by Lucy Lambert
Who indeed, I thought. I fell back into the rote action of setting up camp easily, but it was strange.
I’d rather have been in my small but comfortable bed above the And You? bar. Or, better yet, sharing the sheets with Ellie.
I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyelids until I created some stars of my own against the backdrop.
I opened my eyes in time to watch the headlights of a car strobe through the brush and branches while it passed me by, the tires purring against the blacktop.
I shivered. I hoped that Ellie was warm.
Ellie. Oh, Ellie, why didn’t you get on the bike?
I knew why, though.
I closed my eyes again. I didn’t dream. I didn’t sleep. Not for a while, at least.
Instead, I remembered.
I lived in Pleasant for a period of eight months or so. From being twelve to turning thirteen. Those are delicate years for a lot of people. That transition from being purely a child to being something like an adult.
I remembered things much clearer now, after spending time in Pleasant again. Time with Ellie.
I was a restless child. Probably all that traveling I liked being outside, on my bike, out for walks, anything.
So we went to the park a lot. That one Pine Street park in particular. Ellie and I met there, before school started.
We met at the park quite often, actually. First with our parents there. They’d talk while we went off.
Then they stopped coming. Even back then, Pleasant wasn’t exactly a boomtown. We could hold hands and no one could see. We could lean up against a tree and kiss and no one would know.
At first I hated Pleasant. It was just another in the string of Podunk towns my mom dragged me through on her journey to nowhere.
But none of them had anyone like Ellie in them.
She wasn’t shy. She’d say what was on her mind. She could run just as fast as I could, throw rocks into the pond just as far or skip them across the surface of the water.
And she was pretty, even then. Just getting the hints of the woman she’d become in her body and face.
“You tell your mom about us yet?” she once asked. I remember we sat on the curb of the teacher’s parking lot at the consolidated school. I could remember the rough texture of the concrete against my palms.
It was after school sometime in the fall. We both wore jackets against the chill in the air. The touch of cold made these lovely spots of color flush in Ellie’s cheeks.
The lot smelled earthy, from the fallen leaves and the cold rains. Funny how scent always came with the memories. It didn’t smell all that different from the little clearing where I made my camp.
I could remember the way the breeze picked at Ellie’s hair, the way the sun seemed to catch fire in it.
“No,” I told her. “She wouldn’t like it.”
“Why not?” She put her hand over mine, I remembered.
“She’s sad. About my dad I think.”
“What does that have to do with us?”
Despite wanting to be a grown-up already, probably even thinking I was, I couldn’t understand. Not then. I understood only in that childish way that stretches for the truth, touches it even, but couldn’t fully grasp it.
“Just that she doesn’t like me making friends or… girlfriends.”
I smiled at that. My young cheeks heated up so much I thought the collar of my jacket might burst into flame.
Except then I looked at Ellie and saw that she blushed, too. I knew I looked goofy. It took me a while to grow into my looks. She looked beautiful.
Then she socked me a good one in the shoulder. “I never said I was your girlfriend! Why doesn’t she like it?”
I swallowed hard, both in my memory and in the present. “Because we always leave.”
That I also couldn’t understand. The constant shuffling around. The transience of it. I couldn’t see then that my mother had been in the same situation I was in now. Restless. Uncertain of just who she was and what her place was in this life and in this world.
Every time we moved to a new place she told me that this was it, no more moving. Settling down, putting down roots, making a home.
She believed those things when she said them to me, but it didn’t take me long to know that she was lying to both of us, even if she didn’t know it yet.
Though I think some part of her did. Why else would she not like me making friends? She wanted to protect me from losing those friends.
She caused me a lot of pain trying to save me from some heartache.
That earned me another sock in the arm from Ellie. I recalled the tensing pain of a Charlie horse, the way I tried to pretend it didn’t hurt.
“You can’t go! I… I can’t be your girlfriend if you leave.”
“Thought you said you weren't?” I replied. I remembered the way my heart kept tripping over itself. No chill in the air could damp the heat that rushed through my young body.
She grinned at me, “No, I said that I never said I was your girlfriend. But I also never said I wasn’t, see? Maybe you won’t go.” She squeezed my hand harder, her palm hot against my knuckles.
“Maybe.”
We kissed again then. Neither of us was very good at it, but that didn’t get in our way. I resolved then and there that even if my mother wanted to leave I would stay.
I had this notion I could just hide in the school. Shower in the locker room, eat in the cafeteria, get a sleeping bag and sleep in the basement. I had it all figured out.
Less than a month later my mom woke me up in the middle of the night, shaking me by the shoulder.
She hurried me into the car, an old four door Valiant as I recall, all my clothes and things jammed awkwardly into my too-big suitcase.
We left Pleasant in our dust before I even came completely out of my groggy state.
“Why?” I asked her, hurt more deeply than any physical injury. I remembered the prickling pressure of tears behind my eyes and the way I fought to keep them from spilling in hot little trails down my cheeks.
“It just wasn’t good anymore, Dash. The next place will be better. I promise.” She always drove with a white-knuckled grip, a creased frown between her eyebrows, her neck and back pitched forward so that her face was only a few inches from the wheel. As though driving took every last ounce of willpower, attention, and skill she had.
I hated her then. I understood her now. Or thought I did, anyway.
I never even got to say goodbye to Ellie.
In the present, I sat upright, my back stiff. I didn’t tell her goodbye this time, either. I just packed my stuff into my bike and took off.
I recalled another memory. This one just a week old.
Ellie and I lay on her bed. Light spilled in through the curtain in the golden beams of the morning.
She lay naked on her side beside me. I let my eyes trace over the shape of her, the dip of her waist and the rising swell of her hips. The light, flowery smell of her hair filled the air.
She kept her chin propped up on her hand.
Her sheets were a twisted tangle at the foot of the bed.
“Tell me something nice,” Ellie said.
I kept drinking in the sight of her. Her lovely shoulders, the swells of her breasts. I couldn’t name the one thing I liked about her body the most because I liked all of it the same.
“I’m ready to go again if you are,” I said through a grin.
She socked me on the shoulder. I pretended it didn’t hurt.
“No! You know what I mean. Something nice.”
“You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. I don’t want to lose you.”
She smiled at that, pulling her bottom lip in between her teeth and letting it slide out slowly. Then she rolled onto her back and stretched, catlike. Excitement coursed through my body.
“So don’t,” she said.
The past repeated itself.
Not this time, I thought. It couldn’t. I wouldn't let it.
The moonlight reflected off the chrome forks on the Sportster. I looked at the bike, considered what it meant, where it had taken me since leaving New York.
I couldn't do anything as Dash the vagabond biker, moving from town to town, pocketing cash from under the table jobs.
But as Dashiell Beaumont?
I understood where my mother went wrong. She kept searching, kept thinking that maybe the next town would be right for us, for her.
She never considered that maybe sometimes it was better to stay and fight than to pack up and leave. That some things, some people, were worth the fight.
She had spent all those years chasing a shadow of herself, who she thought she wanted to be. And you can never catch a shadow, because it isn’t there. It isn’t real. A shadow was absence.
I remembered asking her once, years before even our brief stint in Pleasant, why we moved so often. I recalled thinking maybe my father wanted to find us, and that he wouldn’t be able to if we kept moving.
I voiced that concern to her, and she’d smiled a little and said that my dad wouldn’t find us because he wasn’t looking.
That upset me, and when she saw she sat with me. She told me that she wanted us to feel like we did when my father was still there, and that no place had quite done the trick yet.
But she was certain she would find that place for us soon.
We just had to keep moving, keep looking. Keep leaving.
Brutus was right, of course.
It was time for me to stop chasing shadows. Time to fight.
Chapter 24
ELLIE
One night in the holding cell became three. Then five.
That second night Sheriff Robert took me back to my house to grab some clean clothes because he “didn’t like the thought of me in one of those orange jumpsuits, sweetie.”
I’d packed while thinking about how funny life could be. This all started with Bobby at the laundromat, keeping me from my clothes.
And now Robert leaned against the door frame of my bedroom, watching me pack away jeans and blouses and socks and underwear.
This time, Dash wasn’t here to come save me.
So there I sat on my cot, spending my sixth day in that holding cell. The place smelled of mothballs and some cheap air freshener one of the deputies sprayed into the air every morning.
Bobby came in, grunting while he pushed his back against the door. A black power cable dragged along the cement floor, the prongs dancing over the little inconsistencies and bumps like a pair of tiny, shiny legs.
I didn’t stand up.
“Brought you something!” Bobby said.
He set it down on the desk. It was a small TV set, one of the ones with a VCR built in and a pair of bent rabbit ears on top.
He grabbed the power cable and hunted for an outlet. Then he plugged it in. He pulled the remote out of his jacket.
“I’ll give you this if you talk to me today,” he said, shifting the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.
Bobby visited me at least once a day. Sometimes he gripped the bars and leaned in close to speak from between them. Sometimes he sat at the desk.
He always came offering something.
I never accepted. And I also tried to not talk to him.
But a TV? I was so, so bored. So bored I would watch paint dry and like it while I did.
My heart stammered. Television! I didn’t realize how much I missed commercials, how much I missed the ability to just plunk down and turn my brain off for a while, until I lost the ability to do so.
But I didn’t want to owe Bobby a single thing.
“Unless that remote works on you, I don’t want it,” I said.
Bobby smiled. “I missed that mouth of yours.”
“Missed using your fist to close it, you mean.”
The smile didn’t leave his face while he dragged the chair from the kneehole of the deputy’s desk over in front of my cell.
He turned it so the back faced me and then straddled it, putting his elbows on the backrest. I rolled my eyes.
“You gotta learn some manners. You will, though. In time.”
He eyed me. I wore a blouse and some jeans, the blouse unbuttoned a bit at the neck for comfort. I did the buttons up and then crossed my arms and legs. My skin crawled.
“Go choke on that toothpick,” I said.
“I don’t like seeing you in this place. You’re just making things harder for yourself. You know that?”
I turned my head so that I could study a cobweb forming up in the corner.
Bobby started tapping the remote against the bars. Ting, ting. The sound dragged up and down my spine. I refused to look at him.
“Maybe you’re still thinkin’ your pretty biker boy is gonna rescue you. You know, I don’t think I told you that I was there when he ran out of town. He was too much of a coward to fight me. Even when I told him how you’re mine now. Just got on his bike and pissed off like the devil was chasing him. What do you think of that?”
I didn’t reply. He sat there, waiting. Ting, ting went the remote, grating into my skull.
“You know, I think he ran out so fast ‘cause he couldn’t wait to get away from you. Took the first opportunity and split. Bet he didn’t even look back. Went off to find himself something fresh, get me?”
The trembles started in the small of my back and radiated out from there.
I should have gotten on that stupid bike!
“Gonna cry? Want a Kleenex?” Bobby said. He half-stood.
I could cry, I knew. The pressure built behind my eyes, and I swallowed against the lump in my throat.
Instead I laughed.
For once, the smile dropped from Bobby’s face. A look of hayseed perplexity stole over him. I reveled in it.
“What’s funny?”
“You, Bobby-boy.”
His face darkened. He squeezed the remote hard enough so that the plastic case creaked. “You know I don’t like it when you call me that.”
“Does it look like I care?”
The flush in his face deepened. His lips peeled back from his teeth in an ugly snarl that might have scared me if I cared anymore.
“You know you’re in there until I say, right? It’s all up to me. Sooner you figure that out, sooner you get out.”
I stood up, arms crossed still. I walked over to the bars, careful to stay out of grabbing distance. I was brazen, not stupid.
“I’d rather stay in here the rest of my life than be out there with a spoiled little crybaby like you… Bobby.” I smiled around his name.
His snarl twisted him to animal ugliness. I thought he might slam himself against the bars and try and grab me.
Instead he stood up, grabbed the chair, and flung it back at the desk. It crashed into the desk and fell over on its side.
“Then let yourself stew for a while!” he shouted. Then he raised the remote to throw it.
I flinched.
He whipped it in through the bars. Not at me, but at the wall. It broke into a couple of pieces, the AAA batteries rolling across the floor.
He stormed out and slammed the door behind him.
I sat on the cot and buried my face in my hands.
I guess one good thing came out of spending time in that cell.
It gave me time to think. I had nothing but time, really.
At first I spent it lying on the cot with its thin excuse for a mattress, staring up at the concrete ceiling. If I stared long enough I could make out shapes in the little whorls and stipples in its surface.
But when a person doesn’t seem to have much in the way of a future, they tend to return to the past.
If I closed my eyes and slipped away from the moment, I could recall the deep, heavy thump of Dash’s heart when I rested my head against his chest.
I wished for just one more night of him coming in from a shift at the bar and whisking me upstairs. Or not having the patience, the two of us just letting our clothes fall where they
may.
I stared up at the ceiling and thought about what Dash said about sleeping under the open sky, with no ceiling but the stars.
I’d like to see the stars.
There was a window, set high up on the wall. But I couldn’t see much through it except the sky during the day. During the night, a streetlight set close to the window glared into my cell and blotted out any hope of seeing much of anything.
I hoped Dash could see the stars. I wondered how much longer I might be in this cell for.
The third day in I asked the sheriff what my bail was. He’d responded with a chuckle and, “What bail?”
I wondered if maybe one day, maybe one day soon even, I might break and tell Bobby to let me out. Just to give me a chance to look up at the night sky again.
Like I said, I had a lot of time to think.
I also thought about our last days together as young teens. Neither of us knew they were the last days of course, though Dash must have sensed some sort of restlessness on his mother’s part.
His mom was at work. I couldn’t remember where. A diner, I thought, made sense.
We were outside. We never really spent much time inside together, except for at school. Outside was so much more alive.
I sat on the tire swing, moving back and forth slowly, the toes of my plain white Wal-Mart runners dragging in the little trench of dirt that marked the swing’s track along the ground.
Dash leaned against the tree. I remember he looked different then. His mom kept his hair short, for one. But his face hadn’t filled out yet, nor his shoulders. And we were almost of a height. I may even have been a hair taller.
Girls do tend to be taller than boys at that age.
So it was no wonder I didn’t recognize him when he came roaring back into town on that bike of his.
“Let’s go, I found something,” Dash said. He started walking. His shoes crunched the colorful Fall leaves that carpeted the lawn. They were crisp and dry and spoke of the closeness of winter.
I liked Dash so much then, I remember. He was quiet and thoughtful and a bit of a mystery around town and school. Folks who kept to themselves like he and his mom plus them being strangers bred the mystery, of course.
His eyes always looked older than he was. And he’d seen so much more of the country than I had. I wanted so badly to get out of Pleasant.