A Ticket to Ride

by Paula McLain

  I went into the drugstore and bought an atlas; also travel-size toothpaste and shampoo and conditioner in those perfect little bottles that had always made me wish I had somewhere to go, when I saw them in their bins on the shelf. Afterward, I went down the block into a dress shop and selected a simple black blouse and skirt, black pantyhose, a black half-slip. I would need shoes too, but I was out of money and there was enough to think about for now.

  The second half of the day passed more quickly than the first. I returned home and spent what was left of the afternoon as Fawn and I always had together. Out on my beach towel, I absorbed heat and WKEZ, listened to Skinny Man run his edger up the side of the driveway, a metallic grinding that made my teeth hurt. I found myself wondering whether Fawn even knew that by asking me to go off to New York with her, she was really asking me to risk being abandoned again. This friend from Phoenix was surely a boyfriend. I would be on the outside from the beginning, and when she was through with him or he was through with her, she would run off with someone else and leave me on my own. It was more than possible; it was inevitable. And even if I were able to exact a promise from her that we’d stay together no matter what, even if I could convince her of the significance, the necessity of such a promise, there was no way she could ever keep it.

  Raymond made lasagna for dinner that night and as we sat and ate in companionable silence, I thought to ask him something that had been on my mind for some time. “Why haven’t you sent me back to Bakersfield, Uncle Ray?”

  “I made a promise to your grandparents. You know what the story is there. I knew when I agreed to take you that it was probably for good, and that’s okay with me. I’m not sending you anywhere, if that’s what you’ve been worried about. Do you want to go back?”

  I shook my head. “But you sent Fawn away.”

  “You know it’s more complicated than that. Fawn was in a lot of trouble before she came.”

  “She told me.”

  “Did she? No doubt she told you her version. Anyway, she got into a bad situation, or brought it on herself, rather. She got obsessed with one of her teachers, called his wife and said they were having an affair, tried to get him fired.”

  I was only surprised by this detail for a moment. After all, it was what I had suspected for some time—that Fawn had talked a good game but was all talk. “That wasn’t exactly how she put it.”

  “No, I thought not. And I don’t know what else she told you about her life in Phoenix, but the business with her teacher was just one of a long line of messes. The point is she was never going to stay with us for good. Camille just wanted to get her out of Phoenix for a while, hoping that would settle her down a little or at least distract her. But she brought her trouble with her. If Fawn had been willing to live by my rules, live like a sixteen-year-old girl ought to, I’d have let her stay as long as she wanted. But she’s hell-bent on self-destruction and maybe there’s nothing anyone can do about that.” He paused to watch Felix swim several lengths of his tank and looked back at me. “Are you willing to live by my rules, to let me take care of you? Can you do that?”

  “I think so,” I said, studying my hands.

  “Well think hard, because I can’t stick around and watch if you’re going to hurt yourself or hurt other people. You’re a smart girl, a good girl. You have a good life ahead of you if you just keep your head on straight. You’ve got a lot of potential.”

  “I do?”

  “Of course. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?”

  “No.” I shook my head. But Fawn had, had used those words exactly.

  After Raymond excused himself to his room later that night, I filled a brown paper bag with leftover rolls, apples, a jar of peanut butter. On top of that, I tucked the atlas and the perfect, miniature shampoos. I’d gone into Raymond’s room again before dinner and taken as much cash as I dared from his dresser, forty-five dollars. This I folded into an envelope and then into my pocket. When it was time, I lowered myself out the window. And it was then, as I walked up the road lit by bug-haloed streetlights, conscious of myself, that it occurred to me how grateful I was that Fawn had come back, and even that she had asked me to come with her, no matter how flawed and loaded that invitation was. Raymond’s talking about all Fawn’s messes back home made me think she had more messes now. Me and Raymond—and especially Claudia. We were all part of the ordeal that had been her summer in Moline. Maybe someday Fawn would recount the story of us as casually as she talked about her drama teacher, or sex with strangers in a game of “I never.” Who knew what her future held, but at least I would have the chance to say good-bye to her, and to tell her why I was staying, if for no other reason than that I needed to hear myself say the words out loud.

  The lawn swaddling Queen of Peace was as pristine as ever, green and lush under my feet as I headed for the greenhouse. Fawn wasn’t there when I arrived, but I was a little early. I would wait. I leaned against a wood-plank table, tried to read the Latin names of plants in the gloaming, paced clockwise, counterclockwise. I wasn’t wearing a watch but tried to make sense of the passing time anyway. Had an hour elapsed? Two? The sleeping pills had given me a strange rest the night before, and I was growing more exhausted by the moment. I didn’t want to fall asleep, but I needed to lie down. Finding a length of black plastic sheeting, I put it down against a mound of peat moss and reclined to look up at the ceiling, from side to side along the topmost frame. Oddly, the whole place seemed flimsier than before, more fragile. The wooden posts appeared to be made of balsa, the roof and sides of cellophane. Anything could come crashing down and topple it, anything at all, and I would be crushed under, alone with the wreckage, impossible for Fawn or anyone else to find.

  I heard no footsteps or voices, no creak of the door opening, no idling of a car, only the cicadas which were getting louder in a way that sounded wrong. Were they inside the greenhouse with me? With each cycle, their song began in a low register, guttural as maracas or a rattlesnake rattling, and then advanced until it seemed to lance the air above and around me. They were shrieking, as if in agreement that the time had come for terrible music. At the time all I could think was that they were singing about Fawn, telling me in their language that Fawn wasn’t coming, that she was long gone. I tried to sit up, but my body felt rubbery and wouldn’t obey me. And then—was I dreaming?—I thought I saw a shape pressed against the opaque plastic framing in the door, trying to find a way in just as the firefly, weeks and weeks before, had tried to find its way out. Fawn had finally arrived. I called her name once and then again, more loudly, but whatever or whoever it was vanished. It was nearly dawn and I was alone.

  Later, when I would revisit this moment in memory, I would hear the cicadas’ chorusing differently, their meaning reaching broader to become an elegy—not just for Fawn but for everything that had been lost: the soft night-talk, the sweet bracelet of Collin’s hand circling my ankle, the way I had so needed to be told by someone, anyone, that I was good enough. They were singing for Suzette, dead at twenty-six, and for the absence I carried in my mother’s shape, a pinching skin I wore and would always wear on the inside.

  More than anything, the cicadas were singing for Claudia, who wasn’t a girl anymore but a name that time was erasing, evaporating, melting away. I would never hear cicadas again without thinking their voices took the shape of loss itself, defining it in time and space, and defining me too. I would always be the one who could have drowned that night in Chicago, but didn’t. The one who wasn’t, who isn’t Claudia.

  Fawn too would become fixed from that moment on. Not lost but not found, either. A forever sixteen-year-old. A mistake, a mirror, a feeling, a dream. In the years ahead, when Raymond and I would hear news of Fawn—that she was in New York for a year or so, then in Boston, then nowhere, no one knowing what she was doing for money, whether she was singing in a seedy club like the Razzle Dazzle or selling phone-book ads door to door or in love, even, floating in a pink sea of optimism—I would find myself wonder
ing if Fawn had come looking for me the night before she left, if the dream image of Fawn’s face beyond the opaque plastic at the greenhouse had been real. Maybe the sound I had thought was cicadas was really Fawn’s voice repeating my name like a question in the dark.

  But for the moment it was nearly morning, a Tuesday at the end of August, warm and untransformed by my thinking or dreaming. I stood up from my bed of peat. I was achy and filthy and exhausted in a way that filled me like my own spine. It held me up, how tired I was. It walked me home. When I got there, I found Raymond sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.

  “I’ve been worried,” he said. He crossed over to the pot, poured me a cup, and handed it to me. Perhaps I imagined it, but he seemed to know where I’d been and what I’d decided. His eyes were kind and his silence even kinder.

  “Thanks,” I said to Raymond and held the cup. I didn’t drink it, just held it. Felt how warm it was in my hands, took the warmth into my lungs and breathed it out again.

  Was there anything sadder than starting your life? I didn’t think there was. Did Fawn know that, wherever she was then, in a fast car on the highway somewhere, or in her own too-fast dream? Would she let herself know that? I looked at Raymond and then at the window holding as much light as it could bear, and then at my two hands, the way my fingertips just knitted. This was my body, a sink of memory and doubt, a messy but salvageable bridge. A place to begin.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my agent, Julie Barer, whose enthusiasm and editorial savvy got me through crucial drafts; and to my editor, Emily Takoudes, for continued faith and for championing this book long before it was a book. Thanks to Daniel Halpern, Rachel Elinsky, Greg Mortimer, and all the fine folks at Ecco/HarperCollins, and to Olga Gardner Galvin. Many thanks to early readers who offered invaluable advice: Glori Simmons, Lori Keene, Robin Messing, and Leigh Feldman. I’m grateful for the ongoing support of my family and dear friends, especially Teresa Reller, Penny Pennington, Rita Hinken, Alice D’Alessio, Julie Hayward, Becky Gaylord, Katherine Carlstrom and Steven Hayward, Pam and Doug O’Hara, Kirsten Docter and Paul Cox, Amy Weinfurtner, Patricia Kao, Heather Greene, Michael Schwartz, and my extraordinary colleagues and students at New England College and John Carroll University. Finally, thanks to my husband, Greg D’Alessio, for talking me through all the false starts, snarled drafts, and general self-loathing, and for so much more.

  About the Author

  PAULA McLAIN received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. She has been a resident at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and the recipient of fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. The author of two collections of poetry and a memoir, McLain lives with her husband and children in Cleveland.

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  ALSO BY PAULA MCLAIN

  Like Family: Growing Up in

  Other People’s Houses: A Memoir

  Stumble, Gorgeous: Poems

  Less of Her: Poems

  Credits

  Jacket design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  Jacket photograph by Jason Shenai/Millennium Images UK

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A TICKET TO RIDE. Copyright © 2008 by Paula McLain. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2007 ISBN: 9780061870330

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