The Disenchantments (18 page)

Alexa finds the snacks from yesterday’s fruit stand.

“Cherry?” she offers us. “Pistachio?”

Bev says yes and digs through her purse. She finds a scrap of paper and takes out her gum, but then she freezes.

“Shit,” she says.

“What?” we all ask.

Then I look at the scrap of paper.
Starlight Motel.
A reminder, too late.

“The amp,” Bev says.

Meg stares at Bev. She blinks. “Oh, fuck,” she says.

Slowly, we all turn to Alexa, knowing that though this will throw all of us off, she’ll be the one to take it the hardest. Her eyes are open wider than I’ve ever seen them, a cherry suspended in midair between herself and Bev.

“I told you not to put the amp in the closet,” she says.

“I know,” Bev says. She looks awful, mascara smeared below her eyes, hair in need of washing. Her white tank top is smudged with something blue—maybe Alexa’s hand paint—and across her face is utter hopelessness.

Bev blinks back tears but Alexa either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. All signs of gentleness fade away.

“They’re expecting us in an hour. They’re making dinner. She was setting the table for us when we called her.”

“Fate?” Meg jokes, but Alexa ignores her.

“I
reserve
our places to stay and I
book
us our shows and I
try
to get us where we need to go but I
can’t
do
everything
. And we can’t have a show without an amp.”

No one knows what to say. We are at a standstill. We can’t afford to buy a new amp, and that one is on loan from my parents’ friend, so even if we could scrape together the money I wouldn’t want to come home without it. But Alexa and Meg’s family is waiting for us, and it’s clear that Alexa needs some off time.

“I’ll go back by myself,” I say.

“How?” Alexa asks.

“We’ll find a bus station. There has to be one in this town.”

“I just really want to see my aunt,” she says, her voice hopeful.

“You can,” I tell her. “You can see your aunt. We just have to find a bus station. You guys take Melinda and I’ll bus back to Redding. Then I’ll get as close as I can to your aunt’s house tonight and one of you can come pick me up.”

“You sure?” Meg asks.

“Yeah, it’s no problem.”

Alexa breathes deep, squeezes my arm.

“Thank you,” she says.

The gas station attendant directs us to the Greyhound station in Weed, a shabby brown building set back from a residential road. I grab my bag and tell Meg that I’ll call her phone when I board the bus for the trip back, and I’m almost out the door when Bev says, “Wait. I’m going, too.”

I shake my head. “I’m fine. You should go with them.”

“No. I’m the one who forgot the amp.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to,” she says. “But I am,” and she steps out after me, messenger bag slung over her shoulder.

“Take good care of Melinda,” I say.

Meg crosses her heart, waves good-bye. I watch Melinda until it disappears, and then I join Bev inside. She stands at a Coke machine, feeding it a crumpled dollar that it keeps spitting back at her. The woman at the ticket counter shows me the Redding station on the map, and I’m relieved to see that it isn’t too far from the Starlight. When it’s time to pay, Bev appears next to me, holding more crumpled bills. I hand the woman my credit card.

We have to wait over an hour for our bus to arrive, so when a boisterous woman in cargo pants and an American flag T-shirt sits next to us, I am more than happy to hold up my end of the conversation.

When she really looks at me for the first time, I remember that I’m still wearing the mud-flap girl hat, but the woman doesn’t seem to care. I wonder if she knows I’m being ironic. Or maybe she takes it as a compliment—I mean, she
is
an American woman.

She tells me that she’s returning home from three weeks on the road, shows me a photograph of her daughter. I ask her what it’s like to drive a truck and she tells me that it’s lonely.

“It gets in your blood, though,” she says. “If I go more than a few weeks between jobs I get restless.”

Bev puts on her Walkman.

“And there’s always the CB,” the woman says. “I got friends I’ve never met in person, but we know each other through the radios.”

The trucker is going north; her bus arrives before ours does.

As soon as she walks away, Bev takes off her headphones.

“Don’t try to tell me you’re thinking of breaking into the trucking profession.”

“As you might remember,” I say, “I’m kind of at loose ends right now.”

She puts her headphones back on and I lean forward with my head in my hands. It would be so much easier if she had chosen to go with Meg and Alexa, if I were here by myself and not thinking of last night every other moment,
and wondering—always—how Bev and I got to where we are now. So unlike how we used to be.

Gently, I take Bev’s headphones off her head. I make my voice even and kind. I try again.

“I was asking for Alexa,” I say. “I don’t remember seeing ‘trucker’ on her list.”

Bev nods.

I say, “We’re alone now. The trip’s almost over.”

She presses the stop button on her Walkman.

I say, “Maybe you could try to tell me why. I get it now, why you would have brought up going after eighth grade. But we spent four years after that planning. Why didn’t you tell me that you changed your mind?”

I watch her face. She blinks a couple times. She swallows. She takes a breath, and says, “I keep trying to think of how to explain it—” and then a voice booms over the intercom.

Our bus has arrived.

We pick up our things and walk outside and stand in a line we probably should have been in before. By the time we board, there aren’t any seats next to each other, so Bev takes one near the front as I continue down the aisle, away from her.

There is only one car in the Starlight parking lot.

“Looks like another slow night.”

“Yeah,” Bev says.

In the lobby again, Melvin regards us from across the counter as though we are complete strangers.

“Hey,” I say. “We checked out this morning? Remember?”

His expression doesn’t change. Eventually, he lifts an eyebrow.

“Okay. And now you’re back.”

“We forgot something,” Bev says. “It’s in the room we were in last night. Two-o-six.”

Slowly, he turns on his stool and takes the key from the Peg-Board behind him.

“Or it might be in the room I was in,” I say. “One eleven.”

Bev turns to me but I pretend I don’t notice.

Melvin’s hand moves across the Peg-Board. His face is skeptical, but he hands me the key.

“Meet you back here in a few minutes,” I say to Bev, and slip out the door before she can respond.

The room has been cleaned. The carpet vacuumed, the bed made. For some reason, I expected it to be untouched since we left. Why clean a room in a motel where no one stays? You would think Melvin could give the maid a day off, but the room looks just like it did when I first walked in last night.

Still, even though the room is absent of any trace of us, I can get back some of the feeling of last night. We were right
here. Her hair smelled like oranges and smoke. She was arching her back, breathing hard, watching my face. Every time she touched me I wanted to thank her, but it was only the beginning of us. I thought I had the rest of my life to say thank you, to tell her all of the things I was thinking, so I just kissed her everywhere I had fantasized about kissing her, and on other places, too—the inside of her elbow, the bottom of her rib cage—places I hadn’t yet discovered in the thousands of times I had imagined being with her like that.

We were right here.

The comforter stretches taut over the bed. Our footsteps have vanished from the carpet. I can’t believe that we could be so impermanent. I can’t even smell the smoke from Bev’s cigarette.

I need to leave something behind here. Something that will stay. This room should be a historical landmark, the site of the beginning and end of Colby and Bev. Several minutes have passed, and I know that if I wait too long there will be a knock on the door and I’ll have to go, but I need to leave a mark. It has to be significant enough to last, but subtle enough that the maid won’t notice and wash it away.

As I’m looking around, I realize that I never noticed the print above the bed. It’s another in the family series—a faded wedding portrait. Groom in tux. Bride with pearls.

It comes off the wall easily.

I set the print on the bedspread and wipe away the dust on the wall with the sleeve of my hoodie. I take out a Sharpie
from my bag. The wall has yellowed to create a perfect rectangle where the photograph must have been hanging, unmoved, for years.

I fill the whiter space with this:
I never got to tell you how beautiful you are.

And then I return the frame to its place on the wall and go back out into the night.

We walk back to the Greyhound station in silence, each holding on to a handle of the amp to share its weight. Bev doesn’t ask me why I went to the room, and I don’t tell her what I did there. People are scattered throughout the station, waiting for our bus, but I don’t start conversations with any of them. Everyone looks tired, and I imagine that we are all on the edge of something terrible. We’re all broke and unemployed and desperate for something. This overweight, middle-aged man with sweat marks on his shirt sits near us, looking out the window. I watch his sad reflection and feel a sense of camaraderie.
Yes
, I say to him in my head.
Our lives are changing, and not for the better.

Soon the bus arrives. It smells like mothballs and it’s so hot I can hardly breathe, so as soon as we find a seat in the middle I slide in first and open the window to the cooler night air. Bev sits next to me. When I avoid looking at her face, I end up looking at her bare thighs and knees.

I turn to the men and women filing in, most of them
alone. The overweight guy doesn’t get on. He must be waiting for a different bus to take him somewhere else. When the bus pulls out I catch a last glimpse of him as we drive away. He’s sitting inside the bright station next to a Coca-Cola vending machine, looking out at us. But he actually doesn’t look sad. He looks peaceful and maybe even content, so I change the story and decide that his life isn’t changing at all. He just works really hard every day and then rides the bus home to someone who finds him funny or smart.

The bus turns onto the freeway and gains speed. Bev shifts on the seat and takes a breath. I think,
Okay: we’re going to talk about us now.

“I can tell you more about that day,” she says. “About the boots and my mom and everything.”

I turn to the window: darkness moving fast, headlights on a rough road.

I nod, but I don’t know if she’s looking at me.

“So what happened is that a couple weeks later, I saw the boots again. I’d probably seen them a million times before the science fair day but I didn’t notice them because they hadn’t meant anything to me. You know what I mean?”

I nod.

“They were Steve’s,” she says.

Steve and his wife, Joanne, are Bev’s parents’ closest friends. They’re the people Bev’s family spends Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July with. When we were kids, she called them aunt and uncle.

“They came over for dinner,” she says. “Like they did all the time, and he walked in and he picked me up and hugged me. And when he set me down I saw them.”

“You’re sure they were the same ones?”

“They’re cowboy boots and they’re
green
.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”

“And then I had to sit there all night, watching my dad with his arm around my mom’s shoulders, smiling at her, refilling her wineglass.” She gets quiet and shakes her head over and over.

“My dad really loves my mom,” she says. Her voice is so low I can barely hear what she’s saying. “I mean he really loves her.”

She says this like love is the saddest thing.

Maybe it is.

“He thinks they’re happy. He has no idea. But every time it’s her birthday and he plans what to get her, every time she kisses him or holds his hand in front of me, every time my dad hangs out with Steve, or Joanne comes over to do some home decorating bullshit with my mom, whenever they do anything at all, I feel sick. Everything about us is fake and my dad doesn’t know. My mom tells me she loves me and my stomach hurts, because we’re living this fake perfect family life. And then I’m mean to her and she doesn’t know why, but there is no way that I can tell her.”

Bev’s hands are resting on her knees, but her hands
are shaking. She’s tall and she’s wild and she doesn’t like to be taken care of, but if things were different between us I could still reach out and hold her. Before last night I’m pretty sure she would have let me. And right now, if she asked me again if I got what I wanted, I would tell her that, No, I got the opposite. This is so far away from what I wanted with her.

“It’s incredible,” she says, “how much damage everyone does to everybody else.”

I don’t really know where she’s going with this, but then she says, “I didn’t ever want to break anyone’s heart.”

I look away from her hands. I focus on keeping my own still.

“I don’t ever want to be accountable to anyone for anything again,” she says. “I will never make another pact and I will never get married and I will never let anyone think that I am theirs forever.”

She stops talking, but I don’t know what to say. This is about us but it isn’t about us. It’s not the conversation I need. I lean my face against the cold window and listen to the occasional murmur of the other passengers, the road beneath us, the almost imperceptible sound of Bev breathing.

An hour later, the bus heaves to a stop and Bev and I go lurching forward, slamming against the seats in front of us, gasping at the impact. I sit back, my hand over my face, and
look out the window. The night is so dark that I can’t see well, but then my eyes adjust.

Deer.

One after the next, they dart past the window on skinny, graceful legs. For the first time since we left San Francisco, I feel like I might cry. Not because of the deer and how fast they run, and not because my face hurts, although it does, but because of Bev. Because I’m on this bus, because I don’t know if my mom still loves my dad and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with my life. The last deer trots by and then there is stillness, and the bus groans to motion. I lean back against the seat.