by Gayle Forman
I watch all of this like it’s a movie. The motorcycle guy and the woman keep arguing. She hands him the baby, who starts screaming, so he hands it directly over to the girl. The woman says something, and he slams his hand against the seat of his chopper. Then he turns away, looking right at me, but he doesn’t see me. But I see him. I see his hair, the same chestnut color as mine, and his eyes, almond-shaped and hazel-gray, just like mine, and his skin, olive, just like mine.
Just like mine.
There’s more shouting. The teen girl sets the baby down and stomps off crying. Then the baby starts wailing. The woman picks it up and carries it inside, slamming the door, and soon he follows, slamming the garage door.
Ben looks at me. Looks back at the house. Looks back at me. Shakes his head.
“What?” I say.
“It’s weird.”
“What is?”
He glances back at the house, back at me. “He looks like you, but that could be my dad.”
I don’t say anything.
“Are you okay?” he asks after a bit.
I nod.
“Do you want to go in? Or come back later when they’ve maybe calmed down?”
When I was little, I liked to imagine my father as a businessman, an airplane pilot, a dentist, someone different. But he’s not different at all. He’s exactly what I knew he’d be. I shouldn’t be surprised. All along Tricia has called him the sperm donor. He was probably some one-night stand I was the accidental product of. There’s no fairy-tale reason why he never visited or answered my email or even sent me one lousy birthday card. I’ll bet he has no idea when my birthday is. Why would he? That would imply that my existence matters to him.
“Let’s go,” I tell Ben.
“Are you sure? He’s right there.”
“Let’s go.” My words snap. Ben doesn’t say anything else. He pulls a U and we go.
36
Once we’re back on the highway, it’s like someone has vacuumed the Cody out of me. Ben keeps giving me these worried looks, but I avoid them. I avoid him. I scrunch my sweater into a ball against the window, and eventually, I fall asleep.
When I wake up a few hours later, the cool mountain air of the Sierra Nevadas has been baked away by the hot dry Nevada desert. I can almost forget that the detour ever happened.
My head is hazy from the heat, and there’s a metallic taste in my mouth and the crusty remnants of what I suspect is drool on my lips. Ben is watching me, and even though I liked seeing him sleep, being on the opposite end of it, I feel exposed. “Where the hell are we?” I ask.
“Literally the middle of nowhere. We passed a place called Hawthorne a while back, but other than that, nothing. I haven’t even seen any cars on the road. On the plus side, you can speed like crazy out here.”
I glimpse the dashboard. Ben’s going ninety. The empty, straight road stretches ahead of us and shimmers with mirages, little oases of water in the desert that don’t really exist. No sooner do we reach one than it disappears into the asphalt and another appears on the horizon.
“At this rate, we should make Vegas by five and Laughlin by seven,” Ben says.
“Oh.”
“Are you okay?”
“Why do you keep asking me that?” I reach for a now-tepid bottle of Dr Pepper. “This is disgusting.”
“When you see a 7-Eleven, holler.” He sounds peeved, but then he looks at me and something softens. He opens his mouth to say something, but then seems to think again and stays quiet.
I sigh. “What?”
“It’s not you; it’s him.”
I’m still feeling kind of naked in front of him. So I snap back, “Is that a line you give to girls when you dump them? ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’”
Ben turns toward me, then back toward the road. “I might if it ever got to that point,” he says frostily. “I was talking about your dad.”
I don’t answer. I don’t want to talk about my dad, or whatever that man back there was.
“He’s a fuckwad,” Ben continues. “And it has fuck-all to do with you.”
I still don’t say anything.
“I mean, maybe I don’t know anything about what you’re going through, but it’s something my mom always told me about my dad. That it wasn’t me. It was him. And I never believed her. I always thought she was humoring me. Because it had to be my fault. But seeing that asshole, and you, maybe I’m starting to reconsider.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Ben’s eyes are glued to the road, as if he has to concentrate very hard on the flat, straight highway. “When your dad is an asshole from the get-go—and it doesn’t get more from the get-go than denying your existence—it’s not because you did anything wrong. It’s because he did.” His words spill out in a rush. Then he adds, “And maybe it’s none of my business, but I’ve been wanting to say that to you for, like, the last two hundred and eighty-seven miles.”
I look at Ben now. And again I wonder how it is that we can feel so many of the same things and be so utterly different.
“You thought it was your fault, with your dad?” I ask him.
Ben doesn’t say anything, just nods.
“Why?”
He sighs. “I was a sensitive kid. A crybaby. Always running to Mommy. He hated that. Told me to toughen up. So I tried. I tried to man up. Be like him.” He grimaces. “But he still couldn’t stand the sight of me.”
I don’t know what to say. So I just tell Ben that I’m sorry.
He lets go of the wheel for a second, raises his hands in the air, like, What you gonna do?
I have to resist the urge to touch Ben on the cheek. I can’t imagine what that must have been like, having a dad whose idea of manhood was how Ben described it. Spending your life emulating that and trying to escape it all at once. I think of Tricia. About her being gone so much, and about her endless string of three-month flings. About refusing to put me in touch with my father. About how she basically abdicated her job, let the Garcias take over parenting me. I’ve always resented her for this, but now I’m wondering if maybe I should be thanking her.
x x x
Traffic picks up around Vegas and then, suddenly, we’re in a huge city and it’s disorienting and strange, and then an hour later, we’re back in the middle of nowhere, and then an hour after that, we’re in Laughlin.
Laughlin is like a strange hybrid: part nowhere desert town, but plunked down in the center of it are all these high-rise hotels jutting out from the banks of the Colorado River. We drive through the depressing strip of downtown to a more modest stretch of motel–casinos, stopping at the Wagon Wheel Sleep ’n’ Slots, which is advertising rooms for forty-five dollars a night.
We pull in and ring the bell, and a friendly woman with her hair in braids asks if she can help us.
“Do you have two rooms?” Ben asks.
The cash is depleting faster than I’d thought. I think about last night’s motel-room-induced panic attack, Ben’s comforting voice on the other end of the phone. What he told me earlier today in the car. “One room, two beds,” I say.
I pay for the room and we go unpack the car. It was so clean and tidy when we left, but now it’s littered with trip detritus. I attempt to tidy some of it while Ben carries both of our bags up to the room.
When I get upstairs, he’s shuffling through a bunch of papers. “They have takeout menus. Do you want to go out and grab something to eat? Or order a pizza?”
I remember our afternoon a few months back: burritos, TV, the couch.
“Let’s do pizza.”
“Pepperoni? Sausage? Both?”
I laugh. “One or the other.”
Ben picks up the menu, and a half hour later pizza, garlic knots, and vats of Pepsi and Dr Pepper show up at the door. We s
pread it all out on a towel on one of the beds and sit cross-legged, having a picnic.
“God, it’s good to be out of the car,” I say.
“Yeah. Sometimes after a tour, my ass vibrates for days.”
“Too bad it’s not one of those motels with the vibrating beds; you could keep the magic going.”
“I’ve never actually seen one of those,” Ben says.
“No, me neither. I actually haven’t stayed in that many motels.” The truth is, I can count on one hand the number of nights I’ve stayed in a hotel or motel. Tricia wasn’t one for vacations. Most of the trips I’ve taken have been with the Garcias, and we usually went camping or stayed with their relatives.
“So not many opportunities to share a motel room with a guy before?” Ben asks lightly as he pays an inordinate amount of attention to his pizza crust.
“None.”
“So you’ve never shared a room before?” Ben asks. “With a guy?” He seems strangely shy.
“I’ve never shared anything with a guy before.”
Ben looks up from his crust and stares me in the face, like he’s trying to determine exactly what I’m saying. I hold his stare, letting my look answer the question. His eyes, a soft blue, like the empty swimming pool outside, widen in surprise.
“Not anything?”
“Nope.”
“Not even . . . a pizza?”
“Oh, I’ve eaten pizza with guys before. But I’ve never shared one. There’s a big difference.”
“There is?”
I nod.
“So what about now?”
“What about now?”
He looks at me.
“What’s it look like?” I ask.
His brow crumples, a squall of confusion, as if he’s not sure we’re talking about pizza anymore. He glances at the corpse of the pie. “It looks like you had two slices and I had four and you don’t like pepperoni as much as I do.”
I nod, acknowledging the greasy pile of pepperoni I’ve picked off.
“And that this is all happening in a motel room that we’re both sitting in,” he continues.
I nod again. For a moment I’m reminded of the pledge I made never to sleep under the same roof as him. Maybe he is too. Obviously, tonight I’m breaking that, though the truth is, I broke it in spirit a while ago. And none of it seems to matter anymore.
“So what does that mean?” he asks. He’s trying to sound casual, but he looks eager, and very young.
“It means that I’m sharing with you.” That’s all I’m willing to give him, though in truth, it seems like a lot. Then something I said yesterday when I was trying to convince him to nap in the car comes back to me: We can make up a new code.
I think that’s what we might be doing here.
37
I wake up the next morning in a darkened room, shafts of bright morning sunshine slanting through the blackout shades. The clock reads ten thirty. I passed out around midnight.
Ben is still asleep in the other bed, and he looks sweet, all curled up around one of the pillows. I take a minute to stretch, letting my muscles ease out of the crampedness of twenty-four hours in the car.
“Hey,” Ben calls, his voice sticky with sleep. “What time is it?”
“Ten thirty.”
“Are you ready for today?”
The pizza box is still on the dresser. It seems crazy that last night—in another room that Bradford might recommend, right in his backyard—I was able to forget why I’d come here. But now there’s no forgetting. No denying. I am hot and cold and sick to my stomach. I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready.
“Ready,” I tell him.
He stares at me a long minute. Watches me as he peels off his nicotine patch and puts on another one. “You don’t have to do this,” he says. “I’ll be just as happy if we turn around right now.”
It’s a nice thing to say. But we already aborted one mission. That one didn’t matter. This one does. I shake my head.
He puts on a shirt. “What’s your plan of attack?”
“I thought we’d stake out his house all day, like we did . . .” I don’t finish. Ben gets it.
“But you said he worked at one of the casinos,” Ben replies. “They don’t have regular shifts. He could work the graveyard.”
I hadn’t thought of that. “It might be a long stakeout.”
Ben looks at me for a minute. “What’s the name of the place he works at?”
“The Continental.” We drove past it yesterday. It made me shiver in the afternoon heat to think of being that close to him. If he had such a strong effect on me over the computer, with all those miles and false identities between us, what is he going to do to me in person?
Ben opens the phone book and leafs through the pages.
“What are you doing?” I ask, but before he answers, he’s dialing. When someone answers, he starts talking in a kind of a hick accent: “My buddy Brad Smith works there. I don’t mean to hassle him, but I went and locked myself out of my house and he’s got my spare keys. Can you tell me what time he’s on today so I can come grab ’em?”
There’s a brief pause as he’s put on hold. He looks at me and winks. The voice comes back on the phone. “Oh. Right. Course. You know what time he gets off? I can swing on by and grab my spare set off him.” More silence. “Five? Great. I’ll have to manage till then. Thanks. I will. You too.”
Ben hangs up. “His shift is over at five.”
“Five,” I repeat.
“So assuming he goes straight home, five thirty or six.”
“Aren’t you a good detective.” I smile at him.
Ben doesn’t smile back. He’s all business now. “I say we get to his place early to sniff it out, and then you do your thing.”
“My thing?”
“You have a thing, right?”
“Of course I have a thing.” I’ve spent the long hours of the drive working out exactly what I’ll say to him. Like lines in a play. More pretend. Pretend to be Meg. Pretend to be suicidal. Pretend to be strong enough to do this.
“Okay, so that gives us”—he looks at the clock—“six hours.”
I nod. Six hours.
“What do you want to do in the meantime?”
Throw up. Run. Hide. “I don’t know. What is there to do here?”
“We could sit by the pool, but I stuck my hand in it last night and it was warm as piss.”
“Too bad I left my bathing suit at home.”
“We could hit one of those all-you-can-manage dollar- ninety-nine buffets.”
“I’ll bet you can manage a lot.”
“And I’d kill for an iced coffee. It’s, like, a thousand degrees. You’d think they’d ice something other than the beer. We can grab breakfast at a casino, and then gamble.”
“I’m gambling enough on this trip; plus, I have no extra money. What I really want is to zone out. Like, at a movie or something.”
“Okay. Buffet and movie. It’s a date.” He stops himself, even blushes a little. “Not a date, but, you know.”
“Yeah, Ben,” I say. “I know.”
x x x
We don’t find iced coffee, but we do find a buffet, at which Ben eats an absurdly huge amount of eggs, bacon, sausage, and various other meat products, as if trying to store up for the vegan life back home. I manage to get down half a waffle. After, we find a Cineplex in town, and watch one of those ridiculous movies about machines that turn human. It’s part three or four in a series we haven’t seen before, but it doesn’t matter. We groan at the terrible plot and share a tub of popcorn, and there are whole minutes when I forget what I’m doing today. By the time the film lets out, it’s almost three o’clock.
I go back to the motel to change. I’m
not sure why, but I’ve brought one of my nicer outfits, which happens to be a skirt-and-top ensemble I wore to one of Meg’s many memorial services. Ben and I pay for another night at the Wagon Wheel, deciding, rather than leaving tonight, to get up at the butt-crack of dawn and power through the drive home, doing it in shifts, rock-and-roll-tour style.
At the front desk we get directions to Bradford’s apartment complex. It’s not that far from here, about a half mile away.
“Let’s walk,” I say. We have time, and I’m too nervous to sit around waiting, so we walk along the dusty streets until we find a sun-bleached stucco building surrounded by dead grass, with a cracked cement pool.
But we’re early. It’s only just five. “We probably shouldn’t hang out right here,” I say. So we walk back a ways toward a liquor store a few blocks away.
“What time do you want us to go in?” Ben asks.
“I should go at five thirty.”
“And what time should I go?”
“I kind of think I need to do this alone.”
Ben’s eyes narrow. “I kind of think you don’t.”
“I appreciate that, but I need to talk to him myself.”
“So you want me to lurk in the bushes?” He doesn’t seem pleased with this option.
“Bradford is cagey. If he so much as suspects that anyone is with me, there’s no way he’ll talk to me.” It isn’t that I’m not frightened of Bradford; I am. But it needs to be just me in there. “I want you to wait for me here.”
“Here?” Ben is incredulous.
“Here.” I am pleading.
“So I was just the ride, is that it?”
“You know that’s not true.”