Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

“Please, it’s not worth it, Chloe,” said Blake.

  Mason jumped away from the table. “I’m not going to do this,” he said. “Blake, let’s go. The girls need to cool off.”

  “Come on, tell her, Mase,” Hannah said, mocking him. “Or should I tell her?”

  “Somebody tell me,” said Chloe.

  “I’m not going to talk about it!” Mason’s blue eyes were desperate and blazing.

  “Hannah, why are you causing trouble?” Blake said. He didn’t look at Chloe, or at his brother, or at Hannah when he said it.

  Mason and Chloe, standing, faced each other.

  “Mason Haul,” Chloe said, her voice nearly failing her. “Are you refusing to answer my direct question? For the fourth time, who gave you the statue?”

  Before Chloe was Mason’s averted face, his fallen countenance, his bent head. “It was Mackenzie, Chloe,” he said at last. “I’m real sorry.”

  Chloe tried to take a breath, but her lungs had deflated. She put one palm out to stop him from saying another word, while the other calmed her anguished chest.

  “You did this deliberately,” she gasped out. “You engineered this so we’d all have to go home.”

  “No, I didn’t! That’s crazy.”

  Blake stared at Chloe with deep pity. “Look what you did, Hannah,” he said to his girlfriend. “Are you happy now?”

  “Hey, don’t look at me,” Hannah said. “I’m just the messenger.”

  “Go to hell!” Mason furiously swiped the unopened soda can off the table. It popped, hissing out oozing Coke.

  “Oh, worry not, I’m already there,” said Hannah.

  “What does that mean?” Panting and flummoxed like Chloe, Blake took Hannah by the shoulders and turned her to him. “Why are you saying these things?”

  Mason, Mason, Chloe thought. All the fun you had with girls who weren’t me. All the afternoons and nights you spent with the cheer squad at their dances and cancer walks, at their parties and charades. I’ve always been bad at charades. Perhaps that was why I was never invited.

  All those afternoons away, the mornings you couldn’t come with me to Lupe’s, the offended nights when I took clever jabs at your fan club. Your flushed face each time you came to bat and they cheered your name, Mason, Mason. Your relentless desire for postcards in every town we visited, your quest for a pen, for a stamp, for a mail box, you just had to send those postcards back home, no matter how out of the way, no matter how inconvenient. It wasn’t the postcards that were inconvenient. It was me.

  All of it, all at once, in a big O.

  The other big O. The one I never had with you.

  The O of, oh, I finally get it now. I was, finally, the last to know.

  Oh.

  Congratulations, Chloe.

  Chloe stood and condemned Mason with a look and then without saying another word to him spun toward Hannah. “You cannot be trusted,” Chloe said. Not to Mason. To Hannah! “You’re such a fraud. All you do is keep secrets. If you suspected this about him, why didn’t you tell me? Don’t you know that’s what friends do? But you wouldn’t know that, would you?”

  Hannah shrugged. Satisfaction was on her face. “I thought you knew. Everybody else knew.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Hannah!” Mason yelled. “Blake, I swear to God … shut her up. In a second, I’m going to say things I won’t be able to take back.” But it was too late. He clenched his fists. “You’re a fucking vampire. Why can’t you leave us alone? Haven’t you sucked enough blood?”

  “Oh, she definitely has,” said Chloe.

  “Mason!” Blake said. “Stop! You’re out of line.”

  “I’m out of line? Did you hear Chloe?”

  “She doesn’t answer to me. But yes, Chloe, you too.”

  “I don’t answer to you either, bro,” Mason said. “Control your girl, or somebody will have to.”

  “She’s done nothing wrong!” Blake yelled, putting his arm around Hannah, as if to protect her from them. “You control yourself or somebody will have to.”

  Chloe laughed and took a taunting half-bow in Hannah’s direction. “Well played, Hannah! Nicely done. You got Blake defending your honor now. Wow. What a scam.”

  “Ahh!” Blake pulled his angry arm off Hannah’s shoulder. “Will somebody please fucking tell me what you’re talking about.”

  How hostile, how frozen the unforgiving ground. It was a theft of the blue sky. All the lilies in the field were choked in gasoline.

  “Well, Hannah,” said Chloe, her slender empty body shaking. “Here it is. The moment I know you’ve been waiting for. Your turn for a reckoning. Do you want to tell him?” A smile balefully stretched across Chloe’s white lips. “Or should I tell him?”

  “Tell me what?” said Blake.

  “Tell him what?” Mason said quickly, sounding relieved they were off the subject of him and Mackenzie.

  Hannah fixed on Chloe. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” she said with hatred, and took two short steps away from Blake. They were all standing now, the flies fighting over the unbroken bread between them.

  “Doing what?” Blake said. “What’s Chloe doing?”

  “I’m not doing anything,” Chloe said, opening her hands. “I’m just the messenger.”

  Gasoline immolating all the lilies in the field.

  “Blake, it’s over between us,” Hannah blurted. “It’s been over between us for months. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but that’s just how it is. There is someone else. You must have suspected. I’m sorry,” she added, as if it was the last thing she meant.

  “What?” he said. He almost smiled. He thought she was joking.

  “That’s what you’re telling him?” Chloe cried. “Shame on you.”

  “You mean there’s something she isn’t telling me?” Blake said tonelessly, as if he finally understood that Hannah wasn’t joking. To steady himself, he grabbed the wooden table.

  “Holy shit, you’re a piece of work, aren’t you?” Mason said to Hannah, walking around the table to his brother’s side and placing a supportive arm around Blake. “Dude, I kept telling you she was trouble. You wouldn’t listen.”

  “How can we be over?” Blake said to Hannah. “We’re here right now. Together.”

  “He makes a good point, Hannah,” Chloe said, all pitiless bitterness. “Since it’s been over for months, you might as well go ahead and tell him the rest of it.”

  “Stop it!” Hannah cried. “Stop it, stop it! Stop it!” She slammed her palms against her ears.

  Chloe raised her eyes to Mason. “You know how sometimes there’s the rest of it?”

  Mason hanged his head. “I’m so sorry, Chloe,” he whispered.

  Gasping for air, Chloe sank down.

  Across the table Blake stood—judging her! Not his wayward girlfriend, not Mason, but Chloe! “Dying by the sword is such a bitch,” he said to her quietly.

  “Talking to the wrong person is a bitch,” Chloe retorted. “Talk to your brother. Your words are meant for him.”

  Blake faced Hannah, this time unsupported by the table, or by Mason. “Tell me the rest of it. What else is there?”

  “Nothing, Blakie. Don’t listen to her.” She reached for him.

  “You kept this a secret from me last night in bed,” Blake said, moving away from her extended hands. “And the night before. And for months and months. You went to the prom with me. Did other things with me. And to me. You’d think you might have mentioned that we were over. So I wouldn’t waste any more of my fucking time.”

  “Why?” Hannah said. “Mason didn’t mention it to Chloe. And yet they’re over.”

  “The hell with Mason and Chloe,” Blake said to Hannah, pointing to her eyes and then to his own. “Eyes on me. Tell me what else.”

  “There is nothing else! You knew it couldn’t last! This isn’t news. I was leaving. Like Chloe is leaving. We were over.”

  “Tell me what else,” he repeated. Blake wasn’t red in the face, or pan
ting. He was eerily quiet.

  Mouthing I hate you to Chloe, Hannah swallowed. She squared her shoulders and straightened her spine. “Don’t be upset, okay?” she said, quivering with a small charming smile. “But I’m having a baby.”

  Blake staggered away from Hannah. And they had thought the robbery was the worst thing that could happen to them. Silly they. The money was returned. But there was no return from this brutality.

  For a long while Blake, leaning against the table, stood mute.

  “Blake, say something,” Hannah whispered. “Please.”

  “I give up,” he said, in hoarse outrage. “I give the fuck up on you.”

  Everything was squalor. They stood in vomit and retched, the ice fishing and dangling feet forgotten, while all around them balloons were popping and little kids were chasing kites and butterflies and happy parents tossed their melting ice cream cones because it was hot hot hot.

  Why was there so much discord in Poland? All the wars started here. What was it about this country? It seemed so placid on the outside. And yet look at the havoc it has caused. It was now Poland’s fault what had happened. Poor almost blameless Poland.

  Eventually someone said, in a broken voice, what about Barcelona, as if already crying.

  “I’ll go with you to Barcelona, Chloe,” Mason said. “I promised you I would, and I will.”

  Chloe stared at his earnest face as if she didn’t know him, saw him through the kaleidoscope of cheering bases and flirting flyers, through the smiling vapid prism of the detested muscular Mackenzie, and suddenly Chloe didn’t want to see Mason’s face for another second, another breath, much less a week in her beachy naked fading ruined Barcelona dream.

  “That’s not the only thing you promised me, Mason,” Chloe said, trying hard not to cry. “That’s right, look away,” she added. “What else can you do, really? So you can’t look at me, but you’ll go to Barcelona with me?”

  He mumbled something she didn’t hear.

  She thought he said they should talk in private, away from … away from what? Away from whom? This was as private as it would ever get, with shattered Blake and bankrupt Hannah by their side in a public square filled with other people’s joy. Every frozen season of Chloe’s life had the four of them breaking fishing holes in the ice and gliding on their backs and making angels. And now there was nothing.

  She backed away from the table, her pitying eyes on Blake, her frigid eyes on Mason, her guilty, angry, conflicted eyes on Hannah, she covered her face as if to shield it from a knife assault, in tremor she raised her hands, praying, surrendering, protecting herself against them, and then turned and ran as fast as she could in her Polish sundress and strappy sandals.

  31

  The Clock in Trieste

  HER ENTRAILS ARE IN KNOTS. IT HAS BEEN MERE MINUTES IN burnished sunlight, but her whole body feels chafed, raw from exertion. She wanders, pretending to think, but she is single-mindedly, purposefully, frantically searching for Johnny. She doesn’t know what to do. She had run back to the hotel of roses and asked the clerk if anyone had left an envelope for her. They had not. Afraid to encounter her arid bunch, Chloe escapes down a side street, around the university, around, around. How does she fix this? How does she make it right? She thinks that if only she can find him, he can help her figure it out. Everything will be easier to bear if they can figure it out together.

  There is an ancient, small, windy feel to Krakow that appeals to Chloe’s heart, and if only she were better disposed to being a traveler, she might perhaps fall in love with this seventh century city of narrow streets and immense fortresses. There is sun and music everywhere on a hot summer night. Oh, to open her eyes and see, instead of running in a state of siege. Stopping, listening for the seduction of his riding-a-Harley voice, hurrying on. Where is the black dog that will make her burn, that will leave its scorch marks on her? She roams the streets in circles.

  Seconds, minutes, hours?

  If he is here, he won’t be far from where the people are. She won’t give up. She won’t give up.

  The beautiful young Krakow women are tall and in heels. They wear lots of red lipstick and silver jewelry. They don’t have tear-streaked faces. They carry designer purses not shoddy backpacks with stray lipstick of the expired Revlon variety and maybe a gummy bear.

  There is also Mason’s Eurail card, which she is holding for safe-keeping, how handy, and a hundred or so dollars Johnny had given her yesterday. Maybe more. For something to do, and to force herself to feel both less frenzied and less weary, Chloe sits down on a retaining wall and counts her money. Three beggars stop and ask her for some of it. None of them is Johnny. She has one hundred and seventy-five dollars. A Eurail card. Her passport. She wishes she had some underwear. A toothbrush. To be proactive, she looks for a drugstore to buy a toothbrush. The underwear remains a problem. But it’s after seven in the evening, and the shops are closed. Soon it will get dark. And then what?

  She may be guilty, but Mason is wrong. He is the one who broke their tacit agreement for a low-key easy beautiful union. Minimum fuss, minimum pain. That was their motto. Not anymore. She is angry with him for this most of all.

  She doesn’t want to think about how awful she acted, how upset she got, how she said things she can’t take back.

  She doesn’t want to think about how she hurt Blake. She gets angry at this, defends herself to herself, mouthing inaudible words on a street corner. She didn’t hurt him. Hannah hurt him. She was just the messenger. But why did she have to be so vindictive? Hannah would’ve gotten to the truth soon enough, wouldn’t she? Like Chloe would’ve. Like Mason would’ve. Why did they mangle each other like this?

  How does she go back to them, to the room? How does she speak to them, sleep with them?

  No, that’s a lie, what she said she felt. The broken contract is not what she finds unforgiveable. What she finds unforgiveable is that Mason would choose to step out on her with someone who wasn’t just beneath him, but beneath the amoeba floating in the lake, beneath the algae. Why would Mason drift toward the most insipid of creatures? He must hear Chloe’s contempt echoing off all the stones it took to build Krakow. How long had it been going on? She didn’t want to ask, because she was afraid to know. What if he had said two years? Two Christmases, two winters in the snow, two summers in the lake, all of his varsity career. Chloe feels all her good intentions toward Mason swirling slowly down the clogged drain of her heart.

  So what are her choices?

  She can go home. Change her flight, fly home tomorrow. Accept defeat, get ready for the rest of her life.

  She can go to Barcelona alone.

  That seems insurmountable. She has never been anywhere alone.

  She can go to Barcelona with Mason as he had offered.

  Impossible.

  She can go to Barcelona with Hannah.

  The question is, dear Chloe, would Hannah ever again go anywhere with you?

  She can go to Barcelona with Blake.

  Chloe laughs out loud when she thinks this, perched on her little stone wall. Passersby flinch and speed up. They must think she has escaped and is roaming the streets until she is picked up by the soothing people in white.

  Blake is a decent traveling companion. He is super easy. He is open to everything and, until Johnny came along, was in a fine mood from morning to night. He is funny, hungry, game and ready, and he buys her pastries and carries her shit, her bag and books and water. He doesn’t get burned in the sun, and he doesn’t cheat on her with the queen airhead of all flying bimbos. He is her friend and, alas, the only halfway palatable option to seni, rochas and empanadas in Saint Eulalia’s city is the most impossible of all.

  She has to find Johnny. That’s all there is to it. She jumps up, scaring off more passersby, and starts walking with a purpose to nowhere. She either finds him or she goes home. There is no other way. Now it’s really up to her.

  Krakow is the city of poetry. Literally. Poetry is graffitied on Krakow�
�s millennial stone walls. Chloe walks by the same street twice before she realizes she is duplicating her steps. Mark the distant city glow / With gloomy splendor red. A couplet from Sir Walter Scott. She longs to hear a different kind of canto. She will not despair. This city abounds with mystery and life. It has no whiff of disillusionment. She will not despair. She will find him.

  Krakow is a city of women in colorful clothes sitting on wood crates selling cabbages. Most are old. They sit mutely in yellow dresses and sell carrots they brought from the villages. They don’t have stalls, they perch on stools, low to the pavement, and the street musicians share the city walls with them. The old men stand nearby drinking vodka, toothlessly smiling. In the baskets between the women’s feet lie radishes and lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes, and roses by the bunch. On every street there is a blue trolley with an old woman selling what looks like huge pretzels with poppy seeds. They’re called obwarzanek. They look delicious. Chloe doesn’t want to stop.

  The drunken scent of overripe roses mixes with dill and fermented cabbage on every corner. Bigos and roses. Krakow is a phantasmagoria of glittering gold of the setting sun sparkling in the stained glass windows. Chloe is light-headed and hungry and thirsty and alone, intoxicated with a nameless fear of all things unknown and the charged possibility of all impossible things.

  She doesn’t hear him at all, yet she hears him on every corner. She is walking through the desert, and he is her mirage. The canal in the middle of Krakow carries for her his unforgettable voice, echoing it through the parapets and the stained glass windows. She swears she can hear his dramatic tenor amplified by the acoustics of the ancient city, his unbreakable voice waxing about rides and trains and daisies and girls he can’t leave behind.

  She follows a figure she thinks is him down the park slope of the castle with the dragon’s lair, because some women are sauntering and yelling into a young man’s back from a distance, inviting him to familiarize himself with their melody or perhaps with their white necks. It’s not him. It’s another man with a ponytail in a black shirt.

  The sun sets nice and late. The streetlamps switch on. It is dusk. Then it’s night. She looks for him in the lit-up darkness.