The Counting-Downers (7 page)

“HI,” I SAY, all of a sudden shy as I sit beside him, our legs dangling out above the meadow below like wind chimes on the breeze.

“Hey,” is all he says back, and for a brief moment I think that maybe the feeling I just had about him being extraordinary was wrong and this life-changing moment is destined to be nothing other than an awkward encounter.

Then he smiles. And I know my first thought about him was right.

It sounds crazy, but his smile speaks to my soul. Like a baby learning interactions by mirroring facial expressions when he smiles, I want to smile too.

So we sit there in my childhood treehouse, just staring and smiling at each other for several seconds more than is appropriate.

After a while, he breaks the eye contact with a light chuckle. Bending his head so his wavy blond hair flops onto his forehead, he raises his cerulean eyes and looks at me as if he’s known me his whole life, something at odds with the words that follow. “I’m Tristan.”

“Matilda.”

For some strange reason this causes him to smile, though I’m not quite sure why.

“Nice to meet you
properly
,” he says in reference to our brief laughing connection earlier.

“You, too.” I smile. “But since we have just met, do you want to tell me what you’re doing in my treehouse, Goldilocks?” I nudge his shoulder so he knows I’m joking. I don’t know why I’m so at ease with someone I’ve just met. Somehow, my instincts know what his limits are and that he can handle my teasing.

He laughs out loud at the Goldilocks nickname, a rambunctious, infectious, addictively raspy sound, which echoes through my senses and around the treehouse walls. “Your treehouse?”

“My treehouse,” I confirm with a mockingly petulant nod.

“Well, sorry for trespassing without permission, but I just needed to get away from all the death and doom for a bit. I went outside to take in some fresh air and kept walking once I realized it was the never-ending garden. I’ve never seen anything like this. The garden at the front is lovely, but this is out of this world.” He gestures his arm out and around at the meadow. “It’s nature at its purest, wildest, and most beautiful. Once I spotted the treehouse, I climbed up here to have a better view of it all. You’re so lucky to have a place like this.”

For a moment, I’m speechless at his perceptive description. I shift my body away from him to face the meadow straight on and clear my throat. “I know,” I tell him, my voice soft as I look out at the meadow. “It’s my favorite place on earth.”

“I can see why.”

We’re both quiet for a moment, each reflecting on the untamed beauty of the magical world around us. Once we’ve taken it all in, I break the silence.

“Well, although trespassers are normally prosecuted, I’ll allow you to share it with me.”

“Thank you for your generosity, Baby Bear.”

“You’re welcome, Goldilocks.” I play along while a secret thrill runs through my body from his nickname for me. I hope it sticks.

“I wanted to introduce myself to you earlier today, but I couldn’t find you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I wanted to thank you for a life-changing experience.”

“How do you mean?”

“I can’t say I’ve ever laughed at a funeral before today, but it’s an experience to be recommended and never forgotten.” He smirks, causing his dimples to groove further into his cheeks.

I laugh at this, both of us reflecting on our momentary loss of propriety earlier. “I can’t say I ever have either; it was a first for me too. I always find humor in the most awkward and serious of situations, but laughing at funerals is a new one. Typical of me that I decide to be inappropriate at my own father’s funeral...”

“No way, you weren’t inappropriate. The situation was unfortunate but the laughter was appropriate.” He appears to hesitate before he places his hovering hand over mine, which is resting on the floor of the treehouse, squeezing it in solidarity as if sensing my wavering conviction that my impulsivity today was acceptable.

“Seriously,” he says, bending down to meet my lowered eyes, “you did nothing wrong today and everything right. I thought it was amazing.
You
were amazing. Your dad would have thought so too. He would have found it hilarious and been laughing along with us.”

His words strike something deep inside me and resonate throughout my bones. He’s right and reminds me why I did what I did today. I regret embarrassing my mom and grandmother, but I’m not sorry for laughing or taking Oscar away from the situation.

I’m surprised he’s read the situation so well though, read
me
so well. His levels of perception extend further than the beauty of nature. For someone I’ve never met before today, he understands the dynamics between all of the people in my family well. Then I’m reminded we’re probably related, something which I’ve conveniently forgotten.

“Are you…I mean, are we, related?” I ask him, deciding the only way to know for sure is to be blunt.

My serious question doesn’t have quite the response I was expecting however. He sputters with laughter, choking on air and amusement. “What?”

“I asked if we were related. Are you a distant cousin or something?”

At last, he gives me a serious answer once he’s regained his composure. “Um…no.”

“Oh. I thought you were.”

“You genuinely thought we were related?”

“Yeah.” I smile, feeling silly at my assumption. “I thought because you seemed to understand the conversation I had with my grandmother that you must be some sort of distant cousin I’d never met or something.”

He laughs his contagious laugh again at this, causing me to giggle too.

“No, Baby Bear, definitely not a cousin,” he tells me. I think he whispers something like, “Fate couldn’t be that cruel,” under his breath, but I can’t be sure.

My smile is perplexed and the air is a bit awkward for a few seconds before another thought occurs to me. “So how did you understand the conversation I had with my grandmother? We were speaking Norwegian. Did you understand us, or did you just get the gist of what was going on?”

“No, I understood. My mom was Norwegian, so I speak it fluently. My dad was Jewish-American, so he was always left out of our secret conversations.” The corners of his mouth tilt up as he recalls a distant memory of such a time.

“Was?” I ask him, realizing that he’d referred to his parents in the past tense.

“Was.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

I remember my resolution from earlier not to apologize next time I meet a loved one of people who have died. Now seems as good a time as any to practice what I preach, so I say the only thing I can think of.

“Well that sucks.”

His laughter booms around the meadow, and his expression is relieved, as if he didn’t think that was what I was going to say and he was bracing himself for an apology that wouldn’t make it past my lips.

Once he quiets, he stares at me with an intensity and tenderness that shouldn’t belong between strangers.

“Yeah, it does. Sucks about your dad, too.”

“It does indeed.”

We smile small with shared understanding, bonding over the absence of sorrys.

“So what are the chances of two Norwegian families not only living in the same place but running into each other?”

He has that same look in his eyes when he says, “One in a million.” And I wonder if we’re talking about the same thing.

Breaking eye contact, before it becomes uncomfortable, I let my gaze wander without seeing around my childhood treehouse and favorite thinking space.

“So if you’re not a relative, how do you know my dad? I mean how
did
you know him?” I correct myself. “Sorry, I’m not used to talking in the past tense yet.”

“It’s fine; I get it.” His expression tells me he understands more than he says. “I live with my maternal grandfather. We live near the forest where there are several threatened species. We own the land but we’ve kept a distance to allow them to live in peace. It’s a beautiful spot. A few years ago, some developers tried to persuade us to sell, and when that failed, they tried to force us.

“They wanted to knock down our house and build a luxury resort on the land, which would encroach onto the forest and destroy the habitat of all the animals that live there. Your dad took on the case pro bono to fight them and helped us save it. He helped my grandfather keep the home he’s lived in for over fifty years and saved hundreds of animals. We owe him so much.”

The familiar surge of pride I experience whenever I hear about my dad and how much he helped people hits me. He was incredible and often worked without charging a fee to help people win cases he believed in. To know that this boy is sitting next to me right now because of my dad, makes me sense his presence. Tristan and his grandfather are part of my dad’s legacy in their own way.

“That’s amazing. I’m glad he could help; that sounds like him. Is your grandfather here today as well?”

At this innocuous question, his face falls into a serious, sad expression. “No, unfortunately, he couldn’t make it. In fact,” he says, looking down at his watch, “I’m going to have to leave soon to check in with him.”

“Oh, okay.” That strange feeling overtakes me again. Even though this is our first conversation, and even though I’ve had more entertaining and meaningful conversations in my life, I don’t want to stop talking to him.

With his head bent to look at his watch, I take in the countdown clock above his head for the first time. I don’t know why I hadn’t looked at it before and I’m not sure how to feel about what I see. He has 27 years, 8 months, 16 days, 14 hours, 11 minutes, and 49 seconds left to live. On the surface, that seems like a lot of time, but in reality that time will run out faster than he can prepare for.

“How old are you?” I blurt out.

“Twenty. You?”

“Nineteen.”

I watch his gaze wander up above my head and I wonder if he’s doing the same thing I am. Trying to work out the math to calculate how long I may have with him, to get to know him, to explore this extraordinary connection we have. I’m usually happy to live in blissful ignorance, and have made peace with the idea that my time will run out whenever it’s meant to and not a moment before or after.

But this is one of those rare times when I can’t help wishing I knew what my own number was and if it was compatible with his. For all I know, I may die before him. Knowing my number, my dad still gave me advice about marriage before he died, so I hope that means I have at least a few more years.

But what if we started something and, seven years later, I died while he had to go on for another twenty years? I wouldn’t want to be in a similar situation to my parents. My mom still has almost forty years left to live without my father.

I work out that Tristan will be about forty-seven when he dies. Almost the same age as my dad. Chills erupt on my skin at the eerie similarities. Forty-seven is a strange age to die. On the one hand, you’ve lived through a lot - childhood, adolescence, careers, marriage, maybe even children. On the other, you’re still missing out on so much living—retirement, anniversaries, your children’s marriages, and future grandchildren.

Deciding now isn’t the time to think about him dying when we haven’t even established if we want to be a part of each other’s lives, however long they may be, I stash that thought away for later.

“Do you go to college?” I ask him, eager for any information I can gather about him.

“No, it wasn’t for me. You?”

“No, I didn’t apply anywhere as I wanted to spend the past year with my dad, then take some time to grieve and adjust to life without him. I didn’t want to be away from home for most of his final year, so I made an excuse that I needed a year off from studying. I think he knew the real reason, but he let me get away with it.”

“Do you think you’ll apply anywhere for this coming year?”

“I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything right now. I just need a bit of time to figure things out.”

“It always comes back to time in the end, doesn’t it?” he asks, leaving me wide-eyed and stunned that he’s voiced a thought I’ve had so often.

“Yeah, it does,” is all I can think to say back. It’s not enough though, I want him to know the extent of our connection, to help me work out this thing I can’t explain. “You read my mind. I’ve had that thought so many times.”

He just smiles at this, as if he’s known all along that our thinking is aligned. “I guess we’re surfing the same wavelength, Baby Bear,” he says with another one of his intense looks, which say more than words ever could.

Again, I look away and break the spell.

The connection severed, he twists to the side and picks up a sketchpad I hadn’t realized was on the floor next to him. I watch confused as he flips a few pages back and forth, catching a brief glimpse on one page of what looks like the meadow below us, but I can’t be certain. Towards the end, he finds the page he’s looking for and tears it out. Turning it over before I can take a good look at it, he scribbles something on the back with the pencil that was sitting in the sketchbook’s spiral.

Bringing his legs in, he stands up and, still clutching the page in his left hand, puts the sketchbook into a black rucksack, which I also hadn’t noticed, before slinging it over his shoulder.