Lone Star (59 page)

They were past the rock with the whale, which meant almost at the turn to their road, when Blake said, “Have you heard from him?”

And Chloe almost said
who
.

“No.” She said no more. What more was there to say? And he didn't follow up. What else was there to ask? He walked her to the front door in silence. There was a patter of feet, a swinging screen door, and a dark-haired little boy ran out and hugged Blake around the waist.

“Blake! Football? You promised!” Eight-year-old Ray had learned English well. He begged like a pro.

Blake ruffled the boy's hair. “Not today, bud. Maybe tomorrow. I got stuff to do.”

Lang came to the front door carrying a covered plate of cookies. “Hello, dear,” she said, but not to Chloe—to Blake. “Do you want to stay for dinner? I made plenty. Ribeye tonight. Your favorite.”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Devine, my mom is making what she thinks are burritos.”

“Ah. Well, here. Lemon bars for you.”

Blake gladly took the plate.

Chloe stared at her mother. “Lemon bars?”

Lang was already inside the house. Chloe glanced at Ray, expectant by her side. She was right from the moment she first laid eyes on him. He was the sweetest kid. A little needy maybe, but, well, who wasn't?

“So, Ray,” she said. “How about I go put on my beating-Ray shoes and you go get the ball so I can kick your butt?”

Lone Star

“Chloe, come inside, it's almost dinnertime. Why are you pacing the road? Are you waiting for your father to come home? He'll be another twenty minutes. He's bringing Latvian pie for you from Moody.”

“No.”

“Are you waiting for Blake?”

“What? No!”

“So what are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

Chloe couldn't even mope in peace.

Aside from staring at the empty road, she searched for him from the comfort of her favorite red chair by the window with the white curtains and her glorious pendulous violet fuchsias blooming outside in the shade of the firs. With the PowerBook on her lap, she googled until her fingers went stiff. Johnny Rainbow this, Lone Star that. Johnny Rainbow no hits. Every search with the name Lone Star produced a million hits. There was of course the local Lone Star Pawn and Gun in Fryeburg. There was also Lone Star beer, and Lone Star steak, and Lone Star wine bar. Lone Star saloon, Lone Star campus, Lone Star kickball, Lone Star country road 92, and there was even a band named Lonestar, which got Chloe excited, as they had just put out a greatest-hits CD, which would imply that there had been songs to choose from. But they were not Johnny and had nothing to do with Johnny.

Lone Star hiking club. How many search pages back should one go? Six? Twelve? All of them?

Why hadn't she asked him why he had a tattoo of the star of Texas engraved on his chest? She thought she
had
asked him.

Evenings and nights crawled by in endless searching. Lone Star college. Lone Star fertilizer.

Lone Star mercantile shop.

Lone Star music.

That was almost promising. She called them, but they'd never heard of a Johnny Rainbow.

“There is a very strong possibility that isn't his real name,” her mother called from the kitchen. Ray, not Chloe, was helping her make dinner. Chloe was busy.

“I don't want to talk to you about it, Mom,” said Chloe. “You don't know everything.” Chloe hoped her mother didn't know everything. Why had Chloe told her everything! The only thing her mother had said two years ago after she heard
the whole sobbing rant was were you careful. That's it. Were you careful?

No, Mom, Chloe had replied. We were wildly reckless. Flagrantly irresponsible. Careful is the last thing we were. We lived it like we were dying. Don't talk to me about this anymore. I can't bear it. Because I've already bled, but what I want is to bleed out, is that histrionic enough for you? Is that super careful enough for you?

Lone Star emergency vehicles.

Lone Star girl. That was her.

Lone Star Texas eclectic gifts.

Lone Star burritos. Maybe there was a girl in a taco joint, and he got the tat to remember her by. Maybe Lone Star was his Winona Forever.

Zane Grey was the Lone Star Ranger. Did Johnny have anything to do with Zane Grey?

Lone Star chili cookoff. Did he cook chili? Did he even like chili? There were so many things about him she did not know and could not know and was now afraid she would never know.

She googled Johnny Rainbow and Lone Star together. Nothing came up.

But you know what did come up?

Lone Star shoot-out.

Lone Star cookout. They were having a barbecue in Texas. The best spareribs won.

Lone Star scavenger hunt. Chloe was the scavenger.

Her mother observed her for the month of July. Then she said, “Didn't you tell me you two went to visit his mother?”

“So?”

“Maybe she knows her son's name?”

Chloe wasn't sure Ingrid would want to speak to her. “No one there spoke English.”

“You're right. Better not call.”

“Ugh. Don't exasperate me, Mom.” A minute later, “It was two years ago. She's probably not there.”

“You're right. It's hopeless. Stop looking.”

“Mom, I think Dad is calling for you to see what Ray is up to. Go see.”

“Chloe, I think Blake is at the door, asking if you want to go to the movies with him and Taylor and Joey. Should I tell him you can't because you're googling?”

Chloe slammed shut her laptop.

Later that night, after the movies, when everyone was asleep, Chloe googled the Tarcento Pensione to find its phone number. The first item that came up was not a phone number, but a news alert about a something in Italian.
Incendio doloso
.
Gravi danni
. She used her barely trustworthy online translator. Arson. Heavy damage. At dawn she walked outside into the dewy fuchsias and dialed the number she had found. There was no answer.

She kept calling. In August she finally reached someone who spoke a little English at the parish church of St. Peter in Tarcento. The man told her that after the fire, the pensione had closed because the insurance money didn't cover the cost of rebuilding it. No, he didn't know where the people who lived there had gone. Chloe asked if anyone had died. The man said no. It was a miracle that everyone survived. He told her to go with God.
Andare con Dio.

That was that.

Fishing

Blake and Chloe were in the boat together, just like in childhood. It was mid-August, almost time for her to fly back to her other life. They were sitting in the anchored boat, bobbing lightly, late afternoon, trying to catch a perch or a bass. Pickings had been slim. Perhaps because they kept scaring away the fish. No matter how many times he said shh to her, he'd then make her laugh and ruin the silence.

Right before he pulled up anchor and rowed back to shore, he took a breath. “You asked before why I seemed off, and I didn't
want to be rude, but now I'll tell you. I don't want you to go back to school and have it stay unsaid between us, what pissed me off, and still does. Okay?”

“Okay, I guess.” They had been sitting so affably.

“I thought we were friends,” Blake said. “I mean, I understand what happened in Poland was awful, for you and Mason, for me and Hannah. I was upset with you for lying to me for so long—to all of us, I mean. You were leaving us, going west to almost Mexico.”

“Not for good,” she said. “Look at me, I'm right here.”

He looked. “Whatever. I understood why you couldn't tell
me,
since you hadn't told your best friend or your boyfriend, but it doesn't mean I wasn't upset about it.”

“I know.” She hung her head, but only briefly, because she wanted to watch him struggle to get the main part out, the part he wanted to get to.

“But that's not what upset me,” he continued. “What really upset me was that after you came back from your little adventure, after you ditched us all in the middle of Europe without a word—”

“I left a note,” Chloe said. “I told you not to worry about me.”

“Yeah, okay. As I was saying. After all that, you came back home, a full week after us, and not five minutes later flew out to San Diego and didn't say goodbye to anyone. Didn't
speak
to anyone. I mean, I can understand maybe Mason, because he'd done you wrong, and I can almost understand Hannah, though you could've said sorry even to her for being so sneaky and underhanded.”

“Do you really care that I didn't say goodbye to Hannah?” Chloe asked quietly.

“Let me finish. But what did
I
do to you? I thought we were friends. And then you left, and didn't come back for Thanksgiving, didn't come back for Christmas, and didn't even come back last summer!”

“I was working . . . I have two majors. It wasn't personal . . .”

“I thought we would clear the air then, but no. You didn't come back, you didn't write, you didn't call my house, you didn't send me a birthday card. I turned twenty. And nothing.”

“We celebrated your twenty-first, didn't we?” Chloe was guilty as charged. He had turned twenty-one last month. She and Taylor and Joey took him boating and had gotten him so drunk on the shores of Lake Sebago that Chloe had to drive him home in his F-150. It was a great day. She was hoping he'd forgiven her for her previous absence from his life. Guess not.

“Your mom must have told you I'd won the story prize,” Blake continued, “but you didn't send so much as an email saying congrats, old buddy. You and I have been friends since we could walk, and you acted as if you weren't my friend anymore.”

Blake looked away. He lugged the anchor out of the water, bent over the little wooden boat. She watched his broad back in a white T-shirt as she tried to fight through her remorse, yet find words to explain why she had shut him out, too.

Silently he rowed back. She sat in the nose of the boat, in front of him.

“Look, I'm sorry,” she finally said. “I didn't think you'd care very much, but that wasn't right. I just didn't think about it in the terms you put it.”

“How did you think about it?”

“I was really mad at you,” said Chloe.

“What did
I
do?”

“You didn't behave like my friend, Blake,” she said. “You want to talk about friendship? Let's. You knew Mason didn't like me anymore, you knew he had a hard-on for another girl, and you said nothing. That's not how friends behave in my book.” Chloe felt she made a pretty good case for herself.

Blake stopped rowing. He hooked the oars onto the sides of the boat and leaned toward her, slightly breathless, completely unsmiling, and incredulous.

“You must be fucking kidding me,” he said. “Chloe, of all the things to be upset with me about. You have some nerve. Mason
never told me a thing. I had my suspicions, just like you must have had yours, and I did think he didn't act enough like your boyfriend, but he and I didn't have midnight chats about it. But you know who did have midnight chats about things? You and Hannah. You knew Hannah was fucking around! You knew she was going to motels with Professor X, you
knew
and yet you let me go to Europe with you! You let me believe everything was all right. You knew for sure what she was up to, and yet you never said to her, if you don't do the right thing and break up with him, I'm going to tell him myself.”

“She was my best friend!”

“And Mason is
still
my fucking brother!”

Their loud voices, brimming with injured hearts, echoed up and down the tranquil little lake. Anyone sitting in a lawn chair could have heard every word of the injustice, as if through a megaphone.

“She was supposed to tell you, talk to you,” said Chloe.

“You know she didn't. Because we went to Europe. You think I would've gone if I'd known she was knocked up?”

“
I
didn't know that myself!” Her head shook from side to side in protest. “She told me in Warsaw. But you absolutely knew Mason was pining for the airhead back home.”

“We were in Riga by then. What was I supposed to do?”

“What was
I
supposed to do?”

“Maybe if you hadn't been completely subsumed by other things, you would've known what to do.”

“Well, what's your excuse? You weren't subsumed by other things and yet look!”

“How do you know I wasn't subsumed?”

“By effing what?”

He didn't say.

They backed off, regrouped.

“It's not rational for you to be upset with me about Mason,” Blake said.

“I'm not upset with you. I didn't start this conversation.”

“If you're not upset, then why didn't you talk to me for almost two years?”

There was wounded pride in his eyes, and hurt, and incomprehension. He was right. She was subsumed. She had been focused only on what she left behind in Trieste. Which was everything.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't know what to say to you, or to Hannah. Or Mason, of course.” She still didn't. She hadn't seen Mason all summer.

“Did you think we ruined your dream trip?”

That wasn't it at all. Her trip wasn't ruined. Her life was changed.

“No.” My heart is broken, though not dead. The empty ring inside me is still filled with agony. “I wanted to begin my adult life. That's all. Sorry.”

“Okay,” he said, but cold. He picked up the oars.

“And I didn't stay away last summer,” she said. “I told you I was working two jobs, taking classes. It wasn't deliberate.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I'll keep in touch from now on. I promise.”

“Whatever.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she dipped her hand into the water and splashed him. He didn't react. She splashed him again. He blinked, said hey. “You can't do that,” she said, splashing him again. “You either accept my apology, or don't, but if you accept it, you can't sit and brood. That's not what friends do.”