“Maybe,” he said with a yawn. “It might be one of those twenty-four-hour ones.”
I took out my wallet and counted our remaining money. We had only three hundred dollars now. It was mostly the cost of gas that was depleting our money so quickly. Three hundred dollars felt a lot less safe than four hundred dollars, particularly if we had to spend a hundred dollars on a hotel room tonight. “Want to go in?” I asked, putting the money back in my wallet. “We could probably get some snacks cheaper than in mini-marts.”
“Sure,” he said, opening his door and getting out. I got out as well, and Roger pressed his hands against the back of the car and stretched out his legs before walking to the store.
The Wal-Mart was open. There was even a greeter in a blue vest who wished us a good evening and welcomed us to Wal-Mart. I found myself blinking at the fluorescent brightness of the store. It was absolutely massive, utterly quiet, and appeared pretty deserted—which made no sense, since the parking lot was so full. We headed to the snack aisle, and I stocked up on soda and chips. When I turned to ask Roger if he wanted Reese’s Pieces or peanut butter M&M’s, he was no longer there. I left our cart in the middle of the snack aisle—I didn’t think it’d be in anyone’s way—and went looking for him. It was a little eerie, as I didn’t see any other shoppers. It was like I was all alone in that huge, silent store. I was relieved when I spotted Roger heading back to grocery from the apparel section. “Roger,” I called, hearing how loud my voice sounded. He ran over to me, and as he did, I saw that he had a pack of white tube socks in his hand. When he reached me, he ripped the package open. “I think you have to pay for those first,” I said, completely confused as to why he needed socks right now. As I watched, baffled, he kicked off his flip-flops and pulled on a pair of the socks. Then he handed a pair to me. I looked down at the tube socks. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“Put them on,” he said, and he no longer seemed tired at all. He seemed more excited that I had ever seen before.
“But I’m wearing flip-flops,” I explained, wondering if maybe Roger had been driving too long.
“Just do it,” he said, smiling at me. “Seriously.” I shrugged and took off my flip-flops. I pulled on the socks, hoping we wouldn’t get in trouble for wearing them without buying them first. “Ready?” he asked, as I straightened up.
“For what—,” I started. But Roger grabbed my hand and began running down one of the gleaming aisles, pulling me behind him. I stopped protesting and just ran with him, tightening my fingers around his for just a second. Then he let go of my hand, stopped running, and slid down the length of empty aisle in his socks.
He turned back to me, grinning. “You have got to try this,” he called.
I didn’t worry about how it was dangerous, how one of us might get hurt. I just took off at a run down the toothpaste aisle. I didn’t think about what I was doing. I just ran full-out, then stopped and let momentum carry me down the rest of the aisle, faster than I’d been expecting. It was scary and thrilling and it felt, slipping on new socks down an empty Wal-Mart aisle, like I was free. Roger, laughing, slid to my side and took my hands in his. He spun me around and I let go, letting myself twirl, the brightly colored displays all around me turning to a blur. Roger turned in the other direction and started running, then sliding, almost falling, windmilling his arms to stay upright. By the time I caught up with him, almost crashing into a Crest display, I was laughing harder than I had in a long, long time.
“These too,” Roger said, handing the empty sock package to the one cashier still open. She raised her eyebrows, but just scanned it without comment. I put my flip-flops back on, still a little out of breath. In the glass opposite the cashier’s station, I caught sight of my reflection and almost didn’t recognize myself. My hair was messed up, my shirt was wrinkled, and I looked happy. I looked like I’d just been having fun. Which was exactly, I realized, what I’d been doing.
“What’s with all the RVs out there?” Roger asked, as she bagged our items.
“Wal-Mart policy,” she said. “Free overnight parking. That’ll be thirty forty-five.”
Roger met my eyes as I pulled out the money we had left to pay for our snacks and socks. I had a feeling we’d both just had the same thought.
I hadn’t folded down the backseats in a while, but after a few tries, I got them down, turning the whole back of the Jeep into an open area, one that would hopefully give us enough room to sleep comfortably. Roger had gone back inside to buy a blanket and two pillows. While he was gone, I’d changed in the front seat, pulling on the tank top I’d worn the night before. But since it was still warm out, I’d grabbed a pair of Bronwyn’s shorts. They had looked okay from the front, but when I held them up I saw that TEXAS FOREVER was printed across the butt. They also were a little shorter than I might have preferred, but I figured I could deal with it for one night. After I got changed, I took out my phone and saw I had a missed call from my mother. She hadn’t left a message, but she had called. I punched in the number for her cell, and at the last moment, added the code to send a message right to voice mail.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. “I, um, saw you called. I’m fine. We’re in Asheville right now. I’m going to try to see Charlie tomorrow.” I stopped and took a breath before continuing. “I went to Graceland today. I was wondering—did you know how old Dad was when he went there?” I paused again, feeling like I’d just pushed open a door. We hadn’t talked about my father at all. Not even the good stuff that we remembered. Not even the stuff we wanted to celebrate. “I was just wondering. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I’m doing okay.”
I closed my phone, my throat feeling tight. I held the phone in my hand for just a minute longer, in case she called back. But it was late, and she was probably asleep, alone in our new house. It struck me for the first time that my mother had also spent the past month alone. I hadn’t really been able to think beyond myself—I hadn’t even realized we’d been in the same situation. I saw Roger heading up from the store and shut my phone off to conserve the battery, dropping it next to my father’s book in my purse.
Roger must have changed in the Wal-Mart bathroom, as he was back in his T-shirt and shorts that I now knew well. He opened the back door and tossed me the blanket and pillows. I placed the pillows by the door, so our feet would face the front seats. Julia, who’d gone through a big “energy healing” phase last year, could have told me if this was the proper car feng shui. But Julia was finally giving up on me, if the title of her last e-mail was anything to go by.
Roger started the car, shaking me out of these thoughts, and cracked all four windows. Even so, it was hot in the back. Clearly we could have saved the $9.99 he’d spent on the blanket. I passed him the suitcases from the back, and he piled our bags on the passenger seat, my owl resting on top. Then he killed the engine, locked the car from the inside, and climbed over the driver’s seat and into the back. I moved over to the left side—my side—to try and give him room. But it was really close quarters in the back, something I hadn’t really thought through. I lay down, resting my head on the brand-new pillow and seeing that Roger was now nearer to me than he had been in any of the beds we’d shared. But I found that I didn’t mind so much this time. The blanket was down by our feet, and I was really aware of him next to me, without a sheet or blanket covering us, his bare legs just a handspan away from mine.
I rolled onto my back and looked up, through the back window, trying to see the stars. But the parking lot floodlights must have been too bright, and all I could see was the inside of the car, reflected back at me. “’Night,” I said, turning my head to look at Roger, expecting him to be half-asleep already, as usual.
But he was turning from side to side, and kicking the blanket even farther away from him. “I’m hot,” he said, pulling at his T-shirt. “Aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. Now that we were both in the back, it seemed even hotter back there. And the air felt still, like the heat was pressin
g down on us. “But then, I’m not the space heater.”
“I know,” he groaned. “It’s like an oven in here.”
“We could open the windows more,” I suggested.
“It’s so warm out there, it probably wouldn’t make a difference,” he said. “Plus, I’d be worried someone would break in.” He rolled from side to side again, then sat up. “Would it bother you,” he started, then cleared his throat. “I mean, would you mind if I took my shirt off?”
“Oh,” I said, and I could feel my cheeks growing warm. “No, that’s fine.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I assured him, then hoped I hadn’t sounded too enthusiastic. “I mean, sure.” Roger sat up and pulled off his Colorado College T-shirt, and I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the window. But when he lay down again, I glanced over and could feel myself start to blush harder. Because, um … yeah. Roger had a great body. It was lean and not too muscley, but he did have really nice stomach muscles, and … I looked back up to the ceiling quickly, feeling suddenly even warmer in the car.
“’Night, Hillary,” Roger said with a yawn.
“’Night, Edmund,” I said, as breezily as possible. I looked over at him a moment later, once his breathing had grown long and even. He had rolled on his side, facing me, and I turned onto mine, facing him. I closed my eyes but had a feeling I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I had slept last night, but that was in Lucien’s luxury accommodations. It wasn’t in a car in a Wal-Mart parking lot, with a half-naked Roger next to me.
But when I opened my eyes again, it was light out—the cool light of early dawn. And at some point during the night, we had started sharing a pillow.
I was on your porch last night.
—The Format
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
I was sitting outside on the left-hand porch, and according to the faint green glow of the numbers on my watch, I’d been waiting for two hours. The mosquitoes had taken advantage of this and had been slowly devouring me. It was the Amy all-you-can-eat buffet. I’d given up the fight, choosing instead nonviolent resistance, simply scratching the bites every now and then.
My father said this porch was one of the architect’s many follies. Our house was designed with two porches on the second story that faced the street. They looked nice. And the second porch, the one to the right of the one I was currently being eaten alive on, was functional. It was connected to the guest room by a set of French doors, giving our theoretical guests a lovely view of the driveway. But the left-hand porch wasn’t connected to anything—it was purely decorative. However, Charlie and I had discovered long ago that both of our windows—which flanked the porch—were close enough to it that you could climb out your window and make it onto the porch, if you did it quickly and without looking down. When we were younger, we used to sneak out at night occasionally, at a predetermined time. We’d eat candy, or play handheld video games, or just stay up and talk, reveling in the fact that we were breaking the rules, that we were awake when we shouldn’t have been. It had been one of the few times we were united in something.
I scratched at my ankle hard enough to draw blood just as a pair of headlights rounded the cul-de-sac. As usual, they went too far past our house and then just swung around the circle again, stopping in front of our driveway. The driver of the car—it looked like an SUV—turned off the headlights, but left the engine running. I looked toward Charlie’s window and waited. Sure enough, I heard the rasp of the sill being pushed up, and a second later Charlie’s leg emerged from the window, stretching over the railing, and then the rest of him followed, backing out of his window. I waited until he was all the way on the porch before I spoke.
“Hey.”
Charlie whirled around while simultaneously making a high-pitched squeaking noise that I wished I’d somehow been able to record. “Amy, what the fuck,” he said, talking in low tones, his breath coming quickly. “Don’t do that. Jesus.” He glanced down to the waiting car, then back at me. My eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness that I could see he was calculating how to try and spin this. “What are you doing out here?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” I said.
“Come on, don’t be naive,” he said, glancing out toward the car again, and when he looked back at me it was with a smile. Clearly he had decided to go for charm. “I’m just going out with my friends. Is that such a crime? Hey, you want to come?”
For a second I thought about saying yes, just to freak him out and see how he would try to dance around the fact that our social circles didn’t exactly intersect. “You’ve been going out with your friends a lot lately,” I said, then rolled my eyes at myself. You would have thought that after waiting for two hours, I’d have come up with a better way to say this. But apparently not. “Look, Charlie, I’m just worried.”
“Worried?” Charlie frowned, the picture of innocence. “What about?”
“Cut the crap,” I said. “I just think that maybe you should slow down or something. Or at least limit this stuff to the weekends. You do realize it’s a Tuesday night?”
“Hey, my GPA was better than yours last semester, if I recall. And just because you don’t know how to party—” The SUV at the bottom of the driveway flashed its lights on and off, causing both of us to look in its direction. “My friends are waiting,” he said, shouldering his backpack.
“I just think you should cut this back a little,” I said, my voice getting louder. I saw Charlie glance back to the house and realized I held some cards here.
“Amy, Jesus,” he said, his voice low. “Keep it down. I’m fine. You didn’t have to—”
“I’ll tell Mom and Dad,” I said, interrupting him.
He stared at me for a long moment. “No, you won’t.”
I looked up at him. “I will, I—” I slapped at my leg, knowing it was futile.
“No,” he said, crossing the porch to where, I saw, he’d attached a rope ladder. It looked like the one that used to be on our old tree house before it was torn down; I wondered where he’d found it. “If you were going to tell them, you’d have told already. And it’s not like they’d be able to do anything anyway. The only thing that would accomplish would be that I’d be pissed at you, and Mom and Dad wouldn’t trust either of us.”
“Why wouldn’t they trust me?”
“How long have you known about this?” he asked. “Without telling them?” It had been a few months. Maybe four. The answer hung between us for a moment, unsaid. “Exactly,” he said. “So don’t be a narc, okay? Just try to be cool, for once in your life.” He tossed the rope ladder over the railing and threw one leg over, then the other. Then I watched as his head disappeared, and a second later I heard a soft thump as he hit the ground and hustled over to the rumbling car. He got in, and the car peeled away, not putting its headlights on until it was all the way around the cul-de-sac.
While I Breathe, I Hope.
—South Carolina state motto
“Ready?” Roger asked me. I nodded, then looked up at the window five feet above me. I wasn’t sure this was going to work. In fact, it seemed much more likely that it would fail. But as Roger might have said, we’d come this far.
“Ready,” I said. He made a cradle with his hands, and I stepped one foot into it. Roger bent his knees, and I put my hands on his shoulders. His T-shirt was warm from driving in the sun. For just a moment, I let my hands rest on his shoulders, feeling the muscle underneath the warm cotton, realizing how close together we were.
“Okay,” I said, trying to focus on the task ahead. I nodded and pushed off Roger’s hand as he hoisted me up, giving me the leverage I needed to grasp onto the sill of the window above me. I dangled there for a moment, then felt him grab my feet and give them another push. This extra momentum gave me enough forward motion to pull myself up and over, and I tumbled into the room.
The original plan had been to walk in and ask to see him. The original plan hadn’t involved any sort of forced entry. But the o
riginal plan had been foiled. We’d gotten breakfast at a Cracker Barrel near the Wal-Mart, where Roger declared the pancakes the best he’d ever eaten, then headed into Asheville and arrived at Promises Kept around ten. The building looked more like a mansion than a rehab center. The only indication that it wasn’t were the parking spaces, clearly labeled VISITORS, MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS, and DROP-OFF. Roger had gone in with me, but we hadn’t gotten very far before we were stopped by a woman wearing white scrubs who introduced herself as Courtney. Even though the website of this place had seemed very welcoming, we were led back outside. She told us how the guests at Promises Kept were currently in the middle of their treatment plan, and that no contact with family members—except by e-mail—was permitted until the treatment plan was completed. Then she told us to have a blessed day and shut the door firmly behind her.
We had been heading back to the car when I happened to look around the side of the building. That’s when I spotted the low(ish) window and the white curtains blowing out of it, letting me know that it was open, and screenless.
We moved quickly, and I hadn’t really had time to come up with a plan, which hit me just as I hit the floor. I pushed myself to my feet and looked around. The room was large, with two beds, and seemed to be decorated all in white. There was a girl lying on each bed, both of whom looked very surprised to see me.
“Hi,” I said, trying not to speak too loudly. “Um. Hi.”
“Can I help you?” the girl on the bed nearest to me asked. She had brown curly hair and looked all of twelve, and for a second I wondered what she could possibly be doing in here.
Amy & Roger's Epic Detour Page 24