Burning (15 page)

Lala smiled. “My stories are not for you.”

“Why not?”

“You are a
gazhò
,” she said.

I didn’t have the slightest clue what that meant, but I could tell from the way she said it that it wasn’t a good thing.

“Maybe we can work that out,” I said.

Her laugh was infectious. It was loud and sudden, and I smiled too at the sound of it. It seemed like finally maybe we were getting somewhere, but just then someone called out her name.

“Lala?” From around the back of the tent came a guy. He was about my age, and he was holding a guitar by its neck. “Do you need help?”

He was dark like Lala, and he seemed like the kind of guy who spent a lot of time on his hair. He walked toward us.

Lala dropped her gaze and shifted away from me. I felt the space between us and I didn’t like it.

“Is that your brother?” I asked.

The guy ruffled like an angry peacock. He walked up to Lala’s side and put his arm around her waist. “Her brother? No. I don’t think so.”

Lala’s voice was back to being formal again, distant. “Ben Stanley,” she said, “this is Romeo Nicholas. He is traveling with my family. He is my …” Here her voice trailed off, like she didn’t want to finish.

“Lala will be my wife in three weeks’ time,” said Romeo.

This was too much to believe. Who
were
these people?

“You’re joking, right?”

The guy didn’t look like he was joking. He looked pretty pissed, actually.

“And—Romeo? Is that your real name?”

He took half a step in front of Lala so he and I were practically chest to chest. I had him by a few solid inches at least, but he was the scrappy kind. I had no doubt he’d be happy to make our discussion more physical.

“Ben—Stanley?” He said my name like it was a question. “Are you here for a reading?”

I wished suddenly that I had money in my useless, empty wallet so I could pay for a reading—it would be a way to get Lala alone, at least. But I didn’t. I shook my head.

“Then I think it is time for you to leave. That is … if you can get your bike to start?”

I looked at Lala. Her face was blank again, her eyes flinty cold. But she met my gaze, and she nodded.

“All right,” I said. I took my helmet and put it on, straddling my bike. If Lala wanted me gone, I’d leave. I didn’t want to cause trouble for her. But I felt like I’d stepped through a portal into an alternate universe. I didn’t understand these people—who the hell tells fortunes for a living and gets married so young? Hell, who the fuck names their kid
Romeo
?

It was bad enough that I had to leave like this. But when the bike wouldn’t start, that was even worse. Romeo just stood there, that piece of shit, with a grin on his face as I kicked the starter again and again. I flooded the engine and had to wait for it to settle. At least my helmet was on so they couldn’t see my embarrassed blush creeping up my neck.

At last the engine caught.

I looked up and saw that Lala was watching me, her gaze intense and focused, as if she was trying to tell me something without words. But I didn’t know what the hell it was.

I revved the engine a couple of times and squealed out onto the highway. I felt them watching me all the way down the road, but of course I didn’t look back.

At home Pops was helping Mom dismantle her crafting station. She liked to make baby blankets when women in town were pregnant, and every year the school auctioned off one of her quilts to raise extra money for first-aid supplies.

So she had a whole dresser full of scraps of fabric and different-colored thread, and she and Pops were loading all of it into boxes. She’d already packed away her two sewing machines, wrapping them carefully in old blankets before sealing them into boxes labeled
FRAGILE
.

“Hey, Benny Boy,” said Pops. “How was the ride?”

“It was fine.”

My dad didn’t look like he thought my tone was enthusiastic enough, so I said, “The bike ran great, Pops. A little hard to get started once I cut the engine, but it flies on the highway.”

“You took that piece of shit on the highway!” My mother sounded horrified. “Honestly, Ben, it’s like you don’t even want to make it to college alive.”

“The boy knows how to ride a bike, Sarah. And he’s not
even a boy. High school graduate, eighteen years old, off to college—he’s a man.”

“Some man,” I scoffed. I was thinking about how things had gone down with Lala, how I’d backed down and ridden away. I was already sorry—so
what
if she was engaged? The guy was a tool. He didn’t deserve her.

“Where’d you ride to?”

“Just up the highway toward Burning Man.” I paused. “There are some people out there, camping not far from the entrance. Fortune-tellers.”

“Oh yeah,” said Pops. “The Gypsies. Harry told me about them.”

“I don’t know … I guess maybe they’re Gypsies.” I paused, thinking. “They’re different, that’s for sure. I got to talking with some of them.…” No need to go into details, I figured. “A couple of them are engaged. I don’t think they could be any older than I am.”

“Maybe the girl is pregnant,” suggested Pops.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Mom. “I read about Gypsies once. Interesting people. That’s just their way—they marry young. And their parents pick their spouses for them.”

“You mean like arranged marriages?” This was getting weirder and weirder. I had that feeling again, like I’d run up against another world, one that looked a lot like this one and operated under very similar principles, but was different in a few essential ways.

“Just be glad we didn’t choose a bride for you,” Pops teased. “The pickings in Gypsum were pretty slim.”

I shook my head and thought about it. So an arranged marriage—maybe that explained the way Lala seemed. Restrained. Unhappy, even?

I wandered into my room and flopped down on my bed, crossing my hands behind my head and thinking.

It was none of my business. That was clear.

And there was nothing I could do about it. That was obvious, too. Hell, I couldn’t even help my own family with its problems. Dad’s unemployment, the family’s relocation, James’s … whatever you wanted to call it.… Every way I turned I was stymied.

Lala White—her problems, her
engagement
—none of that involved me. It would be better for everyone if I just put her out of my mind and forgot we’d ever met.

Even if I
could
convince her to go out with me, no good could possibly come of it. I was counting down my last few days in town, and she was clearly just passing through. Any interference from me would probably just make trouble for her with her … fiancé, I guess.

Better just to mind my own business and pack my bags. Spend the little time I had left with my family and friends here in Gypsum.

And that was what I did for the rest of the day. When James came home from Shane’s house I took him out to the garage and showed him his new dirt bike. I strapped the helmet on his head, showed him how the kick start worked, and explained
about the throttle, how you had to be careful to turn it easy so you didn’t jolt ahead too sudden.

I watched as he rode around on our street, up and down the block experimenting with the hand brake and shifting up and down through the gears. He picked it up pretty quick. It made me happy to see how good he was on the bike. That was a skill—dirt bike riding—that would help him out in Reno. Other kids would want to take rides on the bike. It might be a key for him, something that would open doors to friendships, something that might help him fit in a little better. As long as he didn’t go spray-painting the damned thing pink.

I woke Friday morning thinking about my mother’s sister Ana. It had been a long time since I had thought about her, but I woke in the hot tent startled from sleep by the sound of her name loud in my head—Ana.

I had not seen Ana in several years, since I was thirteen. And in that time I had not spoken her name aloud, not a single time. No one in my family had. Stefan, who had been born after Ana left our family, was not even aware that Mother had a sister.

No one ever told me exactly what Ana had done, but it was not difficult to guess. Every picture of Ana was removed from our house; Mother threw away the few articles of clothing that Ana had loaned to her. It was, very suddenly, as if Ana had never been born.

She was my mother’s younger sister by a handful of years, and in some ways she seemed more like an older sister or a friend to me than an aunt. She had been married since the age of fifteen to Jackie Lee. He was well liked and respected in our community.

After she left him, Jackie Lee left as well. He went to visit family in Seattle, but he did not return. We had word last spring that he had married a widow with four sons and a daughter. Even then no one mentioned Ana’s name.

If a wife is unfaithful to her husband, she is
marimè
. Even worse, a
kris-Romanì
—a panel of elders that makes decisions about such things—can declare that in addition to the woman, her family is also
marimè
. Not only the woman who has betrayed her husband, but also all her relations—her parents, her siblings, her children—by extension, all of them can be declared
marimè
, and all of them can be cast out. This word
—marimè
—is almost taboo among my people. Rarely is it spoken, though its threat is always present, a silent reminder, a warning.

Friday promised to be the hottest day we had so far experienced in this wasteland. The long, straight road of the highway shimmered like a river. I thought about the book of Greek mythology I had read a year ago. I remembered the river Styx, the waterway that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead.

It would look like this, I imagined, if there were such a place. The river Styx would be like this desert highway.

Stefan was fussy and irritable. A heat rash covered much of his body. Mother did her best to soothe him, offering him cup after cup of water with sugar.

Violeta was no longer bragging about how clever her Marko had been to conceive of this plan. There was a
bright flush in her cheeks, and though she was tired she could not sit still in one position, so much did the weight of her baby add to her discomfort. She would sit for a few minutes, but then she would shift to another position. Inevitably she would rise and pace for long minutes before sitting again.

And all morning no one stopped at our tent, and only a handful of cars even traveled down the road.

Once a motorcycle went by, and a surge in my heart told me that I hoped it was Ben Stanley. But this motorcycle was sleek and shiny and black, and its rider wore full leathers.

The three of us—Mother, Violeta, and I—had already placed close to four thousand dollars in the billfold we kept inside the motor home. Marko promised that the road would be swollen again with travelers leaving the Burning Man festival, that carloads of them would stop as they headed back toward their homes and that they would pay us well for our services.

So we had nothing to do but wait all that long day for the weekend to pass and the travelers to come to us.

Nothing to do but think. Over and over again I remembered the way Ben Stanley had looked at me—yesterday, when he had visited me on his motorbike, and the time before that, after his reading in the tent.

The truth was, I was not sure exactly what Ben Stanley wanted from me. For me, this was most unusual. That had always been my skill—seeing what someone wanted from me, and accommodating them by re-creating myself in the particular image they desired.

Sometimes this was easy for me; the person might want me to be something I already was or something I wanted to be. An obedient daughter. A loving sister. A seer.

Being what my family wanted me to be had never been a hardship, at least until these last few days. And the little I wanted for myself—time to read my books, to spend occasional hours all alone, away from my people—though these were not usual among my family, they seemed not too much to take for myself.

True, among the Gypsies a solitary life was frowned upon. Always our houses were full of voices, of laughter, of the aroma of coffee poured out and shared. Doors opening and slamming, sometimes heated arguments among the men, the near-constant drone of the television left on to amuse the children—ours was a life full of noise and company.

My parents had indulged my whim for solitude, though they did not understand it. Now perhaps it was simply out of habit that they accepted my preference to sit alone at the edge of the tent rather than join in with the others. Romeo did not like this about me. I could see it in the tightening muscle of his jaw when he invited me to sit beside him and I refused.

But he allowed it—most likely because we were still in my father’s
vìtsa
. After our wedding we would live with his parents in their home, and then there would be no time—and no space—for me to be alone.

Fifteen thousand dollars was a heavy bride price. In a way, I suppose, Romeo and his family liked that they had paid so much. It showed that they were a family of great wealth, able
to afford a bride for Romeo who had such a future before her, such money-earning potential.