A Ticket to Ride (17 page)

“We don’t want to do this,” Mr. Fletcher said, “but we can press charges, you know. You were obviously involved in taking the car. There’s evidence putting you there, it’d be an open and shut case and that’s grand theft auto.”

Fawn, who had either been told about my purse being found or was straight-up bluffing, said, “Go ahead. You can’t get me on anything. I wasn’t there and you can’t prove I was.”

“Don’t be so sure. The police have fingerprinted the car.”

“Who are you,
Columbo
?” Fawn sneered. “Good luck to you, truly,” she said, either to the Fletchers or me, I couldn’t tell, and then flounced out of the room.

And that’s when my spell started. It came on lightning-fast. I didn’t have my inhaler, didn’t have any way to fight it back. Sucking air hard, I heard Mrs. Fletcher ask her husband to run for help, and that was the last thing I heard before the room went black.

By the time we were back in Raymond’s truck heading home, I felt utterly exhausted and alone. The paramedics had come
and given me oxygen. When I came to, I was lying on a cot in a small room, still in the precinct office, with a mask covering most of my face. Raymond stood next to me, but he wasn’t really
with
me. His face was hard and when he helped me out to the truck later, there was no tenderness in his touch. He had given up on me. As he drove home, he watched the road with an expression that wasn’t pained or disappointed or disgusted. As far as I could tell, he felt nothing at all. Fawn looked out the window and played absentmindedly with her door lock: up, down, click, clack.

“Do you mind?” Raymond said.

“Yeah, I do,” Fawn replied.

It was late afternoon when we pulled into the drive, shade falling in thick angles over the lawn, and still Fawn wriggled into her suit, grabbed her towel, and went out to sunbathe. I went to our room and sat on my bed, but the silence was too loud, too overwhelming. I’d rather face Fawn, I knew, than my own dark thoughts, and so I went outside. Fully dressed, I sat down next to Fawn cross-legged, waiting for her to settle her towel, the baby oil, the cassette player. Waiting to be acknowledged. But Fawn only lay down and closed her eyes against what was left of the sun, her face flat and untroubled.

“Aren’t you worried at all?” I finally spat out. “We could go to jail or something, you know. And what about Claudia? What if she’s really hurt?”

“Give me a break.”

“No, seriously,” I persisted.

“What’s serious is how
mental
you are,” Fawn said without opening her eyes. “It’s clear I can’t trust you. I asked you for one favor, just five days, and you want to run and tell the Fletchers everything. If you hadn’t fainted like a big fucking baby, you probably would have already.” She rolled over and began to fiddle with the radio, flipping the dial through static and loud
commercials and DJs barking call-in numbers. America flared up, a lyric midway through “Horse with No Name,” and Fawn turned it up loud, louder. “Are you just going to sit there all day?” Fawn said, rolling back over and shutting her eyes once again, “or can I get some privacy for once?”

What I wanted to do was stand up and go into the house; to fall asleep, maybe, bury myself under a wad of sheets, mail myself into unconsciousness. But it occurred to me that I had one trump card, one way to convince Fawn that maybe I wasn’t crazy for wanting to try to help Claudia. Fawn didn’t know about Donald yet, not everything. His forcing himself on me was proof that he wasn’t normal, as Fawn insisted, but a scary customer. Maybe something similar had happened between Claudia and Miles, and if so, I was the only one who could shed light on it. I reached over and touched Fawn’s shoulder with my fingertips.

“What?” Fawn twitched roughly, brushing me off.

“There’s something you need to know. Donald raped me.” The word felt jagged, toxic in my mouth. I still wasn’t sure
rape
was the right word to describe what happened, but it was as close as I could get to the truth just then.

“What?” Fawn said, propping herself onto her elbows. “Define rape.”

“He forced me to have sex with him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I was there, you know.”

“You were high as a kite is what you were.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t remember what happened.”

“All I’m saying is, if you were too high to tell him no, whose fault is that?”

It felt as if I’d been punched. All I could do was sit there, panting shallowly, until I became dimly aware of Skinny Man in his yard. His garage door had come up and he squatted at the mouth, oiling the blades of his push mower with what looked like a furry
pink mitten. There he was, the same as always, worrying about his crabgrass, his earwigs, as if nothing had happened. The police had obviously released him once they found the car and my purse and ID, or even before. Whatever the search had turned up in his house, it hadn’t been enough to hold him. And what
had
the police found? I guessed we would never know. Whatever his secrets, they were safe now, his to keep.

Fawn flopped over and adjusted her bikini top, causing Skinny Man to perk up. He was on his knees near the driveway by this point, rooting up skeletal dandelions already gone to seed. Even if the police hadn’t revealed who’d accused him, hadn’t he guessed? I just assumed he’d be outraged, that he’d show up at our door, pissed and demanding to talk to Raymond. But he was just as pathetic and sad-sack as ever. Every time he wrestled up a dandelion, he’d gaze longingly at Fawn before tossing it in a pile, and I felt embarrassed for him. Fawn wouldn’t give a shit if he fell over in the road pining for her, if he committed suicide with his weed whacker before her very eyes.

“I can’t believe you don’t care what happened to me, that you don’t care about Claudia,” I said, suddenly realizing it was true.

“Oh, grow up why don’t you?” Fawn said coldly. “Shit happens.”

Shit happens.

I hated her at that moment. Hated her with the same precise intensity I had loved her with before. They seemed two sides of the same coin, love and hate, hot and cold wires running from the same conduit. Fawn hadn’t changed. From the moment I had first met her, she hadn’t altered one iota.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said, standing. “You don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

“And you’re so different? You don’t really care about Claudia. You just feel guilty. You think if you cooperate and help them find her, you can feel good about yourself again, a good girl and
the big hero to boot. You’re so full of shit and you don’t even know it.”

“Bitch!” I half-screamed.

“I may be a bitch, but at least I’m not a liar.”

“Yes you are. You lied to Raymond, to the police, and the Fletchers just like I did.”

“Everyone lies to other people, asshole. But you, you’re lying to yourself.”

I rushed toward the house, tears clouding my vision. After a long, singeing shower, I dressed with a sigh and went into the kitchen where Raymond was cooking dinner with the seriousness of a funeral director.

“Go call Fawn in to eat,” he said without looking up from the skillet.

“Do I have to?” I said warily.

“How ’bout you just do what I tell you for once? How about that?” He picked up an oven mitt off the counter and threw it down again.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, and went to get Fawn though truthfully I would rather have shoved toothpicks under my fingernails. “Raymond says dinner,” I said from the welcome mat, then ducked back into the house.

“She coming?”

“I think so.” I sat down in my usual place. On my plate there was a gray-brown pyramid of Tuna Helper and canned peas. In the center of the table a stack of buttered white bread rose from a flowered plate like an ordinary island. It made me want to cry. Things had been so easy at the beginning of the summer. I’d been happy, and whether I’d wasted that happiness or it had been stolen from me, it didn’t matter. Gone was gone.

When Fawn walked in, she was still in her bathing suit, her towel wrapped around her waist like a sari. “Gourmet as always, I see,” she said.

“Go and change please,” said Raymond as he dismantled a piece of bread.

She sat down. “If you don’t like the way I look then don’t look at me.”

“I’ve had about enough from you, miss,” Raymond said with a huff.

“Same here,” Fawn said. The fork she held seemed to balance of its own accord over her plate. No one moved or spoke for several seconds. I stared so hard into my peas they began to blur and merge.

Finally Raymond stood. He held his full plate in his hand, walked it over to the sink, and dumped it without ceremony. “When your mother asked if I’d take you for the summer,” he said, turning around, “she warned me about you. But I didn’t listen. I told her I could handle whatever you could dish out, and I can. I can handle you, but I don’t want to. Everything you touch turns to shit and I just don’t want that in my house anymore.”

“Fine then, just give up on me. Everyone else has.” There was bitterness and self-pity in Fawn’s voice.

“Don’t even try to put this back on me. You’ve brought this on yourself. You had your chances. How many chances, now, Fawn? I know your story. I know what you’re about.”

“You don’t know a thing about me, old man, so don’t even.”

“I do, Fawn. I do know.” Raymond left the kitchen then. He didn’t huff or storm out, just walked calmly through the front room, grabbing his keys on the way, and was out the door. Seconds later we heard his truck start and rumble away.

“That’s just perfect,” Fawn said, shoving her plate with the flat of her hand so that it scudded forward on the tablecloth.

She stomped down the hall then, and I didn’t follow her. I knew Fawn would likely be packing and didn’t want to watch that. It was really over, now. Things were messed up beyond recognition and there was nothing I could do about it even if
I wanted to.
Did
I want to? If it were possible, would I want Fawn to stay after everything that had happened? I wasn’t sure. I was just so angry with Fawn, angry with myself, angry with Raymond for washing his hands of Fawn—even if she deserved it. Because what did that mean for me? Was he done with me too? Was I headed back to Bakersfield, return to sender? The thought made me nauseous. I fed my tuna to Mick, my peas to the sink, and went to lie on the couch. Three hours later, fully drugged by back-to-back detective stories, I went in to go to bed. I wasn’t surprised to find Fawn’s bed empty. She had snuck out, of course she had, and was off doing who knows what with who knows whom. I couldn’t make myself care at that point. I lay down in my cot, pulled my sheet over my head, and fell promptly to sleep.

It was only the next morning that I became aware of how completely abandoned the room was. Fawn’s bed was still empty and more than that, her clothes were gone, the closet door yawning open on nothing but the few things I actually owned. The denim jumper I had worn to the airport the day Fawn arrived lay in a heap on the closet floor like the trash it was. Fawn’s makeup and her hairbrush were gone from the bureau top. The window screen swung wide open in a final fuck-you gesture. Certainly the screen had not been that way the night before. Fawn must have come in late when I was fast asleep. Come in and gone again without even bothering to spit a good-bye in my direction, but where? Where did she go?

I blinked once, twice. What day was it? Sunlight butted its way through the bamboo, struck the milk-glass lamp, and winced through to leave a light pattern on the other side that vaguely resembled a rooster. Fawn was gone. Raymond was at work. What would I do with myself? How could I possibly fill the day that lay coiled ahead of me when I couldn’t even seem to fill my body, which felt dry and papery, the husk of something
gone dormant. I crossed the room and lay down on Fawn’s cot. She had been wrong about one thing. Maybe I didn’t care about Claudia as much as I should have, but it was because I cared about Fawn too much. And for what? How stupid could I be? I tugged Fawn’s pillow up to my face to smell her coconut shampoo, her hair spray, and willed myself to sleep again.

O
ver the Golden Gate and past the headlands at Marin, where poppies waved and ducked like bits of ignited paper, and then through Sausalito, Holly talked and Raymond listened—but only because he didn’t seem to have a choice. She was a girl Suzette had become friendly with at work, and Raymond wasn’t sure why she’d been invited unless it was a setup. As out of character as that seemed for Suzette—she’d certainly never wanted competition for his attention before—he could think of a few reasons she might want another woman around. Holly could be her version of a peace offering, a way to smooth the rough road between them. Or Suzette could be trying to distract him so she could make another, more focused play for Leon. Or—and this was Raymond’s best guess—either consciously or not, she wanted Raymond to screw around in front of her so that her mistakes would be out of the spotlight for a moment, the playing field leveled. But regardless of Suzette’s motives for bringing her along, Raymond had no intention of sleeping with Holly. She was a pretty enough girl, with very pale clear skin and a coarse auburn braid she wore over her shoulder. Occasionally the tip of it slid into the neck of her shirt, puckering out the fabric to expose a bit of her white cotton bra. But as
attractive as she was, she also never shut up. While Leon and Suzette rode ahead on Leon’s brand-new Kawasaki, Holly told Raymond everything about herself: childhood stories, dead pets’ names, particularly revealing aspects of her star chart. She was a double Pisces, and what that meant, as far as Raymond could tell, was that she wanted him to see her soul, up close and personal. She had all sorts of whack-ball theories about intimacy—a word she spoke with gravity and a lead-heavy stress on the first syllable—like “naked therapy,” something a friend at Berkeley had turned her on to.

“People fear their bodies,” Holly told Raymond. “And it makes sense, right? The body is a
powerful organism
.”

She then went on to describe the elaborate methods of desensitization, one of which required a couple to eat dinner, sit around and watch TV, do the laundry, etc., while completely naked. But Raymond didn’t want to eat a pork chop naked and he didn’t want to talk about his organism with Holly or anyone. Also, he was more than a little distracted by Leon’s Evel Knievel impression. As the road curved and flipped back on itself, Leon dipped the bike nearly parallel to the asphalt.

“He’s going to kill them both on that thing,” Holly said, suddenly looking up.

This was one of the things Raymond was thinking too. His stomach clenched each time Leon accelerated out of a hairpin turn, but unless he was faking it, Leon looked pretty competent. And also like he was having a fantastic time. The bike was black and low-slung and studded with chrome. Suzette’s hair pinwheeled wildly as she gripped Leon’s waist, like an advertisement for beauty and freedom. Raymond, on the other hand, was in the particular hell of being trapped in a car with a woman he wasn’t interested in, not even for sex.

They stopped for fish and chips in Stinson Beach, and then were back on the road again, heading farther up switchbacking
Highway 1, the road rocking under them like a crazy cradle. On one side a hill pitched up steeply, yellow folds and tucks studded with
FALLING ROCKS
signs. On the other, a dizzying drop into froth and foam. The water looked black from this distance and Raymond blinked, thinking he saw the pearly tine of a shark fin in the waves. He turned back to the road, combed his eyebrows with his thumb, tried not to count the minutes, while next to him, Holly expertly rolled a cigarette. Her tongue occupied with licking it sealed, she was still somehow able to begin telling Raymond her thoughts on self-actualization. Her particular talent in life, she believed, was helping others locate and realize their talents. She could help Raymond, she said, free of charge.

He shook his head, but she persisted. “What made you happiest as a child?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged.

“Think about it. What were you good at, sports? Racing Matchbox cars? Drawing?”

“I don’t remember being good at anything,” he said. “I didn’t have time for sports, we didn’t have money for a lot of toys. And I was busy a lot, taking care of Suzette.”

“Well what about that? Would you say you were good at being a big brother?”

“Not particularly,” he lied.

“Well, what about now? What makes you happiest now?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “Maybe I’m not such a happy guy.”

Holly sighed compassionately, put on a tender face. “Listen, if you don’t want to open up to me, I can understand that. That’s okay.” But then she didn’t let up. She went on and on about the inner being, the life of the spirit, our innate desire to seek fulfillment, until Raymond thought he might scream. Maybe there was something very wrong with him, but did people—other than lunatics like Holly—really sit around and think about their inner being?

By late afternoon, when they had reached the Point Reyes peninsula, Raymond was exhausted by talking, by thinking, and was relieved to give his attention solely to following Leon up a potholed dirt road that ran between dairy farms, where fat, happy cows munched tufts of green green grass. There were no fences anywhere, just cattle gates that made a rumbling sound under the car’s tires. After about twenty minutes, they reached land’s end, a small parking lot at the edge of a promontory. Several other cars were in the lot, tourists there to see the lighthouse, which lay at the end of hundreds of descending gray concrete stairs.

The four shared a joint in Raymond’s car, and then walked down the steps. At the bottom, you could put a dime in a viewer and see the Farralon Islands, an endless swath of gray, choppy water, and possibly a whale. There were signs posted at the ranger station, saying that whale migration ended in May, but occasionally rogue males that had strayed from their pods could be spotted, as well as lone mothers with calves. Suzette was intent on seeing a whale. This surprised Raymond—she had never been such a nature lover—but he humored her anyway, feeding her dimes so she could stay locked to the viewer, her skirt flapping wildly against the fencing, long after Holly and Leon had wandered away bored. As he waited, he found himself thinking, oddly, about some of the things Holly was saying in the car. When he was finally able to drag Suzette away and back up the stairs toward the parking lot, he said, “Your friend Holly’s a real piece of work.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “she just talks a lot of bullshit. Intimacy. Trust issues. She wanted to know what made me happy.” He laughed.

“And that makes her weird? If you can’t talk about that stuff maybe you’re the piece of work, Ray.”

“Oh yeah?” He made a small huffing noise, and then put on his best impression of Holly’s “concerned woman” voice. “So what made you happiest when you were a child?”

“I don’t know,” she said, playing along, but then she continued. “Getting my hair cut. Swimming on a really hot day. The animals. Remember that sheep with the one blue eye?”

At first Raymond thought she was kidding, making up pat answers as part of a game they were playing, but when he looked at her face, he saw she was serious. He didn’t know why he found her happy memories so unlikely. They were typical, but he had never seen her as someone who could be soothed by small pleasures. She needed drama. Like an unfolding soap opera, she was all peaks and valleys, tension and release.

At the top of the long flight of steps, they stopped to catch their breath. “Did you read this?” Suzette asked. She pointed to the sign Raymond leaned against and read some of it aloud—about how the last lighthouse keeper had lived there for twenty-five years with his wife alone, no children, no diversions but for storms. “It says she tried to keep a garden, but the wind kept blowing it away. Doesn’t that make you want to cry?”

“So, you’re saying you don’t want to be a lighthouse keeper’s wife?” Raymond asked, trying to keep things breezy. He knew from Suzette’s eyes and the tone of her voice that her thoughts and mood could easily take a downward spiral. One of the downsides of that “overactive imagination,” as Berna called it.

“I guess I’d like to be someone’s wife, someday,” she said. “Have a family, do that whole thing. Do you think anyone will have me?”

Raymond felt so irritated, suddenly, by her ridiculous optimism, the way she could blot out anything about her life that she couldn’t face, he didn’t even try to answer her. And his silence wasn’t lost on Suzette. She drew her eyebrows together in a hurt way, then looked out into the waves. When Raymond began walk
ing again, she followed silently, not picking a fight, not pressing the issue. And still he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was carrying her back to the car, dragging her like a leaden balloon.

That night, after pitching their tents and drinking dinner at a bar in Inverness, Raymond and Leon walked to the cliff’s edge, took a piss out into the black. Below them the waves made a percussive hissing against the rocks. From farther off, sea lions barked in a call and response. It had gotten cold.

“Didn’t I tell you this would be good?” Leon slurred.

“You did, Lee.” It was good to be out of the city, out of the apartment, but Raymond couldn’t escape the confines of his own head long enough to enjoy it, even for the night.

There were two tents for two couples, ostensibly. Not wanting to give Holly anything that could be interpreted as encouragement, Raymond went to bed early, leaving the other three sitting out by the fire. He climbed into his tent and pulled on another sweater. He zipped his windbreaker up to his chin and settled his head in the crook of his arm. When dreams came, they were of sea lions swimming along a fault line, feeding on fish kicked up by tremors. He woke in the dark with a clear thought of Suzette, and a question: Was he most happy when she was unhappy? Did that make him feel whole somehow? And would they go on this way, spinning miserably on each other, neither really getting anywhere or making any kind of sustainable life?

Raymond’s sleeping bag lay heavily on his chest, smelling of campfire smoke and something older, muskier. He felt enormously alone. As if he had conjured her with his thinking, Suzette climbed into the dark tent and curled against him, just like when they were kids. He could feel her shudder and press more tightly against him, as if to get warm. And then her damp nose (
she’d been crying?
) found the back of his neck.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured wetly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Hush, now. It’s okay. You’re all right.” He turned in his bag so he could put his arms around his sister’s shoulders, guiding her face into his chest. “You’re all right,” he said again.

“I don’t know what to do, Ray,” she said quietly against his body, and he was reminded of her panicked call from Oxnard.

“We’ll figure it out, sweetie. We always do.” He slid out of his sleeping bag and knelt to wrap her in it like a thick papoose. Even in the dark he could see her pupils were blown. She was stoned out of her mind. Who knew what Leon had slipped her by the fire.

“I should have gone to see Benny when we were home,” she said. “I should have told him about the baby. I owe him that at least.”

For a moment Raymond wondered whether Suzette was delusional, whatever drugs were in her system flipping years on her like a tide. Maybe she was nineteen again, in the time just before Jamie was born—heavy regret or shame tugging her back. “What do you mean, honey? Jamie? You should have told Benny about Jamie?”

“No.” She looked at him strangely then. Later, he would find himself trying to name it, what he saw in her eyes at that moment. Was it pride? Satisfaction? Inevitability? “No,” she repeated, lightly shaking her head, “I mean
this
baby.” She dropped her hands to her still-flat belly, cradling it.

Raymond shook his head, wanting not to believe this could be possible. She was pregnant again? Hadn’t she learned her lesson? Wasn’t it enough that she had one child she didn’t and
couldn’t
care for? The irresponsibility and the blindness in her were staggering. And he realized he hated her, hated something way down at the core of her, a brokenness that imposed itself everywhere, muddying the air wherever she walked and compromising anyone who got anywhere close to her.

“Who’s the father, Suzy?” He was so angry he was nearly panting the words. “Is Benny the father?”

“Maybe. I don’t know, does it matter? This will be my baby, Ray. It’s a
good
thing, don’t you see it? This is my chance to start over.”

Raymond couldn’t bear to hear another word. He grabbed Suzette quickly, pinning her arms against her sides. With his body he rolled her toward the tent flap, unzipped it with a fierce tug, and pushed her out onto the ground. “I don’t even know what you are,” he said. “You make me
sick.
”

She landed in a crouched position a few feet away from where Raymond stood. In the dark, she looked like some kind of threatened animal. Maybe he surprised her completely, or maybe she’d been poised for him to reject her this way, but when she lunged at him, it was with her whole body. When she reached him her palms were open, her nails flared. She scratched him along one side of his face and again up his forearm in a long swath. It was everything he could do not to hit her back, not to hurt her. Finally he was able to pin her arms to her sides.

“Asshole.” She lurched to her feet, tripped and fell in a messy, splayed way.

“What the hell is going on with you two?” Leon jogged toward Suzette from the smoldering fire pit and helped her struggle to her feet.

“Keep him away from me,” she said.

“What happened? Did you hurt her?” Leon turned on Raymond, nearly snarling.

“Oh fuck off,” Raymond said. “I didn’t hurt her. She’s out of her mind.” He ducked back into the tent, dressed quickly, and grabbed his keys. When he came out again, Leon stood holding Suzette by the fire pit, stroking her hair. Holly hovered nearby, smoke from her cigarette surrounding the three like a shredded halo. Raymond couldn’t hear what they were saying and didn’t care.