by Ruthie Knox
She disconnected the call.
Roman returned the receiver to the cradle and looked at his hand wrapped around it, thinking about the woman on the other end.
It wasn’t a question of Carmen’s concealing her feelings. It was more a question of whether she had them at all.
He liked that about her. He didn’t need help from Noah or his PA to guess how to treat Carmen because he could treat her as an extension of himself. They wanted the same things: money, recognition, Heberto’s esteem.
He’d always assumed that made them perfect for each other.
It had. It still did.
But …
But it bothered him that she didn’t care that he’d come very close to having sex with Ashley last night. Wouldn’t he care, if their positions were reversed?
He tried to imagine Carmen beneath another man. Another man’s mouth on her breasts. Another man’s dick inside her. Roman waited for his pulse to quicken, his fists to clench.
Nothing happened.
“Did you sleep well?” Prachi asked.
“Very well.”
“Wonderful. Ashley and I are whipping up breakfast. Should be ready in twenty minutes or so, if you’d like to shower.”
“Thank you. I think I will.”
He didn’t move.
Ashley came over and perched on the arm of the couch. When Prachi left the room, she asked, “How’d it go?”
Her eyes were somber.
“I’m not sure.”
“Did you get an ultimatum?”
Hands off the bitch, or we’re through. That was the sort of ultimatum she meant.
Not Use sex to manipulate her into letting you demolish Sunnyvale, or my father won’t be happy.
“You could say that.”
Ashley picked at her thumbnail. She lifted it to her lips and bit at it, gently. “I’m sorry I put you in that position,” she said. “I don’t—I’ve never been the other woman before. I don’t want to be now.” She tried out a bright smile and made a show of tucking her hands under her thighs. “So I’ll stop assaulting your virtue, I swear.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
A slight downward turn to her mouth made him regret putting it that way. It wasn’t her fault, what had happened last night. It had been both of them together, unhitching themselves from their common sense.
It wouldn’t happen again.
“We’re going to head out in a few hours, all right?” she asked. “Prachi said she has some old curtains and other things I might be able to use for the Airstream, so I need to go through that stuff first, but then we’d better get out of their hair.”
“Where are we going next?”
He’d given up the idea that he might not be going with her. There was Florida, Sunnyvale, Coral Cay—far away and unaffected—and then there was this trip. This thing he was doing with Ashley.
He didn’t understand what it was, but he accepted now that he was part of it, and he wouldn’t be getting off the ride until it came to a full and complete stop.
“Pennsylvania.”
“Camping?”
Ashley did a butter-churning dance with her arms. “In Virginia tonight, baby. Airstream all the way. And then again when we get to the big PA.”
Her glee was a performance. Another man might have been convinced. It was just that Roman kept looking at her eyes, and they were wrong. Too serious. Too sad.
He tried to figure out what he was supposed to be feeling about that.
Nothing. That had been his goal for so long, he’d developed a knack for it.
But he’d misplaced the knack. When he thought of breakfast, camping, sleeping bags, campfires, Pennsylvania, Ashley’s eyes—when he thought of Carmen essentially saying You can score with other women to your heart’s content—he felt a dozen things he couldn’t name. He didn’t know how to sort them into compartments or decide how to act on them, and that made his hands restless, smoothing back and forth over his pajamas.
His jeans were too dirty to wear today, and he no longer had a clean shirt.
“I’m going to need a new phone. Can we find a store before we get on the road again?”
“Sure. Let’s go shopping for real! We can buy you shorts. Little Ken-doll shorts with a belt that show off your magnificent thighs. And a Tar Heels shirt.”
“I’m not wearing a Tar Heels shirt. I went to Princeton.”
“Goodness, Roman Díaz. You are so out of my ballpark.”
He thought of Ashley then with another man between her thighs.
Ashley in the bathroom, upset, probably crying.
He stood up.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “You look like you want to do some pillaging.”
“I’m fine.”
He smiled back at her, but it was the smile she didn’t like, and her face fell. He crossed his arms and shifted from one foot to the other.
He wasn’t fine.
Roman was so far from fine, he doubted he could find it on a map.
CHAPTER FIVE
They camped that night at a park near Richmond.
State campgrounds all looked the same: a looping gravel drive through a patch of forest, a series of sites like lollipops branching off, each with its picnic table, its electrical hookup, its fire ring and numbered post.
Roman pulled into the parking spot feeling leaden and doomed.
They unloaded the back of the truck. Ashley had bought all kinds of supplies at a store in Raleigh while Roman was picking out a phone. She also had the curtains from Prachi, as well as a variety of other things her friend had found in the basement.
“You need me to do anything?” he asked.
“Nah. You just sit there and look pretty. There’s not really room for two people in the trailer right now.”
He got his new phone set up, but it had no reception. He sat on a log and drew patterns in the sand beneath the leaf litter with a stick while Ashley popped into the Airstream, came back out carrying a thin mattress, and draped it over the picnic table. She sang along to a Spanish love song on her portable radio while she beat the dust out of the mattress with a broom handle.
He tried to push back against the pressure building inside him by playing tic-tac-toe against himself, best two out of three. Best five out of seven. The X always won. He tried various opening moves, hoping to find a way to ensure the demise of X, but nothing worked.
It was impossible to throw a game against yourself. You always won.
You always lost, too.
Ashley appeared behind the wraparound windows of the Airstream. She picked off the electrical tape that held the tinfoil in place, squirted Windex on the pane, wiped it off with a soft rag. She’d exchanged her T-shirt for a hot pink bikini top. When she made vigorous circles with the rag, her breasts bounced. Her skin gleamed.
Her belly button was an outie.
Too much pressure.
Roman stood. He walked around the trailer, stuck his head in the door, and watched her ass bunch, her back muscles tense as she twisted to look at him.
“I’m going for a walk in the woods.”
“When it’s the woods, you call it a hike.”
“I don’t hike.”
And it was true, he didn’t. He couldn’t. It wasn’t possible to hike in a dress shirt, suit pants, tie, and loafers. His clothes insisted on dignity, but there was no dignity in what he was doing to himself and no way for him to stop doing it.
A mile up the trail, he gave in to the relentless press of memory.
He’d joined the Boy Scouts to get Patrick’s attention. His foster father had been an Eagle Scout, and Roman had found all his scouting things in the attic. He used to leaf through the old handbooks and study the artifacts of Patrick’s years of scouting as though he’d unearthed them with a toothbrush and had to investigate them gently, to puzzle out their mysteries so he could discover whatever clues were hidden in this joined-together fork-knife-and-spoon set. These two shallow plates that
sealed into a clamshell and could be opened with the twist of a wing nut.
Now that it no longer mattered, he could see how wrong he’d been to think Patrick’s heart—always locked down to Roman—could be accessed and transformed, if only Roman located the right angle, the right pressure to loosen the wing nut.
But it had seemed possible then.
Roman wore his uniform to school on meeting days, never neglecting the neckwear or committing the sin of tucking his uniform shirt into jeans, as the other boys did. He took Patrick’s Swiss Army knife and carried it in his pocket, running his fingers over the smooth red plastic, the Swiss Army insignia, the ridges of blades and scissors and can opener. A classmate had noticed his fingers moving and accused him of touching himself.
After that, he kept the knife in the outer pocket of his backpack, until someone stole it.
Patrick bought him another one. He signed off on the work Roman did toward his badges, made sure his uniform got laundered in time for meetings, asked questions at the dinner table about Roman’s progress. Encouraging signs. Patrick was taking an interest.
Roman stepped in an unseen deposit of muck beneath a tree root and stumbled as the suction pulled off his shoe. He had to put his hand out and brace himself against the trunk to keep from falling. When he pulled the shoe out, it was coated with a foul-smelling mud that seeped into his trouser sock with every subsequent step.
He loosened his tie and kept moving.
Between sixth grade and seventh, being a Boy Scout had lost whatever cachet it might once have had and became laughable. But Roman was already laughable. He was a brown boy with big lips and big eyes, and everyone knew about his father serving a life sentence at the maximum security prison in Waupun. Everyone knew about his dead mother. Everyone knew Patrick, and they must have seen the distance between them that Roman tried so hard to obliterate.
The troop leader dispatched them to ring bells for the Salvation Army, make Pinewood Derby cars, sell popcorn. Roman earned one merit badge after another and pored over the handbooks in the attic. He learned knots and the ways of the woodsman. How to treat Our Country’s Flag. Wood lore, emergency shelters, orienteering. He dragged out Patrick’s old external frame backpack and practiced packing and repacking it with only the essentials.
He imagined his world reduced to knife, tarp, compass, bandanna.
He recited the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning and prayed to God to make him stronger and more worthy.
God would listen. He had to, because Roman and Patrick wanted the same thing. In Patrick’s office, Roman had seen the file labeled with his name, kept inside the locked cabinet so that he could read it only if he fished around at the bottom of the pen-and-pencil cup for the key.
Jesus teaches us to turn the other cheek. I’d like to practice forgiveness by caring for this boy, if I’m able to.
Patrick had made the appeal to a committee at the Department of Children and Families. The social worker assigned to Roman had questioned the wisdom of leaving a three-week-old infant with a man who’d lost his wife to an act of violence perpetrated by Roman’s father. Patrick’s response was six pages long, single-spaced, full of distinguished, earnest declarations.
It’s what my wife would have wanted.
It’s the right thing to do.
I’d like to practice forgiveness. If I’m able to.
Patrick was a social worker for the diocese, a man who believed in second chances, forgiveness, faith. A good man.
God would grant him this wish.
Roman stumbled and wiped his forehead with the flat of his hand. Too hot to be moving. Ninety-five degrees, and he had no water. Ashley would scold him if she knew.
He had to keep away from Ashley.
He took off his tie and cinched it around his head to hold the sweat from his eyes.
The trail blurred and came into focus again. His mind was two decades in the past. When he spotted the campground ahead and realized he was on a loop, he turned around and plunged into the woods.
He’d yearned for this once—for a patch of wilderness to be tested in, for circumstances worthy of heroism. In his fantasies, Samantha’s girlfriends sprained their ankles or floundered in the pool, desperate for rescue. Roman dressed their injuries, dragged them to safety, and always Patrick stood at the sidelines, watching with an approving smile.
Good job, he said. I’m proud of you.
When Roman’s scout troop finally went camping, they slept in a huge canvas tent, skipped the flag ceremony, and went for a hike after dark. The scout master passed around wintergreen Life Savers and the boys cracked them between their molars to make sparks.
They called him a loser when the scout master was in earshot.
They called him a faggot when he was beyond it.
It was October. An hour before nightfall, Roman walked into the woods alone, carrying only a compass, a tarp, and a knife.
A park ranger found him four days later, too weak to walk.
He spent a few nights in the hospital, rehydrating and getting spoiled by the nurses. Samantha had hugged him and wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. She brought him books to read and told him again and again, We thought you were dead.
Patrick spoke in his calm, wise voice to visitors. He discussed Roman’s condition with the doctor and filled out the necessary paperwork. But when the room was empty of anyone but the two of them, silence echoed off the walls, and Roman didn’t know how to erect boundaries around his experience.
Afraid. Lost. Tired. Cold. Hungry. Brave. Those were the words he was supposed to say, but they didn’t fit. They weren’t what he would tell Patrick if only he could convince himself that Patrick wanted to hear what was in his heart.
I breathed alone in the dark, cold, curled into a ball under a damp piece of plastic, and I felt as though I had always been there. I knew that somewhere was a road, and down the road there were people watching movies, eating potato chips, kissing. I knew there were church picnics and inside jokes, weddings and baptisms, Christmas presents and birthday parties, but I couldn’t get to them.
I was alone. I’ve always been alone.
No one was coming for me, because I have no one.
He hadn’t been brave. He’d cried until he retched and rose coughing to his hands and knees so he could vomit up what little was left in his stomach.
But in the hospital, he hadn’t been capable of saying the words. He’d lain there, silent, denuded of his uniform, his armor—and then Patrick had supplied his own words.
What kind of trick were you trying to pull anyway? A stupid stunt like that. You never think of anyone but yourself, Roman. I’m ashamed to even look at you.
A kick in the chest so hard, Roman had forgotten how to breathe.
He should have expected it. Should have learned to expect it, because it always came.
I’d like to practice forgiveness didn’t mean I forgive you.
It was easier when Patrick was angry, because when Patrick was bewildered in his disappointment, he would ask, Why do you keep doing this to me? Why do you make it so impossible for me to love you?
Roman quit the Boy Scouts after that. Quit camping. Eventually, he quit waiting for Patrick to change.
Self-preservation wasn’t a matter of surviving in the woods. It was a matter of learning to set your expectations so that no one had the power to make you feel as though you were huddling alone and afraid. That was what Heberto had taught him: that no one could escape solitude. The only choice was to embrace it.
We’re individuals. Community is an illusion.
What you had left when you accepted your solitude was better, because it opened up space to understand that you could build your own fortress against fear.
Roman had the tools. He had the plan, the understanding, the philosophy.
So why was he stumbling through the woods, cold despite sweating, sucking in shallow, panicked breaths and trying to ignore the trembling in his hands?
He di
dn’t know. Something was wrong with him.
Something yearning. Still.
Some stubborn fucking hope.
On his wet heel, a blister broke open, and the muck soaking his sock ground against tender flesh. He began to limp.
The pain cleared his head, and after a while he stopped and looked up. It was getting dark, but he could still see a clear area off to the right. He caught the shine of the Airstream and grimaced.
Back at the campground, he threw his shoes and socks away in a Dumpster and tossed his tie in after them. He unbuttoned his shirt and braced one arm against the cool metal side of the bin so he could wrap the shirt around his foot.
Can’t leave now. You’re hobbled. Hobbled ponies stay put.
He looked down the drive at the rounded end of the Airstream, gleaming like some perverse egg.
What would he do now, limp back to her? Crawl into her trailer, bunk on the thin mattress she’d just beaten the dust out of?
No.
She’d taken over his plans, taken control of his life, and she’d dug into him somehow, made him want her.
Not just her. Something worse. She made him want to believe her—to swallow the lie that there was such a thing as family, or community. That you could make one for yourself, and it could be the most important thing in your world.
He flattened his forearm against the side of the Dumpster and rested his hand there, overwhelmed by this new knowledge.
Ashley made him want to believe.
So?
The question came in Heberto’s voice, and Roman could almost see his disdainful face. A tumbler of whiskey in one hand. His accent thickened at the end of a long day spent wheeling and dealing.
Hope is just a feeling, Roman.
Feelings don’t matter. Who cares about your feelings? Only you.
You forget about that shit and use your head.
Use his head. Ignore his feelings. Tamp down any hope that tried to rise up.
It was the only way he knew. The only compass he could trust.
Roman untied his filthy, sweat-stained shirt from around his foot and shook it out. He put it back on. Buttoned it up. Tucked it into his pants.