“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 semi-precious 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?”
“Nah.”
“I have a Eurail too, but it’s not valid in Lithuania.”
“I don’t have a Eurail.”
He didn’t offer to show her what he had, and she didn’t press further, maybe because she was all out of breath as they rushed down the long steep steps to the platform. He carried her suitcase and his duffel.
“What would I do if you weren’t with me?” she said.
“My guess,” Johnny said, “is that you would walk up to any man at this station and say, dear sir, could you help me, and they would carry your suitcase and possibly you too down the stairs. Oh, okay, now you’re blushing.”
“No,” she said, averting her face. “Do you want me to carry your guitar?” To change the subject.
“Guitar’s on my back, I’m fine. Glad I got a case. It was getting even more beat up than it already is.”
It did look old and beat up. But the strings were new. Last night he had spent a long time sitting by Otto in the backyard restringing it in the near dark.
“Was it a present, like the boots?”
“Guess so,” he said, as he gave her his hand to help her up into the train. “It was my dad’s. He no longer played. So when he saw I had an interest, he gave it to me.”
“Your dad must be pleased that you love his guitar so much, no?” she said, as they found two seats in an empty compartment that quickly and irritatingly acquired four more people before the train left the station. How were they going to banter with four strangers listening? Now it would have to be self-conscious banter.
“I don’t think he’s pleased with me in general,” Johnny said. “I’m not sure if he cares I have his guitar.”
They settled in, got as comfortable as they could. A young couple was talking intimately across the aisle. A man traveling by himself was trying to fall asleep, though it was barely noon. On the seat one over from Johnny a middle-aged woman took out her knitting. Another woman opened the door and panted in. She was very large and had with her a cell phone and a pet carrier. Inside the carrier a small dog was yapping. The woman and her dog squeezed in next to Johnny. He leaned toward Chloe’s ear, inhaling. “What is it with me and large women?” he whispered. She nearly laughed out loud.
“Next leg I get the window seat,” he said.
“No way. Ladies get window seats. And what leg would that be? I thought this train takes us to Warsaw?”
“We have two train changes. One in Kaunas in a few hours, and one in Sestokai on the border a few hours after that.”
“How long does the entire trip take?”
“Eleven with luck.”
Eleven hours! Lucky indeed. The agitated excitement Chloe felt was similar to when she was three years old and her dad was teaching her how to swim. One afternoon he dropped her into the lake from the floating dock. She squealed and flailed, trying not to swallow (too much) water, trying to stay afloat. That’s what she felt like now. Squealing and flailing her arms.
“Hey, whatcha thinking about?” he said, nudging her leg, watching whatever melodrama was playing out on her face.
“Nothing.” She wanted to make something up, but couldn’t think of a lie fast enough. She tried the truth. “I was thinking of my earliest memory.” She told him what it was. He listened.
“Why were you thinking of that? Do you want to go swimming? That’ll be hard to do in Poland. Hostels don’t usually have swimming pools.”
“I’ll wait till Barcelona,” she said. “Your turn. Tell me your earliest memory.”
“All right.” He scratched his tattooed forearms. “I was probably younger than three,” he said. He smelled of smoke. He kept shifting his long legs to get comfortable. “I was crawling in the grass to catch a Gila monster.”
“What?”
“You know, a large, striped, poisonous lizard.”
“I know what a Gila monster is, thank you. I’m just wondering why you would do this.”
“Ah. Well, like I said, I was two. Plus it was striped. It looked like a little banded crocodile. It wasn’t moving at all. That morning I had overheard my sister saying it had the most awful breath. She said it didn’t have a butthole and it pooped out of its mouth. My other sister said that was how it killed its prey. By breathing on it. Well, any boy would have to see that for himself, don’t you agree?”
“Um, actually, the opposite of agree,” said Chloe. “But why were you crawling?”
“Like a soldier after an enemy,” said Johnny. “I got so close! Then suddenly I hear what sounds like twenty people screaming behind me, and I turn and see my whole family—parents, sisters, grandparents, uncles—yelling and sprinting.”
“What were they yelling?”
“Something dumb like no. But real loud and annoying. So before they caught me, I stood up and ran as quick as I could toward the Gila monster. I really wanted to smell its breath.”
Chloe waited, her own hopefully-not-fetid breath paused in her throat. “And? Did they catch you?”
“They did,” he said cheerfully. “But only after I fell on top of the lizard.” He laughed. “Hugged it with my body, wrestled with it, and tried to prop open its jaws with my fingers. It and I must have weighed about the same at that point. Maybe thirty-five pounds. We were evenly matched.”
Chloe’s hand was to her mouth. There went all her ambition to react like a grown up. “Did you? Open its jaws?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Beck and Rach were right. Its breath really was putrid.”
“Dear God, Johnny. You opened its mouth and it didn’t bite you?”
“Oh, it bit me, all right,” he said, his large black eyes dancing. “It was awesome.”
Chloe had no words.
“Someone threw me in the pool, maybe my grandpa, because he knew that submerging the attacking lizard in water is the only way to break free of its gri
p. So in a way my story and your story are the same. Both are about learning how to swim.”
“See, no, I don’t think our stories are the same.”
“Just look at the similarities.”
“Did it hurt?”
“I don’t remember. My sisters, because they never stop mocking me, tell me I cried like a baby.”
The train finally took off.
She tried asking him some more questions. Where was he born? Where was he raised? Did he have a big family?
But Johnny wasn’t interested in talking about himself anymore. “I’m sad I didn’t get to show you Vilnius,” he said. “I wish we had a day here. It’s not enough, but it would’ve been better than what we had. Which was nothing.”
“How do you know anything about Vilnius?”
“Your friend Blake knows about Vilnius,” said Johnny. “And I assume he’s never been here?”
“Yes, but he’s crazy,” said Chloe. “He spent all of July reading about every single place we might visit along the route to Barcelona.” He also read up on stuff that had nothing to do with Europe. Such as, what a vernal pool was (an ephemeral pool of water that provides a brief habitat for beautiful flowers). And the number of the cabin at Chateau Marmont where John Belushi died of a drug overdose (#3). Blake said vernal pools were important, and also it was important to know where a person had died.
“He is very well read,” Johnny said. Mocking? Serious?
How amusing Blake would have found the description of himself as well read, if only he didn’t detest Johnny. Chloe didn’t comment, nor did she volunteer information about Blake’s researching Eastern Europe to write his book to win the money to buy a truck to start his junk-hauling business with Mason. Hauls R Us. Haul-away Brothers. Halo Inc. That’s what Lupe had said a few weeks ago when Chloe visited last. The boy has a halo. Does your friend Hannah have a halo detector, the old woman had asked Chloe.
“What’s so great about Vilnius?” Chloe said instead.
They had nothing but time, so Johnny told her. Quietly he told her all the things he knew about Vilnius. Which turned out to be a lot.
“How do you know all this, Johnny?”
He shrugged. “How do I know anything about anything? I just know.”
“But how?”
There was a small sigh, as if he didn’t want to lie to her, or lie to a direct question, or perhaps lie to a direct question from her. “My father brought me here with him, to the Baltic states. Two years ago, when I first came to Europe, I came with him. We went to visit my mother first. And then he thought I might like to see thousands of miles of battlefields. That’s really all it is to him. The front during the war.”
“Oh, so he also thinks there is only one war,” Chloe said lightly.
“No. He thinks there’s also Vietnam.”
“Did he take you there, too?” She chuckled.
“Yup. Summer right before I turned sixteen, we went.”
“Really?” She studied him with interest, fascination, as if he were a rare rhesus monkey on loan from a Nepalese zoo. “Was your dad in Vietnam?”
“He thought it would be good for me to get away,” Johnny went on. “It was just after all the stupid trouble with Performing Arts. I thought I was being punished. I said to him, haven’t I been punished enough? I told him he deliberately wanted to take me away from my friends, from the band I was trying to start. And he agreed! He said yes he was. As you can imagine, I wasn’t the best companion.”
“Well, you were sixteen.” Chloe couldn’t imagine going anywhere alone with her mother when she was sixteen. Genital herpes was preferable to hanging with your ’rents at that age.
He smiled. “I think he finally learned. He stopped wanting to take me places.”
“Except for Liepaja.”
Johnny shrugged. “That was a different thing. He … I was … never mind.”
She never minded, but wished he would tell her. “Your mom will be happy to see you, yes?”
“Yes,” he agreed. “She’s been waiting a long time for me to come visit. This will be only my third time visiting her in Tarcento. I keep telling her it’s not exactly near anything or on the way to anything, but her feelings are still hurt. I’ll spend a few days with her before I fly back.”
Chloe wanted to say his mother was probably right. Two years on the same continent and you only visit your mother twice? Not very good.
“I’ve been busy,” Johnny said, as if she needed an explanation, as if Chloe was the one he didn’t come to see. “I had to make my own way. I had no money. Dad wasn’t giving me a penny.”
“Except the guitar,” Chloe said. “A vintage Gibson Hummingbird, no less. And the Bluebird microphone. Oh, and the Lucchese boots.”
“Okay, smartass, I told you the boots were from my grandmother.”
“Ah.”
“And it’s not like cash to eat, sleep, to live. I can sell my stuff, but then I won’t be able to make any money at all. Right now I’m microphone rich but cash poor.” He wasn’t offended. He smiled.
“Winters here must be hard for making money. Playing music. Giving tours.”
“Last winter it didn’t matter,” he said in a clipped, evasive tone. He didn’t explain why it didn’t matter, when most of your work was outside in the blizzards. “My first winter in Europe I spent down in southern Italy. Naples, Sicily. And Spain. That was better.”
“Did you stay in hostels?” Seek and ye shall find.
“Or with friends. I met lots of dudes along the way, musicians, tour guides, others. I’m tight with one or two restaurant owners. They feed me when I’m in town.”
“In Barcelona?”
He moved slightly away. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Chloe, but Barcelona is overrated. You’ll see. It’s packed, stifling hot, expensive, and dangerous. You have to be on constant alert for thieves. The beaches aren’t great.”
“In Barcelona?” She tried not to sound naïve and open-mouthed. She tried hard to grow up between his comment and her question.
“Not great at all. Built as an afterthought for the Olympics. And now slammed with people. No place to put down a blanket. You’ll see.”
She turned her gaze away. Barcelona was her dream, why was he raining on it? She looked for the hill with the Three Crosses he had told her about. Instead there was a banjo player by the side of the road, near the train tracks, serenading the passing train. She waved to the banjo player, and when she turned her head, Johnny was watching her fondly, corners of his mouth slightly up, his almond eyes soft. “You like the banjo player, Chloe?”
“I admire his resolve,” she replied. The train was rattly, the compartment smelly. Maybe they should have invested in first class travel. Someone could come, serve them. Everything would be scented with perfume, and the people would be better dressed and talk less loudly on the phone. The woman next to Johnny, with the yapping terrier, was trying to outbark the dog and succeeding. The knitting woman and the exhausted man were grousing at her. Chloe didn’t have to understand them to know what they were saying.
As if he could read the distaste on her face, Johnny smiled. “Wait till we get on a Polish train. What a treat that’ll be for you.”
Chloe sighed. “Do you think my grandmother knew this when she made me come here?”
He shrugged. “Last time she was on a train, she was probably in a freight car meant for fifty people but carrying two hundred standing in their own filth on the way from a destroyed ghetto to a Nazi work prison. I don’t know if she was thinking about your comfort.”
Chastened, Chloe steered the conversation away from Moody and back to Johnny. Under the white noise of the loud Lithuanian in the tiny compartment, they tried to converse. He told her about his family. Lots of cousins and uncles. They lived all over. Virginia, California, Georgia, New York. She told him about her family. She had eight cousins on her father’s side. Half of them lived in Fryeburg. She didn’t see her mother’s family much. As in at all. No, she
had never been to North Dakota. A few times, her mother’s mother had come to Maine to visit. Last time was for little Jimmy’s funeral. Then she died. Chloe could tell Johnny wanted to ask about little Jimmy, but there were too many people listening. He didn’t and she felt relieved. She really didn’t like talking about it.
He told her about his friends. Lots of acquaintances but few close friends. The closest friends he had were Richie and Mel with whom he had a band for five minutes and then they fell out over nothing, Johnny couldn’t even remember what. Chloe didn’t have to tell him about her friends. He knew. But she told him about some of her other friends, about Taylor and Madison and Regan and Megan, and also about the cheer squad who thought they were her friends, but whom she did not care for, especially that Mackenzie. This for some reason amused Johnny no end, and they spent way too long on slutty Mackenzie, until suddenly the fat woman with the dog stood up and started shouting at the knitting woman. The woman grabbed her animal cage, her cell phone and stomped off through the sliding door down the corridor. A new woman immediately appeared in her place, a tiny quiet bird. Now Johnny and Chloe were the only ones talking. Everyone could hear them. Chloe didn’t like that. Almost everyone spoke some English around here.
Johnny didn’t care. He kept asking her about Hannah and Mason and Blake, asking and asking.
“Johnny, what am I not telling you? Are you dancing around your actual question? What do you want to know?”
He wanted to know why they had paired up the way they did.
“That’s just silly. Can you picture Mason and Hannah together?”
“Why not?” he said. “The varsity star ballplayer and the model.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s not how it was, okay?”
“So how was it?”
“Not like that.” Now she was the one who was clipped and evasive.
He asked how she and Mason had started up. It sounded ridiculous when he put it that way. Started up. Like a car. “I don’t remember,” Chloe said. “We were at a party. And then went bowling. Or roller blading.”
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