People We Meet on Vacation

AS SOON AS the plane touches down, the four babies that spent the full six-hour flight screaming stop at once.

I slip my phone from my purse and turn off airplane mode, waiting out the flood of incoming text messages from Rachel, Garrett, Mom, David Nilsen, and—last but absolutely not least—Alex.

Rachel says, in three different ways, to please let her know as soon as I land that my plane didn’t crash or get sucked into the Bermuda Triangle, and that she’s both praying for and manifesting a safe landing for me.

Safe and sound and already missing you, I tell her, then I open up the message from Garrett.

Thank you SO MUCH for not taking Santorini, he writes, then, in a separate message: Also . . . Pretty weird decision IMHO. I hope you’re okay . . .

I’m fine, I tell him. I just had a wedding come up last minute and Santorini was your idea. Send me lots of pics so I can regret my life choices?

Next, I open the message from David: SO happy you’re coming with Al! Tham’s excited to meet you, and of course you are invited to EVERYTHING.

Of all of Alex’s brothers, David has always been my favorite. But it’s hard to believe he’s old enough to get married.

Then again, when I said that to Alex, he texted back, Twenty-four. I can’t imagine making a decision like that at that age but all my brothers got married young, and Tham’s great. My dad’s even on board. He got a bumper sticker that says I’M A PROUD CHRIST FOLLOWER WHO LOVES MY GAY SON.

I snorted laughter into my coffee as I read that one. It was so supremely Mr. Nilsen, and also perfectly played into Alex’s and my running joke about David being the family favorite. Alex hadn’t even been allowed to listen to secular music until he was in high school, and when he decided to go to a secular university, there had been weeping.

In the end, though, Mr. Nilsen really did love his sons, and so he pretty much always came around on matters that concerned their happiness.

If you’d gotten married at twenty-four, you’d be married to Sarah, I texted Alex.

You’d be married to Guillermo, he said.

I sent him back one of his own Sad Puppy selfies.

Please tell me you’re not still carrying a torch for that dick, Alex said.

The two of them had never gotten along.

Of course not, I wrote back. But Gui and I weren’t the ones in a torturous on-and-off relationship. That was you and Sarah.

Alex typed and stopped typing so many times I started to wonder if he was doing it just to annoy me.

But that was the end of that conversation. When he next texted me, the following day, it was with a non sequitur, a picture of BeDazzled black robes that said SPA BITCH on the back.

Summer Trip Uniform? he wrote, and we’ve dodged the topic of Sarah ever since, which makes it pretty damn clear to me that there’s something going on between them. Again.

Now, sitting on the cramped and sweltering plane, taxiing toward LAX, in the post-baby-scream silence, it still makes me a little sick to think about. Sarah and I have never been each other’s biggest fans. I doubt she’d approve of Alex taking another trip with me if they were back together, and if they aren’t properly but are on their way to being, then this could very well be the last summer trip.

They’d get married, start having kids, take their whole family to Disney World, and she and I would never be close enough for me to be a real part of Alex’s life anymore.

I push the thought away and answer David’s text message: I’M SO EXCITED AND HONORED THAT I GET TO BE THERE!

He sends back a gif of a dancing bear, and I tap open the text from my mom next.

Give Alex a big hug and kiss for me:), she writes, with the smiley face typed out. She never remembers how to use emojis and becomes impatient immediately when I try to show her. “I can type them out just fine!” she insists.

My parents: not the biggest fans of change.

Do you want me to grab his butt while I’m at it? I write back to her.

If you think that will work, she replies. I’m getting tired of waiting for grandbabies.Belongs to NôvelDrama.Org - All rights reserved.

I roll my eyes and exit out of the message. Mom has always adored Alex, at least partly because he moved back to Linfield and she’s hoping we’ll wake up one day and realize we’re in love with each other and I’ll move back too and get pregnant immediately. My father, on the other hand, is a doting but intimidating man who has always terrified Alex so much that he’s never let one ounce of personality out while in the same room as Dad.

He’s brawny with a booming voice, mildly handy in the way so many men of his generation are, and he has a tendency to ask a lot of blunt, bordering-on-inappropriate questions. Not because he’s hoping for a certain response but because he’s curious and not very self-aware.

He is also, like all members of the Wright family, not amazing at modulating his voice. To a stranger, my mother shouting “Have you tried these grapes that taste like cotton candy? Oh, you’ll love them! Here, let me wash some off for you! Oh, let me wash a bowl first. Oh, no, all our bowls are in the fridge with Saran Wrap covering our leftovers—here, just grab a fistful instead!” might be mildly overwhelming, but when my father’s brow crinkles and he blasts out a question like “Did you vote in the last mayoral election?” it’s easy to feel like you’ve just been shoved into an interrogation room with an enforcer the FBI pays under the table.

The first time Alex picked me up at my parents’ house for a karaoke night that first summer of our friendship, I tried to shield him from my family and my house, as much for his sake as for my own.

By the end of our first road trip home I knew enough about him to understand that his walking into our tiny house filled to the brim with knickknacks and dusty picture frames and dog dander would be like a vegetarian taking a tour of a slaughterhouse.

I didn’t want him to be uncomfortable, sure, but just as badly, I didn’t want him to judge my family. Messy and strange and loud and blunt as they were, my parents were amazing, and I’d learned the hard way that that wasn’t what people saw when they came through our front door.

So I’d told Alex I’d meet him in the driveway, but I hadn’t stressed the point, and Alex—being Alex Nilsen—had come to the door anyway, like a good 1950s quarterback, determined to introduce himself to my parents, so they “wouldn’t worry” about me riding off into the sunset with a stranger.

I heard the doorbell and went running to head off the chaos, but in my vintage pink-feathered house shoes, I wasn’t fast enough. By the time I got downstairs, Alex was standing in the front hall between two towers of stacked storage containers, getting batted back and forth by our two very old and badly behaved husky mixes, as a slew of unseemly family photos stared down at him from every side.

At the moment I came skittering around the corner from the stairs, Dad was booming out, “Why would we worry about her going out with you?” and then, “And when you say ‘going out,’ do you mean that you two are—”

“Nope!” I interrupted, dragging the hornier of our dogs, Rupert, back by the collar before he could mount Alex’s leg. “We are not going out. Not like that. And you definitely don’t need to worry. Alex is a really slow driver.”

“That’s what I was trying to say,” he stammered. “I mean, not the driving speed. I drive . . . the speed limit. I just meant, you don’t need to worry.”

Dad’s brow furrowed. Alex’s face drained of blood, and I wasn’t sure whether he was more unnerved by my father or by the layer of dust visible along the baseboards in the hallway, which, frankly, I’d never noticed until that moment.

“Did you see Alex’s car, Dad?” I said quickly, a diversion. “It’s very old. His phone too. Alex hasn’t gotten a new phone in, like, seven years.”

Alex’s face went red even as my father’s relaxed into interest and approval. “Is that so?”

Still, all these years later, I can remember with vivid clarity the way Alex’s gaze flickered to mine, searching my face for the correct answer. I gave him a little nod.

“Yes?” he answered, and Dad clapped a hand on his shoulder so hard Alex flinched.

Dad gave a big, no-holds-barred grin. “It’s always better to repair than to replace!”

“Replace what?” Mom shouted from the kitchen. “Did something break? Who are you talking to? Poppy? Does anyone want some chocolate-dipped pretzels? Shoot, let me just find a clean plate . . .”

When we finally finished the twenty-minute goodbye required to leave my house and made it back to Alex’s car, he said only of the whole affair, “Your parents seem nice.”

I responded, with accidental aggression, “They are,” like I was daring him to bring up the dust or the humping husky or the two billion childhood drawings still magnetized to our fridge or anything else, but of course he didn’t. He was Alex, even if I didn’t understand everything that meant back then.

In all the years I’ve known him since, he’s still never said an unkind word about any of it. He even sent flowers to my dorm when Rupert, the husky, died. I always felt we had a special connection after that night we shared, he joked in the card. He will be missed. If you need anything at all, P, I’m here. Always.

Not that I have the note memorized or anything.

Not that, in the lone shoebox’s worth of saved cards and letters and scraps of paper I allow myself to keep in my apartment, this one made the cut.

Not that there were full days during our friendship’s hiatus when I tortured myself with the thought that maybe I should throw that card away since, as it turned out, always had ended.

Toward the back of the plane, one of the babies starts screaming again, but we’re pulling up to the gate now. I’ll be off in no time.

And then I’ll see Alex.

A thrill zings up my spine, and a nervous flutter works back down into my stomach.

I open the last unread message in my inbox, the one from him: Just landed.

Same, I type back.

After that, I don’t know what to say. We’ve been texting for over a week, never broaching the topic of the ill-fated Croatia trip, and everything’s felt so normal until right now. Then I remember: I haven’t seen Alex in real life in over two years.

I haven’t touched him, haven’t even heard his voice. There are so many ways this could be awkward. Almost certainly we’ll experience some of them.

I’m excited to see him, of course, but more than that, I realize I’m terrified.

We need to pick a meeting point. Someone has to suggest it. I summon the layout of LAX to mind from the soup of hazy memories of every dully carpeted gate and electric walkway I’ve seen in the last four and a half years of working at R+R.

If I ask to meet at baggage claim, will that mean a long stretch of walking toward each other silently until we’re close enough to actually talk? Am I supposed to hug him?

The Nilsens aren’t a huggy bunch, as opposed to the Wrights, who are known to grab, elbow, slap, rustle, squeeze, and nudge for emphasis during any conversation, no matter how mundane. Touching is such second nature to me that once I accidentally hugged my dishwasher repairman when I let him out of the apartment, at which point he graciously told me he was married, and I congratulated him.

Back when Alex and I were close, we hugged all the time; but that was then, when I knew him. When he was comfortable with me.

I fight my roller bag free from the overhead bin and push it along ahead of me, sweat gathering in my armpits beneath my light sweater and under the blunt little approximation of a ponytail swept off my neck.

The flight took forever; every time I checked the clock, it seemed like full hours had been condensed into a minute or two. I was bouncing-up-and-down-in-my-very-small-seat eager to get here, but now it’s like time is making up for the ballooning it did during the flight, shrinking so that I travel the whole length of the jet bridge in an instant.

My throat feels tight. My brain feels like it’s sloshing around in my skull. I step out into the gate, move sideways out of the path of everyone coming off the jet bridge behind me, and slip my phone out of my pocket. My hands are sweaty as I start to type: Meet at bag—

“Hey.”

I spin toward the voice just as the owner of it sidesteps the stroller parked between us.

Smiling. Alex is smiling, his eyes puffy in that sleepy way, his laptop bag slung over one shoulder and earbuds hanging around his neck, his hair an utter mess compared to his dark gray trousers and button-up and his scuffless leather boots. As he closes the gap between us, he drops his carry-on bag behind him and pulls me into a hug.

And it’s normal, so natural to push up on my tiptoes and wrap my arms around his waist, burrow my face into his chest, and breathe him in. Cedar, musk, lime. There is no greater creature of habit than Alex Nilsen.

Same inscrutable haircut, same cleanly warm scent, same basic wardrobe (though enhanced a little over time with better tailoring and shoes), same way of squeezing me around the upper back and drawing me in and up against him when we hug, almost pulling me off the ground but never tightening so much that the embrace could be considered bone-crunching.

It’s more like sculpting. Gentle pressure on all sides that briefly compresses us into one living, breathing thing with twice as many hearts as we should have.

“Hi,” I say, beaming into his chest, and his arms slide down to my midback, tightening.

“Hi,” he says, and I hope he heard the smile in my voice the way I hear it in his. Despite his general aversion to any form of public affection, neither of us lets go right away, and I have the sense that we’re thinking the same thing: it’s okay to hold on for an inappropriately long time when it’s been two years since you’ve hugged.

I shut my eyes tight against rising emotion, pressing my forehead into his chest. His arms fall down to my waist and lock there for a few seconds. “How was your flight?” he asks.

I draw back enough to look up into his face. “I think we had some future world-class opera singers on board. Yours?”

His control over his small smile wavers, and his grin fans wide. “I almost gave the woman next to me a heart attack during some turbulence,” he says. “I grabbed her hand by accident.”

A high-pitched laugh shivers through me, and his smile goes wider, his arms tighter.

Naked Alex, I think, then push the thought away. I really should’ve come up with a better way of describing this version of him a long time ago.

As if he’s reading my thoughts and fittingly mortified, he tamps his smile back down and releases his hold on me, stepping back for good measure. “You need to get anything from baggage claim?” he asks, grabbing the handle of my bag along with his.

“I can get that,” I offer.

“I don’t mind,” he says.

As I follow him away from the crowded gate, I can’t stop staring at him. In awe that he’s here. In awe that he looks the same. Awed that this is real.

He glances down at me as we walk, his mouth twisting. One of my favorite things about Alex’s face has always been the way that it allows two disparate emotions to exist on it at the same time, and how legible those emotions have become to me.

Right now, that twist of his mouth is saying both amused and vaguely wary.

“What?” he says, in a voice that rides that same line.

“You’re just . . . tall,” I say.

He’s cut too, but commenting on that usually leads to embarrassment on his part, like having a gym body is somehow a personality flaw. Maybe to him it is. Vanity is something he was raised to avoid. Whereas my mom used to write little notes on my bathroom mirror in dry-erase marker: Good morning to that beautiful smile. Hello, strong arms and legs. Have a great day, lovely belly that feeds my darling daughter. Sometimes I still hear those words when I get out of the shower and stand in front of the mirror, combing my hair: Good morning, beautiful smile. Hello, strong arms and legs. Have a great day, lovely belly that feeds me.

“You’re staring at me because I’m tall?” Alex says.

“Very tall,” I say, as if this clears things up.

It’s easier than saying, I have missed you, beautiful smile. It’s so good to see you, strong arms and legs. Thank you, freakishly taut belly, for feeding this person I love so much.

Alex’s grin ripens to the point of splitting open as he holds my gaze. “It’s good to see you too, Poppy.”