“It’s just the beginning,” she says. “I want to do some of the rooms we stayed in. And I want to make the apple farm, and the beach, too. I’ve never tried to sculpt water.”
I just nod because I don’t know how to tell her how amazing these are. However beautiful her sculptures were when the things she depicted were perfect, these, in their imperfection, are so much better.
Finally, I say, “RISD is going to fall in love with you.”
“Come with me,” she says.
“What?”
“They would accept you in a second. You draw better than anyone I know. Maybe you could even start in the spring semester.”
I don’t know what to say.
“Come,” she says. “You could get an apartment. I have to live in the dorms for the first year, but after that I don’t know. Maybe I could move in with you.”
She’s looking across the table at me, her eyes wide and hopeful and so painfully pretty, saying what I’ve been wanting to hear her say for forever. But I can’t imagine calling my dad and telling him that instead of going to Europe I’m going across the country to rent an apartment because that’s what Bev has chosen. I need something new. All I have is a life’s worth of school days. What came before school I can’t remember. You can only sketch so many desks and teachers and chalkboards. You can only come home to so many dinners and homework assignments and nights of taking the garbage out. You can only go to so many museum field trips before you start to wonder, Is this it?
Whatever I decide, I might be making a mistake. But if I’m going to make a mistake I want it to be passionate.
I shake my head, no, and I try to explain.
“So my mom makes this painting for her brother’s band, and it’s a nice concept and it turns out well. And then it turns out that she falls in love with her brother’s bandmate, and a few years later they have me. And maybe that love doesn’t turn out to be what they’d hoped, but still, here I am like twenty years later at a tattoo shop in some tiny city and I see my mom’s painting and learn that it has to do with other people getting married. And they’re still in it, and it helps somehow, for me, that they have this painting my mom did as a symbol of their love. Even if they aren’t exactly a normal example. Even if they are, like, magical or whatever. And then it turns out that that tattoo isn’t the only one, that a guy saw a photo of the first tattoo, didn’t even know it had anything to do with a painting or a band, and he changed the image, made it better, made it a symbol of something else, and that leads to me going to Seattle and meeting these people who are so fucking cool, and coming back here and doing something I wanted to do but didn’t really know that I could.”
It’s all coming together, and as I tell the story I start to realize what I meant when I said that seeing René’s tattoo was worth all of it. Because, after everything that’s happened, I finally know what I’m going to do now, after tonight, and the more I talk the more the realization grows until I’m shaking a little and my body feels like it’s humming and it could be the coffee or the fact that I haven’t slept well in over a week, but I think what it actually is, is the overwhelming knowledge that I was right all along.
I always knew what I wanted to do, I just didn’t know I could do it.
“I’m going to Europe,” I say.
I don’t say without you aloud because this decision is not meant to hurt her. It’s not really about Bev at all. It’s about me.
“I really want to go to Amsterdam,” I say. “And I want to see those islands.”
As soon as I make the decision to go, I want to go now.
“Are you still going to visit your mom?”
“Yeah.”
The waitress comes and asks if we want anything, and I tell her I want pie. Pecan pie. Because my grilled cheese is too cold to eat and I am suddenly hungry. She walks away and I pull out my phone. All of this planning I did, it’s paying off. Because I have the airline’s number programmed into my phone and I’ve learned how to ask the right questions and the best people to ask them of. In two minutes, when I hang up, I have a reservation to fly standby out of Portland the day after tomorrow.
“But what about all of your stuff?” Bev asks.
“I have stuff with me,” I say. “I want to travel light anyway.”
“But we’re going home tomorrow morning. It would be so much easier to fly out of the city.”
The waitress sets a slice of pie in front of me, reaches over the table to refill our coffee cups. I put my hands around the mug until it becomes too hot to touch.
“I can’t go home yet,” I say.
I dial my dad and ask him to send my passport overnight.
“I’ve had a change of plan,” I say. “I’m leaving out of Portland.”
There is a moment of quiet, but he recovers quickly.
“What about Melinda?” he asks.
“Bev will drive her.”
“Bev?”
“Yeah,” I say. “She isn’t coming with me.”
“Why not?”
I glance at her across the table. She’s picking apart her pie, not eating any of it.
“Her plans changed, too.”
“Wow,” he says. And then: “My son, graduating from high school, solving mysteries, traveling on his own to Europe.”
I laugh.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” he says. “So maybe FedEx? I’ll see what I can do. But hey,” he says in a hushed voice. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s not say anything to Pete about these plans until Melinda is safely home. He’s in the next room now. We’ll wait until Bev pulls up to the house tomorrow night.”
“Good idea,” I say.
Then, in his normal voice, he says, “I know this must be hard, son. It’s hard for me, too.”
“I know it is.”
It’s too quiet for too long on the phone between us.
“We’ll be all right,” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
And then I call my mother. I get her voice mail.
“Ma,” I say. “I’m coming early.”
On our way out of the diner, the hostess stops us.
“Let me show you something,” she says. “Did you know there are no locks on the doors?”
“What?”
“We never close. Ever. Look, no locks.”
She points to the doorknob; it’s true.
She smoothes her hair, adjusts her name tag, beams.
Above her station, a cuckoo clock announces that it is 3:00 A.M.
“Come back anytime,” she says.
We walk toward the van but then Bev stops.
“I want to do something with you,” she says. “I don’t want to go back yet.”
We’ve already spent hours in an all-night diner and I’m not sure where else we could go. In spite of these obstacles, these are the most glorious words she could speak right now. But we’re in an unfamiliar city in the middle of the night. I’m about to suggest that we just drive around, and then I see them. Still leaning up against the streetlight. Waiting for us.
I walk over and Bev follows. They’re nice bikes, hipster bikes: fixed gears, one light brown with a turquoise seat, the other yellow and with a wire basket on the handlebars.
“Let’s leave them a note,” Bev says.
I rip a page out of my sketchbook and get out a pen, hand them to her to write.
“How should we start it?” she asks.
I look at the bikes and think about it. What would I want to read on a note that was left in the place where my bike should be?
“Dear Friends?” I suggest.
Dear Friends, she writes. And then she sits, leaning against the wall. I sit next to her.
A long time ago I discovered something I wasn’t meant to know. It didn’t have to do with me, but still, somehow, it became me. I didn’t mean for it to be that way. I fought against it. I tried to make a perfect life. Everything I saw, I did my best to correct. Everything I w
as afraid I couldn’t control, I found some way around. But people have a way of knowing things, and they want to know more.
So you’re going to ask me a question no one’s ever asked me. Here it goes.
You: Bev, what was the happiest moment of your life?
Me: Riding bikes with Colby early in the morning, through Golden Gate Park, when we were eleven years old.
Now that you know the answer, you’ll understand. Colby and I aren’t eleven anymore, and it isn’t really the morning yet, and we’re a far distance from home. But it’s going to be a very long time before we’re together again, so we’ll have to improvise. Thank you for letting us use your bikes. We promise to return them later tonight, right here, to this spot.
Love,
Bev
Neither of us has tape so I jog back into the diner and get a piece from the hostess. Then I come back out and we stick the note to the pole.
“Ready?” Bev asks.
“Yeah,” I say.
I straddle the brown bike and she swings her leg over the yellow one, and in hardly any time at all we’re off, sailing through the night air down the empty streets, together in a way we haven’t been in longer than I’d realized.
We ride and ride. Down wide streets and narrow ones, past houses and trees and shops and the river, until, breathless, we reach the edges of an empty park and we tumble off the bikes and onto the grass, and stare into the Oregon night sky.
“Do you feel better?” I ask. “Now that she knows?”
Bev says, “I don’t even know. I feel like I’m in a different reality. Like, when I get home, my parents and I aren’t going to recognize each other. Or like it was all some weird Twilight Zone thing. I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and I’ll be fourteen, and I’ll see those boots and I’ll knock on my parents’ bedroom door and my mom will know that I know, and she’ll confess to my dad and they’ll talk to me, and we’ll, like, go to therapy and play lots of trust-building games. I’ll stand there with a blindfold on and fall backward and they’ll catch me. And then we’ll be fine or something.”
“Do you think you’ll get there? Eventually? Even without the blindfold?”
“And the time travel?”
“Yeah, without that, too?”
She’s quiet, and I look up at the stars like I did last night. Close my eyes. Try to re-create them from memory.
“For the longest time I thought everything was about the affair, but it isn’t so much anymore,” she says. “I mean, I know what it’s like to make out with a lot of people and still only love one.” She’s quiet and I let the silence be, let her words hover above me. “I didn’t understand it when I was fourteen,” she says. “Because things seem so clear when you’re fourteen. Now, nothing seems clear. Which makes me less angry, I guess. But I don’t know how I feel about everything. I feel stunned.”
She turns away from the sky and stares into my face. “Actually,” she says. “I do know how I feel. I feel like Lorenzo.”
“From the play?”
She nods.
“You know how I kept trying to get you to take his lines more seriously? It’s because even though a lot of what he said was ridiculous, so much of it felt true. And perfect. There were all of these things that I wanted to tell you, about why I wasn’t able to trust myself.”
I shake my head. I don’t know what she means.
Her forehead creases. “Trust myself with you,” she says.
“So all of those times?” I ask. “When you were making out with all of those people in front of me and lying to me about Stewart?”
“I didn’t want to do something with you I might regret,” she says.
“Do you regret what we did?”
“No,” she says.
Time passes. We look up at the sky.
“Those lines, after Lorenzo tells Tilly he loves her?” Bev says. “Those are my favorites.”
I try to remember them. I picture opening night, my place on the stage. Bev in the middle seat of the first row. The lights bearing down on us. Meg in a blue dress.
They come back to me: “I want to tell you all the sad things, and then you will know me better than other people know me and that means we are reserved for one another.”
Bev picks up where I’ve left off: “Because we made a reservation like at a restaurant like at a grand hotel and we made this reservation with a certain foreign currency made of secret sad information we told each other in private rooms—”
“Oh, I feel a weight on my chest,” I say.
And then, together: “What have you done to me, Tilly? Why?”
Bev and I smile.
“So good,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. And then she rolls over on the grass, props herself up, and kisses me.
I can’t stop loving Bev just because our lives aren’t taking us in similar directions, and to be absolutely honest, I don’t want to. I know that if Bev did come with me to Europe, she wouldn’t have been doing the right thing. She would have been like my mom, running away from a life she isn’t sure of. Searching, always. And yes, we all are, or soon will be, disenchanted, but I still want to know it all: the heartbreak, the fear, the friendship, the anger, the love. All of it.
When I kiss her back, it feels important. It feels like life.
Bev turns over again, reaches for my hand.
And lying here right now, after everything, I fall in love with her again.
We find our way back to the diner and Melinda. Our note is untouched. We lean the bikes against the pole, and decide to leave the note where it is, make one more mark on the world.
When we get back to the motel I offer to stand outside with Bev while she has her cigarette, but she tells me that it’s something she wants to do by herself.
“Tour ended tonight,” she says. “So this is the last one.” She flips the lid, pulls one out. It looks skinny and long resting between her fingers. “Feel lucky you won’t be with me on the ride home tomorrow.”
She presses the box, a third full of cigarettes, into my palm. At the end of the block, a trash can waits under a streetlamp. I jog over and throw away the pack. When I get back to Bev, she is lighting up. The flame from her lighter illuminates her face and then goes dark. She takes a long drag.
“Good night,” I say.
“Good night.”
Once again, it’s late at night and I’ve given up on sleep.
Instead, I’m lying on the scratchy motel sheets with Alexa’s emergency flashlight propped up on a pillow beside me, drawing the scenes from tonight from memory. The diner with its vinyl booths and our cups of coffee. The bicycles propped against the pole. Bev and me, in the grass, under stars.
I turn over onto my back, so exhausted that I feel like I’m floating. I close my eyes and see Bev’s face. Open them and see the dark, shadowed ceiling. Close them and see an airplane in its moment of ascent.
All of the girls are asleep. I can hear them breathing. I listen close, try to determine which breaths belong to whom. After a little while, I give up.
My phone is next to me in bed. I reach for it and move as quietly as I can, off the sheets, across the carpet, out the door into the night. I find the name that I want and press call even though it’s 4:49 A.M.
“Hey, bro,” Jasper says.
“What’s up,” I say. “Were you sleeping?”
“No, no,” he says, but his words sound heavy. “So how was René?”
“He was cool,” I say, but René isn’t why I called. I lean against the balcony, above the row of parked cars. The streetlights are lit; the sidewalks are empty.
“So listen,” I say. “I was thinking. Do you have a passport?”
Saturday
I want to write Bev a letter on tiny scraps of paper and slip them in her purse for her to find later, mixed in with her own notes to herself. One sentence at a time with no order. Not a puzzle, just fragments. Or yes a puzzle, but a puzzle she could piece together in any way she wanted.
; i remember when we were kids.
i wanted to say thank you.
it is what i wanted and it is not what i wanted.
i am afraid of losing you forever.
But I don’t do anything like that. Instead, I hug Alexa tightly before she climbs into the passenger seat. And then I stand, empty-handed by the driver’s-side door, as Bev gets ready to climb in.
“This is really happening,” she says. “You aren’t coming back with me.”
I take the keys out of my pocket and put them in her hand.
“It’s up to you to get Melinda home safe.”
She closes her hand around the keys.
Too much time passes while we stand here, not saying anything, while Alexa waits inside.
Finally, I say, “Hey, you know what?”
“What?”
“I forgot to tell you. You guys sounded good last night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Like good good.”
“Just in time for the last show,” she says. “Too little too late, maybe.”
She smiles: her nose crinkles, her crooked tooth shows. The cut in her lip is already almost healed, but her eyes are sad.
And then she is hugging me, and then she is pressing her mouth to my mouth, and then she is in the bus with the door shut and the engine running.
Jasper shows up late at night with a duffel bag and backpack, wearing a backward cap and a tank top that shows off the wings and arrows and leaves on his chest and shoulders.
He grabs my hand and we bro hug and he smiles wide and says, “Shit, man, we’re really doing this.”
“I still can’t believe you have a passport.”
“Yeah, well, I told you guys I had everything I needed to get out of town. For years I’ve kept my passport pinned up on the wall of my room, just as a reminder that I’d get out someday. I didn’t think I’d actually use it, though. I figured I’d start smaller than this.”