by Amy Harmon
“Yeah, but you said all the rooms are occupied,” she countered, already confused.
“They are. But if you have the person in room one move to room two, and the person in room two move to room three, and the person in room three move to room four, and so on, then you just cleared out some space. You have an empty room—room one.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Sure it does, you can’t find the end of infinity. There is no end. So if you can’t tack space onto the end of infinity, you have to create space at the beginning.”
“But you said all the rooms are filled.”
“Yes. And they will still be filled,” Finn said, as if this were completely reasonable.
“So if ten people come along and want to stay at the Infinity Hotel . . .” her voice trailed off, waiting for him to fill in the rest.
“Then you have the person in room one move to room eleven, and the person in room two move to room twelve, and the person in room three move to room thirteen, and so on, clearing out ten rooms.”
She laughed quietly. “That makes no sense whatsoever. Eventually someone’s not going to have a room.”
“There are infinite rooms.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And infinite people,” she muttered, as if her mind were a little blown.
“That’s why it’s called a paradox. In a lot of ways, infinity makes no sense. It’s impossible to get your mind around that type of vastness,” Finn said thoughtfully. “But no one argues with infinity. We just accept that it’s beyond visualization.”
“I don’t know about that . . . I frequently argue with Infinity.” Bonnie rubbed her face against his leg as if she liked the feel of him beside her.
“Ha ha,” Finn said dryly, wondering if he should pull away. He probably should. But he didn’t.
“Do you think heaven is filled with countably infinite rooms filled with countably infinite people?” she asked.
Maybe Bonnie wondered if Minnie was in her own heavenly room. Maybe Fisher was there too, in a room near Minnie’s. Maybe they had found each other the way Finn and Bonnie had, Finn mused to himself. And then he swallowed a groan at his romantic thoughts. He was getting delusional. And it was all Bonnie’s fault.
“I don’t know, Bonnie Rae,” he said.
“People in Appalachia have been singing that song since the dawn of time. They’re hoping there are infinite rooms and that the rooms are all mansions.”
“That’s kind of sad.” The cynic in Finn didn’t like the thought of people singing about mansions that didn’t exist. It felt like buying lottery tickets to him—a huge waste of emotion and energy.
“Yeah. I guess so. But it’s hopeful too. And sometimes hope is the difference between life and death.”
Finn had no answer for that.
“Hey!” she said suddenly, her voice rising with her epiphany. “I know how we can make some room at the Infinity Hotel without making everyone move. I’ve officially solved the paradox. Call it Bonnie Rae’s Solution.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. We’ll all double up. Problem solved. You wanna double up, Infinity Clyde?” Finn was sure if he could see her face she would be waggling her eyebrows. She liked to tease. And she was damn good at it.
Yeah. He wanted to double up. Instead he decided to poke back a little. “The problem is, when people double up, they start to multiply.”
She giggled, and Finn found himself smiling in the dark.
“And then we’re right back at square one,” he whispered.
Bonnie snuggled further into his legs, throwing her arm across his knees. It was several minutes before she spoke again.
“How did we end up together? Don’t you think it’s . . . strange?” she mumbled into the blanket. “I mean . . . what are the odds?”
He had asked himself the same thing over and over. But he wasn’t ready to admit that, so he pulled out his mental math book and dusted it off, speaking softly, but impersonally.
“Mathematically speaking, they’re pretty low. But not as low as you might think.” Finn’s mind settled into the comfort of percentages and the odds of certain coincidences with relief, not wanting to linger on thoughts of fate or destiny. He offered Bonnie a few examples of how oddities weren’t really oddities at all when you examined the numbers. It was all true. And it was all bullshit.
Bonnie’s head had grown heavy on his legs and she hadn’t offered up so much as a “hmm” for several minutes. Finn sat up and looked down at her. He’d done it again. Two nights in a row. He talked about numbers and she was instantly asleep. Asleep. In his tiny bed—in Katy’s tiny bed. He sighed and looped his hands under her armpits, pulling her up beside him. It was narrow, but doable. He threw the pink comforter over them and closed his eyes, willing himself to ignore the press of her body against his, willing the numbers in his head to take him away, the way they’d done for Bonnie.
THEY LEFT JUST after seven the next morning, before Shayna and her girls were even up. Bonnie thought it would be easier that way, and had shaken Finn awake with a light hand against his shoulder. He’d scared her, shooting up from the bed, the slam and slide of prison doors ringing in his ears, carried over from a dream that visited almost every night.
Finn couldn’t have felt much worse if he had actually woken up to find himself still behind bars. He’d spent the night snuggled up to Bonnie in a glorified Barbie bed, a bed as hard and small as a pink, plastic shoebox, and his back hurt and his hips ached and he had a headache that only sex or black coffee would ease. Since sex wasn’t an option, he got himself ready in a hurry and was out in the Blazer within minutes of rising, hoping for black coffee and unfortunately, still thinking about sex.
Bonnie climbed in beside him and they were off. Off—just long enough to go through a McDonald’s drive thru for coffee, long enough to get half of it in his belly, long enough to be driving along at maximum speed on highway 51, headed toward Cincinnati, when they heard the awful thumping sound that only means one thing. Steering became almost impossible.
The rest of Finn’s coffee landed in his lap as he gripped the wheel and maneuvered the galloping Blazer to the side of the road. He spent an hour changing the tire, thankful that he had a spare, even though the spare was really just a donut, and he would have to stop and buy a new one as soon as possible. The only way to Cincinnati from Portsmouth was on an old highway that wound in and out of little towns, making the going slow and the services limited. The spare got them as far as a town called Winchester, and at that point, Finn was wishing he had a Winchester to put himself out of his misery. Bonnie had been very quiet throughout the long morning, and surprisingly, the silence hadn’t been welcome.
She hadn’t complained or groaned when they’d blown the tire, and she’d stayed beside him while he’d changed it, though he’d barked at her to get back inside the Blazer. She’d ignored him and huddled in a squat as the traffic flew by them, handing him this tool and holding that one, not saying a word. He preferred the Bonnie that told lame jokes about his name and poked and teased him, non-stop. This Bonnie made him think of the girl perched on the bridge, surrounded by mist.
They were in Winchester for two hours, awaiting service. The tire cost $200, and he and Bonnie fought about who should pay for it, resulting in a few stares and unwanted attention, reminding him again about the fact that the police were looking for them. Looking for her. Because they believed he had “taken” her. But maybe the people in the service station just stared because his crotch was stained with coffee, and his hands were smeared with grease. Nobody approached them, though, and in the end, Finn let Bonnie pay cash for the tire so he wouldn’t have to show his ID or hand over his credit card with his very memorable name engraved along the bottom.
When they were on the road again, he reminded her that when they reached Cincinnati, she had to call her gran. The longer they let things lie, the worse it would get for both of them. Especially him. She just nodded, but didn’t commit to anything
, and Finn resisted the urge to scream. Her moody silence was killing him. And scaring him. He reached for the radio and flipped it on, needing something, anything to occupy his thoughts.
“The tattoo on your hand. The five dots. What does it mean?” Bonnie asked, her eyes drawn to his hand by his sudden motion. He flipped off the radio once again.
“If you connect the four outer dots, they make a square. See?” he held out his hand so she could see what he meant.
She nodded, her eyes on the dots. “Yeah?”
“That represents a cage.”
“And the dot inside?” Bonnie asked.
“The man in the cage,” he answered stiffly. “You’ll see a lot of guys who’ve served time with this tattoo. But I actually wanted to get this one.” Finn smiled humorlessly and felt the slice of nausea in his stomach that always accompanied thoughts of his other tattoos.
“Why did you want this one?” She reached out and touched the small grouping of dots on the back of his right hand between his forefinger and his thumb. The touch made him want to grab her hand and hold on, but he pulled away and gripped the wheel instead.
“There are five dots. Five is the only odd, untouchable number . . . as far as we know,” he said, trying to ignore his reaction to her brief caress.
“Odd and untouchable?” she asked, not understanding.
“You know what odd numbers are. Five is odd, but it’s also untouchable—meaning it’s not the sum of any of the proper divisors of any positive integer.”
Bonnie stared at him blankly. “I could ask what an integer is, but I’m not sure that would help me understand what you just said.”
“Integers are the natural numbers—one, two, three, four, etc., as well as the negative of the natural numbers. Negative one, negative two, negative three, negative four, and so on. Zero is an integer too. Integers aren’t fractions or decimals or square roots,” he explained easily.
She nodded as if she understood. “Odd and untouchable. Is that what you are then, Finn?” He could tell she was trying to tease him, but he didn’t feel like laughing.
“In prison I wanted to be untouchable. I’ve always been odd.” His eyes shot to hers and then returned to the road. “But, yeah. I wanted to be different than the rest of the prison population, and I wanted to be left alone. Interestingly enough, eighty-eight is also an untouchable number.” He rubbed the double eights on his chest through his shirt.
“What was it like, the day you got out?” she asked suddenly.
“Of prison?” Finn found he didn’t mind the personal questions as much as he’d minded her silence.
“Yeah.” Bonnie said nodding. Her dark eyes were probing, and her usually smiling mouth curved down at the edges.
“Terrifying.”
“Why?”
“It was almost as scary as the day I went in.”
Bonnie looked stunned and waited for him to continue.
“When you go in, everybody is counting the days ‘til they can get
out . . . if getting out is even an option. The strange thing is, the longer you’re in, the less you want to get out. It starts feeling safe. It starts feeling like the only option.
“One guy, five years older than me, had been in since he was seventeen too. Ten year sentence. He got out a few months before I did.” Finn looked over at Bonnie, making sure she got what he was about to say next. “But he was back before I was released. And he was relieved. Being out here, in the real world, living? It scared him shitless. He didn’t know how to be on his own. He didn’t have any skills. The world had left him behind, and he crawled back in his hole the only way he knew how—he hurt somebody, stole their wallet. Problem solved. And you know what? I felt sorry for the bastard. I understood his thought process. I didn’t like it, but I understood it.”
“I guess that makes sense.” Bonnie was nodding. “Being out here, in the real world, living? It is pretty scary. It makes me wonder what I’m running away from.”
It was Finn’s turn to wait. He didn’t get the similarities between the two at all. Super stardom and prison? Um, no. But she’d used his words exactly.
“But then I think about going back. And I get so sick I just want to find a . . . a . . .”
“A bridge?” Finn finished for her.
“Yeah,” Bonnie whispered, and Finn felt apprehension quiver in his gut. He studiously ignored it and resumed his own story.
“I promised myself I would be different. I promised myself I would not go back. But I won’t lie and say there weren’t times it would have been easier. It’s been almost two years since I got out. I can’t find a full time job. I can’t really blame people. I was in prison for five years. Easier to hire the guy who doesn’t have prison tats and a rap sheet.
“I lived in the basement of the house I grew up in because my mom had rented out the upstairs. She remarried while I was in Norfolk and moved to a nice house in Chelsea with her new husband. She said I could come live with her, but it would have caused problems in the relationship, and I didn’t want that. Plus, living with my mom wasn’t my idea of independence. So, I’ve lived in the basement and used a hot plate and a mini fridge for the last two years, sleeping on a mattress in the corner, lucky to have my own bathroom, lucky not to pay rent.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad,” Bonnie said, and she sounded wistful. The wistful tone made him angry. She had no idea what she was talking about.
“You say that because you have money to burn and a life most people dream about. I have worked every odd job I could. My mom lined some things up for me. Painting, fixing this, fixing that. I’m not half bad at fixing things. It’s a whole lot easier to fix things than it is to fix myself. But it wasn’t working, Bonnie. So when Cavaro, a guy I met in prison, called me and told me he had something for me in Vegas, I decided it was better than what I had going. His brother owns several casinos. I don’t know if there are mob ties. He told me my job will be to watch the tables. To watch the dealers. Follow the numbers. Nothing illegal, nothing shady.” Finn stopped talking and shook his head. He didn’t really know if it would involve anything shady or not, if he were being honest.
“So the numbers are saving you again, huh?” Bonnie said softly, and he remembered his confessions of the morning before.
“Yeah. Sometimes I think numbers are all I’ve got . . . but they go on forever, so it could be worse.”
“They go on for Infinity.” Bonnie replied wryly, waggling her eyebrows.
“Yeah. Just for me.”
They let the conversation die, and Bonnie resumed her pensive position, feet on the dash, knees hugged into her chest, thoughts inward. So her sudden outburst as they pulled into Cincinnati caught him by surprise.
“I remember Cincinnati. I was here about a month ago. See? Up there! Time to change the billboard, folks.” Bonnie said in a sing-song voice.
Just to the right, on a giant sign, Bonnie, blonde hair swirling, red lips parted, eyes beseeching, looked down onto the afternoon traffic flowing into Cincinnati, Ohio, reminding them all, belatedly, that she had been at the US Bank Arena on January 25th and making every man sorry he’d missed it.
Finn forgot to breathe, and if it hadn’t been for Bonnie’s shrill warning, he would have rear-ended the car in front of them.
“Fun venue,” was all she said. Finn swore and kept driving.
WE DIDN’T NEED to stop in Cincinnati. We could have kept going. It was only one o’clock when we settled on a motel. But Finn was still wearing his coffee-stained pants, and he was grubby from changing the tire. It had been an incredibly long twenty-four hours for both of us, and some regrouping was in order, so I didn’t argue. Plus, he was determined that I make that call.
I didn’t have a credit card, not counting Gran’s stolen, useless ones, and Finn was worried about using his, considering there was a bit of a man-hunt on. Finn said no decent establishment would want to rent us a room without a card, and if we insisted on paying cash it was going to draw attention.
So we opted for a less than decent establishment. One room, two beds, one night—$100 plus a $50 deposit in case we broke something that wasn’t nailed to the wall or to the floor, which left the mirror and each other, which could happen, I supposed. I was pretty sure Finn had fantasized about breaking me in half a few times since we’d thrown in together . . . or I’d thrown myself on him. At least he’d put us in the same room. If I was going to be sleeping in the shabbiest, scariest motel in Ohio, I wasn’t going to do it alone.
We walked into the room, threw our bags down, and Finn handed me his phone. I looked at it, the small black device laying on his long palm. But I didn’t take it.
“I’m not calling Gran,” I said quietly, sinking down on the bed.
“Bonnie!” Finn’s voice rose in warning.
“I’ll call Bear!” I said, offering up the solution I’d spent all morning stewing over. “I’ll tell him where I am and what I’m doing. I’ll tell him to call Gran off because you can bet she’s the one who’s got everyone stirred up. The Golden Goose has flown south . . . or west. Where we heading? What big city is next?”
“Indianapolis. But it’s less than two hundred miles away. We’ll be there in three hours, tops. I wasn’t going to stop in Indianapolis. I was going to go straight through to St. Louis, which is another four hours or so. Long day, but doable, if the weather holds.”
“What’s in St. Louis?” I asked, trying to distract him, trying to stall.
“My dad.”
That surprised me. Finn was going to stop and see his dad. The only things he’d mentioned about his dad were related to math—the childhood promptings, the fact that his parents divorced when he was seventeen.
“He’s head of the math department at Washington University.”
“I see. Well, maybe I could go to St. Louis too.” I had a sudden inspiration and hurried to share it. “I could call Bear, and he could overnight my things—my driver’s license and my credit cards—to your dad’s address. Then I won’t . . . need you . . . anymore. You can go your way and I’ll go mine. That’s an idea!” An idea that sounded very reasonable to me.