I survive this? How did anyone survive this, the ending of the world?
I tried to keep my crying quiet, to not disturb my fellow passengers. But when I rubbed salt from my cheeks and opened my eyes, the elderly woman to my right was looking at me.
“You okay?” she asked quietly.
I shook my head.
She opened the backpack at her feet to reveal two Tupperwares crammed full of crumbly-looking cookies. “I made way too many of these. They’re maple caramel. Want one?”
Someone’s eyes turned in our direction from the aisle. They edged nearer. “Hey, those smell good!”
“Take some.” She pulled out the Tupperware on top.
Five people reached for the cookies from different directions. I took one and it fell into two pieces in my hands. I took a bite from one half; it felt like glue in my mouth. At least it was sweet.
“Mmm,” said the person in the aisle. “These remind me of fall.”
“Yeah, the caramel,” said someone else.
“Man, I can’t wait until it’s caramel apple season again.”
“Just as soon as we get back,” said the elderly woman. “In September, when the floods are gone, we’ll have caramel apples for months.”
“And maple syrup.”
“And pumpkin pie.”
“And oysters,” someone new spoke up. “That’s my favorite part of September, going around Back Bay and picking up the oysters. These days it’s clean enough you can harvest them right off the streets.”
My throat tightened as a few others made noises of appreciation. I leaned back again, toward the window, but I listened.
The voices of the train car overlapped, painting a shared picture of September. Oyster harvests, seaweed cleanups, kids playing on toppled statues before cranes came in to set them right. Every business’s grand reopening, marked with streamers and balloons and massive sales. Reunions with fall neighbors. And the strange, haunting, evergreen beauty of Boston’s autumn: the rustling wind through dried-out treetops; the thick gold sunlight slanting between red brick buildings; the cold, salty mist blanketing streets still paved with cobblestone. And ten thousand teenagers streaming into the city for the first time, gazing around at the recently-flooded streets, awestruck that, despite all we’d done to it, Boston was still a real, living city.
Out the window, the buildings receded, back down into the sea.
* * *
He left me a note. There on our kitchen table, where a hundred other nights we’d stayed up late talking, laughing, planning. A simple note scrawled on graph paper. Liz, you made me want to live.
I came home to it from a lab visit he hadn’t accompanied me to. He’d been stuck in a black hole for a week. I hadn’t thought it was any worse than the previous times; I’d figured he would be fine for a few hours. I’d even left some chicken and rice on the stove for him. He hadn’t touched it.
After the funeral, I stared at that note for dozens, hundreds of hours. Stared instead of sleeping, instead of working, stared until it made me sick. Sometimes I cried; sometimes I screamed at it. What the hell did he mean? Why hadn’t he lived, if I’d made him want to? When had I failed?
But I still kept it. I was still taking it with me to Worcester, tucked inside his spiral-bound notebook with the rest of his writings I still needed for my work. Still, there was a part of clutching that note to my chest that felt like holding him.
You made me want to live. Well, if no one can really save anyone else, what more could I have hoped to do?
* * *
Ellie was waiting for me at Union Station. She waved energetically at me from the other side of the turnstiles. Black hair in a bob, pale pink blouse rumpled and untucked from her dress pants, waist filled out since our college days, she could have been someone’s mother. But she was still the girl with paint-splattered hands who I’d helped sneak into the dean’s office freshman year, to leave a copy of the union’s demands. My weak smile returned when I reached her.
She flung her arms around me. She smelled like baking bread and perfume. “Liz, it’s so good to see you!”
“Yeah, yeah, you too.” I hugged her back.
She pulled away, held me at arm’s length, looked me up and down. The ritual was comforting; it was the same thing she’d always done with me and Dylan, in the years we arrived together.
“It’s been too long,” she said. “Why don’t you ever come out here? The commuter rail can’t be that bad.”
“Why don’t you ever come to Boston?” I said. “The protestors probably miss you. I hear the legislature’s stalling a new affordable housing bill.”
“You know I’d be down there in a heartbeat if I wasn’t working.”
“Don’t you get all the school holidays off?”
“No way. Lesson planning.” She shook her head and grabbed my suitcase. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
I followed her to her car. Hundreds of people were streaming out of the station; some going to meet cars, some calling Ubers, some standing together in clusters trying to work out what to do. Examining big maps on the station walls, exchanging notes.
Ellie said it so easily, home. Every year I’d come here with Dylan, she’d said she was taking us home. She never even thought about it.
“Anyway,” she said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “Why should I come back to Boston? For six months of the year, Boston comes to me.”
I looked at her. Her face was in profile, her gaze forward as she turned the car on; a smudge of mascara or paint or bicycle grease blackened the skin just beside her right eye. I remembered sobbing, loud ugly furious sobs, into her shoulder in the weeks following Dylan’s death. I remembered marching alongside her and Dylan in Boston Common, all of us waving signs, shouting and chanting for a better world. I remembered so vividly crouching behind a table with her at midnight in the brightly lit library, watching Dylan find his cheap little gifts, giggling and wondering if this would be the one to make him smile.
I laid my hand on hers. Her eyes turned to mine. They were warm, too, and for a moment all of me was warm, like the sun-soaked grass of Boston Common had enveloped me.
“We’ll be there in ten minutes,” she said. “Fair warning that the house is a disaster.”
We pulled out of the station. The sky was whitish-blue, not threatening rain, and the streets of Worcester were lined with clapboard houses and scraggly trees. A few were already starting to bud despite the slight February chill. Tiny flowers of pastel pink and yellow. As we drove, my eyes followed them; I liked to think I could see them moving, emerging slowly, hesitantly, hopefully into the air.
Phoebe Barr (she/her) is a library worker and environmental organizer living in Boston, MA. Her work is published or forthcoming in Bourbon Penn, Terrain.org, The Colored Lens, and the Ethereal Nightmares anthology. You can read more of her writing at writealongtheriver.wordpress.