Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  “I guess I didn’t think you and Jake would ever, you know.” Diana bobs her head. “I knew he’d asked. But people change, right? He seems like he really likes you.”

  I grope for a new topic; what do you say to the best friend you never talk to? “How’s Grace?” Diana’s youngest sister, one of the five Reyes siblings. I haven’t seen her since she was five, except from afar at graduation or across the street, running errands with her and Mrs. Reyes. She’s small and skinny and weirdly pale. With those white cheeks, those floating dark eyes, and a natural frown unlike her big sister’s quiet smile, Grace looks like the children in horror films. Silent kids who pop up behind the refrigerator door when somebody goes to get a drink, or at the foot of a stepladder. She kind of acts like them too, so she’s a pretty fertile topic of conversation.

  Sure enough, Diana grins. “You know how last month, that truck crashed with all those rubber aliens inside?”

  I nod while drinking.

  “They did an update last week, how some of them were found all the way in the Gulf? Dad had the news on and Grace was watching. And then today she went to her little summer camp and had this assignment where she was supposed to draw the baptism of Jesus. And she did a tiny stick Jesus in the corner, and then, like, thirty aliens around him.”

  “She did not!”

  “Flying aliens, aliens in the grass. The camp counselor showed Mom her art folder when she went to pick Grace up, and there were aliens in every drawing she did that week. All hailing Jesus. My little sister’s either a genius or dumb as a mushroom,” she says warmly.

  “Un bicho raro,” I laugh.

  “Totalmente.” She rolls her eyes. “She loves you, though.”

  Though Diana didn’t mean it to, this hurts; a small and distant ache like the memory of a broken bone or vicious cramps. “Did she?”

  “Why’d you think you woke up with her breathing in your face every time you slept over?”

  True enough. I once opened my eyes in the gray predawn light to the sight of Grace, crouched inside Diana’s big wooden wardrobe with the door six inches ajar, peering out at me. I nearly pissed my sleeping bag. “Tell her hi for me,” I say, then realize what little right I have to ask this. “Or you don’t have to, but—”

  “I will.”

  I look around, and nobody’s paying much attention to us. Though Adrian and Diana hold hands, he’s pivoted away to talk to the boys clumped around the cooler. That includes Jake, who’s not drinking at the moment, but telling some story with big, broad hand gestures, an easy smile, and something like a hip thrust. I wonder if it’s about me. Oh, right, because everybody’s stories are about Savannah Espinoza, the queen of La Trampa, the center of the world.

  “Aren’t you mad at me?” I blurt out.

  Diana bites her cheek, checks to see what Adrian’s up to before shuffling closer to me, and now this is an official conversation instead of an obligatory fly-by chat on the way to grab another beer.

  Speaking of which, I let my empty bottle slip to the dust at my feet to tuck my arms around my waist.

  “I’m not mad, Vanni,” Diana says carefully. “I think it really sucks, because we were friends, and then we just suddenly weren’t. I know you had stuff going on—”

  “I—”

  “Okay, sorry, you had big stuff.” She leans farther from the light to say quietly, “How’s your dad doing?”

  She must know. Sit in on any chisme session with the church ladies, and you’ll hear updates on anyone of interest in La Trampa. “He’s okay.” I give her the resigned, trapped-in-line-at-the-grocery-store answer. “He hurt his arm a couple of weeks ago, but not too bad. His doctor says he’s walking pretty well, so he’ll get around on his own and then use the rollator for as long as possible before he switches to the wheelchair, and his medicine’s helping with the, you know, involuntary movement, so that’s—”

  “But I mean, how is he other than all that?”

  Squinting, I study her face in the shadows. “Other than what?”

  Diana shrugs. “Like, that’s not really your dad, is it? ’Cause I mean, he’s not just his body, right?”

  I close my mouth with a click, not sure how to answer.

  Then Adrian comes up behind Diana, untucks her hair from the collar of her pink plaid button-up, and she nearly glows in the dark.

  Maybe I could be like that.

  I’m no better than Diana—definitely worse, as I’ve never de-pooped a dog park in an orange vest for fun on a Saturday—so if she can have a life here, can’t I? I can be somebody’s girlfriend for once. Run my fingers through Jake’s hair while we watch stolen cable at his place, and bake for him—well not bake, obviously, but at least buy him something from that awesome bakery in downtown Santa Fe. Become the top administrative assistant that Nick’s Cars ’n’ Kitsch has ever had. Show up at the Reyes’ next week with a box of Swedish Fish for Diana and a James McAvoy movie, and then she’d take me back (even if Marilee never would). None of us in this ditch are leaving La Trampa, and they’re all okay with it. Really, how hard can it be to just . . . be?

  Half an hour later, I tell Jake I’m not feeling great, that my mom cooked dinner and it’s now in full-scale revolt against my small intestine. But when he bends his arm around the back of my neck on our walk to his truck, I purposefully soften my body against his. He squeezes me tighter, and I can tell he’s pleased.

  See? I’m off to a solid start already.

  It’s not that late when Jake pulls up my driveway, but the house is dark. His hand rests on my knee, so I shift a little to slide out from under it. His grip tightens. “Hey, hold up. Am I gonna see you tomorrow?”

  “Don’t think so. I have work at noon, and I have to bring Dad to the dentist and do some stuff around town.” Then I remember that I’m trying to be my best La Trampan self, so I tack on, “Call you after I’m done?”

  He bends halfway across the stick shift to kiss me, and I lean in to meet him. The faded, stale-bread taste of beer hangs on our tongues. I wanted this once, I remind myself. I can want this again. I can want him.

  His fingers flex over my kneecap. “Sure I can’t make you feel better?” Even in the weak glow of the streetlights strung intermittently across Jemez, his dimples are almost supernatural.

  I shake my head, sliding out of the truck.

  “Okay, no problem. Buenas noches, princesita.”

  “Don’t . . . yeah, night.” I smile and shut the door.

  Stopping in the kitchen to sniff around anything left over from dinner, which I skipped, I find only a big Tupperware of green beans. I head to my room empty-handed. I slip out of my smoke-smelling dress and flip-flops, and then I brush my teeth with the tap on low so Mom won’t wake up on the other side of the thin bathroom wall; she’s a light sleeper of necessity. I scrub off my mascara, hook my phone up to the charger in my room without bothering to set the alarm, and unmake my bed.

  All the little routines that make up a perfectly survivable life.

  Instead of sunrise, it’s the buzz of my phone on my nightstand that wakes me.

  Clumsily I grope for it, tilting it toward me to read the name on the screen. L— is as far as I get, and that’s enough. Ripping it off the charging wire, I press the phone to my ear. “Hey!” It comes out as a gasp, the last air expelled from the shriveled red balloons that are my lungs all of a sudden.

  “. . . Hello?” a gravel-deep voice answers hesitantly.

  Not Leigh, then. The stupid bright star inside my chest collapses all over again. “Sorry, who’s this?” This time, I remember to whisper.

  There’s a pause, and then, “It’s Lucas. How’s it going, Vanni?”

  “Um, cool, yeah, thanks.” Smooth as a fucking train track.

  “I was just calling to ask, is Leigh over there?”

  “No. We, um, we’re not really hanging out anymore.”

  “I know.” He does? “I mean, she’s been home all the time
lately, so I figured you guys weren’t . . . There were clues.”

  I reach behind my head to yank out my pillow and slap it down over my face. The sooner I suffocate myself, the sooner this horrifically awkward call will be over.

  “She took off with the van when I got home from work this afternoon,” Lucas adds, “and she isn’t back yet. And you know Leigh.”

  I shove away the pillow and lift the phone from my ear long enough to check the time: it’s 10:34 p.m., and way earlier than I thought. “I haven’t talked to her.”

  “Her phone’s off.” He sighs. “I was just hoping. I mean, shit. Dad and Naveen are pissed, and the only reason they haven’t called the cops is because I told them she was probably with you. Shit. Shit. Okay. I’m really sorry, Savannah, this isn’t your problem.”

  “But you think it’s a problem?”

  “Would you think so?” he asks, sounding absolutely exhausted.

  I can’t say, Don’t worry, Lucas, she would never do something balls-out crazy like running away. Still, it’s only August 25. Over a week left until the deadline; the one I was afraid might pass without ever hearing from (much less about) Leigh. She’s smart enough not to take off before her eighteenth birthday, on a night when her dad would notice her absence. With her escape so near, she would wait a measly week. Wouldn’t she? Could she even buy a plane ticket before her birthday?

  Crap, a quick Google search tells me she can.

  But even if it were my job to worry—which it isn’t, because I was fired from that position as well—I probably shouldn’t be.

  Yet five minutes later, I’m out of bed, sliding into my flip-flops, easing open my bedroom door. I snatch the car keys out of the basket and leave a note on the kitchen table, saying Leigh needs a ride home from a party a few towns over, where her DD got wasted.

  And then I’m gone.

  NINETEEN

  Leaning my chin atop the steering wheel of the Malibu, I yawn and squint down the dark, dusty corridor of Berry Creek. According to our not-at-all-desperate plan, Lucas is telling Mr. Clemente that both my and Leigh’s phones are off, but he’s almost positive we’re at my place. A friend’s giving him a ride to La Trampa to drag his sister’s ass home, so Mr. Clemente and Naveen can go to bed and yell at Leigh tomorrow morning.

  Mr. Clemente might be annoyed at me by association, and if Mom does wake up, she might think a little less of Leigh. But spoiling future Clemente-Espinoza Christmas dinners isn’t exactly a primary concern anymore.

  Soon, Lucas’s bright shape swims out of the dark and into the range of my headlights. With a small wave, he jogs toward the car in a hoodie and shorts, muscled legs pumping loosely. I straighten up as he opens the door and slides into the passenger seat. “Fucking Leigh, right?” he says immediately, smelling familiarly of sunscreen and a little bit of his sister’s clean soapiness.

  The star pulses painfully. Mierda, this night is going to suck. “What happened?”

  He spreads his palms in front of him. “Not much. She and Naveen got into it a little this afternoon, but that’s not a rare event. Naveen wasn’t even doing anything. She asked what Leigh was wearing tomorrow, and if she wanted to go back-to-school shopping with her. Leigh was Leigh, said she was all set on tie-dyed skirts and Birkenstock/sock combos. And then Dad said Naveen was just trying to help, and if she couldn’t be nice about it, she could wear a grocery bag to school. That was about it. Leigh said she’d go shopping by herself and asked for the car. But that was at three. And I don’t know where else she’d go, or why she’d stay gone, unless she was with you.”

  I dial Leigh again, and of course it goes directly to the generic voice-mail message of a person who hasn’t bothered to record their own. I drop my phone into the cup holder, defeated.

  Now I have to tell.

  “I don’t know either, but Leigh had this plan. On her birthday.” I rub at a stain on the steering wheel cover with my thumb. Pressing down, the stain becomes a snag in the vinyl. “She said she was saving up for a plane ticket so she could go back to Boston.” The snag becomes a tear.

  I feel stupid and guilty that I didn’t rat Leigh out sooner, and just as guilty for ratting her out now. Worse yet, this tiny, selfish, whining voice (the same that whispers, What about me? whenever I look at Dad) hisses: Now she’ll never want you back, you traitor.

  “Of course she did,” Lucas says roughly, scrubbing a hand down his face and up again, through his dirty-blond, Leigh-like hair. “She thinks we can’t tell her what to do the second she turns eighteen?”

  I trap my hands between my goose-bumped legs so I won’t make the tear worse.

  “Fucking Leigh,” Lucas repeats with a sigh. “I should’ve told Dad. Probably should’ve told on her a long time ago. I was just . . . I really wanted to take care of my sister.” He slumps back in his seat, looking so sad, a smaller version of the boy in the lifeguard chair I would’ve swum fifty laps to impress on graduation day. That seems like a really long time ago.

  “We’ll look for her,” I promise him. “Maybe that’s not what she’s doing.”

  “If she ran away—”

  “If we don’t find her really soon, then we tell.”

  Lucas drops his head back against the headrest.

  Throwing the car into drive and pulling a decisive K-turn to point us away from four Berry Creek, I ask, “Where should we try?”

  “I don’t even know anymore. Someplace you guys hang out a lot?”

  A vision appears, then vanishes in a puff of glitter and perfume and cracked glass. “She won’t go there. She hates me.”

  “She doesn’t.” He shakes his head and shoves his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt. “Leigh doesn’t hate anybody like she hates Leigh. Let’s try it.”

  Either we make a move, or I go home, put on some Adele song about regret and missed calls and aging, curl up on my bed, and wait for a summer monsoon to pour down so I can stare out the window into the rain, feeling sorry for myself. Continuing to feel sorry for myself, actually, because I can’t really remember the last time I didn’t. So without much hope, I head for Chris’s house. As I drive, we peer stupidly out the window, like we might spot Leigh on the side of the dirt streets, out front of the adobe church, in the disintegrating archway of a ruined home.

  “Whatever happened between you guys,” he breaks the quiet inside the car, “it’s not your fault.”

  My stomach twists. “But you don’t know what happened.” I don’t even really know.

  Lucas rubs his fingers across his chin, callused skin rasping over his nighttime stubble. “Okay, true. At least it’s definitely not all about you. I love Leigh, you know? Pretty much the most. But she scares the shit out of me.” He laughs once. “The stuff she used to get up to in Boston? Everything that happened between her and Mom, you’d think she’d be so thrilled to come back to New Mexico. But she acts like it’s a freaking life sentence.”

  “But she loved it there,” I protest.

  He looks over at me.

  “That’s what Leigh told me. She said this was just custody stuff.”

  All of a sudden, he’s extremely interested in the knob on the glove compartment. “It wasn’t a great situation.” He toys with the knob, examining it closely. “Mom and Leigh would fight about big stuff. When Leigh went to high school, she cut off her hair and stopped wearing skinny jeans, and they fought about that. Mom didn’t like Leigh’s girlfriend, either, and then she thought Leigh was too pissy when they broke up, so that was another thing. But they’d also fight about nothing. Like, just nothing. If Leigh didn’t separate her laundry by cold water and hot, and accidentally shrunk her shirt. If Mom didn’t ask before buying Leigh a new shirt. On and on.

  “And if things were quiet for a while, Leigh would pull some stunt. This spring, she went to her first-period chem class drunk—seriously, so drunk her breath could’ve set the lab on fire if she’d coughed on a Bunsen burner. It’s like Leigh was almost r
elieved to have something new to fight about. Like, I don’t know, she was scared to stop fighting for even a second, ’cause then she’d have to pause and figure out why she was fighting at all, or what came next. I was living at home while I went to UMass, so I tried to get her out of the house when things got dark, but I couldn’t be there all the time.”

  “So—what, your mom kicked her out?”

  “She didn’t. I called Dad. I asked if we could come back home, and he called Mom. She wasn’t exactly thrilled.”

  “But she said yes.”

  He nods, then sits in silence for a few minutes before adding, “I thought things would be better for her in a new place. Then she’s driving drunk, and breaking into the park—heard about that, by the way—and fighting with you. Maybe I was wrong, if she loved Boston so much.”

  We bump across the town line to La Trampa, where the roads are instantly worse thanks to our lowly town budget, scarred by the heat and the cold.

  “I don’t know if you were wrong,” I tell him. “Every time she talked about the stuff she loved back home, she talked about you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Like you guys at World’s End? In the Mickey Mouse hats?”

  He rubs his chin again, staring out the windshield, and murmurs, “That was a good day.”

  Who knows what I’m bargaining with, but as I turn left onto Jimeno, I propose a deal: Let Leigh be at Chris Zepeda’s. Let the boxy bulk of the van shadow the driveway when we pull up. Let her have shimmied open the window, and be waiting for me to find her in the hideous room on that musty patterned bedspread that now smells the opposite of us, and I promise whomever or whatever it takes, I’ll make things better for her.

  The driveway’s empty.

  Just to be sure, we hop out and survey the house—me shivering in my pajamas in the cool night air, Lucas with his hood pulled up like an amateur burglar. I let us inside and click on the hallway lights, but there’s no evidence that anyone’s come through since I cleaned up after us two weeks ago. No dripping faucet in the kitchen; no lingering, oily herb scent in the air; no tracked-in dust on the tiled hallway floor. I don’t have to check the back bedroom to know it’s unoccupied.