Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  “Who is that?” he says to the women in a gruff deep voice, stopping in the garden and squinting at Chloe.

  “It’s nobody, Dad, just another girl about Anthony Jr.,” Jane says.

  “Did you ask this nobody her name?”

  “Uh, no …”

  “I told you to ask their name,” he says. “Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to me?” He steps forward. “What is your name, child?”

  “Chloe,” says Chloe. “Chloe Divine.”

  With rebuke the man turns to his daughter. “You were going to let her drive off, and yet she is the one we’ve been waiting for.” Guiltily Jane looks away from her father, and glares at Chloe! As if it’s Chloe’s fault Jane didn’t ask for her name. “Wait here,” the man says and disappears back inside. Chloe isn’t sure if he is speaking to her or his daughter. But whoever he is addressing, they wait. Because he tells them to, and his voice brooks no argument.

  The man’s wife beckons Chloe to come inside the garden. “I know it’s a shock,” she says when Chloe is at the foot of the porch steps. “We were like you once. It’s been almost four years for us. Only five minutes for you. We learned to live with it.”

  “Not his father,” Jane says, and twists deeply away. She doesn’t look at Chloe again.

  The mother tips her head in pained assent.

  Chloe wants to tell them about her brother, wants to say that she knows something about learning to live with the unlivable. That’s not what this feels like. This feels like the washing away of all waters. Chloe is charred by the remorseless sun.

  Carrying something in his hand, the man reappears after some long awkward minutes. Coming to stand in front of Chloe, he hands her an envelope. She clings to the railing. She looks up at him. Under the external age, under the machine, it is the ghost of Johnny’s eyes that peers down at her from a different face, a broad, calm, watchful, sanguine face. She can’t look away from the man. She doesn’t even blink away from him. Johnny’s eyes are staring down at her!

  On the small greeting card envelope, in Johnny’s block letter scrawl, her name is written, as if in the stars. Chloe Divine.

  “Among the things left in the room where he was found, there was this,” the man tells her. “It’s been waiting for you to come and claim it.”

  Her hands shake.

  The envelope is flimsy. It feels as if there is nothing in it except a postcard or a photograph. One or the other, but not both. That is even worse. Either a picture or a letter. What does she want? Him. She wants him alive. Not even for herself. For himself. She wants him not to fall down, not to give up, not to die alone in a bed in a motel. In a minute she won’t be able to stand upright. She needs to leave.

  “We saved it because he had saved it,” the man says. “His father took most of his things. Like the guitar and his clothes. We have the rest. The boots, the mic. And this letter. Look, he was trying to remember your address. We couldn’t figure it out. We couldn’t tell if it was Maine or Mississippi or Montana. And the name of the town, what is that? Looks like Firetown? Firegrad?”

  “Fryeburg,” Chloe says. She had been right. He couldn’t remember it. The crack cocaine neurons were a micrometer too far apart.

  The thin envelope clenched in her trembling hand, the tips of her fingers numb, Chloe manages a smile and a thank you. She bows her head in a farewell to his family, the one she has heard so much about and yet not enough, so much and yet nothing. Taking a deep breath, she starts away, and then turns back with a last question. “What was his full name?” she calls to the man. “I never knew it.”

  “Anthony Alexander Barrington III,” the man says, his voice like gravel, and like gravel it crackles.

  She stares into the man’s eyes for one last moment. No wonder Johnny wanted a different name. He thought it might give him a different life.

  And it did.

  Chloe gets into her car, after several attempts starts it, drives downhill, brakes at the corner of Jomax and Pima, and then doesn’t move. For she doesn’t know how long, she sits in the driver’s seat, her forehead against the wheel and cries.

  Without opening the envelope, she drives three hundred miles north and east through the desert, the Petrified Forest and the prairie until she can’t drive anymore and it’s midnight. In Gallup where she stops, all the better motels have no vacancies. She finds a ground floor room on Highway 66 in a joint with blood stains on the shower curtain and electrical wires poking live out of the wall.

  She knows she won’t be able to sleep until she opens Johnny’s letter. But she also knows that once she opens it, she won’t be able to sleep. Fully clothed, she lies on the musty bed, and stares at the ceiling, flying back through the years to another ceiling she had stared at, desperately wishing for a life that could never be, for a love that could never be. Even as she had lived it, she wept, because she knew in her deepest heart it would never come again. He was next to her then, his naked body on his stomach, sprawled out, asleep. She crawled on top of him and laid her head on his back. She kissed him between his shallowly rising shoulder blades. She kissed his neck, his loose black hair. She whispered to him about life, herself, love, joy, about all the abundant gifts he was endowed with.

  The place where you died, did it look like this, she asks the empty room, the empty ceiling. Dirty bedspreads, a broken Coke machine down the hall, the slimy bathroom, the algae-filled pool invitingly lit up as if anyone would dare dive into it. Is this like the last cheap hotel where you gave up your one precious life?

  You wanted to be young until the angels came and asked you to fly. You’re nineteen forever now, stumbling over the words, flexing your hips, hip hopping your elbows to the beat of the aurochs. The promises you made me were all for naught, because a promise is for tomorrow, and you didn’t have one.

  All you had was a set in Warsaw’s Old Town Square when the money poured in every time you killed a chord change, every time your unearthly voice soared above the Royal Castle. It was sure good to be alive with you, Johnny Rainbow. Except now all your dreams are used up and wasted, all cut and cut and cut into smaller and smaller irrational fractions, into little white lines until there is nothing left, of them, or of you.

  She forgot to ask where he is buried. It is too painful to realize this. She should’ve asked. Now it’s too late. It doesn’t matter. Is she going to bring him purple lupines? An armful of red roses? Is she going to plant for him lilies of the field?

  Four times someone tries to break into her room. The flimsy lock and chain nearly can’t contain the door. Bereft, Chloe falls asleep in the clothes she was dressed in when she found out he died, all her makeup long melted off by heat and tears, the envelope on her heart unopened, the heart full of cold stone pain.

  When she wakes up nothing is different or feels different, except it’s morning and she is in Gallup, New Mexico. She cleans herself up as best she can in the disgusting bathroom, steps outside, and sits on the old wooden bench by her door. It is a dry morning, the sun high and hot, the sky hazy blue. Highway 66 in front of her, a boulder mountain behind her. Train tracks run along the highway. To the left of her is a sign for a café, but only a sign. There is no café. There is, however, a radiator repair shop next door. If she needs her radiator repaired, she’s come to the right place.

  She sits and waits. The cars whizz by, the freight trains clang.

  She sits and waits for her life to begin, to end.

  The sun beats mercilessly against the sky.

  On the bench, she holds the frayed white envelope and gazes at the historic road, at the train tracks, at the prairie.

  What she holds in her hands is what he left behind for her. He told her that he refused to let the minutes pass without filling them with meaning. Death wasn’t going to snatch the essence from their present days. That’s what he promised her. That he would find a way to make his life matter.

  And here it is.

  White paper covering either a postcard or a photograph.

 
; To prepare herself for every eventuality, Chloe has spent the drive to New Mexico, last night on the bed, and all this morning imagining what the contents of the envelope might hold, so that whatever it is can come as a shock, but not a surprise. Like his death.

  Is it a postcard with words from him? Is it a photograph? Johnny in a uniform holding his rifle. Johnny in a leather jacket, hair tied back, Chuck Berrying his guitar. Johnny with his dad, also an Anthony Alexander, during a better time for them. A small boy on top of his dad’s proud shoulders, his twin sisters in tow, the beauty queen mother beaming by their side. Perhaps it’s a picture of his grandparents when they were young, ruining things for everybody with their crazy love. Wishful thinking all, like sweet coffee or buttercup orchids.

  It’s not important what it is, she decides. What’s most important is the words written on it. It could be a postcard from Death Valley, just for something to scribble on. He had nothing else on hand in Stovepipe Wells, the last motel of his life. The front image is immaterial. The image he is about to paint for her with his words—that is the material part. That is ontological.

  It’s brutal outside. She sits alone in the courtyard, in part shade so she won’t blister or burn her pale swollen face. Her red Beetle is parked in front of her, the hotel pool solid green behind the chain-link fence across the concrete. There is a dying ocotillo in a brown pot next to where she sits. She notices these things. She notices everything. Another hour of grief ticks by before she heaves a laden breath and tears open the last of the magic stars one by one going dark inside her heart. From the envelope she teases out a photograph.

  She is wrong on all counts.

  The front image is not immaterial.

  It isn’t a postcard of the bakeries in Warsaw or the fields in Treblinka. It is a photograph from a green slope on the Riga Canal. The incongruity of the image crashes against her hard expectations. Her mind can’t reconcile the thing she is seeing with the thing she thought she would see.

  It is a photograph of her in Riga.

  Sometime in the balmy late afternoon on the Riga Canal, sometime before the end, before they knew it was the end, before everything came tumbling down off the funeral mountain, Chloe sat perched on the grass with her bare legs crossed, her painted feet flat on the ground. Hannah, Mason, and Blake sat on the grass beside her. Johnny must have snapped the shot from the boat full of tourists, when all she heard from a watery distance was, Chloe, Chloe …

  No one was aware of the silver Olympus that clicked and caught one sixtieth of a second of the four of them after a lifetime together and before a lifetime apart, after a long day of walking, hot, sweaty, tired, slightly grimy, in need of a pool or an ocean, relaxed and at peace. Halfway smiling at whatever it was Chloe was saying, Hannah was inspecting her bitten nails. Mason, one careless hand on Chloe’s foot, was studying the open map.

  Only Blake was turned fully to Chloe. He gazed up at her entranced, while she was laughing and unsuspecting. Probably a good way to describe much of her character. Her teeth gleaming, she was caught by Johnny, chortling at her own joke. But Blake wasn’t smiling. He was fixated on her, unlaughing and unarmored. Because Hannah was in the nails and Mason was in the map, and Chloe was in herself, Blake stared at Chloe open-eyed, clear-eyed, overflowing. Between his gaze and her face was the opulent swell of her summer breasts, squeezed into an aqua sundress, the décolletage spilling out, taking up half the picture frame. Since no one was watching him, or so he thought, Blake’s eyes had freedom to gawp anywhere they wished. But in this click in time, it wasn’t her breasts he was devouring, but her laughing face.

  By the side of Highway 66, her mouth falling open, Chloe stares at Blake staring at her. He is caught, starkly, in plain sight. He is inhaling her. All the tulips bloom in Latvia under his fertile adoring gaze. There is no question that anyone who ever felt anything for anyone else would look at Blake’s face in that frozen blink of transcendental eternity and know that he loved her.

  Chloe is astonished.

  She is afraid to turn the photograph over. What if there is nothing written on it? Does there need to be something on the other side? What if instead of a letter from Johnny, she has only this?

  But why?

  Why would this mean anything to him? Why would he take it, why would he save it? Why in the world would he preserve it in amber, develop it, carry it, put it in an envelope, and die bequeathing it to her, will it to her life? Instead of a love letter, this! Why?

  She stares into Blake’s face as the sun rises in the desert sky, reaching high noon, blistering the ocotillo next to her baffled throat.

  Holding her breath, she turns the photograph over.

  In Johnny’s meandering unsteady hand are the following words. She squints to make them out, tears making them nearly unreadable. It is dated October 2004. She can’t take it. She almost can’t read on.

  I love you, Chloe. I wish I could do it over again, I wish I could keep myself.

  I give you this so you will be free of me. Make your own story. Take your own bus 136. Your whole life it’s been front and center of you. Everything you need, want, long for, inches away from your oblivious heart. Open your eyes —and see. You’re not alone. He is the answer. 3:15. All the things that he desires canst ever compare unto you.

  Johnny Rainbow

  Chloe weeps for him for twenty-five hundred miles through fifteen states of the Union as she races back home. She weeps bent over her knees on the brown bench in New Mexico, her body shaking so much it feels as if she will never stand up, get in the car, get going. She mourns him through the prairies of Albuquerque and the mountains of Santa Fe, through northwest Texas where the sandy heat parches her blotchy face, the flying insects eat her, and the wind blows grit inside her smallest pores. She hides in a ditch to escape a tornado in Oklahoma and just as well, for the tears are blinding her off the road. Of all the unsung regrets, she feels most sharply the waste of his unfinished chapters, the weight of his uncharted oceans.

  After surviving the twister, she has waffles for dinner and burgers for breakfast, she has fries and onion rings and hard strawberries barely in season. In Tennessee, during the length of that entire and entirely too long state, she realizes that faith alone was not enough to return him to her, that something more was needed, something Johnny didn’t have, a way out.

  By the time she reaches Kentucky she is numb, drained of tears. She has pecan pie, and the most delicious bacon hash, so delicious that she stays an extra half-day so she can get hungry in Louisville and have it again. She calls her mother, and can barely get the words out about what happened before she has to hang up.

  She eats her second helping of heavenly bacon hash as a tearful tribute to him.

  In West Virginia, Chloe brutally grasps that she has wasted four years of her life obsessing over a phantom. The spear of grief turns into wobbling self-pity.

  In Maryland, looking for answers and comfort, she drives extra slowly, reading all the white signs posted on the green lawns of churches. Maryland is brim-full of Appalachian houses of worship with signs out front, each pithier than the next, each giving a kernel of old wisdom to live by. One finally does it for her. IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO BE WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE BEEN. It is too late for Johnny. But not too late for Chloe. When he played in Warsaw, Johnny had written out this exact George Eliot quote on a Post-it note and stuck it on the inside of his guitar case so when the passersby bent to throw him some money, they could read those eleven words and walk away maybe a little straighter than before.

  That is what happens to Chloe. Faster and straighter, Chloe drives her red VW bug home to Maine. She comes to understand why she has driven like Jimmy Dean ever since she left Gallup, tearing up the pavement. Because she is terrified. Terrified that while she was being so disastrously dull-witted, Blake has found someone else. He has been through every girl within a six-town radius. Looking for someone other than her? Anyone but her, as he would say. What if one of the floozies has ingratiated her
self permanently into his Biblical life? Didn’t Taylor write there would be some announcement soon from Dani and Blake? What if it is too late? Chloe can’t endure the thought of it. She wishes she could fly.

  Johnny’s days have not been squandered. He left a permanent mark on all who loved him. Afflicted Johnny has nonetheless managed to find a way to fill Chloe’s finite life with infinite meaning. He left Chloe Blake. He filled her cup to overflowing with himself and when it was bone empty, he left her for the one who loved her most. No wonder Johnny never fought back even when Blake was being impossible. Johnny knew why. He knew everything from the beginning.

  All her education didn’t make her heart smart enough to see bliss. Pining away after the lost gold of Pima when the mansion of kings was three houses up from her green cabin.

  A cloud of dust rises up around the red bug as she flies downhill and screeches into the clearing in front of her house. The screen door slams as she storms in. “Mom?” She runs through the empty house.

  Lang is by the lake with her begonias. There is a kiss, a deep hug, a constricted I’m sorry, a comment about Chloe looking awful, as if she has driven three thousand sleepless miles. Chloe interrupts with the only question resonating through her body. “Mom, where’s Blake?”

  “I don’t know. He went out earlier.”

  “Where? With who?”

  “I don’t know. To the store? He was walking.”

  “Walking to the store? It’s six miles away.”

  “Well, maybe not to the store, then, but to Leary’s. How did you miss him when you drove by?” Lang squints, wipes her sweaty head with gardening gloves leaving long dirt streaks on her forehead. “What’s the fuss anyway?”

  Carefully holding it by the edges, Chloe thrusts the discolored Riga photograph into her mother’s face. Lang studies it—rather calmly, a panting Chloe thinks. “You. Blake. Mason. Hannah. So?”