Hydraulic Level Five (1) (23 page)

“Jaime’s meeting us at my parents’ house in an hour. If we don’t hurry, she’ll string up Samuel by his testicles, which might not be a bad idea, actually. Anyway, I’ve already drugged him and I don’t know if I can pull it off two nights in a row.”

“Fresh air and sedatives make for sleepy boys!”

“I’m serious, Danita, Molly. Let us deal with our baggage our own way.”
Just let me go back to sleep. That’s all I want.

“But you don’t deal with it,” Molly argued.

“And this is dealing with it?” I tried once more to wrench my feet free.

Danita gritted her teeth as she and Molly dragged me toward the door. “Quit being difficult, Kaye. I don’t want to have to use the bungee cords, but so help me if you don’t stop squirming, I’ll put you in the trunk.”

Bungee cords? Would they really tie me up with bungee cords? Yes, they would. I had ghastly visions of being tossed in a trunk by my two friends, bound and gagged as we bounced along the road to Lyons. Crazy, crazy people. My body slumped to the floor in a massive exhale, the fight leaving me.

“Fine. At least let me throw on a fleece over my camisole. Let’s go prank the unholy cliff-hucker, woo-hoo. Then will you let me go back to bed?”

Danita flipped on the light switch. Light flooded my room, blinding me. “Yes.” She flipped her long plait over her shoulder like she was friggin’ Nora Nixie.

“I’ve already got your overnight bag, briefcase, and laptop packed and ready to go!” chirped Molly.

Tonight would be rough. I missed those crickets.

Chapter 12: T-Rescue

When a kayak capsizes, a second kayak
maneuvers perpendicular to the first.

Hydraulic Level Five [working title]
Draft 1.12
© Samuel Caulfield Cabral
The Weeping Lady

T
HEIR
E
MPTY
H
EADS
are filled with his sister. All the gangly, pubescent thirteen-year-old boys in Bear Creek who wake to a sticky mess in their pajamas dream of Maria. They talk about her now, his baseball team, as they tromp along the gravel road toward the cemetery.

Caulfield wants to vomit.

It is May twenty-third, his birthday. His aunt wakes him with “Las Mañanitas.” She invites his entire team to spend the night after their game. They eat arroz con leche and Mexican birthday cake that looks like a baseball wearing a sombrero, open presents, and break a piñata. They put on a movie no one watches, bashing each other with giant beanbags in the basement instead. Now it’s nearing midnight and his parents have long since gone to bed. These are the days before Caulfield’s family moves out-of-town to the foothills, and there is an entire nighttime world of parked cars, lawn gnomes, and rolls of TP at their disposal.

But all his friends yap about as they weave around dew-coated graves in Bear Creek Cemetery is Maria. “Shut your face.” He shoves at the ball players, their flashlights bobbing across time-weathered tombstones. “She’s my sister!”

“Oye! You can score her panties for us!” exclaims a pig-eyed pudge who habitually gave Caulfield swirlies a couple years ago. But Caulfield is now a head taller than most of them, a welcome development in recent months. He can stare them down like a Rottweiler if he chooses, save for Esteban. It is Esteban who beats Caulfield to the tackle. He sends the pudge flailing across the ground, freshly-mown grass clinging to legs and arms.

Caulfield trudges through the dark, leaving behind the skirmishing boys. If he is honest, he also aches and strains for a girl—a friend of Maria’s from school. She is a frilly redhead with barely-there hips and breasts, and her lips are perpetually glossed with cherry ChapStick. He’s never physically hurt for someone like this before. He follows her around the house when she visits, shyly averting his eyes if she catches him watching while she and Maria do homework or paint their nails. Aspen notices his crush after he stands her up. She angrily bikes over to his house, pink banjo slung over her scrawny shoulders, demanding to know why he keeps bailing on their music sessions. Maria’s friend smirks down at Aspen through thick eyelashes, asking Caulfield who the kid is.

“This is Aspen, the girl who lives down the street.”

After an argument in which Aspen calls Caulfield a barnacle-brained wombat and Caulfield laughs (which incenses her even more), he convinces her he can have crushes and still be her friend. She watches him through coarse eyes, arms twined to her childish frame.

“Just don’t kiss her. That’s gross.”

Caulfield wrinkles his nose. “I’m not going to promise that.”

“Well, at least promise me you’ll wait a long, long time.”

“Whatever. I’ll wait.”

She smiles a victor’s smile, and Bear Creek is a brighter place.

He never did kiss Maria’s friend with the cherry ChapStick lips. But, three years later, on Halloween night, he did kiss Aspen.

The boys still toss each other around several yards away, behind a cracked marble obelisk. Esteban cusses at the pudge, forcing him to take back what he said about Maria’s panties. Good. He wants a chance to see the stone woman before the others do.

They are supposed to be hunting for the Weeping Lady—a life-sized statue of a woman draped in robes, near one of the more prominent crypts. Like every small town, Bear Creek has its ghosts. Legend is, she weeps for lost love, stolen from her before life had barely begun.

Even in the dark, across the cemetery, he sees two worn streaks where thousands of tears drip from her eyes and slip down granite cheeks. Hers is the expression of a tender mother—the way mothers should look at their children. He obsesses over her expression.

In daylight, Caulfield examines her cold, beautiful face countless times, silently probes her dead eyes with the fingertips of a blind boy. He logically determines that she cries because rain and dew collect in the hollow gouges of her eyes and spill over. It is just science, nothing more.

He and Aspen test his theory. He hands Aspen his water bottle, wraps gangly arms around her legs and gives her a boost, bringing her eye-level with the Weeping Lady. She streams water over the stone woman’s head, and sure enough, tears gather and spill over her cheeks, just like he expects. Aspen’s own face falls.

“It’s just…I didn’t want to know. I like that she cries because it makes her real. Now she’s just…cold. Made of stone.”

Caulfield frowns, hard-pressed to figure out why she feels that way. “Aren’t you happy she’s not suffering all the time? I mean, being around forever and crying is kind of miserable. I hate to think of her like that.”

“No. If she’s crying, at least it means she feels something. Now I could kick her or hug her, and it’s sad because she won’t feel a thing.”

Caulfield works a lump back in his throat, biting his lip, finding a pain that is sharper, more immediate than the cracks spreading through his chest. He can’t comprehend why the Weeping Lady affects her the way it does. The Weeping Lady is just a statue. But Aspen has a soft, sensitive heart. He is a complete ass. A selfish bastard for ruining her fairy tale. Would it kill him to let her believe, a little longer, the Weeping Woman cries tears for the loss of an idyllic love, an idyllic life? He gave her cold, ruthless reality, and now he can never take it back.

Gathering her up in his arms, he embraces her tightly, willing her to be happy. “Firecracker, I believe she’s real. I think she can feel, and see, and hear everything we say and do. And I bet she enjoys our visits.”

Her face is pure sunshine for him, warming his chest, searing the web of cracks closed. He will give her fairy tales, pages and pages of fairy tales, in exchange for her sunshine.

He should have just lied in the first place.

Samuel, don’t you DARE start this self-loathing metaphorical prose garbage on me again. Are we going to have to hash this out like we did with The Last Other? Because if I wanted to feel pointless pain, I’d just smash my fingers between copies of War and Peace. First of all, thirteen-year-olds don’t call themselves “selfish bastards” (which is cliché, by the way). Second, why are you sending this to me at four thirty in the morning? The LAST thing you want to do is start with the late nights again, in the middle of a BOOK TOUR AND MOVIE PROMOTION, of all times. You are driving me INSANE.
~Caro.

Caro, I’m sorry about the tour and promotion. I know this means more work for you. But I’ve got to mend some fences first, and the rest will have to come second. Please be patient.
~SC

SC, fine. It usually does come second. It usually does mean more work. And yes, you are an ass (but a damned gorgeous one, and there’s my weakness).

In the back of Molly’s lime green Subaru, cruising roads after midnight on the way to Lyons, I finally spilled my guts about my trip to New York. Danita fanned the fire, cornering me from the front seat with the fury of a windstorm.

“All right, Kaye. I haven’t done this yet because you and Samuel actually seemed to be getting along, though I don’t know why stupid pranks work so well for you two. But you better start talking about your top-secret New York excursion, right now.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because…I can’t.”

“Because he was screwing a woman and snorting coke in New York?”

“Danita!” Molly barked.

My eyes went wide. “How…how do you know about that?”

Molly gawked at me in her rearview mirror. “It’s
true?
No, you’ve got to be kidding!
Sam?
I don’t believe it.”

“That’s what I said,” Dani grumbled.

“Wait, when did you go to New York?” Molly’s face was rife with bewilderment.

My heavy skull fell back against the headrest. I’d have to spill. There was no getting around it, now. “This does not leave the car, understood?”

They both agreed.

“Remember that this happened almost seven years ago. And it was all really fast, so some of it’s jumbled.” I sighed.
Here goes nothing
.

“After Samuel packed a bag and left, I wasn’t doing very well. Sofia called every night, checking on me, making sure I went to classes, prying information from me about what went down between the two of us. She and Alonso hadn’t heard a thing from him—did you know that, Danita?”

“They asked me if he’d been in touch. Keep going.”

“I was really frightened. So was Sofia. And my head…I wasn’t sure what I thought, then, my mind was scattered marbles. When he left, I was convinced it was just a big misunderstanding, that he was mired down in stress. His job, new marriage, finances, things every post-honeymoon couple has to work through. But when he didn’t call, and no one else heard from him…

“Then, finally, Samuel phoned Sofia. He told her not to worry and gave her his address because he wanted some of his belongings shipped. The minute I had that address, I flew into action. I printed a Google map, threw some things in a backpack, yanked our savings and bought a plane ticket to New York.”

“Where was he living?” Danita asked.

“He had some writer acquaintances from his Colorado University days who attended NYU, and they shared a brownstone in the East Village. I’d only met them once or twice. They really weren’t friends of ours—kind of spoiled rich kids.”