by Emma Young
Sylvia’s ambulance must have made this trip, only in reverse. Her parents were at her bedside. She was smiling in that photo.
“And now, listeners, the lines are open. I have here in the studio none other than Ms. Connie Britton, and for the one in a million that don’t know it, Ms. Britton plays country music queen Rayna Jaymes.”
I turn off the radio. Music, I can handle right now. Chat, I cannot.
Black trees pass, and pass.
I’m grateful for the darkness. I can feel the rot around me, but at least I can’t see it. And with every second, I do feel I’m getting closer to Sylvia.
The Happy Haven Motel is on the outskirts of Lexington.
Before we approached the city, Joe passed me his phone, and I searched our options. With an average of three stars out of five, this motel ranked last. But there were only five listings. And the others were ridiculously expensive.
“There are 287 reviews. Two stars: ‘Yikes. A cigarette burn on our quilt.’ Five stars: The room was newly appointed; the bed was king-size.’ Nice breakfast. Of particular note were the two types of home fries . . .’”
“Noteworthy home fries?” Joe said. “That’s the place.”
Now I’m reading a framed page of a magazine that’s hanging by the reception desk. It’s a travel piece about Lexington. Halfway through the second column, Happy Haven Motel is highlighted in pink. Joe is asking about rooms. Behind us there’s a very grand but obviously fake dark wood fireplace set against the exposed brick wall. I guess I’m not the only thing around here pretending to be something other than it is.
I read:
Belonging to the Greater Boston area, Lexington is the sixth wealthiest small city in the United States, settled in 1642 ... Famous for being the site of the first shot of the Revolutionary War.
I thought I’d vaguely heard of Lexington. I guess this must be why. I keep reading, or at least scanning, the text. Because it’s something to pretend to be absorbed in while Joe talks to the receptionist, a woman in a tight black top, her wavy red hair loose around her shoulders.
She’s saying, “A single room? Yeah . . . for how many nights?”
I feel Joe’s eyes on me.
“Two?” I say.
“That’ll be seventy a night plus taxes. Please fill out this form.” She hands him a clipboard and a Happy Haven pen. “And I’ll just need a card to put on file.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see him take a wallet from his pocket and extract a credit card. She does something with it behind the counter, then passes it back with two key cards.
“You’re in room eleven. If you parked out front, just keep going—it’s on your right. Breakfast is six thirty till nine thirty. You’ll need a card to access the main door after midnight. All-night beverages and ice are available at the station over there.” She gestures down the hall. “Enjoy your stay.”
“Thanks,” he says. “Do you sell toothbrushes?”
“We have a machine.” She points in the direction of a nook beyond the fireplace. A minute later, he’s back with a toothpaste and toothbrush set.
I don’t know how he’s feeling, but as we head back out, the shiver in my guts spreads to my flesh.
He left the car right outside. Beyond it, bright spotlights illuminate the drive that leads to the block of rooms. A covered concrete path runs alongside the drive.
“I’ll walk down,” I tell him.
He nods. If he thinks I’m strange for wanting to do this, he doesn’t show it. He clicks the car open. “Okay.”
Joe didn’t look remotely nervous, but as I walk through the chill darkness toward our room, the web of nerves through my body tightens like a net. I can feel it—a skein of bioelectric skewers, squeezing with each step, until it punctures my lungs and my heart.
I’ve left the hospital without telling anyone and without a formal discharge. Now I’m at a motel. In a strange town.
I glance up at a desperate frenzy of moths around one of the blazing lights, and I think, What have you done?
But I tell myself, remembering a session with Dr. Bailey: It’s okay. Push yourself beyond your comfort zone, and you’re going to feel that way. Fear shouldn’t always be a signal to retreat.
The doors to the cinder-block rooms are painted white, with steel numbers. TVs blare through some of the windows. A man in number five is dancing. Six is dark. So is seven. In eight, the lights are dim. They might just have a lamp on. Who’s in there, I wonder? What are they doing?
As the door numbers rise, I try to take charge of my breathing.
Nine.
Ten.
Eleven.
Joe has already spun the car into an angled parking space. Suddenly, he’s beside me, with his toothbrush kit, my bag, my jacket, and a key card. There’s no hesitation as he slides it into the metal slot.
I shiver again. And I realize that shiver isn’t entirely due to anxiety. More than anything, I think perhaps what I’m feeling is excitement.
Sickness, paralysis, more paralysis—then slow, hard work building up to this. Leaving the hospital. Walking, talking, eating a burger like anybody else. Standing outside a motel room with a guy I really like. Maybe even just for this moment, it’s all been worth it.
The door swings inward.
Joe flicks a switch, and the bedside lamps light up. I try to focus not on the extreme conditions inside my body, but on what I can see.
The room is better than I expected from the internet pictures. There’s a dark-wood unit with a TV, drawers, and a bar fridge, plus a desk. The beds have shiny, leaf-patterned ecru quilts. The air smells of roses—of freshener.
Joe puts my bag on the bed farthest from the window, closest to a door to what must be the bathroom.
He inspects a picture on the wall: a framed photograph of a collection of fall leaves. “Massachusetts—the Spirit of the Country,” he reads from a label on the plastic frame. “They got that from registration plates. The last motel I stayed in, the owner was really into Bob Marley. In the room, there was this poster of him with lions leaping out of his shoulders and ganja leaves sprouting from this ears.”
I don’t want to ask him whom he was with, but it’s all I’m thinking. Except that I’m glad he’s talking about nothing. Because I couldn’t handle silence. But I can’t think of anything to say in response.
I guess in some ways I should feel better in here. Quiet rooms are pretty much what I’m used to. But after my release into Boston, and the journey, free on the road, it seems claustrophobic. I’m in the world. And I want to be with Joe. But this is intense.
My right leg feeling especially slow and stiff, I edge around him and step outside again.
I stand with my back against the wall, my heart thumping.
Beyond the path and the parking spaces, there’s nothing but trees. Because of lights from the town, I guess, and clouds, the sky is less the color of night than of a storm closing in. The mostly bare branches look like dead lightning strikes.
I take a cautious breath.
Was it weird to suddenly leave the room?
“Rosa? Okay?”
My head jerks around. Joe’s in the doorway. I nod.
He comes to stand beside me. A few inches of weathered cinder block are all that separate us. I wish I didn’t feel so tense.
“You want to drive around and find where she lived tonight or wait till the morning?” he asks.
“Maybe the morning,” I say. “I guess I won’t see much tonight.”
My eyes are still fixed on the sky and the murky black trees.
“Not that much of a view,” he says.
“It’s okay.” I wish my voice didn’t sound so tight.
“If it wasn’t so cloudy, you’d see the Big Dipper over there.” He points just above one of the taller trees. “Then if you followed the two pointing stars on the right, you’d find the North Star.”
I’m about to ask him if his mother taught him that, when he goes on:
“Which
happens to be the name of a bar in the West End that Bostonstream recently awarded the title of best place to watch college football. Just in case you love college football and were wondering . . .”
Mention of a Bostonstream review makes me think of the burger place, and I don’t need anything to remind me of the fact of the room behind us. “I’m sorry you paid for this as well,” I say. “I’m keeping a mental note—”
“Are you?”
The way he says it, I suddenly feel small for caring. Which gives an edge to my voice when I say, “So, what, you don’t you care about money?”
He shrugs, still looking up at the sky. “Yeah. Just not as much as I care about other things.”
“. . . Like?”
“You can probably guess. I’m not that original.”
He’s smiling a little. He’s not disappointed in me.
I allow my spine to relax just a tiny bit against the wall. Forcing the sharpness out of my voice, because it’s absolutely not his fault I’m on edge, I say, “Becoming a famous reporter?”
“Famous? Like TV famous? . . . No.”
“For the world to love you?”
“That could possibly be expecting just a little too much.”
“So, your girlfriend?” I say, barely able to believe that these words are coming from my mouth.
“If I had a girlfriend. Maybe,” he says, his eyes now on mine.
I almost forget to breathe. But my body won’t let me—and I don’t blame it, after everything it’s been through.
I guess in theory, I could ask him why he might not want a girlfriend to love him. But I sense that even if I did, he wouldn’t tell me. Extraction, I think.
“How do you get by if you work only three mornings a week?”
He sighs. Returns his gaze to the sky. “Dad agreed to help fund this year. I need to accrue experience to stand a chance of getting into a good college next year.” He says this in the tone of a teacher or career counselor.
“In San Francisco?”
“Probably in Boston.”
“Because you like Boston?” I prompt him.
He frowns. “You can’t really like a city, right? You love a city, or you’d virtually hack off your own hand to escape it—even if you knew that if you did escape, you’d only be pulled right back to go through the same thing again.”
“. . . To hack off the other hand?”
He smiles slightly. “Exactly. One thing about Boston: You can get out of it pretty quickly. I don’t mind it around here.” He gestures toward the skyline.
“Surrounded by nature,” I say, in such a way that he says:
“What, you don’t like nature?”
“Not so much.”
“I thought everyone at least liked nature,” he says. “It’s what our brains were born to. Where we evolved.”
But I’m not natural. And what has nature done for me, or Sylvia? It’s human ingenuity that kept us alive long enough for this hybrid to exist. There’s nothing natural about any of it. Not the good stuff, anyway.
“I don’t think we evolved in forests,” I say.
“I’m fairly certain we didn’t evolve in cities.”
He’s smiling again. It might only be slight, but it’s highly infectious. That, or I’m a particularly vulnerable recipient.
“I’d have been the most bored cavegirl ever,” I tell him.
The attitude of his smile changes a little, in a way I find hard to read, until he says: “If I’d been the boy in the cave next door, maybe I could have kept you entertained.”
Did he actually say that? My heart races. But I’m not going to retreat this time. “How exactly would you have done that?”
“. . . I guess I’d have made this log bench and collected all the stories of everyone in the settlement. You’d have been the first to hear who was bitching about someone else’s new fur outfit.”
I shake my head. “I’m not sure I’d have been that entertained.”
His smile deepens. He turns a little more toward me. “Okay . . . So maybe I’d have regaled you with tales about my fights with saber-toothed tigers and my mammoth-wrangling exploits.”
I make a face. “Yeah, not enough.”
“You’d have been an extremely high-maintenance cavegirl.”
“Maybe just one who wouldn’t have been satisfied only with stories.”
“That’s pretty much all I have to offer.”
“Is it?”
His smile twists. “You’re kind of an unexpected girl.” “I’m unexpected?”
He shifts around so he’s facing me, his left shoulder against the wall.
“If I were telling your story,” he says, “I wouldn’t know where to start. Or what to put in the middle. Or anywhere, actually.”
“I could say the same about you.”
He seems to think about this. Then he says, “At least you know where to start.”
“To the stars?” I ask him, glancing at the words Ad Astra on his arm. “What does that mean? You want to what, reach for the stars?”
He says, his voice very low, “That’s not what it means to me.”
He looks away. The clouds are parting a little. Cracks of blackness are appearing in the sky. Stars, too.
If he knows their names, he doesn’t tell me.
I want to stay out here, with Joe. I want to take the conversation back to the caves. I also have Sylvia in my head, and the story from the newspaper. I do think it would be better to wait until daylight to see Lexington. But, in any case, there’s something else I really have to do.
“I’m going to go back in,” I say. “Could I borrow your phone?”
“I’ve got an iPhone charger—”
“It’s not that . . . I don’t want to use my phone in case—I don’t want anyone to have any way of finding me. I don’t want my parents coming after me.”
He frowns. “You have told them you’ve left of your own volition, and you’re okay?”
I nod.
Suddenly, I don’t know what’s in his mind—or rather, I have even less of an idea. The energy between us hasn’t vanished but it’s definitely faded.
I want to give him something. But I don’t know what I can give. And now he’s turning away, and he’s pulling his phone from his jeans pocket and stepping back into our room.
After dropping Joe’s phone on my bed, I grab a bottle of water and my canisters of meds from my bag. Quickly, I swallow one anti-epileptic and one anti-rejection pill.
Joe’s over at the bar fridge. He opens it. “Empty.”
I push the canisters back into my bag. There’s a faint groan of springs contracting as I sit down on the bed. This mattress is softer, more yielding than the one I’m used to in the hospital. I pull two dense pillows out from under the tightly tucked sheet and stack them against the wall. It’s a comfortable backrest. “All-night beverages available in the lobby,” I say.
“Coffee and tea, probably. You want either?”
I shake my head. “If I drink coffee now, I won’t sleep.”
“You think you’ll sleep?”
My heart catches.
“Being here,” he says, apparently reading my mind. “Close to Sylvia Johnson. Or people who knew her. You know how you want to start?”
After we left Boston, before I went on TripAdvisor, I searched for social media accounts in her name but couldn’t find her. I guess her accounts have been deleted. But there’s no reason she shouldn’t still be mentioned on friends’ accounts.
“I don’t know. Facebook. See if I can find girls in her class. Maybe ones who might have been with her at the party. Or the reservoir. Take it from there.”
He nods. “I could provide moral support by lying around and watching TV while you work?”
I smile slightly. “Moral support would be great.”
“Okay.”
He kicks off his sneakers, finds the remote. While he settles himself on his bed, I try not to look at him, and I bring up a browser window on his pho
ne.
And now, at last, after the sensory onslaught of Boston and the burger bar and the streets, then the stress of getting here, to this room, and even our conversation outside, I feel myself starting to relax.
Joe flicks through a couple of channels. Stops.
There’s an Arabic logo in the corner. Al Jazeera.
I asked if he has a girlfriend.
Focus.
Rosa.
Focus.
While Joe concentrates on a report about an Iraqi businessman who’s buying back female slaves from the so-called Islamic State—bullets rattling and voices screaming in the background—I search “Lexington High School” on his phone.
On the school’s website, I find the names of a couple of student council reps. Then I go to Facebook and search “Dinah Kennedy,” a rep who would have been in Sylvia’s year.
I find her page. All that’s publically available are three photos of her in a midnight-blue maxi dress, hair elaborately done. Beneath the photos, friends have left a few comments:
YOU LOOK GORGEOUS! LOVE YOU!
Gorgeous as usual!!!
I pick up a little Happy Haven notepad and pen from my bedside table. I write down the nine names of the friends who left comments on Dinah Kennedy’s page. Then I start searching these names.
My progress isn’t exactly fast. Like Dinah, they allow only friends to view the majority of their content. But most display a few photos, and again, I write down the name of anybody who has left a comment, then I search them. And eventually, I find a girl named Althea Fernando.
She has 895 photos, and her privacy settings are entirely open.
The most recent set of shots shows a girl in a kitchen. The photos look professional. There’s Althea, I assume—jet-black hair, caramel skin, huge eyes—looking a little tired, wearing white overalls. Then there’s a set labeled GRADUATING GIRL SCOUT AMBASSADORS. Here’s Althea again, a shiny sash emblazoned with badges draped over her shoulder, a blue-and-gold flag in her manicured hand.
Further back in time, I find pictures of a white fluffy dog with a diamanté-studded collar.
Althea in a silver gym leotard, a gold medal on a red, white, and blue ribbon around her neck.
A pink-frosted fairy-castle birthday cake and Althea’s little sister, judging by the facial resemblance.