by Joy Preble
Only once we’ve unpacked the few belongings we’ve taken with us does the thought occur: I will never walk the beach at Santa Monica with my mother again. Of all the things that have been lost to me, of all the things like medical school that I might never achieve, this one somehow feels among the worst.
But I also know this: I will also never be my mother, at least not the bad parts, the piece of her that wanted to be taken care of so desperately she let it ruin her.
I remember what I told Max as we stood in the middle of nowhere, leaning against his truck and he tried to make me understand how worthless he felt. Did I mean the words I told him then? There is no way to know. But I think about them now anyway. How we are all made of stardust. From the ones that burned the brightest. They live on in us.
Destruction isn’t permanent. At least that’s what I tell myself. If it’s a lie, I’m good with it.
I will hold on to that, too.
Sometime later, Paris and I sit on the bed in our temporary room, the sun just barely rising outside, desert heat already warming the window. Maureen has unearthed half a leftover pie from her refrigerator. We’re eating chocolate cream with plastic forks.
Our voices are hoarse from talking, from telling each other the missing parts. We talk until there is nothing left to tell. Just us, this tiny room, and a piece of Heartbreak’s famous pie.
The truth, I think now, is like the ocean—always moving, rolling at us and then rushing away.
“You’re going to be everything that’s good,” my sister says in between delicate bites.
“I’m not,” I say, voice small.
“You are,” she insists, and I leave the words alone, sitting between us, as overly sweet as the pie. Her brightly colored nails, I see now, are chipping here and there.
“I came back for you,” I tell her then. “I would always come back for you.”
“I know you, Leonora,” Paris says, looking down and then at me. “Inside and out, right?”
She ruffles my dirty hair. Her gaze moves to the paper plate, and she smashes the last scrap of pie with her fork, cream filling oozing through the thin plastic tines.
When she looks at me again, she’s crying, tears dotting her lashes.
“Don’t,” I say.
So she doesn’t, just leans across the empty pie plate and pulls me into a hug.
“I kept waiting for you to say something had happened. But you wouldn’t. Not a word. So I kept telling myself I was wrong. That he was just a jerk, like that time—I bet you don’t even remember—on the Ferris wheel at that stupid Arizona State Fair. While Mom was waiting in that idiotic line to buy that pineapple freeze thing she had to have. When he rocked the damn car over and over just to scare us or whatever.”
“I remember,” I say.
She hugs me again, a quick squeeze of my shoulders. I think briefly of Max, then remind myself that he was just temporary and concentrate on the way my sister’s two lower front teeth overlap just the tiniest bit.
Would she have really shot Tommy? What then? If Max hadn’t been there, would I have let her? I don’t believe I would—even if inside I wished it. But I think about it anyway: Is that why I called her when we were nearing Vegas? Not that I had known about Maureen’s gun then. Only that my sister—who had created castles and princes with blue hair and crazy games to make the world bearable—would do something. Anything.
While all I could do was run.
That is part of my truth as well.
I understand now what my sister has done to save me: sent me on the road in order to keep me safe. I know what the prize was in this crazy scavenger hunt. Me. Like those faces from the pictures in that red wallet, my sister, Paris, believed she was taking the ugly pieces of my life and turning them into a pretty riddle for me to solve. That is all that matters.
“What about Toby?” I ask her. “You wrote his name on that Hollywood postcard.”
My sister scrunches her nose. “Who would date a boy named Toby?”
I shake my head. Decide not to pursue this remarkable piece of my sister’s logic.
“And Max?” My heart contracts as I say his name.
“Max was a last-minute addition.” Paris hesitates, twisting her ponytail around one long finger.
We both contemplate the wonder of that. And then, like so many things, I choose to let it go. Like the image of Max Sullivan in my head, hands on the wheel, driving us through the desert. Before we came back. Before he knew the truth about me.
I did not know until now that you could grieve the loss of something before you really had it. A Max-shaped hole in my heart.
“Plus he had nice eyes,” my sister reminds me, and I can see she really means it.
Paris is crying again, tears welling and then spilling over. “I’m so sorry, Leo.”
“Don’t,” I say, reaching up a hand.
We hold each other tight—two sisters tucked safe as treasures in the borrowed bedroom of an employee of the Heartbreak Hotel Diner. Through the thin walls, I hear the shower and Maureen singing “Suspicious Minds,” one of Elvis’s favorites.
I will not mourn the loss of Max Sullivan any more than the other things I have lost. That will be my victory.
Max, who I trusted because if a random stranger was good, then so was I. This was what I told myself as we raced through Vegas and then drove through the night.
“You’re going to see Max again, right?” Paris whispers in my ear. My sister is still a fan of a happy ending.
We leave it there for now.
TWENTY-ONE
TWO WEEKS BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS AGAIN IN LATE AUGUST, MAXWELL Sullivan appears as I am constructing a yogurt parfait for a customer at Yogiberry. I have just swirled the chocolate-and-vanilla combo into the tall plastic cup and am adding mixed nuts when he walks in the door and stands at the counter, in front of the topping choices.
My heart skips a beat, then dances—salsa style.
“You talking to me yet?” he asks.
He has called every day, his messages piling up, unanswered.
I shrug, go back to finishing the parfait.
Max folds himself into an orange plastic seat at a table by the window. He sits and watches me work.
I don’t tell him to leave, but I don’t tell him anything else, either. I wring my hands on my apron, below the counter where he can’t see.
He comes back the next day. And the next. I study his expression, finding nothing, but still I know. It isn’t the same now. How could it be? I am not the same. I never was.
But he keeps coming back. That has to mean something.
“So,” I say to him on the third day, voice casual, pulse skyrocketing. I am arranging blueberries into a cup of peanut butter yogurt. “Did you quit your job? Get fired? Just enjoy stalking me?”
But I’m smiling by day three and when Max stands and walks over, I smile some more even though I don’t know what to make of Max, who has now watched me serve yogurt for three days in a row and has even bought a raspberry-and-lemon combo, but only because my douche of a manager kept giving him dirty looks and I still need this job.
“You changed your hair,” he says, eyes firm on mine. “I like it.” He means the new red streak.
“Purple is so yesterday,” I say, tucking a round, thin hazelnut cookie behind the peak of yogurt and blueberries like a fan.
“I want to be with you, Leo Leonora,” Max says.
My heart thunders in my chest. I spritz whipped cream on the peanut butter yogurt.
“Leo,” Max says. Max Sullivan still enjoys saying my name. “You can’t keep not talking to me.”
I hand the peanut butter yogurt to the little girl who’s waiting, and then, wiping my hands on my pink Yogiberry apron, walk around from the counter.
Max and I stand facing each other but not touching.
What does he see now that he knows the truth? Does he see me? Do I want him to? Telling the truth means keeping the truth. Some days it hurts more than I can
bear.
Some days—today—I fashion frozen yogurt desserts. It is something, anyway.
“You don’t have to do this,” I tell him. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“Leo,” Max says. “It’s not about that. It’s about you and me.”
“There is no you and me, Max.”
He says, “But there could be.”
I listen carefully to his voice, his words threading my heart, my eyes studying his face for hints.
But he says again, “There could be,” and adds, “Leo.”
It is both my name and the possibility that crack my frozen heart and set it free, bouncing around the yogurt spigots and skating through the topping choices.
We step toward each other, close and then closer, and then right there in Yogiberry we are together, arms wrapping around each other, holding tight. I bury my face against his collarbone, blushing. He smells like lemons and sunshine and warm skin. Someone applauds—possibly the girl with the peanut butter yogurt—but I don’t see because Max dips his head and kisses me, soft lips pressing hard against mine.
Tiny specks of nerves bubble, but I rest my hands against the broad and muscled expanse of his back and I am not afraid.
“You kept coming back,” I say against his mouth.
“Stardust,” he says. “Like you told me.”
And then I am crying and kissing him at the same time. How do I explain what Max makes me feel? That there is something hopeful and good in the world. That I am not broken. I want this moment to last forever—except for the Yogiberry shirt and apron. Maybe it will.
A pattering sound at the windows finally pulls me from Max’s lips. The sky rumbles. Tiny drops and then bigger, steam rising from the black parking lot asphalt. The storm fades as quickly as it appears, but here in the desert, just for a moment, it’s finally raining.
TWENTY-TWO
THE NEXT DAY, SITTING TOGETHER AT THE HEARTBREAK, WATCHING Maureen tote pie and Paris fake politeness to the various customers she’s escorting to their tables, Max asks if I will go on another road trip. This time it is for him.
“I need to go to Texas,” he tells me. “I want to see my family. I need to set things right.”
He does not say Ashley Pennington’s name, but I know he means her, too, and this is okay. Like patting Saint Monica’s feet even if there is no hope that she can grant what your heart desires, there are just some things that need doing.
“Not for good,” he tells me. “I’m not done with Vegas quite yet.”
I don’t push for more than that.
Instead I tell him that I will come with him, but on one condition—that he helps me study some more for that SAT retake. They’ve let me reschedule for the September one.
“That’s it?” he asks, grinning.
“You’re good with probability,” I say, not wanting to make a big deal of it.
His smile amps up the wattage. I am almost blinded by it. In a good way.
“If that’s what you want,” he says, giving in.
I confirm that it is.
Of course we both know nothing is easy—not everyone gets a different life from what they have.
“I got into Arizona State,” I tell him casually, like it, too, is no big deal. “They have rolling admission. And a good premed program.” Then I tell him that I’m working on my Stanford application.
He drags me from the booth, lifts me, and swings me around the slick tiled floor until I’m giddy with laughter. Elvis and Priscilla are probably laughing, too.
Together, we twirl and twirl. I think of Paris and that day she danced on the Promenade. Will it last—me and Max? I have no earthly idea. But I dance with him now anyway, spin until we are both breathless and dizzy.
“One more thing,” I say when finally he sets me down. “For the road trip.”
Max looks at me, waiting, curious.
“Paris, Texas,” I tell him. “I don’t see how we can avoid it. I mean, it seems only fitting, right?”
Max shakes his head. But in the end, he agrees.
Sitting in the spare bedroom at Maureen’s, Max and I plot out our course.
We decide that we will stay overnight in Amarillo and then drive on from there. “Two rooms,” I say, giving myself options.
“Two rooms,” Max agrees.
And then it will be on to Paris and after that, we’ll head south to Houston.
I point to the map on Max’s laptop monitor, touch my finger to the tiny black dot of a city that shares my sister’s name.
I know this doesn’t change things. But the grief, a heavy stone, lifts just a little.
TWENTY-THREE
SO WE HEAD EAST. I NAVIGATE US ACROSS NEVADA INTO ARIZONA, skirting near the Grand Canyon, north of Phoenix, where we’ll stop on the way back so I can see ASU, then climbing altitude toward Flagstaff, seven thousand feet up, far from the desert. A brief stop in Winslow—I sing Max an old Eagles song because it’s in the lyrics. We drive to my iPod playlists this time, but I’ve tried to be thematic. Max does not complain. We head into New Mexico, stopping for gas in Gallup, where we gallop around the gas pumps like maniacs on imaginary horses in a very lame play on words, and then continue on to Texas.
In Amarillo, it is very late when we pull in, only one room available, not two. “We can keep driving,” Max says. “Or go find that Cadillac Ranch place. Buncha Caddies buried nose down. You have to see it, Leo.”
But I tell him it is okay. My heart bumps around and I tell it to calm down.
The motel has a Texas-shaped sink. This prompts a debate about whether all states have this. If we drove to a Motel 6 in Des Moines, would the sinks be shaped like Iowa? The room smells funky, like the AC is leaking somewhere even though everything looks dry.
We lie on the bed, two travelers, and try to sleep.
“You’re beautiful,” Max whispers more than once, stroking my hair, my face.
And when this makes me cry, both from sadness and fury, he holds me gently and tells me that it will be okay even though we both know that it won’t—not for a long time and maybe not ever.
Max falls asleep long before I do. I listen to his slow and even breathing. Once, I see him smile in his sleep, a small curving of his lips. Something like happiness fills me. He stirs, eyes fluttering open. “I can sleep on the floor,” he says, almost reflexively.
“You’re fine,” I say.
And although it is a lie of sorts, at least for now, so am I.
In the morning we dip south through Wichita Falls, then detouring past Dallas so I can say I’ve been there, listening to my endless supply of Texas songs—“So many,” I tell Max, who responds by singing “Deep in the Heart of Texas” in a loud, off-key bellow—and then up to Paris, passing little towns and big towns and huge swaths of nothing but land and trees and grass and heat.
And then suddenly, there it is as we bounce down a road off the main drag. The Eiffel Tower of Paris, Texas. Yet another copy of the real thing, a whole lot shorter, but tall enough. Complete with a ridiculous and massive red cowboy hat perched on top. Above it, the sky—a piercing, cloudless blue.
I am scared. But a plan is a plan. There is no more Tommy Davis rocking the car of the Ferris wheel. There is only me. I tell myself that I am moving forward.
We step out of the truck and the wall of heat hits us. Impossibly, it is hotter in Texas than even Vegas. I hop from one foot to the other because I have forgotten to put my shoes back on and the cement path is scorching under my feet.
Max Sullivan lifts me up and carries me the rest of the way to the fake Eiffel Tower.
He settles me safely on the cooler grass and goes back for my shoes.
When he has slipped them onto my feet, we disobey the warning sign and climb. No one runs out from the community center to stop us. Our eyes meet for a short moment, and then we begin. Max goes first. I follow.
Three very tall rungs up, I freeze, panicked.
“I can’t,” I say through clenched teeth.
> I stand very still, perched on the metal rung, looking at Max’s legs above me. The world reduces to this moment: the beating sun. This idiotic tower with its cowboy hat. The existence of a Paris devoid of anything French. Another road trip with an unknown ending.
Max waits me out. Reminds me to breathe. I think of that day at the Stratosphere. How he held me and breathed with me and for a few small seconds made me believe that everything would work out.
Like his physics hero Albert Einstein, who once famously observed, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
“Just do what I do,” Max says. “It will be okay.”
I don’t believe that, not exactly, but as he also reminds me, we’re already three rungs up. It’s hotter than hell out here. We might as well keep climbing.
I tighten my grip, the sweltering Texas air thick as soup in my nostrils. My gaze fixes on a clump of trees in the distance. A tiny breeze, barely more than a flutter, tickles the back of my neck.
Out on the road beyond the trees, a pickup truck lumbers by, dust rising in its wake.
“Ready,” I say finally, and once more, we start to climb.
It’s a messy business—angled rods of metal in between the straighter rungs—and it takes a very long time to shimmy this way and that, and more than once I say I’m giving up but I don’t. Eventually, we haul ourselves to a tiny balcony not quite at the top but close enough and just underneath the red cowboy hat. We stand there, out of breath and sweating profusely in the heat.
“We made it, Leo Leonora,” Max says.
“That we did,” I agree. I steady myself and look around at the whole lot of nothing one can see from up here.
Max looks too, with those ordinary gray eyes that maybe aren’t so ordinary after all. Max, who had asked me if I had ever failed big, thinking he was the only one, that his mistakes were worse than anything horrible I could imagine.
In that moment, I understand that it hasn’t been the height I’m afraid of, but only the possibility of falling.