The Dead Enders

by Erin Saldin

  DAVIS

  Frame One: Jane, on her parents’ landline. Cord wrapped around one wrist. She says, I know, but that’s the thing. I’ve never met someone so . . .

  Frame Two: cord stretched between her two small hands. She looks into the distance, eyes searching, the phone propped between her ear and her shoulder.

  Frame Three: She’s leaning forward a little, intent. The cord lies slack. Inimitable, she says.

  Inimitable? I put my pen down. Is that what I want my girlfriend to call me? I shake my head. Correction: girlfriend on paper. That makes it sound like we’re legally bound—married, or filing a lawsuit or something. It’s not the actual truth, which is that I have a girlfriend, and she’s made of paper.

  This book is the only thing I’ve got going. My week has been a blur. Not a blur as in: getting-wasted-every-night-what’s-a-weekend-for-when-you’re-in-Gold-Fork-anyway-Wednesday-is-the-new-Saturday-every-night-all-night. Definitely not that kind of blur. More like: Hey-it’s-Monday-wait-now-it’s-Saturday-guess-that’s-how-life-passes-you-by. The fact that I actually have a job—okay, okay, unpaid internship—puts me leagues above where I was last summer, which basically consisted of riding my bike around town, “looking for excitement” (in the words of my dad, which should indicate exactly how successful I was).

  But the problem with an unpaid internship (besides the obvious, you know, lack of payment) is that the hours aren’t exactly robust. I still have time to kill. So, I do what any respectable sixteen-year-old boy with a broken heart and five dollars in his pocket would do: I get on my bike and head to Grainey’s.

  Now. You may be saying to yourself, Self, I’m concerned. Isn’t that the coffee shop where Jane and her friends hang out almost every single day? To that I would reply, Yes. Yes it is. But in Gold Fork, our options are limited. If you want to break up with someone, you have to deal with the fact that you’ll probably see him everywhere. I mean, you can’t claim the only decent hang-out spot other than the diner just because you have enough friends to fill a table and he doesn’t.

  You can’t, Jane. You just can’t.

  Grainey’s is on the far end of Main Street, exactly one-point-one mile from my house. I’m fine when I first get on my bike to ride over, but my heart starts pounding as I coast onto Main. I’m sweating by the time I find a spot for my bike in front of my dad’s real estate office across the street. My hands are clammy, and I have to try three times before I can get the combination right on the bike lock. I’m trying to look busy, in case Jane’s watching. Busy and competent. When I finally turn to walk into the coffee shop, though, I can see myself in the door’s thick glass, and I look disheveled, Saturday-morningish. I run a hand through my hair and walk in.

  The thing to do.

  The thing to do when walking into a coffee shop where your ex-girlfriend may or may not be hanging out is to:

  1. Look straight ahead.

  2. Affect a preoccupied air. A furrowed brow helps. So does a slight frown and a shake of the head, as though you’ve just realized that you’ve booked not one, but two dates that night and now what are you going to do?

  3. Exhale. By now you’ve made it to the counter. In just a minute, you’ll have your coffee in hand. You’ll take it black even though you’d like to add some cream or soy milk at the very least, because you know what happens to a guy’s image in the five seconds it takes him to unscrew the top of a milk thermos. When Maria hands you your coffee, it will be time to scan the room. You’ll act like you’re looking for a table, but really, you’ll be on high alert. Chances are, you’ll see her at the first table your eyes land on. Be prepared. She will be more beautiful than she was on the last day of school, the last time you saw her. She’ll probably be wearing The Outfit. She might be with a guy. Even if she isn’t, the specter of another guy will be there, just to her right, like a promise she has to keep.

  A scan, a smile, and then you walk right by her. That’s the thing to do.

  But Jane’s not here. When I get my coffee and do the turn-and-scan, the only person I see is Ana, because she’s right in front of me.

  “Davis,” she says. “Hey.”

  “Oh.” I almost fall backward from the surprise, so I lean forward. For a second, I kind of toggle back and forth. I must look ridiculous. I take a quick glance over her shoulder. No Jane. The coffee shop is only halfway full. I recognize a few of the people here. One guy with a lip ring, sitting at a table with two cups in front of him, catches my eye and then looks away. “Hey. How’s it going?”

  “Good.” She smiles. She’s wearing a blue long-sleeved dress with tiny white flowers all over it, and her boots.

  “You look nice,” I say, and then catch myself. “I mean, very Americana. What do they call that look? Prairie chic?”

  “I think they only call something a ‘look’ when a celebrity wears it.”

  “You’re probably right. Well, in any case, it’s nice.” Why in God’s name do I keep saying “nice”? The pressure of maybe seeing Jane, I guess.

  Or maybe it’s just Ana. Because she does look nice. Nice nice nice nice nice.

  Ana laughs. “Thanks.” Gestures kind of vaguely behind her. “Well, I should go.” She starts to turn.

  From a table nearby, we hear a guy say, “I mean, it’s just a little too coincidental. Two fires in the same place. And then that new one—over by the brewery.”

  A woman’s voice answers, “That one? Wasn’t it small potatoes compared to the others?”

  “Fire is fire.”

  Another woman’s voice. “Frankly, it’s a little scary. What if this is just the beginning?”

  “Of what?” the man asks.

  “Of a Stephen King novel.” She laughs, and then we hear her say, “No, but seriously.”

  Ana and I look at each other. Frozen. She says quietly, “Did you know about the brewery fire?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “There’ll be an article tomorrow. But it’s nothing, really. Trash can outside—brewery wasn’t touched.”

  “Fire is fire,” she whispers, and smiles, though it’s a sad smile. And then she starts to walk away.

  “Wait.” I touch her shoulder, and she shivers like I’ve shocked her. “Sorry.”

  Her eyes widen, but then she smiles. “It’s fine. You just surprised me.”

  My hand is still on her shoulder, and I stare at it like it’s a Rorschach test. “Sorry,” I say again, moving my hand away. “But . . . Have you heard from Georgie at all? Or”—pausing, hoping she doesn’t notice—“Erik?” I step over to the cream station and Ana follows. I pour a little into my cup. (Whatever. Jane’s not here to see that I actually like my coffee the color of suburban carpet.)

  “No,” she says. “Not really since Fellman’s. I’ve missed you all,” she adds, then coughs. “But—why do you ask?”

  “I just—listen,” I say. “Yesterday I found something about his dad.” I lift my coffee in the direction of a table, and she follows me and sits, tugging her sleeves carefully over her wrists.

  “What did you find?” she asks, leaning forward.

  “The divorce notice in the paper,” I say. “They got divorced when we were three.” I take a sip of my coffee. I like this: Me and Ana, scheming. Collaborating. It feels . . . well, nice.

  “Does it say anything?”

  “No. But I did find—” I pause, not sure I want to go on.

  “What, Davis?”

  “It was a legal notice. Something about child support nonpayment. That was the term it used.”

  “Oof. A deadbeat dad,” Ana says, “is worse than a nonexistent one.” Her cheeks flush.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Don’t be. Seriously.” Then she says, “But why would he even come back if he isn’t going to—”

  I hold up my hand and clear my throat. Ana turns to look. Georgie’s just walked into Grainey’s. I’m about to wave, but it’s clear that she doesn’t see us yet. She walks straight over to the guy with the two coffee cups in fr
ont of him and puts her hand on his shoulder. He stands, hands her a coffee, and they lean against each other for a quick second. It’s such a small gesture you might miss it, but Ana looks at me and mouths, Who’s that? and I know she saw it too. It’s weirdly intimate, coming from Georgie.

  We watch them leave.

  “So that’s new, I guess,” says Ana.

  “Where did he come from?” The guy looked vaguely familiar, but then, everyone does in Gold Fork.

  “Fellman’s,” she says. “I saw him there, I think. But,” she adds, “I didn’t see him hanging out with Georgie.”

  “Gotta hand it to her,” I say. “She moves fast.”

  “Yeah,” says Ana, and the look on her face is almost wistful. She glances at me and then away. “When you know, you know, I guess.” She pulls at the sleeves of her dress again.

  I try to think of what to say to that, but I’ve got nothing but questions. Georgie and a guy? Since when? How is it so easy for everyone else, and so difficult for me? And more importantly, what the hell am I supposed to do when I run into Erik? My ability to act like everything’s fine has the life span of a housefly.

  But I don’t say these things. I don’t need to. Because then Ana’s gone, too, a quick good-bye before she heads the other way down Main on her bike. And I bike toward the marina, thinking about the way Georgie and her guy leaned against each other like a physics experiment.

  Jane never leaned against me like that, not even in those days after she first asked me out in art class. Back when we were meeting after school at the park, doing homework on a blanket she kept in her locker and talking about our plans, our hopes, the ways we imagined blowing this town off in two years to only ever come back at Christmas with a fabulous haircut (Jane) and a graphic novel that’s getting small but significant attention in an underground and decisively cool sort of way (me) and yes, okay, sometimes leaning. But not enough. Never enough.

  Oddly, the only person who would really understand this, I think, is Ana’s old lady, Vera. I went to see her once with Ana this spring. The roads were muddy and I was borrowing my parents’ car for the day to run errands and hit the Den, and Ana was going to walk all the way from the Den, otherwise. I thought—okay, I was sure—that it would be an exercise in lethargy, that I’d have to prop my eyelids open with toothpicks while Ana read to her or something. But that wasn’t the case. Vera was more alert than I thought she’d be. Plus, she had this bowl of really delicious nuts by her bed. She’d nod whenever I took one, like I was doing her a favor, which is how I ended up eating half the bowl.

  And then Ana noticed that Vera’s emergency button was somehow disconnected, and she went to the nurses’ station to tell them about it and I was alone with Vera and I smiled at her, all Isn’t it funny that we’re alone together with nothing to talk about? expecting, I don’t know, to just sit there until Ana came back and filled in the silences, but Vera grabbed my hand instead. Her eyes were slate.

  “Love can miss you,” she said, voice matter-of-fact. “It can just chug right by you like a passenger train.” She must have seen something in my expression, because she squeezed my hand a little. Her fingers felt like chicken bones around my palm. “Not always, young man, but sometimes. Don’t believe those who tell you to give it time, that it will find you, because”—she let go of my hand and shrugged—“sometimes it doesn’t. Cupid’s Arrow. That’s what we used to call it.” Her voice went high and girlish. “ ‘Have you been hit by the arrow?’ ” And then she giggled, remembering some inside joke from another time. “Oh, but,” she said, sitting straighter in her chair, “what would I have done with a husband, anyway?”

  I asked Ana about it later. I didn’t tell her everything Vera said—just the last bit. I told her I thought Vera’d been married. She was, said Ana. But maybe it’s better to forget what you no longer have.

  I’ve thought about that conversation with Vera a lot in the past few months. And now, seeing Georgie with Henry, I remember it again.

  Here’s what’s going through my head as I start biking toward the marina:

  Jane. Were you my train? Jane?

  When I get down to the beach, it’s crowded with Toney’s and Dead Enders, toddlers and dogs. Friday afternoon. Everyone appears to have a snow cone from the little cart that’s set up on Main Street. Not exactly an inspirational setting. I turn and walk along the park path that leads to the marina.

  I see them before I know what I’m looking at.

  They’re standing on the marina’s dock. At first, I take her for a Weekender. Her hair’s lighter than it was on the last day of school, and she’s tan, wearing only a bikini top and shorts. A different kind of uniform than the one I’ve been imagining all summer. I watch as she leans against the mannequin she’s standing with, pulls him closer, and says something into his ear.

  Jane.

  A woman from the rental shop pulls up alongside them in a Jet Ski and hands them the key. Well, that’s something at least. Her Weekender doesn’t own his own toys. But then I see the mannequin turn and call to the end of the dock, where a huge speedboat, basically a yacht, waits idling. It’s filled with people, and one of them, a youngish guy, jumps out, runs down the dock, and grabs the key, which the mannequin gives with a slight nod. The guy jumps on the Jet Ski and heads toward the middle of the lake. And Jane wraps one arm around the mannequin’s waist as they walk together to the end of the dock and climb into the boat, where he turns the speakers up full blast and takes the wheel.

  Naturally. Because it’s his boat.

  Three things come to mind as I’m standing there watching the wake that the boat makes behind them as they speed off. First, there’s a certain amount of gratification in knowing that I was right, after all. Of course she found a Weekender. Of course he looks like that. Of course she looks happy. Didn’t I predict all of this?

  Give yourself a pat on the back, Davis.

  Second, she never even saw me. I was staring at them so hard that my vision got fuzzy, and she didn’t even notice me there on the beach.

  And third.

  Third, I can breathe.

  Whenever I’ve imagined this moment, I’ve thought that I’d freeze. That even my lungs would betray me. But here I am, standing by the water, and—

  I can breathe, Jane.

  I reach into my backpack and grab my journal and my pen, turning to a page I haven’t known how to finish.

  Jane’s on a deck looking out over the lake. One leg curled under her, the toes of her other leg barely touching the ground, pushing her chair back a little. The person she’s talking to is just outside of the panel. Note: It’s not my deck. This one is much nicer. The view, for one thing, is million-dollar, not “penny-ante,” as my dad says about the sliver of blue that you can see from our kitchen window. Conversation bubble above her head, empty.

  And I remember, like I do at least twelve times a day, the look on her face when she told me I wasn’t quite it. There was something there. Regret, I always thought. Preemptive regret, the kind that says, Oh, this is going to bite me in the ass someday. That’s what I wanted to see. Because she did like me once. I always thought it had to do with the way, in those old movies I watch with my parents, the cheerleader finds herself mesmerized by the science nerd who wears safety goggles whenever he drives. She had to like something about me enough to ask me out that day in art class and to not run away when I stumbled over my yes.

  But now I think I know what it was she liked, and it wasn’t me. I start writing. Don’t stop until I’m done. I look down at the page. He lived on a lake, the conversation bubble says. I thought he was a Dockside. One more sentence. Turned out the emperor had no clothes.

  Jane was never interested in me. She was interested in my view. And when she saw it, she did the only thing a Dead Ender with Weekender aspirations can do: She got the hell out.

  ANA

  “Did I ever tell you about the summer I hitchhiked to British Columbia?” My mom is washing potatoes in
the sink, and she turns to wave one at me. “One or two?”

  “One,” I say. I’m sitting at the table in our kitchen, grating cheese into a small bowl. There are already four other bowls on the table filled with condiments: sour cream, green onions, broken pieces of bacon. It’s Sunday, which means one thing: u-stuff baked potatoes. My mom’s specialty.

  She turns back to the sink. “I think I was sixteen. Your age, can you believe it? At first, it was me and my friend Jill—we were going to make our way up to the fishing lodges, get some seasonal work. I think we had an idea of ourselves as great adventurers. I know we thought we were heart-breakers.” I watch the back of her head as she shakes it, laughing. “But Jill backed out at the last minute. She said she got work in town, but I think she broke down and told her parents what we were planning, and they refused. It’s a wonder they didn’t tell my mom and dad. They’d have locked all the doors. As it was, they didn’t know I was gone until they got the first postcard. By the time they’d calmed down, the summer was almost over and I was on my way home.” She smiles, then turns away before I can see the sadness in her eyes.

  “What’s Jill doing now?”

  My question has caught her off-guard. She turns to face me again. “Jill? God, who knows? She got married out of high school. I know that much. Tim. Nice enough guy. She’s probably doing something like I am, you know?” She shoots a smile over her shoulder at me. “Living and loving and generally maintaining.”

  It’s her catchphrase. Whenever anyone asks my mom how she’s doing, she always says the same thing: “Living and loving and generally maintaining.” She’ll say it no matter what—even if, say, the rent’s due and her hours just got cut at the spa. Even then.

  “Anyway,” my mom says, “it was wild. I went by myself—what else was I going to do? You wouldn’t believe the people I met on the road. Truckers, families, an orchestra conductor. People were friendlier back then. They had less to be scared of.” She looks at me. “Now, of course, I wouldn’t hitchhike if you paid me.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say. As much as Mom wants to appear young and free in her stories, she doesn’t want me to start getting ideas. But she’s got nothing to worry about. She’s got to know that I’ll never do anything crazy or dangerous or thrilling. I’ve learned my lesson.