I smile, wondering whether I’d rather punch him or jump him. “And what exactly does medieval taste like?”
He holds up the bag with my food in it. “Care to find out?”
I’ve never been part of a conversation like this, where my heart is jelly and my brain is in my shoes. I should be pissed at his boyish antics, but right now should is miles away.
On the radio, the broadcasters discuss an impending rain delay. Blissfully engaged, Walt digs into his fries; Beck is already halfway done with his burger. I roll my eyes, sigh in my most overly dramatic tone, and offer my hand across Walt’s back. “Fine, I’ll go first.” Beck takes a bite while shaking it, and if I thought his look was stunning, his touch is downright majestic. “I’m Mary Iris Malone . . . but only my mother gets to call me Mary.”
I’m in deep before I know it. With a few carefully omitted details (the BREAKING NEWS, my war paint, my solar retinopathy—God, freak show, anyone?), I proceed to unload on Beck. I tell him about the divorce and the move and the conversation I overheard in the principal’s office. I tell him about Mom’s mystery disease in Cleveland and the series of letters I flushed down the bus toilet, my only proof of Kathy’s awfulness. I tell him about the bus accident and Arlene and Walt and Caleb and our perilous rooftop episode, which landed us at the police station. It’s that scene in the movie where the nervous girl just keeps talking and talking, but unlike the douchebags in those movies, Beck actually seems interested in what I’m saying. And I hate admitting this—probably because I don’t like being the most predictable character in my own film—but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t wearing my cute face the entire time. (I know my cute face when I feel it.)
Once done, I come up for air. “Wait, where’re we going?”
“North,” says Beck, merging onto the highway. “You said Cleveland, right?”
I vaguely recall him starting up the engine during my soliloquy. “What, you’re gonna drive us?”
“How else you plan on getting there?” He hands over my food. “And here. I officially lift the embargo.”
I’m not above eating fries while being indignant. If anything, indignation is bolstered by fries. “Umm, these are amazing. And—lest you forget, Uncle Phil belongs to me. I bought him with my cash-monies. That’s how we plan on getting to Cleveland.”
“Umm, yes they are. And lest you forget, I’m the one with the license.”
“Just because I don’t have a license—God, seriously, how good were these when they were warm? Never mind, I don’t wanna know. Anyway, I know how to drive.”
“I’m sure you do. But really, it’s no problem. I’m sort of passing through, anyway.”
“You’re passing through Cleveland. On your way to what, Lake Erie?”
He gives another one of those half smiles. “Canada, actually. Or—Vermont.”
Before I have a chance to point out that Cleveland really isn’t on the way to Canada or Vermont, the skies open up. It’s a heavy rain, each drop bursting like a water balloon on the windshield. After a few minutes of squinting and leaning over the steering wheel, Beck gives up, and pulls to the side of the highway to wait it out. In the new stillness of the truck, the warbled radio mixes with the pounding rain to create an odd sort of half silence. Broadcasters are going through stats now, filling time during the rain delay. Walt has his hat pulled down over his face, but other than that, he hasn’t budged.
“So you’re from Cleveland, then?” says Beck, sipping his soda.
I shake my head and unwrap the burger. “After things went to shit, Mom sort of relocated there. It’s where she always wanted to be anyway. I grew up in Ashland, about an hour outside Cleveland.”
“And she’s in the hospital for this . . . disease, right? Your mom, I mean.”
Reaching between my feet, I unzip my backpack and hand over the envelope with my mom’s PO Box address. “For two months, I received a letter a week. Then three weeks ago, they stopped. This was the last one I got, and the only one since the move.”
“You think your stepmom, Cassie—”
“Kathy.”
“Right, Kathy.” He hands back the envelope. “You think she’s been hiding letters from you?”
“She always gets to the mailbox first. She tried to get me to quit calling so much. It’s obvious she doesn’t want us to communicate. Plus”—I pull out Kathy’s sixth letter—“here—this is the letter from Mom to Kathy, the only one I didn’t flush. I’m pretty sure Mom asked if I could visit, to which Kathy said no, to which Mom replied . . .”
“Think of what’s best for her,” says Beck.
“Bingo.”
Beck holds it for a minute, slurps his drink. “It’s got an error.”
“I know.”
“Think of whats best for her.” He holds up the note as if I haven’t read it a hundred times. “She forgot the apostrophe.”
“I know.”
He looks down at it again. “Hmm.”
“What now, a dangling modifier?”
He smiles, hands back the crumpled letter. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Well, if it’s probably nothing, then it might be something. What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Well you can’t just say hmm, and then say it’s nothing. A hmm is something. You have to tell me.”
He chews his straw in I-don’t-know-what . . . knee-wobbling sensuality. “So. You just gonna go camp out at this PO Box and hope your mom stumbles in from the hospital to check her mail?”
I smile-slash-glare at him, and—bloody hell, there’s my cute face again. Strangely, I’m not as frustrated as I want to be. What I want to be is Beck’s straw for two minutes. I swallow my last bite of burger (hoping he doesn’t notice it took all of twenty seconds to inhale), then say, “I have a plan, and it is this. Step one, get to Cleveland. Step two, figure shit out. This is my plan.”
“Flawless, if I may say so.”
“You may.”
Walt interrupts with a colossal snore. It tapers off a little, but still, how he fell asleep in that position is beyond me.
“What’s his story?” asks Beck.
I give him a brief rundown of what little I know of Walt: dead mom, likes “the shiny,” New Chicago, et cetera. Honestly, I’m stalling a little, buying time to consider Beck’s offer to drive us the rest of the way. It’s attractive for a few reasons, the main one being—well, I’ve never driven on the highway. I haven’t driven much at all, for that matter. With only one good eye, it makes for quite the Evel-Knievel-motocross-ass-grabbing-death-defying experience. The stuff of YouTube legends, really.
Beck clears his throat. “So there’s probably something you should know.”
Here we go. Without meaning to, I reposition myself in the seat. My curiosity about Beck is suffocating, and it’s just—I want so badly for him to be real, to be good, to be a person of major fucking substance and despair.
He looks me directly in the eye, leans in, and says, “Uncle Phil is a perv.”
At this, my brain splits into two very distinct factions: the first encourages me to gasp, to throw my hand over my mouth, to say No, not Uncle Phil! Beck, darling, say it ain’t so!; the second sits in silence, unmoving, thoroughly disappointed.
“Total degenerate,” he continues. “At the last family reunion, he told everyone his bald spot was a solar panel for his sex machine.”
I sit in silence. Unmoving. Thoroughly disappointed. (The second faction appears to be winning out.)
“What?” he says, noticing my less-than-enthusiastic response. “I’m kidding. I mean, I’m not, Uncle Phil is a perv, but—”
“Beck.” I sigh, and it’s heavy, because even though I don’t know anything about this guy, I’d bet all the cash in the can he’s on Team Pizzazz. So what then? What’s holding me back from going with my gut?
Walt’s Rubik’s Cube falls from his lap. I pick it up and reach to turn off the radio.
“. . . and year out, the Cubs seem to get these great young prospects, only to watch them fizzle out, or never really reach their potential.”
I pull my hand back, leaving the radio on.
In my entire life, I’ve never once felt anything akin to a maternal instinct. On the baby fever scale, I check in from the tundra. Pretty typical for a sixteen-year-old, probably. But something about Walt has stirred me up, brought out a protective side I never knew existed. More wolfish than motherly perhaps, but still. Something. The same something that’s holding me back from going with my gut. And while I don’t think Beck would harm us, or even hinder us . . .
“You okay?” says Beck, watching me work things out.
I look at the Rubik’s Cube in my hands and wonder when me became us. “We don’t need you to get us anywhere,” I say.
Beck doesn’t respond, and for just a moment, I am reminded of my odyssey’s opening scene—Mim of the Past, alone on an empty Greyhound, marveling at the madness of the world, listening to the rain stampede across the metal roof like a herd of buffalo. Opening scenes are funny, because you never know which elements will change over time and which will stay the same. The world was, and is, mad. The rain was, and is, pouring. Looking at Walt, and yes, even Beck, I know one of my elements has definitely changed.
I’ve gone from me to us.
“I’m a junior at LSU.” Beck leans his head against the back of the seat. “Or—I would’ve been.”
How old is a college junior? This is immediately followed by Holy hell, what’s wrong with me? I suppose the first faction of my brain won’t go down without a fight.
“Long story or short?” he says, closing his eyes.
“Long.”
And he begins, never once raising his head, never once opening his eyes. Walt’s snoring, the radio, the rain—all of it fades while Beck talks.
Three years into a poli-sci major, he realized a) he hated poli-sci and b) he hated college. After a summer course in photography (here, I choked down a gag reflex), he discovered his “true passion” (another gag). His parents, divorced, did not approve. He took what little savings he had and purchased a one-way Greyhound ticket from Baton Rouge to Burlington, Vermont. It was to be “a photography pilgrimage.” (And once more.)
“My parents think I’m at school,” he says. “Big state school like that, it’ll be another week, probably, before anyone realizes.” Lifting his head, he smiles, but his heart isn’t in it. He unzips his duffel bag, pulls out the camera. We sit in silence for a few seconds while Beck takes pictures of the rain against the windshield.
“And what about the shiner?” I point to his black eye. This, being a milder version of what I’d like to ask—how did you end up in the Independence police station, hmmmmm?
He trains the camera on a bug trapped between the windshield and the wiper blade. “I punched a guy. Twice, actually. He got me once in between.”
“Jane’s Diner,” I whisper.
He nods, and begins a new story. And as soon as he starts, I know exactly how it will end.
24
The Coming Together of Ways
THE DOOR TO the men’s room was locked.
Beck stood, waiting in the hallway, when a young Hispanic girl exited the ladies’ room next to him. (19A and B must be mother and daughter, a beautiful Hispanic duo . . .) “Her eyes,” said Beck, “were puffy and red, and I thought it was odd, but she was probably thirteen, and with girls that age, you just never know.” Seconds later, Beck saw a grown man come out of the same ladies’ room. “His eyes were strange, like glazed over or something . . .” (I notice his eyes are wet and shiny, but it’s not from crying or the rain.) The man shrugged, pointed to the locked men’s room, said, “It couldn’t wait.” Minutes later, Beck entered the men’s room, did his business, and, while washing his hands, peered into the mirror. Behind him was a single stall. He frowned, and stepped back into the hallway. When he knocked on the ladies’ room, there was no answer. He poked his head inside, gave a faint, “Hello?” Still, nothing. Confident no one was inside, Beck entered the ladies’ room, letting the door close behind him. “It just felt odd, you know?” said Beck, his camera dangling from his neck. “Like—dim, or something.” (The bathroom dissolves into a reddish hue, the corners dimming like the vignette of an old art house film.) Beck looked around, noted the single stall—one stall. He remembered the look on the face of the girl only minutes ago, puffy and red from crying, and he felt the blood rush from his face to his gut. (His words are ice. They hit my gut first, then spread in all directions . . .) Turning, Beck exited the ladies’ room, walked down the hall, and into the main dining area. “I saw the girl first thing,” said Beck. “She was sitting in a booth with her mom and another couple. Her mom was chitchatting across the table, but the little girl—that girl wasn’t saying a word. She looked shell-shocked.” (We’d seen the footage of the hyena and the gazelle, and it always ended the same.)
When Beck scanned the room, he found the man sitting on a barstool, eating pie, “as if nothing had happened.” (“Nothing will happen,” he says, his voice thick. “Nothing you don’t want.”)
Beck walked calmly to the bar.
Tapped the man on the shoulder.
“AND I PUNCHED him. Twice. In front of a cop.”
“What?”
Beck adjusts the focus of his camera, goes back to taking pictures while he talks. “It actually ended up turning out okay. The cop was this gung-ho idiot starved for action.”
“Randy. With the huge head?”
“Yeah, you know him?”
“Sort of. No, not really. It doesn’t matter, go on.”
Beck raises an eyebrow and scans through the photos he just shot. He hasn’t met my eyes for a while now, and I wonder if there’s something he’s not telling me. There are only so many angles a person can get of rain on a windshield.
“Officer Randy interrogated us,” he says, “and pretty much sorted it out. I got a lifetime ban from Greyhound for fighting, and spent my last few dollars at a Red Roof Inn in Union last night. They called me in this morning for some follow-up questions, then turned me loose.”
“And what about Poncho Man?”
Beck stops taking pictures, but doesn’t look at me. “How’d you know he was wearing a poncho?”
I hear my mother’s voice in my ear. Tell him. “I just—I remember him. I remember a creepy-looking guy, is all. In a poncho.”
Beck takes a second before he answers my question. “He’s in jail.”
“They arrested him?”
“Had to. The little girl spoke up.”
I look out at the rain and think back to the flashing blue lights in the parking lot of Jane’s Diner. I knew I wasn’t his first. And if I’m honest with myself, I knew I wouldn’t be his last.
But I could’ve been.
I could have said something. I could have saved that little girl myself, made it so it never happened. But my Objective had come first. And now—because of me—some little girl will never be the same.
I slip on Albert’s aviators and let the tears come, hard and heavy. Life can be a real son of a bitch sometimes, bringing things back around long after you’ve said good-bye. Not only am I selfish, I’m a coward. That little girl spoke up. She did what I couldn’t do.
She did what you wouldn’t do, Mary.
“We should go,” says Walt out of nowhere.
Honestly, I’d forgotten he was even here. I look at him—he’s wide-awake, smiling like a kid on Christmas morning—and fight the urge to throw my arms around his neck, just kiss his cheeks for all of eternity.
Beck looks at me quizzically, then back at Walt. “Go where, buddy?”
“To the game,” Walt says, turning up the radio.
“. . . and now that the rain has finally stopped, I can’t imagine a more perfect day at the ballpark. So once again, if any listeners are interested, we still have seven innings of baseball to play, and I’m being told there are plenty of tickets available.”
At that moment, the rain stops.
Walt looks up and points through the windshield. The entire city of Cincinnati is spread before us in a breathtaking panorama. I take in this new clearness of the day with my good eye, in absolute awe of the sudden and wonderful metamorphosis. It’s a landscape worthy of documentation.
“Beck,” I whisper.
“On it,” he says, raising his camera, snapping away.
How strange—only minutes ago, Beck was aiming in the same direction, documenting something else altogether. The city, in all its grandeur, had been there the whole time, hidden by the storm.
Walt claps his hands, squeals, bounces in his seat. Before I have a chance to settle him down, Beck turns his camera from the Cincinnati skyline to Walt, and for just a moment, the scene eases into slow motion. Beck’s smile is intense and sincere, a smile with, not a smile at. Mom used to say you could tell a lot by the way a person treats the innocent, and Walt is nothing if not innocence personified. Ricky was, too. I think about Ty Zarnstorff and all his little bully clones, united in their mutual disdain for kids who strayed from the pack. No matter that the stray was harmless, gullible, weak. No matter that Ricky eventually gave up trying to make friends and settled into a pathetic desire to be left alone. No matter that I was a friend to Ricky that one summer, then, God save me, ignored him on the playground, and in class, and in the cafeteria, and in the gym. Son of a bitch, I can’t believe I did that. And my instincts are no better off now. Rather than join in the laughter, the unadulterated joy, as Beck did, my knee-jerk reaction to Walt’s excitement was to calm him down. Minimize his embarrassment. Minimize my own.
I turn to look out the window, smiling my own smile, more timid than I’d like. And I cry. I cry thinking about the Rickys and Walts of the world, smiling in the face of all those Ty Zarnstorffs. I cry because I’ve never smiled like that, not once in my life.