“Really?” he asked, looking down, causing the car to swerve slightly.
“Yeah,” I said. I took a breath and leaned over him, making sure to keep looking straight ahead, very aware that if I turned my head, we’d be close enough to kiss. I saw the dial that controlled the lights on Roger’s side of the steering wheel. “Hold on,” I said. I reached over, being careful not to touch him, and turned the dial to the setting for the automatic lights, and they came to life immediately, two spots of light on the dark road. I moved back to my side of the car and buckled my seat belt, feeling my heart beating a little faster than usual.
“Thanks,” Roger said, turning his brights on. The headlights were absolutely the only light on the road, but it wasn’t pitch-black out, because the moon was huge and bright above us in the clear, enormous expanse of sky. And the stars were even better than they were at Yosemite, because there seemed to be more of them, as the sky seemed much bigger than normal. Roger reached around behind his seat, and seeing what he was looking for, I reached back and grabbed his backpack.
“This?” I asked.
“Thanks,” he said. “Would you mind grabbing my glasses? They’re in a brown case.”
I unzipped his backpack and reached in, wishing it was light enough to see what was in there. But I found the glasses case, opened it, and handed him the glasses.
He put them on and adjusted them a little self-consciously. “I know,” he said. “I only wear them for driving at night. Well, and movies. Things in the dark that are far away, I guess.”
“They’re nice,” I said, taking in this new version of him. And they were—he now seemed a little more approachable, a little dorkier, and a lot less perfect.
“They make me look like a substitute math teacher,” he said ruefully. “According to some people, that is,” he added after a moment.
“But like the really cool substitute math teacher,” I said, and was rewarded with another of his booming laughs.
“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate the support.”
I put the empty case back in his bag and went to zip it when a small sketch pad at the bottom caught my eye. “You draw?” I asked, then realized he probably thought I was snooping. Which I kind of was, but unintentionally. “Sorry—I just saw it in there….”
“It’s fine. I draw,” he said, nodding. “Not well, though. It’s just something I do for fun.”
“Do you mind?” I asked, lifting out the sketch pad.
Roger laughed. “Sure,” he said. “But don’t mock me.” I held the sketchbook over the dashboard, flipping through the pages by moonlight. Almost every page was filled with small sketches. Roger had a cartoon-ish style, unless he was doing little miniportraits, when the drawings became more realistic. Most of the portraits seemed to be of a stunningly beautiful girl with long, light hair. I figured that this was Hadley but didn’t want to ask about it, feeling I’d pried enough for one night. I closed the book and zipped it back inside his bag.
“They’re good,” I said, but Roger just smiled and shook his head. “Are you an art major?”
“Definitely not,” he said. “I’m leaning toward a history major, political science minor.”
“Oh,” I said. Normally, this would have been when I would have said that my father was a history professor. I pushed away the impulse. It wasn’t even an option—I wasn’t talking about that. But the fact that I couldn’t even manage to make this simple statement caused a wave of sadness to hit me. I turned away from Roger and curled up, facing my window. I looked outside, to the endless empty landscape and zillions of stars above. Then I rested my head against the cool glass of the window and closed my eyes.
“Amy. Hey, Amy.”
I started and jerked awake—I’d been dreaming. It had been March, and warm, the grass freshly cut and sticking to my bare feet. I blinked at Roger, driving in the dark, the deserted highway stretching on and on forever in front of us. Right. I was on the Loneliest Road in America. Naturally.
I tried to turn my head, immediately feeling the pull in my neck. “Agh,” I muttered. It seemed that I had managed to find the most uncomfortable sleeping position possible. “Hey,” I murmured, rubbing my eyes. I looked at the clock and saw that it was two a.m. “Jesus,” I said, sitting up straighter. “Roger, shouldn’t we stop so you can get some sleep?” The road in front of us was still dark, and still utterly deserted, the stars shining as brightly as they had been a few hours ago. It felt a little bit like we were the only two people on earth at that moment, like it was just us and our car under all that sky, the stars shining for us alone.
“That’s why I wanted to wake you up,” he said. Even by dashboard light, I could see he looked exhausted. His eyes seemed bleary behind his glasses. “I want to make it to Utah tonight. I’m ready to be off this road, and if we can get to Delta, we should be almost to the interstate, and then we can definitely make Colorado Springs tomorrow.” Even though I appreciated this urgency, it was surprising, since he’d been the one saying we had lots of time. I wondered where this rush to get to Colorado Springs was coming from. “But I’m going to need you to keep me awake,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “Sure.” I looked at him, waiting for more instructions. “How should I do that?” I saw the headlights of another car coming toward us. It looked miles off in the distance, but as the only light on the horizon, it was easy to spot. Roger turned his brights down, even though the car was probably a good five minutes from reaching us.
“Just talk to me,” he said, rubbing a hand across his forehead. “Make sure I answer your questions. And if you could put some new music on, that would be great.”
“Okay,” I said, picking up his iPod. “But we can always stop in Ely and get some sleep.” On the map, it had looked like Ely was the last mini-town in Nevada before hitting Utah.
Roger shook his head. “We need to make it to Utah,” he said. Since it was my choice of detour that had gotten us off schedule, I wasn’t going to argue with him. “Something upbeat,” he said, gesturing to the iPod. “I didn’t make a new customized playlist, but I should have some older ones saved on there.”
I scrolled through it and saw that most of the playlists had very generic titles—“Mix #1,” “Mix #2.” I scrolled up to the top, figuring I would just have to look at them and try and guess what kind of music went with his oddly named bands, when I saw a mix titled “Had to be there … ” Figuring the smiley face was a good sign, I selected it and put the iPod back in the cradle. The first song that started playing was pretty and slow, with lyrics about a love-struck Romeo.
“What mix is that?” Roger asked sharply, and I turned to him, surprised.
“The smiley-face one,” I said. “I thought—”
“Something else,” he said, the edge still in his voice. I noticed his hands were clenching the wheel, and he no longer seemed tired at all.
“Sure,” I murmured. I hit pause, and the song stopped playing, leaving silence in the car. As I scrolled through the other mixes, the clicking of the trackball suddenly seemed very loud. I found one called “Mix #4,” hoped that was safe, and selected it. Some very upbeat horns started playing, and Roger’s hands unclenched. “Better?”
“Much,” he said. “Sorry. I should have deleted that one.”
I figured it had something to do with Hadley—which I now realized was probably part of the title—but I wasn’t about to ask. So I just nodded.
“It was a mix she made me,” he said after a moment. “Hadley.” Her name floated between us in the car for a moment, and I couldn’t help but notice that he’d pronounced her name differently, like her name, and only her name, contained all the good letters. “My ex,” he added unnecessarily. But maybe it was for his own benefit, since he seemed to be having trouble remembering that part.
“Ah,” I murmured, not sure what else to say. Amy! probably would have known exactly what questions to ask. She would have been sympathetic and kind, inviting Roger to talk about his feelings with
out reservation. She probably would not have sat silently next to him, looking out the window, afraid to ask him anything in case he returned the favor.
“Utah,” Roger said, pointing out the window at the sign. We slowed, and I leaned over and looked at it. WELCOME TO UTAH! it read. And then in smaller letters underneath that, MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME ZONE.
As we drove past it, I thought about the imaginary line we’d just crossed, and how even though I was two states out of California, nothing felt any different. Not that I’d really been expecting it to.
“So!” said Roger, turning to look at me. “You’re falling down on your job here. I need to be kept awake. Ask me questions. Recite poetry. Whatever you’ve got.”
“Is it a person?” I asked, yawning, six rounds of Twenty Questions later.
“Yes,” Roger said. “Nineteen. Stay with me, Curry!”
I smiled at that, and it happened automatically, surprising me enough that I stopped immediately. “Are they alive?” I asked.
“No. Eighteen.”
“Are they male?”
“Yes. Seventeen.”
I looked at Roger, who no longer seemed in danger of falling asleep at the wheel. I had learned the hard way that history majors had a distinct advantage when playing games like Twenty Questions. But I was beginning to get a sense of the kind of answer he was continually choosing. “Is he an explorer?”
Roger glanced over at me, one eyebrow raised, looking maybe a little impressed. “Yes. Sixteen.”
He’d already chosen Drake, Livingstone, and Sir Edmund Hillary. I took a guess and hoped it was right, as I wasn’t sure how many more explorers I knew. “Is it Vasco da Gama?”
He sighed, but seemed happy. “Got it in five,” he said. “Well done. Your turn.”
“What’s with the explorers?” I asked, figuring that four in a row had to be something of a theme, not just a strategy to keep beating me.
Roger shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. He ran his hand through his hair, and it stood up in little tufts all over his head. I had an impulse to reach over and smooth it down. But it was an impulse I immediately squashed. “I’ve always been interested in them. Since I was a kid. I loved the idea that people could discover things. That you could be the person to see something first. Or see something that nobody else had been able to.”
“Is that why you’re a history major?”
He smiled without looking at me. “Probably. I started reading history like an instruction manual when I was a kid, trying to figure out what all these explorers did so that I could do it too. I used to be convinced that I was going to find something really important.”
“But everything’s been found by now,” I said. I turned to face him a little more, pulling out my seat belt to give it some slack and leaning back against my window.
“Well, technically,” he said, not seeming bothered by this. “But I think there are lots of things still to be discovered. You just have to be paying attention.” I pulled one knee up and rested my chin on it, thinking about this. “God, I’ve been talking a lot,” he said with a laugh. “Your turn. Tell me something about you.”
That was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do, now or ever. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t discovered anything.”
“Yet,” Roger said emphatically, and I felt myself smiling again. But I looked over at him, with his substitute math teacher glasses and hopeful expression, and my smile faded. He hadn’t learned yet that things didn’t work out just because you wanted them to.
“Right,” I said, reaching over and turning up the music, a song about a fake empire that, on the second listen, I’d found I really liked.
“But I’m serious,” he said. “Tell me something about you. What is your … biggest regret?”
I hadn’t been expecting that question, but I knew immediately what the answer was, and I closed my eyes against it. The morning in March, carrying my flip-flops, my feet covered in grass clippings. The one thing I really, really didn’t want to think about.
I opened my eyes and looked at him. “No idea.”
Yesterday, when you were young …
—The Weepies
MARCH 8—THREE MONTHS EARLIER
“So then what happened?” Julia asked breathlessly.
“Stop it,” I said, laughing into the phone. I was sitting on the front steps of the house, talking to her while my father mowed the lawn. My mother and I were always teasing him about the lawn. He tended to be kind of a slob with everything else, but about the lawn, he was beyond fastidious. It never looked like it needed mowing, mostly because he spent every Saturday morning doing just that. “There’s an art to it,” he always insisted. “I’d like to see you try!”
As I watched, he pivoted the mower at a sharp 90-degree angle to get the corner of the lawn. “There’s really nothing to tell,” I said, turning my attention back to Julia.
“Yeah, right,” she said, and I could hear she was laughing too, which always made me happy, as Julia was usually a little too composed, always considering her words before she said them. “I need details, Amy.”
I could feel myself smile. I’d had a date—and a pretty epic make-out session—with Michael the night before. And Julia was always the first person I told about these things. Somehow, if I didn’t talk to her about it, it didn’t seem real. “It was good,” I said, and could hear her sigh loudly over the phone, all the way from Florida.
“Details!” she said again.
“My dad is out here,” I said into the phone, lowering my volume. “I can’t talk about this now.”
“Tell Julia I say hi,” my father called, as he pivoted the mower again.
“Put your back into it!” I called to him, and he smiled as he headed in the other direction, for an overgrown patch invisible to everyone but him.
“Come on,” Julia said. “Give me the scoop. Things are going well with you and the college boy?”
I looked over to check that my father was out of earshot. “Yes,” I said, settling back against the step, preparing for one of our marathon conversations. “Okay. So last night he picked me up at eight.”
“And what did you wear?” she prompted.
“Amy,” my mother said, in the doorway behind me. I lowered the phone and looked at her. She seemed stressed, and usually Saturday was the one day she took off from that.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Have you seen your brother?”
I could feel my pulse begin to race a little bit at that, as I tried in an instant to figure out what the right answer would be. Charlie hadn’t sent me an alibi text, so I was in the dark as to what he’d told Mom and Dad he was doing, and what he’d actually ended up doing. “No,” I said, finally.
“He’s not upstairs,” my mother said. She frowned, staring out at the cul-de-sac. “I’m going to check again,” she said, heading back inside.
“Sorry,” I said to Julia. “Charlie drama.”
“How is he?” Julia asked. Julia had had a huge crush on Charlie back in middle school, but it has faded out during high school, when he headed down a very different path than we did.
“About the same,” I said. This was to say, not very well. I knew Julia would understand what I meant. I looked back to the house and realized I should probably do some recon, to try and get in front of this before it got worse. “I should go.”
“Okay,” Julia said. “But call me later? Promise?”
“Of course,” I said. I hung up with her and pulled the door open, taking just a moment to look back at my father, in his element, puttering along behind the mower, whistling to himself.
A love-struck Romeo sings a streetsuss serenade.
—Dire Straits
I sat on the edge of the king-size bed, trying not to disturb the rose petals scattered on it, waiting for Roger to come out of the bathroom and trying to figure out how, exactly, this had happened. Again.
It had taken longer than we’d thought it would to reach Delta,
the first town in Utah on Highway 50. By that point I was truly concerned about Roger, who had been driving for the better part of a day. Most of the motels we passed had the NO in their vacancy signs illuminated, and I had begun to worry what would happen if we couldn’t find somewhere to stay in Delta. On the map, it looked like the next town was probably another hour away, and I had a feeling Roger just wasn’t going to be up for that.
We’d finally pulled into the Beehive Inn to see what the situation was. As it looked a little nicer than the roadside motels, it wasn’t advertising its occupancy in neon on its sign. We’d gotten out of the car, and as I walked to the entrance, I felt the tightness in my leg muscles, and how much my butt was aching from sitting for that long. I could feel myself getting nervous as we stepped through the automatic glass doors and into the lobby, which seemed jarringly bright after the night’s drive. I’d never tried to check in by myself at a hotel before. Was I even allowed to? Did you have to be eighteen? Was that why my mother had made reservations for us—because I wouldn’t be able to do it alone?
My heart was pounding as I reached the front desk. The hotel itself seemed nice, if a little aggressively homey, with quilts covering every available surface. Before I could look around too much, though, we were greeted by a frazzled-looking desk clerk.
“Are you the Udells?” he asked, looking from me to Roger.
“What?” I asked, thrown, as this wasn’t a question I’d been expecting. And Roger, who was literally swaying on his feet at this point, didn’t seem in a state of mind to answer it.
“I’ve been saving our last room for you,” he said, frowning at me and typing on his computer. “Even though I got that message that you were canceling the reservation. I’ve been holding it open, since you booked in advance.”