Wherever Nina Lies

by Lynn Weingarten

  My mouth drops open. I cannot speak.

  “I don’t want to do it,” Sean says. He stomps his foot on the ground. “I mean, you know that, right? I’ll do you here first so you don’t have to watch, and then head off to San Francisco on my own after you’re…”

  “Are you talking about…” My voice is just a whisper now. “…killing me?”

  Sean looks down at the floor. “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds so harsh.” Sean smiles this funny little smile. And then he bursts into tears. He sobs in ragged gasps, his shoulders shaking. And I just watch him. He picks his head back up; he wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand. “This is what I have to do now. I wish I had a choice…”

  “But you do!” I say. “You always have other choices!”

  “No,” Sean says. He waves the gun back and forth like an extension of his finger. “I could never just let you go.” He’s shaking his head. “You’d tell people and then I’d never be able to make things right.” Sean is pointing the gun straight at me. He stands up and steps back. “And even if you didn’t, you don’t love me anymore and you think I’m some monster. And I just couldn’t live knowing that you think such terrible things about me. I couldn’t stand it.” His arm is shaking. Clear fluid is running out of his eyes, his nose. I strain against the belt, but it’s tied too tightly. I can’t move. I stare at the gun. I cannot believe this is real. I cannot believe this is real.

  I cannot believe it ends like this.

  “I have to just get this over with.” His voice is calmer now. He’s talking to himself. “I just have to do it and get it over with.” He walks forward, wraps his arms around my shoulders, and squeezes me tight. I can feel his heart pounding. “Just please,” he whispers. “Keep your eyes closed, okay?”

  Ten seconds left on earth. He lets go, kisses me on the top of the head, squeezes me again, hard. Five seconds.

  “Sean, wait!”

  Four seconds.

  “I can’t.”

  Three seconds.

  “WAIT!”

  Two seconds.

  “I’m really sorry, sweetie.”

  Sean takes a deep breath. He cocks the trigger.

  One second.

  “Close your eyes,” he says.

  Thirty-eight

  "SEAN, I LOVE YOU!"

  Sean freezes, his arm stuck straight out in front of him. He blinks.

  “What? ”

  My whole body is shaking. “Sean, don’t kill me,” I shout. “I love you! Do whatever you want to Nina. I don’t care! I don’t care, I only care about you.”

  Something flickers across his face.

  “You’re just saying that,” he says, “to get me to let you go.” But he wants to believe me, I can tell he wants to believe me.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t want you to let me go! I want to be with you.”

  “Then why…then why were you acting like that? Why were you looking at me like that before?”

  “I was jealous! When I saw those letters, it made me feel sick! Because I was jealous and I wanted you to be able to love me that much.”

  Sean frowns. “But why did you go into my bag then?”

  “Because I love you!” I say. “Isn’t that obvious? I was feeling insecure.” I pause. “And I was worried that maybe that person who calls you all the time and hangs up really is another girl and just the idea of it makes me want to vomit and I just want you all to myself! I wanted to make sure there was no one else!”

  And Sean is staring at me, wrestling within himself. I can see it on his face.

  I go on. “I don’t care about Nina or your brother or anyone! I understand why you did what you did! It was only because you’re so passionate, because you really know how to love people. Because you really love with all your heart! So I don’t care what you do to Nina because I love you and that means you’re my family now. And I am your family, and we don’t need anyone else.”

  Sean leans forward.

  “You really love me?” He sounds so desperate.

  “More than anyone I’ve ever known.”

  He lowers the gun and leans in even closer. Our foreheads are touching.

  “I’ll still need to go to San Francisco and take care of Nina, you understand that, right? I don’t think I’ll be able to move on until I do. It’s not fair for her to be alive when he isn’t. And I won’t be able to go on and live a normal life until everything is even. Until I make it even.” He sounds so calm now, like he could be talking about anything.

  “Of course,” I say. “She deserves it. Whatever happens to her, she brought it on herself.”

  He leans back. “So you’ll come with me? You’ll help me find her?”

  I nod. “I’ll go anywhere you want,” I say.

  “You think she’ll still be there?”

  “Oh yes,” I say, and then in my loudest voice, “She’s definitely still in San Francisco. And I know just where to start looking for her when we get there, too. Right on Haight Street. We’ll find a clue as to where she is, right on Haight Street. So we’ll be there in about twelve hours, I guess. Or maybe thirteen. And we’ll go right there to Haight Street.”

  Sean leans back. He’s not crying anymore, his eyes look huge, oddly beautiful, in that way sick things can be.

  He stares at me. I stare back.

  This is my last and only hope. I slow my breathing. Inside I am screaming, but my face is calm. I just stare into his eyes, trying to radiate love.

  Time creeps by. One minute. Two minutes. I don’t even blink.

  Finally, Sean lets out a huge sigh and his mouth curls into a strangely sweet smile. For a moment he looks about ten years old. “I love you more than I ever loved her,” Sean says. “You don’t have anything to worry about. That was just a fantasy, but this…” His lips are over mine, his breath is hot, his teeth knocking against me. It takes everything I have in me not to gag. He pulls back and strokes the side of my face with the gun. “…this is real.”

  Thirty-nine

  I shift in my seat and press my face against the glass, gazing out at the soft blue arc of the sky stretching for miles in every direction. We’re two hours closer to San Francisco on a mostly empty highway, driving fast.

  Sean reaches down and takes his extra-large iced coffee out of the cupholder. His third of the trip so far. “I was supposed to go to San Francisco once, a long time ago,” he says. His voice is soft and gentle, like he’s telling me a bedtime story. “My mom was going to take me, but we never quite made it there.” He holds the straw up to my mouth, offering me a sip because my hands are duct taped behind my back. I shake my head. “It’s kind of a funny story actually.” He raises the straw to his own lips and sucks. “So we were staying at my family’s house in Big Sur. This was when it was just me and my dad and my actual mom. My mom didn’t like to ski but my dad was out skiing every day, and I guess my mom was getting bored and lonely or maybe she was just mad at my dad, I don’t know. But one night at like three in the morning she just woke me up and told me we were going on vacation, just her and me. She told me to get in the car because she’d already packed and everything and we needed to leave before traffic got bad. So, I mean, I was five at the time so I didn’t think much of it, other than that it sounded fun, so I just got into the car in my pajamas with my pillow and my blanket. After she started driving, she told me she had friends in San Francisco and that we should go and visit them because she hadn’t seen them in twenty-five years and she wanted to show them how cute I was. So we drove along for a while, stopped at an all-night mini-mart for ice cream sandwiches and then kept driving. I don’t remember anything else after that except at some point later we were surrounded by about fifteen cop cars with their sirens and lights on. Turns out my mom had never mentioned her plan to my dad, so when he woke up the next morning and found the house empty, he freaked. She hadn’t been taking her medication for a couple of weeks so she ended up back in the hospital for a while after that, and then about nine months
after that she went away for good. My favorite part of the story, though, is that later the maid was unpacking the bags my mom had put in the trunk and you’ll never guess what was in them.” He pauses. “Try and guess.”

  “Clothes?” I say.

  “For me she’d packed nothing but this tiny winter jacket that I’d worn when I was about two, a bunch of action figures and a bunch of mini juice boxes. And for herself all she brought was,” Sean starts laughing then. Laughing so hard he has to stop and take a breath. “A bag of…floor-length…black-tie…gowns!” Tears are filling his eyes, he’s laughing so hard. “These custom-made designer gowns, probably worth a total of about a hundred thousand dollars.” He reaches down for his coffee and takes another sip, hiccups, and wipes the tears off his cheeks. He takes a deep breath. “In my dad’s version of the story, when the police finally found us, I was curled up in the backseat of the car, scared out of my mind, covered in ice cream. But that’s just not how I remember it. I think it’s probably my very favorite memory of my mom actually.” Sean turns toward me and smiles. “I guess we didn’t pack that well, either, come to think of it. But anything we need we can get while we’re there, since I figure we’ll want to go…Hey, you know what we should do? We should go on a big shopping trip after…” Sean stops then, reaches down for his coffee. He turns toward me and smiles this sweet sheepish smile, like he’s just slightly embarrassed by what we’re on the way to do.

  The sun is high up in the sky now and the road is filled with other cars. We are not talking anymore, just driving. Sean has one hand on my knee, as though to make sure I’m still there, to keep me from floating away.

  They say that no matter what life throws at you, there’s always a lesson to be learned, and I sure have learned some important things in the last eight hours while we’ve been on the road, such as exactly what it feels like to spend the better part of a day sitting in a Volvo with your wrists taped together, and that I am, as it turns out, capable of pulling my pants up and down that way, too, to go to the bathroom. Also, I learned that I am probably the most talented actress the world has ever known, too bad my best and only performance is taking place in a car in front of an audience of one.

  The sun is setting now. Sean pulls over on a long stretch of highway surrounded on either side by giant fields of waist-high grass that no one has touched for years. “I’ll be right back,” he says. He gets out of the car, walks fifty feet into the middle of the field, and holds the gun straight up over his head. There’s a loud CRACK. It echoes. A delicate whisper of smoke curls from the barrel of the gun up toward the sky. Sean walks back to the car, gets in, and shuts the door.

  “I just wanted to check,” he says, “that it would work.”

  Sean starts the car again. We will be there soon.

  I’m staring out the window at the early evening sky, at the swooping red cables of the Golden Gate Bridge lit by a thousand tiny lights and the sparkling ocean beyond it. It looks like a postcard that we just so happen to be a part of.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Sean says, the tension is back in his voice. Maybe it’s the nine extra-large iced coffees. Maybe it’s just that what he’s about to do is finally sinking in. “Haight Street?” Sean says. “That’s where you said you think we’ll…” Sean stops, for the last twelve hours he hasn’t, not once, actually directly referred to what we’ve come here to do. “That’s where you think we should go?” He turns toward me.

  My organs, my bones, everything inside me, has dissolved into a pool of molten hot liquid panic. But I smile calmly. “Oh yes,” I say. “Haight Street, I’m sure of it.”

  Sean reaches into his pocket, then behind him into his seat, then leans down and sticks his hand between the seat and the door.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yeaaaah,” Sean says slowly. “I’m just trying to find my phone and I’m not sure where it is.”

  “How weird,” I say. “I hope you didn’t leave it back at the motel.”

  “Me, too,” Sean says. “I wonder what happened to it?”

  I shrug. “I guess it’s just a mystery.” I close my eyes and picture that phone, exactly where I left it. And I have to turn my face toward the window because at this moment it is impossible for me not to smile.

  Forty

  To everyone else out here we’re just another young couple enjoying an evening stroll on Haight Street. No one can see the loaded gun shoved down the front of Sean’s jeans. And the red marks on my wrists where the duct tape was ripped off. Or the fact that Sean is crushing my fingers with his own, as though to keep me from running, as though he never plans on letting go.

  A girl in a tiny plaid skirt and fishnets walks past us and smiles at Sean. When she gets a few feet away she turns around and looks back. Is this…? Nope, just some girl who thinks he’s hot. She sees what most people see when they look at him, just a seventeen-year-old kid, with f loppy skateboarder hair and a heartbreakingly beautiful face. I used to see him like that, too.

  “Whatcha looking at?” Sean asks. His hair falls over one eye and he pushes it away, anxiously.

  “I’m just glad we’re here is all,” I say.

  He tries to smile but he’s too nervous. His teeth are chattering. “Me, too,” he says.

  We keep walking up the steep hill—we pass a fancy home goods store, a store that sells handblown glass bongs, a tapas restaurant, a place with psychedelic posters stuck up in the window.

  We keep going. Sean squeezes my hand again. I can feel his heart beating through his fingers. Or maybe that’s my own.

  Everything we pass seems somehow meaningful. A man in a pair of too-yellow pants walks by, struggling with grocery bags filled with too much fruit. A girl in a maroon hooded sweatshirt is very deliberately looking for something in her pocket. A man drops a bottle of water and the water splashes on his shoes. He looks up, we make eye contact for just a second. He looks away. Two men in tuxedos are walking arm in arm.

  “Hey, dude, can you spare a cigarette?” We turn to the right, look down. There’s a girl and a guy sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk behind a cardboard box with a few coins inside, and Why Lie? We Want Beer! written on it in pencil. The girl has short bleach-blonde hair and a steel bull-ring through her nose. “Or some change?”

  “Sorry,” I say. I look at her again…is she? No. She’s not even looking at us anymore. Sean and I keep walking.

  Finally we reach the top of the hill, the street ends at the entrance to Golden Gate Park. There’s a grassy area in the front, and behind it a paved pathway winding back. A young couple is leaning against a brick wall kissing. Three guys are kicking around a Hacky Sack. A half-dozen people are sitting in a circle, drinking out of paper bags, listening to a girl playing guitar. Sean gasps suddenly, he grabs my upper arm, squeezes it.

  “Ellie,” he whispers. “Ellie.” I can feel his hand shaking. He motions toward a little group standing just a few feet away, a girl with long dark hair, a big guy with red hair, a smaller guy with blond hair, and a girl with a blonde pixie cut. They’re all looking around, like they’re waiting for someone. The girl with the long dark hair is smoking a cigarette. The big guy glances at his watch.

  And all of them are wearing identical T-shirts, white V-necks with a graphic drawn in the center. A sweep of a jawline, the arch of an eyebrow, the crescent of a crooked smile.

  It’s a face: mine.

  Sean leans in close. “Bingo,” he whispers.

  We walk forward. The girl with the long dark hair takes a final drag of her cigarette, tosses the butt on the ground, and grinds it out with the heel of her boot. She watches us approach.

  “Hey,” Sean says. “I really like your shirt.”

  “Yeah?” The girl tips her head to one side. She has giant eyes rimmed in gold eyeliner. Her friends are clumped together behind her. The blonde girl behind her is staring at me. Our eyes meet. She holds my gaze a second too long.

  “Yeah,” Sean says. “It
’s really fucking cool.”

  “Thanks.” The dark-haired girl grins. “This local artist makes them.”

  The big guy steps forward. He’s about six-five, with giant arm muscles bulging under the thin white fabric of his T-shirt, which is almost exactly the same as hers, except my face is a little distorted where it’s stretched across his massive chest. “We each got one.”

  “Awesome,” Sean says, nodding. “Really cool.” He pauses. “You don’t happen to know where I might find the person who made the shirts, do you? We’re from out of town and these would be great to bring back home.”

  “I do indeed,” the guy says. He turns around. He points to his back over his shoulder.

  NINA WRIGLEY DESIGNS:

  Custom-Made Hand-drawn T-shirts.

  1414 Avery Square, San Francisco, CA

  “She sells them out of her apartment,” the guy says. “You can just go there right now, I bet she’ll be there.”

  “Thanks, man,” Sean says. He squeezes my hand. “Can you tell me how to get there?”

  The guy glances at me, and then back to Sean. “I’ll do you one better, I’ll take you there myself.”

  Sean starts shaking his head. “Nah, that’s okay, man. You don’t need to do that.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” the guy says. “Let me!”

  “No, seriously, you can’t,” Sean says. “I mean…we’re not going to go tonight. We’ll just probably go tomorrow or the next day or something.”

  “Okay,” the guy says, slowly. “Okay. Okay.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out a little notepad and a pen. He starts scribbling down the directions. Sean is watching the guy. The girl behind him is still watching me. When our eyes meet again something flickers across her face. The guy hands the directions to Sean.

  “Cool,” says Sean. “Thank you.”

  “No problem,” the guy says.