“I know.” He pulled Tomás’s coat tighter around him. “Am I in trouble?”
The detective sighed. “Don’t go out driving when there’s flash-flood warnings from here to kingdom come. It’s not safe, and it’s especially not safe for you if you get pulled over. Entiendes? Use your head. What if something happened? Dios. Where was Angie?”
He’d started to say, At home, but then he realized they’d find out. “At the motel with Rose.”
“Why the motel?”
“We go there sometimes. We don’t do anything. Just hang out. We can watch cable.”
Detective Alvarez had looked at him over his reading glasses. He took off the glasses and hung them on the front of his shirt, raked his fingers through his hair. “Go home, Beto,” he said. “Don’t let me catch you driving without a license again.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
But that was later. That night, after he saw Jess, he drove past the station and pulled into the motel lot to pick up his friends. He waited in the car, pulling Tomás’s coat tight. Stevie’s car now was parked in front of her room, the light on in the window. In a few minutes, Angie and Rose stumbled out of Room 7. They climbed in the back seat, still holding each other.
“You drive, Beto,” Angie said.
He was shaken up from his spinout, chilled and damp, and hungry as always. As he looked at their glowing faces, he was angry about something he didn’t understand yet.
He threw the car in reverse and gunned it too hard. They shot backward until he slammed on the brakes. The car jerked, throwing them forward.
“Beto!” Angie said. “Stop.”
“I am,” he said. “I did.”
“What was that?” Rose asked. “What was that noise?”
The windows were even foggier now with three of them breathing, craning their heads.
“Did we hit something?” Angie said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see.”
Rose said, “Shit. Well, go. I don’t want Stevie to see it was us. Go, go.”
He put it in drive and hit the gas. They barreled forward, and the front left tire almost clipped a porch post.
“Beto, watch out,” Angie said. “Jesus. Papa is going to kill me.”
Rose started laughing. “You’re the worst driver, Beto,” she said. “The worst in the world.” She laughed harder, and Angie did too, her big echoing laugh.
“Sorry,” he said. His hands were sweating, and he could smell the stinking wool of Tomás’s jacket, and he hit the accelerator too hard again. They skidded out into the street, splashing in a giant puddle. The jolt sent both girls sliding across the seat, and because they were tipsy, and in love, they started laughing harder.
Beto wasn’t laughing. He was shaking, and sweating, and he could barely see past the headlights. He just wanted to get home. He was starving.
Roberto bolted upright in the shop’s office. He blinked at the windows and then at his watch. Eight o’clock now, well past his dinner time. His stomach churned. He hadn’t eaten anything but a convenience-store turkey sub that Angie picked up for him at noon. His hands were shaking—he could blame too much coffee, but he knew it was more than that. Angie had gone home at six, but he’d said he’d close up. He hadn’t wanted to go home to his empty apartment, to see the tangled sheets imprinted with the body of another stranger. He had sunk down into Mr. Juarez’s recliner, replaying the memories that had erupted throughout the day. He heaved himself out of the chair now, and his legs wobbled before he caught his balance.
Roberto walked home in the near dark. The day had reversed itself: dawn turned to deep dusk. He reversed his route, too, down Main and past Esther’s closed shop. The other stores were bright and busy now, the street alive with cars and headlights. The scent of char-grilled carne asada wafted from Casa Verde. He’d stop there in a minute, wolf down tacos and take home another batch, and the owner would say, as she always did, “Hijole, mi’jo, where do you put it?” But he stopped first across from Esther’s, staring at the unlit window. The bats were out again to feed, their wings beating fast after a day at rest. He tilted his head and watched them dart and swerve after invisible prey.
He saw himself—that boy, Beto, the boy who dreamed of flying through space. A boy whose brother died, whose friend disappeared, whose body grew too quickly. Somehow he’d shut off his heart and mind and let his body take over, consume him. A kind of self-protection, yes, but where had it led him? Scarfing food, holding down three jobs, walking and biking instead of driving, having rip-roaring sex in dark parking lots. And here he was: still hungry, a gnawing pain he could not shake.
Tomás, again, always: Don’t try so hard, hombrecito. Be yourself. Little man, all grown up. But into whom? He wished he knew. Maybe it was time to figure it out.
Standing across from the bakery, Roberto stared upward. It was not yet night, but the planets and stars swam in the murky aquarium sky. Something bright streaked high in the east, and he squinted. A meteor? No, a satellite. Or a ship sailing across the sky. He rose to his tiptoes, rocking on the balls of his feet. A car honked, and someone catcalled, “Whoooo, Beto!” He waved automatically. He looked to Esther’s window, and the line came to him: He was pure moonbeam, traveling by the light of himself. He put his head down and began to walk at a fast clip. He passed the restaurant and instead headed straight home. He needed to write it down before he could forget.
Say You See the World
They found you. At least that’s the word on the street. About a half mile north of the motel, in the wash where I gather stones for the lake. All this time, you’ve been that close. All this time, I could have been the one to find you.
They’ll be knocking on my door soon enough, I’m sure. Going over it all again. I can’t tell them any more than I did then. I was the last to see you. I still don’t know where you went. If that’s you in the wash, I have no idea how you got there.
All I know is that was the fall of falls. That’s how it has become entwined in memory for me. Fall the season. Falling down. Falling for the pharmacist.
I had graduated high school, and I should have been at Arizona State on an art scholarship, but instead I was stuck helping my parents with the motel until my mom got on her feet after her double mastectomy. I had moved out of the room I shared with Rose in the house I grew up in and into the Woodchute’s Room 11, with its king-size bed, kitchenette, pink-and-turquoise southwestern art and dusty gold curtains. What could I say: at least I had my own space now. I shoved my clothes in the closet, my toiletries in the bath, my drawings and half-used paints and drawing pads under the bed, along with a shoebox where I stashed my savings.
The first fall happened sometime in October, I think. I remember tufts of yellow and red on the Black Hills. I was at the motel, carrying a load of bedding from a room to the laundry bin, when I got distracted by the sky, by the riotous clouds casting shadows on Mingus Mountain. Distraction. That’s how I thought of it. Still think of it. My space-outs, Rose calls them. The best I can describe it is that it’s like seeing a flash from something, the face of a watch, maybe, or a car hood, a hubcap at the bottom of a river. Behind my eyes, colors and shapes take flight, and I can’t seem to help it: I stop and stare. That, on top of my face, and you can imagine the assumptions: I’m crazy, or mildly retarded, or possibly autistic, or, well, not quite right. People say these things in front of me. I’m sure they said them in front of you, as well as others: Space Cadet. Prentiss Dementis. Hickey Face. Tard. Deformo. They stare at my cheek but won’t meet my eyes, or whisper to each other when they see me coming, their eyes fever-bright with malice or pity. My own parents never really noticed when I was in a room—not after Rose, their “surprise,” the unblemished daughter, came along. It’s like I’m either too visible or invisible, which is a strange place to inhabit.
Anyway, that day at the motel, I stepped on a dangling sheet and, boom, down I went to the pavement, scraping the hell out of my knee and elbow. The first fa
ll.
That also was the first day I spoke to you.
At the HealthCo, I was standing in line at the pharmacy, my basket full of antiseptic and bandages, when I turned to see you watching me, touching your cheek in the spot where my mark was. I knew who you were. I’d seen you at school earlier in the spring, of course, but I also knew you as the girl who walked at night. I knew before anyone about you and the man and the dark house. But I never told. I’m good at secrets, even if no one asks me to keep them.
I said to you, “It’s not contagious.” Out of habit, it came out with more sting than humor, and you dropped your hand as if you’d burned yourself, as if your own perfect skin would ever harm you.
“Sorry,” you said, your voice softer than I’d expected.
I looked at my feet, sorry I’d made that red flush creep into your face. The fact was, I felt a kinship with you even though we’d never met. You haunted the streets at night; I did, too, although I drove instead of walking or sat on the motel’s roof, where no one could see me but I could see all. You had found an older man; I knew I needed someone older, too, at least that’s what my mom had told me the night of my senior prom as I stayed home and ate my TV dinner. As I stuffed in a bite of metallic apple cobbler, my mom had said, “Older men don’t get hung up on looks.”
I looked up to speak to you again, but you were walking away with Dani Newell. Smartest girl at school. Everyone knew she’d probably go to some Ivy League college. Dani wasn’t one of the ones who teased me, but she wasn’t exactly warm, either. Thought she was better than everyone. Turned out she wasn’t. She stayed here too.
I ran my finger along my birthmark. Like a map of the world, you said once, later. What I saw in it depended on my mood. Lichen. Inkblot. Palm print. Oak leaf. Phlegm. Some days, when I was feeling especially silly and dreamy, I saw it as France: Paris on my jaw, Marseille on my throat, the outcrop of Brittany jutting toward the Celtic Sea of my right eye. Mostly, though, I tried not to see it at all.
“Next,” the pharmacist said.
That’s when I first got a load of Tom Donahue, Pharmacist. He came out from behind the partition at the Formica counter, stringy black hair brushing the collar of his white smock. His Adam’s apple ran up and down his skinny neck like a mouse in a maze. Ten years older than me, maybe. He had acne pocks on his cheeks, and a scar ran from his right temple to the corner of his mouth. He would know the Question, too, then: What happened to your face? I swore I would never ask him.
I looked down at my torn red sweatpants, at my T-shirt with the coffee dribble. I ran a hand over my unwashed brown hair, my cheek, and I thought about all the ways people knew me, or thought they did. I thought, He knows none of that. I pulled my hair forward over my cheek. Right there among the aisles of Q-tips and hemorrhoid treatment, I thought, I could be anyone.
Tom smiled and rang up my items. “Will this be all for you?”
I handed him my debit card. I stifled a wheezy cough and nearly choked on my gum. “Are you new here?”
He nodded. “Moved to town a couple months ago.” He held up the card and read my name. “Stevie Prentiss,” he said.
I said, “I go by Prentiss. I’m an artist.”
Now where did that come from? I did not go by Prentiss. But I could. An artist? I hadn’t drawn anything since I’d graduated, but what the heck. It sounded better than the manager of a rundown motel. Maybe I could be an artist. I suddenly had the sense things were going to change.
“Prentiss.” Tom Donahue rubbed his jaw, and he smiled a little. His scar reminded me of a seahorse, a jutting V near his temple, a curled tail near his mouth. “That’s nice. Sounds French or something.”
I stopped myself from touching my face, my own imagined country. I swallowed my gum, and the mint trailed down my throat. “Have you been to France?”
“Once. Before,” he said.
“Before what?”
“Oh, who knows. Another life, I guess.” He gave a short laugh and then cleared his throat. “How about you?”
I nodded. At least I planned to go, someday.
He said, “Well, bonjour, Prentiss.”
I smiled at the sound of my new name in his mouth.
The whole time I was talking, Tom looked me straight in the eye, which was more than I could say for most people, who either stared or looked past me like a memory. Not Tom. He didn’t just look. He saw me.
Until I met Tom Donahue, Pharmacist, my days revolved around the motel. Mornings, I set up a continental breakfast, and then my mom came in for an hour so I could run errands and fetch supplies. Afternoons, I answered phones, took reservations, balanced the books, cleaned the rooms, and did laundry when employees called in sick. I usually had one day off, Mondays, when a student from the Syc covered the office.
Evenings, I visited my folks, helped cook, loaded the dishwasher. My parents loved me, I’m sure—Stevie is, after all, a combination of their names, Steve and Marie—and I loved them, but I often felt like background noise. Mostly they talked as if I weren’t in the room. Dad talked about his jerk bosses at the cement plant, where he’d picked up shifts to help with my mom’s medical bills, and how it was a relief to have gas prices down after the Gulf War. Goddamn Saddam, he said. My mom talked about what was on sale at Bashas’, but she was tired, and she absently rested her hands where her breasts used to be. Rose was often out, either working her shifts at the Patty Melt or with her friends Angie Juarez and Beto Navarro. I knew Rose was sneaking into the motel with Angie and Beto. When I confronted her, Rose had begged me not to tell. “Please, Stevie, for me,” Rose said, as she always did when she wanted her way, which was always. So I didn’t tell. I might have been a lot of things, but a narc wasn’t one of them. I could keep a secret, and as much as a pain in the ass as Rose could be, she was my little sister. Since she was born, I’ve wanted to protect her. When my parents brought her home, a squeaking swaddled peanut, I hugged her too tight, eager and clumsy, thinking I was making her safe, and they took her away from me. Once, thinking she was cold, I covered her head to toe with blankets, nearly suffocating her, for which my father smacked me on the backside, yelling, “Don’t you touch her, you hear me? Don’t touch her.” So I didn’t much after that. At night in our shared room, I told her stories, about us flying into space and going roller-skating on the moon. She’d laugh and say, “Stevie, you can’t roller-skate on the moon,” and I’d say, “Sure you can. You’ll see.” Funny she spent most of her time in high school defending me. Five feet tall with her pipe-cleaner blond hair and fuck-you fists, bright as a welder’s spark. Baby Rose, I still call her.
Anyway, those days and nights were hardly the life I’d dreamed. In those dreams, I got on a Greyhound bus, twenty pounds lighter after a summer of drinking banana yogurt shakes, and I left behind my parents and young sister in a house behind the high school. I left this little Arizona town with its slow, shady river and headed to the sprawling streets of Phoenix and Tempe. In my dreams, I sketched drawings and wrote essays and ate lunch on urban patios. I lived in a fifteen-story dorm with a roommate named Laurel or Traci with an I, or Renée with an accent on the first e, a city girl who taught me to wear eyeliner and how to use cover-up on my mark and let me borrow her best jeans. I drank beer from kegs and lost my virginity with a boy named Dylan, or Alex, or Ryan, a smart boy, an older boy, an art major probably, who knew nothing about me but who knew enough of the world not to care about my face, who traced it and said I was beautiful not despite it but because I was. On summer vacation, I backpacked through Europe and smoked Gauloises and drank black coffee, all the things I had read in books from one library and seen on my parents’ one television and in movies at one theater. My dreams then were as real to me as the river running through town, as sure as the square charcoal between my fingers. When my mother was losing her breasts and my father was sleeping at the hospital in Flagstaff, those dreams started to slip away like air from a leaky tire.
All of which is to say, I was conscio
us in the moment the life I was living was not the one I had dreamed, and it brewed restlessness in me. I have wondered so often if this was true for you, that sense of living in contradiction to what you desired. What was it that drove you out at nights? That drove you into the rain that last night?
In the summer, I often climbed a ladder up to the motel’s roof, a blanket under my arm. No one ever saw me. Did you ever notice that no one ever looks up? You didn’t, either. The night I first saw you, you ran across the street and ducked into the alcove of the vacant office building. We both watched the high-schoolers gathered at the gas station. They leaned up against car hoods, snuck sips of wine coolers. We both watched the college students drift out of the Syc’s gates and cruise to the Pickaxe and the Patty Melt and Casa Verde, all the Laurels, Tracis, Reneés, Dylans, Peters, Ryans. We both saw Jerome’s tiny blanket of lights, the Milky Way as bright as tourmaline, the illuminated smoke billowing from the cement plant.
Other nights, with the same restlessness that drove me to the roof, I drove around town. I drove up and down Main through the District, past the single-story shops closed for the night. I drove out to the fairgrounds and climbed up the mountainous slag heap, the shiny pieces sharp under my hands and feet, thinking of Mordor. I drove up College Drive and through the iron gates onto the Syc’s campus, a whole other world even though it was only across the street, where even in summer young men and women walked with their arms full of books across the neatly clipped quad. I drove into the neighborhoods, parked in dark graveled cul-de-sacs. That’s where I caught sight of you one night in late summer. You were jogging toward a house with a For Sale sign. I ducked down in my seat and watched as you walked to the front door and let yourself in. As if it was your house. As if it was yours for the taking.
It was like watching in a dream. I wanted to get out and follow you, but I couldn’t move. All I could do was sit and wait. A police car pulled up, its headlights on but its blue warning lights off. I thought I was in trouble, and I slunk farther down, waiting for the officer to knock on my window. But when I peeked up, he was standing at the door, talking to someone. A man. Older, but I didn’t know him. The door closed, and the officer drove off. Soon enough, you came out, and this time you ran, leaping off the front step and stumbling on the path. You ran to the dark street. The man stepped on the porch. He watched you go. He never looked in my direction, but I could see even from a distance how he was watching you, holding on to the porch post. Like if he let go, he might fall down.
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