I gently lower myself down so that I’m sitting on the hood of the car. “Because it’s my house. It’s my home.” I’m surprised by the sound of my own voice. The words come out flat and empty. Like the voice of that bank manager on the day my mother and I went to try to fight the first foreclosure notice.
I remembered thinking the manager didn’t sound like a person. He sounded like a robot. An ATM machine with a preprogrammed script.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Collins. There’s nothing we can do.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for an extension.”
“Yes, Russellville Bank is very sympathetic to your situation.”
Nico sits down next to me, but again he doesn’t say anything. I think he’s waiting for me to continue.
Waves crash. Water comes in. Water goes out.
And I’m still here.
“Is it . . . ,” Nico begins, but then seems to be searching for the courage to finish. “Will you be homeless if you lose the house?”
I shake my head. “No. It’s not like that. My mom already rented us an apartment in Harvest Grove.”
“Harvest Grove is nice.”
“But it’s not ours. It’s not home.” I run my fingers through my hair. “It’s all Jackson’s fault. When he was still married to my mother, he would open credit cards in her name, max them out, and then not pay them off. By the time she filed for divorce, she was so far in debt, it was impossible to climb out. Everything we earned went toward paying off his mistakes. There was nothing left over for the mortgage. And when that car appeared Thursday afternoon, I thought . . .”
That’s when my voice finally cracks. That’s when I finally crack. Like a tide pool that’s suffered too much abuse from the reckless ocean and is now breaking open, spilling over, unable to take the pressure any longer. Tears stream down my face in long rivers, pooling under my chin.
“You thought, for once, he could help,” Nico finishes the sentence for me. “Instead of destroy.”
His words are so spot-on, his comprehension so profound, I flinch and look at him.
“I get it,” he says to my questioning gaze. Then he laughs darkly and drops his head into his hands. “Trust me, I get it.”
I feel a tingle shoot up my spine. I’m suddenly certain he’s going to come clean too. He’s going to break open that locked vault of a mind and tell me everything. Everything he refused to tell me in our eighty-eight days together.
I brace myself for it.
I promise myself that whatever it is, I will not judge. I will not condemn. I will just listen. I will understand the way he seems to understand me right now.
But the truth never comes.
The vault remains locked.
Instead of revealing his own mess, Nico, true to form, tries to clean up mine. He lifts his head and says, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you don’t need to sell that car to get twenty-five thousand dollars.”
I hide my crushing disappointment with a scoff. “Right, the stupid trades.”
“Are they, Ali?” Nico fires back, that tenseness returning to his voice, as though he, too, has reached the end of his rope. “Are they stupid? Because if I recall, we started out with a rubber band and now we have a chess set in the back seat that’s probably worth more than two hundred dollars.”
“Did you not hear me? I need the money by next week!”
“Or what?” Nico challenges. “What happens if you don’t get the money by next week?”
I throw my hands up in the air. “I lose everything.”
“No,” Nico corrects. “You lose a house. That’s not everything.”
“It may as well be! It’s everything to me.”
“Okay,” Nico allows, although he still doesn’t look convinced. “So, what are you going to do about it? Now that the car is no longer in play?”
“I . . . ,” I rush to say before realizing I have no idea how to finish that sentence. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I haven’t thought much further than my plan to run out here and wallow at the sea. My shoulders sag with defeat. “I don’t know. Go home and start packing, I guess.”
Nico stands and faces me. “Exactly.”
I look up at him, shielding my eyes from the bright sun overhead. “Exactly what?”
“You have nothing to lose by giving this a try.”
“That’s not true,” I argue. “I could call Tom Lancaster back right now and sell him the car for three thousand. At least it’ll be something.”
“We can sell the car to anyone at any time for three thousand dollars.”
I huff out a breath and continue to stare up at him. He looks so confident right now. So sure of himself. I wish, for one second, I could share that confidence. I could live in Nico’s skin and feel what it’s like to be so dang optimistic all the time.
“Why are you really doing this, Nico? Why do you even care?”
He lowers his gaze, and I see his confidence waver for just a flicker of a second. “I need the money too.” But he won’t look at me as he says it.
“And you really think you can trade up to something worth twenty-five thousand dollars by next week?”
“I really do.” He finally lifts his eyes and looks at me. “But I can’t do it alone. Or rather, I don’t want to. Will you do this with me? Will you take a chance on me?”
Despite the humid sea air, my throat goes bone-dry. For some unfathomable reason, I want to say yes. To whatever he’s asking. That’s the power of Nico’s eyes, Nico’s words. They have the ability to entrance. To form spells.
But the problem is, I’ve already taken a chance on him. And it failed.
And he can never fix that.
Which means, he’s right. What do I have left to lose?
[DRAFT] FOR TRADE: Hand-carved wooden chess set (Crescent City, CA)
Help! I’m stuck on the road with my ex-boyfriend and he’s driving me crazy. Literally. (He’s the one driving.) I need your help. The faster I can trade up, the faster I can get out of this car and go home. We currently have a gorgeous wood-carved chess set with a Pirates vs. British Royal Navy theme. What will you trade for it? We’ll pretty much take anything at this point, and we’ll pretty much travel anywhere. Can you tell I’m desperate? Pictures below. The pieces are really exquisite.
3:02 P.M.
CRESCENT CITY, CA
INVENTORY: 1968 FIREBIRD CONVERTIBLE (1), CASH ($564.72), SEA GLASS (1 PIECE), PIRATES VS. BRITISH ROYAL NAVY CHESS SET (1)
Nico and I are both starving, and we need a place to stop so we can set up the chessboard and take photographs for the Craigslist post. We find a restaurant right on the water called the Chart Room and order grilled crab sandwiches, which apparently are a special around here.
Nico removes the chessboard from the box that Mack gave us to carry it in and starts pulling red pirate pieces out and assembling them on his side of the board. I reach into the box and grab blue naval officers and soldiers and position them on the opposite side.
With each piece that I place, I can’t help thinking about Jackson and that chessboard he came home with when I was twelve. How his made-up rules caused me to completely humiliate myself at that first chess club meeting.
“The craftsmanship on these pieces really is exquisite, isn’t it?” I ask Nico.
“Yes,” Nico says, and I can hear the reverence in his voice. He’s impressed.
I pick up one of the pieces—a soldier in a blue coat and white pants, holding a tiny telescope. “Which do you think this one is?”
Nico leans across the table and squints at it. “The knight, I think.”
An involuntary smile dances on my lips as I think about the looks on the faces of those kids at the chess club meeting, when I moved my knight—or the “Cavalary,” as I called it—to the far corner of the board, next to my “Fortress.”
“What are you doing?” my assigned opponent asked.
“It’s the most vulnerable piece to the Sorceress’s spells,” I explained as
though it were obvious. “I’m protecting it behind the Fortress.”
The laughter followed me out the door of the library and all the way home. After I finished crying from the humiliation, I went online and spent hours watching chess matches on YouTube, studying the real rules of the game and cursing Jackson’s name the entire time. But even though I was angry at him for lying to me—for causing me such mortification on my first day of high school—I remember thinking that Jackson’s version was way better than the real version. It felt more fun. Less stuffy. More creative. Less rigid.
Regardless, I never went back to the chess club.
“What?” Nico asks, breaking into my thoughts. And that’s when I realize that I’m still smiling.
I shake my head. “Nothing.” I place the knight on its proper square. “Have you ever made a chess set? Out of wood, I mean?”
Nico shakes his head. “No, but I’ve always wanted to.”
I pluck the next blue piece from the box. This one is a foot solider with a musket; I assume it’s one of the pawns and position it in front of the knight. “What theme would you pick?”
Nico smiles. I think he likes this question. “Hmm. Maybe I’d start with a classic set. Just to see if I could do it.”
“You could do it,” I say confidently. Nico lifts his head and meets my eye. I flash him a kind smile and reach into the box for another piece.
“What makes you so sure?” he asks, clearly trying to milk the compliment.
I play along, shaping my voice into something professional and serious, like an art critic. “I’ve seen your work, Mr. Wright. You have a strong future.”
“Princeton could use a guy like me?” he asks, quoting Risky Business, another installment from one of our Epic Eighties Movie Marathons.
I laugh. “Yes. Exactly.”
I assume Nico is going to drop it now. We’ve made the joke. We’ve followed the topic to its conclusion. What more is there to say? But then, after an extended silence, he asks, “What’s your favorite piece I’ve ever built?”
I flinch and look up at him. This time, he won’t meet my eye. He’s busy arranging the little pirate pawns with their black-and-white-striped shirts and red belts.
The real answer to his question is easy. It comes to me instantly. But I can’t say that. I can’t give him the real answer. And I can’t mention any of the other things he made for me because they’re all sitting in a landfill somewhere.
I rack my brain for something safe. But I come up with nothing.
Everything Nico ever made—everything Nico ever touched—is too sacred. Too many memories are seeped into the wood.
So I just grab another piece from the box—an eighteenth century British warship, which serves as the rook—and place it on the board. “I don’t know,” I mutter, refusing to look him in the eye. “I guess there are just too many good ones to choose from.”
Thankfully, our grilled crab sandwiches arrive a moment later, and I have something to stuff into my mouth.
I’d always known Nico liked to build things out of wood. Even before we became a couple, I would occasionally see him leaving school with some kind of handmade object he’d crafted in woodshop. Stools, boxes, clocks, bookends.
After we started dating, those were the kinds of gifts he would give me. Other boys might bring flowers or write poetry or take girls on fancy dates to fancy restaurants. Not Nico. Nico carved little dogs out of wood (inspired by the regular clients at Chateau Marmutt). He sanded down splices of tree trunk to make beautiful ringed coasters. He even made me a checkerboard once, after he found out how much I love board games. And two nights later, he showed up with hand-carved wooden pieces to match.
Every time he picked me up, every time he showed up at my door, he would have something in his hand. An offering of sorts. Sorry I can’t take you somewhere nice, his eyes would say.
Nice places are overrated, mine would say back.
On the night of my eighteenth birthday, two months into our relationship, Nico picked me up at my house in his truck.
I asked where we were going. He said it was a surprise.
It certainly was. When we pulled up in front of our high school at eight o’clock at night, I thought he had to be joking.
“You’re taking me to school?” I asked. “For my birthday.”
“Not exactly,” Nico said, and killed the engine. When we hopped out of the truck, he took me by the hand and guided me past the main entrance, around the side, near the gym. He paused at one of the back doors, and I yanked on the handle.
Just as I suspected. It was locked.
“How do you expect us to get in?” I asked.
Nico fished a key out of his pocket and held it up triumphantly. “With this.”
My mouth fell open. “How do you have a key to the school?”
He inserted the key into the lock and turned. “Mr. Canter.”
“The woodshop teacher gave you a key?”
He held the door open for me. “I come here a lot. He trusts me.”
I had to laugh at that. Of course he did. Everyone at school loved Nico.
As soon as we were inside the darkened hallway, Nico reached for my hand again and led me up the back stairs and down the hall. I’d never actually been inside the Russellville High woodshop before, and as soon as I entered, I wondered why.
It seemed like such a wonderful place. Such a place of possibility. With its mysterious-looking tools and machines and large sheets of wood.
A magical place.
Or maybe that was just because I was there with him.
Nico looked so sexy standing there among the musty scent of oak, I could barely form words.
“W-w-what are we doing here?” I stammered.
“What do you think we’re doing?” he asked. “We’re going to build something amazing.” He led me over to a table where a blueprint had been spread out. I tilted my head to try to decipher the shape of the design.
“A birdhouse?” I asked.
He ran his hands across the paper, smoothing it down. “Yes. A birdhouse.”
For the next two hours, Nico taught me how to saw, sand, nail, and finish. By the end, we had done exactly what he said we would do. We had built something amazing.
Nico held up the tiny wooden house for my inspection. “Do you like it?”
“I love it.”
“And I love you.”
It was the first time either of us had said those words. I went completely numb. I couldn’t speak. But Nico didn’t seem to mind. He gently set the birdhouse down on the table, gathered me in his arms, and kissed me.
When we finally pulled apart, he looked deep into my eyes. He gave me silent permission to say it back. He waited for me to say it back.
I didn’t say it back.
Instead, I crushed my lips against his once more. He responded immediately, pulling me into another intense, all-consuming, debilitating kiss. His arms wrapped around me, his fingers found their way up under my hoodie, pressing into my skin, leaving little white Nico-was-here indents that would soon fade.
There was an urgency in his kiss that told me exactly what he was asking for. But somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to give it.
I told myself it didn’t matter. Words weren’t everything. After all, Jackson had said I love you a thousand times to me and my mom, and he was the one who kept leaving.
I didn’t need to say the words. My actions would speak for me. And it would be enough.
But as Nico drove me home later that night and I held our beautiful creation in my hands, the birdhouse no longer felt like it was constructed out of solid wood.
It felt like it was made out of thin, flimsy paper.
It felt like one gust of wind might blow the whole thing down.
After we’ve finished eating and paid the bill, and the chess set has been fully assembled, Nico barely has time to get out his phone, let alone take a picture, before we hear a voice call out, “Oh, how darling! Howie, look at that c
hess set!”
We both look up to see a gray-haired woman waddling over to our table. She picks up the royal commander of the British Navy—the king piece—and studies it through the bottom half of her enormous bifocals. “Just look at that craftsmanship. Howie! Get over here!”
A moment later, a man with matching gray hair and bifocals comes scuttling over.
“Will you look at this?” she says. “This is exactly what we need for room seven!”
I glance between them. “Room seven?”
The woman laughs. “Sorry. We own a bed-and-breakfast up in Seaside, Oregon. Have you ever been?”
I shake my head. “I’ve never left California.”
“Really?” Nico and the woman say at the same time.
Heat fills my cheeks. “Really.”
“Oh, you must come visit!” the woman crows. “It’s simply beautiful. Our little inn is right on the coast. Gorgeous views. I run the front of house—decorating the guest rooms and designing the breakfast menus—and Howie here runs the business.”
Howie gives a weak little wave, like this whole conversation is making him uncomfortable.
I smile politely. “Sounds nice.”
“Oh, it’s just delightful. Ten guest rooms, all with their own elegant charm. We’re currently in the process of remodeling room seven. According to that Rip Advisory, we need more family-friendly rooms.”
“Rip Advisory?” Nico repeats.
“She means TripAdvisor,” the old man says.
“Thirty years we’ve run that B and B,” the woman goes on, like her husband isn’t even there. “Thirty years! And we were doing just fine. Wonderful comments in the guest book. We even got a write-up in one of the big travel guidebooks! They gave us four stars. And then that awful Rip Advisory comes along, and suddenly people got mean, you know? Someone actually had the audacity to write a scathing reviewing about my blueberry pancakes. Saying they had too many blueberries. Too many! That recipe has been in my family for generations. No one has ever had a single bad thing to say about those pancakes until Rip Advisory came along. It’s that Internet business. People feel safer hiding behind their computer screens and fancy snaps.”
The Geography of Lost Things Page 17