“And that’s the last room available tonight?” I asked, looking over at Roger, whose eyes were drifting shut, then snapping open again.
“Yes,” the clerk said a little testily.
“Right,” I said, thinking fast. If these Udells had canceled, they most likely weren’t coming. And it was three thirty in the morning, and Roger clearly needed to crash as soon as possible. “That’s us,” I said smiling brightly. “The Udells.” That seemed to wake Roger up a little, and he blinked at me, surprised.
“Finally,” the clerk muttered. “All right. Names?” he asked, fingers poised over his keyboard.
“Oh,” I said, “Well. That’s … Edmund. And I’m Hillary.” Roger glanced over at me, a little more sharply, and I tried to shrug as subtly as possible.
I think the clerk began to doubt us when I wasn’t able to tell him the zip code of Salt Lake City, and when Roger, who’d joined in the conversation by this point, explained that we didn’t have a cell number to give, because those things were just fads. But I think at that point the clerk just wanted us to go. I paid in cash from my mother’s sock-drawer fund, so that the Udells, whoever they were, wouldn’t be charged. Then he’d handed us a key—not a key card, but a real old-fashioned brass key, with a small heart charm dangling from it.
“Enjoy your stay,” he said, with an odd smile and a raised eyebrow. I thanked him, and Roger and I headed off to find the room.
Which turned out to be the Honeymoon Suite.
I stared at the plaque with its curly writing for a moment, hoping that it was a joke. But it wasn’t—the key fit into the lock, and it explained the clerk’s leer and the heart charm. I pushed open the door and stepped inside, and could feel myself blushing as I took in the room. The white quilt of the king-size bed was covered in rose petals, and to the side of the bed was a bottle of champagne bobbing in a bucket of water. This seemed weird until I realized it had probably been ice a few hours ago. Roger closed the door behind us and I looked up at him, hoping my face wasn’t the same color as my hair.
“So …,” I started, incredibly embarrassed, and not even sure what I could say about this. “Um …”
“Nice choice of rooms, Hillary,” he said with a faint smile. Maybe he was too tired to be embarrassed, but he wasn’t even blushing.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “But they only had this one left—”
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m going to change first, if that’s cool.” He headed toward the bathroom, carrying his duffel.
“Sure,” I said, still staring at the bed. When Roger closed the bathroom door, I looked in the mirror and saw that my blushing had more or less subsided. Then I checked out the room. It had been awhile since I’d been in a real hotel—the cabin in Yosemite didn’t count. It was nice, too—there was a memo pad on the desk in the corner of the room, with a yellow and black BEEHIVE MOTEL pen, and I took both, stashing them in my purse. As I did, it occurred to me that this was the first time I was staying in a hotel without my family. And I was in the honeymoon suite. With a college guy.
Just as I had this jarring thought, Roger came out of the bathroom, yawning, dressed in the same shorts-and-T-shirt combo he’d worn the night before. It wasn’t so startling, now that I’d known to expect it. Roger looked at the bed as well. “It seems a shame to wreck it,” he said, and I looked down at the rose petals and realized that they’d been arranged in the shape of a heart.
I looked away, grabbed my own suitcase, and headed for the bathroom. “I don’t think the Udells will mind,” I said as casually as I could. I closed the door behind me and leaned back against it, letting out a breath. I knew Roger was tired, but clearly he hadn’t been too tired to notice that the whole room had been set up with the expectation that the people staying in it would be having sex.
We were in the honeymoon suite. The expectation of sex was in the very atmosphere, like perfume, but less subtle. This was worse than sharing a bed in Yosemite, even if this bed was bigger. It was like there was an elephant in the room. An elephant that expected us to have sex. I could feel myself blushing again, and thanks to the bathroom mirror, I was able to have visual proof as well. Trying to think about other things, I looked around the bathroom and saw that the tub was built for two, with complimentary bubble bath and a small dish of rose petals waiting on the tub’s edge.
Stalling, and also taking advantage of the fact that this bathroom was in-suite, and not a five-minute walk through bear-friendly territory like it had been last night, I took a long shower. Then I got changed for bed, swapping the long-sleeved shirt I’d worn the night before for a T-shirt, figuring that it wouldn’t be as cold here. As I combed out my hair, I tried not to focus on how much hair was left behind in the comb when I finished. I just packed up my toiletries, adding in the bubble bath, the complimentary shampoo, the sewing kit, and the hand lotion.
When I came out of the bathroom, I saw that Roger was already under the covers on his side, with his eyes closed. So maybe he wasn’t bothered by any of the weird room pressure at all.
Roger had turned off all the lights but one, the small chintz-covered bedside lamp on the left side—my side. Trying to make as little noise as possible, I slipped under the covers and snapped off the light. I turned on my side and looked across at Roger, who was curled up, facing me. Sleeping next to him didn’t seem as scary to me as it had yesterday. Had it only been yesterday?
I watched him for a moment. Then, even though I was sure the night before had been a fluke, and I wasn’t going to get any sleep, I let my eyes close. “Good night, Roger,” I murmured.
After a moment, Roger surprised me by replying—I was sure he’d fallen asleep. “’Night,” he said. “But the name’s Edmund.”
3
Colorado Springs Eternal
There’s no surf in Colorado.
—Bowling for Soup
“Hi, it’s Amy’s phone. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Thanks!”
Beep.
“Amelia. This is your mother. I’m not happy that you didn’t call me back yesterday. I’m getting concerned, especially since none of the hotels seem to have a record of you checking in. Call me immediately.”
“Hi, you’ve reached Pamela Curry. Please leave a message with your name and number, and I will return your call as soon as I am able. Thank you.”
Beep.
“Hi, Mom. Wow, I guess we keep missing each other. Weird. But things are fine! There’s no need to be concerned. We, um, hit traffic outside of … Oklahoma, which we are way past by now. So we’ve been a little behind. But we’ve been finding hotels with no problem. And the driving is fine, and everything is going okay. So no need to worry!”
“Is it a man?” Roger asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “Sixteen.”
“Is he alive?”
“No. Fifteen.”
“Is he an explorer?”
“Only you would ask that. No,” I said.
“You ask me that every time.”
“Because you keep choosing explorers.”
“Fair point. Is he famous?”
“Yes. Fourteen.”
“Hmm.” Roger drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and I curled my legs up under me and looked out the window.
The sun was just beginning to set—we’d been driving all day. We’d gotten a later start than we wanted because, to my shock, I had slept through the night again and was still fast asleep when the irate desk clerk called us at what I thought was ten. But since neither of us had adjusted for the time change, it was actually eleven, and we were in danger of getting charged for a late checkout. We’d hit the road and actually stopped along the way to sit down and eat both breakfast and lunch. I’d discovered that I loved diners, and Roger loved diner jukeboxes.
The drive through Utah—during which I’d learned that John Cabot had possibly discovered Canada and Roger learned who Stephen Sondheim was—was absolutely breathtaking. The scenery was even more stunning than
it had been on Highway 50, mostly because there was now something to look at. And what there was to look at took my breath away. It was strangely otherworldish—these huge red plateaus and fantastic little drift-wood trees that I couldn’t stop taking pictures of, much to Roger’s delight, since he thought that taking pictures of trees was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard of. As it had been the day before, it was as though someone had opened up the landscape and you could just see forever, underneath a sky that, I swear, was bigger and bluer than it had been in Nevada.
Now that we were back on the interstate, we were seeing road signs again, and most of them were new to me. In addition to the inexplicable OPEN RANGE CAUTION, there were animal signs I’d never seen before—an antelope, a cow, and a cow with horns. There were deer signs too, but I’d seen those for the first time near Yosemite. But it worried me that, without warning, a cow with horns might be running across the interstate. And that this had happened frequently enough that they’d had to erect a sign to warn people about it.
As we crossed into Colorado, slowly but surely the landscape changed again. The open flatness we’d had in Nevada and Utah became more mountainous, and suddenly the pine trees were back. The grades of the incline were now posted on signs on the side of the road, and the road was getting more winding and much steeper as we crossed actual mountains. We’d climb and climb, and then go downhill sharply. The Liberty was fine with this, but it seemed that the steep grades were an issue for the truckers—especially the downhill grades. There were signs that I couldn’t believe were real, that seemed to offer truckers stream-of-consciousness support for these roads. STEEP GRADE AHEAD, TRUCKERS! USE CAUTION! and TRUCKERS! IT’S NOT OVER YET! MORE 6% GRADE AND WINDING ROADS! The one that I stared at the longest, however: IF BRAKES FAIL, DO NOT EXIT. STAY ON INTERSTATE. I mean, what? That seemed like terrible advice to me, and whenever we were behind a truck, I found myself watching its brake lights, making sure they were flashing red.
Roger had been getting quieter the closer we got to Colorado Springs. At both diners, he’d left during the meal to make phone calls, calls he made clear he didn’t want to talk about when he returned to the table and immediately changed the subject. I’d almost asked, the first time, if he’d been calling Hadley, but then realized that would involve admitting I’d heard his conversation at Yosemite.
I’d used one of his absences to send a message to my mother’s cell. Charlie had figured out how to do this years ago, but I’d never done it until now. It meant that a voice mail showed up on her phone without it ringing. Charlie was sure that Mom had never figured out her cell had this feature, as she always just assumed that she had missed the call. I didn’t think I was up for having a conversation with her that would either involve a lot of uncomfortable truth telling, or would be a parade of lies. I knew that I would probably have to tell her the truth soon—we were supposed to be in Indiana at the moment, and we were pretty far from Indiana. But I tried to tell myself that maybe we could make up the time by driving all night, or something. I also wasn’t exactly excited about the prospect of being in Connecticut in a day or two—I didn’t want to have to start that life yet. I also hadn’t seen my mother in a month, and the thought of seeing her again made me nervous, for reasons I didn’t want to explore.
I took a sip of my cream soda and checked my watch, now adjusted to mountain time. It was getting close to seven, and it felt like we’d been in the car for a very long time. “Well?” I asked, propping my feet on the dashboard and looking over at Roger.
“Sorry,” he said. He picked up his phone, looked at it, then set it back down in his cup holder. “Um. Is he alive?”
“No,” I said, glancing over at him again. “And you asked that already.”
“Sorry,” he said, giving me a quick smile, then turning back to the road, which was getting windy again. “I think I’m just a little … distracted. Want to just put on some music?”
“Sure,” I murmured, trying not to feel hurt. It was just a stupid game, anyway. I turned up Roger’s mix, and we drove the next six songs without speaking.
I started seeing Colorado Springs on the signs that told you how far you were from various destinations. And when we were about sixty miles outside it, it was like we joined the world again. We must have been through the mountains, because the landscape was more open, and there were suddenly three lanes of traffic we could drive in, then four. The sense of remoteness fell away, and there were Targets and Wal-Marts and Starbucks and fast-food restaurants on the side of the road again. All those things I’d missed on Highway 50 that now seemed too big and brightly colored. I found myself missing the little mini-marts.
We stopped for gas when we were about twenty miles outside of town. While Roger filled up, his cell rang—I was squeegeeing the windshield, which had turned into a dead bug graveyard, and I could see it, lighting up and dancing around as it vibrated in the cup holder. I opened the passenger door and grabbed it, seeing the display read BRON CALLING. I had no idea what this meant, but I handed the phone to Roger, who suddenly looked very nervous. I put the squeegee back, even though the window was only half-cleaned, and got back in the car so I could avoid hearing Roger’s conversation. But I couldn’t help slouching down a little in my seat to see him in the side mirror. I could only see him in profile, but he didn’t look too happy. Even though he was smiling, it seemed a little forced. It struck me, a moment after I thought this, that I could now tell the difference with him.
Roger got back in the car and slammed his door a little harder than necessary. He didn’t put the keys in the ignition, just played with them, resting on his knee. He looked tired, and some of the energy that was always humming around him seemed to have faded a little. “You okay?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said to the keys, still not looking at me. “So I have good news. I got a place for us to crash. It’s one of the houses off campus. It’s the International House during the year, but right now, it’s just for people who are taking summer courses.”
“Great,” I said. I looked at him more closely. He did not look happy. “That’s a good thing, right?”
Roger just sighed. “So here’s the thing,” he said. I immediately felt myself tense up. “I should tell you something. I should have told you before, actually.”
“Okay,” I said, really beginning to get worried now. Was he sick of me, and just planning on staying here with his friends? Was he backing out of the trip?
“So the reason we’re here,” he said, still not looking at me, “is that … I heard Hadley was here.”
“Oh,” I said. Suddenly it made sense that Roger had been so focused on his phone all morning. “Is she?” I asked, as casually as possible.
“No,” he said, and I felt myself relax a little bit. “I’d heard from one of my friends that she was here taking summer courses. But apparently, she’s back home in Kentucky.”
“Oh,” I said again, feeling out of my depth.
“She hasn’t been returning any of my calls or e-mails. So I just thought that maybe if I came here, and saw her, we could talk, and we could maybe …” His forehead creased. “I don’t know.”
Amy! would have known exactly what to do here. She wouldn’t have felt so tongue-tied and awkward and annoyingly young. “Um,” I finally said. “What … I mean, what happened with you two?”
There was a honk behind us, and I turned and saw a minivan waiting for the pump, clearly wondering what we were doing just sitting in the car. Roger started the car and steered us back onto the interstate. We’d been driving in silence for a few minutes when he started talking again. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “If I knew that, I don’t think we’d be here.”
“Well,” I said. I wondered if we should do this like Twenty Questions, with The Reason Hadley Broke Up with Me being the answer. “So what did she say?”
Roger clenched and unclenched his hands on the steering wheel, his forehead still furrowed. He looked preoccupied and unhappy, whi
ch only highlighted just how cheerful he normally seemed. Like so much else, I hadn’t fully realized this until it was gone. “It was during finals. We were supposed to meet at the library—I was going to help her study for her history final. I’d made note cards,” he said, sounding disgusted with himself. “But she came to my dorm and …” Roger paused, and I noticed a muscle pulsing in his jaw as he clenched his teeth. “She said,” he continued, “that it was over between us. That she’d been feeling this way for a long time, and she needed to get it off her chest, because it was interfering with her studying.”
“She said that?” I asked, stunned.
“Yeah,” he said, with a small, unhappy laugh. “Hadley never really was one for sentiment. Well, needless to say, I didn’t do so great on my finals. And then she left me a voice mail saying that she was sorry about the way she left things, and told me when I could come by her sorority house, so we could say good-bye.”
“And?”
“Oh, I didn’t go,” said Roger, changing lanes. “I don’t say good-bye. And she knew that. I’d told her a hundred times.”
I sat up a little straighter. “You don’t say good-bye?”
“Nope,” he said. “Not since I was eleven. It’s a superstitious thing,” he added, a little unnecessarily. “Three of my grandparents died that year—bam, bam, bam. And each time, it was almost immediately after I talked to them. And said—guess what? Goodbye. So now I don’t do it. It’s stupid. But the one grandparent I have left is still alive and kicking and I haven’t said good-bye since. So there you go.”
“But,” I said, as Roger took exit 143 for Uintah Street/Colorado College, “what does saying good-bye have to do with it?”
“It has everything to do with it!” Roger said, some of his old energy coming back into his voice. Things were starting to look less developed now, and I could see the mountains again. And they were stunning. They were backlit by the setting sun, so I could basically only see their outlines—but the mountains actually looked purple, just like in the song. Roger was driving down what seemed like a main street—clothing boutiques and pizza parlors and record stores. It could have been Raven Rock—it had that college-town feel to it—except for the mountains in the background, which were far more impressive than California’s. “Saying goodbye is basically an invitation not to see a person again. It’s making it okay for that to be the last conversation you have. So if you don’t say it—if you leave the conversation open—it means you’ll have to see them again.” I just stared at him, and Roger looked over at me and laughed, a normal-sounding laugh this time. “I know it doesn’t actually make sense,” he said. “But it’s pretty much ingrained now.”