Page 11 of Anywhere with You

Cara watched me from the bottom, grinning under her massive sun hat.

I wiggled. I ducked low to be more streamlined. I was moving, picking up a little speed as I went down, but nothing like I’d imagined. I could’ve leisurely drunk an espresso on the way down without spilling a drop.

“I just realized that all my sledding expectations come from cartoon characters sledding in the snow,” I said as I neared the bottom.

Cara tilted her head. “You’ve never gone sledding in the snow?”

“In Houston? I managed to build a six-inch-tall snowman. Once.”

“No, obviously not in Houston, Honey,” she said, exasperated again. It was amazing how easily I could exasperate her. I just had to be myself.

“My family never vacationed much,” I said, “and I guess I kept up the tradition.”

Cara shook her head. “Honey, if we don’t kill each other by the end of this, we’ll spend fall break in the Rocky Mountains.”

“Cara Espinoza,” I said, standing and lifting the sled. “It’s a date.” I tilted the sled toward her. “Your turn?”

“For that roller coaster? You bet.”

Cara ran up the dunes in her sandals, and I followed her, grinning.

At the top, I held the sled while she sat cross-legged inside. Then I pushed her. Hard.

In my defense…I can’t think of an acceptable excuse for my behavior, and I’m sure Cara would agree that it was uncalled for. I just thought of her grinning at my snail-slow descent, and I pushed.

She didn’t have a firm grip on the edge of the sled, and as it slid forward, she tilted backward. She flipped off the back, and when she landed, she just kept rolling, her shoes flying off, her sundress bunching around her waist, showing off lacy white panties.

I stood for a moment in shock as she tumbled down toward the bottom of the dune. Then I ran as fast as I could, slipping and landing on my ass in the sand repeatedly.

She reached the bottom, sat up, and looked at me racing down after her with the horror I felt clear in my face.

I felt a little better, just seeing her move.

I’d already started to fast-forward to a hospital room where a doctor explained that the spinal injury was likely permanent, and it would be my responsibility to feed her for the rest of her life because I’d pushed her down the goddamned dune like an attempted murderer.

Cara watched me descend. Her sun hat had flown off somewhere, and the fine sand stuck to her arms and legs and face.

Then she laughed, pulling her sundress back down. “Let’s do it again,” she called out.

Before I could reach her, she was racing to where the sled had landed. She lifted it over her head and started climbing as fast as she could back to the top.

I stood for a moment, my heart still racing, listening to her laugh. I’d expected her to shout at me. I’d thought of Cara as the uptight one, the one who cared whether her sock drawer was organized, but I may have been wrong.

The sound of her laughter was better than music. It was permission to sweep the eggshells out from under my feet.

Without wanting to, I thought of Bridget, of how any misstep of mine on the dance floor had surely broken her toe, of how any accident, however small, meant the end of the fun for her, meant leaving parties early, especially if they were parties with my friends, meant that she needed painkillers and an ice pack and a quiet room, so I could sleep on the couch.

I hated that couch. We’d bought it together when she moved in, and I’d never thought about it, but suddenly, I hated it with more passion than any piece of furniture had a right to spark in me. It was hideous—striped, hard, and narrow.

I followed Cara to the top, and this time I asked, “Holding on tight?”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to actually push you hard?”

“Yes.”

“And I’m sorry.”

For a moment, Cara sat with her hands gripped onto the edge, her dark hair a tangled, sandy mess.

Then she said, “I think I can trust you to see when I need to be pushed. Does that make sense?”

I wasn’t sure that it did. But I pushed anyway.

As she slid down the hill, faster than I had but not actually very fast, she leaned into the slide and laughed all the way down.

I grinned at her, and when she reached the bottom, she started climbing back up, yelling, “Your turn!”

When we had each taken a dozen turns sledding, we took a water break, then decided to explore.

Honestly, I hadn’t looked around much when we arrived. Sledding had been my top priority.

I hadn’t known that I was missing the view.

Mountains, blue in the distance, surrounded the sands, and there was nothing between here and there but those pristine white dunes and the occasional spiky bush or patch of brown, dry-looking grass.

“We could walk for days and not get to the edge,” Cara said, her voice soft in the breeze. “It’s technically a desert, but there’s no desert in the world quite like it.”

I heard her words and let them settle over me. I was truthful when I said that my family never traveled much. We couldn’t afford it. And once I was an adult, each rare windfall had gone into savings for the store.

My parents had started traveling again once they retired, just a little, and I’d found myself strangely jealous. I did want to see the world, and I didn’t really want to wait until my knees hurt before I could.

But in my mind, seeing the world meant buying a thousand-dollar plane ticket out of the country, seeing Abbey Road, Musikverein in Vienna, and Seoul, the birthplace of K-pop.

I’d been to the SXSW music festival in Austin, but it hadn’t occurred to me that a place as unique as White Sands could be so near, that there was so much seeing the world I could do in a little over a day’s drive.

The sun was setting when we remembered to record a Mesmio reel.

By that time, we were exhausted and sweaty, but we still looked excellent on camera in the golden light.

Cara was a shade darker in complexion, her eyes brighter, but when I looked at myself on the screen, I was surprised to see how widely I was smiling, how alive my eyes looked, too.

Cara shared a few fun facts, then added in a clip of me taking one last spinning sled trip down the highest dune we’d found.

We took some time brushing sand off and out of our clothes and hair when we got back to the car. Neither of us liked the idea of carrying any of it with us through the days of travel ahead.

We opened the cooler and grabbed snacks and drinks for the next part of the drive. Cara opened her tenth bag of popcorn, white cheddar this time. It smelled like last week’s socks, but she seemed happy, so I didn’t complain.

“How far is the hotel for tonight?” I asked, trying but not succeeding in keeping the whine from my voice. If it was going to be another late night, I was going to struggle to stay awake for my driving shift.

“Twenty miles,” she said. “And there’s fast food on the way.”

“Bless you,” I said, “and just for that, you can have the first shower.”

“I can have it first tonight because you had it first last night,” she corrected.

“Fine. Reject my generosity. Just feed me soon.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she said and started the car.