Lone Star (47 page)

Hannah frowned. “What does that have to do with us, Johnny?”

“Searching anywhere and everywhere for the honey, you don't think it applies to us?” Turning his head, he locked eyes with Hannah.

She looked quickly away. “Are you saying that everything happens for a reason?”

“No,” he said. “But I am saying be careful where you look for it, because no one was made wretched in a brothel.” He paused. “Except maybe my father.” After a shrug, he went on. “I mean more about the eternal questions. Where is the drop of honey in your life? Are you the honey in anyone else's?”

“I completely disagree with your premise,” Blake said. “I don't think life is a beast above and a dragon below and gnawing mice. Life is walking through a meadow. Occasionally there may be rain.”

“But is there honey, Blake?” asked Johnny.

No one spoke for the rest of the ride.

The train, slow as a sloth and yet not slow enough, finally pulled into Krakow station at six in the morning. With all of Blake's travel guides gone, they had to rely on Johnny to find them a cheap, clean place to stay. He said he knew just the hotel, safe and reasonable, just off Krakow's main square, the thirteenth century Rynek Glowny. He brought them to a hotel of roses on a historic street full of shops and cafés. It was a nice place, tall and narrow, in a corner building with a long gray lobby.

“Thanks,” Blake said to Johnny just after Chloe had signed for the room. “That's it then. We'll see you.” Chloe's sleep had been so brief, the previous day so fraught and long that for a moment she didn't understand what Blake was saying to Johnny.

Even Johnny didn't understand. “Yes, you'll see me upstairs,” he said.

Blake shook his head. “No. This is where you and us part ways.” Glowering at each other, they stood with their suitcases in front of the morning clerk behind the tall desk. The young woman eyed them warily, the girls pale, the boys unshaven, all of them miserable. “You said yourself we don't need you for Auschwitz,” Blake said to Johnny. “And we don't have an extra day to go on an Oskar Schindler tour with you, no matter how much we'd like to. Auschwitz is all we have time for, I'm afraid. If you want, we can meet up with you later, or tomorrow, for the money.”

Now it was Johnny's turn to shake his head. “I'm out of here tonight,” he said. “I have to be in Italy by tomorrow morning.”

Chloe, now sharply awake and aware, wanted to cry why, but managed to keep her mouth shut.

“Whatever,” Blake said.

“Bro, wait,” Mason said, pulling Blake away, and then quieter, “What are you doing?”

Yanking his arm away from his brother, Blake shrugged. “Saying goodbye to him. What are you doing?”

“He's got to sleep somewhere, like us. What, we're going to split up now, after everything?”

“That is exactly right,” Blake said, enunciating every word. “We're going to split up now. After everything.”

“Hold on, Blakie,” Hannah said. She made a gesture to Johnny as if to say, don't worry, it'll be fine, he'll calm down. “Be reasonable.”

“I am being reasonable.”

“Why should he rent a separate room, pay more money? It makes no sense.”

Blake was quiet, breathing deeply. “It doesn't matter to me if he sleeps on the street,” he said coldly. “We were robbed, Hannah. Because of him.” He turned to Johnny. “All of our things were stolen, because of you. We still don't have over five hundred dollars of our money, because of you. Our irreplaceable things, the ones no money can buy, are gone forever—because of you. There is no fucking way I'm sleeping in the same room with you. I know you understand why.” Blake and Johnny stared mutely at each other. “Trouble is,
they
don't.” He glanced at Mason. “He's bound to open our throats, Hannah, and take off with what's left, though granted, there isn't much. He pretty much took everything.” And then Blake stared at Chloe.

Chloe would never look at Blake again!

Johnny stepped away, bowing his head in assent. “It's fine,” he said. “I got stuff to do all day. Don't forget, if you want to get to Auschwitz, the buses leave at eight
A.M.
You don't have much time to get ready. It's almost seven.”

“Wait,” Mason said.

“Wait!” Hannah said.

Chloe wanted to cry wait, but she couldn't find her voice. This can't be how it ends! He can't just walk out of her life like this. No. No. Please. No.

Blake stepped away, too, from Johnny, from Hannah, from his brother, and he was already far from Chloe. “No more waiting,” he said. “You choose, friends, brother, girlfriends. Him or me. Because the two of us are not staying in the same room. That will never happen.”

“Bro, it wasn't his fault,” Mason said. “He just got mixed up with the wrong people. And he helped us. Give him a break.”

“Yeah, Blakie, come on.”

Chloe said nothing.

“This is so fucked up,” Blake said, taking another step away from them. “Him. Or. Me.”

Stepping forward, Johnny raised his hands in surrender. “It's absolutely fine. Blake is right. You're right, dude. I know how you
feel.” Johnny looked sad and guilty, but he didn't look away. “I'm really sorry for the trouble I caused. I didn't mean for any of it to happen. I liked you guys and only wanted to have fun with you. No sweat. Really. Oh, and don't even worry about meeting up with me later. As soon as I have it, I'll leave five hundred dollars in an envelope behind the front desk. Is the room under Chloe Divine?” He cast her a gaze of stormy despair. “I'll leave it for Chloe Divine, then.” He hugged Hannah. “Take care, girl,” he said to her. “Don't be too hard on yourself. But do try to hold yourself to some standards. If only so you can tell when you fail.”

“What does that mean?” Hannah said.

“What the
hell
does that mean?” Blake said, but Johnny was already shaking Mason's hand. He didn't shake Blake's hand, obviously. Nor did he come near Chloe.

“Don't forget to visit the Temple of Sagrada Familia,” he said to them. “It's the most visited place in Spain.”

“Yeah, we got it,” said Blake. “I read all about it in the books your chum stole from me.”

“The temple rises nearly a thousand feet above sea level,” Johnny went on with a last tormented glimpse at Chloe. He nodded to her and smiled, hoisting the green duffel onto his shoulder. “As God made the mountain, the saying goes, so man made the structure. Be well, all of you. And so long.”

T
HEY DIDN'T GO TO
A
USCHWITZ.
T
HEY CLIMBED TO THEIR
tiny room on the fourth floor, sat down for just a sec on their hard beds with the itchy blankets, and didn't open their eyes until late afternoon.

For a few absentminded moments they teased each other for falling asleep before Hannah ran to the bathroom and Chloe remembered Johnny. Her chest and stomach and legs went numb, numb, numb, stabbed with a kind of Novocaine through which sorrow seeped. It was impossible! She didn't give him her home address. She didn't even know his real name! This couldn't be. The teasing stopped.

They showered and dressed, stared at the Krakow newspaper, hurried each other along, complained of life-ending hunger (not Hannah). Around six, they walked out of the hotel of roses, hair brushed, faces clean, denim clad, except for Chloe who, while brushed and clean, wore the coral minidress she'd bought in Warsaw, bought to wear for Johnny, while he was in Majdanek and she roamed the streets, trying to make herself look pretty. Here she was, with her bejeweled sandals and exposed bare legs and halter neckline, hair shining, lips glossy, and no Johnny. She wished for a cardigan to cover herself. All she had on was the sleeveless coral dress and her new small backpack that contained in it all the things she couldn't part with. Except for him.

They strolled down two blocks of a narrow treeless pastel-colored street to the immense wide plaza with the enormous basilica. They were too late to enter St. Mary's to take a look around. The last scheduled visit was at six. They had just missed it.

“Ain't it our luck,” said Mason. “Once again I'm thwarted in my mission.”

“What mission is that?” said Blake. “To visit every damn church in Europe?”

“Oh, nice. Blaspheme the holy church.”

“It would've been worth it to go,” Blake said. “I remember reading something about the opulent altar inside. It's from the fifteenth century. It's supposed to be the tallest indoor Gothic structure in the world.”

“Thanks, bro, for letting me know what I'm missing.”

“Welcome, bro.”

Some things never changed.

The main square in Krakow's Old Town is the vast Rynek Glowny, a medieval renaissance Gothic space surrounded by light modern townhouses. It's an open-door market, with hundreds of eateries, dozens of tent vendors, millions of pigeons. Chloe had been in Livu Square in Riga, and in Old Town Square in Warsaw. Krakow's plaza was the largest. But it was the first one without Johnny in it. So it felt the smallest. She heard music in the far corner, a saxophonist playing an incongruous “Fly Like an Eagle.” There was music, yet there was no music.

They bought a map and a guide, in bad Bilingual. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys, Blake said, but Hannah thought even there, they'd overpaid. “We're not staying, and we slept all day,” she said, “so why throw our money away on a guide for a city we'll never see?”

“Perhaps we'll decide after reading this shoddily produced masterpiece,” said Blake, “that one more day in Krakow will be worth it.”

They were starving, yet had a lot to do, so they decided to divide their duties. Hannah went to buy herself and Chloe a phone card to call their mothers. Hannah hadn't called hers once. She said she wanted to tell her about Zhenya.

“Zhenya is what you want to tell your mother about?” Chloe whispered.

“Zhenya is all I can tell her about,” Hannah whispered back.

Mason went to buy and mail a Krakow postcard back home to his friends. Blake found a small picnic table next to a beer bar by the far shady side of Cloth Hall, a closed-door market, and planted himself there with the map. He said he would do his best to salvage Krakow for the four of them. Chloe was sent to buy a feast for dinner.

“Something filling and Polish,” Blake said to her.

“Something filling and non-Polish,” Mason said to her.

Hannah said she wasn't hungry.

“Blake,” Chloe said before she walked away, “don't forget to get us to Oskar Schindler, okay?” Her voice almost didn't crack.

“We have no time for Schindler and his enamel factory,” Blake called back, sitting by himself at the picnic table, straddling the seat, studying the map. “But we might have time to walk to the river and see the dragon's lair. Would you like that?” He smiled. “I thought you might. Apparently it's a must-see.”

By the time Chloe returned with the food, Mason had joined Blake at the table. The brothers were trying to outdo each other in useless conversation. It all started, they told her, because Mason had put on a striped henley. “I know Sponge Bob thinks the best time to wear a striped sweater is all the time,” Blake said, “but the talking sponge is wrong, bro.”

Mason waved him off. “Eat your foreign food and shut up. Just remember that diarrhea is Europe's third-leading cause of death.”

“Ha! Dude, when?”

“Well,” Mason replied, trying to stay serious, “in 1900.”

Blake laughed. “A
hundred
years ago? I'll take my chances. But on the same subject, did you know that
constipation
is Latin for ‘crowding together'?”

“Is not!”

“If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'.”

“You're such a bullshit artist. You lie like a rug!” They both guffawed.

“Will you stop being two, you two?” Chloe said, setting the white bags down on the table. “Where's Hannah?”

“Still talking to her mom, I guess,” Blake said. “Wait, there she is. Hannah! Here!” He waved. Hannah hurried across the square. “Look how funny she's walking,” Blake said, amused. “Like she's waddling.”

Chloe made no comment, not even under her breath. Especially not under her breath. “I got you
zurek,
Blake,” she said, drawing his attention away, parceling out the food. “It's some kind of weird stew. You'll love it.”

She held the pizza and pierogi in her hands. Mason was helping her unwrap the bread and the potato latkes.

Out of breath, Hannah neared the table. “Ugh, no, not pizza. I can't stand that tomato sauce.”

“Pizza?” Mason said in a mimic tease. “Chloe, didn't you hear Hannah tell you she didn't want ethnic food?”

“Funny stuff, bro,” Blake said. “Funny stuff. Hannah, since when don't you like pizza? You love tomato sauce.”

Chloe quickly handed Hannah a paper plate with a potato pierogi and a crusty loaf. “Here, take, sit. Eat.”

“I wish it wasn't fried,” Hannah said, eyeing the greasy fare.

And then she spoke the following words: “Chloe, when was the last time you talked to your mom?”

“I don't know. Riga, I guess. After the orphanage. I called to tell her about the boy I found.” In the ruins of old forts near white-sand beaches. Chloe struggled to open her Coke. Her hands trembled slightly.

“You mean Raymonds?”

“Of course Raymonds.”

“Oh. Did you ask her if you got your UMaine room assignment yet?”

Very carefully, Chloe lowered her unopened can of Coke to the table. She said nothing.

“Because my mom says I got mine in the mail,” Hannah continued, “but for some reason I was given a random roommate. Not you. When you call your mom, can you find out who they gave you? Clearly she's going to have to call housing tomorrow to get it taken care of. Why would they do that? We were so specific that we wanted each other. We filled out our housing forms together just last month.”

There was a hard marbled silence, the kind where the only sounds are of taxis and strangers, of wailing sirens and cooing pigeons, of vendors and buskers (though not
the
busker). The kind where there is so much to say, and yet not a single word can be spoken. Blake was eating voraciously. Neither Chloe, nor Mason, nor Hannah ate or moved. The plate with the tepid pizza dangled in Chloe's hand.

Mason took it from her, and placed it fastidiously in front of himself. With a napkin he dabbed the cheese on top to absorb some of the grease. “Are you
ever
going to tell her, Chloe?” asked Mason.

A puzzled Chloe turned her head toward her boyfriend. She didn't even have time to wonder properly before Mason spoke again. “Or should
I
?” He took a big bite of his slice.

“Tell me what?” said Hannah.

“Yeah.” Blake's happy mouth was swallowing the thick
zurek
. “Tell her what?”

But Mason's mouth was full of pizza. He didn't reply.

Chloe lowered her hands. She had been waiting all these months to talk to Hannah, waiting for the right time. And yet this couldn't be a worse time. Simply could not be. Can I have a do-over, she thought with sadness. Can I rewind back to July,
when we were on my dock, our feet dangling in the water, splashing each other, laughing in the afternoon, dreaming of Europe, mapping, planning, giggling like when we were kids and Hannah and I were the closest thing to sisters. I want that back. I want to ruin
that
moment.

She took a deep deep breath, a slow-motion pause before the train wreck. For some reason she couldn't take her eyes off Mason sitting next to her, enjoying his pizza. What do
you
know about it? she wanted to ask. What are you implying? That
you
know? She frowned, suspicious and troubled. Was that possible? She almost spoke her first words to Mason instead of Hannah. But she checked herself. Hannah deserved an answer.

“Hannah,” Chloe said. “I'm sorry, poodle. But I'm not going to the University of Maine. That's why you have a different roommate.”

Sparrows, shopkeepers, tourists, singers. Why did they fight, remember each other's offenses? Why didn't they go play? Chloe felt such regret.

“What?” Hannah said.

“What?” Blake said. He stopped eating. He put down his spoon. He stopped smiling, making num-num noises. He stopped.

“I'm going to another university.” She turned her gaze to Mason's unraised head. “Mason, did you know this?”

“Mason, did you know this?” Blake echoed.

Mason wiped his mouth. “What are you glaring at
me
for? I'm not the one not going to UMaine. Though technically, of course, I'm not.”

“Mason,” Chloe repeated, more and more distressed, “
did
you know?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “So?”

“You knew and you said nothing?”

“What did you want me to say?”

“What—I don't know, but . . . why didn't you talk to me?”

“Why didn't you talk to
me
?” Mason said, not looking at Chloe, staring ahead at Blake. “I was waiting for you to say something. Any minute, I thought, she's bound to tell me. Any second now, she'll let me know.” Mason studied his pizza crust like it was a rare unearthed fossil. Chloe stared at Mason's spiky-haired head. She wouldn't and couldn't look at Hannah, or at Blake.

“Where are you going, Chloe?” Blake said in a voice so quiet.

Beyond the stunned
what,
Hannah had yet to speak.

“University of San Diego.”

Blake's hands dropped to his sides. His shoulders slumped. Chloe almost wanted to say I'm sorry to him. She remembered her place, and didn't.

“Bro,” Blake said, “you knew this and you didn't tell me?”

“Why would I?” said Mason.

Hannah found her voice, a loud one. “But you might have thought to tell
me,
Mason, no?”

“What are you yelling at
me
for?” Mason raised his own voice. “I'm just the messenger.”

“Um, you mean the dead opposite of messenger?”

“Hey, yell at her! It wasn't my secret to tell. Be mad at Chloe. She's the one who didn't say anything.”

She's a cat, Chloe wanted to say.

“She's the one who's leaving,” said Blake.

The brief silence that followed wasn't the silence to process, to suffer, to grieve. It was the silence of the universe before the hurricane.

“Oh my God!” Hannah jumped up. “What is
wrong
with you?” she said to Chloe. “What's wrong with you?” She started to cry.

“I'm sorry, Hannah.” Chloe wrung her hands. She wanted to rush to her friend, but didn't dare. She was afraid Hannah would punch her. In any case Blake was already doing the consoling. “I was going to tell you. Really. I just couldn't find the right time.” You know how that is, sometimes? Chloe thought. When you
have to tell somebody very dear something very important but just can't find the nerve or the right moment? You can imagine something like that, can't you, poodle?

“How long have you known?”

“Since May.”

“Since May!” Hannah cried. “And you couldn't find a good time to tell me? We made plans to come here, and you knew! We filled out our housing applications together, and you knew! Couldn't you have told me then, before we wrote down our personal hygiene habits?”