“I’m not going to become a gambler,” she said snidely.
“Oh, like me?” he said, the insult stinging more than it should have. “You’re going to judge me now? Listen, go home already. I’m serious. Even if you leave Vegas, where are you going to go? I’ll give you some money if that’s what’s keeping you here. But if that’s what you want to do, then you’re a complete idiot.”
“Fine,” she said and let out a sigh. “I’ll go back.”
One would think she had begrudgingly agreed to share her ice cream cone with her nemesis.
“Fine?” he repeated, mimicking her. “Fine? Okay, I’m not going to ask if you’re sure. I’ll take your word for it.”
“Will you fly back with me?” she asked.
The thought hadn’t occurred to him. “I guess,” he said. “If you want me to.”
He knew full well that in trying to save her from the years of struggle that would inevitably befall her if she didn’t return, he was also trying to redeem himself in some small way. He also knew that true redemption for him was impossible. He could never repay his mother for her long years of hard work and unconditional generosity. She had sacrificed her life for his well-being and instead of living up to the hopes she’d had for him, he had become an enormous burden. It was the reason he avoided visiting her, even on the holidays. The one time he had flown to New York was supposed to be for a week-long visit during Christmas. When he arrived, there was nothing that could have prepared him for the conditions in which his mother was living. She had rented out the bedrooms in the house to two men who had recently been released from a methadone clinic nearby. She slept on the couch in the living room, often visited in the evenings by police officers looking for one of the tenants. Within days, he had fabricated an excuse to leave early and go back to Los Angeles.
Araxi lay down and closed her eyes. He had the advantage of looking at her without her noticing. He remembered his mother bringing him to his uncle Levon’s house when Araxi was just born. He had no memory of her other than the small, crying infant who occasionally woke up the house in the middle of the night. He and his mother moved out shortly after, but visited randomly on the insistence of his grandmother, Anoush. Throughout his teenage years, he observed Araxi, not making much effort to interact, but understanding with certainty who she was. To him, she was a deep, quiet well, the surface calm and unmoving. He guessed that perhaps it was for this reason that her parents had neglected her for so many years. She rarely made a fuss and, like a pebble, moved along with the force of an erratic wind that had been her life. What lay behind her large eyes and innocent face remained a mystery to him until now.
When she had agreed to go back to New York, he found it difficult to ignore his personal disappointment. He had the wild impulse to let her stay with him indefinitely, recognizing how inappropriate it was, even to himself. He usually dated older women, and so he knew that his desire for her was not lust, but an unnameable yearning he had not experienced until now.
“When should I go back?” she asked, startling him out of his thoughts.
“Whenever you want to. But the sooner the better,” he said, forcing the words out of his mouth.
“Is it okay if I stay for one or two days?” she asked. “I’m in a lot of pain, and I haven’t stayed put in one place since I left Santa Fe with Cecile.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll get us the plane tickets tomorrow.”
The plane tore across the tarmac and Araxi’s stomach clenched. A few moments later they were in the sky and she felt the weightlessness of being in the air. She looked through the window, watching the city shrink and diminish. She couldn’t decide whom she dreaded seeing more, Cecile or her family. There was no chance of a friendship with Cecile, she knew that much. But she also had no desire to be friends with her. She felt indebted to her for having to return alone and contend with the reaction of both their parents, and yet did not want to repay her in any way. It was the guilt of this that nagged at her.
“Don’t think about it all at once,” Nate said, nudging her gently, as if he were reading her mind. “I made my mom promise not to tell your parents. Let’s just get there. Everything will happen when it’s supposed to.”
“Okay,” she said. “I just have so much to think about.”
“I’ll put it to you this way: let’s say you made plans with a friend to see a movie next week. And now you’re sitting here worrying that the popcorn line will be too long and you’ll miss the beginning of the film. There’s no point to it. It’s just going to happen the way it’s supposed to,” he said.
“That’s a pretty flimsy analogy,” she countered, and held her palms out as if she were weighing two imaginary objects. “My returning home after running away for three months versus going to a movie and the popcorn line being too long. I don’t know about that one,” she said.
She turned her back to him and looked out the window, allowing herself to become absorbed in the field of clouds that drifted by. There was truth in what Nate had said. The problem was that the world waiting for her in New York felt like brambles of thorny wood that had become inextricably enmeshed. Looking back, since the morning Cecile had driven to her house and they had taken off, there was very little she regretted, with the exception of Tom Jones. She tried to imagine who had found his body and if he’d had any family for the authorities to contact. What would always terrify her more was not that she had killed him, but that the rage she felt was only quelled when she felt the weight of the rock in her hands end his life. She hadn’t told anyone and knew she never would.
Kyle had been looming in her thoughts since the evening with Lori and Vanessa, and she wondered why she hadn’t decided to go back to Santa Fe to be with him. Perhaps it was because she knew that in doing so, her escape would be permanent and her life there more or less predictable. If Nate hadn’t spotted her and tracked her down, she would probably still be walking around the hotels and casinos. She realized that no matter where she was, whether in a car with Cecile or with the two girls Vanessa and Lori or at home with her parents, she was always a passenger, a voyeur with no voice or control. So really, it didn’t matter that she was going back home.
She remembered when she and Cecile had come across the Palo Duro Canyon in Texas on their way to Santa Fe. After hiking for a considerable length of time they had found themselves deep in the hollow of the canyon.
“Hey!” Cecile had screamed, and the canyon had greeted her back, “Hey!”
But when Cecile had prodded Araxi to yell something so she could hear the echo of her voice, she wasn’t able to at first. They had continued walking through the trail until they were exhausted and dehydrated. They retraced their steps and were about to walk past the spot where Cecile had screamed at the canyon.
“I’ll be up in a few minutes,” Araxi had said. “Just go ahead without me.”
She stood in the same spot for a long time, hearing the silence of the wind and observing the sand-colored mountains that surrounded her. She felt singular and alone in the midst of the encompassing blue sky and the beauty of the sun beaming across the landscape. This is the real world, she had thought. Where I am right now is what life is. Perhaps it was true, and what she did or didn’t have to say was not important, but rather that she had been there.
“I am everything!” she had screamed. She had braced herself, convinced that the canyon would not recognize her voice, that she was too small and insignificant for this world to embrace her.
Seconds later, the wind carried her voice back, “Everything … everything…”
Even then, it had not been enough. She wondered what she would say now if she were standing in the middle of that canyon. Her first words had been grandiose, disingenuous. She wasn’t everything and she never would be. If she could draw an image of what her life had been in New York, it would be a picture of a long narrow road paved on flat, gray land, the sky perpetually dark, smothering the faint glow of the sun that was never able to reflect th
rough. That was what she was returning to. But there had to be a way of wiping off the thick film of dirt, of digging into the earth to create hills and valleys, of broadening the passage so that it led to somewhere she wanted to go. Maybe then she would have something to say, and it would come from within her like the words of a song she had always known, but had forgotten until now.
The End
About the Author
Aida Zilelian is a New York writer and English teacher. She has been published in over twenty-five literary journals and several anthologies. She is also the curator of Boundless Tales, a reading series in Queens, New York. She is currently writing a collection of short stories. She was the recipient of the 2014 Tölölyan Prize in Contemporary Literature. This is her first published novel.
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