The Long Ride Home

by Tawni Waters

  I was thinking of going alone. I mean, in the thirty seconds that have passed since I concocted this plan for my summer, I’ve only envisioned myself alone. Mercy does her waiting trick again. And for the second time in one night, it works.

  “Dean,” I blurt. “I was thinking of going with Dean.”

  Dean who is the only person I know in Los Angeles, besides Mercy. Dean who, when I can’t handle school, ditches with me to stare at the ocean. Dean who lets me be quiet as long as I need to and only interrupts my thoughts to say stuff about seeing god in seagulls. Dean who writes poems in this wussy little notebook he keeps in the back pocket of his worn-out jeans. Dean who fixes my motorcycle when it breaks because, in addition to being a poet, he’s a motorcycle nut. Dean who is pretty, in a young Elvis meets a young Albert Einstein kind of way. Dean who everyone thinks is gay, probably because he writes poetry. Dean who almost certainly isn’t gay because last time we sat on the beach, he kissed me out of nowhere and screwed up our whole friendship for good. Dean who I fucked after he kissed me because I was in a really messed-up headspace, and I needed love, and he felt like love to me just then.

  That Dean.

  By the time Mercy finally heads to bed, my mind is swimming in Dean. (Note: that’s not good.) I open the liquor cabinet, grab a bottle, and take a swig of something clear and bitter—vodka, I think. I don’t bother to read the label.

  “A shot a day keeps the devil away,” I whisper. By devil, I don’t mean some scary, red being that haunts a fiery pit at the center of the world. I’m an agnostic who wandered into atheist territory the day the coroner put Mom’s ashes in my hands. The only devil I believe in is the monster that lives in my head.

  • • •

  Mom’s urn sits on the mantel in Mercy’s apartment. When I say “mantel,” I mean “kitchen counter,” next to the cookie jar. Mercy’s apartment is way too basic for anything as lavish as a real mantel. That double meaning stuff again. I can tell you definitively that you do not want to stumble into Mercy’s kitchen at midnight looking for Oreos.

  Ever since I told Mercy about my big plan to take Mom’s ashes back to New York, I feel nauseous and guilty whenever I look at the urn. I want to forget I ever said so, but it’s like I made a promise to Mom.

  When I first got the urn, I wasn’t ready to scatter the ashes. That would be letting go of the only piece of Mom I had left. Plus, she never told me where she wanted her ashes scattered. Hell, I don’t even know if she wanted to be cremated, but after the fire, we had no other option. Still, now that I’ve had time to clear my head (which means I have gone from perpetually homicidal to frequently suicidally depressed), I’m 100-freaking-percent sure she would not want to spend eternity masquerading as a jar of sugary snacks. Mom was a huge health nut. Maybe, maybe, if she were posing as a bowl of hummus, she’d be okay. But cookies? Not a chance.

  Meanwhile, as I’m wrestling with the big questions (how should I dispose of my mother’s earthly remains?), Dean is probably wrestling with the small ones (why won’t the girl I freaked out by sticking my tongue down her throat talk to me?). He keeps calling my cell and leaving messages. It’s been more than months since that day at the beach, and he still won’t leave me alone. The last one went like this: Hey, it’s Dean. (Duh. No one else in LA has my number.) Me again. Look, I’m so sorry. I know I totally messed with your head. I didn’t think. I just acted. Which I guess is the problem, right? I didn’t expect it to go as far as it did. Hell, I didn’t expect it to happen at all. Let me make it up to you. Your Harley is ready to roll. I’ll bring it by if that’s okay. I pinkie swear I WILL NOT touch you.

  He said “pinkie swear.” He does not know this, but he has uttered the proverbial magic words, the syllables that would have gained him entrance to Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders if I were the cave in question. My mom and I used to pinkie swear on everything. “It’s like signing a contract with the mafia,” she’d say. “You can’t break it or else.” Pinkie swears are deeply imbedded in my psychology. I am powerless in the face of the mighty pinkie swear.

  Based solely on his pinkie swear, I call Dean back. It has nothing to do with the fact that I’m rat-in-a-cage bored, ready to gnaw off my leg for entertainment. Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that when I look at his teeth, I want to lick them. Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that my period is more than a month late, and even though I’m trying not to think about it, I do. All the time.

  “Harley?” he says when he answers.

  My belly flip-flops. Jesus. Does he have to say my name right off? Can’t he just say “hello” like a normal person? His voice is deep, which I guess is to be expected, what with him being male and all. He overpronounces his r’s, which is not to be expected, and is completely impossible to describe using the written word. The combination makes my heart pound a little faster. His voice is my favorite sound in the world right now, even if I have resisted calling him back for months. Don’t give him too much credit, though. Remember my world is populated by flies, my mom’s weird friend, and an urn.

  “Hey,” I say. I’m perched on the edge of one of Mercy’s overstuffed chairs, which happens to be this bright turquoise color I’m sure will be horrifyingly unfashionable in about a year. I stare into the kitchen at Mom’s ashes.

  “Are we okay?” he asks.

  I think for a minute. The question seems too big. Is anyone really okay? I finally go with, “Yeah. Of course. I mean, no big deal.”

  “Thank fucking god,” Dean says, and I launch into a theological debate, partially for kicks, but mostly to distract him from the deep conversation about “us” he seems intent on having.

  “If there is a god, would he/she appreciate having the adjective ‘fucking’ attached to his/her name?” I ask.

  “Good question,” Dean says. “Can I have a few days to mull it over?”

  “Certainly.” I walk over to the kitchen and run my finger over the ivy leaves engraved along the surface of Mom’s urn. I wait for him to talk, but he doesn’t. It’s like he’s pulling Mercy’s stupid trick, and it works. I’m such a sucker. “So look,” I say. “I’m thinking of taking my mom’s ashes home.”

  “To New York?” he asks.

  I wonder if he has a transcript of my and Mercy’s conversation.

  “Where else?” I ask on cue.

  “That’s cool,” he says.

  “Only Mercy doesn’t want me to go alone,” I say.

  He doesn’t reply, but the silence is pregnant. He’s swimming in hope, the nerdy kid frantically raising his hand in the back of the classroom. Pick me! Pick me! I pick him. “So you wanna come?”

  “Hell, yeah, I do,” he says.

  I wander back to the living room and plop down in a pretty chair that will be ugly a year from now, feeling like barfing because I’m absolutely sure this trip will change my life forever and not necessarily for the better. And it’s not as if my life can really afford any more drastic downgrades. I mean, my period is late, and I’m traveling across the country with my mother’s ashes and a guy who scares the shit out of me because I think I might be into him, and I’m really not ready for any emotional commitments right now. One giant life cataclysm is more than I can handle, thank you very much.

  Did I say, “Because I might be into him”? I meant, “Because he’s a fucking dweeb.”

  Two

  Six months after my ex-friend Amy’s father told her he was dying, we stood beside his coffin. A framed picture of him grinned, poised precariously on the polished mahogany lid. In the photo, he showed off a giant rainbow trout. It was weird how someone could be fishing one year, in a coffin the next.

  “I just don’t get it,” Amy said, staring at the photograph. Her dad looked young in it, way younger than I remembered him. The funeral was over, but Amy and I had stayed behind. She didn’t want to be alone with his body. She’d seen what was left of him bef
ore they closed the casket. She said it didn’t look like her dad.

  Before the funeral, she’d whispered jokes to me about his face, which apparently resembled a model from a wax museum. Even then, not having endured the death of a loved one myself, I understood that she was laughing about it to keep herself from falling to pieces. But she wasn’t laughing after the funeral. She was borderline catatonic. And wax face or no, she couldn’t let her dad get buried without saying goodbye one last time.

  She ran her fingers through her short, black hair. “Before he told me he was dying, he made me ants-on-a-log.” Ants-on-a-log was her dad’s signature dish. He wasn’t much of a cook, so celery stalks smeared with peanut butter and covered with raisins were the best he could do. “Then we sat down at the kitchen table like we were going to talk about my gymnastics schedule.”

  “That so sucks,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I’m a good friend when someone goes through something normal, like breaking up or failing a class. But death? That was new for me. That was a year before Mom died. I had no idea I was about to get a crash course.

  Amy nodded. “It did suck. Why the hell would he make ants-on-a-log before he told me about his cancer? I mean, ‘Hey, kid, I’m kicking the bucket, but here’s a nutritious, delicious snack to soften the blow?’”

  I still didn’t know what to say. “What a dick move” would be what I’d say if we were talking about someone who was alive. But it seemed like an inappropriate eulogy at best. Besides, Amy’s dad never made dick moves. He was the coolest dad I’d ever known. I was secretly jealous of Amy, wishing I had a dad like hers. When we were little, he always made us both ants-on-a-log. We liked to pretend the raisins really were ants. We’d imagine we were on Fear Factor winning prizes for eating bugs. I don’t guess Amy thought about Fear Factor while her dad was telling her about his cancer. Or maybe she did. Who knows?

  “Wanna know what I did when he told me he was dying?” Amy asked.

  I wasn’t sure I did. Entering her pain was hard. Her world had shattered, but mine was still intact. Losing my mom was the worst thing I could conceive of. I didn’t want to have to imagine Amy’s predicament any more than I had to. Still, I thought I was safe. I mean, what are the odds of two childhood best friends losing a parent? It’s the proverbial lightning striking twice.

  Amy didn’t wait for my response. “I didn’t know what to do with the hurricane inside me.” She reached out and touched her dad’s picture. “So I laughed,” she said. “Do I win the ‘worst daughter ever’ award or what?”

  She started to cry, and I put an arm around her broad shoulders. Amy was a big girl, not in a bad way. An Amazon. All the guys thought she was sexy as hell.

  “He knows you love him,” I said, even though I was pretty sure her dad no longer knew anything.

  “You really think so?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  She shrugged, obviously embarrassed about crying though we cried in front of each other all the time. I knew why she was uncomfortable. These tears were different than any tears she’d ever cried. These weren’t normal tears. These were end-of-the-world tears. “That’s how you know your world has just ended,” she said. “You laugh.”

  She was wrong. A year later, the day after the fire, Mercy sat by my hospital bed and told me Mom didn’t make it. I didn’t do anything. I was being treated for smoke inhalation, but other than that, I was fine. I regret my silence. I should have laughed like Amy said. Or screamed. Or thrown something. But I simply stared at Mercy, noticing this mole she has on her right shoulder, wondering if it was cancer.

  “Do you hear me, Harley?” she asked.

  I didn’t understand the words. I felt the way I used to feel when Mom and I watched Spanish soap operas together, hearing nothing but nonsense syllables, guessing at the plots.

  “What?” I finally asked.

  “Honey, your mom died.”

  Those four words. They run through my head all day, every day. Right now, as I shove jeans in my saddlebag, I hear them. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe I’m going back to New York. I can’t believe I’m riding my motorcycle. Most of all, I can’t believe I’m going with Dean.

  Dean is no Amy, but he’s the only friend I’ve got. I tried to keep in touch with Amy after I came to LA. She was so far away though. How could I explain over the phone what it felt like to lose everything? I mean, at least she still had one parent. I had nothing. So I stopped talking to her about my pain and then, I stopped talking to her altogether. The distance between us grew incrementally, so we barely noticed until it was too late.

  Ironically, I understand Amy now better than I ever did when we were friends. I live every day with this crazy hurricane of grief roiling in my belly, just like the one she described when she found out her dad was dying.

  Pain is a driver. It drives people to drugs. It drives people crazy. It drove me to the ocean. After I moved to LA, the only one I could imagine understanding my private hurricane was the vast and ever-changing sea. In New York, Mom and I had loved the beach, and now, in LA, the ocean made me feel close to her. I’d go there and stare at the blue-gray sky for hours, picturing the life and death churning beneath the surface of the waves. Sharks eating seals. Sea horses smashing their dainty heads on coral. Cheerful stuff like that.

  Dean found me sitting under a dock.

  “Hey, you okay?” he asked. He went straight for the jugular. No “Hi, I’m Dean.”

  He was tall and lanky, blocking out the sun momentarily. His concern made me sob harder. Never cry in front of a nice guy. They go all knight-in-shining-armor on you and shit.

  He sat beside me like he’d known me forever. “I can listen if you need an ear,” he said.

  I looked at him. He had this shoulder-length, wavy brown hair. His eyes, the same gray-blue color as the waves, looked into forever. I totally thought he was seeing what I’d been seeing, sharks eating seals and all that.

  “An ear?” I asked. “Are you gonna pull some Van Gogh crap on me?” Did I mention that when I feel vulnerable, I deflect with sarcasm? It’s a gift.

  “Van Gogh?” he said, and I had to go into the whole story of how Van Gogh sent his ear to a girl to get her attention, which distracted me from my mother’s death for a few minutes, which made me forgive him for not knowing the most rudimentary Van Gogh story in the world. Besides, he made up for his lack of Van Gogh knowledge by talking about the Zen of Batman at length, which sounds cheesy when I say it out loud, but somehow it didn’t when he said it.

  “When he was fighting his way out of that pit,” he said, watching a seagull swoop and dive, “it was like busting your way out of the hell inside your head, you know?”

  I didn’t know what it felt like to climb out of the pit, but I certainly knew what it was like to be in it, having recently been diagnosed with PTSD (thanks, Mom’s death), so I nodded.

  After that, we started hanging out all the time. He was in his first year of college; I was in my last year of high school. We ditched more classes than we should, enough to earn us both a D, him in biology, me in literature, which was ironic considering how much I loved to read. I’d read every book on the syllabus three times before the class had started, but I simply could not bring myself to write a bullshit paper about Gatsby’s love for Daisy and the symbolism of the light burning in the distance. For me, there was no light in the distance. My light in the distance was dead.

  Twice, I stole a whole bottle of bourbon from Mercy’s cabinet, and Dean and I downed it together, staring out at the waves. Even if I live to be one hundred and have bourbon a thousand times, the taste will always remind me of Dean. The second time we drank together, about halfway through the bottle, he kissed me. It went like this.

  He said, “So how do you feel about ________________?” (Insert the name of your favorite band here because I can’t for the life of me remember
which one he actually said. I want to say it was someone cool, maybe a retro band like the Beatles, but I bet it was some epically talentless boy band like Nickelback. We were that drunk.)

  I took a swig, making that sexy hacking-wheezing sound I make when taking a shot. I’m not an amateur drinker, but I still can’t seem to endure the burn without choking at least a little. My head was swimming. The sea was dancing, which I know the sea does, but the sea was dancing more than usual. So were the clouds. And the cliffs.

  “____________? They’re my favorite band ever. They rock,” I said.

  “So do you,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, taking another drink. (Yes, I tend to be self-destructive. Don’t judge me.)

  “I said you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known.”

  Which wasn’t what he’d said the first time at all. I was drunk but not that drunk. I was about to say, “No, you didn’t,” turning the conversation into an argument about semantics instead of a declaration of love, but before I could, he kissed me. Hard. I’d been kissed before, okay? It’s not like I was some sweet, innocent girl. But that kiss. Holy shit. It was the way you think kisses are going to be until you finally get kissed and discover kissing isn’t as cool as it looks on TV. Dean’s kiss was a TV kiss. His kiss made my head explode. Places I didn’t even know existed inside me started to buzz.

  I pulled away and looked into his eyes, and maybe it was the bourbon, but they were shining, the way people say the tunnel of light shines when you die. Glowing like heaven or some shit like that. Sucking me in.

  I’d like to blame what happened next on Dean. I’d like to say he crawled on top of me and not the other way around, but he didn’t. I wanted him, and I found myself unzipping his pants for reasons I still can’t explain. (Wait, I’ll try. Reason number one: bourbon. Reason number two: his shining eyes. Reason number three: the buzzing inside me.) I could say, “Oh, the big, bad boy took advantage of me,” but it wasn’t that way at all. Dean was the one who said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”