Lone Star (15 page)

Why can't she go alone? said her best friend and my girlfriend.

Hannah

Carmen was just asking me in English how I get my hair so blonde and straight, and everybody was looking at me, and suddenly Blake starts telling Carmen that the flowers Chloe grows back home are really pretty. And then everybody started looking at Chloe and Blake, and no one wanted to talk about my hair. I was so annoyed. I said the flowers are just as pretty if
you go to the country store on Saturday and buy a bushel for ten bucks. You don't have to spend your Sundays on your knees.

I don't want to talk to anybody right now. All I wanted was to have tomorrow to myself, and it looks as if I'm going to have to go with Chloe to the stupid orphanage. Why can't I be stronger? I keep saying I don't want to, but Blake just won't listen. Men.

Why can't Mason go? Mason, I said, she's your girlfriend, you
have
to go. Blake and I will walk around Riga, have lunch in a café maybe. Blake, I cooed, some time alone together, don't you want that? And he said, ah, cutie, but I have to blah blah blah.

I turned to Mason for support, and he said, you heard my brother. I can't. We have to blah blah blah.

Mason's already getting on my nerves. This is only our first day here. How are we going to last another twenty days?

Chloe would let me stay back. She can go by herself. I know she can. I want to ask her, but she's been busy with her aunt all night. I've been staring at Otto while waiting for her to finish talking. Otto is completely ignored by his wife. He could keel over, and she wouldn't pause to breathe between words. What could she possibly be telling Chloe? In fact, Otto's fallen asleep at the table and is tilting over onto Mason, who looks terrified. It's so funny. Five more degrees and Otto will be on the floor. Maybe he'll be more comfortable there. He can put his head on the dog. Better not, that mongrel smells like the swamp. Varda passed Otto no food, poured him no drink, didn't address him once, and still hasn't looked at him, and now he just struggled up and shuffled away, and she never even glanced in his direction. She gazed at the meat pie longer than she gazed at her own husband. I wish I could ask her about it. What I want to know is, did Varda and Otto begin like other people? Did they begin like my own parents, before they hated each other, or like Chloe's parents, who never stop talking, bickering, discussing, relating, or even like Blake's mom and dad, who were normal before Burt got hurt, although now they're a little clogged up? Burt is like Otto in some ways, peripheral to the daily life of his family.

Anyway, Otto disappeared, but Chloe continued to talk to Varda through Carmen, who was too busy to make eyes at Mason, and so Blake had time to harass me all night about the orphanage and his prize-winning pig—I mean, story.

When I tell other people about Chloe and me, they cry. Like Martyn. When I told him, he went all sentimental. That's the sweetest thing I ever heard, he said. Lifelong friends, who ever gets such a thing? Okay. Yes. Great in theory.

But look at us. We can't go to Europe without the boys. We can't go to Europe without each other. We can't go to college without each other. We are rooming together our freshman year, as if we're identical twins. There's no way out.

I'm really tired of the way Chloe acts sometimes, all mousy, and small, and helpless. Oh, Mason, can you help, oh, Blake, can you help, let's push the boat out, can you help, I want to build a bench, can you help, I have unlaced ice skates, can you kneel down in front of me and help, who's going to come with me to the orphanage, help help help.

I think she could be using her helplessness and her body to get guys to do stuff for her. Except she hides her body, so my theory falls apart slightly. Okay, maybe using not her body, but definitely using her helplessness, which is like her inner body. She told me once that she hid her boobs because she was afraid if guys saw them, they wouldn't notice how smart she was. She's not
that
smart. She didn't even know the currency of Latvia.

That's it, I'm refusing. Mason can go, or Blake, I don't care. The way I see it, if you can't ask your boyfriend to schlep with you across a foreign bog, then what are they good for? I don't think Chloe has ever once asked herself what she would like in a boyfriend. Or what the important things are that some boyfriends like, say, hers, might do. For example, does a boyfriend buy you things? Does he pick flowers to bring to you? Does he maybe do other things to you, things you'll soon find you can't live without? I would say and
do
say to her, Chloe, you know how this is supposed to work, right? This is prime hormonal time.
He's not supposed to kiss you on the cheek at the screen door of your house. She and Mason have been “dating” since they were fifteen, right after Blake and I hooked up, and in that time, I've never heard them say one cross word to each other. They laugh, they talk, they discuss things, they never argue. Once they were almost going to disagree, when Mason said that
Field of Dreams
was his favorite film and it clearly wasn't hers. But Chloe just said, Mase, aw, I love that you love that film so much. And for his seventeenth birthday she got him a
Field of Dreams
baseball cap that he slept in for six months after.

I mean, is that normal, to go out with someone and not have one teeny argument? For example, he doesn't want to go with her tomorrow. So what does she do? Nothing! She asks
me
to go. She doesn't get upset with her boyfriend. Mason is late, that's fine. Mason is sick and doesn't go to Meals on Wheels, that's okay. Mason dances with the entire cheerleading team, not a problem. What does Mason have to do to get a rise out of Chloe?

She argues more with Blake than with Mason. She argues more with Blake than with anyone. They're always at each other. If it weren't for me and Mason, I don't think those two would ever willingly hang out. Everything he does annoys her, and her criticism bothers the crap out of him. Their personalities clash and have always clashed. He doesn't want to go here, she doesn't like to eat there, it's not the eighteenth hole, it's the sixteenth,
Gone with the Wind
was absolutely Margaret Mitchell's only book,
Dodgeball
was stupid, “Una Palabra” from
Man on Fire
means “One Word” not “One Act.” On, and on, and on. Ad nauseam.

And he, to torture her, calls her “Haiku,” even though he knows it drives her crazy.

Why can't Blake go with Chloe to the orphanage? Why do I have to?

Chloe

So apparently for boys, the sun brightly shining in at four in the morning is like sleeping with an eye mask, because Blake and Mason didn't stir until Hannah and Chloe kicked them awake at eight. Carmen's mother, Sabine, who had arrived with bread, fresh eggs, and thick-cut bacon, in her energetic Latvian way was already frying up a feast for eight people.

Sabine and her husband, Guntis, took the things Varda grew and sold them at the market. That was how the family made its living. Guntis set up the stalls in the morning and then ran the unsold produce to the pig-feed market at the end of the day. Varda had told Chloe all this and more last night at dinner.

“So not only
is
there a dad,” Blake said to Hannah when he'd heard, “but he's a good one. See, Hannah, men aren't all bad.”

At odds with yesterday's disrespect was Sabine's reaction to Otto. She and Guntis had been away last night in Valmiera, trying to get a contract from a local seed farmer. But though there were guests from America, the first thing Sabine did when she walked into the kitchen, her arms full of squash, was go outside to find her father. Chloe watched them through the glass door. The woman put her arm around Otto, leaned down, hugged him, kissed his head. They spoke. He smiled! Otto looked positively
benevolent in the morning sun, looking up adoringly at his daughter. He was wearing the same baggy uniform as yesterday and the sticks were in his hands.

Over breakfast, Blake planned his and Mason's day in Riga. He was sunny like the morning, rumpled, unshaved, wearing a plaid cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, jeans, and cowboy boots. It was supposed to hit ninety in Riga this afternoon, but according to Blake a long-sleeved shirt was what Latvian weather called for.

“You sure you're not underdressed?” Chloe asked. “You might want to bring your parka. You know, just in case.”

“Tell that to the cold rain in Liepaja,” he said. “Because that's where
you'll
be in your sleeveless pink blouse.”

Chloe asked Hannah to hurry up because they needed to leave. It was Sunday and the trains might be running poorly. She read in one of Blake's books that sometimes there was track work. And Liepaja was a long way away, over two hundred kilometers, not that anyone had any idea how far that was. You could've said seventy cubits, and they'd be none the wiser.

Hannah, who was not speaking to anyone this morning, shot Blake a lethal glare.

“Hannah, honestly, you don't have to go with me,” Chloe said. “Blake, I know you're trying to guilt her into going. Stop it. It's fine. I'll go by myself.” Chloe didn't mean it. She'd never been on a train by herself.

She'd never been on a train.

Mason said he would go. But first he asked Carmen if the family went to church on Sundays. It was nine in the morning. He would go with Chloe after church, he said.

“No, you're coming to Riga with me, bro,” Blake said.

“Church was at six,” said Carmen. “Market opens at nine. We already went.”

“You woke up at six o'clock?” said Hannah.

“No, we woke up at four. To water fields and harvest vegetables. But church at six.”

Mason looked disappointed he had missed it.

Blake elbowed him. “Mase, it's in Latvian.”

“So? God is God.” Mason seemed happier this morning. He ate ham, and even tried the black bread, which he said was not the
worst
thing he'd ever tasted.

Having cooked, Sabine cleaned up and talked to her parents in the manner of a hectic, harried spitfire. Black haired and black eyed, she looked like Varda, a little taller, a little thinner, her face already weathered, her skin scarred with work, the hem of her dress fraying.

“How old is your mom?” Chloe asked Carmen.

“Thirty.”

Chloe tried to hide her American shock. “Wow. Huh. She doesn't look thirty.” Chloe took a long sip of her coffee. She looked fifty. What did the world do to you to age you like that before your time? Her mother—despite everything—didn't look as old as Sabine. “She must have had you young.”

“She was fifteen. She had older sister. Killed in wagon accident before Mama was born. Then Grandmother lucky to have Mama when she almost forty.”

“And now you all live in this house?”

“Yes. Grandmother wants Mama to have another baby. But Papa says it will be with another woman because Mama too old.”

“Ah. I think your father is joking, no?”

Carmen didn't reply. But Chloe, having absorbed the proximity with which Carmen had been nesting near Mason even at a casual breakfast, suddenly understood some things.

“Did you hear what that girl just told me?” she whispered, pulling Mason into a corner of the kitchen, pretending to look for a butter knife.

“No.” He was eating a ham sandwich so heartily, he hadn't bothered to swallow. “What she shay?”

“Mase, a little distance, please. I'm seeing that girl in a new light.”

“Why?” He grinned. “She so nice.”

Chloe rolled her eyes.

“She's just a kid,” he said.

“Yeah, like us. Just—keep away, that's all. I worry for Carmen's future if this is what she's like already.” Chloe started collecting her wallet and book to read on the way to Liepaja, but Carmen stopped her.

“Mama says too late to go,” the young girl said. “When you woke up so late, we thought you not go.”

“Late? We woke up at seven-thirty.”

“Too late. Liepaja train runs once a day.”

“That can't be true,” Chloe said. “It says the trains run from Riga. Our guidebook said. Blake? Right?”

“They run from Riga,” said Carmen. “Once a day. Once there, once back. You missed train there. Try again tomorrow. You have to wake up early if you want to go. Grandmother says she didn't want to wake you after long travel. But she wake you tomorrow.”

Seven-thirty was too late to wake up?

“Much too late,” said Carmen. “If you serious about Liepaja, you wake up at five, and then really hurry.”

“What time would we need to wake up if I wanted to take my time?” Chloe said, dazed. She turned to Blake and Mason. “Guys, did you hear?”

Blake shrugged. “What can we do? So come with us to Riga. We'll find out what time the Liepaja train is for sure. You'll go tomorrow.”

“You won't see Riga today. It's going to rain,” Carmen said. She seemed delighted by this. She was dressed in a pretty frock and had flowers in her hair and pink gloss on her lips. “You stay here. Come with us to market. We play cards. There is beach nearby, I take you.”

“I thought you said it was going to rain?” Chloe said suspiciously.

“If it stop,” the girl said without missing a beat. “Then we talk about how you can adopt me instead of some Liepaja boy.
They dangerous. They get into all kinds of trouble. Not me. I come with you to America.” She smiled at Mason.

All right, Chloe thought, let's just drink some chamomile tea and chill the crap down. “My parents want to sponsor a male child,” she said, disbelieving Carmen about the trains. How would Carmen even know? When did she ever take a train? Rain! Look what a beautiful day it was. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. The girl simply did not understand boundaries. And Mason, harmless and friendly, wasn't going to inform Carmen of them. He loved the attention. He never informed anyone of the boundaries.

“Okay, let's go to Riga,” Chloe said to Blake in a resigned voice.

“Only one train a day from Riga to Liepaja,” Carmen repeated. “Everybody in Latvia know this. Otto know this.”

Sabine said a bunch of words.

“Mama says orphanage will not be close to station.”

“How does she know?”

Rapid fire from Sabine's mouth.

“Because,” Carmen said, “Mama says kids all runners. You don't want them close to train station. You will have no orphans left.”

Chloe, Hannah, Mason, and Blake had a meeting outside in the garden, with Patton underfoot and Otto nearby, already drinking beer, his rough hands shaking through his miter cuts. Blake watched the old man, chewed his lip uncertainly, and then opened his journal. They revised the countdown of their days. Where was this extra day of unexpected delay going to come from?

“How long do we absolutely
have
to stay with Varda?” Blake asked Chloe.

“Three days. Minimum.” She didn't tell him what Moody had told her, that she better not stay one minute less than five days.

“Does yesterday count?”

“Yesterday's gone,” Mason said.

“Okay, not helpful. Chloe?”

“I don't want to stay in Latvia an extra day,” Hannah said, “just because Chloe couldn't be bothered to check the train schedule.”

“You didn't check the train schedule.”

“I didn't have to.”

“I didn't have to either.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn't.”

Blake interrupted. “Hannah, no one was going to get up at four in the morning today, even if the train made a special stop at Varda's house to pick you girls up. Let's go to Riga, and then get to bed early tonight, so you can get up when you need to. Mase and I will go to Jurmala. Frommer's says it's a must. The day after, the four of us will get a tour guide for Riga, and the following morning we'll head out to Poland.”

“Except this day, the day you're standing in presently, in Otto's yard, doesn't exist on your little schedule,” Hannah said. “It exists in reality. Here.” She waved her hand. “But not in your chart of meaningless numbers. You didn't budget for stay-in-the-house-while-Mason-flirts-with-Carmen-all-day day.”

“I'm not flirting with Carmen.”

“He's not flirting with Carmen,” said Chloe. Ugh.

Blake put away his notebook. “We'll have to make up the time down the road,” he said. “In Poland somewhere. Nothing we can do about it now.”

“Except not go to the orphanage.”

“Hannah!” Chloe and Mason exclaimed. Hannah stormed off.

“Thanks a lot,” Blake said. “Only one of us is going to have to grovel, and it's not going to be the two of you, wiseacres.”

Inside the house Sabine was talking again with great urgency; it was the only way she knew how to speak. She pointed to some distant location and pushed Carmen forward.

“Mother says I should come with you to Liepaja,” Carmen
said to Chloe with a saucy smile. “They do not speak English at orphanage.”

“Of course they do,” Chloe said. Someone had to be able to translate the sponsorship papers for the Americans.

“Mother says I should come with you,” the girl stubbornly repeated.

Hannah nudged Chloe in the back. “Yes, let her come!” she whispered. Chloe turned around and fixed her friend with the stare she had learned from her mother. The stare that said you better shut your mouth when you're speaking to me.

“You are being a really bad friend right now,” Chloe said. “Really, really bad.”

“Okay, fine.” Hannah raised her hands in frustrated surrender.

Chloe turned her sights back on Carmen. “Carmen,” Chloe said, “the boys are not going with us to Liepaja. Only Hannah and I are going. You know that, right?”

After that, Carmen lost interest.

Mason

The orphanage is dividing us. No one listens to me when I keep quoting Lupe saying and saying that together we travel down one river, we all meet up at the end, why worry about the tributaries. I feel guilty for not going with Chloe. I feel guilty for wanting to go with her when my brother clearly wants and needs me to go with him. Wait, that's not actually true. I don't
want
to go to an orphanage. I want Hannah to go, and I don't care if she doesn't want to. The more she doesn't want to, the more I want her to. There's a word for that, isn't there? Schadenfuckingfreude.

The commuter rail station was in stony Carnikava, a mile away or, as they say in this part of the world, something something kilometers.

Blake and I wore boots, Chloe flat sandals. Hannah of course
wore some impractical thing like ballet flats a size too small, and defended them by saying, ballerinas practice eight hours jumping on their toes in these, and I can't walk to a small village? After two Sheppeys of walking down a paved road, she began to complain of breaking blisters and open sores and general exhaustion. It was barely noon.

The trains to Riga ran once an hour on Sundays. We had just missed one and had to wait fifty-five minutes for the next. On the platform we bickered about why it didn't occur to anyone to bring a schedule. Why didn't the station house have a schedule? Where was the ticket seller?

The train was late. Blake was drenched in sweat in his plaid shirt by the time we climbed aboard, and then it had no air-conditioning and was crammed with hundreds of underdeodorized Latvians taking a Sunday trip to the big city.

We got off at a big old Communist-style train station, which is to say that the station was built in pre-Communist times, taken over by them, and never renovated. Everything was falling apart: bricks, windows, frames, stairs. I said to Hannah, look, here's that Communist architecture you wanted to see so much. She ignored me.

Blake wanted us to spend a day together, just me and him, researching things, taking notes, making observations. But every time he opened his journal, Hannah groaned. So you know what we did?

We went where Hannah wanted to go. We marched through the Old City as if it meant nothing, through a park, past the Riga Canal, on which it would've been so nice to stop and meander, to the white Opera House. It was an impressive building. Maybe we could check out the Daugava River after? No. Hannah wanted to buy some dresses, wanted to go to the World War I zeppelin hangars of the Central Market. Chloe wanted to walk in the park by the winding canal. Blake wanted to find some spies. No one wanted to do what I wanted to do, which was go inside a great
big old church called St. Peter's with the gray spire. Chloe said she'd go with me while Blake went skirt shopping with Hannah, but Blake didn't want to split up the group. Chloe said to him, why not, you don't care about splitting up tomorrow.