Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  “Know what?” he said. “How young women thank me for car rides?” He raised his eyebrows. “Absolutely.”

  “Blake!”

  “Mom,” Chloe said to her mother, “is it true what Blake told me? He eats dinner here once a week?”

  “Oh, that boy likes to exaggerate,” said Lang. “He comes by once in a while …”

  “He said every week, Mom.”

  Her mother demurred. Her father, already sitting at the dinner table, called Chloe over to his side. “You don’t want us to feed him, Chloe-bear?” Jimmy asked, kissing his daughter’s temple. “How was your day with him?”

  “Fine, but—why does he do that? Why do you do that?”

  “What, eat?”

  “Why don’t you invite Hannah or Mason or Taylor over for dinner?”

  “For your information,” Jimmy said, “your mother would love to have more of your friends over. But Mason is married and busy, and Hannah is pregnant with twins and planning yet another wedding. We’re hoping this one takes.”

  “Go wash your hands,” Lang said, opening the back door. “Ray, dinner!”

  The four of them sat down, blessed their food, broke bread.

  “Geez, Mom. What do you talk about?”

  “When?”

  “At dinner! With Blake!”

  “Don’t shout, girl,” Jimmy said. “Nobody’s deaf.”

  “Nothing much,” Lang said, cutting up Ray’s steak. “This. That. He’s quite impressed by the deep coral petals of your roses.”

  “That’s not creepy at all, Mom. Why do you talk to him about my schedule at SDU?”

  “He asks. What am I supposed to do, lie?” Lang glanced at Jimmy. “Why is she being so ornery about this?”

  “Who knows, sweet potato. Pass the salt.”

  “Because it’s weird, Mom. It’s supremely weird. How would Burt and Janice feel if I went over there for dinner?”

  “Oh, you absolutely should!” Lang exclaimed. “I mean, Janice is not the best cook, you might want to eat a bite here first, but they love you. They’re always asking how you are.”

  “And you tell them.”

  “Why shouldn’t we tell them about our daughter double majoring at a private university,” Jimmy said, “possibly heading to Harvard Law School, working two jobs? We can’t be proud?”

  “Yes, but Mom also tells him about my karate courses and my voice classes.”

  “I don’t tell him!” Lang was indignant. “He saw it himself on your class schedule.”

  “Ahhh!”

  The Armchair Detective

  “What are you doing?” her mother asked later that night, later that week, later that month. “What are you looking up with such zeal?”

  “Nothing.”

  During the year, to keep two jobs, two majors, twenty-one special dispensation credits and a summa cum laude average, Chloe’s searching was by necessity limited. But in the summer, she came home, unpacked, grabbed a Coke from the fridge, and from her reclining La-Z-Boy explored Google’s oceanic depths, searching for one lost boy.

  Her mother came back with a piece of upside-down pineapple cake, a fruit salad, cheese and crackers. “You know it’s a beautiful day out, right?”

  “I know. Taylor’s coming by in a little while. What are you worried about? Where’s Ray?”

  “Dad took him to work. Remember this morning he asked if you wanted to come too?”

  “I was sleeping, so no.”

  “Because you were up all night googling.”

  “Mom, please.”

  “Chloe Lin Divine, your father and I have discussed it, and we would like for you to be home less. Curfew is sunrise. Can you do that for us? Dad’s been leaving his cans of beer right in the fridge, hoping you’ll pinch three or four. You’re almost twenty-one. You’re allowed to go a little crazy.”

  “Why would I need to steal Dad’s beer, Mom? Blake’s already twenty-one. He can get me all the beer I need.”

  “How much beer do you need, sunshine?”

  “None.”

  “You see, that’s the problem, right there.”

  A lot of dead ends on a rural afternoon.

  In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida

  Blake knocked on her door crazy early one July morning. Even Jimmy hadn’t gone to work yet. She heard them exchanging manly pleasantries below, heard her father leave. Blake didn’t leave.

  “Chloe, it’s Blake,” her mother called up into the attic.

  “Who?”

  Oh, nice, she heard Blake say.

  She had gone to sleep at three, having been online until all hours, consumed with the cold molecules of the binary universe. All things are numbers. 1,0,1,0,1,0. He is either here, or he’s not here. Those are the options. Here. Not here. 1. 0.

  “What’s wrong?” Chloe said, stumbling downstairs in boxer shorts and tank, meeting him by the screen door standing all big in jeans and work boots, ready for the day. His fitted green T-shirt had a picture of yellow Tweety Bird on it.

  “Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  “Don’t pretend. We agreed yesterday we were going on the Cog Railway.”

  “We did what?”

  “You said you couldn’t believe you’d lived here your whole life and never been, and reminisced about how the four of us once tried to go, but missed the turn and went all the way to Berlin around the mountain. Do you remember? How we missed the train?”

  She rubbed her eyes, tried to look alive. She remembered how they had missed the train.

  “Hurry up if you want breakfast.”

  “You didn’t say you were going to take me today!”

  “Yes, I said how about tomorrow.”

  “And what did I do?”

  “Well, you laughed, as if you thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. So hop to it, rabbit.”

  “You don’t think we’ve been on enough trains?”

  Blake paused, blinked at her cheerfully. “Listen, Chloe-bear. I’m going to take you for a ride on a long red train, all the way up the tallest mountain in the Appalachian range. It leaves at ten. Hurry up.”

  Chloe looked helplessly at her mother, but she would find no quarter there. Lang was getting the cooler ready! With drinks and potato chips, which Chloe didn’t realize needed to be chilled, but whatever. She was also making sandwiches, and filling plastic bags with carrots and chocolate-chip cookies.

  “Mom, are Blake and I heading into the Alaskan wilderness? Stop it. For God’s sake.”

  “You’ll get hungry. And this way you don’t have to spend Blake’s hard-earned money. You don’t have any of your own. You’re jobless.”

  Chloe opened her hands in barely awake befuddlement.

  “Chloe Divine, don’t make the poor boy wait any longer than necessary,” Lang said. “Go get dressed, young lady. But not overdressed. It’s going to be hot today. Dress like Blake. Honey, would you like some coffee while you wait for her? I made it fresh.”

  “Yes, thank you, Mrs. Devine.”

  Twenty minutes later Lang and Ray were at the door, waving goodbye. “Don’t hurry back! Stay out as long as you like! We’re having leftovers for dinner.”

  “Leftovers?” Chloe muttered. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard my mother use that word in a sentence before.”

  They raced to the mountains. They made it in time for the ten o’clock, just. The red train was half-full. Chloe was hungry, hungry and resentful that her mother was as usual right about the food. As she sat next to Blake, eating her mother’s lovingly prepared ham and cheese sandwiches, she remembered Johnny saying to her, you’re so lucky, Chloe, so lucky that someone follows you to the end of the road to make sure you’re okay. He had said it to her on the train to Tarcento. But at the pensione, Ingrid had mentioned that she came to Italy only to be close to Johnny in case he needed her, and Johnny’s father had come to Kurosta, to Treblinka, to Trieste, and Chloe herself saw a man waiting by the gate of the plane that took him away, and she wondered if Johnny perh
aps had been lucky himself that he had someone to follow him to the end of the road to make sure he was okay.

  Was he okay?

  Would she ever know?

  Would he ever come for her down the dirt road, with a rifle on his shoulder and a guitar on his back, in officer’s duds, a beret on his head, whistling a tune through the pines, as he promised?

  “Chloe, why are you crying? Is it the sandwich?”

  She swiped the tears from her eyes. The train chugged slowly uphill, the mountain full of green, the view astonishing, the day clear and sunny.

  “Blake, did you mean it,” she asked, “when you said that you should’ve listened to Lupe and never gone to Europe?”

  He opened his hands. “You’re crying now because of something I said a month ago?”

  She confessed she didn’t know why she was crying.

  And Blake, who used to sing—before Europe—placidly started humming something catchy and vaguely familiar. She listened to him, her head turned to the mountains. There was a place in Southern California, down San Diego way, where the dudes played guitar and sang all night in some dark and low café.

  She wanted to tell him it wasn’t like that, that she spent her days in San Diego in flannel pajamas on Moonlight Beach, being where she dreamed she’d be but being only half a Chloe, living only half a life.

  Blake’s steady comforting voice was making big talk masked as small talk. Was there was someone special out west? No, no one special, she assured him. She now knew the answer to a question she never wanted to ask. Nothing in her ordinary life ever did compare to Johnny Rainbow.

  She kept herself busy in the relentless sunshine, work, school, parties on the weekend, study circles, boys who followed her around. Sometimes she thought she was forgetting and grew all proud of herself, drinking forbidden beer and staying up all night, until one boy at the end of sophomore year said as he was leaving, you keep wanting from me what I don’t have, like you think I’m somebody else. This set her back the entire junior run. And now, here they were.

  “But there is someone?”

  She told Blake she went out a few times with two surfers and a double-major geek like herself, and Blake said, “What, all three at the same time?”

  She laughed despite herself.

  “And?”

  “And what?” She didn’t want to tell him what she found out the hard way: that surfer dudes had the most beautiful bodies but were the worst lovers, as if external beauty precluded them from being anything but horizontal monuments, like statues or chocolate ice cream. And the double major’s modus vivendi was memorizing the names of the stars at the end of his telescope. Omitting the surfers, Chloe told Blake about the philosophic astronomer, who had rhapsodized to her about ontological relativity.

  “About what?”

  “Ontological relativity,” she repeated. “The understanding that nothing can be separated from language, which is symbolic. So there is no actual way of knowing the meaning of any concrete thing, because every concrete thing, like stars and the universe—”

  “Stars aren’t objective? The universe isn’t concrete?”

  “Yes, let me—”

  “And friendship?”

  “No, not concrete. But to finish, since everything is understood only by using language, which is a symbol—”

  “I don’t agree,” Blake said. “Not everything is understood by using language. Sometimes nothing is understood by using language. And other times nothing is understood by using anything at all. Nothing is understood.”

  She tried not to sigh. “You’re just proving Felix’s point.”

  “His name is Felix, and he’s seducing you with ontological relativity? Doofus. No, I’m proving the opposite point. Some things are understood without any language at all. And some things are not understood despite the most advanced language skills.”

  “Okay, but then, as Felix said, it’s all subjective, all relative, and there is no way to actually know anything about anything.”

  “Hmm,” Blake said. “The dude is taking a university course on this?”

  “Try a whole major.”

  “That doesn’t sound to you like a waste of his parents’ money? He should read a book, available for free at his local library, about the ghost in the machine.”

  Chloe studied Blake with surprise and amusement. The ghost was the soul, the machine the body. Was there separation between the two, or wasn’t there? Two millennia of philosophers argued this point. And poets. Love’s mysteries in souls do grow. But yet the body is his book.

  “What do you possibly know about the ghost in the machine?”

  “I’m a published writer now,” he replied loftily. “I’m paid to know all kinds of things.”

  That was so endearing. Impulsively leaning over, she kissed his stubbly cheek. “You are so funny,” she said.

  When the train stopped and they alighted, they found the mesa of the mountain peak disappointingly crowded with other people. Tourists drove their cars to the top of the mountain and parked in a large paved lot. It wasn’t as transformative as Chloe had hoped. They could’ve been on the ugly concrete of an outlet mall. It was like driving cars on a virgin beach. She and Blake carried their cooler to a remote bench, set up a picnic, and stared out beyond into the blue mist vistas. They sat for an hour.

  “How does the dude even know he’s alive,” Blake asked, “if he doesn’t know the meaning of anything? What does it even mean to be alive?”

  Chloe didn’t know. Once she was alive.

  She felt pretty alive at the moment, sitting with Blake on the highest Appalachian peak, drinking Coke and eating Lang’s ham sandwiches.

  “What were you humming earlier?” she asked him as they headed back. “It was nice.”

  He shrugged and said he didn’t know the meanings of all ontological humming symbols, but possibly the humming could be interpreted to mean “Rosalita.”

  “‘Rosalita’? Are you flipping kidding me?” That was Taylor, floating in the lake. They had been drifting for two hours, Chloe in a red ring and Taylor in a blue one, kicking up the water, kicking away the fish. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t I tell you what?”

  “Honey, have you heard the chorus of ‘Rosalita’?”

  “No, but so what? Stop reading into stupid things. He didn’t even know what he was humming. It could’ve been ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ for all he cared.”

  Taylor laughed and dived under her tube. “Girl, you are the squarest chick in this county. Possibly in two adjacent states. What’s wrong with you? Do you even know what ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ means?”

  “No. And I don’t want to.”

  “I didn’t think so. You should be so lucky if that delicious dude sang you that song—”

  Chloe cut her off. She knew all about the Iron Butterfly gypsy tune. “He wasn’t singing to me, I told you. He was humming to himself.”

  “Swell difference. Well, in ‘Rosalita’ he sings that you are his stone desire.”

  “Stop! Why can’t someone just hum, non-ontologically? Why does it have to mean things?”

  “He just wants to be your lover, baby.”

  “Which song is that or are you making unsupported observations?”

  “Correct,” said Taylor. “Blind friend, have you seen how yummy he is, how jacked? The other day when they were at our house working on a transmission, I overheard him telling my Joey that his favorite tool was the demolition hammer. I nearly came right then and there.”

  “Taylor!”

  “Chloe, Fiona still calls me up bawling three times a week. That boy’s got game. Swear to me on your boobs, you haven’t once thought of him using the demolition hammer on you—”

  “Taylor, I swear on all things holy, if you say one more word …”

  Blake calling to the girls from his dock. Hey, what are you two giggling about? Everyone on the lake can hear you.

  God, Chloe hoped not. The girls giggled all the mor
e.

  Chloe did only one actual thing in July. She turned twenty-one. The rest of the time she slept, ate, swam, played with Ray, floated, bowled, fished, drank Blake’s beer, tailgated off Blake’s truck, visited Hannah, and occasionally opened a celebrity magazine. She wanted to be and not to think, and most of the time she succeeded, except at night.

  At night she tried to convince herself that it was all for the best. Sometimes she tried to hypnotize herself into believing it was better he didn’t come looking for her, better she didn’t find him.

  That way she was never disillusioned.

  Or disappointed, or bored.

  There wasn’t any bickering.

  (Or Christmas.)

  No shopping in crowded malls, waiting for the car to be brought around, being hot in your parka, knowing as soon as you got outside you would freeze.

  No getting fuel in the rain, no flat tires.

  His hands never smelled of gasoline.

  They were never broke. Or had to get up in the middle of the night to let the dogs out, or because she heard a noise.

  She never heard a noise.

  She pretended she wanted a routine with him, but she wouldn’t trade it for the sublime with him, not when their fused celestial bodies had imagined that everything else would one day be perfect too. Or that nothing could be as perfect.

  Either way it wasn’t real.

  Just a fairytale, a dream divine, a breath barely taken.

  Her lungs filled with his fake name and, for one shining day, life became extraordinary.

  And even before she exhaled, he was already receding. Every moment with him was the one before the one before the one before the last.

  But every once in a while when her body ached with loneliness, Chloe craved not the aria burst of Italian fire, but the elevator muzak of daily love. Every once in a while she longed to find someone else in the woods. She slept and wandered, hopelessly lost in the brambles, in every new face searching for him and the way out.

  Faith

  “Mom, do you think he’ll ever come looking for me?”

  “No, my love,” said Lang.

  Chloe wouldn’t speak to her mother afterward, wouldn’t listen to her explanations.

  “Ask me another question,” Lang said.