by Adi Alsaid
“I don’t know. Maybe I just really like tea.”
Surprising herself, Sonia managed to smile. She looked at Leila, for a second forgetting Sam and Jeremiah, wondering who, exactly, this girl was.
Leila shifted, bringing her left leg up onto the seat and tucking it beneath her.
Sonia pulled her phone out of her pocket, checking the time and subtracting the hours until the wedding. When the screen came to life, it showed the picture of her and Sam sitting on top of the troll statue in Seattle. Sonia had wondered if it bothered Jeremiah, seeing that picture, if she should change it. Even that was a betrayal she wasn’t ready to commit.
Sonia was usually better at dealing with her emotions with paper and pen, but then, she’d apparently lost that ability. Maybe Leila was trustworthy, the way she talked about sadness as if she was familiar with it. Or maybe there’s just a limit to how long we can hold something in before it comes spilling out involuntarily.
“About seven months ago,” Sonia began, “my boyfriend of two years, Sam, collapsed in the middle of a basketball game. They rushed him to the hospital, but he died within two hours. A heart abnormality. Something myocardia? I don’t know. I can never remember the exact name.
“I know most teenagers think their first love is the one and only love of their lives, but we were special.” She paused to wipe at her eyes and, noticing that her phone was still lit up with Sam’s picture, put it back in her pocket, knowing she couldn’t handle talking about him and looking at him at the same time. “When he died, I felt that was it for me. That no one would ever come close to what we had. I didn’t want anyone to come close. My soul mate was gone, and I was going to spend the rest of my life without him.”
A tear scurried down Sonia’s cheek quickly, as if it were being sucked in by a drain. She shook her head at herself and wiped the trail the tear had left behind. “God, that’s just the beginning. Are you sure you want to hear all this?”
“The tea’s not ready. Keep pouring.”
“That metaphor is not working at all.” Sonia chuckled.
“Whatever! You’re not done telling your story.”
Sonia rubbed her eyes, then ran a hand through her hair, gathering her thoughts. “His family was always great to me,” she continued. “And after he died, that didn’t change at all. If anything, they got even better. They’d call to check how I was doing, they’d take me out to dinner, invite me to the movies. Hell, they treat me better than my own family does. I’d never really had that feeling of belonging until I met Sam.
“So anyway, I was over at their house a bunch, for family dinners and barbecues and all that. And that’s where I met Jeremiah. His brother is marrying Sam’s sister tomorrow,” she said, pulling her cell phone out of her pocket and motioning to show that this was who’d been calling her. She took a slow breath, feeling as if she were on a tightrope, and moving too quickly would send her plummeting down to another weeping session.
“At first I didn’t even get that it was a crush. One day he offered me a ride home, and before I realized it, we were kissing. I felt sick to my stomach for days afterward. I mean, the last batch of flowers I’d put on Sam’s grave hadn’t even wilted yet, and I was jumping into someone else’s arms.”
Leila opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind and waited for Sonia to continue. They drove onto a bridge, a little brown sign letting them know they were passing over the Stillaguamish River.
“We’ve been secretly seeing each other for a couple of months now, and despite how happy he makes me, when we’re not together, I feel even more miserable than I usually do. I can’t stop feeling like I’m cheating on Sam, like being with Jeremiah means I never even loved him at all, and he died wrongly believing he’d found his soul mate.
“And now Jeremiah wants to go public, or he wants to break up—I don’t even know which. But I can’t have Sam’s family knowing that I’m seeing someone else. I can barely even think about it myself, so how could I face telling them? What if they don’t want anything to do with me after they find out? I can’t risk losing them.”
They must have been going fairly slowly, because every now and then someone would pass them, headlights filling up Leila’s car. Leila remained quiet, patient for Sonia to work through her story, as if she really expected to soak up Sonia’s sadness by just listening.
Sonia’s knee knocked against the plastic bag that hung off the gearshift. A half-full bottle of water sat in a cup holder, which Leila offered as soon as she saw Sonia eyeing it.
“When I ran into you,” Sonia said, “Jeremiah and I had just gotten into a fight, and I needed to get away from there. But I’m an idiot and left wearing his jacket, which has the wedding rings in it.” She looked over at Leila, whose serene face had taken on little hints of worry: a furrow in her brow, the slightest droop to her lips. “Do you think we could go back? I really need to bring him the rings. It’ll ruin the wedding if I don’t.”
Leila immediately turned her blinker on and pulled over onto the shoulder, the car rumbling as they passed over the divots in the road that warned drivers they were too close to the edge. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” Leila asked, angling the car for a U-turn.
“You didn’t even think twice about it,” Sonia said, in awe.
“I think the last thing you need right now is to feel like no one is on your side. If all it takes is a little gas and time for me to help someone feel not alone, I’m more than happy to do it.” She glided onto the empty two-lane highway, going back the way they’d come.
“So, is the awful feeling gone?” Leila asked, smiling.
“Not really.” Sonia took another drink of water, her mind racing with gratitude. “But it helped. Thank you.”
“My pleasure.” Leila smiled.
For a second, it did seem that the awful feeling had gone away, or at least was less awful than before. But something was nagging at Sonia, a vague fear that there was something she’d forgotten. She checked the breast pocket of the jacket and found that the box with the rings was still there. Just to make sure, she pulled it out and saw the two upright rings, little silver soldiers standing at attention. Her phone was tucked safely against the waistband of her shorts.
To make sure she still had her wallet and passport, she reached down to the floor to grab her purse. As soon as her fingers felt the fibers of the mat at her feet, Sonia’s hands scurried about the floor, searching for the touch of leather. She leaned over and slipped her hand as far below the seat as it could go.
“What’s wrong?”
“Shit,” Sonia said, picturing clearly her purse sitting on a dirty bathroom counter. “I think I left my purse at the rest stop.” She unbuckled her seat belt and crawled down to get a look, her shoulder pressed hard against the faux-suede fabric of the car seat. But she knew it wasn’t there.
“That’s okay,” Leila said calmly. “We’ll stop by on our way back.”
It only took them a couple of minutes to get there. There were no other cars in the lot, which Sonia took as a good sign that the purse would be untouched. She rushed out of the car and into the bathroom.
And yet the bathroom counter was completely bare, nothing on it except for puddles and the dried crust of soap that had leaked out from the dispenser. She sprinted from the door to the counter, as if she was just too far away to see the purse. But it was gone, and with it all its contents: her lip gloss; a picture of her and Sam taken at arm’s length; her wallet, which contained an emergency credit card, a few Canadian bills, and her Washington State driver’s license; her hotel room key; her notebook, the last few entries full of words scratched out almost as soon as they’d been written; and her US passport, the ink from her latest entry stamp not yet dry.
The weight of the rings somehow increased in her pocket, as if somehow aware that they were now an impossible world away from where they should have been.
3
SONIA AND LEILA sat in a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s in a duty-free shopping center near the border. Sonia was gently knocking her head against the window, looking out at the highway, begging for a solution to suddenly occur to her. Leila was resting her chin in her hand, her elbow propped up on the table, a bag of fries cooling between them. The McDonald’s employees chatted casually to pass the time, awaiting the next late-night traveler. Every now and then they’d cast strange looks at Sonia in her tuxedo jacket, shorts, and somewhat exposed bra.
“I’ll drive the rings back myself,” Leila said after a while, already rising from her chair. “I still have my passport.”
“You don’t have to. We can think of another way.”
“No reason to think of another way when we already have a solution. You sit tight here, and I’ll give you a call when I’m on the way back,” Leila said, handing her phone over for Sonia to program her number in.
“You are a bottomless well of kindness, Leila. Thank you.”
“I’ll be back soon,” Leila said with a smile, speed-walking out of the restaurant with the rings in hand.
Although Sonia would have preferred to avoid giving herself any more reasons to feel guilty, she lied to Jeremiah, sending him a text message saying that she was on her way.
okay, he texted back, the lack of capitalization somehow feeling unique to him.
She typed out responses and then deleted them, locked her phone and then immediately brought the screen back to life, only to turn it off again.
Sonia buried her face in her hands, pressing her palms into her eyes until she saw those little explosions of light in the darkness. She ruffled her hair, then caught a glimpse of her reflection on her phone. The auburn mass above her head barely resembled hair, so she raked her fingers through the knots. When she was done, she picked up her phone again. I don’t know about anything else, but I love you, she typed out, staring at the words for nearly a full minute before deleting them.
Right when she started doing the math on how long it would take Leila to make it there and back—a couple of hours, at least—the door of the McDonald’s swung open with a creak, and Leila sheepishly entered.
“What happened?” For a brief moment, Sonia imagined that everything had somehow magically been resolved, that the rings had been tele-transported into Jeremiah’s possession.
“Border patrol wouldn’t let me through,” Leila said, biting her lip, her eyebrows drawn together in a near-caricature of sadness. “They found it suspicious that I just went through and I’m trying to get back in.”
“Into Canada? Since when are Canadians fussy about letting people in?”
Leila looked down at the floor, shrugging. “I don’t know, but they searched my car, went through all my stuff. Maybe they thought I was smuggling drugs or something, I don’t know. The guy said I was lucky they weren’t detaining me, but that customs agents can deny entry to anyone as they see fit.”
Sonia slumped down in the hard plastic bench. She pictured Jeremiah having to tell Liz and Roger that he didn’t have the rings, the truth coming out, even if Jeremiah tried to hide the details. She wondered who would be more heartbroken in that scenario: Liz, for her ruined wedding; Martha, for Sonia’s betrayal; Jeremiah, for Sonia’s indecision; Sonia herself, for creating such a mess of everyone’s life.
“Don’t worry. We’ll think of something,” Leila said, although her voice lacked conviction. She looked around the empty McDonald’s. “Maybe someone will come in who’s going in that direction and wouldn’t mind dropping off the rings?”
“I wouldn’t trust anyone with them,” Sonia said, suddenly realizing how easily she’d trusted that Leila would indeed take the rings to Canada and come back to pick her up. She wondered if this was due to Leila’s kindness, or whether it had been unloading her sorrows that did it. Perhaps it was simply because Leila seemed to care.
“What if we wait until the shift change at the border? Maybe I’ll get someone who’s nicer and won’t give me any trouble.”
Sonia gave it some thought, feeling skeptical. “If they flagged your passport, which they probably did, no one will let you through.” She grabbed the jewelry box with the rings inside and spun it on the table, trying to resist the urge to throw it right across the McDonald’s. Outside, in the shopping center, bright yellow signs announced special discounts on chocolates and liquor.
Leila pulled out her cell phone from her purse, as if suddenly remembering she had one.
“You know,” Leila said, swiping her finger across the screen of her phone. “I’m looking at it on the map, and...I mean, I always knew Canada was big and that the Canadian border was long. But it’s really freakin’ long.” She handed Sonia her phone. “You think there’s any possible way that they have enough manpower to keep an eye on all of it all the time? Every single bit of it? There’s no fence or anything, right?”
The map showed a few major entry points along highways. Little bubbles popped up suggesting duty-free stops like the one they were in. Between those highway entries were miles and miles of greenery. The only thing to be found between those checkpoints was an imaginary line that someone long ago had decided would separate the two countries.
“Am I crazy,” Leila said, “or could we just simply walk across? I mean, if people get through the Mexican border, which is much more guarded, it shouldn’t be that hard to sneak across here.”
Sonia sniggered, studying the map a little closer. “That’d be a hell of a story if we did.”
“I don’t see why not,” Leila said, excitement in her voice.
“What about your car?”
“We’ll leave it parked somewhere near the highway. Somewhere like a motel parking lot that won’t look too suspicious. We’ll walk into the woods and head north. I have a compass on my phone, and this thing that tells you how long you’ve been walking in case the GPS doesn’t get a signal. Then all we have to do is get to the highway and hitch a ride back to Hope. There should be enough truckers coming through that it won’t be a problem. I have a friend who spent months hitchhiking across the country, and she said you’d be surprised at how easy it can be on the right highway.”
“Are we on the right highway?”
“I have no idea. But it’s worth a shot, right?”
Sonia zoomed in on the map on Leila’s phone. “I wonder whether you could see border patrol agents if you zoomed in far enough.” She handed the phone back to Leila. “How would we get back to your car?”
“We’ll just do the same thing coming back. No big deal.”
“No big deal,” Sonia repeated, trying to connect the words to the act of sneaking across an international border. She thought about the scribbled-out beginnings of sentences in her notebook. She wondered if her writer’s block might be undone by a night like this. “Okay,” she said, grabbing another fry and tearing it in two, the mushy insides oozing out as if she’d just squished a bug. “Let’s do this.”
* * *
According to the feature on Leila’s phone, they’d walked half a mile west into the woods. Sonia could barely see in front of her, so she and Leila trod carefully, thankful for the full moon shining through the spaces between trees and the light from Leila’s phone saving them from complete blindness.
Sonia was nervous but giddy, her heart lighter than it had been in hours. “We are actually walking into Canada,” she said, not knowing whether it was necessary to whisper. Every step they took, Sonia kept expecting someone to pop out from the darkness. Each crackle in the forest sounded like the white noise of walkie-talkies; every branch her arm brushed against felt like someone ready to apply handcuffs.
“What if we run into a SWAT team?”
“I don’t think there’ll be SWAT teams. Maybe Mounties or something.”
“That’d be worse,” Sonia said, reaching out to put a hand on Leil
a’s shoulder, not wanting to lose her in the dark. “I’m terrified of horses.”
“Horses? Why?”
“As a rule, I don’t like things that could kick my head off.”
“What was that?” Leila said, stopping suddenly, causing Sonia to bump into her.
“What?”
“You didn’t hear that?”
Sonia stood perfectly still, waiting for the sounds of sirens or a helicopter approaching. There was the barest rustling of leaves as an overhead wind blew through the treetops. She could hear herself breathing, far-off crickets, but nothing else.
“You didn’t hear that neighing?” Leila said.
“You are a bully.” Sonia smacked her arm as they resumed walking, trying not to give away how afraid she’d been that they’d been discovered. Her heart was racing, and though she was terrified, she couldn’t wait to make it through, to tell Jeremiah about this little adventure. If he still wanted to talk to her.
“Okay, I think that’s far enough,” Leila said. “We can turn north now. It should be about a mile to the border; we’ll walk two to be safe, then rejoin the highway.” Her face was lit up by the glow of the screen, and Sonia once again caught a flash of something melancholy in her expression. “The highway stays straight for a bit after the border, so it shouldn’t be hard to find.”
“Let’s do it.” Sonia motioned for Leila to lead the way. Her phone buzzed inside the tuxedo pocket as they continued their way through the woods. Cupping her hand over the screen to contain the light, Sonia brought the phone out.
where are you?
Sonia shut off her phone, not quite sure how to respond at the moment.
“Is that the boy again?”
“Yeah,” Sonia said. “Just checking in.”
Something crunched under Sonia’s feet as she stepped past a branch. The sounds they made walking through the woods seemed like the only sounds for miles, and the thought was both a comfort and deeply frightening. “Do you...” Sonia started, feeling silly asking. “Do you have a boyfriend?”