We'll Fly Away

by Bryan Bliss

  “I’m a creeper. What can I say?”

  The thrill of her smile shot through Toby.

  “Anyway.” Lily held up the avocados. “What do you think about guacamole?”

  “I think I’ve never had it and it looks nasty.”

  Even Lily’s mock outrage captivated him.

  “I might be able to find you some cheese and crackers. Or maybe a nice Pop-Tart.”

  “Sorry if one of my life rules is to avoid eating anything that literally looks like shit.” Toby pointed to the guacamole in progress.

  Lily stood there for a second, trying to read Toby. He was stone-faced and committed until the very last second. Until the exact moment when Lily would think he was being serious. And then he smiled.

  “Oh, you’re an asshole. Like, seriously.” She went back to cutting the tomatoes. “I know you’re a North Carolina boy, but damn. Might as well say you don’t like sex!”

  His mind dropped to the gutter. Lily close to his face, her hands on the waistband of his jeans. The anticipation building until—he stopped himself. Lily stared at him, amused.

  “Everything okay over there?”

  Toby cleared his throat. “Fine. You know. Hungry.”

  “Okay, well. Here’s the thing . . . I should’ve made you go to school. That was a mistake on my part. I don’t want you not going to college because of me.”

  “This might keep me out of Harvard. Damn it.”

  Lily laughed.

  Inside, he wasn’t as cool. Every stitch of his body was screaming. Trying to come up with any kind of plan—something they could do. But every idea, no matter how good, seemed to wither on the vine of his imagination. She wasn’t like the girls at school. Perhaps because he knew they didn’t take him seriously. With Lily, he honestly didn’t know if he had a chance, or if she saw him like a little brother. Somebody to protect, making any advance laughable. Or worse—met with awkward pity.

  But he had to try.

  “We could, you know, go to the mountains.” Toby said it casually. As if this was a normal option. She could either take him to school or—hey, why not!—they could shoot up the highway to the mountains together like it was nothing. Like Toby wouldn’t be joyfully terrified the entire damn trip.

  He tried to play it cool, but his heart was pounding. He watched as Lily went to a different cupboard and pulled out a plastic bowl and a lid.

  “Well, I guess this is guac to go.”

  Toby drove up the mountain, a drive he’d taken countless times when his mom was still around. She would smoke with the windows down, talking to him from the front seat. He could still remember the smell of the smoke mingled with pine. The way the sun would bounce off her sunglasses and into his eyes every time she looked into the rearview mirror, telling him how she didn’t have the right kind of blood for hot weather.

  “Just a quick getaway,” she would always say. “To keep ourselves honest.”

  He never knew what that meant, but it was always said with a hint of sadness. A hint of urgency.

  The trees were mostly bare now, save for a few that stubbornly held their leaves. Lily said something about the fall colors, and in a moment of either inspiration or panic, he started blurting out facts.

  “Did you know that fall colors have nothing to do with when fall comes? It’s all about how much rainfall you get. And the days getting shorter.”

  Lily gave him a sideways glance. “Well. Thank you for that, Mr. Kettle.”

  “Who?”

  “My old science teacher.” Lily rolled down her window a bit, the cold air spinning around the El Camino. “He used to dress up like a ginkgo tree for Halloween. That was his thing. I don’t know if that’s really awesome, or really sad.”

  “I think there’s no question it’s sad,” Toby said.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Lily said, staring out the window. “I can still spot a fucking ginkgo tree like it’s nothing.”

  Toby laughed.

  “This is something I would love to see,” he said. “Do you, like, get really excited?”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  “Wait! Is that a ginkgo?” Toby pointed to an oak tree.

  Lily refused to look. “I’m not going to play your games.”

  “Because you take ginkgo trees very seriously?”

  Lily smiled. “No, because you’re an asshole.”

  They didn’t drive all the way into Asheville, a city Toby always thought of as being the top of the mountain. He’d never been beyond it. Instead, Lily directed him to pull off at a rest stop a few miles from the city. When they got out of the car, Toby started shivering.

  “I brought blankets,” Lily said. “They’re in the back.”

  Toby found them rolled up inside a sleeping-bag sack. He pulled out the two quilts and carried them over to Lily, who had a collection of food in her arms. Chips. The guacamole. Two cans of mandarin oranges. A feast fit for a highway road stop. And from a bag she had hidden from Toby, she pulled out a bottle of cheap strawberry wine.

  “Farm of the Boones,” Lily said, presenting the bottle. “A fine vintage. Bottled two weeks ago.”

  Toby arranged one blanket on the top of a picnic table to sit on. The other they wrapped around their shoulders, the food and wine on the bench at their feet, and they watched the empty parking lot. Every so often a new car would arrive—full of traveling families, retired people—as they nibbled and drank. The wine was sweet, almost too sweet for Toby. But he sipped it from the small waxed paper cups Lily had packed.

  “So I’ve made you a truant, and now I’ve given you alcohol,” she said. “I’m seriously going to jail.”

  Toby raised his glass. “To the correctional system.”

  Lily toasted him, tossed back the wine, and poured another cup.

  “God, this takes me back,” Lily said. “I was totally in love with this guy in high school and I brought him up here and . . .”

  She took a drink of wine. Toby groaned.

  “I really don’t want to know,” he said.

  “Stop,” she said, hitting him softly. “What I was going to say is, I didn’t know my dad followed us.”

  “Oh, that’s not fun.”

  “Yeah. He got out of the car and started yelling about my purity. My dad could’ve given a shit that I was drinking whiskey at the Deuce when I was fifteen, as long as I kept my hymen intact. For the Lord.”

  Toby didn’t know what to say except, “Hymen safety is important, I guess.”

  Lily laughed. “And guess what? I had sex with that guy two days later. In his van, behind the Food Lion.”

  She raised her glass to the heavens, toasting her dad or maybe God. It was just starting to rain, and Toby held the blanket over their heads.

  “Do you think it’s possible to forgive somebody after they’re dead?” Lily asked.

  This was a topic Toby had thought about extensively as a kid. Well, he thought about his father dying. About attending the funeral and whether he would make some sort of statement by not paying his final respects. Refusing to cry. In the end, he had decided that he would do nothing. That even a person like Jimmy deserved a final moment of respect, whether they gave it in their life or not.

  “I think you get to decide whether you want to forgive them or not,” Toby said. “And if you do it, then it’s done, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Lily said, cupping the wine with both hands. “I don’t know.”

  Before Toby knew what was happening, Lily jumped off the picnic table and walked out from under the canopy of trees and into the parking lot. She had her arms spread wide and her eyes closed, face pointed to the sky. A few seconds later, she was soaking wet. Her hair streaked onto her T-shirt in dark blond strings. When Toby called out her name, she didn’t answer—just stood there with her arms out, trying to catch the rain. When he brought the blanket and put it around her shoulders, he could see her skin already puckered from the cold. Her teeth chattered like a typewriter.

  Toby cleane
d up the food and washed out the Tupperware in the bathroom sink, bringing everything back to the El Camino, including the wine. He wrapped the bottle in an old T-shirt and hid it behind his seat. Lily was curled in the passenger seat. Toby opened the door, half expecting her to be crying. Or at least to seem distant. But when he got in—the heat glorious against his wet skin—she reached over and took the container from his hands.

  “You washed it?”

  “Yeah?”

  She looked at the container, then back to him.

  “What?” Toby said, unsure if he’d made a mistake.

  “It’s just not, you know, a thing you’d expect from a high-school boy.”

  “That’s because I’m a high school man.”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot.” Lily shook her head. “Man. Good lord.”

  Toby put his hand on the gear shift, not really wanting to leave this place. As they sat there, the rain slowly began to turn to snow. When there was a thin layer across the asphalt parking lot, Lily reached over and touched Toby’s hand.

  “I needed this. Thank you.”

  Toby nodded as Lily shifted in her seat and leaned against his shoulder, both of them watching the sun slip away in the distance.

  Toby wanted a snapshot of this moment, something he could live in outside of time. This was the first time Toby had had fun with anybody besides Luke. Sure there were moments at school, passing shouts of laughter. But usually it was him and Luke, walking to the store. Him and Luke, watching the boys. Him and Luke together as the day was long. And for the first time, maybe ever, he wondered if that was strange.

  Toby didn’t want to think about Luke, or the fact that school was already out. Running away from Annie’s apartment was understandable, something he could twist Luke’s guilt into accepting. Missing school, though, would bring a reckoning. But he would deal with that tomorrow, the next day. Whenever this ended with Lily.

  “I want to take you somewhere,” he said, but Lily had fallen asleep.

  She sighed gently, shifting her body as Toby slowly pulled out of the parking lot. He barely made a sound, ticking off every mile back down the mountain until they were parked on the side of the road, the woods barely visible in the distance. They hadn’t been sitting there more than a few minutes when Lily woke up and rubbed her eyes.

  She looked into the empty blackness, then back to Toby. “Are you planning on murdering me?”

  “No. This would be a terrible spot.” Toby motioned to a passing car as evidence.

  “Not to mention that you’re a skinny little fucker and I’d break you,” she said, yawning.

  For some reason, Toby liked that. He pushed it a little further, trying to be smooth.

  “Well, you never know what will happen in the dark.”

  Lily rolled her eyes.

  “I can tell you one thing that’s not going to happen.”

  Toby took it on the chin, with a smile. When he opened the door, he reached over and brushed Lily’s leg lightly, like he did this sort of thing all the time. Like he couldn’t care less. Inside him, alarms were blaring. Danger, danger.

  “I don’t take just anyone out here,” he said.

  She looked to the trees, and when she turned back, her smile was like a taunt. A challenge. “I can honestly say a guy has never taken me to the woods on a date before.”

  He wanted to tell her that the plane was the most important thing about him, maybe his entire life. He wanted to tell her about Luke. But he didn’t say any of it, because of one word—date.

  She got out of the car without another word. Before he followed, he grabbed the bottle of strawberry wine and then ran to catch Lily.

  January 21

  T—

  Marilyn came by today and, if I’m being honest, I wasn’t in the mood to hear another speech about how I need to do this or that. All I could think about was Eddie punking me and Sister acting all boo-hoo. How I’d barely seen either of them in a week. Man, I don’t know what I was even feeling. It was like somebody had reached inside me and mixed everything up. I couldn’t tell if I wanted to hit something or cry.

  So when Marilyn came into the room, I sat down and tried to remember how to smile. And that probably sounds stupid to you. But really, I don’t smile that often. Whenever I do, it feels wrong. Too extravagant, maybe. I don’t know how else to explain it except to say that whenever I smile now, it always makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong.

  Anyway, Marilyn starts right in telling me she’s got good news. And like always, I’m right back at her all, “You found another lawyer to deal with me?” When I said that, she took off her glasses and put down her pen, all calm, and started tapping her fingernail on the thick folder in front of her. That’s when I knew I was in trouble, T. I even tried to roll it back. But she wasn’t having it.

  First she starts talking about all the people who work on my case. Lawyers and law students and even a few pastors. Entire buildings of people, it sounds like, all of them working too many hours to count. Calling the governor. Studying thick books. People I’ll probably never meet who care about me more than . . . well, most people I ever knew.

  Marilyn was like, “They think you matter!”

  And all I could think was: she sounds just like Sister.

  It must’ve been all over my face, because Marilyn stopped tapping that folder and gave me the eye so hard I had to look away. A few seconds later, she said my name, and her voice was a lot softer. I still couldn’t look at her, though.

  She told me that a lot of people think me being in here is “a grave injustice.” That she wanted to get my death sentence reduced.

  When I didn’t say anything, she pulled another folder out of her bag. It was stuffed full of papers and pictures. All the work of those same people. Collected in hopes of telling what Marilyn always calls the “real” story of what happened.

  Sometimes I feel so tired, T. Tired of pretending. Tired of working up the energy needed to talk to people like Marilyn or Sister. So tired that sometimes it feels like I can’t move.

  Because I’ve been through this a hundred times. Shit, a million. And I wasn’t about to look at the pictures she had in that folder. No chance.

  I could feel myself starting to slip. But instead of saying anything, or throwing that folder against the wall—and that’s what I really wanted to do—I sat there, trying to be hard. Like whatever she could pull out of that folder wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to me.

  And then she said: “I want the court to know who you really are.”

  Who I really am.

  When the police grabbed me, I wouldn’t say anything. They let me sit like that—deep in the anger. The confusion. The sadness, like a brick around my neck. For hours and hours I sat there, until one of the detectives dropped those pictures on the desk right next to me, a convenient accident.

  They were all surprised when I was like, “I did it.”

  They asked me three more times, had me write every single thing down. By the time the lawyer got there, it was already finished. He went through the motions best he could, and to his credit, he tried to get me to help.

  But nobody understands: confessing meant nothing to me. Now, then—one hundred years from today. Saying I did it—taking whatever punishment comes? That only feels like being let off a hook.

  Marilyn wants to get me a new sentencing hearing. I wouldn’t get out, but I wouldn’t stay here either. Most guys in here would do a backflip if their lawyer even hinted at those words. But all I could do was nod, because even though I wake up at night sweating and screaming out, thinking about the day when I’m the one walked back to that room for the last time, I don’t want them to take it easy on me.

  I don’t want mercy or forgiveness or even justice because goddamn, T. What if that erases it all?

  What I did. Why.

  Because that’s who I really am.

  Luke

  15

  ANNIE was asleep on the couch, still cradling Jack-Jack, whe
n Luke finally gave up on sleeping. He stood up and quietly walked onto the landing, flexing his throbbing hand.

  He’d spent the whole night staring out the window, watching for Toby. But the truth was, Luke knew he wasn’t coming back long before the sun came out. He understood why Toby had run away from the apartment, even if he didn’t agree with it. If Toby had gotten over his betrayal in a single night, Luke would’ve counted himself lucky. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from watching the road.

  He was lost in his thoughts when Annie came up behind him.

  “Good morning,” she said, ducking her head under Luke’s arm and wrapping her arms around his chest. A wave of warmth washed over him. Her hair tickled him as she looked up into his eyes.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  Luke smiled. “Just, you know, looking at the parking lot.”

  “That’s weird,” Annie said, yawning as she leaned her head against his chest. Soon the boys would be up, needing clothes and breakfast. Luke took a few deep breaths, but it felt like he was breathing through a wet towel.

  “Do you think he went to the plane?”

  Luke didn’t answer. The chance that Toby had left Annie’s apartment, grabbed a sleeping bag, and gone back to the plane was pretty good. He might be there right now, cussing at the cold morning air. But it was clear: Toby was making a point. Knowing didn’t help Luke, though.

  “Is it weird?” Luke asked.

  Annie gave him a confused look.

  “Me being worried like this.”

  Luke didn’t tell her that he’d been up all night, or that he couldn’t stop himself from imagining all the terrible things that might happen to Toby. It seemed like such an easy solution, to just get over it. But he’d tried a hundred times last night, and it never stuck.

  Annie squeezed his chest. “I think it’s possibly the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen. You love him, even if he’s a complete idiot.”

  Luke took a breath, and then another one. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to cuss Toby, or apologize to him.

  Behind them, Luke heard Petey come into the living room, followed by the thud of Jack-Jack being pushed off the couch. As they started fighting, Annie pulled herself away from Luke.