by Veen, Milena
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said and gently pulled my hand out of his.
I stepped outside. It was 2011 again.
“I was so worried!” my mother said in a crying voice. Why didn’t you answer your phone? Oh, Ruby, please, tell me where you are and I will send you some money so you can travel properly.”
“There’s really no need for that,” I answered, trying not to sound harsh.
“But if you really have to go there, you could at least accept some help. I’ll send you some money and you can get back by bus, or plane, as you like it,” she said.
“No, Mom. Please just let me do this my own way, okay?”
“But maybe your way isn’t the right one, you know.”
“Let me find out myself,” I said.
A family of three passed beside me when I hung up and turned around to enter the 1950s again. The woman looked just like the fortune teller from the outskirts of Phoenix, only younger, cleaner, and with brighter and smoother skin. She looked at me and smiled. Her little son pointed his hand toward me.
“Dorothy!” he said, grinning.
There are still parents who show their kids The Wizard of Oz. That was comforting to know. They won’t all grow up wanting to be droids, vampires, and psychics. I smiled back at him. Joshua waved to me through the café window. Not to stray from my path – that’s what the fortune teller told me. I felt I was on my path more than ever.
When I entered, Dexter and Joshua were paying the bill. We bought some food and drinks to go and climbed back into the van. Dexter said his friend from high school lived in Amarillo and that he would like to pay him a short visit if we were not in a hurry.
“It’s a working day, but I hope he will be able to get out for half an hour or so,” he said.
We knew we couldn’t get further from Oklahoma City that day, and even if we could, we didn’t want to visit Sarah in the evening, so we agreed. We would probably agree even if we were in a hurry, because Dexter was the best fellow traveler we could ever ask for, and we couldn’t allow ourselves to lose him.
Amarillo was dusty and flat. It somehow reminded me of home I left behind. Dexter’s friend worked in the Chase Tower. We waited for him in the nearby park. I thought it was a good idea to leave two of them alone for a couple of minutes, but Dexter insisted that we stay. He said we had to meet Charlie, that we would certainly like him. And we did. He showed up wearing a big smile and the White Stripes badge on his plain white T-shirt.
“To hell with bureaucracy!” he said. “I’m so glad you called me out. Have to be back in fifteen minutes, though.”
“Do they allow you to work dressed like that?” Dexter said, hugging him.
“No, but I surely won’t get out on the street dressed in a gray suit and a tie,” he said.
He kept his cool wardrobe in his locker, along with the comic books that he read during his lunch break. Guys like Dexter and Charlie make you believe in the possibility of normal adulthood, that place-time-heart joint where you still listen to music even when you’re thirty-five, you don’t wear brown shoes, and your hair has never met the perfect parting. Yeah, it’s possible.
We left Amarillo in high spirits, slamming the cherry-red van door behind us.
“Hey, Dex, this car of yours is like a time machine,” I said.
“Really, and how’s that?”
“Well, it’s simple. We’re listening to Joy Division, I’m wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and a 1980s dress, and Joshua here has a haircut like one of the Byrds members, I just still can’t decide which one of them.”
“Oh, that’s not nice, Ruby!” Joshua said, pulling his ear.
“I saw this movie about a guy with Tourette’s syndrome once,” Dexter said. “It was kind of funny.”
“It’s not that funny in real life,” Joshua said. “Not funny at all. Actually, it can make a hell out of your life sometimes.”
“Yeah, I guess it’s hard,” Dexter said. “Not that I know much about it.”
“Yeah, it’s not easy. But what can I do? Some people have green eyes, some have killer smiles, and I have Tourette’s syndrome,” he laughed.
I glanced through the window. The white line on the edge of the roadway looked like an endless satin ribbon. I put the headphones in my ears and closed my eyes so I could see myself better. I felt that everything inside me was young and fragile. And the music flowing from my iPod into my soul was the proof that my life was real – finally real.
Joshua’s fingers tapped my shoulder.
“Sleeping?” he said.
I shook my head no.
“Sometimes I feel that every Okkervil River song is the story of my life,” I said, removing the headphones from my ears and handing them to Joshua. “Just listen.”
We arrived in Oklahoma City around six. Dexter gave us his phone number and invited us to visit him if we ever come to New York.
We had almost 200 dollars in our pockets and decided to find a place to sleep in downtown Oklahoma City rather to spend another night in some dreadful suburban motel. I went to the window and drew the curtains apart. The city below looked like a postcard. Our final destination was so close. Somewhere behind those buildings, Sarah was watching TV, or she was reading a book, or maybe she was fixing dinner for her family, unaware of tomorrow’s encounter.
“To the bathroom, sloppy!” Joshua laughed, pulling my ankles and dragging me across the floor.
Chapter Twelve
Something strange happened when I came out of the bathroom. Well, two strange things, actually. I was sitting on the corner of the bed, toweling my hair, when my cell phone rang.
“What are you doing?” my father’s voice jangled against my eardrum.
“Uh… I’m just drying my hair,” I said, taken aback.
Have I mentioned that my father calls me three times a year? Those rare and precious occasions are: my birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
“No, Ruby, I’m asking you what the hell are you doing there, wherever you are right now?” he raised his voice. “Do you know how irresponsible your behavior is?”
“And who are you to teach me responsibility?” I said, shocked by my own words. “You left me as soon as I was born.”
Silence on the other end of the line sounded like a seashell when you hold it against your ear. Silence that screamed how everything was breakable, and that the image of my father in my head was just an image, nothing more. It was my own construction, my own work of art, my own deception. And it hurt. It hurt me to realize that I actually didn’t know that man on the other end of the phone. Because he’s never been there for me, not even to check my body temperature and make me wear three sweaters at once. Never.
Something moved behind the curtains.
“I know that you know why I left,” my father said, breaking the silence.
“I know why you left Mom,” I said, walking toward the curtain. “But I can’t tell why you left me.”
I quickly pulled the curtains. Something fluttered across the room and flew out the window.
“Oh, it’s a red bird!” I screamed, pressing my hand against the window sill.
“What?”
“Look, Dad, I’m fine, don’t worry,” I said and hung up the phone.
Do you believe in black-cat-bad-luck, find-a-penny-pick-it-up, and all that stuff? Well, I didn’t, but I still couldn’t ignore what I just saw.
“What’s wrong?” Joshua said.
“It’s just what she told me,” I said, stretching my arm to the window.
“Who told you what?”
“Don’t you remember? The fortune teller told me to watch out for a red bird. When I see it, I will know what to do.”
“So what should we do?” he laughed.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I think I just want to go outside and breathe.”
“Did your father upset you?”
“No, I just realized something that I should have realized a long time ago,” I sai
d. “Let’s go, there’s fun outside. The red bird told me.”
***
Did you know that even vanilla ice cream tastes better when you’re in love? Who could have guessed that? And Oklahoma City lights? Oh, they’re magical! After walking for a while, we bought some junk food and found a lovely little park.
“I love unhealthy food,” I said. “It tastes like freedom. Not that I would eat cheeseburgers all the time, I don’t even like them that much, but you know, there’s something so liberating about it – knowing that you’re doing something that your parents wouldn’t have allowed, something that is essentially bad for your health. It may sound self-destructive, but it really isn’t. It’s just freedom in a dangerous package.”
“What’s bad for your body may be good for your soul,” Joshua answered.
Joshua understands everything. Sometimes I don’t even have to explain things to him; he understands exactly what I mean by the tone of my voice. Some people are meant to wander around the world together, conjoined in imperfection and internal poetry of their beings, the kind that’s not expressed in words, but soul beats.
“Hey, you remember that night when I told you not to believe the shooting stars?” he suddenly said, taking my hand.
“How could I forget it?”
“Well, there was a reason I told you that,” he whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath and moved his body closer to mine. “Well… it’s kind of a short and sad story,” he started in a trembling voice. “I saw a shooting star the night Macy was diagnosed with cancer. I made a wish. It never came true. She died three months later. That’s when I started hating shooting stars. When the sky is dark and clear, I can’t even look at it.”
The words got stuck in my throat.
“I will never make a wish again when I see a shooting star,” I muttered. “I wish I knew her… your sister.”
“It’s not that I really believed that a shooting star would make my wish come true, of course,” he said. “It’s just that I will always remember that – always – how I made a wish, and she died.”
A skinny brown street dog stopped by our bench. Joshua gave him a piece of his sandwich. He wagged his tail, licked his nose, and lay down by the bench. A group of girls in satin dresses passed by. It was a prom night, and the air was milk-warm and fragrant.
“Do homeschoolers have a prom?” Joshua asked me, chewing his roll.
“Maybe somewhere, but not in our town” I said, thinking about Mrs. Wheeler’s beautiful dresses.
No prom for me, that’s for sure. No corsage, no satin dress, no prom dance. And before that: no summer camps, no messages in my school locker, no school plays, no bland cafeteria food. And all that just because of one scratched knee. Sometimes I imagine how my life would be if I hadn’t been born sick. But how can I be sure that it would be better than now? Maybe it would be a disaster. Maybe I would suck at it.
“I hated mine. I was the first one who left” he said, winking. “All those hysterical girls, and boys in dark suits, and corny music.”
The silence was unreal for a Friday night in a big city. But what do I know about big city nights? Only what I saw in the movies. I spent my whole life in that torpid little Californian town. It must have been that Joshua thought about something similar, because his next question was about me going to college. Only a couple of months earlier, I was eagerly waiting for the day when I would pack my things and leave my house for a better and more exciting life, far away from my always-worried mother and small town non-events. But now, the idea of leaving was breaking my heart into pieces.
“Los Angeles isn’t that far away, you know,” I said, not believing my own words for even a second. It was far, far, far away, almost 150 miles away from Joshua’s house on the hill.
“Does your mother know that you’re going?”
“Sure,” I answered. “She’s going to visit me once a month and I’ll have to promise that I’ll wear an undershirt every time the temperature drops below seventy-seven degrees.”
“I’ll miss you,” he said.
“Are you going to visit me?” I asked, still feeling those little pieces of my wounded heart stabbing my skin from the inside.
“Of course I will,” he said and looked at me seriously. He wrapped his arms around my body. I felt his warm breath on my neck.
“I’m so glad that I found you,” he said. “I mean, what was the probability really?”
I wanted to tell him how we probably wouldn’t have met if his sister hadn’t died and he hadn’t moved from Virginia. And we wouldn’t have met if I had been in school that Friday afternoon like any other seventeen-year-old girl in our town had been. But I didn’t. I knew he was thinking the same when he said, “Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being that every event in life is a result of a series of coincidences affecting each other. It’s frightening when you think about it.”
“It’s like people don’t really have any choice, right?”
“Yeah, or they have only the illusion of a choice.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
He stretched his legs and rubbed his knees.
“I think we should get to know Oklahoma better,” I said.
“Where could we go?”
“I don’t know, let’s ask Google,” I said, pulling my cell phone out of my bag.
***
Half-empty, dusty bar in Oklahoma City with a guy who has Tourette’s syndrome? Repeat after me: “Not a god idea, Ruby girl. Not a good idea at all.”
It happened in the blink of an eye. We didn’t even try to buy alcohol using Joshua’s fake ID. We were just two nice kids sipping tomato juice, when a big guy approached us and said, “Aren’t you kids supposed to be in bed by now?” He grinned at us, showing his bad teeth.
We tried to ignore him, but he was persistent.
“I asked you something!” he said.
I turned around, desperately looking for someone who would help us, but no one seemed to be interested in what was going on. Brushing off the beads of cold sweat that drizzled down my neck, I stood from the stool.
“Sir, we don’t want any trouble, if we have somehow offended you…”
He cracked his knuckles and drew his face near Joshua’s as if I was invisible. I remember the song that was playing on the jukebox. It was “Great Balls of Fire”, and when Jerry Lee Lewis said, “Oh, what a thrill,” the big guy grabbed Joshua’s neck. I never liked that song. And now I hate it.
“Now ya gonna tell me what’s your pretty face doing here so late,” he grumbled, laughing ominously.
Joshua winked and pulled his ear.
“You think that’s funny?” he shouted.
My mind started replaying, “Don’t say the word, don’t say the word!”
But the word sneaked out of Joshua’s mouth and cut the smoke in front of big guy’s nose in half. There was nothing between them anymore. I covered my face with my hands. The next thing I remember was that we were standing in front of the bar and Joshua’s nose was bleeding.
“We need to take you to the hospital,” I said, trying to stop the bleeding with a paper napkin.
“No need for that,” he answered, lightly pushing my hand away, “I just need something cold to put on it and it will be okay.”
“I think I saw a grocery store on our way here,” I said. “Wait for me here.”
And of course that grocery store was closed, and of course I didn’t know what to do. “A tornado would be great now. That way it would be complete,” I thought to myself. There was no one around. I was standing on the street trying to figure out what to do, when I suddenly heard the sound of shutters opening and a ray of light illuminated the sidewalk.
“Hey there!” a hoarse female voice said. “You down there!”
“Are you talking to me?” I said, raising my head toward the light source.
“No, I’m talking to my great-grandmother whose ghost is standing beside you,�
� the woman said. “Of course I’m talking to you. What are you doing there?”
“I’m… I’m just waiting.”
“Are you lost?”
“Actually, I was looking for ice… or anything cold.” I said. “My friend hurt his nose… and I… the grocery store is closed.”
I heard her footsteps moving away, then getting closer to the window again.
“Here,” she said, and the bag of frozen beans landed on the sidewalk beside my feet. “Drunk kids.”
I opened my mouth to say “thank you” but the window was already closed.
“I met God,” I said when I got back to Joshua. “And she tossed me a bag of frozen beans.”
“I’m a walking disaster,” he said. “You should have found a normal guy to accompany you. You won’t get far with me.”
“A normal guy?”
“Yes, someone who wouldn’t get you in a mess like that.”
“Well, I found you, moron,” I said, pressing the bag against his nose.
We waited and waited, but his face didn’t start to look any better. His nose was terribly swollen and his left eye was black and almost closed. It was Friday night, and we were alone in an unfamiliar city with almost no money and no one to call. It couldn’t get more complicated than that. But even in that gloomy moment, with Joshua’s blood on my fingers in that poorly lit park – I was happy. In some weird and inexplicable way, I was actually happy.
“We really need to get a doctor to check that,” I gently said, caressing his hair. “Come on, get up!”
“Please just don’t do what the red bird tells you anymore.”
How were we supposed to know where the hospital was in Oklahoma City? We had to take a cab, and the driver ripped us off. We now had less than 120 dollars left.