When he returned to the dining room, he saw that Sara was serving coffee at the booth, or trying to. As she moved to fill Vic’s cup, Cross grabbed hold of her free wrist, stopping her, then saying something Vic couldn’t hear. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the look in Cross’s eyes.
Killer’s eyes. Like he’d devour Sara if given the chance.
When Cross saw Vic, he dropped Sara’s wrist, and that look in his eyes dropped away, too, like it had never been there. Almost.
For a time, Vic stood where he was, letting Sara finish the refills and head back toward the kitchen. Later, she told him that Cross hadn’t said anything threatening—or maybe she just hadn’t heard him.
But Vic saw a threat.
When he returned to the booth, he retook the seat he’d abandoned, to Cross’s right, only half-listening to the conversation going on around him, about some business now long forgotten. What commanded his attention was Cross’s right hand, now grasping his coffee cup, now resting on the table beside it.
When Cross withdrew his hand from the table, began to lower it to his lap, Vic grabbed his wrist, twisted it so hard it cracked. Yet, somehow Cross contained himself—didn’t yowl, merely gasped, as blood rushed to his face.
When Vic let go, Cross wagged the hand from side to side, as if to make sure nothing was broken. He no longer looked like a killer. He just looked stunned. So did Wes, Dave, and Luke.
Vic leaned toward Cross and spoke quietly, but not so quietly that anyone at that table could have missed his message.
“If you lay a hand on Sara again, it’ll be your neck I wring. You understand?”
At first, Cross made no sign that he’d heard, didn’t even look at Vic. So, Vic shot a hand toward his wrist, close enough to spook him. Cross yanked his hand away, nodded yes.
Now, Wes said to Vic, “Yeah, I remember that time. And I admired you for doing what you did.”
Vic didn’t know what to say to this. In the final analysis, his wrist grab, his threat, they’d made no difference. They weren’t even close to being enough. After he and Sara had split, Vic wanted to give her space, stay away from the diner and her life in general, the way she’d wanted. That was one of the main reasons he decided to move his business back to Reedstown, eventually taking Wes, Dave, and Luke with him.
Cross was the one bit of garbage Vic had left behind. Because he no longer trusted him. Because he believed he’d scared him off Sara, for good. This latter belief had been Vic’s greatest mistake, one he could never fix. Yet, as he lay in bed this morning, he imagined doing to Cross what he’d done to Tommy Baines all those years ago.
“Well, there’s no changing how things went, is there?” Vic said. “But I appreciate you hearing me out, Wes.”
This was the closest Vic had gotten to a confession since high school. Yet, the sins he’d described to Wes were far from the made-up, innocent-sounding ones he and Gene had “admitted” to the priest all those years ago (not praying enough, not paying attention at school), knowing those lies were only expanding the collection of real sins (jerking off, shoplifting). But he didn’t care, back then. Because even as a boy, he understood that his experiences in that stuffy confessional were false and pointless.
This time with Wes wasn’t false or pointless, even if it couldn’t right any wrongs. Vic had spoken the truth to any gods who were listening, put the worst of his wrongs to words. It was as good a last confession as he would ever get.
He grabbed the check, prompting Wes to make the usual reach for his own wallet. Vic waved him away, as he always did.
The check, Vic saw, was signed with a “Thanks!” and the waitress’s signature, “Jess,” to which she’d added a smiley face.
This kindness, though surely routine, stopped his breath. He paused to collect himself, then took out a one hundred and wedged it and the check under the salt shaker. He wouldn’t be needing change.
Before rising from the table, Vic took the glass of water and started drinking, feeling the relief of diminishing thirst, and the sense that something good and essential was flowing through him, nearly restoring him. Then the water was gone.
Chapter 17
I-40 (Route 66),
East of Albuquerque
They rolled forward to the sound of classic rock, Layla thinking of Bette’s “contact” in Phoenix. In her mind, he was dark-suited and faceless, like a man from a Magritte painting. He stood by a locked silver vault, waiting for them.
The other faceless man, her mail stalker, had receded from her thoughts over the last day or so, becoming even murkier. And she still hadn’t received any more weird texts. All this made it tempting to imagine she’d turned a corner with the threats back home. Really, though, she was only on the run from them.
Yelling from the radio interrupted Layla’s reverie: the start of a coked-up run of advertisements for a car dealership, then a waterpark, then a multi-destination cruise package that sparked thoughts of diarrhea run rampant, as cruise ads always did for Layla. At last, the station returned to the deejay, who was only slightly less hyper by comparison: “Kickin’ off the rockin’ theme weekend now, with an out-er space THREE-fer!”
As “Space Truckin’” started up Bette said something, her voice too faint to stand up to the music.
“Sorry. I didn’t hear you.”
Bette spoke up: “It’s been ages since I heard this song.”
It made Layla realize that she hadn’t had a single alien dream since they’d gotten on the road, four days ago. Her nights had consisted of thin and dreamless swatches of sleep, interrupted by stints of restless wakefulness, and glimpses of Bette’s own insomnia.
“Space Truckin’” rolled into “Satellite of Love,” which intensified the strangeness of the landscape all around them, with its stretches of sand and scrub and pine, and its distant, low-slung hills that might actually have been mountains. They shimmered like a bluish mirage.
Then came the third song and its familiar opening piano chords, the lonely sounding male voice. “Rocket Man.”
This was one of fifteen or so songs on a cassette tape that had lived in her mom’s Gremlin, the last car she’d driven. After she died, the tape migrated to the glove compartment of Layla’s grandparents’ LeSabre.
In black marker, on the A- and B-side stickers, her mother had written the names of as many songs as could fit, and together they formed the most disjointed music compilation Layla had ever encountered. Among the tunes: “Wuthering Heights” (Kate Bush), “Single Girl, Married Girl” (The Carter Family), “Cities in Dust” (Siouxsie and the Banshees), “Benedictine Sisters Chanting,” “Chicken Fat” (Robert Preston), “Meat Is Murder” (The Smiths), and “Shostakovich Punk” (her mom’s own description, apparently, for some symphony she’d been taken with).
As Layla learned from her grandparents, this tape was the only one of several to have stuck around. “Your mom made ’em from the radio,” her grandfather explained. “Or at the library, whenever she could find the time. She loved listening to records there, and recording some of the songs for herself. Sometimes, she gave the tapes away as gifts.”
For a long time, Layla believed her mom hadn’t written “Rocket Man” on the cassette because she’d run out of room. But sometime during her teens, she started wondering whether the absence had been more intentional: maybe her mom hadn’t wanted to draw too much attention to the fact that she liked a white-bread pop song. And Layla could relate. Especially during art school, she’d felt “taste shame” all too often herself.
But when she was a kid, Layla had no shame about “Rocket Man,” or about any of the other tunes on that cassette. Whenever she and her grandparents were on a long-enough car trip, she’d ask, “Is it okay if we listen to Mom’s songs?” knowing even then she needed permission to stir up the past.
Without fail, her grandma—always the manager of the glove compartment and
cassette deck—would answer, “Sure, baby doll.” And in the tape would go.
Layla never tired of the songs, which seemed like ghosts of her mother’s moods and quirks and dreams. The ghosts rose from the speakers and spoke for her: I felt this, I wanted this, I was this ….
“Rocket Man” affected Layla like nothing else on that tape, its words and music flowing through her like something physical. Eventually, she figured out why: the song’s story, of a man being launched far from Earth and into the loneliness of space, echoed the ever-growing distance between herself and her mom, and the longing that went with this, a longing that time didn’t lessen.
Yet, “Rocket Man”’s forward motion, in its sound and lyrics, suggested possibility, even hope. Grandma Alice seemed to sense this, too, because it was the only song she’d sing along to. And Layla, then Grandpa Roy, would always join her. Those times, Layla felt close to happy, because the three of them were alive and together, singing back to her mother’s ghosts.
Layla was singing along now. Bette, too. Or, rather, she was humming, as if the song had cast a spell she was trying to figure out.
Soon, the music took Layla away from Bette, almost out of herself. As the next set of tunes played through, followed by the blab of more commercials, Layla’s mind drifted out of the truck, back to the studies pinned to her workspace’s walls, back to her easeled failure-in-progress. Ditch it, or see it through?
The truck veered into the passing lane, triggering a horn blast from behind.
Looking over, Layla found Bette slumped in her seat, hands loose on the wheel, and her foot still on the gas.
“Bette!”
Nothing. Nothing but the chaos all around them: more horns blaring, yelling from an open window to their right. The driver they’d pulled in front of?
No sounds of skidding, thank God, or the rasp and crunch of metal on metal.
“Bette!”
This is how it’s going to end, Layla thought. This is how I’m going to die.
How to take control? To stop this? She reached for the wheel, just a best guess.
The motion jarred Bette awake. She opened her eyes and retook the wheel.
“Pull over!” Layla yelled, not trusting that Bette was really with her. “We need to pull over!”
Slowly, Bette nodded, looking as dazed as a sleepwalker. Still, a more careful driver seemed to take possession of her. She signaled right and checked the rear-view mirror before re-entering the center lane then the slow lane. Then she pulled to the shoulder and parked.
Layla couldn’t speak. Her heart beat like a trapped, helpless thing.
As for Bette, she didn’t seem the least bit alarmed. She stared ahead, looking confused, lost.
Once she felt able to speak, Layla asked, “Are you okay?”
Still staring ahead, Bette gasped one word, like air hissing from a tire. “Fuuuccckkk.”
With this, she slumped back.
Chapter 18
County Hospital
Santa Rosa, New Mexico
Two days later
Layla sat in a nook off the hospital floor—away from the traffic of carts and gurneys, the beeping and chiming of unseen machines, the back-and-forth P.A. announcements. Here, those sounds became background noise, almost comforting.
Exhausted, she couldn’t sleep. Hollowed out, she had no desire to eat. Between trips to the coffee-vending machine and bathroom, she sat and stared at Jake’s drawings, or at one of the months-old magazines that littered the table beside her.
She needed breaks from the drawings. Not because they were bad—they were the opposite of that—but because each was such a dense jumble. Within a few minutes of looking at either of them, she felt woozy. The kind of woozy that could overcome her whenever she studied especially detailed or busy art, and that she would have welcomed in better times. Though just two in number, these latest drawings of Jake’s contained multitudes, calling to mind the work of Cy Twombly, Sagaki Keita, and Where’s Waldo.
“There’s, like, ten more of these at home,” Jake had told Layla, before handing the drawings off to her, hours ago.
Then, he and Marla vanished into Bette’s room, where they’d been ever since, without interruption from Layla. She didn’t want to intrude on their time together, especially now that Bette, in the words of this morning’s doctor, was “lucid and alert.” Unlike yesterday, when she’d been in and out of consciousness and seemed so close to the end that Layla wasn’t sure she’d last until Jake and Marla’s nighttime arrival. But she had.
“Some patients’ll hang on ’til their loved ones show up.” That’s what one of the nurses had told Layla, something she’d heard before. “They’ll keep going longer than anyone would have expected.”
How long Bette might keep going, no one could say. The most immediate concerns, dehydration and pneumonia, were being addressed with fluids and oxygen. But the underlying concern, the cancer, was far beyond the reach of any treatment. According to the doctors, the only other things that could be done were to keep Bette comfortable and wait for the end—here. She was too frail to be transported back to Reedstown.
Layla turned back to the drawing that had most captivated her, possibly because each of the tiny, thirty-some figures in it was Bette: Bette zooming ahead on a rider mower. Bette pushing or pulling a kid (Jake?) on a swing, in a wagon, on a raft. Bette doing flips on a trampoline. (Did they really have a trampoline? Had Bette ever done flips?) On and on it went.
Jake had captured Bette’s character with simple lines. They suggested, at various points, the no-bullshit set of her shoulders, her smile-smirk, her assured movement through space. And like the robots and dogs in Jake’s earlier drawings, each Bette radiated squiggles of colored ink suggesting motion, energy, life.
Life.
Were the drawings memories or wishes?
Layla sensed motion in front of her, then stillness. Looking up, she saw Marla and Jake standing before her, neither one of them smiling. For Jake, this was rare, and she expected to hear the worst. But the worst didn’t come, not then.
“Bette wants to see you,” Marla said. “Alone.”
Finding Bette asleep, Layla took one of the chairs by the bed and waited. To her right, unopened puddings, Jell-O cups, and “meal replacement” shakes crowded the nightstand. At her feet, a machine pumped oxygen through a line to Bette’s nose. These signs of the end were all too familiar to Layla from her hours at her grandparents’ bedsides. She never imagined she’d have to face them again, in this way.
Bette fluttered a hand. A spasm or a wave?
“Bette?”
Slowly, Bette opened her eyes and looked to Layla. “Hey,” she said, her voice a rasp.
“Hey,” Layla replied, not knowing what else to say. On impulse, she extended a hand to Bette, and Bette took it, gave it a good, hard squeeze. As she kept hold of Layla’s hand, the look in Bette’s eyes became just as hard, almost fierce.
“I put you through hell,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“You didn’t put me through hell. And you don’t owe me any apologies.”
“Yes, I do.” Bette went quiet, as if she were thinking through how to deliver difficult news. “I lied to you about something important. And I need to come clean about it.”
Despite the uneasiness rolling through her, Layla kept hold of Bette’s hand. Letting go might suggest that whatever Bette was about to admit would surely exceed Layla’s abilities to forgive. A real possibility. But she wanted to hold out hope.
“Go ahead,” she said.
Bette swallowed hard. “I know who the Wolf is—was. It was Gordon Cross.”
Vic’s former business associate. The one who’d made enough trouble to get himself killed.
“‘Mr. Wolf’ was one of the things he called himself. Or used to, in the old days. And he looked like the man in your mother
’s drawing.”
Layla withdrew her hand and sat back from the bed, overtaken by that picture of his face. Once again, she imagined him at the counter of the Red Rose Diner, his eyes boring into her mother.
“I should have told you right when you asked. But I was afraid that’d make Dad look even worse in your eyes.” Absently, Bette scrunched the sheet where Layla’s hand had been. “And since Cross is dead, I figured, ‘What difference would it make?’ But I know it would have made a difference, for you. And I’m sorry.”
Layla’s mental picture of Cross, of the Wolf, wouldn’t budge. Why had he been granted so much space and time, in her mind and in reality? Why had he been granted so many more years on Earth than her mother had? Layla felt she had an answer, and the anger that came with it shoved the picture aside. Anger at Bette, and Vic.
“Dad couldn’t look any worse in my eyes,” she said. “It’s pretty clear his gangster cronies meant way more to him than my mom, or anyone else. Including us.”
For years, Layla had wondered how much Vic knew about her mother’s killer. It was likely he knew far more than he’d let on to anyone.
“Not true,” Bette said. “Not where your mom was concerned. He loved her more than anything, anyone.”
“There’s no way you can know that.”
“There isn’t. But I do.”
So what? Layla thought. The love Vic had for her mom—if love is what you could call it—had never nurtured or protected or saved. It had led to nothing but ruin.
“Well,” she said, “I guess I should be thank—”
Bette started coughing, with a force that sat her up from the bed. The fit went on long enough that Layla reached for the call bell. But Bette grasped her wrist, shaking her head. Then she raised a finger, as if to say, Give me a minute. In less time than that, the coughing died down.
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