Lone Star (7 page)

The girls had a three-hour ride back home.

“Did you see him?” Hannah asked.

Oh, I saw him all right. Saw him, heard him, memorized him. I could play him by heart on the piano, that's how well I've studied him. “Yes,” said Chloe.

How could she tell Hannah about college?

She couldn't. And didn't.

She wanted to ask if Hannah loved Blake half as much. Would she shed a quarter of Martyn's tears when it came time to say goodbye to the one she'd grown up with? Would she miss
him an eighth as deeply? What was it called when it wasn't pain, but a fraction of pain? Grimly Chloe closed her hands on the wheel.

“What happens next, Chloe?”

“I don't know, Hannah. What happens next?” She wished someone would know the answer to this question, anyone. It was going to get dark soon. Her mother would be worried. Nothing to do but drive on. “Remember Darlene Duranceau?”

“Who could ever forget her? Why would you bring
her
up, of all people?”

Chloe shrugged. “I'm trying to make a point about what happens next.”

After Darlene had died, Blake and Mason dismantled the woman's overflowing garbage heap of a house in Denmark, Maine. She had been a hoarder, hoarding even herself in the end. She kept eating and sitting, eating and sitting, and soon she got so big that she couldn't move off her couch, and she just kept eating and eating and eating, using the couch not just as a bed and a dining table, but also as a toilet, and, eventually, as a grave.

It was winter when she died, and everyone had been snowed in for days. The local market couldn't deliver Darlene's groceries. When the roads were finally plowed, Barry the delivery boy brought Darlene her customary two boxes of Pringles and pretzels. Barry found her. Barry did not recover from this. He had been a shy clumsy kid in Chloe's homeroom, but now he was on major meds, in therapy six days a week, and homeschooled by Social Services.

The townies talked about nothing else for weeks. What was Darlene's life like before she and the couch became one? What drama in her life had led her to the upholstered end? Was the end a consequence, an answer to a why? Or was it a catalyst? If everything you did led to everything else that would eventually happen, the question was, was Darlene Duranceau the beginning or the end?

After the coroner pronounced her dead, and it was time to
remove her from the premises, the EMT workers discovered that she was stuck. From lack of movement, she had developed sores that festered, causing open wounds that oozed into the sofa, which then closed up around Darlene's flesh like lichen to a rock. She had liquefied and then mummified into her furniture. The town cremated her with the couch. No one but the boys out in the school yard ever discussed how the funeral home fit Darlene and her davenport into the relatively narrow opening of the cremation pyre.

How could Chloe add to Hannah's chaos by confessing about college?

She wants to tell her, but she can't.

She can't.

And she doesn't want to.

Hannah will feel betrayed.

What kind of a terrible friend would Chloe be to betray her friend and then tell her about it?

So she doesn't tell her.

She thinks she justifies it beautifully.

Only a guilty mouthful of what feels like open safety pins alerts Chloe to the falseness of her excuses.

“I know the answer,” Hannah said. “You know what happened next for Darlene? Nothing.”

“Yes. That was the end of Darlene's story. But yours is just beginning, Hannah. That's what I'm trying to say. Take heart.”

“But what if what happens next is you and your sacred striped sofa become one?” said Hannah. “What if when God said flesh of my flesh, he meant flesh of my sofa? The chesterfield of my flesh? What if Martyn
is
a Darlene?”

“You can't possibly believe that.”

There was silence for a while. It was black out. There were no lights on the road except for the car's headlights.

“Blake is the sweetest lover,” Hannah said in a small sad voice. “You don't expect that from someone like him, because he's so rough and tumble, but he is super gentle and super
considerate. He's always caressing me, kissing my back. He's always trying to make me happy.”

“You're lucky,” Chloe said, settling into the wheel, stepping on the gas pedal. She didn't think Blake was so rough. For months, when his dad couldn't walk, on account of nearly dying, oh, and having a back broken in three places, Blake carried his father to the reclining chair by the sandy shore and set him down into it so Burt could watch the lake and the sky and Blake and Chloe fishing in the boat and skating on the ice. His dad liked to watch the kids having fun, Blake said.

“T
EACH ME,
H
AIKU.
T
ELL ME HOW TO BEGIN.
T
UTOR ME IN
beginnings.”

Blake plopped down across from her in the nearly empty learning center, scruffy, smiling, slapping his notebooks onto the heavy wooden table between them. His pens rolled toward the window. Chloe watched them, and he watched her watching them. “What's been the matter with you lately?” When she didn't reply, he went on. “Is it because of Barcelona? Don't worry. They'll say yes. They've been talking to my mom. Asking her if she thinks we're trustworthy.” Blake laughed. “I told her, lie, Ma, say yes!”

Chloe smiled halfheartedly but couldn't look at him. She pretended she was super distracted by Very Important Thoughts. About pi and Ovid and her upcoming essay on Pearl Buck. The tutoring center at the Academy was a large first-floor classroom with twenty-foot windows and long wooden tables behind which girls like herself sat and waited for students who needed help in math, hard sciences, English.

Although final exams were getting close, the place was nearly empty. Before Blake, she had had just one student all afternoon, an apathetic freshman from Delaware whom she schooled in irrational numbers like pi. “You can't have an infinite string of zeroes in a pi exponent,” Chloe told Kerwin, “because then the fraction would end. And what do we know
about pi? It's transcendental. It cannot end.” Her mother had once taught her about pi. Something about divinity and infinity. The soul is divine, her mother told an anguished Chloe. Don't worry. The soul has no end. Like pi. An infinite thing cannot end.

Kerwin wasn't getting it. And Chloe wasn't at her best. Her mind kept wandering. To distant beaches, imposing cathedrals, white stucco resorts in the hills, Hannah walking arm in arm with Blake through the halls, cozy as all that, as if Martyn had not happened, as if the last eight months of tawdry Tuesdays and Saturdays at the Silver Pines had not happened, Hannah making out with Blake between Health and Gym, discussing the prom with him between English and Science, fretting about her mango dress matching his peach cummerbund at the prom, and all the while Blake going on and on about Barcelona, and all the while sadness seeping on and on into Chloe's heart. How could Hannah pull off such nonchalance? Chloe couldn't tell why this bothered her as it did. Usually she tried not to ask herself too many why questions.

Now, pretending she hadn't heard Blake ask about beginnings, Chloe turned to the window, to continue to daydream about Iberian dragons rampaging through the streets. Across the field she could almost make out Mason's breathless shape on the baseball diamond. He was just a panting dot in the golden dirt. It was the only time she saw him panting, perspiring, on fire. When he was out in the field.

“Yoo-hoo, Haiku . . .”

She blinked and, dragging herself back to reality, turned to a quizzical, smiling Blake. He was clad as usual in plaid and flannel and cotton and denim, his stubble four days old, his wild curly wavy bushy hair three days unbrushed and two months streaked by the spring sun. His happy brown eyes were carefree. “I just need to know what's in my suitcase,” he said.

“In our play we reveal what kind of people we are,” Chloe told Blake, quoting Ovid. “So figure that part out.”

He looked unimpressed. “You're putting the cart before the horse.”

“No . . .”

“You are. Believe me. First I write. Then I figure out what it all means. Which, by the way, is the opposite of the insane horse crowd. They put portents on paper first and then use a mallet to beat it into a story.”

“You have it all figured out, don't you? What do you need me for?” She sounded just like her father.

He leaned forward as if confiding. “What would
you
put inside it? Look what I have.” He pulled out a three-subject spiral notebook to show her. He had divided his notes into sections: story; characters; and the last one for thoughts, notes, lists, tidbits. “I write and write,” Blake said, “but I still don't know the most important thing.”

Ain't that the truth, thought Chloe. She studied the grain in the table. He was too carefree and earnest to be saddled with her pity. “You do kinda have to know what's in the suitcase if you're writing a mystery.”

“Who said it's a mystery?” He shook his head. “No. See, it's the best thing of all. It's an unexpected thing. You think you're reading one kind of story, and then—POP, it's another.”

“Like not a mystery?”

“You
think
it's a mystery, but it's really a coming-of-age musical about a soldier.” He laughed.

“Wait, what? A
musical
? How can a story on paper have music in it?”

He grinned. They were leaning forward over the table. The only other people in the room were three tutors and a proctor. Outside it was deep spring, warm colors, tulips and grass, outdoor sports and new running shoes, the courtyard full of girls in light summer frocks, the kind Chloe never wore, blowing up in the wind. She could see the Academy's three cream-brick dormitories, arranged in a semicircle of unchaperoned fun. Every Friday night before curfew, drunken madness. Next to the
Hastings dorm a fence, a back gate, a cemetery, and a memory. Before the fence a tent. And under the tent, a barbecue grill and three picnic tables.

There once was a story with music in it at one of those tables.

Blushing at a hot lick of a nearly forgotten evening, Chloe quickly cantered away from the aching nostalgia of the picnic bench near Hastings, thinking we'll never be that drunk again, her tongue-tied gaze colliding with Blake's amused and amiable stare.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She stared at his large scuffed hands, folded together in Zen calm across the table.

“Tell me why we
must
go to Europe,” he said.

“To find the blue suitcase, I suppose.”

“Why Barcelona?”

“The question is not why Barcelona,” she replied, gazing out the window. A thousand open questions, invisible to the naked eye, apparent to every living soul. “The question is why anywhere else?”

“Exactly. Who else would know this but you?”

You would, Chloe.
How she hated that phrase. “You
would
write about Pearl Buck,” said her English teacher, whose insinuations Chloe didn't appreciate, but it was too late to change her topic. As if she just had to write about the daughter of missionaries who spent half her life in China. You
would
get all As, Chloe. You
would
have an extra eraser, your neat notes from last year, the report handed in three weeks before deadline, and a yes from all the schools you applied to. Universities of Pennsylvania and Maine. John Kennedy Jr.'s alma mater, and Einstein's. Every Boston school worth going to, Duke too, and San Diego, that misty Spanish renaissance on Mission Bay. You
would
.

It fed too cleanly into the digested and mealy narrative about her, the stereotype she despised and tried all her life to change. She didn't want to
not
do well. She just didn't want to be known as the girl with the Chinese mother who did well.

You
would
.

My mother is fifth-generation American, Chloe would answer to every suggestion of the supposed intellectual blessing of her ethnicity. She is more American than I am, since my father's father was born in Ireland and Moody, his mother, somewhere in the Baltics.
My
mother, on the other hand, makes peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. She frequently forgets to buy soy sauce. Does that sound Chinese to you? And yet how else to explain Chloe's own relentless quest for excellence? Every revolutionary date, every candidate for president, every battle in the Civil War, every Law and Act, every polynomial and integral domain, every
tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
all the way to dusty death had to be not just memorized but internalized. She had no idea how to explain it. Chloe had the answer to everything except the important things.

“Don't worry about what's in the suitcase for a moment,” she said to Blake in a voice thick with longing. “And the answer to the why will come. Just start at the beginning. Start with something true and real. Begin with your two main characters, the junk dealers.”

“If you're going to make fun,” Blake said, “I'm going to give them another livelihood.”

“I'm not making fun. Tell me about them.”

Eagerly Blake opened the notebook to the second section.
Character.
Pages were filled in pencil in a slow and careful hand, too slow, too careful for Blake. Her delighted skepticism must have been apparent on her face. Without affront, he said, “Did you know, Miss Smartass, that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his entire lifetime?”

She marveled into his grinning face, tedium forgotten, even Barcelona and parents and Hannah's other lover forgotten for a moment. “The surprise here,” she said, “is that
you
would know anything about Van Gogh.”

“Come on, Haiku, you know I'm a font of useless information.” He broke a pencil.

“Are you implying that you will also sell only one thing in your lifetime—say, your purported story? Or could you possibly be equating your writing skills with Van Gogh's talent?”

“Neither.” Blake was unperturbed by her teasing. “
Red Vineyard
was not even his best painting.”

“It was pretty good, let's say that, but again, how is that relevant”—she wagged her finger in a small pi-circle at him and his notebook—“to what's going on here?”

“All I'm saying,” Blake said, “is that if Gerald Ford can be a male model, then yours truly can be a writer.”

“Another metaphor
entirely,
but at least more apropos.”

“And did you know that Einstein did not or could not speak until he was nine years old?”

“How in the flipping world is
that
relevant?”

“Maybe I'm a late bloomer like him.”

Chloe smiled. He was being so cute. “Maybe. But the thing that's actually relevant about Van Gogh is that he painted the
Red Vineyard
not while standing at the window looking out at it, but solely from his memory and imagination. Take that away and mull it, Einstein, as you continue to pack for a trip we might not be taking.”

Blake took it. He mulled it. “Maybe then
The Blue Suitcase
will be my
Red Vineyard,
” he said, his own voice deep with longing.

“Or you could try writing something like
Breath
by Samuel Beckett,” Chloe said, straight-faced. “It's one of his lesser-known plays. It lasts thirty seconds and has no actors and no dialogue.” Her eyes twinkled.

And Blake, bless him, laughed, as Chloe had hoped he might. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “It's called an intermission.”

And Chloe laughed.

The proctor shushed them. “I'll thank you two to keep your voices down or take it outside.”

“But what if I turn out to be a writer?” Blake said to her, lowering his voice and leaning in. “I could be a writer, no?”

It must have grated on him that Chloe didn't think he could do it. But so what? What did it matter what she thought? God.

“Figure out what's in your suitcase,” she said, “and you'll be a writer.”

Blake sat contemplating her. His face was inscrutable.

“What?” She became discomfited. She hated not knowing what people wanted from her. She didn't like to disappoint.

“What do
you
think should be in it?”

“How should I know? It's your story.”

“But if it was
your
story.”

Chloe shrugged. “This one lady I deliver Meals on Wheels to, all the way in Jackson, lives in a yellow shed. I'm not kidding, it's a shed off the main property, which is huge, but the shed is tiny, and it's painted yellow, and she sits in a chair outside this canary box all day and watches the road, the cars, the walkers. She's right past the covered bridge to Jackson. She's ninety-two. She tells me that she prays to Jesus every day that today will not be the day she dies because she wants to be buried with all the jewelry her husband had given her, but she's afraid her kids will never go for it once she's dead. She tells me she's trying to figure out how to get buried alive so she can decide what goes with her. She'd probably put her jewelry into this vanished case.”

“What's her name?”

“Lupe.”

“I need to meet her ASAP,” Blake said. “Are you and Hannah doing Wheels tomorrow? Mason and I will go with you.”

A stammering Chloe didn't know what to say.

He was so excited, he skipped right over her lying silence.

They ran for the late bus, heaved on, said hi to Freddy the thoroughly vetted and tested union driver. Chloe sat next to the window, Blake beside her, their backpacks squeezed between their legs. Freddy waited another minute for stragglers. Chloe spotted Mason still in his baseball uniform, walking down the path from the fields, with a team of catchers and cheer girls
flanking him with their pom-poms and their camaraderie. He saw the bus, waved to Freddy, yelled something facing the girls while running backwards, then turned and sprinted with his gear and school books to the blue bus. In the twenty seconds it took Mason to jump on, Blake had gotten up and moved over one seat. Mason took the vacant spot next to Chloe. Blake sat with his back to the windows, his feet stretched out. He nearly tripped Mason with his sticking-out black Converse high-tops.

A panting, sweating Mason kissed Chloe. “Sorry I'm all gross,” he said, wiping his face with the sleeve of his jersey.

“No, I like it.” It was nice to feel an exerting Mason wet on her skin. It was only after sports that she felt it.

“Mase, we're going with the girls tomorrow,” Blake announced. “Meals on Wheels. To get awesome deets for our story.”