No, I tell myself. Not gonna happen.
I’ll use some of the money I get for the car to rent us two separate hotel rooms. There’s no way I’m sleeping anywhere near him.
I head to the kitchen and, checking that Nico isn’t peeking through the window, I open the freezer, pull out the old box of Lean Cuisine chicken fettuccine, and reach my hand inside. I remove the plastic baggie with my emergency stash of cash in it. A little bit from each paycheck that I’ve been ferreting away ever since I started working at Chateau Marmutt. A total of seven hundred seventy-two dollars.
This is the money I was going to use to save us. Pay all the bills. Settle all the debt. Salvage this house. Until I realized it would never be enough.
Now I’ll have to use it to pay for food and gas to get us to Crescent City.
I grab the key to the Firebird and the envelope with the paperwork from the kitchen table and lock the front door behind me.
Nico is still sitting in the driver’s seat, admiring the inside of the car—adjusting the mirror, pushing buttons on the cassette player that Jackson installed himself. I dump my bag into the back seat and toss Nico the key.
With a grin, he sticks it in the ignition, presses one foot on the brake, the other on the clutch, and turns the key. The engine roars instantly to life, and Nico’s smile widens. “Now that is one of the most beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard.” Then, he lets out a roar of his own and bounces in the seat. “C’mon, c’mon, let’s go! I want to see how this baby moves.”
“Please, don’t call it that,” I say as I make my way around the front of the hood to the passenger side.
Nico tilts his head. “What? Baby?”
“Yeah.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . ,” I start to say, but I stop myself.
Because it’s what he used to call it.
Because it’s just a freaking car. It’s not a baby. It doesn’t breathe. It doesn’t cry. It doesn’t need taking care of.
“Just don’t,” I finally finish. I reach for the door handle but stop just short of making contact. My hands are suddenly shaking.
What happens when I open that door?
What happens when I sit down?
I haven’t sat inside this car since I was twelve years old. Since I still believed in the magic of time. That it can change people. That it can bring people home. That it can make people stay.
“What’s wrong?” Nico asks, pushing himself up off the seat so he can see the door handle that I’ve been staring vacantly at for the past five seconds.
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
I repeat the word in my mind until it feels true. Until it becomes more than a word, but a motto to live by. Then, before I can second-guess myself, I quickly reach for the handle, yank open the door, and sit down.
I take a deep breath, waiting for the panic to come. Waiting for the memories to flood me like tidal waves. But it doesn’t happen. The car feels like a car. The white leather feels unfamiliar beneath me. Like all the memories have been run down, worn off, cast away, with each mile on the odometer.
Maybe my twelve-year-old self was right.
Maybe time really is magic.
3:07 P.M.
RUSSELLVILLE, CA
INVENTORY: 1968 FIREBIRD 400 CONVERTIBLE (1), CASH ($772.00)
When Nico reaches the end of my street, I expect him to turn right instead of left, toward the other side of town where he lives. But he doesn’t. He turns toward the coast.
“Don’t you want to swing by your house to pick anything up?” I ask. “We won’t be home until—”
“No,” he says hurriedly.
I feel somewhat relieved by his response. I’m anxious to get on the road. But I’m also curious about it. Does he, too, not want to be reminded that we’re going to have to spend the night somewhere? Or is it something else? Something having to do with the fact that I’ve never been inside Nico’s house and that every time I asked to go there, he’d have a lie ready and waiting to feed me.
“My mom hasn’t cleaned in a while. She’d be embarrassed if you came over.”
“My dad has the flu. I wouldn’t want you to catch anything.”
“We have relatives in from out of town—it’s a madhouse right now.”
At first, I believed them. I had no reason not to. Then, after about the fifth excuse—“We just had the place fumigated. It’s not safe.”—I started to notice the signs. The tells. The quick swallows and downcast eyes.
Two weeks later, a comet came barreling through the sky and ended us.
I plug the address of Tom Lancaster’s shop into Google Maps and preview our route. Fairly simple. Route 128 west to California 1 north. That turns into the 101 north, which will take us all the way up the coast to the very top of the state. But just as I’m about to hit start on the turn-by-turn directions, a text message appears on my screen.
You currently have 5% of your data plan remaining.
Irritably, I swipe the message away. I guess we’ll need to use Nico’s phone from now on.
I really need to get that money.
As soon as the speed limit changes from forty-five to fifty-five, indicating we’re officially out of Russellville, Nico guns the engine and pushes the car up to seventy.
“Wow,” Nico says. That boyish smile that took over his face the moment he saw the car is back again. “This car drives like a dream!”
I turn to watch the passing scenery. I admit, the warm May air feels good on my face, and in my hair. It feels like it’s blowing away the past.
If only the past weren’t sitting right next to me.
“I can’t believe you’re selling this!” he calls over the rush of wind. “It’s such a classic.”
I shrug, keeping my eyes on the road. I kind of hope the shrug will be answer enough, but apparently it’s not.
“Why are you selling it?”
I want to tell him it’s none of his business, butt out. But for some reason I feel like I owe him an explanation, at least a vague one. If for no other reason than because he’s the one driving the car to the seller.
“My mom and I need the money.”
“What?” he yells. The wind has picked up, making it harder to hear each other with the top down.
“We need the money!” I shout.
He glances at me, confused. “But this car is a classic. It’ll appreciate in value. It’ll be worth a lot more in ten years than it is now.”
I feel the gnawing of agitation in my stomach. Why can’t he just be satisfied with my explanation and drop it? Why does he have to pry?
“I can’t afford to wait that long,” I say quietly, knowing it’s inaudible over the wind.
“What?” he yells again.
This time, however, I don’t repeat myself. If he can’t hear me, that’s his problem, not mine. I got the truth out. I said the words. I fulfilled my duty, and now I’m done. But then I feel the car start to slow as Nico pulls it off to the side of the road.
For a moment, I panic, thinking that he’s going to demand a real explanation. That he’s not going to continue driving until I tell him exactly why I’m selling this car. But instead, he shifts into neutral and pushes a button next to the radio. A second later, I hear a whizzing sound as the convertible soft top starts to rise from the back and sweeps over us like a curtain being drawn, closing us inside this tiny, tiny car.
I never realized how infinitesimally small this car really is until now.
“Um, I kind of liked the top down,” I say.
But it’s too late; Nico has already locked the latches into place. “I couldn’t hear a word you were saying.”
I know, I think. That was the whole point.
He shifts the car into first and pulls back out onto the road. “This is much better.”
But I disagree. This is not better at all. This feels like being trapped in a prison cell with th
e bank job partner who ratted you out. As we drive, the awkward silence is more deafening than the wind. Now it feels like we’re forced to talk to each other. Forced to pretend we still have something left to say to each other.
Nico must realize his mistake, because a few minutes later, he points to the cassette player in the car and says, “So, uh, do you want to listen to something?”
I breathe out a quiet sigh of relief. Partly because yes, I do want to listen to something. I want to listen to anything other than this silence. Nails on chalkboards, feedback from a microphone, a five-year-old playing the violin for the first time. All of those options have got to be better than this.
But mostly I’m relieved because he seems to have forgotten about his previous question.
Before Jackson left for the first time, he could usually be found in the garage. He would spend hours out there, buffing and shining and tinkering. For the three years he was gone, that’s how I remembered him: the hood up, Jackson’s tall, willowy frame bent over the engine with a tool in his hand.
While everything in his life—his family, his relationships, his appearance—was constantly in need of repair, his car was always in immaculate shape.
Two months before he left, I woke up in the middle of the night from a bad dream. I ran to my parents’ room—to Jackson’s side of the bed.
I’d always gone to my father with bad dreams. He would carry me back to my bed, tuck me in, and listen as I described the nightmare. Then he would perform an exorcism of sorts, to chase the nightmare back into “Nightmare Land,” as he called it, complete with strange chants, ostentatious hand movements, and finally the sprinkling of “hole-y” water (water with invisible holes in it). He’d dip his fingers in my water glass and sprinkle drops across my forehead.
The ceremony was over-the-top ridiculous, but it worked. It kept the bad dreams away.
Until Jackson himself became the bad dream.
When I reached Jackson’s side of the bed that night, the covers were pushed back, and the pillow was empty. I headed to the garage, where I knew I would find him.
Sure enough, Jackson was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Firebird, fiddling with something on the radio.
“Dad?” I said. “What are you doing?”
He glanced at me through the windshield but didn’t ask why I was awake. In fact, he barely seemed to register that it was the middle of the night. He simply called me over to him and told me to get in. He had a huge grin on his face.
“Look at this!” he said, after I’d closed the passenger-side door. He held up what looked like a bunch of wires tangled around a small metal box. “Found it at the dump. Do you know what it is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a perfectly good, working cassette player. That someone just threw away.”
“What’s a cassette player?” I asked.
Jackson tossed his head back and laughed. “When I was your age, we didn’t have MP3s. We barely even had CDs. We listened to music on these things called cassettes.” He held up a black unlabeled tape to show me. “But first, I have to install the player.”
For the next few minutes, I sat in the passenger seat and watched as Jackson expertly untangled the wires around the cassette player, connected them to various wires emerging from a giant hole where the car’s stereo used to be, and slid the box into place.
“I’ll have to retrofit it so it looks more seamless, but let’s see if it works.” Jackson turned the device on and fiddled with the dials on the front, causing a little white needle to move across a spectrum of numbers.
“That’s called a tuner,” he explained. He turned up the volume, and a newscast in Spanish came over the speakers. Jackson smiled. “Let’s try out the tape deck.” He inserted the cassette tape into the device, and suddenly a loud, distorted guitar riff blasted through the Firebird’s speakers, startling me. Jackson squeezed his eyes shut and began to bang his head violently along with the music. For a moment, he didn’t look like my father anymore. He looked like someone throwing a tantrum.
I rested my hand on the door handle, terrified and ready to bolt. But a few seconds later, he opened his eyes and smiled at me, returning to the Jackson I knew and loved.
“What is this?” I yelled over the noise. And that’s exactly what it sounded like to me. Like noise. Like a small child had gotten their hands on a guitar and was pretending to know how to play.
The drums kicked in, and Jackson mimed the beats right along with the drummer. As though he’d already heard this song a thousand times and had been rehearsing it for a big concert.
“It’s the new Fear Epidemic album!” he shouted back. “It just dropped yesterday. Your mother won’t let me play the CD in the house. So I copied it onto this cassette, and now with my new tape deck, I can listen to it in the car! Isn’t it amazing?”
I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t amazing. It was loud and abrasive, and I felt like the musicians were reaching through the speakers and smacking me over the head with their instruments. But I also hadn’t seen my father that happy in a long time.
Actually, come to think of it, I’d never seen my father that happy. It was as though something had come alive in him. Someone had plugged him into an amp. He was always charming and upbeat and spirited. But this was something else.
This was Jackson with the volume cranked up.
“I never thought they’d get back together!” Jackson yelled. “This is the best day ever.”
He continued to drum against the steering wheel, his whole body convulsing with each strum of the guitar. I watched him with a mix of confusion and fear. I’d come out here because I’d wanted him to chase away my bad dreams with his special nightmare exorcism. But it was as though I’d stumbled upon a very different kind of ceremony. A sacred worship ritual. One that I was clearly not a part of because I suddenly felt as though I were intruding upon something. Something I didn’t understand. Would never fully understand.
I don’t think Jackson even noticed when I opened the passenger door, climbed out of the car, and eased the door shut behind me.
As I lay awake in bed later, thinking about what I’d just witnessed, it was as though, somehow, I just knew that cassette player would change everything. Because as soon as I fell asleep, my dreams were plagued with more nightmares.
As Nico and I pass the sign marking the entrance to Mendocino County, I suck in a breath. We’re no longer in our home county of Sonoma. I’m now officially on a road trip with my ex-boyfriend. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d say in a million years.
“What do you want to listen to?” I ask, trying to sound diplomatic. If it were just me in the car, I’d put on my favorite playlist and sing along at the top of my lungs. But I know it’s an unspoken rule that the driver picks the music.
He glances at the cassette player, and I notice, for the first time, that there’s a tape inside. “Let’s see what’s in here.” Nico turns on the radio, and I hear the faint click of the cassette engaging. The sound seems to vibrate through the marrow of my bones, and I brace myself for what comes next.
Then, I hear it.
Those loud, abrasive chords.
That angry voice screaming.
It’s different from the album Jackson played for me that night in the garage. That much I can tell immediately. The sound of the guitar is tinnier. The voice of Nolan Cook, the lead singer of Fear Epidemic, has a hollow echo to it. As though the song were recorded in a closet, rather than a professional studio.
But it doesn’t matter. It’s enough.
I lunge for the cassette player and push eject. The silence that comes next is blissful and soothing. Ice-cold water over burned flesh.
Nico shoots an inquisitive glance at me as he drives, clearly trying to make sense of my over-the-top reaction to something as seemingly harmless as a song.
“Sorry,” I mutter as I pull the tape from the cassette player and stash it in the center console. “It was so
loud. Let’s listen to something else. Something on your phone.”
“Okay,” Nico says slowly, pulling his phone out of his pocket and handing it to me. Without thinking, I turn it on, type in his password, and start navigating through his playlists. It isn’t until I’ve reached the one titled “iChill” that I realize what we’ve just done.
We’re like play actors who have rehearsed the blocking onstage so many times, it’s become second nature. Even after the theater has been dark for more than a month, we can still pick up right where we left off.
How many times have we sat in this same configuration, Nico driving, me working the tech? Scrolling through his playlists, reading questions aloud from my favorite personality quiz website, looking stuff up on Google to settle a fake argument. And now, holding his phone in my hands, my fingers finding the right apps as easily as a pianist finds the right keys, a sourness starts to spread through my gut.
Maybe we should have laid out some ground rules before getting into the car. A code of conduct.
Ali and Nico’s Rules of the Road:
1. No mentions of the past.
2. No references to glove boxes, comets, rain, muddy shoes, or anything else relating to that night.
3. NO ROUTINES.
Nothing familiar.
“Uh, how about a podcast instead?” I suggest.
“A podcast?” he replies, as though he’s never heard the word before.
“Yeah, they’re like TV shows but audio only. They have them on practically every topic.”
He chuckles. “I know what a podcast is. I’m just not sure why you’d want to listen to one.”
I suddenly feel myself getting defensive. “To learn things. To educate myself. To gain a new perspective on the world.”
Nico raises one hand up in surrender. “Okay. Okay. Calm down. We can listen to a podcast.”
Calm down.
Those words. They’re like gasoline on a fire. I can hear them echoing in my mind. Two different memories colliding in the middle.
The Geography of Lost Things Page 5