Lone Star (29 page)

The three hostels we found in Daugavpils were full. “How can they be full?” I said. “There are no people here.” A narrow, run-down, Bolshevik joint, advertising itself as three-star accommodation and serving mostly commuters, wanted a hundred latu from us, nearly two hundred dollars. Even Mason became agitated. None of us had ever stayed in a hotel that expensive. Scratch that. None of us had ever stayed in a hotel, period. With our vats of knowledge gleaned from skimming
Chloe and Hannah's celebrity magazines, we thought the Ritz-Carlton on the French Riviera commanded those kinds of prices, not a fleabag on the wrong side of the tracks in a provincial town. (Which is where people like us lived, Chloe would say, if she were here. But she wasn't.) We had two choices. Cough up or look for another place.

“Or sleep on the piss-soaked bench at the station,” offered Mason. Then, seeing Hannah's glare, he added, “Just kidding.” But who was he kidding? We three knew he would've preferred to sleep on that bench than pay two hundred dollars for a room. Mason was nothing if not frugal.

We paid two hundred dollars for the room. It came out of our money—the money we had worked for and saved—not Moody's money, which was all with Chloe. After paying, the three of us became stunningly bad tempered.

Across from our luxury palace we found a cheap café.

“Why did you faint, Hannah?” I asked after we sat down and ordered. I tried not to sound churlish.

“People faint, Blake.”

“Not you.”

“Bro's right,” Mason said. “You've never fainted.”

“Just because
you
haven't seen me faint doesn't mean I haven't.”

“When have you fainted, bird?” I asked.

“Not in front of you, but I have.”

“When?”

“When I was a kid. What's the point of this interrogation anyway? Even if I've never fainted, I fainted this morning, didn't I?”

“Yes.”

“So what are you getting at?”

“Nothing.”

“What are you implying?”

“Nothing.”

“That I didn't actually faint?”

“No, no, you definitely fainted,” I said. “The question remains, though: Why?”

“Why do people faint, doctor? I don't know. I hit my ankle. I was in sudden pain. I fainted.” She was annoyed, but not as annoyed as I was. And then she aimed for the balls. “I thought you might be relieved,” she said, “that we didn't have to travel with Johnny, whom you don't seem to care for.”

“While that is certainly true,” I returned, “instead of relieved, imagine that we might actually be worried about Chloe.”

“No one's worried, bro,” Mason said. “Just you.”

“Amen,” said Hannah.

“Well, you two
should
be fucking worried,” I said to Mason and Hannah. “That you're not is worrying in itself.” I glared at my brother.

Mason said nothing, but looked twisted with guilt.

I said nothing more. I stopped obsessing about Hannah's vomiting, though I continued to obsess about Chloe being thrust against the worst human being on the planet. My gut was so full of anxiety about Johnny's nefarious nature that I couldn't fit even a sandwich in there with it.

To avoid talking to Hannah and Mase, I took out my travel guides, opened the map on the table, moving aside the food, the beer. I didn't know what I was looking for, tracing the roads, from the Latvian border to Warsaw, almost as if I would have liked to rent a car and race to Poland down the paved highways. All futility. I paid the bill and closed my guidebook. I didn't want to oversleep and miss our train. That was the one thing I could still control. Or we'd be three days behind, and then we might never find her.

Hannah

I am never getting on a bus again as long as I live. That was the worst thing that's ever happened to me. The boys are both mad
at me, but I don't care. I would rather hitch the rest of the way than set foot on a bus again. The most miserable three hours of my life were spent between Riga and Daugavpils. As soon as the bus ditched us, I felt better. A coincidence? I don't think so. I wasn't sure
how
we were going to get to Warsaw but I knew for sure it wasn't going to be by the worst transportation mode ever invented by man, and I didn't care beyond that. We sat too far in the back because all the front seats were taken, and the entire time I was just praying, don't throw up, don't throw up, don't throw up. I know this is not ideal. We could've already been in Vilnius. But it is what it is. So what if we're one day behind Chloe? We'll make up that day along the way. I smiled fetchingly. Perhaps by not going to Treblinka?

Blake snapped at me not to joke, but I don't know what he meant, I wasn't joking at all.

Blake snapped at me. I couldn't believe it.

I know he's mad, but it's not my fault. It's the bus's fault. We weren't supposed to take a bus. That wasn't in the plan. Ours was a train vacation; the bus is hateful. I know Blake agrees with me, but he's being stubborn at the moment, as if I ruined things somehow.

It's not great, I won't dispute it. The one daily train to Vilnius isn't until 5:30 the next morning.

“Blake, don't be upset. The train to Warsaw doesn't leave Vilnius until eleven. We'll definitely make it.”

“You sure about that?” he said. “So far, not a single thing has gone as planned.”

I wanted to ask him if he meant today or the whole trip, but I didn't. I was feeling well enough to travel by train but not well enough to argue.

The large expensive hotel room turned out to be the size of a walk-in closet. It had barely enough floor space for one double bed, which only fit because it was pressed into the corner. Didn't the hotel clerk tell us for a hundred latu we got two beds, not one? No one felt up to going downstairs and arguing. The room
was high up, and through the window we could see the station, the dozens of train tracks beyond it, the lights. We had a bit of a view.

“Come on, you guys, it's an adventure,” I said. “Let's go find a place to eat.” I can't believe I was suddenly the cheerleader. Me.

The little café close to the hotel served decent sausages and potatoes. Mason was famished, but I just had some clear chicken broth, bread, and a cream cake. Here's how I know something was wrong. Blake bought himself a sandwich and only finished half of it. Blake didn't finish a sandwich. And when I asked him about it, he said he wasn't hungry. He didn't have the Blake twinkle in his eye. He looked like a different Blake without that twinkle.

The brothers kept talking, but not about me, about how I fell and hurt my leg, but about Chloe. Where is she? What do you think has happened? Are they already in Warsaw? We planned on Gdansk first, they said, so Chloe will have to sweet-talk her way into our hostel reservation two days early. Or was it only a day early? Neither I nor the boys could tell anymore. I could see they were worried about finding her, Blake especially, because they wouldn't shut up about it. Mason was like, of course we'll find her, dude, and I was like, Mason's right, where could she possibly get to, can we talk about something else? And Blake said, I just want to go to sleep. He didn't want to talk about anything. We set two alarms and asked the desk guy to wake us up at 4:30 and he looked at us weird and said, “Four-thirty in afternoon?”

Blake and I lay down in the bed together, and Mason took our only blanket and half of our pillows and squeezed in on the floor next to his brother. Blake and I were fully dressed in T-shirts and shorts. It was night, and we had a bed. That was the first time those two things had combined in one moment in our three years together. Night. And bed. There had been night before, without bed. In trucks, backseats, an abandoned barn.
And there'd been bed before, without night. A few times when our parents were out. Now in Daugavpils there was night. There was bed.

And there was Mason.

I wanted Blake to hold me, to spoon me, but he turned his back to me. He said he was hot. He didn't even sleep under the sheet. What's wrong with him?

There was no bathroom in the room (a hundred latu and no bathroom?) and I had to get up three times in the middle of the night to use the facilities down the hall. Blake got up with me each time and waited outside the bathroom to make sure I was okay. It's fine, I kept telling him. Stay in bed. But there was a strange man sleeping on the floor in the corridor near the bathroom. He was either sleeping or dead. He smelled awful, of not washing and of drink. Or perhaps decomposition. I was glad Blake was with me. Sometimes I think I deserve better than him. But sometimes I think he deserves better than me. Every once in a while I think I haven't treated him as well as I should have. I thought this especially when I was in the bathroom at three in the morning, throwing up all of my insides, while he stood like a Buckingham Palace guard outside my door next to the unconscious drunk.

Chloe

She kept hoping they would appear, pleading with the conductor not to pull away just yet. But they didn't. The train pulled away. Trying not to fidget, Chloe sat next to the window, Johnny to her left.

“Don't worry,” he said. “Your friend didn't look well. She'll be okay, but she probably needed a few extra minutes. They'll catch the next one.” He opened his
European Timetable
book, looked up some numbers. Binomials? Irrationals? Sequential algorithms for living a better life? “Yeah, it's not looking great for their bus. The early ones get sold out quick. But if they can catch the 3:15, they can stay overnight in Daugavpils and then catch the train to Vilnius in the morning. So they'll be a day behind us.” He paused. “Provided, of course, they don't miss that 5:30 to Vilnius.”

“Why would they miss the train?”

“I don't know. They missed it today.”

“Well, Hannah is not going to be fainting tomorrow, is she?”

Johnny closed his book of numbers. “Let's hope not.”

Why would he say that? Why wouldn't Hannah be feeling better? She had banged her ankle, not torn her Achilles' heel.

“Blake and Mason know to be careful, right?” he said. “Some of the hostels are sketchy.”

Chloe didn't know if Blake and Mason knew to be careful. They never had to be careful before. “How do you know?”

He shrugged. “Let's just say I learned the hard way not to miss the bus from Riga to Vilnius. After I'd missed it once, I thought, so what? I'll take the evening train to Daugavpils, stay overnight, get up, and go the next morning. I was so cocky.”

Was
? Chloe thought. “So what's wrong with the hostels? We're booked into a three-star one in Warsaw. It got great reviews on a travel website.”

“Yeah,” he drew out. “Do you know the saying seek and ye shall find? Many who stay in the hostels take that commandment fully to heart. Drunks and addicts seek to lift the lids of the communal toilets to see what they shall find inside the tanks.”

Her eyes round with alarm, Chloe tried not to sound scandalized. “Um, what are they looking for under there?”

“You name it. Drugs taped to the lid. Bottles of vodka sunk into the water. The junkies hide stuff in the toilets, hoping to retrieve it at some future date, but other junkies find the goods first. Then they stab each other in fights over the contents.”

“When you say stab each other . . .”

Johnny said nothing for a long moment. “With any luck the hostels near the station will be full and your friends will get a hotel room instead. Are you hungry?”

Though she was, she said she wasn't, because she didn't want him to think she had appetites that could not be controlled.

“I'm starved,” he said. “Absolutely stahrved.” He smirked. “My grandparents would not be happy with me. They tell me never to say that, because I have no idea what that really means. But I can't help myself. That's how I feel, famished. I don't say it in front of them, though.”

“Why?” Chloe asked, but she was only half listening. She was scanning through her brain for details about Mason, trying to make sense of his passport forgetting. It was so out of character. He didn't leave behind his keys, his school ID, his permit, his license, his money. He was the careful one, the most
careful one of them all. And if it was his passport he'd forgotten, why didn't he say so immediately? Why did it take four tries to get an answer out of him? She wondered if he had made an excuse to go back. But why would he do that? Perhaps he was just flabbergasted he'd forgotten something as nonnegotiable as a passport. She didn't know what to think, all the while catching snippets of Johnny talking about his grandparents, their big house, the food on their table.

The commuter rail arrived at Riga Central right on time, at 6:20. Their bus was at seven. They hurried, Johnny dragging Chloe's suitcase on its busted wheels. She wished she had bought a new suitcase for this trip and said so. She apologized to him for her suitcase. But he shook his head. “Trust me. Be like Paris Hilton.”

“Um, in what way?” she said, coloring slightly, thinking only of the graphic video,
One Night in Paris.

Johnny, thank goodness, meant something else. “Have you seen her walking through the airport after coming back from her travels?” he asked. “No? A shame. Everyone should learn from Paris. She pushes eight suitcases on a trolley. And you think that she's freaking Paris Hilton, she's going to have Louis Vuitton luggage handmade especially for her. But no. Do you know what she has? Kmart luggage. The oldest and most sorry looking. Ripped-up suitcases, held together by twine, clasps broken, wheels coming off, mismatched, as if she'd picked them up off the side of the road before the garbagemen came. In this heap of awfulness, she carries her Gucci shoes and Prada dresses and Tiffany diamonds. That's how you travel. Humbly.” He smiled, opening the door for Chloe into the tiny station café. “The way
you
carry yourself. Without ostentation.”

Taken aback by his words, she couldn't think of a riposte at first or a thing she wanted from the café chalkboard. She carried herself without ostentation? She looked down at her Doc Martens. He ordered for both of them. Two coffees and three cheese buns. “On second thought, five buns,” he said. “If
we miss a connection or are stuck on the bus, we'll be glad for the food.”

“Without ostentation,” Chloe repeated. “Huh. You mean, like your Lucchese boots in black calfskin leather?”

He laughed. “Touché,” he said. “As you see”—he pointed to his current footwear—“I wear my father's old army boots when I travel. Luccheses are for when I perform. But only you would know what they are, Miss Fashion Magazine. You think anyone here knows about cowboy boots?”

Chloe, perversely flattered that he would be impressed by her trivial knowledge of cowboy boots (and it was only because her mother had bought a pair for her dad one Christmas ten years ago and he wore them to this day), said, “Folks here seem to know about Bluebird microphones.”

“Yes, the Eastern Europeans do like the Western tech,” he admitted. “Come, let's hurry. And by the way, it's alligator leather, not calfskin.” Winking, he tipped his beret. “A gift.”

“For singing?”

“Funny. But no. Maybe. For nothing really. For living.”

They made the bus with five minutes to spare, but had to sit in the back. She sat next to the window, he next to her. He didn't ask to sit next to the window, and she didn't offer. His duffel and guitar were stuffed under the seat and between his legs. Her suitcase was in the cargo hold.

“Why do you always hold on to your bag?” she asked him.

“My whole life is the guitar and the duffel. You have to protect the things you can't do without, don't you agree?”

Chloe thought back. “But on the train from Liepaja, you left your stuff with me when you stepped out.”

He nodded. “You looked as if you could be trusted. Was I wrong?”

“Well, no. But”—she furrowed—“yesterday at Livu Square you took the guitar when you ran off to the bakery.”

“How would it look if I gave you my guitar to hold while I ran off? What would Mason say?”

Oh, Mason wouldn't care about a silly thing like that, Chloe had to stop herself from saying. He'd barely notice.

It took awhile to check everybody's passports. The bus finally took off, ten minutes late, which stressed out Johnny, since the transfer in Vilnius from bus to train had to be perfect to succeed. The bus would arrive at 10:45
A.M.
, and the train to Warsaw departed at 11:20. No time even to get a sandwich.

“How far is the bus depot from the train station?”

“You'd think they would build them next to each other for convenience,” said Johnny. “But the Communists preferred the old ladies to cart their suitcases some distance down the Vilnius cobblestones.”

“Hey, I'm not that old,” she said.

“Old ladies and very young women, then.”

Why did that make her blush?

“Why are you blushing?”

“I'm not blushing.” God!

“You are, I just saw you. What did I say?”

“I have no idea what you mean. Pastry is good.”

“Yes. Did the pastry make you blush?”

“I didn't blush.”

“Okay.”

After some time had passed he said, “The bus is awful, isn't it?”

She hadn't noticed. She hadn't noticed anything except him sitting next to her.

“Yes, it's pretty bad,” she quickly agreed, because she didn't want him to think she was so lost in reverie that she didn't notice the horror of buses in general and of this one in particular. She was slightly let down that he would observe in such subtle detail how the bus lurched, how bad it smelled. He was sweating. She wiped her own brow. She was sweating. The bus had no AC. Fifty people and no AC.

“Do these buses ever have AC?” she asked him.

“What's AC?” he said. “You're in Latvia. Soon you'll be in
Poland. Wait till you make your acquaintance with those trains. You won't get AC until you get on a train in Vienna.”

“Vienna? I'm not going to Vienna.”

“If you want AC, you will.”

“Why do I have to go to Vienna?”

“Because Vienna waits for you.” He didn't take out his timetable book. “I'd show you the routes, but not now. Sitting in the back of the bus like this, if you do anything but stare ahead, you'll be throwing up for hours. It'll ruin your trip.”

Could anything ruin Chloe's trip, even the vomitous bus? She didn't think so.

A woman sprung up from the seat in front of them. Whirled around and stuck her head over the seat. “For your information,” she sputtered in huffy accented English, “this bus is a luxury bus. There is a bathroom and cup holders and extra legroom. The AC, as you call it, is on. You'd know if it wasn't on. You know how? You'd be dead from heatstroke.” Pointing to a vent up in the ceiling blowing out hot air, she spun forward.

Chloe and Johnny laughed soundlessly. “Do you know Italian?” he whispered, leaning into her head. “Maybe we can talk quietly in Italian.”

“You can't insult my country in any language,” said the woman in front, not turning around this time. “And for your information, I also speak Italian.”

They covered their mouths, trying not to giggle. They were still sweating, nearly pressing their damp foreheads together. Chloe decorously moved away a few inches. Johnny took off his jacket. This time he contained his arms and didn't elbow her in inappropriate soft places. She couldn't take anything off, wearing only her T-shirt, all her warm things packed away.

“I like the color of your shirt,” Johnny said, pinching the hem of it between his fingers.

“Thank you. It's labradorite.”

“What?”

“Labradorite.”

“Is that the color of a Labrador? White? Or black?”

“Well, since it's blue, it's neither. It's iridescent blue. There's a semiprecious gem mined in the Urals, I think, called labradorite.”

“I should've known,” Johnny said. “All the best things come from the Ural Mountains.”

“You've been to the Urals?” He seemed so well traveled.

“No. It's on my list, though. After I come back from Afghanistan.”

She was quiet for a few minutes while she composed things to say, to ask, to comment on. One thing she tried hard to get out but couldn't:
What if you don't come back from Afghanistan?
When she turned to look at him, to ask if he was really, really going to Afghanistan, he was sleeping, his head tilted toward her iridescently blue shoulder. She stared at him for a long while. Then she became worried that he would open his eyes and find a deranged half stranger devouring him, inches away from his straight nose, from his soft full mouth. She turned to the window, the pit in her stomach whooshing, sucking her into a vortex of itself, a cauldron that contained odd despair, angst, tension, crackling exhilaration like Bengal lights, a numbing sensation of falling.

Like this she passed the hours from eight to ten, as the countryside changed from marsh to forest, forest to fields of red wildflowers, trees of green, and rivers, rivers, rivers, streaming south from the Baltic Sea. She sat and tried to make herself grow up before he woke up, grow up so she wouldn't see all the new things in her life with her mouth open, wanting to laugh at anything, at everything, at the sun, at idle youth, at her bedazzled impetuous heart.

The bus was ten minutes late getting into Vilnius. They had twenty minutes to make the Warsaw train; a ten-minute walk. They hurried. It was just the two of them. No one fainted, no one
lost their passport. At the station they had enough time to buy her ticket and find their platform.

“You don't need a ticket, Johnny?”