Lone Star (2 page)

“We found some jewelry too once.”

“Jewelry and rats?”

“Okay, maybe not jewelry, then.”

Chloe glanced at Hannah, walking on the side of the tracks, not listening to Blake jackhammer away at Chloe's concrete skepticism. She wondered where Hannah was at. Certainly wasn't here.

“They discover something that changes everything. Mason, what can they find so monumental and terrible that it changes
everything
?”

“True love?” Chloe smiled.

“It's not that kind of story, Haiku,” Blake said with twinkling amusement. “This is a man's story. No room in it for lurv, no matter how terrible and true. Right, cupcake?” Jumping off the rail, he jostled Hannah along the pebbles.

“Right,” she said.

Mason had other suggestions. “We found an old suitcase once. It was full of snakes. And once we found a live rabbit.”

“Yes,” Blake said. “He was delicious. But Chloe is right. We need a real story, bro.” He smacked his forehead. “How about a human head in the trash?”

Chloe didn't even blink. “Nice. Then what?”

Blake shrugged. “Why are you always so preoccupied with what happens next?”

She could tell he wasn't taking it seriously. What the boys did for a living—that was work. Here, all they had to do was come up with a few words and place them in the sweet order that ensured victory. Blake was convinced it was child's play. “Yes, yes,” he went on. “The writer drones on about what happens next and as
soon as the reader guesses what's coming, she either falls asleep or wants to kill him.”

“So the trick is what? Never give the reader what she wants?”

Blake shook his head. “Nope. Give her what she didn't even know she wanted.” He acted as if he knew what that was. As
if
.

Eventually and without much success, they turned for home. “They find a human head,” Blake continued to muse, ambling down the narrowing pine path next to Chloe, Hannah and Mason behind them. “But not a skull.” He glanced back and widened his eyes at Hannah. “A
head
. That's been recently separated from the body. It still has
flesh
on it. And they don't know what to do. Do they investigate? Do they call the cops?”

“I think they should investigate,” Mason said, catching up to them. “Investigations are always fun.”

“Yes, there'll be danger in it.”

“Danger is good,” Hannah said from behind. “Danger is story.”

No, Chloe wanted to correct her friend. Danger is danger. It's not story.

Blake went on ruminating. “What if asking too many questions of the wrong people puts them in mortal danger?”

Is there any other kind, Chloe wanted to ask but didn't.

“Someone must shut them up. But who?”

“Obviously the one who separated the head from the body. I really think we got us something here, Haiku, right?”

“I say keep working on it.” Chloe used her most discouraging tone.

“Wait! I got it!” Blake got (more) excited. In so many ways he was much like the German Shepherd he'd once owned. Insuppressible. “Instead of a head, what if they find a suitcase? Yes, a mysterious suitcase! It's blue. Oh my God, I got it. That's my story.” Blake stopped and turned to the girls, his whole face flushed and thrilled. “
The Blue Suitcase.
What do you think? It's flipping awesome is what you think!”

Hannah smiled approvingly. Chloe caught herself shrugging.
“It's a good title for a mystery,” she said. “Is that what you're writing? A title is important, but it's not everything. What's in the suitcase? Once you figure that out,
then
you'll have yourself a story.”

Blake laughed with his characteristic lack of concern for details. He was a big-picture guy. “James Bond always goes to a foreign country to solve mysteries and catch the bad guys,” he said. “Some fantastic exotic locale full of drink and women.”

Chloe made a real effort not to rub her forehead. “James Bond is a government spy. He kills for money. He doesn't rummage through the trash for severed heads.”

“Foreign country!” Mason said. “Blake, you're a genius.”

Blake's entire peacock tail opened up in kaleidoscope green.

“But wait,” Mason said. “How can we write about it? We've never been to another country.”

Blake blocked the girls' way, beaming at them. “Well, not yet,” he said.

The girls remained impassive. Only Chloe twitched slightly. Oh no! He doesn't mean . . .

“We'll go to Europe with you,” he blurted. “Mason's right, I
am
a genius. The answer to our mysterious suitcase is in Europe with you. Oh man, this is fantastic. And we've only been at it for five minutes. Imagine how good it'll be when we spend a few days on it.” Blake thumped his flannel chest. “We could win the book prize.”

“What book prize would that be, Blake?” Chloe said.

“I don't know, Chloe.” He mimicked her. “The prize they give the best book of the year. The Oscar for books. The Grammy, the Emmy.”

“Um, the Pulitzer?”

“Whatever. That's not the important part. To write something people will love,
that's
the important part.”

Chloe leaned into Hannah. “Did your crazy boyfriend just say he wants to go to Europe with us?”

“I'm sure that can't be right,” Hannah, suddenly frazzled-looking, whispered back.

Blake pulled Hannah away from Chloe. “When are you two flying to Barcelona?”

“I don't know,” Hannah mumbled. “Chloe, when are we flying?”

“I don't know,” Chloe mumbled.

“Mason, that's where we go, bro. Barcelona! Our story will climax there.” Blake laughed. The brothers high fived and bumped shoulders.

“I thought you said it wasn't
that
kind of story,” Chloe said.

“If it ends in Barcelona, Haiku, it'll have to be a story for all seasons, won't it? Isn't that where they have the running of the bulls?”

“Oh dear God. No. That's Pamplona.”

“Blake,” Hannah said, “you're not
seriously
thinking of coming with us?”

“We're done thinking. We're coming, baby!”

Mason looked shocked. “We're going to Europe? You're bullshitting me.”

“Mason, do I come up with the best ideas or what?”

Mason was at a loss for words. “We got no money, bro.” He mumbled that too. Everyone was mumbling except for Blake.

Finally Hannah became actively engaged in the conversation. “Blakie, come on, what do you know about writing a story? The contest is open to all Maine residents. That's a lot of competition. Just from our school, there'll probably be at least a hundred entries. Everyone on our literary magazine is submitting something.”

“Hannah, have you
read
the literary magazine?” said Blake, swinging his arms, bouncing down the road. “It's called
Insanity's Horse,
for heaven's sake. Just for that title alone, those fools should be disqualified from participating. Do you remember the magazine's April thought of the month?
The pastiche of the pyramids implementing primal passion is a prolix representation of all phallic prose.
I got your phallic prose right here.” He laughed. “Yeah,” he added, merry and intense. “I'm not worried.”

How did this happen? One minute ticked by, and before it was up, Blake and Mason had climbed aboard the girls' slow-chugging teenage dream.

Hannah pulled on Chloe to slow down. “Now I
really
have to talk to you,” she said. “Come by before dinner?”

“Is it about Barcelona?” Chloe looked up into Hannah's anxious expression.

Hannah blinked. “No and yes. Do you have your passport yet?”

Chloe didn't reply.

“Chloe! I told you—it takes two months to get a passport. Come on. What are you waiting for?”

“Easy for you to say—you're eighteen. I have to ask my parents to sign for my passport.”

“So?”

“Well, first I'll have to tell them we're going, won't I?”

“You haven't told them yet? Chloe!”

Blake was in front of them, panting, his body heaving. “So how do we get a passport?”

“Don't ask her,” Hannah said. “She doesn't know how to get one either. Go to the post office.” She batted her lashes, her eyes moistening. “Are you guys really going to come with us? Don't tease us. Don't get our hopes up and then not come. That'd be mean.”

“I never disappoint you, pumpkin, do I?” Grabbing Hannah around her slender waist, Blake pretended to dance with her and stepped on her feet. She yelped.

“Blake, you do know where Barcelona is, right?” Hannah threaded her arms around his neck. “In Spain. And you know where Spain is, right? In Europe. As in—on another continent.
As in, you need not just a passport, which costs upward of a hundred bucks, but also a plane ticket, and train tickets, and maybe, oh, I don't know—some lodging and food money.”

With gleeful indifference, Blake shrugged off a vigorously nodding Mason. “You know what they say, babycakes.” He squeezed her. “You gotta spend money to make money. It's like the ten grand I'm going to get for my story. We can't start our own business till we write and then win this thing. And we can't write and win this thing till we do this other thing.”

“This other thing,” said Chloe, “meaning horn in on my lifelong dream?”

“Exactly. Mase, let's jet. To horn in on Chloe's dream, we gotta go get us some passports. No time to lose.” As they sped up, their boots kicked up dust in a bee cloud. “Where's this post office anyway?”

“Are you joking? You've never been to the Fryeburg Post Office?”

Hannah poked Chloe. “Listen to you. You've never been there either.”

Chloe poked Hannah back. “Yes, I have, stop it.”

Blake pulled on his brother. “Let's hoof, bro. Should we pick you up, Chloe?” The Hauls lived three houses up, around the pond through the scraggly pines and birches.

The girls gazed after their young men, and then resumed walking. Hannah shook her head—in distress? In wonderment? Chloe couldn't tell. “I guess I'll be going to Spain with my boyfriend and your boyfriend, but not with you,” Hannah said.

“Har-de-har-har.”

“I'm not joking, Chloe.”

“Oh, I know.”

“You can't start your adult life being such a chicken. What are you afraid of? Be more like me. I'm not afraid of anything.” Her lip twisted.

They were almost at the clearing in front of Chloe's green bungalow. Hannah slowed down, as if she wanted to linger, but Chloe sped up as if that was the last thing she wanted. “I have to be diplomatic,” she said. “If I want them to say yes, I can't just do an I'm-going-to-Europe vaudeville routine.”

“If you don't start acting like an adult, why should they treat you like one?”

How much did Chloe
not
want to talk about it. It wasn't that Hannah was wrong. It was that Hannah always said obvious things in such a way that made Chloe not only think her friend was wrong, but also want her friend to be wrong.

“I'll talk to them tonight,” she said, hurrying across her pine-needle clearing.

“I wouldn't tell them about Mason and Blake just yet.”

“Ya think?”

“Start slow,” Hannah said. “Don't make your mother go all Chinese on you. You always make her nuts. First dangle our trip, then wait. The boys might be pie in the sky anyway. Where are they going to get the money from? They won't come, you'll see.”

Chloe said nothing. Clearly Hannah had no idea who her boyfriend was. There was no talking Blake out of
anything
. And as if to prove Chloe's point, Janice Haul's Subaru came charging toward them from around the trees, Blake rolling down the window, slowing down, honking, waving.

“Off to get our passports!” he yelled. “See ya!”

Chloe turned to Hannah. “You were saying?”

Hannah brushed a strand of hair from Chloe's face and fixed the collar on her plaid shirt. “She's not going to let you go, is she?” Hannah said. “That's why you haven't asked. You know she'll say no.” Something wistful was in Hannah's tone, indefinable, perplexing.

“Clearly I'm going to use all my powers to get her to say yes,” Chloe said. “Don't worry.” They both looked worried.

Hannah sighed. “Still, I wouldn't tell her about the boys just yet. You know how she gets.”

Chloe sighed in return. She knew how her mother got. “What did you want to talk to me about?” Only a flimsy screen door separated Chloe's mother's ears from Hannah's troubles.

Hannah waved her off. “Just you wait,” she said, all doom and gloom.

“I
'M IN THE KITCHEN,
”
HER MOTHER CALLED OUT AS SOON AS
Chloe opened the screen door. A statement of delightful irony since they lived in a winterized cabin that was one room entire, if one didn't count, which Chloe didn't, the bathroom, the two small bedrooms, and the open attic loft where Chloe slept.

I'm in the kitchen,
Lang said, because this month she was baking. Last winter, her mother was scrapbooking, so every day, when Chloe came home, she would hear,
I'm in the dining room
.

The previous fall, her mother had decided to become a seamstress and told Chloe that from now on she was sewing all her daughter's clothes,
in the craft room
.

When she was tracing out the family tree on her new Christmas-present software, Lang was
in the computer room
.

Lang Devine, née Lang Thia from Red River, North Dakota, reinvented herself constantly into something new. She had wanted to be a dancer when she was young, but then she met Jimmy and wanted to be a wife. After many years as a wife, she wanted to be a mother. And after many years as a mother of one, she wanted to be a mother of two.

Jimmy's favorite, he said, was when Lang took up tap dancing. He built her a wooden platform; she bought herself a pair of black Capezios size 5, some CDs, and taught herself how to tap dance. That was noisy.

And not as delicious as baking, which was the current phase, and Chloe's favorite after gardening. Jimmy Devine liked it, too, but groused that he was gaining two pounds a week because of Lang's buttery hobby. Chloe thought her dad might teasingly mention the extra pounds Lang herself had put on around her five-foot frame, now that she wasn't tap dancing. But no. Just last week, Jimmy said as he dug into Lang's cream puffs (made with half-and-half, not milk, by the way), “Sweet potato, how do you bake so much and yet stay so thin?”

And Chloe's mother had tittered!

How to explain to her parents that it was unseemly for a grown woman of advancing years to titter when her husband of nearly three decades paid her a halfhearted compliment by calling her the name of a red starchy root vegetable?

Chloe walked in, set down her school bag, pulled off her boots, and walked through the short corridor, past her parents' bedroom, past the bedroom that no one ever went into anymore, past the bathroom, into the open area. She put down her lunchbox on the kitchen counter where it would be cleaned and prepped for tomorrow. Something smelled heavenly. Chloe didn't want to admit it, because she didn't want to encourage her mother in any way. What her mother needed was a tamping down of enthusiasm, not a fanning of the fire. Her mother and Blake shared that in common.

“Doesn't that smell divine?” Lang giggled, turned around, and with floury hands, patted Chloe's cheeks. “I only make divine things for my divine girl.” Lang was shorter than Chloe, making even Chloe seem tall and svelte by comparison. Otherwise mother and daughter had many physical features in common. The one Chloe was most grateful for was her brown hair. It was straw-straight, shining, streaked with sunlight. There was nothing she did to make it great. It just was. Every day washed, brushed, clean, unfussy, thin-spun silk falling from her head. She wore no makeup, to differentiate herself from the senior girls who were all about the heavy eyeliner, the flimsy
tanks, the one-size-too-small jeans, and three-inch (or higher!) mules in which they clomped through the Fryeburg Academy halls, always in danger of falling over or tripping, and perhaps that was the point. Sexy but helpless. Chloe kept her body to herself and walked in sensible shoes. Her face, unblemished and fair, suffered slightly from this pretend plainness, but there was no hiding the upper curve of her cheekbones or her wide-set eyes that tilted slightly upward, always in a smile. She had inherited her Irish lips from her father, but her eyes and cheeks from her mother, and because of that, her face, just like her body, wasn't quite in proportion. The ratio of eyes to lips was not in balance, just as the ratio of body to breasts was not in balance. There was not enough body for the milk-fed breasts she had been cursed with. There might have been a genetic component to the comical chaos inside her—to her math abilities colliding with her existential confusion—but there was simply no cosmic excuse for her palmfuls of breasts. That was the feature she was least grateful for.

Chloe blamed her mother.

It was only right.

She blamed her mother for almost everything.

Chloe brushed the white powder off her face. “Whatcha makin'?”

“Linzer tarts.”

“Doesn't smell like Linzer tarts.” Chloe glanced inside one of the pots on the stove.

“Raspberry jam. I made it from scratch this afternoon for the tarts. It's still warm. You want to try?”

Chloe did want to try, so much. “No, thank you,” she said. “I'm full.”

“Full from lunch four hours ago?”

Lang got out some orange juice, a yogurt, unboxed some Wheat Thins, opened some cheddar cheese, washed a bowl of blueberries, and set it all in front of Chloe sitting glumly at the table. She brought the long wooden spoon half-filled with warm
jam to Chloe's face. Chloe tasted it. It was
so
good. But she only admitted it to herself. She wouldn't admit it to her overeager mother. “What's for dinner?”

“I'm thinking ratatouille. And pork chops. I found a spicy new recipe. With cumin. How was school?”

Chloe didn't know where to start. That she didn't know
how
to start was more vital. She tried not to be irritated today by her mother's earnest round face, also unmade-up and open, high cheekbones, red mouth, smiling slanting eyes, affectionate gaze, her short black hair pin-straight like Chloe's. Tell me everything, her mother's welcome expression said. We will deal with everything together. Chloe tried hard not to sigh, not to look away, not to wish however fleetingly for Hannah's mother, the thin, pinched, absentminded, and largely absent Terri Gramm. “School's good.”

That's it. School's good. Nothing else. Open book, look down into food, drink the OJ, don't look up, don't speak. Soon enough, jam would have to be cooled, the Linzer tarted, the ratatouille stewed.

Trouble was, today Chloe
needed
to talk to her mother. Or at least begin to try to talk to her. She needed a passport. Otherwise all her little dreams were just vapor. She had kept her dreams deliberately small, thinking they might be easier to realize, but now feared she hadn't kept them small enough.

“Are you going to write a story too?” her mother said. “You should. Ten thousand dollars is
amazing
. I bet Hannah is going to write one. She fancies herself to be good at things. You will too, of course, right?”

Who wouldn't be exasperated? What kind of a mother knew about things that happened
that
day in fourth-period English, before her child even had a chance to open her mouth? Chloe contained her agitation. After all, her mother had unwittingly offered her the opening she needed.

“You discussed it with Hannah and your boys?” Lang prodded.

“Not necessarily. Why would you say that?”

“Because you took nearly forty-five minutes to walk home from the bus. It usually takes you fifteen. What else are you doing if not discussing the Acadia Award for Short Fiction?”

Again, easy to suppress a giant sigh? Chloe didn't think so. She sighed giantly. “I'm not entering it, Mom. I've got nothing to say. What am I going to write about?”

Lang stared at Chloe calmly. For a moment the mother and daughter didn't speak, and in the brief silence the ominous shadows of the hollowed-out fangs of the past, essential for a story, were abundantly obvious.

“I mean,” Chloe hurriedly continued, “perhaps I could write about Kilkenny. But I can't, can I?” When Chloe was eleven, her parents had gone to Ireland without her. They said it was for a funeral. Pfft.

Lang continued to stare calmly at Chloe. “You don't need Kilkenny to write a story,” she said. “There are other things. Or, you make it up. That's why they call it fiction.”

“Make it up from what?”

“I don't know. What's Blake making it up from?”

“How do you know this? No, don't tell me. I've seen nothing. But Blake has seen rats and—” She stopped herself from saying
used condoms
.

“You have an imagination, don't you?”

“None. I need a story, Mom, not musings about what it's like to live on a puddle lake in Maine.”

“Puddle lake? Have you glimpsed the stunning beauty outside your windows?”

In the afternoons, the glistening lake, blooming willows and birches trimming the shoreline, the railroad rising on the embankment, did occasionally shine with the scarlet colors of life. That wasn't the point.

“I can't write about skiing or bowling, or learning to drive,” Chloe continued. “I need something else.” The one ashen catastrophe in their life she could never write about. And
Lang knew that. So why push it? Besides, her mother had once informed her that the Devine women were too short to be tragic figures. “We can be stoics, but not tragics,” Lang had said a few years ago, when it seemed to everyone else that the very opposite was the only thing true.

“Make it up, darling,” Lang repeated, unperturbed by her daughter's tone. Chloe watched her mother slap the printed-out rules of entry for the Acadia contest on the table. “You have five months to come up with a story and write it. After it wins, it will be published by the University of Maine Press. Properly published! In book form and everything. That's exciting, isn't it?”

“Did you not hear me when I said I didn't want to be a writer?”

“No. By the way, I got you the pens you wanted.” Lang produced three packages of blue pens, gel, ballpoint, and fountain, and laid them in front of Chloe. “I also took the liberty of getting you a notebook. Several different kinds to choose from. I thought you might need one if you're going to write a story that's going to win first prize. The Moleskine is very good. Has soft paper. But you try them all.”

Chloe stared at the pens, at the four notebooks. “Mom, listen to me.”

Lang sat down, elbows on the table, staring at Chloe with complete attention. She looked so pleased to be told to do what she had already been doing.

“Here's what we were thinking.”

“Who's we?”

“The four of us.”

“The four of you were thinking all at once?”

“Well, discussing.”

“That's better. It's always good to be precise if you're thinking of becoming a writer.”

“Which I'm not, so.”

“What are you four up to now?”

“We were thinking of going to Europe.”

Lang stayed neutral. She didn't blanch, she barely blinked. No, she did blink. Slowly, steadily, as if she was about to say . . .

“Are you
crazy
?”

There it was. “First listen, then judge. Can you do that?”

“No.”

“Mom. You just said you wanted me to write.”

“You have to go to Europe to write? Did Flannery O'Connor go to Europe? Did Eudora Welty? Did Truman Capote?”

“Actually, he did, yes.”

“When he wrote
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
his first novel, he'd been to Europe?”

“I don't know. We're getting off topic, Mom.”

“Au contraire. We are very much
on
topic.”

“Mason and Blake need to do research.”

“So they're going to
Europe
?”

Chloe made a real effort not to facepalm, a real, true, Herculean, McDonald's supersize-sandwich effort not to facepalm, because there were few things her mother hated more than this brazen gesture of exasperation and frustration.

“Hannah and I have been talking about the trip for a while.”

“I thought you just said you wanted to go for Blake and Mason? Make up your mind, child. Either you thought of it on the railroad tracks, or you've been planning it for years.”

“How do you know we were on the tracks?”

“I saw you.” Lang pointed out the window. “Right across the lake.”

Both things were true. Chloe and Hannah
had
been dreaming of going for years, but Blake and Mason just thought of it today. Lang sat and watched her daughter like a bird watching the world. One never knew what the Langbird was thinking until she sang.

“Isn't going away to college enough for you?” Lang said quietly.

Chloe clasped her hands. She didn't want to look into her mother's face. She knew how hard it must have been for her
parents to let her go away to school. “I've been dreaming of Europe since I was little,” she said, almost whispered. “Way before college.”

“Sometimes circumstances change, and we have to dream a different dream,” said Lang. There was only a breath after that, and no change in expression to reflect the colossal wreck from which life had to be rebuilt, Capezio shoe by Linzer tart. “College away is a big step, not to mention an enormous expense, even with the scholarship they're giving you.”

“I know, Mom. Exactly. And then work and study and more work and study, and when else could I ever do it?”

“Oh, I don't know, let's see, how about—four years from now? Or never. Either way is good with me.”

“That's what I want for my graduation present,” Chloe declared boldly. “A trip to Europe.”

“Graduation present. Really. I thought you wanted a laptop.”

“I'll use our old one. I'll take the desktop.”

“You certainly will not. All my family-tree files are on it.”

“I thought you were baking now? Oh, and yes, the files are permanently embedded in that one desktop computer. You're right. They can never be moved.”

“Do you know what happens after you make a choice to be sarcastic to the woman who gave you life?”