“You don’t have to say anything.”
He gave a light nod, his hand over his mouth. How his throat twitched—she could tell she’d upset him. She felt beyond repair. Beyond redemption. Beyond humanity.
“It’s really not how it sounds.” Only now had she begun to cry. She reached for a fresh tissue. “I mean I guess I’m a little fucked up, but it’s not like—”
“You’re not fucked up, Diane.” Tim said fuck with an angry dart of air. “What I’ve been telling you, all these months, is that very thing. You’re not fucked up. You’re not bruised. You’re not damaged. You’re not crippled or maimed or whatever else you think you might be. You’re a beautiful, kind woman who’s been left to deal with more than she asked for. It’s ‘in sickness and in health’ but not ‘death,’ Diane. There’s no death. That’s not part of it. This wasn’t you. It wasn’t your doing. Your wish to enjoy life, to go out in the lovely spring weather, to drink hot coffee on a cool porch, your desire to find partners for healthy sexual intimacy—none of this is wrong. What’s happened, in your head, that you feel so ashamed to be alive?”
She’d never seen him cry and clearly he’d never wanted her to. She imagined the Diane he described, the hurt Diane, the alone Diane, the Diane who only wanted to go on living her life, taking care of her family. The Diane who told her husband not to eat barbecue in a white shirt, who made sure the kids did their chores. She saw this Diane, who’d lost everything, like an actress in a film—someone it was painful to love, to root for, but you did anyway. You knew how hard life was for her. Tim comforted this Diane as she cried. He slowly raked a finger through her hair, circling around her ear and down her neck. Tim had seen the real Diane cry a dozen times, and she wished it mattered more, right then, that she’d fallen apart, that she couldn’t speak, that her entire body trembled as the session went long. “I’m not letting you leave like this,” Tim said when she pointed to the clock. “Everyone else can wait.”
For the last year, Alan had filled her head with stories. Real people, she assumed, who’d died, who’d suffered, who’d achieved something great—men who invented machines or women who pulled fellow passengers from plane wreckage. Even in life, he’d never told her a story about herself, and she wondered where all of this had come from. How long had he kept these notebooks? How long had he harbored their facts? He’d always noticed things. He’d always observed the life around him. If it was so simple—if all a person had to do was tell her, No, Diane, that’s not you, this is you—she would’ve asked decades ago. It was only a story, of course, a kind of fiction or a lie, but believing it stopped her tears and stilled her shoulders. It brought her to her feet. It thanked Tim via her smile and her weak, sweaty handshake. Outside, in the parking lot that clung to winter, it lit her cigarette and filled her lungs with warmth, and as she glanced down in her purse, pushing the gun aside, it reached in via her own hand and crumpled her old list into a little ball. It threw that ball into a bin with McDonald’s wrappers and pop bottles and all the other trash. It said, Go home. It said, Rest.
In her previous life, she would have come home to find Alan asleep in front of the television or hidden away in a corner with a newspaper. All the stuff she’d fantasized might be fixed—the creaky cupboard door, the crack in the foundation beneath the dining room window—would be as broken as it was when she’d left. If she said anything, it would be a dig at him—Sorry to disturb you, or Your servant has returned—while she collected ingredients for a quick, flavorless dinner she was ashamed to serve her family. One more night of wondering why she hadn’t yet divorced him. As she drove home, this imagined evening felt like a stone suddenly lifted from her chest—the relief of knowing it wasn’t waiting for her—and then, with a wash of guilt, put back. How can you be grateful for something like that? she thought as she pictured his body, the remains of this man who’d never disappoint her again.
Colin was at the kitchen table and had already eaten, his plate pushed out away from him and the atlas in its place. He had a scrap of notebook paper next to him and was adding up the miles. “You know you can do that online,” she said, tapping his calculations with her finger.
“This is more fun.”
Diane set her purse on the counter, draped her coat on the chair by the phone. “That’s because it’s new for you. Can you imagine what it was like when we bought our first computer?”
“I was there.”
“You were two years old. You weren’t…you weren’t really there.”
“I’m pretty sure I remember it.” He flipped over to Nebraska and traced a highway that wasn’t the interstate.
While she ate, he outlined their route. He read from the scrap of paper next to him—what was special about Deadwood, South Dakota, and who’d eaten breakfast in Rock Springs, Wyoming. She saw how he bulleted his notes—the right-angled arrows and the method of underlining names uncanny, not his own. How were you supposed to be angry with the dead? How do you reprimand someone who’s no longer alive? You see what you’ve done? she imagined herself shouting at Alan’s headstone. Colin was telling her how in the desert you can see forever. Her mouth was twitching, and if she wasn’t stuffing it with food it would’ve been no secret, how close she was to crying.
“I wonder what else we’ll see,” she said. “Maybe we’ll drive through a ghost town.”
“You don’t really drive through them. But there’s a few here.” He pointed to a part of Nevada that looked, on paper, purely white. No green patches. No veins of highways. Not even a little grey pencil mark of a road.
“Wow.”
“It’s a big place,” Colin said, as if she’d never left home. He gathered his notes and the atlas. She noticed the cordless, snuggled up against his chest at the edge of the table.
“You should put that on the charger.”
“Whatever, it’s charged.” He picked up the phone and waved it at her and set it back down.
“It’s bad for the battery,” she said—something Alan had told her. She pushed a stray vein of onion around in circles with her fork. “The more you use the battery the faster it wears out.”
“Um, that’s bullshit.”
“Colin.”
“Sorry.” He rolled his eyes and leaned into the atlas, his notes. “Bullcrap.”
For weeks now she’d wondered if, with Colin, she’d made all the wrong decisions. Heather, too, if she felt honest with herself. Even Paul. How much can a growing child take? How much can you place on his shoulders? She wished, right then, that they’d talked about Colin in her session instead of her own problems. She wished Tim had told her she was doing the right thing, or at least revealed there was no right thing to be done. That, too, she’d considered—what if all of this was irreparable? Colin turned the page to California and she looked at San Francisco, a knot of roads and parks and points of interest. What would she tell the world around her, should something happen to him? Colin radiated pain like no one she’d ever met. Perhaps there wasn’t anything you could say. Perhaps there was nothing to understand.
“I should’ve done more,” she said, and she smiled as she began to cry.
“Huh?”
“For you. I should’ve been there when you got home from school every day, you and your brother and sister. I should’ve stayed home with you when you were too young, not sent you to preschool. I should’ve—”
“Mom, stop it.” He shook his head. “You’re crying. Cut it out.”
“I just feel so bad.”
He’d stopped moving—no more fidgeting, no more eye-rolling. “I feel bad too,” he said. “But whatever. It’s fine. Stop crying. I’m fine.”
She reached across the table and he recoiled, dropping his hands into his lap. “Colin,” she said, her voice like a bent piece of metal. “Colin, I—”
“I said stop it!” He reached up with the collar of his shirt and wiped his eyes. “I’m fine, remember? Look at me, I’m fine.” He sat up straight and put on a smile, so fake and so sill
y she couldn’t help it—she laughed. “I’m just a normal kid,” he said. “Going to school, learning stuff, making friends.” He bent his elbows and swung his arms back and forth like he was marching or dancing. He made crazy eyes at her and that was it—she was done. Thank you, she wanted to tell him, but she knew it’d drag her back into herself, and instead she called him a creep.
“Son of a creep,” he said, and stuck out his tongue.
She took her plate to the sink. There was a pile of pans and she began to wash them.
“I so can’t wait to go on our trip,” Colin said. “Like, just to get out of here?”
She pushed out a long breath. If you thought about it, their life was too much to believe. “No work. No school. No goddamn dishes.”
“I’ve never seen the desert. Or mountains, I guess. Not the ocean, either.”
“It’s so beautiful. All of it.” She felt like she should place her hand on his neck but it was soaked with dishwater and wet food. Instead she bumped him with her hip and he bumped back. “I wonder what all we’ll see. Buffalo, I’ll bet. Maybe some—”
“There actually aren’t buffalo in America. We have bison. Buffalo live in Africa.”
“Bison then, smartass. I bet we see some.”
“There’s a lot in South Dakota and Wyoming. We’ll see some for sure. Antelope, too, and vultures, elk, mule deer, maybe a bighorn sheep.”
“I’ll bet we see some wild horses.” The image of a herd came to her, galloping over an open plain, an earthquake of hooves like you hear in movies. “There’s a resurgence of them,” she explained. “With the recession their owners can’t really take care of them, so they set them free. They’re supposed to be all over the west, tens of thousands of them. I read about it in…” She swallowed and looked at herself in the window. It was still light out but the air had gathered enough evening to reflect her own hesitation, to show Colin next to her, his eyes fixed on the clanking bundle of silverware in his hands. “In the paper,” she said.
On their own, these horses quickly fall in with the wild herds already scavenging the plains for water—some ninety thousand horses. Colin dropped the silverware into the little wire basket next to the sink. There were still plates clunking together in the dirty water, and then all the glasses and coffee cups to wash. Without predators, his father had written, the wild population doubles every four to five years, depending on rain.
“They’re probably all dead,” Colin said. He balled the dishtowel up in his hands and dropped it on the counter. “I’m done for now. I’m supposed to meet Chelsea. I’m gonna walk over there.” As he left the room he stretched out the word bye as if he were speaking to a four-year-old. He was supposed to be a snotty, ungrateful teenager—an easy part to play if they didn’t have to confront the truth. Oh, you’ve read them too! he imagined himself saying, as though it was a best-selling series. It was easier to pretend the notebooks had been written for him and no one else. As he slipped on his hat and his gloves he felt violated. Why couldn’t the horses have belonged to him? “Leaving now,” he called into the kitchen, and winced at his own strength as he slammed the door. He pushed his hands deep into his pockets and felt her eyes on his back as she stood at the window, but he wouldn’t turn around.
It was still that part of the year when you were surprised every time you went outside. The sun was taking its time in setting. It no longer felt like winter, despite all the snow. Right away Colin zipped open his jacket. Halfway to the gas station it was folded in the crook of his arm. He still didn’t know what he was doing. The trip to Chelsea’s house was a lie and he had nowhere to go. At the gas station he bought a bag of cherry licorice and ate it as he kept walking, past the mechanics and auto-body shops, the thrift store that never seemed to be open, and the stray houses that filled the gaps between them.
At the next intersection, there was a strip mall set back from the street. In front of a chain restaurant he saw a boy he recognized shuffling away from a car. His mother—Colin guessed—shouted at him to get back here right now. He’d seen him in school, maybe the year before when Colin was still a seventh grader. It occurred to him that he might run into other classmates, wandering around like this, and he changed his demeanor. He tried not to slouch and he carried the bag of licorice at his side instead of out in front of his chest, like a child. Seeing this boy with his mother—an older boy he’d respected and feared—Colin felt embarrassed. He slipped into the coffee shop at the end of the strip mall.
It was too warm inside—fake warmth from the fake fireplace surrounded by fake leather furniture. Colin stuffed the licorice into his jacket and looked at the menu above the counter. Coffee was something he’d never understood. He was conscious of everyone in the room, imagining himself being watched, but nobody was watching. Nobody he knew was here. He ordered a large mocha and the barista warned him—because he looked like a dumb kid, Colin guessed, standing there with his hands in his pockets—that it had three shots. “Exactly,” Colin said. The barista shrugged and made his drink. It was bitter but he got used to it, and by then—with the sky purpling and the western clouds glowing like coals—it was nice, at the very least, to hold something warm.
As he continued down the strip mall, glancing through the windows of the late-night bakery, a hair salon, the bar where everyone did pull-tabs, a fast-food Chinese place, and a store that sold used games, he realized he was hoping to see Andy. Only see him—from a distance or through glass, where Andy might glance up and see Colin out by himself, walking alone at night with a cup of coffee. For months, he’d tried not to think about Andy in the way that came easiest. He tried, instead, to imagine them as friends. It was his own fault that Andy avoided him. It was his own lack of self-control that had driven him away. But he could change that. He could not ask for him. He could not want him. At the end of the strip mall was a burger-and-fries kind of place, and he stood outside until his ears were cold, waiting for one Andy-looking boy to turn around. Colin blushed when she did, and she wasn’t a boy.
Down the street was another strip mall—a tiny bowling alley, a greasy pizza place, a video store with empty shelves, more coffee, more bakeries, more restaurants. There weren’t yet stars but it was dark enough for the treetops to look like mountains, miles and miles away. He imagined Andy at the video store, picking out a movie with some new best friend. Colin called himself stupid for thinking he could’ve just walked up to him and said Hi, remember me, I’m sorry I sucked your dick, I’m not a fag, please don’t hate me. He laughed at how pathetic it sounded, but he couldn’t ignore his heart. With every beat it felt jumped by a car battery. Andy, it seemed to shout, Andy, Andy, Andy, ANDY. He began to breathe too fast and too deeply and he had to stop walking. He rested his hands on his knees, bent over the salt-stained sidewalk. Am I throwing up? He wasn’t throwing up. His heart slammed against the bars of its cage, the word Andy like a taunt from something free outside. He dumped the rest of his coffee and watched it melt the snow into a brown slush. At the curb, he tossed the cup into the garbage. He tried to think about homework. He thought about cooking with his grandfather, how it was getting close to spring and they’d start in with new recipes. By the time he got to the gas station his heart had calmed. His breath came slowly. He gnawed at a stick of licorice as he walked, his hands going numb with nothing to do. He saw the black Toyota before he saw Victor, swiping his credit card at the gas pump. It was dark enough for Colin to vanish—down another street or just into a shadow, out of the fluorescents. I saw you, he could say to Victor on some future phone call. Instead he stepped over the guardrail that separated the sidewalk from the parking lot and walked up to him. Normally, Victor controlled the world around him, pulling all of its strings as the threat of a grin hooked the corner of his mouth. Today he looked ready to cry and kiss the backs of Colin’s hands with joy. “Colin!”
Colin only nodded. It was best just to wait for Victor to say all the things he liked to say, tell the stories he liked to tell. This was a str
ange comfort compared to his earlier panic. This was familiar, a part of his life he’d come to expect. He knew, next, that Victor would offer him a ride, and he knew he’d say yes, and he knew Victor—who was the most reliable, predictable person on earth—would push Colin’s boundary just a little further. Only around adults did Colin feel astute, sharp, and observant. Around teenagers, he felt like a separate species.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Victor was saying. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing, walking around in the middle of the night when it’s this cold?”
“It’s like eight o’clock,” Colin said. “And I don’t know. I just went for a walk I guess.”
“It’s almost nine, mister. You staying out of trouble?” Victor looked at him askance. He lowered his voice and leaned in close. “Been up to no good?”
Colin stepped back. He shook his head. “Just…I dunno. Bored?”
“Does your mother know you’re out wandering around?”
“She wouldn’t really care.” He slipped his hands into his pockets. The last of the licorice was still there, and it struck him how strange—how normal—it would be to stand there like any other bored-off-his-ass eighth grader, chewing candy while he suffered someone’s concern.
But it wasn’t concern. Victor’s eyes were lit up in a way the harsh gas station fluorescents couldn’t account for. This wasn’t his duty.
“Anyway.” Colin shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, stretching the polyester lining of his coat until it creaked. The pavement was discolored from years of spills and mosaicked with an entire winter’s worth of pressed-down trash. His nose had begun to run and he sniffed it back. “It was nice running into you?”
“Colin,” Victor said.
Like a word that halts every muscle, his own name. He wondered if Victor had hypnotized him, when they’d first met. In a few seconds you’ll be awake, but from now on whenever I say your name you’ll freeze. Whatever you’re doing, you’ll stop in your tracks. Do you understand?
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