A Ticket to Ride (12 page)

“That you were a freak, if you really want to know. That I was supposed to tell you to stay away from him.”

There was a split second of collapse, Fawn’s face changing, falling like something constructed of pick-up sticks, and then she was herself again, composed and detached and harder than ever. “You can both go fuck yourselves,” she said, and with that turned to head back the way we’d come.

I walked home alone. Once the anger dissipated, which took all of about three seconds, I felt dizzy, deflated.
What had just happened?
I hadn’t meant to say anything about Tom at all, and I certainly hadn’t meant to hurt Fawn, but I’d been forced to. Fawn had picked and picked at me. What was I supposed to do, just take it? That wouldn’t have worked either. Fawn didn’t want me to be a baby, but didn’t want me to stand up for myself either. There was no right answer, just like with Tom. What if I’d lied and said I didn’t want him to touch me, would he have done it then? Was that what he wanted to hear? No. If I lied, if I told the truth, if I said nothing—there was a tiger behind every curtain.

When I got home, Raymond was out, no note. Fawn was nowhere to be found. I tried to take a nap and failed, and then watched TV for a while, switching back and forth between a movie about pioneers and a gospel choir in flowing robes and white collars. When I turned the sound off, it looked like they were floating or swimming, deranged underwater angels with their mouths opening and closing like Felix’s. I went to the freezer for the plastic bag of pinkies and fed him, feeling no par
ticular relish or disgust. He was a carnivore; it was his nature. What was my nature? I had felt a flare of power when I told Fawn what Tom had said about her, the word
freak
like a shell casing in my mouth. But now I felt awful, remote from Fawn and remote from myself. I stretched out on the couch and reached up under the sheet so I could feel the fabric. It was satisfyingly coarse, making my palm and fingertips itch. I rubbed it harder. In the corner, Mick thumped his tail with his eyes closed, and somehow, to that whacked percussion and the sensation of my hand moving in serrated circles on steel wool, I fell asleep.

It was dusk when I woke, and I was still alone. I walked outside and sat in the grass for a long time.
Where was Fawn?

Eventually Skinny Man came out and rolled his garden hose into a meticulous basket coil at the side of his garage. One by one the streetlights stammered on and the sky brightened to a false white-pink ceiling that looked collapsible, like one big trapdoor. Bats skittered and dove, feasting on the mosquitoes that were eating me alive. Nothing had really changed. I needed Fawn to like me as much as ever—needed to talk to her, to tell her that I would make things right between us. How I would do that I didn’t know, but I had to figure it out. Even a few hours without Fawn had been lonelier than I could have imagined.

At the corner, a white sedan pulled up to the stop sign and someone got out. It was Fawn. She leaned over, said something to the driver through the window, and then backed up, lifting her hand in a wave. As the car pulled away from the curb, I thought I saw the silhouette of Shipman’s formidable Afro, but I couldn’t be sure.

Fawn approached the house slowly, moving in a feline way, her hips swinging, her hair lifting lightly behind her. It was beautiful to watch. How could Tom not want her? She was amazing. In my whole life, I would never have an iota of Fawn’s grace and composure. I would never be anything like Fawn, in fact; I
should just give up trying. Closer and closer, Fawn walked, her face materializing out of the dusk, growing clear and lovely features. I felt a sharp pang of guilt. Fawn was my best friend in the world and still I had gone to Tom, wanting him to come on to me.
What had I been thinking?

When Fawn got to the edge of the driveway, she stopped.

“Hi,” I said.

“Don’t even think about talking to me, you little bitch.” Her voice was flat and even, as if she were a judge delivering a verdict, a doctor making the prognosis crystal-clear. Then she turned on her heel and walked into the house.

I
t will all blow over. It will all blow over.
This was my mantra in the days after my fight with Fawn, a phrase I borrowed from the country, which seemed to be saying it or something like it over and over, en masse, about Watergate. Everywhere we went that summer, radios and TVs were tuned in to the Senate hearing trials. People were interested, but mostly in being told that it was all a big misunderstanding. Any day now, the whole thing was going to be explained away. John Dean would say his thing and then Nixon would say his thing. People had made mistakes, maybe even Nixon himself, but he would apologize and they would accept, and everything would go back to the way it had been before.

Or would it?

At home, we watched the trials in the evenings after dinner, but with the sound off.

“I can only hear so much lying before I start to get really ticked off,” Raymond said.

“Me too,” said Fawn, lifting her eyebrow pointedly at me before turning away.

In the daytime, things were more or less the same as always. We sunbathed every day between ten and two, but unless one of us asked the other to pass the cocoa butter, or to change the radio station, we didn’t talk. From my towel, through squinted lids, I could see Fawn’s bent legs twitching back and forth, keeping their own time. If I turned the other way, there was nothing in my sight but the bleached green yard and paler curb, the asphalt curdling and blurring and going nowhere.

It will all blow over
, I repeated at bedtime, when a silent Fawn lay facing away from me, her tanned shoulder like a piece of statuary above the sheet. After enough time had passed and Fawn was sure I was asleep, she would sneak out on her own. Where she went on these nights, I didn’t know, but I supposed Fawn had a new boyfriend. Maybe it was Shipman, maybe some total stranger. Did they go to the park, or to the construction site? Did they grope each other to “Bennie and the Jets”?

One night I lay in bed awake and started to feel like I was going crazy. My breathing was loud and steady, and with each exhalation, I felt I was sinking into the mattress. At first it was sort of comforting.
This is just me relaxing
, I told myself. But soon, I began to feel panicky. It was like a spell, but different, backward. Rather than starting way down at the bottom of my lungs and climbing me like a ladder, this pressure seemed to be moving from the outside in. The bed was trying to breathe me, the room itself to devour me atom by atom. I had lost Fawn or she had purposefully lost me, and what was I anyway? What was I made of and for what purpose? If Fawn wouldn’t forgive me, I’d be alone again. I could die in that room, like furniture. I might go to sleep and never wake up. Or go to sleep and wake up just as sad and hollow as I felt right then. With that thought, I forced myself upright. Adrenaline and fear pushed me out of my nightgown, into shorts and a tank top. I was out the window and halfway down the street before I could fully register what I
was doing. Where was I headed? After Fawn? No, she wouldn’t be happy to see me even if I did manage to find her.

I walked aimlessly for a while. It was after midnight and the streets were relatively empty. I was a little afraid to be out on my own, but not as afraid as I had been at home in my own bed. So I kept walking. At the corner of Nineteenth Street and Twenty-fourth Avenue, the 7-Eleven glowed in a friendly way. I had no money but went inside anyway, cruising the bright racks of magazines and candy bars as the Slurpee machine gurgled pleasantly.

“Hey stranger,” said a voice behind me. It was Claudia. A rope of foot-long red licorice trailed from one side of her mouth, and as she talked around it, I saw her teeth were pink. “Where’s Fawn? I thought you guys were attached at the hip or something.”

“Not anymore.” I shrugged. “We sort of had a fight.”

“About Tom?”

“Actually, yeah. How’d you know?”

“There’s always a boy involved, isn’t there? Besides, I sort of got the impression things weren’t going well between him and Fawn, and that maybe he’d rather be with you instead.”

I was shocked to hear this. “Really? Did he tell you that?”

“Tom never tells me anything, but most of the time he doesn’t have to. The man’s totally transparent.”

She burped unself-consciously, then bumped one side of the swinging doors with her hip. I followed her out into the parking lot, feeling baffled. Tom was transparent? I couldn’t fathom him any more than I could Fawn or Raymond—or anyone, really. The only one who seemed transparent in my world was me, but at the moment I didn’t care. I wanted Claudia to read my face, my mind, and know that I needed her to stay with me—with her pink teeth and affability, her skates pulsing back and forth on the asphalt—even for five minutes longer. I wanted to hear more about Tom, sure, about why she would ever guess he was inter
ested in me, but it didn’t matter if we talked about the weather instead, or nothing at all, if we just sat and watched clouds of bugs circling the streetlight as if their lives depended on it. I knew that if I was left alone just then, I would lose my mind.

“Well, I’m glad I ran into you,” Claudia said, her ponytail flicking to one side as she glanced behind her.

“Do you have to go?” I said and sort of lunged at her, grabbing her arm. I knew I sounded pathetic but couldn’t help myself.

“Are you okay?” She wrinkled her forehead. “I mean, you look a little sick to your stomach.”

“I am,” I said, relieved for something tangible to pin my desperation on.

“My house is only a few blocks away. Do you want to come over and lie down awhile?”

“Really?” I asked. I couldn’t quite believe her niceness, her concern. If I ever showed one sign of panic or weakness to Fawn, she pounced on me like a hawk on a squeaking, flailing mouse. “I’d like that.”

“What’s your shoe size?” Claudia asked, sitting down on the curb and loosening the laces on her left skate.

“Seven and a half.”

“Close enough. Here,” she said, handing the boot to me, “we’ll be a lot faster this way.”

And we were. For the six blocks to the Fletchers’ house, we each used our one bare foot to push off against the sidewalk, and then sailed as far as we could before pushing off again. Inside, the boot was still warm and sweaty from Claudia’s foot, but I didn’t mind. It felt good to be moving in tandem, with a singular task and direction. Through the open windows of the houses we passed, we could see the occasional blue rinse of TV light, but most of the world was asleep around us. The sound of skate wheels clicked and rolled through the quiet like a miniature train, and I realized I was having fun. Just
fun
—without Fawn’s constant
scrutiny, without the pressure of having to pretend I was older than I was or knew more than I did. Without having to guess what Fawn was thinking or plotting. For the first time in weeks, I was actually happy. So much so that by the time we arrived at Claudia’s house, I’d nearly forgotten why we were there.

“Everyone’s probably asleep already,” she said. “Wait here.”

In a few minutes she returned with a squat glass of warm water and an Alka-Seltzer tablet. “This might taste yucky,” she warned, bending to sit next to me on the front step, “but it should help.”

I dropped in the tablet and took a big gulp. Hot fizz climbed into my nose, washed over my tongue leaving behind the taste of aluminum and baby powder. It was awful. And it was kind of wonderful too, the way Claudia sat beside me and watched me drink it. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone worried about me.

“Are you going to be all right?” she asked when I’d nearly finished.

“Yeah,” I said. “I feel better already.”

The next night after Fawn snuck out, I waited half an hour and left myself. This time I dressed with deliberation and headed straight for the 7-Eleven. Just as if I had willed her there with the force of my concentration, Claudia stood in the magazine aisle, sucking on a cherry Coke and chortling over something foul Alfred E. Newman had done in that month’s
Mad
.

We greeted each other, and I could tell she was just as happy to see me as I was to see her. Claudia didn’t seem to need to protect herself by acting casual or aloof the way Fawn did. Ultimately it was what I liked best about her, the way she was who she seemed to be, sunny and uncomplicated—no games or masks or machinations.

“You want to go check out Turner Park?” she suggested once we were outside.

“Why don’t we go someplace new? I kind of like it just being us.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Tom’s been a real jerk lately, so maybe it would be best if we didn’t run into him or, you know, anyone else.” She glanced at me knowingly.

“Exactly what I was thinking.”

I trusted Claudia to lead the way and when we came upon the wrought-iron gate of a cemetery, I was only slightly nervous.

“We used to come here when we were kids,” she said, “me and Tom and Collin, and tell ghost stories. Are you game?”

I nodded and followed as she led me well past the front gate to where a fat lilac sat, its unpruned blossoms brown and shriveled. “We have to crawl under,” she said. She pushed aside a handful of branches and pointed to a kid-sized hole in the chain-link fencing. “Tom used to say someone made that hole trying to get out, not in.” She raised her eyebrows spookily.

“Did you believe him?”

“Every single time.”

Once we were inside it was like any other garden in the dark, long sweeping pathways, islands of shrubbery, trees pressing down from above—except there were dead people everywhere.

“What I really want to show you are the babies,” she said as we walked. “There’s a whole section for them, little tiny graves. Some are so small you wonder if they’re not buried in shoe boxes.”

“Ugh.” I shook my head, trying to unhouse the image. “And you came here as a little kid? Weren’t you scared?”

“Yeah,” she said, stopping to pick dead lilacs out of her ponytail. “But I was sort of into it. It was my job to be scared just like it was Tom’s job to scare me.”

“What about Collin? What was his job?”

“To tell jokes on the way home if Tom did his job too well.”

“Jokes. Really? Collin doesn’t strike me as such a funny guy.” I thought briefly, guiltily of our talk by the mailbox.

“No, I guess not. But he used to be hilarious.”

“What happened?”

“His mom died. Didn’t he tell you?”

I shook my head.

“She had a brain tumor. I guess that was about five years ago, now. It was terrible. Her head swelled up and she lost all her hair. It’s a little creepy, I guess,” she said, turning to me in the dark. “But she’s in here. We could go see her grave.”

It
was
creepy but I wanted to see her just the same. Claudia found the right path, and there was Collin’s mom under a sedate and slightly pink marble stone: Miriam Elizabeth Caldwell, 1931–1968, wife and mother. I did the math on my fingers as Claudia stooped to clear away some long grass from the stone. “She was only thirty-seven,” I said.

“Yeah. She was really young, and pretty too. We had a barbecue once when I was a kid and she wore this orange bikini and a sarong that tied around her waist. She looked so fantastic, I wanted to be her. That was right before she got sick.”

We sat down in the grass right between Miriam and another Caldwell, and Claudia sank back, tucking her folded arms behind her head. “Can you imagine losing your mom?” she mused, as much to the trees and the faraway stars as to me. Then she caught herself, sat up suddenly, and said, “I’m sorry, that was really thick of me. You live with your uncle but I don’t know why. I don’t know anything about your mother. Is she still alive?”

“I think so.” I shrugged. “But I’m not sure. I don’t know anything about her either.” It was the strangest feeling, telling the truth to Claudia. Over the years I had concocted so many lies about Suzette—to friends and strangers, to Fawn, to myself—that the unedited facts sounded exotic spilling from my mouth,
like I had woken to find I spoke Russian or Taiwanese. “She ran away when I was a baby, so my grandparents raised me.”

“Ran away? Can grown-ups do that?”

“Well”—I tried to laugh it off—“if I ever see my mother again I’ll be sure to tell her she broke the rules.”

“No, seriously though, Jamie. That’s really awful.”

And for the passing flash of the next few seconds, I really felt it, the unwieldy awfulness of Suzette’s leaving. I felt the anvil on my chest, my breath disappearing in a crush. Felt the smallness and the emptiness and the dark question that was Suzette in the universe somewhere. But where? A tear rolled into my ear and then another. Claudia put her hand on my hand in the grass. She was being so nice, and without making me feel stupid at all. But it was hard, thinking about Suzette, being reminded of all I had lost. I looked up into the fuzzy stars, focusing on the larger ones around the moon, which were surely planets, until I wasn’t so aware of my own body, of the way it hurt to breathe.

Claudia was silent for a long time and then said, “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

An hour or so later, Claudia and I were back at the 7-Eleven parking lot, splitting up to head home. “I could meet you here tomorrow,” she said. “And I promise I’ll think of someplace better to hang out in the meantime.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I actually sort of liked the cemetery.” And I meant it.

When I got back to Raymond’s, I saw that not only was the screen we used to sneak out of fully back in place, but the bamboo blinds were drawn. Fawn was home. I had my key but didn’t want to risk going in the front door and waking Raymond, whose truck was in the drive. I sucked in my breath, prepared myself for the worst, and knocked on the screen. “Fawn,” I whispered. “Are you awake? Let me in.”

To say I expected a hassle from her is an understatement. I
wasn’t sure Fawn would let me in at all. But before I could even knock again, the blinds rolled up, and there was Fawn’s face, beautifully blurred in the dark. “I’ve been wondering when you would show up,” she whispered, deftly pulling the screen aside to let me in.