The Reunion by Bryan Vale
The three of them arrived one at a time, holding out their arms to each other as they exited their cars. It was a hot day, a sunny day, a smoke-free day in suburban Pleasant Hill, and the heat rebounding off the grey-white sidewalk made sweat trickle down their arms. Earrings jingled as they moved to a table in the shade; early arriver Megan had already reserved the table with a blended frozen drink, the plastic exterior of which was dripping.
Coffees ordered, they sat in silence for a moment and let the cars roll past on the boulevard. They had much to talk about, but it could wait a moment.
"It's too bad Janice couldn't make it." Ella's thoughtful voice broke the table's silence.
Megan and Mell nodded. "It wasn't likely, but I thought it was worth inviting her at least," said Megan.
"She doesn't go out much now, right?"
"She doesn't go out at all."
"Ah."
"She's, like, a shut-in."
They sat with this for a minute.
"And Lizbeth? She's really going to stay in Nevada?" This from Mell.
Megan nodded. "She's there for the long term. She told me that she and Erik were making offers on houses. On houses. Maybe I should move out there too."
Ella sipped her coffee. "So it's not really a real reunion, then."
"No. It couldn't be."
"No."
Around the corner from their shaded table, a trio of teenage boys entered the coffee shop's glass doors. They laughed and playfully shoved each other as they went in, neglecting to hold the door for the middle-aged woman exiting with a tiny Chihuahua clutched to her chest. A car started and backed out of its spot. The high sun cast dark, squat shadows and nobody wore a mask.
****
Just over two years previously, all five of them, the now-absent Lizbeth and Janice included, received a graduation announcement in the mail from Ella's younger sister Samantha. Samantha, proclaimed the announcement, was graduating from college, a real college, not a community college or a certification program but a college with dorms and sports teams and wide grassy quadrangles and lecture halls full of hungover fraternity brothers. She was almost the only one any of them knew to do it. Ella's prom date had gone to UCLA (although she could not remember if he ever finished) and Lizbeth's cousin had disappeared to a liberal arts school on the East Coast, but the rest of them had been workers (or moochers) since their own high school graduations. So it was notable, to be sure, Samantha not just going to college but working her way through, and paying for it herself.
But the graduation announcement was just that: an announcement. Not an invitation. There would be no graduation ceremony. Only a "drive-through," in which friends and family would be allowed to drive their vehicles onto the university campus until they reached the rim of the amphitheater, where they could watch, safely removed, while their masked and robed graduate walked across an almost-empty stage to receive their diploma from a masked and robed faculty member. All from afar. They would, presumably, be allowed to take pictures for Instagram.
Done now with binging four or five Netflix reality series, done with Zoom calls and bread baking and Tiger Kings, done now with home or apartment or bedroom reorganizations and outdoor rendezvous, Megan had an idea.
****
"I was losing my mind just being in my apartment or going to the park," said Megan, commenting in the present as they sat around the coffeeshop table. "Any excuse, anything, I was just like, get me out of here!"
"We had some really great picnics, though," said Mell wistfully. "Remember when we went to those hills and finished the whole handle of vodka? And Lizbeth made that fancy cheese plate?"
****
Megan's idea, as texted to Ella: "Why don't we just GO."
Ella: "Okay. But could my roommate come? Since we both have to quarantine anyway?"
So they were three, and then quickly became five, as Megan's own roommates also wanted any excuse to get out of their environment and roam. Just for a while.
It would be not merely a drive, but a road trip, as Samantha's school was over 500 miles away in sprawling San Diego. And they would have to make sacrifices for it. Two weeks of pre-quarantine. Possibly two weeks of quarantining after. Saving up money in advance to cover gas, hotels, food, booze, and the rest of it. Sleeping in sleeping bags not beds, to save money on hotel rooms. Spare masks stuffed under each seat, just in case. And the days of tight quarters, the five of them pressed together in a sedan (they would take turns in the back middle seat, it was decided).
And as long as they were going to all this trouble, they might as well turn it into a real road trip. See the places they had never seen or could not normally go to. And after some fierce debate (intensified by the stress of two weeks of quarantine), it was decided that each of them could pick one sight or destination. Making five sights or destinations total, not counting the San Diego graduation.
So Megan, Ella, Lizbeth, Mell, and Janice got into a Honda CR-V and started driving...
****
...The road rolls beneath the tires like a just-discovered scroll. Sunlight strains eyes but illuminates the landscape of scrubby bushes atop sloping hills, rough clifftops, shoreline sand dunes. Their car is one of the few on the interstate. They can speed, change lanes, select exits and pull over with impunity. The world is theirs. The wind comes in through the gap in the barely open passenger-side window. Their hair blows in it. There is no one to see their messiness or hear their booming soundtrack, Doja Cat and Lizzo...
They surprise Samantha at the graduation. They really do it. They roll into the big wide campus like they own the place, following the signs while surreptitiously taking shots of vodka, yelling their disdain for all things college, this place that won't let them belong. They lean out open windows and scream from behind their masks in support for Samantha when her name is called and are rewarded with her wide, startled eyes (visible even from 40 yards away) that quickly crinkle into a smile. Samantha waves; they wave back. Ella blows kisses. Photos. Poses.
They sleep at the most expensive hotel of the whole trip just yards from the wide San Diego beaches, beaches where they eschew masks (along with everybody else, it's like a strange dream down here in San Diego) and work on tans that had become uneven in the car-filtered sunlight of I-5. In the morning, bagels and coffees in hand, they get back on the curving freeway and turn inland, into the unknown, into those parts of the state that remain mysterious to them...
They drive through thickly polluted air in Imperial County and the hot unmoving air of Native American reservations. At a nearly unmarked junction they turn north, from Interstate 8 onto State Highway 111, guided by their collective collection of phones (which gain and lose service at random intervals). To the strange lands of the industrial-runoff Salton Sea and environs, nameless abandoned small towns and resorts, blasted by heat, economy and agricultural runoff. Past row after row of palm trees, all the same height, then a gap, then row after row of palm trees a little taller, then a gap, then...and they realize that this is the place where palm trees are grown, this is where they come from...the green branches sway against the pale blue sky...
To the anarchist community of Slab City (Ella's choice), an unmaintained bumpy road between a dozen scattered trailers, each one a hundred yards away from the next, and right at its heart they find it, Salvation Mountain, the artificial mountain of paint and sculpture right on the very blasted desert rocks proclaiming GOD IS LOVE, with signs at its foot, yes even here, saying "Please wear a mask"...
****
"The crazy part is," said Ella in the present, "we had the wrong tire on one of the Honda's wheels. Like, the guy at the garage told me it was the wrong size, or something. It could have blown at any time. And if it happened there? In the middle of nowhere? I don't know what we would have done?"
"Holy shit, Ella," said Megan. "Don't tell me that. I'm never getting in your car again."
****
...To the site, the very site, of Coachella (Lizbeth's choice), that crown jewel of the festival scene, that unattainable lineup of superstar artists who cost a grand per day to experience. There is nothing to see. The tents are all gone, the stages have been disassembled, the festival outfits are carefully put away in the rich festival-goers' closets. It is an empty valley. It is like window-shopping in rich neighborhoods, but without the windows and without the shopping.
To the Joshua Tree National Park (Megan's choice), that dry, heated rock landscape of trees looking like twisted nightmarish versions of the neatly aligned palm trees they had passed through days earlier. It is one hundred and twelve degrees. There are signs posted at the first ranger station they come to: the signs read: "DO NOT DIE TODAY."
Allllllllll the way across the bottom of the state now, through the heat and struggle of Interstate 15, and as car after car overheats and pulls frantically over all around them, they make it, they make it to Los Angeles and the hills beyond, and they land safely in the region of Big Sur (Mell's choice), green trees and fog on impossibly steep mountains and cliffs. They have a reservation at the state park but have no tent, no plan. They park in their campsite and eat trail mix and drink the remaining booze and water and sleep, upright, shivering, in the car together. Every campsite is full. Suburbanites escaping their lockdown claustrophobia in the wilds of the coast...
Lastly to beautiful Carmel-by-the-sea (Janice's choice), wealthy outpost at the very end of Monterey Bay, shops and wine tasting rooms with no addresses on a grid of twee architecture, with the ocean just in view, where, where, where —
****
"I don't think she got it there," said Mell.
"We didn't get it. None of us did. Right?" Megan wanted it to be true.
"I didn't," affirmed Ella. "And I don't think Lizbeth did."
"So why would only she have gotten it there?" asked Megan.
"I don't know. It's a weird disease. Random who gets it and who doesn't. And we weren't together the whole time."
"But guys," said Mell, "she didn't get sick for like another three weeks. She must have gotten it somewhere else. I mean we were home the next day. That's too long of a time."
****
Three weeks later Janice came down with a cough. She quarantined in her bedroom and told her roommates she would get herself tested, just to be sure. Which she never got around to doing, because by the next day she was unable to get out of bed. And she stayed there, for days and days, not moving, only barely hauling herself to the hallway bathroom once or twice a day, subsisting on the crackers and broth and Gatorade her roommates insisted on supplying her with. Everybody wore masks and was terrified.
She never quite needed to be taken to the hospital. But she came out of 15 days of hell a little different. She moved back in with her parents. And they didn't see her for a while. Her cough lingered.
A couple of months later a coalition of Mell, Megan, and Ella persuaded her to at least meet them in her parents' backyard. They sat on a cracked concrete back patio and sipped white wine. Janice didn't say much. She kept her mask on.
"I kept inviting her to shit for a while," said Megan in the present. "I mean I still do. I figure it's worth a try. I worry about her, you know?"
"She was always pretty anxious," said Ella. "Like more than normal, know what I mean. Remember? She would sometimes hide out at parties? I could never find her."
"Social anxiety," commented Mell.
"Yeah. And the Covid just made it worse, probably."
"Maybe she's afraid that she'll get it again."
"Maybe she's afraid that she'll get something else."
"It was her birthday last week."
Their coffees empty, they sat at the table and avoided each other's eyes. They didn't quite know how to say what they felt — that even this, even this absence, could not poison the look of the sunlight on I-5 South. Lizbeth's departure, the strange anxieties of their new lives, their absent friends and coworkers in other places, their crummy jobs, their run-down cars, none of it could cancel out what they did together, even in the midst of the worst times that anybody could remember. The moments of light in darkness hold a strange attraction.
“The story structure is odd, the expression of the theme is over-the-top, and the ending is too sentimental! That's what the editor in my brain says, anyway. I do like the setting and the setup, but I've explored similar settings and setups in other pieces, so I stopped coming back to "The Reunion" (ironically enough).”
Bryan Vale (he/him) is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several journals, including Friday Flash Fiction, 10 By 10 Flash Fiction, Paddler Press, Boats Against the Current, and trash to treasure lit. Learn more at bryanvalewriter.com, or follow Bryan on Twitter and Instagram: @bryanvalewriter.