Their waiter was an old man in a velvet smock who walked with his hands clasped behind his back. “Okay?” he asked, whenever he looked at them. Allie’s eyes were still bloodshot and he was wearing a grin even now. “Okay?” the old waiter asked, and Colin wondered if he was smart enough to know the sweaty, tank-topped man who nodded at him was totally out of his mind. Then he wondered if it was safe to drive around with someone so stoned. It’s not like getting trashed, Heather once explained. Being buzzed, she’d said—it’s just like being super chill. Like, wow, that car cut me off, whatever, that’s cool. Colin tried to remember the details—what Heather was wearing, how old he was at the time, what streets they’d driven on and how much snow had accumulated or melted or left the grass green or hopelessly brown. Los Angeles was beautiful but you had to have a certain kind of love for a place where the skyline was nothing but chimneys and gables and the occasional overpass peeking through the treetops. You’ll get out someday, Heather had said, and Colin realized she’d been planning her escape for years. He scanned the room for a window. He wanted to see the city and verify that he, too, had escaped, but everything was covered in red paper that allowed in nothing but red light.
“How’s your dog?” Allie asked, and popped a wet lump of chicken in his mouth.
Colin shrugged. “It’s a little ruff,” he said, and couldn’t help but laugh at his terrible joke. “Shut up,” he kept telling Allie as he laughed with him. His muscles seized up and soon his plate was a blur in front of him, and Allie too, so there was no warning when he felt two hands close on his wrists, when he felt his body pulled forward, when Allie’s lips touched his own and stubble scraped his cheek. Colin opened his mouth to let in anything that might want in but Allie pulled back. He took Colin’s face in his hands and dried each eye with his thumbs. How were you supposed to stay alive when it was impossible to know whether or not you wanted to live?
“I’m sorry,” Allie said as they walked back to the car. “That was the wrong thing to do. You just looked…” He had his hand in his pocket and was doing something with his keys. The sky had lost most of its orange and was now something like melted ice cream with swirls of strawberry. Colin pulled his arms into his T-shirt. On the drive back to the motel it began to get dark. The traffic on the 101 hadn’t cleared and the canyon was aglow with brake lights. Colin had undone his seat belt and snuggled up to Allie. “I’m cold.”
“Put your seat belt on. We’ll get pulled over.”
“No one can even see me.” Colin shrank lower until all he saw was the blue empty sky and the black mountains all lit up, as if the stars had finally let go and fallen straight to earth. “All hidden,” he said. His head was lodged between Allie’s hip and his arm, right against his ribs.
“Get up, for fuck’s sake.”
“Why? It’s nice down here.”
“Colin, get up.” He pulled at Colin’s shirt, but not that hard.
Colin shook his head, letting his hair rub up against Allie’s jeans. He slid lower until his back was almost flat on the seat. “Too comfy,” he said as he opened his mouth for a fake yawn.
“Seriously. Quit fucking around.”
Colin propped himself on his elbows. “What was that? Something moved.”
“Nothing moved, Colin. Quit being such a fucktard and get up before someone sees you.”
Nothing had moved. Allie wasn’t even hard yet, Colin discovered when he undid his fly and pulled it out, but within seconds that changed. For a while he just looked at it, letting his fingers move up and down, touching all the spots that made it unique. They were all unique, Colin was learning. Allie had gone quiet and was just breathing, slowly, deeply, with a little stab of air when Colin’s breath reached the part that glistened under the streetlights. Colin licked the light away. The taste he already knew and he let Allie’s moans guide him.
At first he begged Colin to stop but soon he begged him not to. Colin’s own was hard and bent like a ruined nail in his underwear, but he didn’t let himself touch it. He wasn’t allowed, he decided, until Allie said he could. His hands were trembling and all he could smell was coconut oil and sweat. Allie’s hand landed in his hair and roamed down his neck, along his back, his fingers just brushing the waistband of his briefs. It was really happening. Colin moaned when Allie grazed the base of his spine, and his moan traveled back into Allie. I’m such a slut, he thought, and the word felt hot in his heart. He wanted Allie, moaning above him, to call him a slut, a cocksucker, the best fucktoy he’d ever had, the perfect little cockslave. All the words he’d learned from porn were like firecrackers in his head. Your mouth is made for cock. Your tight little ass is made for fucking. It was exhilarating to be such a thing, to take a break from being a person. There was no way he could go home.
What could the Titanic’s passengers, still onboard at two in the morning, have thought? By then her bow was submerged and her keel out of the water. It wasn’t possible, anymore, to deny the ship’s future. Clutching railings, wrapping themselves around benches and other passengers, hoisting themselves into windows—what was it like to feel your entire world sinking out from under you? The ground underfoot vanishing—and so slowly, with ample time to watch it go?
If you eliminate the variable of hope, is death like a calm, glassy pool of water, as warm and soothing as a bath?
How long am I going to do this?
Opportunities, wait-and-sees, what-ifs—you can reach out into the dark and imagine that anything you’ve grasped is the much-longed-for lifeline, the sign from God to wait a little longer. If anything’s infinite it’s a list of excuses, of possibilities. Hopes.
Either I do this or I don’t. All speculation is ornamental.
Alan had written.
It was after ten when Colin climbed the stairs to the hotel room. Diane could tell he was trying to be quiet but she surprised him halfway. The way he broke—just a squint in his eyes at first and then a cascade of tears, like a failing dam or a shattering vase—disarmed her, prepared as she was to punish someone so much less childlike. She latched onto him and squeezed, once again ready to crush him rather than let him get away. She’d been crying too, up waiting for one more person she loved who might have vanished forever. He didn’t struggle. He didn’t shove her away. Before they went up to the room she drew back and slapped him across the face. There was nothing she could do to feel safe, to feel like she’d won.
“Where the fuck have you been?” She slammed the door behind her and the wall shook with her rage. “Who are you, Colin? You’re not like this. This isn’t how I raised you.”
He sat on the bed and hugged his knees. He still wouldn’t look at her. “I was at the beach all day. Looking at all the garbage. There’s all this garbage on the beach from the earthquake.” With a shrug he wiped his face on his shirt and spoke into his shoulder. “I was there all day and I stayed too late. I missed the bus and had to wait like an hour. It took forever.”
Not looking someone in the eye is a confession, Tim once told her. There was no way she could prove anything, but she knew everything he said was an absolute lie. She could smell the smoke on him. He’d always been her favorite child, the one who used to search her roots for the hairs she called greys. She stood with her hands on her hips and tried to control her breathing, to summon whatever wisdom was left in her to deal with this very normal, very adolescent problem. Instead she felt like leaping off the balcony.
“Anyway,” he whispered, and he coughed and tried again. “Anyway, I totally need a shower. The beach was kinda gross.”
She tried to loom over him, stepping closer. “You expect me to…what? Forget about this?” The urge to slap him, to strangle him, to whip him with a belt was welling up within her, climbing her throat like bile, and she tangled her hands together behind her back. “Colin, this isn’t fucking funny. You could’ve been…well, how the fuck am I supposed to know?”
His eyes were still on the bedspread. That feeling again, as though he was only a child w
ho didn’t know right from wrong. She’d heard long ago that cuteness—in kittens, in puppies—was an evolutionary adaptation to avoid being eaten by one’s parents. “I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was small and pitiful, and it made her think he was doing it on purpose. “I—I didn’t—”
“I don’t want to hear it.” She put up her hands and went to the window. “You could’ve been anywhere. I had no idea. Anything could’ve happened to you, do you understand?” She closed her eyes and saw all the possibilities, the multitude of ways the living body could be destroyed. “Go take your goddamn shower before I slap you again.”
As though she’d released him from a spell, he sprang up and vanished into the bathroom. Through the window the balcony looked inviting and she helped herself outside for a smoke. The sun had long set and it was the ground’s turn to light the sky. Earlier, as she waited for Colin, she’d scanned the hillside for plots of light they could never afford. How had she convinced herself that this was life? That what was left of her family would feel any better in this city? Days ago, she commented on how Los Angeles would be good for him. Now she’d seen what a place like this had done—the marks on his neck, the new opacity of his eyes. A mother was supposed to know the cure for everyone’s ache, or at least what would help. She started to cry, out on the balcony, and rubbed away the evidence with the ball of her thumb.
For days now, even after her dinners and her afternoons with Liam, she recited everything—the good news and the bad—to an imagined Tim who sat across from her, listening like a rock you kept nestled in your favorite plant’s dirt. Right now she was asking him what to do about Colin. He’s my last child, she said, and reminded him how Heather had left, how—we had no choice, you understand—they locked Paul up in some faraway room.
Are you afraid you’re pushing him away?
But he’d always loved her, and he’d always shown it. What had changed?
He’s fourteen, the imagined Tim said. It’s just an age boys get to, a phase they go through.
Diane ashed over the railing and tried to believe that Colin was out doing stupid things because he was a teenager, because he was at that insane part of life where the word consequence was just something your parents said.
Or parent, she thought.
It’d been a long time since she felt any use for Alan, any real absence, but right then she wished she had asked him about his own adolescence. Tell me what’s normal, she would’ve said, and saw herself taking notes. She put the cigarette to her lips to suppress a laugh.
I noticed you didn’t wish Alan was still alive, the imagined Tim told her as he crossed his legs. You just wished, he said, that you had asked him something when he was alive.
“I’m totally fucking crazy,” she said out loud. She shook everything out of her head and looked at the city, every night the same shimmering treasure at the bottom of a black ocean. When she asked herself what kind of trouble Colin had gotten himself into, there were too many answers. When she tried to think of ways to chastise him—to be his mother—there were none. All these months she’d spent looking through Alan’s notebooks for some trace of the real Alan, and there was none. It was a sad hope to have clung to for so long, the wish to know the man her husband had become. But now there was no more searching, no more deluding herself into thinking you could ever really know other people or see what was supposed to be their soul. Alan, Colin, Heather and Paul, Shannon, even Tim: all the notebooks had taught her was that there was nothing she could know about anyone. Instead, she only wanted Liam to take her somewhere fancy for dessert and coffee, even if that, too, was just a fantasy, a diversion. It wasn’t hard for her to understand that Liam meant nothing and could have been anyone. Just another distraction from reality, whatever reality was.
Her stomach felt light as she remembered the phone calls that morning, all the voicemails she hadn’t listened to. She switched on her phone and saw the messages pile up, but she wouldn’t listen to them. Not tonight. Instead she began to dial, sucking the last bit of life from her cigarette before she flicked it into the parking lot.
That her mother was awake was a surprise she hadn’t prepared for. She broke out in tears without saying a word.
“Diane. Thank God. Are you okay? Where are you? The hotel in ’Frisco said you never checked in, and I find this out this morning. You’re alive?”
Diane heard Ron mumble something and she knew they were in bed, Ron asleep and her mother flipping through pages of all the books and magazines she never finished. She leaned against the railing and slid down to the floor. “Diane, you have no idea,” her mother was saying. “I don’t know what’s happened but I’m so glad you called. Where are you? Wherever you are, you need to come home. Don’t even go to your place. Just come here. You and Colin can sleep here, as long as you need, whatever’s happened. I’ll get the beds ready.”
Diane smiled and tasted tears at the corner of her mouth. “Mom,” she said, and heard a long sigh through the phone, something whispered away from the receiver. “We’re in LA. We’re fine. Nothing’s happened. The car’s fine. I’m fine. Colin’s fine. Heather and Paul?”
“You don’t sound fine. You were supposed to be at work today. You need to come home.”
She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the railing. Somewhere downstairs that couple was arguing again, or maybe a new couple, with new voices and new accents. She listened closer and noticed they weren’t even speaking Spanish. They’d been in this motel five days, she realized. “I think you’re right,” she said into the phone, trying to conjure something like happiness as she pictured Colin hoisting his bags into the car, as they drove out onto the highway and sat in the city’s endless traffic, suburb after suburb on their way to the desert.
“Of course I’m right, Di.”
“We’re leaving tomorrow.” Her throat cinched up. Joy or misery, the sensation was the same.
“You come straight here,” her mother said. She heard the bedsprings creak through the phone. Her mother was going out into the hallway, flipping on the light, and would soon rummage through the linen closet for two fresh sets of sheets. There was another mumble or groan from Ron and the way she hushed him brought a smile to Diane’s lips.
“I’ve been so stupid,” she said. The word itself sounded absurd enough to laugh at. She covered her mouth so no one else could hear.
“Everyone’s stupid now and again. Call in the morning and tell me you’re coming.”
“I will.”
“You know I love you.”
“You too.”
“Of course, Di. Now I want you to go to sleep. You’ve never sounded so tired.”
Was she really that tired, or was her mother just being a mother? They said their good-byes and Diane got to her feet. This city—was it something she would miss? Or—like the Mojave at dawn, like the mountains of southern Arizona—would it be some glorious thing she had seen on the way to someplace a thousand times better?
Life, right then, was the biggest branch on the oldest tree, splitting off into so many dead-end leaves you couldn’t comprehend it. Had she done the right thing, coming here instead of San Francisco? She wouldn’t have met Liam, but she would’ve met another Liam in another city. Further back she unimagined Colin, Paul, and Heather—even Alan—and pictured herself as someone young who could have backpacked the Pacific Rim or built hospitals in places like Africa or Bosnia. That she wouldn’t have known how it felt to have Heather’s alien little hand grasp a strand of her hair and twist it through her fat fingers turned into one of those God-or-no-God moments. If no one had told her, would she cry at the threat of His absence? She thought of everything she would’ve lost or missed and it was too much. For the first time in months she looked at the sky, from where God, presumably, could see her and love her, and she asked to be forgiven. She explained, as though He might not know, that she loved her family, that if it disintegrated any further—if she lost the only one left—it would be over and nothing would matt
er. “Amen,” she whispered, and then clarified, like a postscript, that she hadn’t meant it to sound like a threat.
She thought of going north, maybe, or returning to the desert. Even driving all the way up into Wyoming or Montana—huge, empty places where you noticed yourself, where you could tell what divided you from everything else. Then she thought of Mexico, where they could sweat on a beach. How long, she wanted to know, does a hundred grand last in Mexico? How long could she ignore her life back home?
Tim, had he been listening, would have pointed out how she just referred to her life, back home. As she lit another cigarette she tried to think psychologically. Why had this vacation become so urgent? She reviewed what she had learned: how she loved to fall in love; how it was easier to imagine a new life rather than live the one you built; how if she decided that Heather and Paul were really gone she would have to accept Colin as gone, someday. Already he’d grown and changed, and he would go through so many more phases of personhood there were none to which she could cling. She tried to instill herself with wisdom, and when she pinpointed the word—wisdom—she knew it was what she’d come looking for in the mountains, in the desert, in the palm-lined canyons of a city where wisdom would never come and she could lie to herself forever. “My mother is right,” she whispered to Tim, whom she wanted so badly to be listening.
In the shower, Colin scrubbed his skin red with the washcloth and soaped up twice, the water so hot it felt like ice under his toes. Allie had dropped him off two blocks away from the hotel, unable to look Colin in the eye. He didn’t pull away, though, when Colin kissed him on the cheek and touched his chest. In a more chaste life, this would have been their good-bye, but he’d sworn to go back, to abandon his mother and run away forever. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he whispered, and slid out of Allie’s car. In the morning, he would start his new life. It was instead his mother’s violence that felt like good-bye, her wish to banish him from her life. It was for her own good that he was taking himself away.
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