three scenes and a coda

i.

When we were kids, I just thought that she was shy. Almost every kid is rambunctious and loud and pushes boundaries — okay, fine; I was that way, and like most kids, I just assumed everyone was like me, deep down inside — and while Lyn actually wasn’t any of those things, it wasn’t that weird to me that she preferred the quiet and the outdoors and that she didn’t really want to play cops and robbers and endless tag.

I wouldn’t even have known her except that her mom was on the PTA board, and my dad was trying really hard to get elected. We ended up spending a bit of time together from age six onwards, and while it is true that all those lazy afternoons and weekends were filled with all the usual nonsense that kids do… it was mostly a group of friends doing the things and her staring out into the untamed woods behind our development of neat, tidy houses.

Looking back on it now, even though she never really played with us, she never turned down an offer to hang out - I think she appreciated the company, even if she didn’t want to participate. I wouldn’t have known that she even cared - or that she was special - until the creek incident.

That was the first time that I said it to her, before I had any idea what it would mean.

ii.

It was probably more obvious that she was weird as a teenager, but, honestly, who isn’t weird in high school? Even the quarterback (a bonafide stamp collector!) and the head cheerleader (do you know how much spy x family paraphernalia she has?) have their quirks; they just get elided over in favor of the more standard label.

I had mine (we’re not getting into that now), and she, of course, had hers. Of course, I understand now that it’s not actually normal to shy away from iron like she did when we were doing softball in gym and she refused to go near the fences, but she mumbled something about being backed into a corner and that kinda made sense.

And you can’t even tell me that you know what St. John’s Wort is; there definitely wasn’t a single kid in our high school that could. Flowers aren’t exactly a required subject matter, so the fact that she turned green around the gills when Amanda Possny wore a garland of them - brought back from Ireland, of course - wasn’t exactly screaming ‘something is wrong here’.

Honestly, part of it is that she was weird but she was our weird. She had grown up with us and we might have ostracized her more for her coldness or for her demeanor if it wasn’t obvious that she just saw everyone and cared. You know? Yeah, the creek, of course, but I mean she cared about everything. Everything. Jason, and his terrible haircut - she said a few words and it made him feel better. When Louise’s mom was in the hospital, I swear Lyn said more words to comfort her than she had the entire summer. And the menagerie of animals or whatever that she seemed to be taking care of.

A lot of people say that they care. Even the ones that do, though, have a limited capacity for empathy, because how can you care about everything and everyone? There are starving children here and there are dying children there and there’s just so much - no one can hold it all in them.

But I think she could. Or at least, from what I could see of her, she did. she didn’t stop caring simply because it was hard and she didn’t prioritize only people she knew; she simply cared about everyone and everything. and it didn’t break her, though it should have, and that, more than anything else, was a sign that she was different.

I asked her once about it. Junior year, a week or two before prom. I think my exact - and extremely eloquent, mind you - words were “why do you give a shit about all of it?”

I was expecting a ‘someone has to’ or a ‘what do you mean’ or some other reasonable response from a sixteen year old. What I wasn’t expecting was her to look at me in a way that I don’t know that I’ve ever been studied so intently; less a deer in the headlights and more Gollum under the eye of Sauron, you know? I didn’t know it was possible to see someone the way she saw me, that afternoon.

“Don’t you?” she asked, and sixteen year old me said the only thing you can say in a situation like that. But the truth is that I did care. Lyn was kind of like the sun; you couldn’t spend that much time with her in your orbit - or perhaps, you in hers - without having the effect of her light upon you.

I said the words a second time to her that night, and even though I didn’t know what it meant, she did.

iii.

A force of nature is how I described her in college, a wandering star in the night sky, leaving behind a blazing trail, sometimes harsh, but always illuminating.

She was twenty six when she came by to my ‘office’ - a not-very-nice cubicle in the not-very-nice Manhattan Public Defender’s Office, filled with not-very-nice people. I hadn’t seen her after high school, and really hadn’t seen her much after that conversation we had, though the grapevine always had tidbits of her latest and greatest accomplishments. Turns out, when you meet Amal Clooney and you defend human rights and the environment and refugees, it’s hard not to be in the news.

Lyn had come to tell me that her time was up - that it was time to return. She didn’t specify where, and I remember being flabbergasted that she would simply walk back into my life like that, after making it abundantly clear that she wanted nothing to do with me. But I had some experience with heartache and heartbreak by then, and instead of raging or confronting her, I let my emotions settle, and asked her about her work had been, instead.

Three hours later, we were sitting in a park and it was like we had never spent any time apart. We fell into the same patterns we always had, and I don’t think either of us was surprised when I reached out and her hand slipped into mine as we stood.

“You shouldn’t follow me,” she said, in the same tone Rick told Isla that they’ll always have Paris. A goodbye, a thank you, a so long.

She squeezed my hand, and let go, and she walked forward, onto the lawn. Onto a perfect little ring of mushrooms, and she looked at me, and smiled that beautiful smile of hers, and she vanished.

That was the last time that she was seen in this world, of course, as you and I and every other person in central park that saw it knows.

iv.

I’ll spare you the public craze and the news articles and the government investigations and the despondency that I felt afterwards. You can read about it, if you so choose.

I’ll leave you with this, which took me a stupidly long time to realize: she didn’t say that I couldn’t follow her. She said that I shouldn’t. And I learned one thing in all my studies: they are all very, very precise in their words.

And that to say something three times is a binding.