She didn’t move, not even an inch. So I put my hand on her delicate breastbone and shoved her away, hard enough to make her stagger. Now the fucking tears came to my eyes, and her beautiful face got blurry. The woman I loved started to disappear. The guard gave the door a hell of a yank and managed to get his elbow into the gap. My heart was ripping in two, but I didn’t give a fuck about myself. She was what mattered. She was all that mattered.
So I locked eyes with her, set my teeth. I was what I would always be—a thief, a criminal, a guy who’d never be able to walk the straight and narrow for long. But I had the chance to do one good thing, and this was it. “Bite those stars. Do it for me.”
“This isn’t goodbye,” she said with trembling lips.
It was goodbye, and I knew it. But there’d be no saying goodbye to what I felt for her. That was a life sentence I was glad to serve. “Run for it. Never look back.”
And she was gone. The hotel door swung shut, and everything was quiet and still. For one instant, it felt like it had all been nothing but a crazy dream. Until the guard yanked the bathroom door open and came at me with every goddamned thing he had.
41
STELLA
Sirens, so many sirens. I stepped out of the lobby with our prepacked luggage and Priscilla as the noise of approaching police cars pierced the air. I felt myself gasp for breath and fought back a wave of tears. Clusters of guests and employees turned in the direction of the noise, and so did I, frozen solid by a potted palm that had a WAIT HERE FOR VALET sign sticking out of it.
“Uber, you call Uber? Elizabeth? Uber for Elizabeth!” said a voice, jolting me out of my daze. I turned to find a black sedan in front of me. It was the same guy who’d driven us to the Ritz only yesterday, and what seemed like an entire lifetime ago. He got out of his car and hoisted my little carry-on—and Nick’s duffel—into the trunk, wedging the bags next to two bottles of radiator fluid.
I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry. Not yet.
From behind me came the sticky, rubbery noise of a set of tires on the shiny cobblestones. When I turned, I saw the thing that I hadn’t even let myself imagine was possible in the shower. It was a cop car, clear at first but then blurry and far away behind a sheen of quickly welling tears.
The radio clipped to the officer’s belt was going crazy. As he walked past me with heavy, authoritative steps, the dispatcher said, “Unit fourteen. Caller reports intruder in his room, over.”
The Uber driver opened the back door for me and guided me inside, asking, “Ma’am, are you all right?”
I swallowed and nodded, not trusting myself to open my mouth and do anything but let out a sob. Without allowing myself to think about what I was actually doing, without letting my mind register that I was leaving the man I loved behind in a whole world of trouble that I had caused him, I sank down into the back seat, and the driver closed the door. I turned to look over the rear headrests as another cop car pulled into the U-shaped driveway. And another. Bulky, husky guys in blue uniforms headed toward the revolving doors.
“Oh God,” I whispered into Priscilla’s silky fur. She climbed up awkwardly in my arms to get a look for herself, her little paws digging into the gray upholstery. Her tail swung slowly and tentatively, like even she knew everything had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
The driver buckled up and fussed with his phone for a second, and then we began to leave the driveway. A fourth cruiser pulled up, idling on the outside of the cobblestone U, as if awaiting orders to block anybody from exiting. The driver signaled left, and the cop waved him past.
But I was too stunned, too shocked, too empty to even breathe a sigh of relief.
We headed south on the PCH, and the cop cars and the Ritz grew smaller and smaller behind us. The sirens became faint, replaced by the sound of fresh air whooshing through the slightly opened windows. The driver rolled them up and turned on the air-conditioning, and the pineapple-shaped air freshener twirled on its string on the rearview mirror. “Ma’am, didn’t you come here with your husband?”
My husband. The word hit me so hard, I actually gasped. With all my might, I pulled myself together. On the outside, anyway. Spinning my gaudy rings on my finger, I met the driver’s eyes in his rearview mirror. They were kind eyes, actually. Worried and honest. “Yes, I did.” Now I spun the rings almost hypnotically, round and round. Round and round. Round and round. “He’s meeting me back at the campsite later on. Had some business to take care of,” I said, feeling my voice get wobbly and weak.
“Oh yes, indeed. I see.” He nodded and straightened his seat belt. “Would you like me to give you my card? That way he can call directly?”
My chest felt like it was collapsing on itself as I took the card from the driver, a print-at-home number with smudgy ink. It hit me then, hard and painfully, that there was no best-case scenario now. I would never sit in the back of an Uber with him again. I would never take a road trip again.
I might never see Nick Norton again.
I sank farther down into my seat, and the tears spilled out unchecked. Priscilla jumped into action instantly, licking my face and frantically trying to make it better. But all the dog kisses in the world couldn’t make me feel better right now, and I knew it.
Suddenly, my phone buzzed in my purse and I pawed for it, sniffling and wiping off my cheeks with my palm. It wasn’t Nick.
It was another post from the sheikh. On the screen was a photograph of the inside of the Zero Halliburton’s textured egg-carton foam interior, completely bare and empty. In the very corner of the frame was Nick’s tattooed forearm and a handcuff on his wrist. Underneath he had written, #SoPissedRightNow North Star is gone, but they got the guy. Watch this space.
I dropped my phone in my purse and slid my fingers into the side pocket, where I’d put the diamond in my hurry. It was cold and hard and meaningless. I pressed it into my palm, trying to focus on the way it felt against my skin. I gripped it so tight, I tried to make it hurt. But it didn’t hurt at all, not compared to how my heart ached and throbbed, breaking more and more each time I heard his voice saying, “Bite those stars. Do it for me.”
I found another campsite fifty miles north. Before I pulled in, I took off my wig and makeup and changed my clothes. I gave the owner a different fake ID, with my face but a different name. I paid cash for the night and parked the Love Boat underneath a parched pine tree with thin clusters of dry brown needles. I drew the shades, locked the doors, and sat on the floor of the living area. There, I stared at his zipped duffel for a long, long time. I kept replaying what had happened, trying to will a different ending to the scene, to the nightmare, to the disaster. Priscilla crawled into my lap as the sun was setting and flopped her face onto my thigh, looking just as heartbroken as I felt.
“I know,” I said, my voice shaking. “I miss him too.”
I had never wanted a hero. But I’d gotten one. And now he was gone.
Very slowly, I unzipped his duffel. His T-shirts and pants were neatly folded, and sitting on top were his phone, his keys, and his wallet. As if he’d known, all along, that things might go so very wrong. Or maybe he was just better at this than I was, courageous enough to plan for the very worst. I ran my fingers over the leather billfold, tracing the stitching, before finally mustering up the courage to look inside. Half of his face peeked back at me from the fake ID I’d made him. I reached across the floor and got my purse, from which I took my puzzle box. Inside, I’d hidden both of our real IDs. He was smiling wide in the one I’d made, so wide that there were smile wrinkles around his eyes. In his real ID, he looked angry and tough—the sort of guy that the phrase Don’t mess with me was made for. But that was not the Nick I’d come to know.
Or the one I’d come to love.
Then I noticed that peeking out from behind the fake ID was a strip of paper. It was our fortune, folded in half. He’d saved it, without a word, and neatly hidden it away. Swallowing a sob, I opened it, and my vision got blurry again. One bi
g tear ran off my cheek and landed with a splat on Priscilla’s fur. She scrunched her back side to side and curled into an even tighter ball between my legs.
I woke up his phone and saw my own face looking back at me from the home screen. It was me in profile, when I’d been driving the RV. I had my hands at nine and three, granny-style, and I was giggling. I had my head thrown back and my face all contorted with a somewhat unflattering laugh. But then I remembered him saying how he loved my laugh. And my heart split right open one more time.
Eventually, I unfurled myself from the floor of the RV. My legs were prickly and asleep, but I hardly noticed the pins and needles at all. On autopilot, I made Priscilla dinner, just going through the motions. Scooping out the dry food, opening up a small can of wet. I put the bowl down on the floor, and she gave it a sniff, but then she looked at me with flattened ears and lay down again. Forlorn.
I scooped her up in my arms and carried his duffel into the bedroom. From the neatly folded stack of T-shirts, I pulled out the one on top. Priscilla sat on the bed and watched me take off my clothes. I stood naked in the dark, pressing Nick’s shirt to my nose. I could smell him on the fabric, and my lips quivered against the cotton. I slipped it over my head and crawled into the pink satin sheets, on the side where he’d slept. For a long time, I lay there, listening to the crickets outside, listening to campers laugh and sing. Through the back window on the RV, I looked up at the stars, blurry through tears. And in Andromeda and Perseus the hero I saw not possibility. But only what might have been.
42
STELLA
Priscilla and I got on the road before dawn, and the miles passed in a numbing monotony as I listened to Johnny Cash singing “Hurt” over and over again. I couldn’t bear to take exactly the same route that I had with Nick, so instead we went north through Anaheim and slowed to a crawl in the early-morning traffic outside LA. Each time we stopped to pee or gas up, I steeled myself and opened my phone. I wasn’t expecting a call from him; it would’ve been too risky to contact me now, if he ever would. So I searched for “Nicholas Adam Norton arrest” to see if there was any news. At first, there was nothing. But about four hours into the trip, just past the Dead Mountains and before Havasu, in a town called Needles, I saw that there was.
His new mug shot made him look older than he’d looked just last night, and his eyes didn’t have the same twinkle that I’d come to know. In the picture he looked worn out, spent, and . . . I pursed my lips together, but the tears were coming again, hot and painful against already-swollen lids . . .
He looked sad. So very, very sad.
On the abbreviated charge sheet below, I grasped the gravity of what was about to happen to Nick. It was the worst news of all.
Grand larceny. Felony class A. No bond.
Drying my eyes on my hoodie and pushing my all-consuming guilt aside as best I could, I searched for attorneys in Southern California, and then I made a blocked call to an attorney in San Diego who specialized in criminal defense. I told her I was Nick’s sister, that he’d been arrested in Orange County, and that I wanted to hire her to help him. She sounded efficient and serious, and I liked her right away.
She said she’d be glad to go talk with him. “My fee is two hundred fifteen dollars an hour, Ms. Norton.”
Hearing my name like that was a shock that I was too tired, and too worn out, to handle without a gasp. We had been so close to diving into that new life. I had been so close to having all the things I’d never known I’d wanted. And now they were so very far away.
“Ms. Norton?”
“Yes, sorry. I’m here.” I made myself focus on practicalities. No matter what, he would need a good attorney. And that, at least, I could give him. Between Ruth and me, we could find a way to pay her without our names ever being attached. I’d have to scrape all the barrels to do it; moving the North Star would take months, and it would be very tight in the meantime. But even if I had to use every penny I had and plenty of pennies I didn’t, I’d find a way to make it happen. He had given up everything for me, and I would do the same for him. “It doesn’t matter what it costs. I just want him to have the best attorney that money can buy.”
I hung up, tucked my phone into the pocket of my hoodie, and helped Priscilla back into the passenger seat. I clipped her harness to the seat belt to keep her safe, and then I closed her door.
Standing there under the stanchion of the Shell station, I looked across the street at a little dive called the Wagon Wheel, bright yellow and brown, with license plates stuck all over the front entrance. An elderly couple got out of a pickup and walked hand in hand through the front door, the old man holding the door for his wife. I sank down into the reality that we would never be that old couple going for eggs and bacon at the Wagon Wheel. We would, most probably, never be a couple at all.
I took a deep breath, hopped in the driver’s seat, and we got back on I-40, heading east, and I hit play on “Hurt” for the fifteenth time that morning. My map said I had a little less than eight hours left to go. But even if I listened to Johnny singing about all he’d lost a hundred more times, it would never fill the hole in my heart. Because I couldn’t start again, not even a million miles away. Not without him.
The lady at Cruise America could tell I’d been crying, I think, and she was really nice about everything, even the fact that the BE MINE pillow now looked more like an actual human organ than a stuffed decorative accent.
She picked it up with two fingers the way people do with dead mice and looked at me. Her turquoise earrings swung like pendulums.
“Sorry,” I croaked. Even my own voice sounded strange—far away and muted, like I was talking underwater. It was what eleven hours of nonstop driving, singing along with Johnny Cash, and letting tears spill down her cheeks would do to a girl. I zipped up my hoodie a little higher and resisted the urge to put the hood over my head, the way Ruth would have.
“It’s all right, hon. These are just novelty items.” She twirled it back and forth as she inspected it. Priscilla had really gotten into it, and there were small rusty dots of blood from where she’d flossed her back teeth with the fabric. “But what happened to it?”
Sparing me having to string together more words in the hopes it would make a sentence, Priscilla began dancing around the lady’s feet, nipping at the air to try to get to her new best friend, since the demise of the frog.
“Oh, I see,” she said, smiling down at Priscilla. She opened her fingers and dropped the heart onto the pavement, blueish now under the fluorescent floodlights that came on with the dusk. Priscilla planted her face into the still somewhat stuffed half, picked it up, and sat at my feet, making snorting sounds as she tried to breathe into the stuffing.
The lady handed me a clipboard and asked me to initial at the Xs. Each line also featured Nick’s scrawled initials. He’d been careful to make them say MM, instead of NN. But just knowing he’d done what I was doing now, without me as I was without him, was enough to make another roll of sadness overtake me.
I blinked my stinging and exhausted eyes at the fine print and forced myself into autopilot again, placing my pen right next to where he had and trying to keep myself together just a little bit longer. Again and again I initialed and signed as Elizabeth Rutherford, and as I did I wished that I could actually be her. I wished that this wasn’t my life. I wished that I’d never plunged us into this mess.
On the Uber ride to Mr. Bozeman’s house, looking at all the happy houses with their festive Halloween decorations, thinking about all the regular families, thinking about all the things I’d never get to do with Nick—string fake spiderwebs on bushes, spend a night watching TV while the doorbell rang and we ran to the door to hand out candy—I felt perilously close to falling apart and to telling the driver to go to the police station so I could undo this mess I’d gotten him into. But the drive was over before I knew it, and I found Mr. Bozeman sitting on his couch looking at the picture of his wife when I walked in. He still had his hospital
intake bracelet on his wrist.
“Stella—” he said, his face all lit up with a smile. But as soon as he saw me, his eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. God only knew what I looked like. I probably looked like an exhausted call girl with mascara halfway down my cheeks, but I really and truly didn’t care. “My heavens, what happened?”
I locked the door behind me, looking at my own reflection in the glass on the storm door. How was I going to have this conversation? Mr. Bozeman thought I was a dog sitter. Mr. Bozeman thought I was a nice, upstanding girl. Mr. Bozeman didn’t need to know the mess I’d gotten Nick into. Turning, I mustered up a smile. It made my skin feel tight and dry. “How do you feel? Are you OK? I’m sorry I wasn’t here to visit you in the hospital.”
“Never fear, my dear! You had Priscilla, and that was all that mattered to me. I feel fine.” He patted his stomach gingerly. “Much better. Miracles of modern medicine. But sit down. Have some circus peanuts,” he said, offering me a half-finished crinkly package.
I did sit, in the easy chair next to the sofa, but I didn’t take any candy. Instead, I undid the sticky plastic ends of his bracelet and put it in my pocket to throw away. Then I looked at Mr. Bozeman and wondered how in the world I was going to come to terms with these feelings and what on earth I was going to do now.
Again, Mr. Bozeman tried to get me to eat a piece of candy. I hadn’t had anything much to eat in twenty-four hours, and the little grumble in my stomach was undeniable. Mr. Bozeman crinkled the package and held it out to me. Reluctantly, I reached out and took one of the foamy, oversize peanuts. I tucked it into my mouth whole, and it began to dissolve instantly. It kicked off a chain reaction somehow, because as soon as I finished one, I reached for another, and then, much to my utter astonishment, I started talking. At first, it was just about Nick. How I’d lost him and how I never knew if I’d see him again. But very slowly I let it all unravel, in vague but still-true terms. That our trip hadn’t gone as planned and that the ideas we’d had for the future weren’t going to work after all. Each word that left my mouth made me feel a little bit better and also worse, lightening the weight inside me but also making the situation so very real. Mr. Bozeman listened to me, nodding and asking only the most crucial questions as he ate his circus peanuts and one episode of his endlessly rerunning Columbo ended and another began.
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