“Maybe if I lived in Oakland.”
Pete texted again before class was over. He was beginning to be a worry. On the mats, Alden glanced at Tristan every time he stumbled or the instructor gently corrected him; she hurriedly looked down at her phone, pretending to text. Otherwise, her brother grinned a lot. That was good. Despite Tristan’s increasingly sporadic replies, her mom’s weekly emails had grown worried about him. Probably having a hard time adjusting to the fact he was a teenager now, just a year away from high school, and the little blond boy who hugged her first thing every morning was gone, never to return.
When they got home, their dad was unloading scallions and organic chicken breasts from his green canvas grocery bag.
“Well, look at that,” he said. “You drove your brother there and back and somehow didn’t drop dead from exhaustion.”
Tristan popped open the fridge. “Is this your plan to convince me I’d rather be a grownup in the big city?”
“Is it working?”
“Like a dream.”
After dinner, as she racked the dishes into the washer, her phone rang. She glanced at its face, ready to deny the call, but it was Laura. Twenty minutes later, they were seated together at the Hoof & Tanner, a tourist-sucking drinking hole that was patterned, for totally arbitrary reasons, after a quaint English pub. But Laura worked there, which meant that as long as her manager was out, Laura didn’t pay for drinks and her friends got doubles at the price of singles. Strictly speaking, Tristan should have been saving every penny in her pocket, but drunk at half price struck her as a pretty good deal right then.
Laura was a born bartender: pretty, tough, able to let the most offensive statements slide by without a blink. While Tristan had found herself shockingly unsentimental about losing touch with the rest of their high school friends, Laura was the one person she genuinely missed even in the deepest throes of city and school. Whenever she got back to Redding, their conversation resumed without missing a beat, as if Laura had been off in the bathroom for five minutes rather than away in Berkeley for the last six weeks.
“I want to tell you something,” Tristan said after her third screwdriver. “But it’s going to sound totally entitled and awful.”
Laura’s expression didn’t budge. “You think that makes me want to hear it less?”
“My parents want me to get a job.”
“The horror.”
“Any job. When I want to work in music.”
Laura snorted. “So does everyone. That’s why they start off giving it away on the street corner. Speaking of, what’s your plan B?”
“Move back here. With my parents.”
“I feel like this is the part in the Katherine Heigl movie where the friend who’s not quite as pretty tells Heigl to get over herself, get out there, and find what she wants before it’s too late.”
“First—no.” Tristan stirred her drink. “Second, I don’t want to hear what Sarcastic Sidekick thinks. I want to hear what you think.”
Laura nodded. “Get over yourself, get out there, and find what you want before it’s too late.”
She laughed. “Come on.”
“If you really need another year or whatever to figure shit out, then move back home. All the cool kids are doing it. Me? I think you’ve got a much better shot landing anything remotely connected to the playing of consecutive, melodic notes if you’re down in San Francisco.”
“Berkeley.”
“Whatever.” Laura waved her hand. “It doesn’t matter. You’re not going to drop dead if you make a decision now and regret it a year later. We’ve got so much time, Tristan.”
Tristan sipped her drink. The vodka bit beneath the sour surface of the orange juice. “Well, as long as we’re getting my life in order.”
“Is this going to be about Zeke?”
“Yeah.”
Laura leaned nearer, conspiratorial. “Is his name really Zeke?”
“A guy can’t be named Zeke?”
“Not unless he’s about to take you up to the hayloft.”
Tristan finished her screwdriver. “Again, I have two points. One, I cleaned the hay out weeks ago. And two, I took him.”
“Does Pete know?”
“That I appear to have a thing for guys with two e’s in their name? Did you get Pod Personed?”
Laura rolled her eyes. “You get that you don’t even like Pete at this point, right? He’s yesterday’s lunch. He is the soggy Styrofoam that once contained yesterday’s lunch. Throw him away.”
“Okay,” Tristan said.
“Okay? I was expecting much more fight. Great. Can we move on to my problems now?”
Tristan laughed. Once she was home—Laura’s friend had driven them, Tristan would pick up the Lexus in the morning—she went to the back deck to watch the stars. She resolved to call Pete the next morning.
Three days later, they still hadn’t spoken. With plans to drive back to Berkeley that Sunday, she hadn’t even texted him. Her failure just made her feel worse. It wasn’t that Pete was even bad. He just wasn’t...for her. Not the Tristan who was about to finish college. He was a relic, a walking photograph of a younger woman, one charmed by the tall boy’s comfort in his own skin. In high school, where they’d met, that had been a rare thing. By the end of college, it was as common in the Berkeley men as open shoes and stupid haircuts.
That’s what made her disinterest so hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t Laura. From the outside looking in, she and Pete were storybook. She’d been a sophomore in high school, he’d been a junior. She’d been his third, he’d been her second. They weren’t the prom king and queen, nor the high school couple you felt certain would wind up with eight kids together, but they just seemed well matched: equally handsome (weird to self-apply the term, but if she were being honest, it was true), equally competent—she in a career-woman way, he in a handy, sturdy way that would find work as a carpenter or ski instructor or manager of an a local auto mechanic.
Yet she no longer wanted that from a partner. She hadn’t wanted that for a long time. Still, even when she left for college while he stayed in town to work in one of the lodges in the mountains, she had remained faithful—and as far as she knew, so had he—for three and a half years.
And then Zeke. If Pete & Tristan were a story, she was ready for it to end.
She felt more guilty about not telling Pete about her drifting feelings for him than she did for cheating on him. In a way, that was worst of all, because the guilt only made it that much easier to keep putting off her confession. To wait on the chance, however slim, for Pete to hear about her indiscretion from someone besides herself. Or for Pete to get so frustrated with the growing distance between them that he’d break up with her. Put plainly, her reticence to speak was stupid and it was selfish.
And knowing that didn’t help one bit. She was frozen, stuck mid-stride, waiting for the world to rise to meet her feet.
* * *
In the mornings, she made her family breakfast, then retired to the deck overlooking the sloped back yard to read from her mom’s sci-fi collection, a down comforter cloaking her shoulders to nullify the mountain chill, a cup of coffee steaming on the granite end table. In the afternoons, she browsed the SF Bay Area Craigslist for music work, including unpaid internships; she figured her dad might spring for another six months of rent if she had a foot in the door. Proof of her dedication and work ethic. Not that she’d floated the idea of taking an internship to him. She hadn’t heard back from anyone yet, and didn’t particularly expect to. No sense descending into another foolish argument over something that wasn’t even on her radar.
She burned her afternoons in Redding driving around, either on family errands, or simply cruising the back roads. If she did snag a job in the next eight weeks, she might not see much in the way of forests for a while. Anyway, she just had to avoid Pete for another few days, and then there would once more be two hundred blessed miles between them.
When she got back from her
drives, she helped prep dinner, or acted as a living dummy for Alden to practice his kung fu on, which he did every day. He was a skinny little kid and she outweighed him by more than a few pounds, but he could unbalance her at will just by grabbing her wrist and dropping his weight in a sudden, foot-tromping jerk. Except when she resisted. Then he screwed up his baby-smooth face (which showed no sign of acne yet, though his sweat stank like a boy who’d begun puberty), yanked on her wrist, and told her she was cheating. She laughed and let him try again.
After that came dinner, and after dinner came TV or a movie, and soon enough it was time for bed. It was all pleasant enough, but she soon began to miss the rhythm of the city, the ability to go to the coffee shop at any time of day and find her friends there writing screenplays on their laptops or arguing about Lacan and Foucault. She no longer belonged here. To visit was nice, but to stay was wearying.
That Saturday, the day before she was scheduled to return, she asked Alden if he wouldn’t rather practice his kung fu at the park instead.
He dropped his gaze to the carpet. “Nah.”
“Come on. Fresh air. You can karate chop a pigeon.”
“It’s not karate.”
“You can kung fu chop a pigeon.”
He glanced at the front window. “They have salmonella.”
“Come on, it’ll be way more fun.” She squinted at him, then grinned. “Are you afraid of being seen?”
“No.”
“But you’re way good!”
He glanced up, a spark of pride in his eyes, then grew guarded again. “A true master of kung fu doesn’t engage in prideful displays.”
Tristan laughed. “Nobody’s going to see. And if you don’t come with, I’ll post the clips I’ve been taking of you on YouTube.”
His jaw dropped. “You’ve been filming me?”
“Only always.”
He ran to get his shoes. She drove them across the river and swung down Victor. It wasn’t much of a park—isolated pines, grass, bathrooms, the requisite gazebo—but it was a sunny day and the grounds were busier than she’d anticipated. A car followed her into the turn and parked down the lot. On the soccer field, a squad of eight-year-olds was holding a pickup game, turf flying from their sneakers. A couple about Tristan’s age was lodged in the tall grass, the girl’s head resting on the man’s lap. Tristan led Alden past a pair of middle school girls giggling at the couple from beneath the safety of a tree, then came to a stop at an isolated patch of grass on the north end of the park. Small white bugs fluttered clumsily from the grass.
Alden stared off at the girls. Tristan waved a hand in front of his face. “Well? Let’s get awesome.”
He scowled at her, then began his stretching process, an eight-part routine he claimed was traditional in China and included symbolic gestures like drawing a bow and pouring a bowl of water over one’s own head. To help him feel less like an idiot, Tristan joined him. By the end of the routine, she was ready to peel off her sweater and he was ready to begin his forms no matter who might be watching.
While he was punching, kicking, and mangling the air, Tristan gestured to the two middle school girls, who’d been watching them the last five minutes. They laughed behind their hands and conferred. Tristan gestured again. After another, lengthier conference, the pair walked across the grass and stopped in front of Alden, who quit his form mid palm strike and blushed furiously.
“What are you doing?” the dark-haired girl asked. “Karate?”
“Kung fu,” Alden mumbled.
“Like in the movies?”
“All the good ones,” Tristan said. She socked Alden on the shoulder. “Come on, don’t quit. They want to watch.”
“Yeah, that was cool,” said the other girl, a short-haired blond who hadn’t quite grown into her height. “I liked how you were twirling your wrist.”
Alden shot Tristan such a helpless look of embarrassment and wrath she burst out laughing. “You’ve done this a million times. Consider this the next step in your training—it’s time to step out of the temple.”
He froze, gazing toward her car with naked longing until Tristan feared he might actually make a run for it. Then he snapped his eyes forward, let out a long breath through his nostrils, and picked up exactly where he’d let off. The girls clapped. When he finished his form, they gave him a proper round of applause.
Alden gave her another look, then. One close to gratitude, at least as much as a thirteen-year-old can feel for his older sister. She winked.
“Do you know anything cool?” the dark-haired girl asked.
“Well, I know a pretty good trap,” he said. “Here, give me a slow punch at the chest, followed by one with your other hand.”
She punched. He intercepted. She struck with her other fist and he blocked again, tangling their arms. The blond girl laughed. “He’s so smooth!”
“You’re a tough lady to find,” a man called from behind.
Tristan whirled. “Pete? Why are you here?”
He grinned, gazing up at her from beneath his eyelashes, mock-shy. He had veiny arms she’d once admired and a goatee she’d always despised. After the last few minutes looming over the thirteen-year-olds, Pete made her feel very short.
“Hunting wild you,” he said.
“Wait, that’s not a joke, is it? You followed me.”
His grin contracted. “You don’t give me much choice. I been by your house three times. Where you been all week?”
Tristan barred her arms over her chest. “Busy.”
“Too busy to send a text? What’ve you been working on, a moon launch?”
“I’ve been trying to find a job. At graduation, I’d prefer not to step off the stage and straight into the gutter.”
Off to her side, Alden flipped headfirst into the grass. Her heart lurched. Before his head could smash into the grass and crack his spine, he bent his right arm over his upturned head, met the ground, and rolled forward. He popped up to his feet, dew streaking his back. The girls laughed.
Pete shook his head. “I haven’t seen you since Christmas. You never call. You text so little I got afraid your hippie friends convinced you literacy is the tool of the oppressor. I mean, what the hell?”
“I was going to call.”
“When? Once you were back at school? Safely removed from the picture?”
She clenched her teeth. “And following me to the park like a creep so you can yell at me when I’m trying to spend time with my brother—that really makes me want to call.”
Pete spread his arms as if readying to pin her to the grass. “Don’t you try and turn this around on me. I’m not the one running off like some damned bitchy gazelle, leaping from—”
“‘Bitchy gazelle’?”
“African deer, they’re always jumping—”
“That’s not the part I object to,” Tristan said.
“Well, if you don’t want to get called certain words, you shouldn’t act like one of them!” Pete smiled angrily at the mountains looking down on the town. “Look, you want to pretend everything’s fine, to know there’s a problem yet refuse to step up to it, then I will. Is there somebody else?”
She blinked. “Of course not. Somebody else? The whole problem is I don’t have time for one somebody right now. I’ve got graduation. A job hunt. Finding a place to stay. Does that sound like it leaves a lot of time for fooling around?”
To the side, the girls scooted away, faces upturned. Alden stood on a pine branch eight feet above the ground, clinging to the branch above him to steady himself.
Tristan’s blood froze. “Alden—”
Alden jumped headfirst at the ground. He bent his right arm over his head. His eyes went wide; an instant before he hit the grass, he jerked back his hand.
His head hit the ground with a crunch. His legs flopped flat. He went very still.
3
Shawn sat up on his mattress and grinned. “Did I shoot your cat?”
“Why does it smell like gunpowder in here?
” Ness said.
“Are you crazy?”
“You were mad at her for peeing on your bed.”
“So you admit it!”
Ness spun toward their mom. He fought to breathe. “He shot Volt. He shot her!”
She swayed back on her heels, frowning, eyes crinkled with suspicion. “Shawn, did you go and shoot Volt?”
Shawn snorted. “Mom, you really think I’m going to shoot a fucking cat?”
Relief flooded her face. She turned to Ness. “There you have it. Cat’s fine. I’m sure she’ll turn up in the morning.”
“He said he was going to do something to her!” Ness screeched. “Get him out of here! Call the police!”
“That’s what this is about,” Shawn said. “He wants me out of our room. You know how he makes stuff up.”
His mom lurched forward. “Calm down, Ness. You’re gonna have an attack.”
Ness stumbled away. Tears blurred his eyes. He was still wearing his coat and shoes from calling for Volt. He shoved the door open and ran into the night.
“Ness!”
Gravel ground under his heels. He headed straight up the road toward the top of the mountain. His breath burst from his mouth in hanging clouds. The stars burned like blind and angry eyes. Back at the trailer, his mom yelled at Shawn to follow him. Shawn whined, indistinct. Ness wanted to call out for Volt, but he couldn’t slow down. He had a two-minute head start by the time the trailer door banged from far down the hill.
“Ness!” Shawn hollered, voice echoing in the night. “Nestor!”
Ness sprinted harder. He reached the stands of trees that fringed the mountain’s upper reaches and paused there, leaning against one of the pines. Tacky sap stuck to his fingers. Shawn shouted again. Far downhill, footsteps crackled in the leaves. Ness burst up the slope. Minutes later, deep in the woods, he hunkered behind a tree, pulled his hood over his head, and fought to control his breathing.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 107