Range of Light by Valerie Miner

whole new life.”
    â€œI just went away to school,” I repeated, flabbergasted.
    Deliberately, she continued, “You know, this is a funny country. You grow up with someone, go to school together, hang out, assume you have the same options. Then a few years later they come back with a Ph.D., a BMW and a new accent. And you’re still looking for a steady job.”
    â€œI intended to come back. Remember how we were going to be neighbors and baby-sit for each other?” Despite the anxiety in my gut, I had to smile at our precisely timed life blueprint. Nowadays there seemed to be no time left because I had lost the youthful sense that there was a time for everything. I felt Sari’s death now, as I always felt it in California. Why had I thought I’d be able to avoid it this time? Because Kath was with me, because we could rewrite the whole scene together, resurrect her from the dead? All these years later it was hard to admit that I couldn’t have stopped her. It was Sari’s death, Sari’s suicide, Sari’s exit from the family. Perhaps I could even feel grateful for her that she had found a way out.
    â€œI left my family.” I stopped, struggling to hold Kath in my gaze. “I didn’t leave California. I didn’t leave you.”
    â€œLeaving is an action.” Kath’s eyes grew wide. “It’s not an idea. You can’t pick your audience.”
    I concentrated on not crying. If I abandoned anyone it had been Sari.
    â€œLook, Del, I’m really, really sorry about what happened to your sister. It was tragic.” She walked faster now, speaking into the wind, and it was difficult to hear. “I liked Sari a lot. It was a terrible waste. And so hard on you!”
    I stared at her expectantly. The wrong note, for Kath did not like demands. “Yes,” I said simply, concealing the degree of my wanting before it was too late.
    She looked behind her at the trail and continued. “Still, long before her death, you were gone for good. Once you went to your Ivy League college, you were on your way up and out.”
    I could see Kath trying to hold herself back, but the banks had crumbled. “You made your choice.”
    Her words were a fist in my stomach.
    â€œDon’t you understand? Don’t you see, I was leaving home. I wasn’t leaving you .”
    â€œHome.” Kath glanced out at the stream as we walked over the bridge. “Wasn’t I part of home to you? A close friendship—‘a best friendship’—and you walked away.”
    â€œKath, be reasonable.”
    â€œI guess friends aren’t that important. People have lifetime attachments to their parents, spouses, kids. But friends are expendable.”
    â€œFor Christ’s sake,” I shouted into the mountains that now seemed to surround us like shadowy judges, “I just went to college.”
    She persisted with infuriating calm. “You just went to find yourself a new life.”
    She was right, of course, although I still pretended not to understand. I had left Kath. And I had left the West. I was a deserter in the undeclared civil war. Lou thought Western identity was a joke, but to Kath and me California was nourishment and refreshment. I had never been sympathetic to patriotism, but I had always felt remorse about leaving the West. Remorse when Canadians complained about their friends defecting to the United States, when the Scots talked about the brain drain to England. In Boston, I inveighed against the provincialism of Easterners, but Kath was right, I had become one of them. Tonight I was too tired, too angry, too petty to tell her I understood this, that I was sorry, that I didn’t know what else I could have done. Instead, I declared, “Well, how about your disappearing act?”
    A jay barked loudly from the stand of lodgepole pines. Those Steller’s jays were notorious camp robbers, but I loved their sauciness