"Eventually, you learn that your dreams are yours alone to push uphill."

Has anything good ever come after the words, “I have something to tell you”? This phrase, accompanied by its trusted partner, gloom, is so uniformly bad that if one day, by some act of God, it happened to be followed by something good, you would have to assume aliens with no clue about our cultural norms had conquered the world. But, of course, that hasn’t happened yet, so they’re still terrible.

One day, now over a year ago, my best friend Maggie started our lunch conversation in the break room with those words, and they were followed by, “I have brain cancer.”

The news nearly knocked me out of my seat. It was difficult to understand that a statement that important, indeed, life-changing, could be spoken in such a banal, lifeless place, the regular setting for conversations on cost optimizations and process efficiencies, complete with a framed watercolor of a beach that no one would ever enjoy. In response, I reacted like any scared child would—I asked questions and fell over my words, trying to understand.

“What kind, how long, when did you find out?”

Maggie told me with her steady, comforting hand over mine that she had been diagnosed with glioblastoma and would be dead by Spring.

My eyes fell to the tile floor, and my body shrank. I searched for a way to comfort her, but nothing came, so we sat in compassionate silence, which was better, I thought, than reciting platitudes. When her expression softened to apologize, I got up to give her a bear hug, teary-eyed and disoriented. And as we sat back down, we shared a moment of mystical understanding of how fast life can change.

In the days leading up to her death, we continued to do the things we always had. We hiked on the weekends, gossiped about who Mel was dating, and discussed my painting. At the time, I was working on an oil piece of a road sign outside one of our favorite trails, which originally read “Trail Below” but had been vandalized to now read “Blow Me.” I painted it with an American Robin perched at the top because the idea of a bird saying that to hikers was hilarious. Maggie laughed so hard she snorted when I showed her. We took her daughter out for a fancy Italian dinner of Gnocchi with oxtail ragu and went whale watching again to feel the water spray on our skin. There was no bucket list or calling on old loves, just a constant fear of the unknown that we shared, and time passed as it always does, leaving me wondering how I arrived there and where I would go next.

And, just as the doctors predicted, she died in April. I saw her last with her arms resting by her side in the hospital bed with a picture of us flexing our biceps at the top of Mount Si taped to the wall behind her, her daughter and ex-husband comforting each other in the hall.

I insisted on speaking at her funeral, even though I didn’t have anything specific to say other than I loved her, and she made my life full—a quality too often overlooked in a world obsessed with productivity and life hacks.

It was at the wake that I learned how much I didn’t know about my friend.

“How did you know her?” I asked a man with a shaved head and a red beard in the food line.

“We were both ambassadors. She was kind of my mentor.” He said, piling the pasta salad on his plate.

“Ambassadors?”

“For the World Wildlife Fund. She helped me run my first event—an Orca recovery day up on Whidbey.”

I looked at him blankly as he tried to find silverware and a napkin.

“I didn’t know Maggie was an ambassador. What do you do—I mean, what kind of group is it?”

“Mostly, it’s just people with normal lives who spend all their free time trying to get others to care about the Earth. It sounds romantic, but it’s a lot like pissing into the wind.”

We shared a grieving smile. Because of the circumstances, I could tell he was allowing himself a moment of cynicism.

After the conversation, I ambled through Maggie’s belongings arranged at a long dining room table in her ex-husband's house. It was here that more evidence of her life as an environmental activist appeared. One framed picture just beside the guestbook showed her standing on the steps of the Capital building with a pin that read “Wildlife Protector.” Another, in an ornamental red, post-war frame at the head of the table, showed her making a peace sign at a booth for the Puget Sound Restoration Project. Stacked in an open box along the wall were extra Salmon habitat restoration flyers, an old book on the wildlife of the Puget Sound, and a certificate of appreciation from the state of Washington’s Department of Ecology. At the end of the room, almost like she was keeping it safe, was her collection of whale-related items: old shirts and stickers, coffee table books on Humpbacks and Orcas, paperweights, and a decades-old faded blue mug that read “Save the Whales.” I knew she loved whales and cared about conservation, but all of this?

One day the following week, while playing Balloon Quest at work, I received a link to her obituary.

“A true original and a passionate supporter of the environment, Magdalene (Maggie) Willard lightened every person and place she touched. As a program director for the World Wildlife Fund based out of Seattle, she worked tirelessly to educate people on the effects of pollution, deforestation, and habitat loss. She spent her life protecting natural life in the many waterways of the Puget Sound and beyond. Nothing could brighten Maggie like the thought of being on the water next to one of her beloved Humpbacks. Like these acrobatic marvels, Maggie embodied a zest for life that will be dearly missed…”

Maggie! Six-one, I-only-get-my-haircut-once-a-year, snorts when she laughs, Maggie. The one I joked with about poorly baked work cupcakes and team-building events with magicians; the one that worked in accounts receivable for a real-estate firm in what was possibly the most tedious, mundane, and mind-numbing job imaginable—she was a hero.

A month passed, and I trudged through life. At first, I was resentful for losing a friend before her time, but this eventually passed and left me with a feeling of inspiration from her life and a vague sense of unease with my own. I lost the motivation to write weekly status reports and listen to my husband John ramble on about his latest obsession with constructing (and deconstructing) remote-controlled cars. One night at dinner, after throwing the plate of chicken and broccoli in front of him, I blurted out, “I’m taking some time off.”

John grabbed the salt and responded without looking up.

“Oh, how much?”
“I don’t know, probably a lot.” Ever since the funeral, I had felt a throbbing need to do something, anything really, that would expand my life and not shrink it: build a skyscraper, climb Everest, tunnel to the Earth’s core!

“Hmm,” John said, unconvinced, cutting his broccoli floret in two.

“It’s not like we can’t afford it,” I said impatiently. “And it’ll be good to get out of the grind.”

“What are you even going to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” by which I meant ‘anything other than sell office space.’

“I just want to keep sight of our goals, hon. You know we said we’d put the addition on early next year.”

Yeah, yeah, goals. I was sick of goals—they had their place, of course, but the way people deified them, especially my engineer husband, bled the soul dry of everything beautiful and mysterious. I was sick of practicality, sick of how nothing could be counted as valuable if it wasn’t from a spreadsheet. I wanted to do something impractical—something that made picking color swatches and planning for retirement seem like the useless tasks they were. I wanted to become the least practical person alive!

“I know. I will,” I finally said with a touch of regret. Eventually, you learn that your dreams are yours alone to push uphill.

Even with the fire under my butt, it took me a few days to decide what impractical thing I really wanted to do. I asked other Ambassadors about Maggie and combed through my pictures—there was a great one of us at the Journey concert with those giant thirty-dollar beers. As I heard stories and remembered our time together hiking, seeing shows, and getting lunch after spending time on the Sound, it became clear that my friend dedicated her life to one theme: caring about the natural world and helping humans understand how important it is. I decided to create something that would do the same.

A few nights later, I told John I was going on a road trip to a few national parks. It seemed like as good a story as any, and since it might actually happen, it wasn’t a complete lie.

I left with my duffle bag, a historical fiction novel titled Words and Drawings set in the Italian Renaissance, and a hard-shell, handheld carrying case for my painting supplies. I felt like an itinerant Bob Ross.

I drove northeast out of town on Route 2 toward the Wallace Falls hike that Maggie and I had taken so many times. As the subdivisions turned into walls of Western Hemlock and Douglas Fir, I stared out at the road. It was on this exact highway that I told her that there was more I wanted to do with my life, but I didn’t know how to start and that I was afraid it was too late. We talked about my relationship with Ellie and the time she stopped talking to me, and we talked about John and how he had become detached, which left me feeling profoundly lonely. At the end of our serious conversations, she always gave me a pat on the shoulder from the passenger seat. “Your best is good enough, Sue,” she would say with a warm smile.

Soon enough, I came to the billboard I had seen a hundred times. I slowed down to take a left into the gravel lot just below the sign, then got out and stared up at the giant eyeball magnet. The current ad was a picture of Smokey, but usually, it was a promotion for an accident attorney or low-cost dental implants. I walked around the back and found the name and address of the business that sold the space.

“How much to buy the billboard on Route 2?” I asked the young man at the front desk of Engage Communications, who was watching a video on his phone of two men in spandex pummeling each other.

“It’s 15 dollars a day,” he said.

I looked around. A cheap picture of Mt. Rainier hung slightly askew over a continental breakfast coffee machine and a few tired metal chairs.

“I was hoping to buy it, not rent it,” I said, with a knock on the veneer countertop.

“Oh,” the boy said. “I don’t know if you can do that. Let me get the manager.”

The manager was a bigger guy with a barn red flannel who looked like someone with an Axe-throwing hobby. He opened his mouth, and a surprisingly kind and polite greeting came out.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. What can I help you with?”

Maybe he wasn’t in the back planning an armed revolution after all.

“I’d like to buy the billboard on Route 2. The one just before you enter Gold Bar.”

“No problem, it’s fifteen dollars a day. I’m sure it’s available.”

“No, I’d like to buy it, like forever.”

“Forever?”

“Whatever that means,” I chuckled, and he scratched his head.

“Huh, well, we usually don’t do that.”

“I could pay you more than you make on it in ten years—that way, you don’t have to worry about selling it. Even better, eventually, I’ll be gone, and you’ll be able to make money from it again—I’ll even sign a disclaimer or waiver or whatever you need. I just want it there as long as possible with my work.”

“Your work?”

“I plan on painting a mural on it—a sort of tribute to a friend.”

“It’s nothing nasty, right?”

“Oh, no, of course not,” I laughed, imagining myself as a traveling smut artist.

The man thought about it, looking down at some of the brochures on the front desk. I pulled out my phone and did some math.

“At fifteen dollars a day, ten years is just under $55,000. I’ll give you sixty, and you can tell the owners that you deserve a vacation.”

He still wasn’t sure; he looked at me like it was a ruse. I knew what he was thinking—is this lady going to make me lose my job; is she another one of these latte-toting assholes from the city that can’t be bothered to move seats on a plane when a mother and child want to sit next to each other. I bowed my head slightly and found the man’s eyes.

“Sir, I promise you, I don’t mean you harm, and I don’t want to disrupt your business. This is just something I’m doing for myself. You have my word: I won’t cause any problems.”

And you know what, I don’t care if you think I’m some sort of childish dreamer, naïve and oblivious to the horrors of the world, but it made me feel pretty good that he lightened after I said that. I guess the avalanche of cynicism and cruelty hasn’t buried everyone yet.

“Alright then, you got yourself a billboard.” He slapped the countertop and began to pull up the account on the computer.

“Fantastic. I may need a day or two to get you the money, but I’ll sign whatever you need right now.”

That night, I liquidated one of my 401k plans, and it felt good to be reckless with it, to be doing instead of preparing. My entire life had been spent preparing—finance instead of art in college, cutlery and lamps instead of a trip for my wedding, and new floors for our anniversary instead of my studio. What good is money if it doesn’t help you do something you believe in?

I became the proud owner of a new billboard a few nights later, and to celebrate, I sat down with a glass of red wine in my motel room (paid in full for six months) to sketch. While experimenting with different ideas, a Maggie memory came to me. On a whale-watching tour once, she convinced the captain to let her steer the boat, and as a joke, because she had a mischievous sense of humor, she kept directing questions to me. “Humpbacks are just beautiful,” She exclaimed to the passengers, “and they’re known to breach, so keep a close eye out. Also, if you want to know the difference between breaching and flippering, just ask my friend Susan—she’s upfront, acting like she doesn’t want to be bothered.” She thought it was hilarious—it made me uncomfortable, but I never saw her as happy. So, I decided there at my motel desk to try and recreate that look in my art, the one that captured her justified amazement at our limitless Earth.

“We have, like, house paint. Is that what you mean?” The checkout clerk said at the hardware store, looking at me with an empty stare. He was cute—no older than twenty-five with a kind of hillbilly Patrick Swayze vibe—tall, scruffy, and accidentally charming. I smiled, hoping he would reciprocate.

“Not really. I’m painting a large mural outside, so I need something sturdy enough to hold up to the elements but nice enough to be in the living room. I’ll need a bunch of different colors, too. So, I’ll probably need to mix some custom ones.”

“That’ll be kind of expensive.”

“That’s fine,” I said with turned-down eyes like I was back in high school. Jesus, Susan!

“Well, I can help. Dylan, watch the register.” He yelled to the back room.

As he showed me the different options, I explained what I was doing.

“Seems crazy,” he said, trying to think of the right thing to say, “but it sounds like a real nice way to remember your friend.”

I caught his eyes, naked in the paint aisle.

“Thanks,” I replied.

“My name’s Mason. You can ask for me next time you come back—you’ll definitely need more help,” he laughed.

“I’m Sue, I appreciate that.”

Eager to start, I drove to the site and hauled a bucket of paint up the ladder but quickly realized I was going to need way more than my supplies to work; I couldn’t even reach the top of the canvas. Driving back to the hardware store, I got a good chuckle at how clueless I knew I would look walking back in. Sure enough, when Mason saw me, he didn’t even try to hold back the smile.

“Yeah, I can set something up,” he said, laughing. “I’ll be by after work. It’s not like I do anything useful around here anyway.”

And that’s how I set up my painting scaffold.

On the first actual day of work, I got up early and took it slow. I sipped my coffee while eating fried eggs and hash browns at Goodall’s diner and stared out the window at the families piling out of their vans in the parking lot. It felt like I was setting out to climb Everest without the sherpa (was that Mason?) or any of the training. After breakfast, I sat behind my steering wheel in silence, wondering if this was the start of some meaningful new chapter or some silly, wild-eyed goal that would just end up making me feel worse for not finishing.

It was still foggy when I climbed the twenty feet up to my perch. While preparing, I decided that my mural would include any threatened animal or place, not just Maggie’s whales, so my first task was the African Elephant in the top left. Native to the Congo Basin, I learned they are in sharp decline due to the ivory trade and habitat loss. In the pictures I found, their eyes were the star of the show since they reminded me of Maggie’s warmth —weary but wise, ancient and kind. I planned to paint two of them walking toward me from a grassland behind the billboard.

I pried open the cans of damp cement and sand, placed them on my seat that Mason had constructed, and started the outline around the eye. I ran my brush along the canvas, focused and unrushed. I created the creases that fanned out from the dark oval window of the eye and began to give shape to the old burlap sack skin of the elephant’s rocky skull. Inching my way across the top, I gave the body texture so people driving by knew they were seeing something alive.

An hour or so later, as I began the ear, I felt a strange tingling in my chest, like my heart had started pumping Pop Rocks instead of blood. It must have been a little past ten, so I told myself I just needed more coffee, but the sensation persisted. The next moment, I reached down for another dab of paint and noticed I was floating. By this, I don’t mean that it felt like I had just met my soul mate outside of a library in a Hallmark movie—I mean, I was levitating! I panicked and grabbed the ropes on either side of my seat, letting out a scream, then gripped the sides with a force that could have crushed a baseball. The air circulated through my legs as I took deep breaths. I moved, then stayed as still as a corpse, then repeated the process a hundred times to test my abilities. Once it was clear I wasn’t going to fall to my death, I kept painting above the traffic, floating like a lost star.

I painted the next day and the day after that, and on and on until I forgot I had a life outside the billboard. For weeks, I painted as a floating statue above the road bikers pedaling in formation. A couple of times a faded red truck pulled over to stare at me working, which made me feel nervous, but the driver eventually flicked a cigarette out the window and drove off. I painted for Maggie, and I painted for myself. The power—whatever it was—washed away my expectations for the piece, which meant the work was pure joy.

Even with the ability to fly and a newfound youthful energy, the work wasn’t all winning lottery tickets—my tribute to Maggie was also stubborn in its bleakness. After my elephant, I painted many, and found even more, species and places that humans had left for dead on the side of the road. Just to the right of the Elephants, I created a view of the dense tree cover of the Amazon, more of which was being clear-cut every day. Below the Amazon, I painted a Coral reef—vibrant, colorful, and full of life that is being stripped away by overfishing, pollution, and climate change. I painted monarch butterflies with their regal, almost hallucinatory, orange wings and bees clustering in front of a hive. I painted a Polar Bear, Sea Turtles, a giant melting glacier, Panda Bears, Nepalese Tigers, giant Sequoias, Conifer trees that had been cleared for a road, Northern White Rhinos, Rocket Frogs, Petrals, a Great Ape, Dung Beetles, Snow Leopards, Caribou, Salmon, a Pacific Walrus, a Spotted Owl, Arctic Foxes, Red-Naped Sapsuckers, Rockhopper Penguins along with their arctic buddies the Puffins, and one of my personal favorites, Sea Otters. I found so many living things on the verge of extinction that it became difficult to create a portrait that didn’t feel like reading an encyclopedia about a prehistoric time that had already passed. In painting what scientists are now calling the sixth great extinction, I couldn’t help but wonder, what the hell are we going to be left with? Is our world just going to be Walmarts and Exxon stops silhouetted against a horizon of trash and concrete?

One day, well into the second half of my mural, while I was cleaning my brushes late in the afternoon, Mason checked in on me with a sandwich. It was sweet, and I blushed when I saw the paper bag in his hand.

“How’s it going up there?” he yelled on a sunny afternoon. He was wearing his khaki work pants with the tool strap and a grey hardware store polo shirt with a stretched-out neck.

“Just fine, come on up and take a look.”

The tarp was covering the half of the board that I had already finished, and it flapped as I came down off my perch. Mason clapped his hands against his pants and lifted the cover to get a look.

“Damn! This is…it’s amazing,” he said, trying to make out all the animals.

I looked toward him, my brush in hand, and I could tell he was looking at the details of the butterfly wings, trying to figure out how I made them look like they were flapping. For a brief second, he noticed the lines, not the picture—which always feels good.

“How’s your summer going,” I offered as I dropped my brush in the cleaning bucket.

“Alright, I guess—I’m still trying to find a new job.”

I took a second to take my mind away from the painting.

“Oh,” I said, surprised at hearing that a personal topic had been breached. “What kind, what are you thinking?”

“Maybe some kind of internet work? But I don’t really know. All I know is I can’t work at that hardware store forever.”

I could tell he had had a tough day, and I knew he wasn’t fishing for advice, but I jumped anyway. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” He gave a defeated shrug.

“That’s alright, I don’t either. Do you really think anybody does?”

He thought about it for a moment.

“Can I take you to dinner? I never got a chance to thank you for all of this, and if you want, I can help you try to figure it out, but no pressure.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, still staring at the wings of the Monarch.

We went to Carson’s for dinner and sat at the bar where I lied and said that no, I hadn’t gotten takeout from there, which he knew wasn’t the truth when I ordered without looking at the menu. He told me he loved building stuff but had never been a good student. There was no way he could go to school now—it was too late, he said. His sisters were the smart ones, and he always assumed he would end up putting in drywall, which didn’t sound bad, but still. I related to the feeling that life was telling him he should do something different but also to wait for the right time, and I wanted to tell him to hell with that, but I didn’t want to come off heavy-handed. I was also a bit drunk, so I had flashes of him without his shirt on more than once.

“You could get an engineering degree?” I said, finishing up my roasted chicken with saucy potatoes.

“You think?”

“Sure, why not? It’s hard work, but it seems like you’re up for it. You don’t have kids or anything, right?”

“Ha, no kids,” He turned his head to the baseball game on the television.

“Why don’t I find some local associates programs around here, and you can check em’ out?”
“Oh, ok,” he said with a sip of his beer.

Then we talked about me. He already knew I had a daughter, so I told him how I had come to live in my Seattle suburb and manage a team in charge of selling corporate real estate. We talked about how, now that my daughter was away and my best friend was gone, I felt like I wanted to fall into the deep end, to paint and travel and own an art supply store that was also a coffee shop, but like everyone, I was afraid of losing the life I had built and unsure if it sounded stupid and childish. He kept interjecting with these crazy middle-school questions about my favorite things. Favorite movie: When Harry Met Sally; although anything crime-related, maybe LA confidential, was a close second. Proudest Achievement: My daughter. Favorite place I had traveled to: I hadn’t done as much as I wanted, but Hawaii.

“Not bad, not bad,” he would say after each answer with a nod.

He drove me back to the motel, and I invited him in, not knowing exactly what I was doing. We fumbled over our words for a minute, and I threw my jacket on the corner chair. And before I even knew what had happened, we had sex. Can you believe that? What the hell was I thinking? What a cliché. What would Maggie say? She would probably have applauded it—she had a bit of a wild streak. It was good, though: he loved it, I loved it, and it just felt so good to have someone interested in me. Thankfully, he didn’t ask to stay the night or take me out to breakfast or anything ridiculous like that.

***

July came and went. I spent my days painting while Mason, after a bit of convincing, prepared for the fall semester at Shoreline Community College. At a not entirely accidental pace, he checked in on me with food and beers at the billboard. He played Led Zeppelin from his truck while we discussed Joni Mitchell, reality TV, and bad bosses. There was one more night at the motel before we both decided it shouldn’t happen again.

I continued to work on the painting with a kind of determination and ferocity that I previously thought was reserved for brain surgeons and people trying to diffuse bombs. I floated through all of it, posing in disco moves and swan dives, laughing at gravity like a kid on a trampoline. As much as you can get used to defying the laws of physics, I did. And Maggie was with me the whole time, which I know sounds like something you’d hear from a psychic with purple hair, but it was true. Each time I was about to take a wrong stroke, my hand corrected itself, and the mistake became a signature.

The last section of the billboard was dedicated to Maggie’s whales. She and I had been whale watching several times, and once, when a Humpback happened to breach, I asked her why she loved them so much. “They sing, they leap out of the water like a synchronized swimmer, and they swim across the world just to eat—show me a human that can do one of those things, and I’d be impressed,” she said. I remembered her wise smile, half illuminated by the sun peeking through the overcast sky. “Also, they look like grumpy old stodges but move like gazelles. What better example is there that life is what you make it.”

So, to finish, I painted a giant Humpback whale named Magdalene. I reduced the scale of nearly all the other animals and places in my piece because I wanted people to understand the breadth of what was happening to the Earth, but Magdalene had her own section! I painted Maggie riding on her with a royal blue Save the Whales shirt, waving to me and anyone who would take the time to look at the details—it was an excellent wink and a promise I made to myself to live with her vigor.

Toward the end of August, I was finishing up the waves below Magdalene’s tail, with Mason up top next to me, when that same old Chevy truck pulled into the gravel lot below. The back window had a giant white cross sticker that read “Jesus Saves.”

“Hey, up there,” The driver yelled after flicking a cigarette and getting out. He was a stout man with a black trucker hat and an erratic lean caused by his gut.

“Hi,” I called back, turning around in my seat to greet him.

A punchy, ratty little Igor emerged from the passenger side.

“Interesting project you got here,” The driver said, tilting his body to look straight up at my work.

“Thanks,” feeling that he wasn’t really complimenting me.

“We heard you’re doing something environmental—some sort of protest?” He yelled.
“We did hear,” the lackey repeated as he spit tobacco into an empty energy drink can.

I didn’t know how to respond, but I also wasn’t in the mood to accommodate petty hate.

“That’s right. It’s actually more of a tribute piece, but you could say it’s for the environment, too.”

“Is there some sort of problem?” Mason said, leaning over the platform's railing as the first wave of nighttime air coursed through the trees.

“Well,” the driver said, staring at me without a blink. “It’s just that I work for a mining company, and we know what you environmental types are like.”

I laughed to myself, incredulous that this man didn’t seem to know he was living as the rapist from a '70s crime drama.

“Uh-huh, and what are we like?” I said, crossing my arms. Mason watched closely as they inched forward.

“Just seems like that billboard doesn’t really belong here.” The man yelled up.

I was surprisingly calm for how aggressive he was, but I felt invincible up on my perch. “Look, we aren’t bothering anyone. Why don’t you go back to drinking yourself to death in some bar,” I said. I had no intention of moving.

“It’s no joke, lady,” he said in a severe tone.

We stared at each other for a moment, then I turned back to my work, hoping they would disappear.

Half a minute later, I heard Mason yell. “What the hell are you doing?”

I felt a pull on my arm and jumped down from my seat. As soon as I was on the platform, I looked down to see the lackey lighting a couple of old cloths stuffed inside beer bottles. Then, I heard the first bottle fly through the air a moment later. Before Mason or I could even get to the ladder, one of the bottles landed on the metal scaffolding at the foot of the billboard. My paint!

I rushed back to try and grab the cans so they wouldn’t ignite, and Mason began to move toward the ladder. I heard the stout man yell, “C’mon, Derek, let’s get out of here!”

As their doors slammed, I heard the fire catch the bottom part of the canvas. The crackling was just loud enough to make us both feel like we were about to be trapped in a burning house, so I dropped what I had and went toward the ladder. Mason looked up toward me as I was getting on the first rung and lost his concentration. His foot slipped, still fifteen feet up, and before I could try and help him, he tumbled off the ladder and hit the ground with a thud.

“How much of it did they save?” Mason asked me from the hospital bed two days later.

“Most of it,” I lied with a gentle smile.

Mason had just woken up and could only look at me with hazy, drugged eyes. His body was being held in place by a complex system of braces and pulleys. “You know, I told your parents you were delivering supplies.”

“That’s not a lie,” he said. He turned his body over to face me with a scared and frustrated groan.

“I know,” I said, wiping a tear from my eye. “Mason…”

I didn’t know how to tell him. I didn’t know how to say how sorry I was, how much regret I already had, but I couldn’t stay—there was no reason. He had his future, and now that I realized that life isn’t about fulfilling other people’s expectations, I had mine. It was better to rip the band-aid off before he got resentful and started yelling.

“Mason, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am and…well, I think I need to leave.”

“You mean like leave town?

“Yes”

“What, why?”

“Here, I got you something.”

I opened my card and held it up so he could read it. The note told him that after he left the hospital, he had my remaining retirement and a good chunk of my savings to return to school and start whatever life he wanted. He shut his eyes.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I think I do. And Mason, can I tell you something that has taken me fifty-five years to learn?”

“Sure,” he said, already angry.

“Now is the time,” I said. “Yesterday doesn’t exist, and tomorrow is a lie. Remember that when you get out of this bed.”

I touched him on the shoulder gently and walked out.