They say you can never go home again. They for once are right. You can get in the car and travel clear across the country but when you pull in the drive you realize that everything there has shifted to replace you. You can come back and watch for a few days or even weeks, but you can never be a part of your home in the same way again. It is better not to try. Friends will not know you and relatives will expect you to still be someone you can barely even remember. But sometimes home comes and finds you. Sometimes it calls in the middle of the night and forces you to bury who you were and change who you want to be. You can never go home again, but sometimes you have to go back.

I grew up in Hailey Creek, population four hundred and twelve. In a town that small the questions are the same but the answers are simpler. Not easier, just easier to remember. In grade school the teacher would ask us what we wanted to be when we grew up. The boys would answer off the cuff with their latest fantasy: a doctor, a lawyer, a rock star. The girls answered in unison, "a wife and mother Mr. Jones." But I did not want to be a wife and mother and neither did Kate. That is probably why we bonded so close so young. We shared every dream, or so I thought. It wasn't until much later that I realized the dreams were mine and Kate just agreed with them. It wasn't until recently that I recognized the difference. When we were six we wanted to be ballerinas; when we were ten we wanted to be zoologists. When we were twelve I was going to be a doctor and she was going to be my nurse. By the time we were seventeen I wanted to be a journalist and Kate mostly didn't talk about it anymore. That should have been my first sign that our futures were not going to turn out quite as I had planned.

And as our senior year progressed boy did I have plans. I was going to go to Columbia School of journalism. The very worst scenario I could think of was that I would have to go to 

Stanford instead, but I did not think that was likely. And as it turned out I was right. I did not have anything against the fighting Cardinals, but New York was much farther away from Oregon than California, and all I wanted from Hailey Creek at the time, was away. For some reason I always pictured Kate in New York with me. She didn't do anything. She did not go to school or have any pre-planned job I could think of, but she was there. I could hold the image as long as I could keep reality away from it. So I filled out my college applications in private and did not talk to Kate about the future anymore.

In fact we did not talk much at all that year. Looking back that is what strikes me most about my senior year. The non-stop stream of soul baring that had been our daily bread until then had dried into a trickle of quite common small talk. On the rare occasions when we did talk about the future it was of the far distant variety where we were both so famously successful it was no longer important to mention how we got that way. We were at an impasse with each other and with time. Neither of us were ready to let go of each other, and yet neither of us could conjure a set of circumstances that would let us stay together. I think we both thought that the other would come up with something given enough time, but under that we both had the fear that we would not. By refusing to name the demon, we were hoping he would simply disappear.

Then came the night after our graduation when everything cemented. We skipped out of the Drug and Alcohol free party to split a bottle of Jim Beam up by Walker's Lake. I was waxing poetic about the glamorous life I was going to find in New York and she was laughing at my delusions of grandeur. I fell silent trying to create a story for her first visit. The silence lengthened and grew awkward. For a change she was the one who broke it.

"Ann, I'm pregnant." She said it just like that, and was silent again.

After a moment I caught my breath. "Is Josh the father?"

"I hope so, 'cause he's the one I told."

"So what are you going to do?" I asked, my mind reeling with the possibilities of abortion and adoption.

"Josh says he wants to marry me." That settled that.

Oh, I thought rather than said. We said little after that. I think she had seen marriage and family coming for quite some time and was only just now realizing that I'd had other plans for her. I on the other hand was going backwards, trying to figure out where I had lost her, because everything in my world told me I had. At some point she looked over at me and said, "It's going to be alright Ann. We will still see each other," and I knew I would have to pretend I believed her.

"So when's the wedding?"

"June twenty-fifth. I want to do it before I get really big, you know."

"Yeah, that makes sense." If I accepted early admission I would have to leave on the thirteenth and would have reason to miss it. It was on the tip of my tongue to invite Kate to New York with me, but I new she couldn't get into Columbia and without a job she couldn't afford to pay rent...and I never wanted a kid.

In the end we compromised. I made some excuse about a writing seminar I did not want to miss, and she did not ask very many questions about it. We both pretended it had been an option all along. Her mother wept because I would not be there to be the maid-of-honor. I think my mother understood. When she drove me to the airport she did not mention the fact that Katie was not accompanying us, a fact that would have been unthinkable even six months before.

She gave me a hug as I was boarding the plane. "Come back soon," she said. "She isn't dying you know. She still be the same old Kate."

"Oh mamma," I replied, "No she won't."

I finally cried on the plane to New York. I was thinking about how sad Kate's mother had been that I would not be able to be her maid of honor. It struck me that Kate had never asked me to be in the wedding. In a flash I was angry because I was her best friend and that was who you were supposed to turn to. Then I remembered how quickly I had run for the door the second I found out about her pending nuptials. I occurred to me in a flash how well we had come to know each other and how completely removed we were going to be. I started bawling, a mess of tears and snot running down my face. When I came up for air the middle-aged woman beside in the seat next to mine was smiling at me.

"It's okay," she said in a soft, mothering voice, "My youngest got homesick when she went away to college to."

I smiled to keep from laughing right out loud. While I was in mourning for Kate, I knew that even if I turned around right now she would still be lost to me. In that single moment, with 

that one banal phrase I realized the thing that would allow me to stay sane. Hailey Creek had never really been my home, it was simply the place of my childhood. Home, real home, in my case would not be a circumstance of birth, but the result of discovery.

I hit the ground running in New York. After a beige childhood suddenly my world was bright and vivid. I was an illigent and eager student and my professors loved me. As a result of this I was given many opportunities for workshops, internships and the like. I graduated a semester early to take advantage of a job at the Village Voice. Somehow or another I just never made it back home.

Kate and I stayed in touch, however, in the usual manner of old high school friends, exchanging cards every Christmas that said a little less every year. It was from my mother that I learned that Katie's second pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, and that Josh left her when he found out the little girl was not his. It was from my mother that she learned, if she learned at all, that my boyfriend died in a car crash and that I was mugged walking through central park. Neither my Kate nor my mother ever learned of my abortion. It was from my mother that, last week, I learned that Katie died when her house burned down. I begged my boss for a few days off, put a hold on the mail, threw out my one plant that was half-dead from neglect anyway and, for the first time in almost ten years, boarded an airplane to go back to Hailey Creek.

I went to see the charred remains of the house my second day back. I had heard the rumors and the journalist in me needed to discover the truth for myself. The official report said she had started the fire smoking in bed-just another of those all too common tragic accidents. How fortunate it was that her daughter was at that slumber party. It made no mention of the dog 

tied, howling, outside, although the neighbors said it never had been before, nor of the gas fumes that still lingered in the air and stuck in my nose. Initially, this galled me, but when I looked into the face of her mother and daughter I realized it was better.

At first I could not figure out why Kate had left the girl to me-she knew I never wanted to be a mother. I got my answer, though, from little Annie-Kate herself. At the funeral one of her aunts asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She tore herself away from her dolls for a moment and replied,

"Mamma always said I could be anything I wanted, even a writer like Auntie Ann."

As the plane lifts off I do not turn around, like Annie-Kate, to look back at the place of my childhood. I'm an adult now and it's time to go home