Never Forget Your First

Magdelena Brumhauer’s weathered hiking boots crunched through the twigs, undergrowth, and detritus of the forest floor.  The incline was steep enough to take her breath away and slow her pace, and she leaned against a tree near the summit of the hill to rest.  A large swig of water from her blue plastic bottle cooled and rejuvenated her as she looked to the treetops, searching for the birds that chirped and tweeted invisibly above her.  None of the trees looked familiar, and she shook her head in a silent argument with herself.  It had been nearly forty years since she had been here, and she wasn’t sure she was even on the right hill.

In 1985 she was only 16 years old.  She was in love with a boy who loved her back, and they were going to be together forever, she just knew it.  Brad Comstock was going to graduate and then work for two years until she graduated, saving every dollar he could.  Then they would pack up their stuff and drive away together, parents and expectations be damned.  They walked through these hilly woods often after school and on the weekends, dreaming together about their future home, children, careers, and the bliss that would accompany it all.  They gave themselves to one another in these woods, near the top of one of these hills under the shade of an oak tree.  It was around her somewhere.

Since returning to her hometown of Springborn, Magdelena had reminisced on her old life here often.  Her old high school was gone, torn down after asbestos was discovered in the walls.  Her favorite diner was gone, replaced by a strip mall with a vape shop, liquor store, tattoo parlor, and pawn shop.  Her former home was still up, but the current owners weren’t maintaining it as well as her family had, and when she walked by to see it she barely paused to give it more than a cursory glance.  What used to be a downtown Main Street was now more of a ghost town, with the economic hub of activity shifted outwards towards the highway.  When she concluded that not much of her hometown was the way she remembered it, she felt she truly understood why they say, “You can’t go home again.”  Home isn’t the way you left it, and even if it were, you’re not the same person who left.

She rented a room above Main Street Bakery a few months ago.  It had the basic furnishings she needed - a bed, a chair, a television - and she always woke to the aroma of freshly baked pastries each morning.  Her frequent hikes through the hills and forests east of town were the only reason she hadn’t put on ten pounds since her arrival, and she knew it.  But now in her fifties, she wasn’t so concerned about her hips or curves anymore.  She was pretty and kind enough to be in love with four men in her lifetime and marry three of them.  She wasn’t looking for a fifth.  She was looking for her first.

She parked her Honda CR-V at the wide spot in the road that served as the informal parking lot for the Greenwoods Forest, just like Brad used to do with his old farm pick up, driving the old country roads with tools rattling around in the bed calling all the attention in the world. She headed north-ish on foot, but that was as far as her memory served her.  Erosion and four decades of growth had changed the landscape considerably.  The trees were taller and closer together, and the valleys and glades were smaller and more crowded.  She thought their spot was about fifteen minutes in, but the pace of a 16-year old girl giddy with love and anticipating her first sexual encounter is far more rapid than that of a 50-something-year old woman who hadn’t been giddy about anything except dark chocolate for more than a decade.

Most of the trees in this forest were aspen, their slender trunks and white bark forming a swaying, impenetrable wall to block her vision.  Their heart-shaped leaves hissed in the wind, shushing her whenever she swore or talked to herself too loudly.  “Hush, hush, keep it down now, voices carry…” she sang under her breath as she traversed the unfamiliar landscape.  ‘Til Tuseday’s hit debut single wasn’t a very good love song.  In fact, it describes a toxic, controlling relationship, but twitterpated, teenage Magdelena didn’t care.  She sang it to her Brad every night on the phone, and he never got tired of it.  At least, he never told her he was tired of it, and that was just as good at the time.  

Day rolled into day and week into week, searching for their spot.  He carved their initials into one of the few oak trees in these woods, claiming it as theirs.  The Greenwoods were a popular place for making out and sex among the teens of Springborn, which is why Brad took her so far back.  “I’m so special - what we have is so special - that the usual places, the places close to the road aren’t good enough for our love,” she told herself then.  In present times the charm was wearing thin, and Magdelena would have thought their spot a lot more special if she could just find the damned thing.

At least she had the time to look.  She would never describe herself as independently wealthy, but she got by alright.  Her late husband’s life insurance money would last her a while, especially when she lived as simply as she did.  With as many crime shows, documentaries, and podcasts were around these days, she sometimes wondered if she would ever see her own face on the screen one day, a jarring headline labeling her a black widow.  She doubted it, but still wondered.  Just like the chances of being killed by a cow are pretty low, but they’re never zero.

That’s also why she liked her name.  Magdelena provided her with many names to use, and they were all plausibly still her name.  Maggie, Lena, Del, Aggie, Elena - new city, new name, new life.  She moved away from Springborn the summer after her sophomore year of high school.  Her father was promoted at the tire company at which he worked, and it meant moving to Chicago.  She was distraught as most teenage girls being told to move halfway through high school would be, but she adapted.  Philadelphia, Boston, Asbury Park, Albany, and finally back to Springborn.  She learned to love the thrill of reinvention, discovering new versions of herself, trying them on like a stranger’s clothes until they became her own.

But now she just wanted to talk to Brad again.  She learned how to put satellite overlays on Google Maps and searched for likely candidates for their oak tree that way.  The bigger challenge was pairing her digital searches with the physical terrain as she hiked it.  She was down to two possible sites left, and she could see one of them up ahead.  “Hush, hush…” she panted up the hill.

“Keep it down now, voices…be damned.  This is it.”

She sat down on their rock.  It was a flat boulder protruding from the earth near their oak tree.  Barely the size of a coffin, it was an ideal bench for two young lovers sitting side by side.  Their tree towered before her.  Wider, stouter, and taller than before, but still bearing the scar of their love: B.C. + M.H. in a heart pierced by Cupid’s arrow.  The bark had swollen around the lines, but it was still legible all these years later.  Another heart, roughly and shallowly etched in stone peeked up through the dirt and mulch at the base of the tree.  The oak’s roots had barely moved it before embracing the stone and growing around it.

“Oh, Brad,” she began, but then gave in to the grief that unexpectedly arose in her heart.  She buried her face in her hands and silently cried.  She hated how crying distorted her face, having caught herself in a mirror once after some forgettable teenage tragedy, and vowed to never see herself that way again.  Naturally, she couldn’t avoid crying sometimes, but she learned to shed her tears in silence, avoiding even the sound associated with the awful visage.  Wiping tears on one flannel sleeve and snot on the other, Magdelena started over.

“Brad, I miss you.  I’ve missed you so long.  There’s so much I wish we could have done together.”  The unknown birds continued to chirp and peep, the trees persisted in whispering, and Magdelena paused to listen.  The last time Brad brought her up here to their spot replayed in her mind.  She closed her eyes to see him again.

He had been seeing a Navy recruiter in the city and was going to sign up now that he had finished high school.  The recruiter promised him 25-thousand plus benefits every year for four years.  Brad tried telling her it was better than working at the gas station for the next two years, even if it was for twice as long and would take him away from her the whole time.

She looked forlornly at the heart on the stone being swallowed by the tree.  “I was so angry at you.  We had it all planned out, and then you made your own plans with that Navy man, and I… I reacted… poorly.  I was mad, and I’m sorry.  I wish I could have told you that then, but you were gone so fast.  We never even got to say good-bye.”

Magdelena rose from the sitting rock and crossed over to the heartstone in the earth.  She knelt down before it with her hands in her lap.  “Your parents were so surprised, too.  They couldn’t believe you just up and left like that, but they came to believe you just wanted a way out.  Out of this town, this life, away from me…  When you never wrote or called, they just believed it was true and that you were done with all of us.  Your mom cried about as much as I did, but your dad just stayed sad and mad like he does.  You remember what he was like.  We kept in touch for a few years, but then that just kind of went away, too.”

She cleared away some of the dirt at the base of the stone, exposing the pointed bottom of the heart and the rust staining the granite.  “I visited the overlook at the quarry lake where we used to go. There’s a guardrail up now, but otherwise it looks the same.  I never heard about anyone finding anything at the bottom of the lake there, and I don’t see why they would bother looking.  You left to join the Navy and never looked back.  I got home so late after walking back from the overlook; my parents were so mad, but then I told them you were gone and they felt so bad for me…my mom made cocoa and just held me on the couch as I cried.  They never even noticed I had changed clothes.”

Rising to her feet, Magdelena wiped her nose on her sleeve again.  “I really wish we could have had our life together.  I think it would have been great.  If you don’t mind, now that I’m back in town I’ll come visit from time to time.  Despite the way it ended, this is still a beautiful spot you found for us.  I love it, and I love you.  I’ll talk with you later.”

On her way down the hill, she looked back frequently to help her remember the path better.  She didn’t know how long things like this took or the science behind it all, but she figured the soil, tree roots, and whatever creepy crawly things were in the dirt had done their part.  His fingerprints would be long gone by now, and that heartstone had made sure he wouldn’t be identified by his dental records.  Not that anyone would ever think to dig there.

Now that she knew the way, she’d come back often.