Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  Ibiza, she wrote. She didn’t even know where Ibiza was. She had read about it in one of the National Geographics Blake had bought for her from Polly in Fryeburg. Ibiza was paradise. What about you?

  Here and now is pretty good, Johnny wrote. Like I’m still in junior high on a crowded train.

  She didn’t want to show him her pleased face. She showed it to the spruce and elms flying by.

  But if not here and now, then Manitoulin Island, he continued. Check it out. It’s in the middle of nowhere surrounded by water. And it’s got Misery Bay. Who could ask for anything more.

  I’m hungry, she wrote.

  Kaunas is next. There’s a park outside the train station. We’ll have time to buy food and drink. I’ll buy beer and Coke, and you’ll buy water and Coke. We’ll get sandwiches and potato chips and cookies, and a whipped cream cake that is surely going to melt. You’ll forget your daily budget and spend all your per diem on food for the train. My survival handbook demands it. What if the train gets stuck between stations? What if the engine blows out? What if there is a mishap, an accident and we’re forced to live in the woods for days? You’ll need a cream cake then, won’t you?

  Chloe read his words, longing for a minor mishap. Then for a few minutes out of the rest of her life she would be forced to live in the woods with him without other eyes on her. Strangers’ eyes. Friends’ eyes.

  Where are you going to learn to be a legal florist? Johnny wrote. Or is it a floral lawyer?

  And just like that, back in reality, Chloe was cornered. She could either lie to him as she had been lying by omission and commission to her friends, or tell him the truth. She could trust him with the truth as he had trusted her with his guitar. Tottering on the beam between light and lies made her pen fall silent.

  Kaunas. The red domes of the Gothic castle swim by her eyes. She sees but doesn’t see, is hungry but is not, thirsty but not really. She just wants the minutes to slow down. She’ll tell him anything, confess anything, profess anything, just so Enrico Caruso, masquerading as Einstein with his eternally repeating transcendentals, figures out a way to sing a brake onto time.

  He watched her conflicted face with amusement. “You’d think I asked you about the meaning of life,” he whispered. “Chloe, you do know where you’re going to college, don’t you?”

  She didn’t want her answer to appear on irrefutable paper.

  Wait, I remembered, he wrote. Hannah said UMaine, right?

  Chloe’s pen hovered in the air.

  He took her hand and drew it to the paper. Still she refused to write it. He took her hand is what she was feeling. Squeezed it into a ball inside his palm.

  Ah, he wrote. Not UMaine?

  She leaned over to his ear, to his ponytailed head. She was so close to his stubble, she could kiss it if she moved a lyric note forward. “San Diego,” she whispered into his cheek.

  In confusion and delight, he laughed, banging one loud slap on his black velvet case.

  !!! Now I understand everything, he wrote. It’s not they who are detached from you. It’s you who is detached from them.

  That’s not true!

  Why San Diego?

  She scratched out his question.

  They gave me a full ride, she wrote. And it’s warm.

  It’s very far from Maine.

  It’s warm.

  It’s far.

  I’m not running away, she wrote, defensively. My mother approves.

  I didn’t think you were running away from your lovely mother.

  Chloe lost interest in doodling back and forth. Gripping the pen, she pressed her head to the window and wrote nothing.

  He grabbed the pen from her. Do they know?

  She didn’t reply.

  Oh my God, Chloe. No one knows? Not even Mason?

  Mason can’t keep a secret. Was Chloe going to scratch out the whole thread of this conversation? Easier to just rip out the pages of the journal and stuff them down her throat.

  You don’t think? wrote Johnny. He drew pictures of bass clefs and treble clefs over and over, as if thinking. When do you plan to tell them?

  Dunno. After Barcelona?

  Johnny shook his head in mock disapproval. Maybe not mock.

  Listen to me, he wrote after a few minutes had passed. I know you’re afraid to tell them, to tell Mason. Don’t be afraid. Tell him. It’ll be fine. You’ll see.

  How do you know?

  I know.

  How?

  I just know.

  You don’t think he’ll be upset?

  No.

  Why not?

  He won’t be upset, wrote Johnny, because he doesn’t love you.

  She sprang from her seat as if scalded, turned and faced him. Six other people getting ready to change trains were awake and grimly staring at her, about to make a scene. Johnny, hands slightly open in quiet question, sat silently, his blinking mild eyes on her. Red in the face and panting she stood without words. He raised his hands in surrender. “Don’t be mad at me,” he said. “Be mad at him. He’s the one who doesn’t love you.” She yanked her bag down, clamped her mouth shut and stood facing the door. She said nothing.

  They were off the train and in line for sandwiches at the Kaunas station when she finally spoke. “Why would you say that?” She tried not to sound upset and failed.

  “I’ll tell you when we get our food and sit down.”

  Chloe was suddenly not hungry. But they bought sandwiches and walked outside, deep into the rambling green park across the street. They found a secluded bench. “It isn’t true,” she said. She didn’t open her smoked ham and cheese baguette.

  He opened his. “So why are you so bent out of shape, then?” He ate heartily.

  “Because it isn’t true!” She had to get up again, up and around, to face him, to face him standing.

  His mouth was full as he tried to chew and swallow before he spoke. “If I say you’re a gazebo, will you also get this mad?”

  “I’m not mad. And it’s not the same. You’re … you’re casting aspersions.”

  “Not at all. Listen to me. Are you listening?”

  “No.”

  “Can you sit down?”

  “No.”

  “Mason is a nice boy,” Johnny said. “He is polite. We’ve established his good manners. Treats you with respect, blah blah. But you misunderstand his motives. He is not easygoing and indulgent of your anxieties and whims because he’s in love with you. He is indulgent because he isn’t.”

  She was still standing, stiff at attention. One should be on one’s feet when receiving news like this.

  “Just think of all the questions in your head, about him, about the way he acts. What I told you is the answer to them all. That’s how you know I’m right. It’s hardly news,” Johnny added. “It’s been in front of you all along.”

  Chloe sat down. She stopped talking to Johnny as she opened her sandwich and ate listlessly in gloomy thoughtful silence. “But he’s so good to me,” she said quietly when she was done eating. “He calls when he’s supposed to. Remembers my birthday. Holds my hand. Walks me to the door.”

  “Never oversteps his bounds?” Johnny asked. “Never!” she said triumphantly. “That’s how you know,” said Johnny.

  “Who ever loved within bounds?”

  She threw out their trash and returned to the bench. They had only a few minutes before boarding the train.

  “How many hours to Sestokai?” she asked, wishing despite the latest calumny that the train would be slow and that their compartment would have no people so she could talk alone to him, sit alone with him.

  “Just over three. Hey, wanna smoke a joint with me?”

  She was dumbfounded.

  “You’ve piffed before, right?”

  “Pfft,” she said. “Of course. Hundreds of times.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Dozens and dozens. I mean, yeah. Who hasn’t? You have some with you?”

  “Always.”

&n
bsp; She swallowed and came clean. “Maybe you didn’t hear me when I told you I was the police chief’s daughter. No one, and I mean no one, does drugs in front of me. Or even talks about drugs.”

  “So the answer is no?”

  “Police and chief and daughter. The answer is no.”

  “Okay, don’t tell your dad. So do you want to smoke with me or not?”

  She watched as he opened a zip-lock gallon bag—inside which was another gallon bag, inside which was another gallon bag—and pulled out and unrolled a red jewelry roll. Inside were several (many?) pre-made joints of varying thickness. He pulled out a thin one, and flicked on his lighter. “Ready?”

  She had smoked once, a couple of years back, when she was sixteen. Taylor’s friends were going on about it, and Chloe didn’t want to be even more the nerd. She took a puff, nothing happened, she took another, felt light-headed, said that’s enough, and that was that. But she hadn’t told Johnny the complete truth.

  “It’s not about my dad, really,” she said, watching him take long drags on the joint. Though it was true, no one brought out drugs in front of her. “You want to know why I don’t?”

  “Sure.” He took a deep inhale, closed his eyes, and waited. To hear her, to exhale.

  “Because I’m afraid of death,” she said.

  He laughed. “It’s pot, not heroin.”

  “All the same,” she said. “That’s why I don’t. That basketball player who took one hit of cocaine, had a heart attack and died? That will be me.”

  “What basketball player? One hit of coke and death? Poor asshole. Clearly he was doing it wrong.”

  At sixteen, it hadn’t been a great and glorious high for Chloe. But Johnny was smoking deliciously now, his eyes rapturously closed, his head back, his wavy ponytail swinging. He was tantalizing. She reached for the joint. “Give it here,” she said with a small resigned sigh. Maybe grass was better now, greener, she thought as she put it in her mouth. And maybe, just maybe—she closed her eyes and took one toke and another, holding the joint in her mouth for a moment and passing it back to him—this would be the closest she’d ever get to touching his great and glorious mouth.

  She thought she heard him quoting the manual about survival, and he was—about clear plastic bags layered inside one another, hiding the smell of all pertinent vegetation. “Because”—and here he laughed—“said vegetation has such a strong and recognizable scent, that sometimes nosy and stupid police officers in foreign countries smell it, search you, find it, and then make all kinds of trouble for you, all because you carried a little vegetation for strictly leisurely use.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Oh, some juvy pissing annoying trouble. All kinds of hassle for absolutely fucking nothing. Never mind, it’s all over with now.”

  Chloe dimly remembered Reverend Kazmir talking about the new and improved Latvian drug laws. Had some bad things happened to Johnny?

  The joint was almost done, the train was leaving in ten minutes. “I know what you’re thinking,” Johnny said. “That this amount I got on me seems like more than I might carry under normal circumstances for personal use, but that’s only because I’m traveling from country to country and don’t want to be stuck scrounging to acquire some ganja, snow or mud from sources unknown after being on trains for a thousand kilometers, do you know what I mean?”

  Here was the thing. When that sentence began, Chloe knew what he meant. But by the time it ended, she no longer had any idea. He started swimming in front of her eyes, doing the backstroke, and she was swimming in circles in front of his circles. Her feet no longer felt on solid ground, and the feet weren’t so solid either.

  He said something like we have to go and she said something like where. He was pulling her up except she was swaying. He said they had to run or they would miss it, and she laughed so hard because she couldn’t run, but also because, miss what?

  She was pulled by him in a zigzag across the street to a big building and then he left her wandering the concourse and ran off. She wondered how he could be running when she couldn’t even drift in a circle. He came back, said, come on, they’re holding the train, but hurry, and try to look normal. Or they’ll have us arrested. You don’t want that, do you? God knows, I can’t have that. So please, Chloe. Just walk straight, and blink like a normal person. She tried to say I am walking straight, but the words were meandering and she couldn’t get them out.

  He got her inside the train, set her down by the window, sat next to her, but too close. Not because she didn’t want him close but because she was spinning and needed the space to spin freely. As the train gathered speed, she too gathered spinning speed, and remembered all too clearly why she had smoked only once and never again. It was because of this. She couldn’t sit up, stand up, talk. She couldn’t understand what Johnny was saying. All that kept going round and round inside as she went round and round outside was, please let this end, please let this end, please let this end, and then somewhere deeper still, not spinning, not moving and not fading was the raw regret that this is what she had instead of what she wanted, which was to be present for every second of the dance in the garden with him after vespers. What she got was nothing.

  “CAUTION: Do not use poisonous vegetation,” the book had clearly said, his manual for living. Johnny had all the survival techniques down. He used all his senses. He remembered where he was. He vanquished fear. He improvised. He acted like a native, lived by his wits, knew basic skills. He valued living.

  He did value living, right? He wasn’t dying while he was living, was he?

  Loud music on the train from down the corridor. Raucous laughter. The fermented yeasty smell of beer. Then fighting. She hears but doesn’t see. Every time she pries open her eyes she is spinning spinning, her head bobbing.

  Yet his stubborn arm is around her.

  She wishes she were more present in the moment in which his long tattooed arm cradles her. But here’s the conundrum, and she understands it, even as she rolls in the air, and he tries to weigh her down. Just with his hand, not his body. For shame. The conundrum is this. If she weren’t spinning out of orbit—nauseated, dizzy, unable to sit straight or open her eyes—his pale copper arm wouldn’t be wrapped around her lapis lazuli shoulder. He touches her because she is not present enough to sit without being untouched. She is absent from her body. If her soul and body are in one place, his hands are to himself. If she is here, he is far away.

  Yet the way she is now, she cannot feel as a girl does, cannot react as a girl does. So what good is it? She can’t talk to him, or smile, or look out the window or make jokes. She can’t laugh. Her rational controllable self is back on the bench in Kaunas, taking the joint from his hands. That was the last moment her conscious Chloe acted from her Chloe free will. When her fingers touched his as he passed her the demon weed on a summer day, and she wanted him to think she was Miss Cool, not a shadow drip full of failings.

  She doesn’t know how long she lingers in limbo between sleep and light. She is dimly aware of the noises down the corridor getting louder. Dimly aware of his angly black-clad shoulder pressing into her cheek. All she wants is to be herself again.

  To make matters more unpleasant, he keeps trying to engage her in conversation, just like before Kaunas. Their compartment is empty. They could be having the most breathtaking discussion. They could be talking about feelings. Chloe could finally tell him what she has been unable to articulate, about the boxes her parents had built to hide little Jimmy from themselves and from her, containers like coffins the size of Lang and big Jimmy. Little Jimmy was on the outside and they were on the inside. It took a long while for them to climb out. They chipped and chipped away, whittling the boxes down to the size of little Jimmy. Now they carry the boxes with them wherever they go. Is that what you wanted to know? How you do it? That is how you do it. You either put yourself in a crate or your grief in a crate. And then you nail it shut.

  Chloe could tell Johnny about Hannah and her
desire to be excited, to be loved. She could tell him why he’s wrong about Mason, why he’s right about Mason, and she could tell him about Blake and the moment years ago on a picnic bench after Meat Loaf’s paradise. She could tell him so many things. They could discuss smart things, too, like vector graphics and pi’s senseless procession to infinity. Instead he keeps asking if she wants a drink, a potato chip, a piece of gum, and even that’s too intellectual a conversation because her mouth won’t cooperate with her brain. It’s true what they say. God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.

  She opens her eyes. She is lying across three seats. He is opposite her, reading his survival manual. What does it say about stoned girls spread out across your bench? He helps her up. He seems completely normal, as before. She feels slightly better, though woozy and thirsty. As if he knows this, he gives her a drink. Wow, he says. You are something else. She doesn’t think he means it as a compliment. She sits like a lump for a few minutes, three or forty, she can’t tell. He says soon they’ll be in Sestokai. How long was I out, she says. More than two hours, he replies. Possibly three. Oh the black regret! Three hours. Gone. She won’t have another chance to be on the train alone with him. She won’t have another chance to sit close to him. This was it. And she wasted it, literally. She found the longed-for diamond hours taped to the lid of the communal toilet, a hot bounty of time, a gift of grace, and flushed them down the bowl, and wasn’t even cognizant enough to watch them swirl.

  By the time they got off in Sestokai, she was famished. She bought herself another parma ham and cheese sandwich and devoured it on a lonely bench in a small dim park nearby. It was after seven in the evening, sun still out, but shadows long.

  “Sorry I’m such a baby,” she said.

  “It’s my fault. I never should’ve offered. I’m the one who’s sorry.”

  “I took it from you.”

  “I didn’t know you’d react like that. I won’t do it again. I was worried for a minute. But then you went to sleep. I hoped after you woke up, you’d be better.”

  “I am better. Not a hundred percent.”