A Ticket to Ride

by Paula McLain

  “People fear their bodies,” Holly told Raymond. “And it makes sense, right? The body is a powerful organism.”

  She then went on to describe the elaborate methods of desensitization, one of which required a couple to eat dinner, sit around and watch TV, do the laundry, etc., while completely naked. But Raymond didn’t want to eat a pork chop naked and he didn’t want to talk about his organism with Holly or anyone. Also, he was more than a little distracted by Leon’s Evel Knievel impression. As the road curved and flipped back on itself, Leon dipped the bike nearly parallel to the asphalt.

  “He’s going to kill them both on that thing,” Holly said, suddenly looking up.

  This was one of the things Raymond was thinking too. His stomach clenched each time Leon accelerated out of a hairpin turn, but unless he was faking it, Leon looked pretty competent. And also like he was having a fantastic time. The bike was black and low-slung and studded with chrome. Suzette’s hair pinwheeled wildly as she gripped Leon’s waist, like an advertisement for beauty and freedom. Raymond, on the other hand, was in the particular hell of being trapped in a car with a woman he wasn’t interested in, not even for sex.

  They stopped for fish and chips in Stinson Beach, and then were back on the road again, heading farther up switchbacking Highway 1, the road rocking under them like a crazy cradle. On one side a hill pitched up steeply, yellow folds and tucks studded with FALLING ROCKS signs. On the other, a dizzying drop into froth and foam. The water looked black from this distance and Raymond blinked, thinking he saw the pearly tine of a shark fin in the waves. He turned back to the road, combed his eyebrows with his thumb, tried not to count the minutes, while next to him, Holly expertly rolled a cigarette. Her tongue occupied with licking it sealed, she was still somehow able to begin telling Raymond her thoughts on self-actualization. Her particular talent in life, she believed, was helping others locate and realize their talents. She could help Raymond, she said, free of charge.

  He shook his head, but she persisted. “What made you happiest as a child?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged.

  “Think about it. What were you good at, sports? Racing Matchbox cars? Drawing?”

  “I don’t remember being good at anything,” he said. “I didn’t have time for sports, we didn’t have money for a lot of toys. And I was busy a lot, taking care of Suzette.”

  “Well what about that? Would you say you were good at being a big brother?”

  “Not particularly,” he lied.

  “Well, what about now? What makes you happiest now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “Maybe I’m not such a happy guy.”

  Holly sighed compassionately, put on a tender face. “Listen, if you don’t want to open up to me, I can understand that. That’s okay.” But then she didn’t let up. She went on and on about the inner being, the life of the spirit, our innate desire to seek fulfillment, until Raymond thought he might scream. Maybe there was something very wrong with him, but did people—other than lunatics like Holly—really sit around and think about their inner being?

  By late afternoon, when they had reached the Point Reyes peninsula, Raymond was exhausted by talking, by thinking, and was relieved to give his attention solely to following Leon up a potholed dirt road that ran between dairy farms, where fat, happy cows munched tufts of green green grass. There were no fences anywhere, just cattle gates that made a rumbling sound under the car’s tires. After about twenty minutes, they reached land’s end, a small parking lot at the edge of a promontory. Several other cars were in the lot, tourists there to see the lighthouse, which lay at the end of hundreds of descending gray concrete stairs.

  The four shared a joint in Raymond’s car, and then walked down the steps. At the bottom, you could put a dime in a viewer and see the Farralon Islands, an endless swath of gray, choppy water, and possibly a whale. There were signs posted at the ranger station, saying that whale migration ended in May, but occasionally rogue males that had strayed from their pods could be spotted, as well as lone mothers with calves. Suzette was intent on seeing a whale. This surprised Raymond—she had never been such a nature lover—but he humored her anyway, feeding her dimes so she could stay locked to the viewer, her skirt flapping wildly against the fencing, long after Holly and Leon had wandered away bored. As he waited, he found himself thinking, oddly, about some of the things Holly was saying in the car. When he was finally able to drag Suzette away and back up the stairs toward the parking lot, he said, “Your friend Holly’s a real piece of work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “she just talks a lot of bullshit. Intimacy. Trust issues. She wanted to know what made me happy.” He laughed.

  “And that makes her weird? If you can’t talk about that stuff maybe you’re the piece of work, Ray.”

  “Oh yeah?” He made a small huffing noise, and then put on his best impression of Holly’s “concerned woman” voice. “So what made you happiest when you were a child?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, playing along, but then she continued. “Getting my hair cut. Swimming on a really hot day. The animals. Remember that sheep with the one blue eye?”

  At first Raymond thought she was kidding, making up pat answers as part of a game they were playing, but when he looked at her face, he saw she was serious. He didn’t know why he found her happy memories so unlikely. They were typical, but he had never seen her as someone who could be soothed by small pleasures. She needed drama. Like an unfolding soap opera, she was all peaks and valleys, tension and release.

  At the top of the long flight of steps, they stopped to catch their breath. “Did you read this?” Suzette asked. She pointed to the sign Raymond leaned against and read some of it aloud—about how the last lighthouse keeper had lived there for twenty-five years with his wife alone, no children, no diversions but for storms. “It says she tried to keep a garden, but the wind kept blowing it away. Doesn’t that make you want to cry?”

  “So, you’re saying you don’t want to be a lighthouse keeper’s wife?” Raymond asked, trying to keep things breezy. He knew from Suzette’s eyes and the tone of her voice that her thoughts and mood could easily take a downward spiral. One of the downsides of that “overactive imagination,” as Berna called it.

  “I guess I’d like to be someone’s wife, someday,” she said. “Have a family, do that whole thing. Do you think anyone will have me?”

  Raymond felt so irritated, suddenly, by her ridiculous optimism, the way she could blot out anything about her life that she couldn’t face, he didn’t even try to answer her. And his silence wasn’t lost on Suzette. She drew her eyebrows together in a hurt way, then looked out into the waves. When Raymond began walking again, she followed silently, not picking a fight, not pressing the issue. And still he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was carrying her back to the car, dragging her like a leaden balloon.

  That night, after pitching their tents and drinking dinner at a bar in Inverness, Raymond and Leon walked to the cliff’s edge, took a piss out into the black. Below them the waves made a percussive hissing against the rocks. From farther off, sea lions barked in a call and response. It had gotten cold.

  “Didn’t I tell you this would be good?” Leon slurred.

  “You did, Lee.” It was good to be out of the city, out of the apartment, but Raymond couldn’t escape the confines of his own head long enough to enjoy it, even for the night.

  There were two tents for two couples, ostensibly. Not wanting to give Holly anything that could be interpreted as encouragement, Raymond went to bed early, leaving the other three sitting out by the fire. He climbed into his tent and pulled on another sweater. He zipped his windbreaker up to his chin and settled his head in the crook of his arm. When dreams came, they were of sea lions swimming along a fault line, feeding on fish kicked up by tremors. He woke in the dark with a clear thought of Suzette, and a question: Was he most happy when she was unhappy? Did that make him f
eel whole somehow? And would they go on this way, spinning miserably on each other, neither really getting anywhere or making any kind of sustainable life?

  Raymond’s sleeping bag lay heavily on his chest, smelling of campfire smoke and something older, muskier. He felt enormously alone. As if he had conjured her with his thinking, Suzette climbed into the dark tent and curled against him, just like when they were kids. He could feel her shudder and press more tightly against him, as if to get warm. And then her damp nose (she’d been crying?) found the back of his neck.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured wetly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “Hush, now. It’s okay. You’re all right.” He turned in his bag so he could put his arms around his sister’s shoulders, guiding her face into his chest. “You’re all right,” he said again.

  “I don’t know what to do, Ray,” she said quietly against his body, and he was reminded of her panicked call from Oxnard.

  “We’ll figure it out, sweetie. We always do.” He slid out of his sleeping bag and knelt to wrap her in it like a thick papoose. Even in the dark he could see her pupils were blown. She was stoned out of her mind. Who knew what Leon had slipped her by the fire.

  “I should have gone to see Benny when we were home,” she said. “I should have told him about the baby. I owe him that at least.”

  For a moment Raymond wondered whether Suzette was delusional, whatever drugs were in her system flipping years on her like a tide. Maybe she was nineteen again, in the time just before Jamie was born—heavy regret or shame tugging her back. “What do you mean, honey? Jamie? You should have told Benny about Jamie?”

  “No.” She looked at him strangely then. Later, he would find himself trying to name it, what he saw in her eyes at that moment. Was it pride? Satisfaction? Inevitability? “No,” she repeated, lightly shaking her head, “I mean this baby.” She dropped her hands to her still-flat belly, cradling it.

  Raymond shook his head, wanting not to believe this could be possible. She was pregnant again? Hadn’t she learned her lesson? Wasn’t it enough that she had one child she didn’t and couldn’t care for? The irresponsibility and the blindness in her were staggering. And he realized he hated her, hated something way down at the core of her, a brokenness that imposed itself everywhere, muddying the air wherever she walked and compromising anyone who got anywhere close to her.

  “Who’s the father, Suzy?” He was so angry he was nearly panting the words. “Is Benny the father?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know, does it matter? This will be my baby, Ray. It’s a good thing, don’t you see it? This is my chance to start over.”

  Raymond couldn’t bear to hear another word. He grabbed Suzette quickly, pinning her arms against her sides. With his body he rolled her toward the tent flap, unzipped it with a fierce tug, and pushed her out onto the ground. “I don’t even know what you are,” he said. “You make me sick.”

  She landed in a crouched position a few feet away from where Raymond stood. In the dark, she looked like some kind of threatened animal. Maybe he surprised her completely, or maybe she’d been poised for him to reject her this way, but when she lunged at him, it was with her whole body. When she reached him her palms were open, her nails flared. She scratched him along one side of his face and again up his forearm in a long swath. It was everything he could do not to hit her back, not to hurt her. Finally he was able to pin her arms to her sides.

  “Asshole.” She lurched to her feet, tripped and fell in a messy, splayed way.

  “What the hell is going on with you two?” Leon jogged toward Suzette from the smoldering fire pit and helped her struggle to her feet.

  “Keep him away from me,” she said.

  “What happened? Did you hurt her?” Leon turned on Raymond, nearly snarling.

  “Oh fuck off,” Raymond said. “I didn’t hurt her. She’s out of her mind.” He ducked back into the tent, dressed quickly, and grabbed his keys. When he came out again, Leon stood holding Suzette by the fire pit, stroking her hair. Holly hovered nearby, smoke from her cigarette surrounding the three like a shredded halo. Raymond couldn’t hear what they were saying and didn’t care.

  Once in his car, he locked the door, gunned the engine, and headed away, his headlights making little sense of the pressing dark. Still, he drove as far as he could, following the cattle road out to the farthest place on the Point. He parked in the ranger’s lot, slept half-reclined in his car in his clothes, and woke feeling like he’d spent the night rolling in shit. What on earth had made Suzette think she could be a mother? Who would this baby go to when her life unraveled again, as it was bound to? Raymond also wondered about what Suzette had said in the tent the night before, about owing Benny news of her pregnancy. Was it possible that Benny was the father? That Suzette had seen him before or during her stay in Oxnard? Or was she simply, in her drug-hazed state, magnifying the scope of her loyalty to Benny, revising details, changing the arc and heart of her story with him?

  There were too many unanswered questions, leaving Raymond feeling as mapless as he ever had with his sister. And he was aware of a strong urge to take another route off the peninsula, bypassing the campsite altogether, and let Leon and the women figure out how to get back to San Francisco on their own. But he also knew he couldn’t do that. He felt guilty enough for pushing Suzette away and out of the tent the night before; for having the desire, no matter how fleeting, to hurt her. She was a pro at hurting herself, over and over. She didn’t need his help for that.

  He got out of the car and walked up to the cliff’s edge. The morning was cold, bleary with fog. He couldn’t see much of anything below but could hear the hiss and lurch of surf on the rocks and, for a moment, something else—a foghorn sound, mewling, insistent, cautionary, and forlorn, all at the same time—that must have been a whale. Was it a rogue, one who’d had enough of the pod and was lighting out for new territories? Or a stray, stranded, lost? He peered into the dense line of fog but the whale stayed hidden, didn’t even sound again.

  When Raymond arrived at the campsite, the sun was just beginning to rise. Webby strands of light seemed to pulse over the ash-strewn fire pit and the tamped places in the grass where the tents had been the night before, but the tents themselves were gone, as was Leon’s bike. Everything was covered with dew and beautiful as abandoned civilizations are beautiful. How the three had managed to leave with just the one bike he didn’t know, but he was relieved to find himself alone. Now he would have several hours to compose himself or not, have coffee and a roll in Inverness or screw that and find a drink, take the long way back to the city or maybe not make it back until tomorrow, or the next day even. He pointed his car toward the Pacific Coast Highway and turned the radio on, turned it up.

  HOLD YOUR HEAD UP

  It was early evening when I woke, feeling sticky and stunned. I yawned and blinked for a full minute before I realized Raymond was sitting on the edge of Fawn’s cot.

  “She’s gone,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I’ve called her parents and the police too. But let’s not worry about Fawn for a minute. There’s other business to take care of.”

  I nodded heavily, immediately understanding his meaning. We were going to talk to the Fletchers, and we wouldn’t leave until I had told them everything.

  I got dressed and we drove to their house in silence. Once we were inside, Raymond let me do all the talking. I kept my hands in my lap as I spilled out everything I could remember, without stopping, without breathing, even. The only thing I kept to myself was what had really happened with Donald on the picnic table. When I got to that moment of the story, I veered into a lie, saying I had simply gotten so drunk I freaked out, ran away. That Fawn had found me, and that by the time we went back to the park, the guys had driven off and Claudia was gone.

  “Why didn’t you come to us before?” Mrs. Fletcher asked when I was finished. Her voice was shrill and angry
.

  “I’m sorry. I should have. I guess I was just afraid.”

  “The police are going to want to know all of this,” said Mr. Fletcher. “In fact, I’m going to drive you over to the station right now.”

  As he went to find his keys, I let myself risk a glance at Tom, who’d been sitting silently on the couch from the moment we arrived, and was instantly sorry I did. His eyes were accusing slits, his mouth set hard against me. He looked like he wanted to throttle me with his bare hands. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe Fawn was right. Maybe I did think I’d feel better once I’d confessed. But no one forgave me or even thanked me.

  When we got home from the police station, Raymond seemed tenser and more agitated than ever. When I tried to excuse myself to bed, he said no, that he wanted to talk to me first. But he didn’t talk, at least not right away. He paced back and forth in front of the muted TV until I thought he might be trying to dig a ditch to throw me into. Even Mick noticed the mounting pressure in the room. When Raymond’s pacing would bring him near Mick’s pillow, the dog would sort of half-stand, his forehead bunching in a concerned way, then crouch down again to wait for the next pass. And just when I thought one of us was going to crack and start howling, Raymond let me have it.