Kissing in America (20 page)

I
'd liked Texas's giant dome of a sky, its rolling hills and endless endless endlessness; I'd liked Cleveland and Tennessee and the swirling scenery of every state we rode through—but I fell in love with Tucson. Tucson was the Gurlag of cities: different, crazy, gorgeous, and surreal.

Mountains. Red and orange and bright pink at sunset. Saguaros raised their arms toward the sky like a cactus cheer. Prickly pears sprouted purple fruit. Giant aloe plants hovered like extraterrestrials. It was so hot that my Hershey's bar began to melt from store to car, but the heat made everything seem even more foreign and adventurous: another country. Another
planet
.

I still felt anxiety simmering inside me, but I pushed those feelings down deep and tried to forget about them. I tried to focus on traveling, the view outside the window, this new place, instead. My mom had texted me:
Lulu said you arrived safely
—
so glad!
She didn't mention the wedding date. I didn't write back.

Lulu toured us around town in her sky-blue VW Bug,
named Bugalicious. She took us to the café at Hotel Congress, which was antique and modern at the same time, the kind of place that makes you feel cool just for stepping inside it; to Bookman's, the biggest and most organized used-book store I'd ever been to; to Café Poca Cosa, her favorite restaurant, where we ate
pastel de elote con mole negro
—tamale pie with melted cheese and a chocolate mole sauce—gooey, spicy, and sweet. I ate the whole thing. (
Chocolate!
For
dinner
!)

Toward the end of the meal, my phone buzzed. A text from my mom, I figured, until I picked it up and saw a new number. My heart froze.

Still in LA. I'll see you on Friday :) Will

He'd texted me.

The bright tablecloth glowed, the curtains sang, the trees on the patio danced. I practically stood up on my chair. I stared at the message for a long time, then passed it to Annie and Lulu to make sure that it was real. He was staying in LA. He'd used a smiley face. Will had used a smiley face. In man-speak, that was practically the same as saying I love you.

I typed back:

The taping starts really early on Friday & ends by 5pm. See you after that? Can't wait! Is this your new #? Did you finally get a new phone?
☺

Instead of the smiley face, I wished they had an emoji that said
I love you and you just made my year and thank freaking god you're staying in California.

I showed it to Annie and Lulu to make sure it sounded okay, and then I pressed send. I stared at the screen. My future, my whole life, in one little candy-bar-shaped phone.

As soon as the text was gone, my limbs felt hollow. My mind swelled with the image of Janet's face. Which side of her would we see in LA—Aunt STD? Aunt Cowboy Kiss? How would I get past her to see Will? We told Lulu about Janet and Farley.

“What if when we get to LA she won't let me see him?” I asked.

“Don't worry,” Lulu said. “You'll figure something out.”

“We'll smuggle you out if we have to,” Annie said.

My mind imagined things I hadn't let it picture in days: Will and me alone on Venice Beach, the Santa Monica pier, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and at all the sights I'd read about. And I thought what a great place the world is. For two years, I'd felt like I was teetering on a high wire, not knowing if the world spun on an axis of good or one of pain. Seeing Will was the universe saying: it's a good place, and the dark days are exceptions to the light.

A
fter dinner, when the desert began to cool, we drove to Sabino Canyon to walk in the moonlight. We wandered past saguaros, cholla cacti, paloverde trees, and groves of ocotillo. The desert was quiet, nearly empty. Everything smelled like sage and mesquite, and the rocks glistened.

We walked single file down the path; the full moon lit up everything. “So if Tucson is Gurlag, who would Cleveland be?” Annie asked.

“Definitely Sir Richard,” I said. “And Texas is Destry, obviously. The bold brother with a soft heart.”

Annie opened her water bottle and took a sip. “Who's New York?”

I thought for a minute. “Andy Pomp from the
Pomp and Circumstance
series. He's a megalomaniacal but endearing businessman who pretty much owns the whole world, and he seduces all these women even though he has a giant ugly scar down his face.”

Lulu rested her hand on her stomach. “Too bad there aren't romances about pregnant women.”

“Oh, there are. There are romances about everybody—people with no legs, and women who have sex with cucumbers and stuffed animals and—”

They stared at me.

“I haven't read those. I prefer historicals.”

We continued on down the trail, and Lulu changed the subject to Elizabeth Bishop, who she was writing an article about for an academic journal. She told us how Elizabeth had traveled the world, circumnavigating South America by boat.

Then Lulu stopped talking. She gasped and froze. Annie and I peered from behind her.

At first I thought it was a rope on the ground.

A rattling—an eerie, sickening sound. The rope coiled, its head raised. We stood still, paralyzed.

The snake moved closer and we ran, screaming, barreling down the path, moving faster than I ever had in my life. We reached the car, then locked the doors and huddled inside. We grasped each other, trembling. Finally, we laughed with relief.

Lulu rested her head on the steering wheel, breathing hard. “Oh my god.”

“Muggers. Ax murders. Rapists. Diseases. But never rattlesnakes. My mom never warned me about rattlesnakes,” I said.

“I've lived here for years and that's the closest I've ever been to one.” Lulu shook her head.

“Are you supposed to run? Or stay still? What are you supposed to do?” Annie asked.

“I think move away slowly,” Lulu said. “But I wasn't thinking when I saw it. All I could think was RUN!”

She drove extra carefully, and we stopped at Donut Palace on the way home. Two bored girls in red aprons eyed us, seeming annoyed that we'd come in. Little did they know how good it felt to be alive, to buy puffy hot clouds of sugary dough, which we gobbled in the car and back at Lulu's house, sitting on the chairs and the bench in her garden.

“Everything tastes much better after you almost died,” Annie said.

We're lucky
, we said, and
What are the chances
, and
Nothing would've happened anyway
.
Even if we'd stepped on him, we would've been okay. We're not far from a hospital
. But I couldn't help picturing the opposite. Lulu pregnant, Annie and me carrying her down the trail. Phone calls, the hospital vigil, Lulu's husband grieving. Telling Annie's parents and sisters, if she'd been the one. I pictured my own mother, if it had been me who'd gotten bit. In my mind I watched her throw another ceramic pitcher against the wall.

“At least it would be quick, a snake bite,” I said. “You wouldn't even know what was happening.”

“Not exactly,” Annie said. “Snake venom can be hemotoxic—it would be pretty slow and painful if untreated.” She picked up another doughnut. “Not as bad as some other
reptile or animal deaths, though—there's this giant bird in Australia and New Guinea called the cassowary, and it can disembowel you with its claws. If you wanted a good death, a painless death, you'd probably want to stay away from the animal kingdom. . . .”

Lulu clutched her stomach. “No more talk of snakes and crazy animals.” She glanced around the garden. Beside us, a bed overflowed with more white flowers, their petals glowing in the darkness.

Annie eyed the curve of Lulu's belly. “What's it feel like?” Annie asked her. “Being pregnant?” The fear had stripped us bare; I felt like we could ask each other anything now.

“It's amazing and terrifying at the same time.”

The corner of her mouth quivered. It was strange to see Lulu scared—she always seemed so calm and together, so different from my anxious mom and anxious me. She picked a leaf off the plant growing beside her. “This isn't my first time. When I was thirty, I had a baby who died. Stillborn.”

My mom had told me about that so long ago that I'd forgotten it.

“Before it happened to me, I would've wondered how someone could miss a person they'd barely known. But you can't underestimate the depth of love a mother has for her baby. Or the depth of grief. I still grieve him. It's been sixteen years and I think of him every day.”

I thought of Will and his baby brother who died, his
parents who never got over it.

Lulu brushed a leaf off her chair. She shrugged. “I never thought I could get pregnant again. I never thought I'd have this chance.”

We were quiet. Lulu brought us glasses of water, and we sipped them in the garden. Annie shifted on the bench and stared at the moon. After a while, she touched the elastic hair tie around her wrist. “Is this what love is supposed to be like? Is it supposed to make you feel kind of awful?”

I nodded. “Yup. It's like a never-ending low-grade flu. Kind of like grief, actually. Do you remember that book my mom gave me?
The Stages of Mourning
. It said
Each year you'll feel better and better
. I don't know what the hell that book was talking about.”

“I always think
dead
is such an inadequate word. It sounds so final for something that, in so many ways, is completely unfinal after all,” Lulu said.

“It's final for my mom, though. That's why she never talks about my dad. Threw out almost every trace of him.” I touched the wax paper bag where the icing had pooled. “I just want to know that he died like you said”—I turned to Annie—“a good death.”

“I'm not sure what a good death is,” Lulu said, looking down.

The wax paper bag crinkled beneath my hand. “I don't know if I can stand more years of feeling like this. Of missing him,” I said.

Lulu took off her shoes and rubbed her ankle. “Grief and pain are natural, though. One thing I love about Tucson is how close we are to Mexico. Sixty miles away. You'll have to come back sometime for the Day of the Dead—it's a national holiday, with sugar skulls, parades, dancing, and picnics in graveyards, to remember people you love who died—it's the best holiday in the world. If we had a Day of the Dead in America, it would be sponsored by Xanax.”

We laughed.

“My mom would never celebrate it,” I said. “She's marrying Larry, planning the wedding as if my dad never existed.”

“Oh, she thinks of your dad. She thinks of him all the time. She just has a hard time being honest about it. And one of the most painful things of all, to your mom, is the thought of letting you go. You're sixteen. You'll only be at home two more years, and that scares her.”

“More than two years probably. She wants me to live at home and go to Queens College.”

“Will you.”

She said it as more of a statement, not a question.
Will you.

This voice inside me—a tiny, quiet voice, a new voice (or had it been there all along?) said,
I don't want to. I want to live somewhere new, on my own. I want to go away to school.

It didn't matter what the voice said. In reality, that wasn't a possibility. Even if I went to Queens College and lived in a dorm, my mom would probably stop by every day and make
sure I had no boys in my room and was wearing a whistle. My earlier idea of being emancipated seemed ridiculous when I thought about it now. My mom would probably hunt me down and guilt me into giving it up. If Lulu was the Truth Machine, my mom was the Guilt Machine.
(Shall we talk about thirty-six hours of labor?
she liked to say.
How you were surgically removed from my belly? And how you refused to eat homemade baby food—you'd only eat the expensive store-bought kind?)
I hadn't even made amends for how bad a baby—and fetus—I had been. I'd never have the guts to get emancipated.

I looked at Annie. She kept snapping the elastic band on her wrist. “Maybe you'll see Chance again soon,” I told her. “And whatever happens with him, you have this amazing future ahead of you at MIT—”

Annie shook her head. “I don't know if it will be amazing.” She picked at her fingernails.

“But you're happy,” I said. “You're not such an anxious person like me—”

“I just hide it well.” She shrugged. “I don't know. Sometimes I think how my parents have college degrees that are worthless pieces of paper here in America, so they own a laundromat, and my sisters are disappointments who break their hearts every day . . . so I feel like it's up to me to make their entire lives worth it.”

She pointed to the elastic hair tie around her wrist. “And there's this.” She snapped it against her skin again, hard.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I read about it online. Whenever you think of a guy you want to put out of your mind, you snap it.”

“Really?”

“We have one more day to study.
One day.
” She snapped the rubber band once more.

“Ouch,” I said.

I
n bed, Annie conked right out to sleep, and I went back to my nightly routine: checking texts, emails, voice mails. Textsemailsvoicemails. Repeat.

The air conditioner hummed as I listened to my sole voice mail from my mom (she was back from her trip,
Call me
), and I debated how long to stay awake to see if Will would write back.

On to the message board. I'd checked it a few times since we'd arrived in Tucson, but there hadn't been any news.

Now there were ninety-six new posts.

Fran had started a new thread.

I just spoke to Frank Longbrown. He wanted to let us know before it's announced to the media tomorrow that seven more bodies have been recovered and are awaiting identification, bringing the total to eleven. These will be the last bodies retrieved. They're going to leave the site and close the recovery effort.

Fran Gamuto (husband Frank, daughter Lisa, 22C, 22D)

This gives me hope. I pray every day that we'll be one of the lucky ones and they'll bring my son home. Then we can all close this chapter and move on with our lives.

Erin Farwell (Malcom, 19E)

I can't stand to think that my father may be there, his body intact. . . . He needs to be buried properly, with dignity.

Aurelie (father Edward, 14B)

You don't understand the state of the bodies. They're very fragile. They won't be identified by sight but by DNA. The submarines work with a robotic crane and a cage, and they'll damage the bodies by transporting them. After two years under the sea not only would they be decomposed but the fatty tissue would become wax. They will be punctured and destroyed by the crane and cage, disintegrating in the process, and then be transported in freezer containers. It's not humane.

Jill (Jacques Bluelake, 14A)

Back and forth, back and forth, retrieve the bodies, leave them there. I read through more messages, pages and pages of them on my phone.

I wanted his body found. I knew it completely. He had to be among them, we had to be among the lucky, and in my mind I thought again,
If the world spins on an axis of good
, then
he'll be brought back. The people who didn't want the bodies retrieved were wrong.

I kept reading the messages until they began to numb me, like my soul was slowly freezing, but I couldn't stop.

Then I came to this.

I've called Frank Longbrown personally and told him I don't want to be notified if my husband's body is retrieved. I don't want to have another funeral, to go through this all over again. My daughter and I have been through enough. I hope that after this there will be no more news reports or media coverage, and we can at long last put this episode in our lives to rest.

Claire Roth (husband Frederick, 8B)

I read it three times.

Four times.

Six.

If I kept reading it, I thought, it would make sense, become clear, fit into everything that I knew.

Not notified? Not
notified
?

My mind spun.

I walked out into the garden. I called her.

“Eva?” her voice crackled. I'd woken her up.

“How could you?”

“What?”

“You'll talk to strangers about him but not to me?”

“You're not making sense.”

“The message board. I read what you wrote on the forum.”

“Eva. Calm down. Please.”

“
How could you do that?
” I tried to clear my voice, to talk normally. “How could you say we don't want to be notified? How could you make that decision without asking me? You never asked me anything. You've never talked to me about this at all!”

Silence. She spoke slowly, softly. “You don't understand. . . . Since he was already identified, it's unlikely they'll find anything else . . . and even if somehow they do, it's not so simple. . . . The bodies aren't the way you imagine. . . .”

I said, “You've been making decisions with other people about Daddy's body. But not with me.”

“I don't want to talk about this right now—”

“You never want to talk about it. That's the problem. That's the problem with
everything
.”

The line went silent. Neither of us knew what to say. I didn't know if I should hang up or not.

“We can talk about all this when I see you,” my mom said. “We can—I can explain then. In person. It's not the same on the phone—it's late at night—”

“There's no way you can explain this. Not telling me that you made this decision—that's lying. And why did you go away with Larry without telling me?”

“I didn't want you to worry.” She paused, and then her tone shifted. “And you lied to me. Janet told me you've been
getting letters from a boy in California. A boy named Will.”

My throat felt dry.

“You lied to me about what this trip was for, didn't you? It was never about the scholarship, was it?”

I didn't answer.

“How well do you even know this boy—Will? When did you meet him? You never even mentioned him to me once.”

I couldn't stand to hear her say his name. She was crushing it, the love, thumb-squashing everything good. “Why do you think I didn't tell you? You don't know anything about my life.”

“I hate seeing you chase some boy. Some fantasy. I keep waiting for you to grow out of it—”

“That's why I didn't tell you. Because I knew you'd react like this.” My eyes stung. Tears had started.

She kept talking—lecturing—but I stopped listening. “I can't talk anymore,” I told her. “I need to go.” I hung up the phone and turned the ringer off. I set the phone facedown on the garden bench. The white flowers looked ghostly now, shadowy. Cicadas sang in a shrill roar.

I thought of my dad's funeral. There are so many brutal things about death. Ugly things you don't want to remember. Memories you wish you could wipe off your brain. And normally I did—usually I pushed the memory of that day away, tried to forget it, but now it rushed in—all the worst things began to rush in.