We hear the
click-click-click
of a woman’s shoes tapping against the tile floor. The rush of water from the faucet and then the creak of the door opening. “You don’t have to hide, you know,” the voice calls on the way out. “You think you’re the first two people to come in here together?” And then the door creaks shut.
Sean looks down at me, and I can feel myself blushing. We leave the stall, go back to the sink. My mouth is still warm where his hand was. I look at Nina’s mark on the mirror one last time, reach out the tip of my finger and trace the
lines, following the path she must have followed with her pen. And I notice something that I hadn’t noticed before, there next to the mirror, drawn on as though it is driving up the side, is a tiny little bus, dark deep red, drawn by Nina, with three tiny numbers written on the front:
257.
I hold onto Sean’s arm. I point, suddenly breathless with my own realization. Our eyes meet. And then I am grabbing Sean’s hand, or maybe he is grabbing mine, and we are running back through the dining room, which is almost completely empty now. Through the front window we can see bus 257 starting to pull away. Sean takes out his wallet, tosses a couple twenties onto our table and together we tumble out into the night.
W
e run, our feet slapping against the pavement, and fling ourselves into the car. Sean peels out of the parking lot and we hold our breath until we catch up to the bus right before it pulls out onto the highway. It is only once we are safely situated behind its giant chrome bumper, that Sean turns to me and shakes his finger, saying, “Well, see? I told you so! There’d be a clue! A clue for which I have now decided to give myself full credit.”
And I grin. “Thank you,” I say. I lean back against the seat. I’m not tired anymore. It’s not an I’ve-gone-to-sleep-and-woken-up kind of awake, it’s an all-this-adrenaline-has-shifted-me-over-to-a-slightly-different-reality kind of awake. I sit back up. “But really, thank you for everything, for all of this.”
“Eh, don’t mention it. I have ulterior motives.”
I feel my face getting hot. “Oh?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Because there’s nothing I can do to find my brother. So going with you on this trip makes me feel like, I don’t know, like I’m
doing
something.”
Oh.
“For siblings everywhere!” He punches the air, smiling, like he’s trying to make things light, but his smile doesn’t reach up to his eyes.
My stomach tightens. I’m an idiot. Both for somehow thinking he was flirting with me just now, and for somehow forgetting how hard all this must be for him. Going on a hunt for someone’s sister can’t be easy when a hunt for your brother would only lead you underground.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry that…”
“Don’t.” Sean turns toward me. He reaches out and puts his hand on my arm. “It’s nice that you want to, but you don’t need to.” My skin feels hot where he’s touching it. “We’re the same, you and me.” Something is happening in the car, the energy is changing in here. I hold my breath. We sit there like that, his hand still on my arm, his fingers moving ever so slightly. And then suddenly he takes his hand away.
He clears his throat. “So she was full of surprises, huh?”
I miss his hand. I want him to put his hand back. I shift in my seat. I put my own hand on my arm where his hand was.
“Your sister I mean. She was
surprising.
” There’s an edge to his voice and just for a second I feel protective of Nina, which is, of course, ridiculous. Sean doesn’t know anything about Nina other than what I’ve told him. And what I’ve told him certainly doesn’t make her sound like a rock of reliability.
Sean is staring straight ahead at the bus in front of us. The taillights are making his face glow red. I lean back against the seat and close my eyes. The images flash through my brain—the red ink on the mirror, the guy’s face, the heart, at once comforting and terrible. Comforting because she was okay, she was happy. She was in love. Terrible because she left us all for a guy and she never looked back. “Yeah,” I say. “I guess she was.”
Maybe there was a sign and I missed it.
A month or so before Nina disappeared, I had gone into her room to look for a pencil, or that is what I told myself I was doing to have an excuse to snoop without feeling bad about it. The few months prior, Nina hadn’t been around much and I missed her. The house felt different when she wasn’t there, like no matter how many lights I’d turn on, it was always too dark.
I remember pushing her door open, the smell of oranges and ginger curling out to greet me. Her room looked the way it always did, jeans and tank tops tossed on the floor and the bed, a few bottles of hair dye on the desk, and drawings everywhere: on the walls, on the desk, on the f loor, on the dresser, on her bed, torn up, crumpled, folded, in varying degrees of doneness. I remember looking at a row of faces, wondering who the people in the pictures were supposed to be. Were they all from inside Nina’s head? Or was Nina’s life
populated by a whole world of people who I’d never even seen before?
There were the pencils in a can on the desk. I grabbed one and let myself look around her room one more time. There on the floor was a half crumpled piece of paper covered in tiny handwriting. I poked it with my toe, hoping to “accidentally” get it to uncurl so I could read it. I dropped my pencil and bent down to pick it up. I looked at the paper again,
I love you
was written on it over and over and over in blue ballpoint pen. The marks were extra dark, whoever had written the letter had pushed so hard with their pen that it had torn the paper in a few places, because that’s how much they meant it. I stared at that paper, and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be Nina, to be so loved by everyone, that one individual person’s love could mean so little to you. That you could just toss it on the floor. I felt a stab of something then, similar to jealousy, but not jealousy exactly, mixed with a little twinge of pity for whoever had written the letter. I remember having an urge to pick that letter up, to smooth it out and take it to my room, to pretend it had been written just for me.
For the next six hours, the view out the front window doesn’t change—six red circles, four enormous wheels, a big chrome bumper. I might think we hadn’t moved at all, except for the fact that when we started driving, it was dark, and
now the sun has risen, turning the sky the cool light blue of morning. And the bus has finally stopped, on a side-street bus depot. And now here we are in Denver, Colorado.
Denver is what a city looks like when it’s not afraid of running out of room. The buildings are far apart and the streets are wide. There’s a giant dome of open sky over us, reminding us that the city is not all there is.
The bus door opens and a line of dazed and sleepy-looking passengers emerge. A girl just a couple years older than I am comes off the bus and claims her sagging red duffel bag from the pile of luggage on the sidewalk. Two years ago, this could have been Nina. The girl turns around, she looks like she’s looking for someone, like she’s worried they might not be here. I can’t stop staring at her. I feel like I’m watching a movie about the past and the part of Nina is being played by this girl. I catch her eye and she smiles and I feel weirdly relieved, as though if this girl is okay, it means Nina was, too. This makes no sense.
I think
I am very, very tired
. I think
maybe it is time to lie down now.
I turn toward Sean who is leaning back against the seat, his eyes half closed, his hand resting against his stomach. An image flashes through my brain, the two of us together in a bed, my face resting against his chest.
I force myself to look away and concentrate on what’s in front of me. What I see now is what my sister saw two years ago—this wide street, tall gray stone buildings, lush green trees. I step out of the car. What was in her head when
she walked down the stairs of the bus onto this concrete sidewalk? Joy? Relief ? Excitement? Sadness? I breathe in the clear morning air and try to imagine what it would feel like to be Nina arriving in this very spot. I reach up and touch my hair, imagine it ocean blue. I stand up straight and tip my head slightly back the way Nina always did. I close my eyes. When I open them, I notice there’s a slightly crumbling community bulletin board in a grassy clearing about fifteen feet away, perfectly placed as to be directly in the line of vision of anyone getting off the bus. I walk toward it. It’s covered in colored fliers: ads for a cheap motel, for restaurants and coffee houses, for rooms for rent and people looking for roommates. And up at the very top of the bulletin board are a few permanent ads behind glass.
Rocky Mountain Tours—See Denver With the People Who Know It Best
.
Keep Denver Beautiful—Get a Tattoo at Bijoux Ink. 2740 Colfax Avenue
. Bijoux. I stop, reach my hand out, and touch the thick glass.
Bijoux. As in “Bijoux wheere aaaaare yooou?” And I know it seems crazy, but I suddenly have this flash and I feel like I can picture perfectly how it must have gone: Nina standing here, new to this city, fresh off a fifteen-hour bus ride, and she reached out and she touched this sign, just like I’m doing now, in a city of unfamiliar people and unfamiliar things, this comforted her, she saw this and she thought
yes
. I can feel this yes coursing through my body as if it were coming from inside me. Maybe I think this because of some special connection I still have to my sister. Maybe after all
this time the strength of our bond can cross space and time and I can understand one thought she might have had, even though I cannot understand them all.
Or maybe I just think this because I’m tired, and slightly delusional because of how badly I want this to be true.
I guess there’s only one way to find out.
B
ut first, we need sleep.
Sean and I drive to the closest motel, a run-down place that rents rooms by the hour. And now the woman behind the counter stands in front of us, the room key dangling from her skinny index finger. “And you’re sure you kids are over eighteen, right?” She raises one heavily penciled eyebrow and nods slowly.
“Of course,” Sean says, nodding back.
“Okay, good.” She hands him a key on a white plastic Travel Route Inn key chain. “Checkout is tomorrow morning at ten. Continental breakfast is served until nine.” She looks at Sean, then at me, then back at Sean. “If you’re up by then.” And then she smirks like she knows something about why we’re here and what we’re up to. And even though what she thinks she knows is wrong, I blush.
We walk back outside, up a small set of concrete stairs and into the room. It smells like mold in here, and someone’s bad breath. There are two twin beds covered in sad floral comforters and in between them there’s a small chipped nightstand and
above the small nightstand is a framed picture of what I think is supposed to be a pineapple made by someone who has obviously never seen one.
“Honey, we’re home,” Sean says. He pulls back the covers on one of the beds and crawls in, still wearing all his clothes. Before I’ve even taken off my shoes, I can hear the slow rhythmic breathing of sleep. I look over at him. His lips are parted and his face is relaxed. His eyelashes brush against his cheeks. My heart squeezes. He looks different to me now, just ever so slightly different than he did yesterday. I cannot explain this and I don’t understand. All I know is I suddenly feel like I could sit here and watch him all day. But instead I change into some of the clothes I tossed in the bag with me last night and force myself to get in bed. Within minutes, I am sleeping, too.
I
have that dream again, the one I used to have all the time after Nina first disappeared. In the dream I go into the third bedroom in our apartment and there’s a girl in there, sitting at a desk. I ask her who she is. How did she get in here? What does she want? But the girl doesn’t answer, she just laughs like I’m making a joke. And she thinks this joke is very funny. And I feel so weirdly proud at making this strange girl laugh that I don’t even bother to tell her that my questions were serious.
We stand there for a moment, this girl and I, and then she says, “Oh, Belly,” and I realize the girl is Nina. She has a different haircut than when she vanished; her hair is made of thin strands of real gold and I decide that’s probably why I didn’t recognize her at first. But where has she been the last two years? I ask. She just shakes her head like I am crazy. Why, she’s been here, of course! And I am confused, so confused, but Nina just shrugs and smiles. She asks me if I want to look through her clothes and help her pick out which ones
would look best with her new haircut, and I say okay and she opens this door in her bedroom that I hadn’t noticed before, which opens into a giant warehouse, filled up to the ceiling with beautiful things. Right near the door is a giant bunch of gold Mylar balloons on extra long strings. She tells me she’s been selling them to make extra money, which is how she could afford all the new clothes. Normally she charges two hundred and fifty-seven dollars for each balloon. But I can have as many as I want, all for free, because I’m her sister. She starts walking around the enormous closet, gathering up the balloons for me. Once she has about six, the balloons start to lift her up off the floor and each time she adds to her collection she rises a little higher. She doesn’t seem to notice, or if she does, she doesn’t care. I look up at the ceiling and now it’s nothing but sky. And she is still gathering those balloons, going up and up and up. And I realize something is going very, very wrong here. I start yelling, “Nina, stop!” and “Nina, let go!” but she isn’t listening. “Nina, stop! Nina, stop!” I yell louder and louder. And this is usually how the dream ends, with me screaming and her rising higher and higher and higher until I can’t see her anymore. Only this time, it’s different. This time, right when she is about to pass between where the room ends and where the sky begins, she looks down and then, at the very last second, she lets go and starts to fall. Faster and faster, she hurtles toward the ground. And I gasp because I do not know if I will be able to catch her.
I wake up just after one-thirty in the afternoon, staring at Sean’s dimly lit naked back. He’s standing by the sink in the corner, wet from a shower, a thin motel towel wrapped around his waist. He looks so beautiful I can barely stand it. I can see his reflection in the mirror—his smooth chest, the faint line of hair leading down his stomach. I know I should look away, but I can’t. He raises a smaller towel up to his head and starts rubbing his hair, the muscles in his shoulders and back flex as he moves the towel back and forth. And in the mirror I can see his biceps flexing and releasing, flexing and releasing. There’s something on the inside of his upper arm, a smattering of white jagged lines. Scars. From an accident maybe? I wonder. I want to reach out and touch them.
When he starts to take his towel off, I finally force myself to squeeze my eyes shut, and behind my eyelids I picture what I’m not seeing. I breathe, in and out, trying to lie perfectly still.
“Ellie, wake uuuuuuupp.”
“Mmmpph?” I make a noise which I hope makes it clear that I was not awake until this very second and certainly wasn’t watching him get dressed only moments ago. I open my eyes. Sean is standing there in front of me, barefoot, fully clothed, his hair flopping over his face, his cheeks flushed from the steam of the shower, the damp towel around his
neck. He’s staring at my face and when our eyes meet, he smiles and I feel my heart in my chest.
“You sleep cute.” Sean says. And then he flips on the light. I sit up in bed, swing my feet out onto the hard, scratchy carpet.
The moment my feet hit the floor I hear my phone vibrating on the nightstand. Without even thinking, I pick it up.
“Oh my God, what is going
on
? I’ve called you like a hundred times in a row!” It’s Amanda.
“Huh?” I’m too groggy from sleep to deal with this right now.
“That guy? Sean? Are you still with him?”
“Hi, Amanda,” I say.
“I’ve been calling you,” she says. “Why didn’t you call me back?”
Sean sits down at the end of the bed.
“I was busy,” I say. And I glance at Sean, who is leaning over putting on his socks.
“Ellie. Helen was over here this morning picking my mom up for Pilates and she called her nephew Eddie from our house, you know, the one who goes to Beacon, and Eddie said one of his friends used to room with Sean and that Sean’s a total freak.”
I glance at Sean. He is leaning over and picking up his shoe.
“I’m not sure anyone in Helen’s family is really in a place to make that kind of judgment,” I say. Helen is Amanda’s
mom’s friend, a woman who gets a new nose put on her face every other year at Christmastime. An actual new nose. Like from surgery.
“I’m serious. Eddie says he doesn’t have any friends at school and just sits around by himself, like staring at things. And also I think he has a girlfriend.”
“What?!” The word pops out. My insides start to twist.
“Yeah, Eddie said Sean keeps a picture of some girl in a frame next to his bed and he, like, makes out with it every night before he goes to sleep. And he’s always writing letters late at night with a flashlight, like love letters to her or something.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to say to that. I mean, I doubt that’s even true, and…” I pause. “What do you expect me to say to that?”
“That you’re ditching the freak with the girlfriend and coming back home immediately.”
“But I’m not going to do that.”
“I don’t get it, what are you even
doing
in Nebraska?”
“We’re not there anymore.”
“Then where are you?”
“Denver.”
“
Denver?
Why would you be in Denver?”
“Why wouldn’t I be in Denver?”
“Ellie, you don’t just meet some guy at a party, decide he’s cute, and then take off to
Denver
. That is so not like you. Have you been kidnapped or something? If you’ve been
kidnapped, cough twice.” I roll my eyes. If she were genuinely worried, I might feel bad, but she doesn’t sound worried at all. Actually, she sounds kind of jealous. I can just imagine what she must be thinking, that
she’s
the one who’s always dating someone,
she’s
the one who should be going on a romantic last-minute road trip with a cute guy who picked her up at a party.
“I’m not even going to humor that with a response,” I say. “And I’m not really even sure why you called, actually.”
“You’re not
sure
why I called? Um, hi, I’m your friend and I’m worried about you. Why don’t you come home now, Ellie. I’m seeing this new guy now, Adam, and he has a friend, Cody, and I think he’d be perfect for you, Ellie. Just come home.”
She says this like it’s a command. Like she has the right to make such commands. I shake my head.
Sean has both shoes on now, and he stands up and walks back to the bathroom.
“I have to go now,” I say.
“But Ellie listen…” Amanda says. But before she finishes her sentence, I’ve already hung up.