Stir by Jessica Fechtor Page A

with my fists.
    â€œYou have to calm down,” my father said gently, but I couldn’t. For the first time since I’d fallen from the treadmill, I cried with all my might. Eli was with me on the bed now. I flung myself at him, tucked myself into a ball on his lap with my knees up under my chin and my face pressed into his chest. Then, out of nowhere, a riptide of gratitude.
    â€œI am the luckiest,” I croaked into Eli’s T-shirt between ragged breaths. “I have everything. I am the luckiest one.”
    Before Eli left for the night he leaned in close to my head, a changed landscape with its ear-to-ear stitches along a strip of bald scalp, its temples swollen and bruised. I knew the forehead kiss was coming, but the nerves had been cut. I couldn’t feel his lips at all.

CHAPTER 12
Plotting, Together
    â€œM ake sure you get a window seat on the left side of the plane,” Eli told me. He’d been living in Seattle for two months, and I was flying out to visit him for the first time. He wanted me to see Mt. Rainier as the plane passed by. I was afraid I would miss it, so once we crossed the Mississippi, I barely peeled my eyes from the window. You get far enough west, and lots of mountaintops pop up through the clouds. I wasn’t sure I’d know which one was Rainier. Eli assured me that I would.
    Truly, there was no mistaking it. The peak was enormous, grand, snow swept, catching the light along its slopes and grooves. The contours of the rock appeared sketched and shaded in with pencil. In fact, the whole mountain seemed drawn, painted, the backdrop for a movie set. Framed by my tiny bubble of a window it looked like something I could hold in my hand.
    Eli picked me up from the airport and we drove to the little apartment he’d found in Capitol Hill. It was our first time really alone, ever. This visit would be our last before I moved to England for graduate school, and we were determined to make the most of it. We wandered from Eli’s place down to Pike Place Market and ate Beecher’s grilled cheese sandwiches by Puget Sound. We climbed to the top of the water tower in Volunteer Park, then snacked on chocolate-covered cherries in the grass. My dad had given me an old fully manual film camera for college graduation, and I shot my first rolls on that trip. While Eli was at work, I wandered the neighborhood, grateful for the weight of the camera around my neck and the click, whirr, click that told me I was indeed right there.
    At the end of my stay, we hiked up along the White Chuck River and spent a few days camping near Glacier Peak. I awoke in our tent on the first morning to find Eli peering out at me over the top of his sleeping bag.
    â€œI’m thinking about the ring I want to make for you,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
    I didn’t know what to say, or what to do with myself, so I pulled the sleeping bag closed over my face, curled up like a potato bug, and butted him in the shoulder with my head. Then I poked my face out, and we lay there for a while in silence, listening to the rain on the leaves.
    I was so glad for that visit. This way, I could picture Eli in his space, doing his thing, as I scratched off phone cards from half a world away. When I thought of Eli, I thought of Seattle, and vice versa. I’d travel back there a few times over the next two years, first from England, and then from Israel, where I lived during my second year abroad. And when I finally bought a one-way ticket back to the U.S.A., it was to Seattle. The city already felt like home.
    I’ve often felt as though Seattle were in on some kind of secret back then, a secret about who we were, who we would become, and the life that would be ours. Seattle is the city where Eli learned how to climb mountains (he’d summit Mt. Rainier years later), how to build big things out of wood, and where I ran my first 5K. It’s where we started plotting, together, the