Goodbye from Nowhere

by Sara Zarr

  “True. But maybe not all rules make sense. Look at capitalism itself, the system we all operate in. One could argue that capitalism has all kinds of victims, and so—”

  “Emily,” Kyle said, stopping her. “Forget it.” It wasn’t an ethics exercise, it was his life. If would be better if he forgot it too. He would eat the secret, choke it down, and see if it would stay there.

  He could barely see Emily’s face in the dark but felt her eyes anyway.

  “Okay,” she said. “But you know I’ve trusted you with some stuff, and I want you to know you can trust me, if you ever want to.”

  They heard voices and laughter coming from the grove. Kyle jumped off the table like he was about to get caught at something, as if his dad was going to appear and be all “What did you say to Emily?”

  “It’s Martie,” Emily said quietly. “And a guy. They haven’t seen us yet. Should we scare them?”

  Kyle spotted them too, hand in hand and clearly trying to find a good spot to make out.

  It would be exactly like him to be on board for the scare-the-crap-out-of-my-cousin prank, but he was not feeling exactly like himself and called out, “Hey, Martie, it’s Kyle and Emily.”

  It startled them anyway, especially the guy, who sort of scream-yelled before he could stop himself. That made Martie laugh, hand pressed to her chest and doubled over and saying, “Ohmygodyouscaredme!” and then they were all laughing.

  “Sorry,” Emily said, obviously not that sorry.

  “What are you guys doing?” Martie said when she’d recovered.

  “Just talking,” Kyle answered. “What are you doing?”

  “Showing Julian the bunkhouse. Um, these are my cousins,” she said to Julian.

  “Hi, yeah,” Julian said, “I saw you back at the house.”

  The two of them looked like such kids to Kyle, even though he was barely two years older. Martie had changed out of her dress into cutoffs and a sweatshirt. Julian had masses of curly hair and a face that looked like it had never had a zit or been shaved.

  “Is the party over?” Kyle asked.

  “Yeah,” Martie said. “It sort of ended when Aunt Brenda hurt her knee doing the safety dance.”

  “How ironic of her,” Emily said.

  “That’s your mom, right?” Julian asked. “She’s cool. She’s like . . . the fun aunt.”

  “That’s one way to look at it, I guess.”

  Better your mom be the fun aunt than the cheater aunt, Kyle thought. “We were just about to leave.”

  “We were?” Emily asked.

  “Yeah. I’m pretty tired.” That was true.

  She shrugged. “Okay.”

  The thought then crossed Kyle’s mind that maybe, as the older cousins, they had some responsibility to keep Martie and Julian from doing anything too stupid. He added, “But we’ll see you guys back up there in like ten minutes, right? I’ll let your mom and dad know where you are,” he said to Martie. “So they don’t worry.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Kyle.”

  Kyle and Emily walked back up the path, listening to their feet in the brush and the crickets and the tree frogs. When the patio came into view, they saw Aunt Brenda with her leg up, icing her knee. Uncle Mike was also there, talking to her. There was no sign of Aunt Jenny or Kyle’s dad or anyone else.

  “We’re leaving early tomorrow,” Emily said, pausing just outside the circle of light cast by the house. “My mom needs to be back in time for a performance one of her students is in.”

  He grabbed her hand. Maybe because he’d had to eat the words he wanted to say, or in sudden need of human touch, or out of the fear of being left alone. He stood there with her hand in his, feeling like, I’m being weird, and let it drop.

  “Hey, Kyle,” Aunt Brenda called, “I have your phone!”

  Emily put the hand Kyle had just been holding on his shoulder and faced him. “Even though I have to leave, I’m still here. I’m always here.” She took out her phone and shook it. “Okay?”

  Kyle nodded, knowing that if he tried to talk, he’d cry.

  Later, Nadia texted him.

  Hey. Movie done, I’m back home.

  Yes that was Jack. Jack still exists in the world and still has some of the same friends I do. As you will recall, I broke up with Jack because our relationship was over. tbh this is even more of a reply than I really owe you for that question, but you’re usually not possessive so I don’t know what’s up.

  He started to reply and apologize, but more typing bubbles came up and he waited.

  Actually, Kyle, I’m super tired right now and want to just go to bed. I’ll try to call you tomorrow between airports and stuff.

  All he could do was send a thumbs-up, and as soon as he did he could see it looked sarcastic and petty.

  This was all new, a side of her and of himself he hadn’t seen, and he didn’t know what to say or what to do to make it right. The ground was slipping out from under him.

  Mom is seeing someone.

  Four words less than a day old.

  He pictured his mom and dad driving together, back and forth to the farm for Kyle’s whole entire life. Her hand on his thigh, every time, because it belonged there. How she’d always looked at him, and the way they were a team.

  That was real. He’d always thought it was so real.

  3

  KYLE WENT on the Arizona trip with the team. They didn’t even make it to the quarterfinals. Coop and Mateo were all depressed about it, but Kyle didn’t care. He was just glad that he was able to avoid his mom during the half day between when he got home from the farm and when he got on the team bus to head for the airport.

  Now they were hanging out in their motel room with a couple of pizzas, waiting to find out if they were going back home or staying for the rest of the tournament. Coop was on one bed with a pizza box balanced on his stomach, Mateo on the other, and Kyle was on the floor next to the other pizza, because the rollaway was too uncomfortable to be on while awake.

  “That one pitcher,” Coop said.

  “I know,” Mateo said. “Dude was on a tear.”

  Kyle looked at his phone. He and Nadia had hardly been texting, her in Chicago and him here, and the tension over Jack and everything else still stretched tight. “We’re not that good, though,” he said. “Even if the pitcher hadn’t been so hot.”

  Mateo didn’t say anything, but Coop threw him a glare. “Your attitude sucks. No wonder we lost.”

  Kyle found a gif from Damn Yankees and sent it to Emily.

  Baseball and musicals collide. p.s. we lost.

  She sent back there’s always next time plus a “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” clip from The Sound of Music.

  “Is that Nadia?” Mateo asked.

  “It’s my cousin.”

  “The girl?” Coop asked. “The one who came to our game last year?”

  “Yeah.”

  It had been a home game toward the end of the season, and his grandma and grandpa and also Aunt Brenda and Uncle Dale and Emily and Alex all showed up, packed into a minivan. “They all came? Just for this?” Coop had asked, glancing up at the bleachers. “To see you play on our dumb team? I can barely get my own dad to take off work once in a season.” Later on, Coop had asked, “Did your cousin say anything about me?”

  Kyle had laughed. “No, Coop, she didn’t.”

  “So what’s up with you, Baker?” Mateo asked now. “No mojo out there. Not that we had a chance anyway, but you’re off.”

  “Not my week, I guess.”

  He imagined telling them. My mom is having an affair. Mateo he could sort of trust to keep it to himself, but there was no way Coop could keep his mouth shut about something like that. Plus, what if knowing that info made them picture his mom having sex? It definitely would. Kyle had a hard enough time keeping that shit out of his own mind, he didn’t need his friends thinking about it.

  Coop shoved the pizza box to the side and rolled off the bed to use the bathroom. While he was in
there, Mateo asked, “You and Nadia cool?”

  “Yeah, man, we’re fine. She’s just in Chicago with her parents. The team is here. So, you know. We’re both busy and stuff right now.”

  Mateo waited as if he expected Kyle to say more, to relent and be like, Well, okay, there’s more.

  “That’s it,” Kyle said. “That’s all.”

  Not hungry, he took the last piece of pizza to prove he was all good, that he came from a big, basically happy family and he had an awesome girlfriend and a healthy appetite. No weakness, no crack in the system. If he could play it like that, maybe it would be true. The “blip,” as his dad put it, would unblip, and life would go back to how it was.

  And he tried.

  One day at a time, he tried. Tried to wait it out. Tried to act normal around his mom, then couldn’t, so avoided her. Tried to act normal with Nadia and had the same problem with the same solution: avoidance. It became impossible for him to be around anyone for more than minimal chunks of time, because he was afraid of what would be asked or told once the small talk was over. He skated over just the very top layer of his life, knowing that if he stayed in one place too long, the whole thing would crack beneath him, pull him under.

  The only person he could talk to without fear was Emily. She knew something was up, and that he couldn’t say what it was. That was enough for her and enough for him and it hadn’t changed anything between them. She didn’t expect anything from him like Nadia did, like the team did.

  After Arizona, he started skipping practice. Missing games. Coach Ito put him on probation. Kyle told Nadia his shoulder was bothering him, even made up some crap about physical therapy, but kept it vague. In fact he mostly used baseball time to drive around.

  Driving was his new pastime.

  Driving did not require teamwork, talking, being talked to, enduring being cheered up, listening to more lies, pretending to be the same old dumb Kyle he was before. Driving only required gas.

  He’d been burning through a tank of it every week, while he drove around during the time he was supposed to be at practice or games. Getting on the 101—south to Ventura one day, north toward Lompoc another. Or inland, AC blasting until he shivered. The best was how when he was driving, it felt like he wasn’t in a real place. It wasn’t home and wasn’t school or Nadia or baseball. It was nowhere.

  A couple of weeks after Arizona, Kyle sat in his car in the student lot, in his favorite parking space: under a tree, in the farthest corner. He used to avoid parking near trees, let alone under them, because he didn’t want his car covered in bird crap and pollen. Now all he cared about was being hard to find, keeping to the perimeter of the lot, of the halls, of his house—the perimeter of his life where he wouldn’t see or be seen head-on. Anyway, if bird crap and pollen and dust got on the car, that meant he could go through the car wash—easing onto the track and shifting into neutral, hands off the wheel as he let the belt chug him forward one inch at a time under the tentacles of the scrubber. He liked the way it made his car a dim cave, a cave inside a cave. And it came out clean. No evidence that anything messy had ever touched it.

  He sat there, thinking about going to practice. If he didn’t go today, it basically meant he’d be quitting. He could play baseball; sure, he could go to practice. It wasn’t the game itself he didn’t like anymore. It was everything else: having to see the team, listen to their stupid talk in the dugout, rib or be ribbed for missed easy catches and awkward strikeouts, hear Coach Ito yell or joke or deploy one of his meaningless phrases about hustle or teamwork—

  A knock on his car window made him jump. It was Coop. Kyle turned the key so he could lower his window halfway. “Dude, don’t scare me like that.”

  Coop’s face loomed close. Too close. Kyle could see the scraggly blond hairs of the beard that Coop had been trying to make happen for a month.

  “Are you coming or not?” Coop asked. “This is it. Shit or get off the pot.”

  “I don’t know,” he told Coop.

  “What don’t you know, Baker? Whether or not you give a crap about literally anything?”

  “Ellison is good at second. You don’t need me.”

  “Not the point, dude.”

  “I’m not feeling too . . .” He couldn’t finish.

  Coop stared at Kyle, then tried the handle of the locked car door, rattled it a couple times. Like if he tried hard enough, he could reach in and physically drag Kyle out from under this cloud of garbage that had been following him everywhere since the trip up to the farm for Martie’s birthday.

  Kyle closed his window, and Coop slapped the glass.

  “Just get your ass out of the car and show up!” Coop’s voice was muffled, but not muffled enough. “You don’t have to pretend to like it. Just show up! Drag your ass two hundred yards so Ito doesn’t cut you! Think about next year.”

  Kyle ran his hands around the steering wheel. Pictured himself gliding in slow motion through the car wash.

  “You’re shit. You know that?” Coop shouted through the window.

  Kyle nodded. “Yeah, I know.” Absolute shit. The way he’d been ghosting Nadia, ghosting his whole life.

  “What did you say?”

  He lowered the window half an inch. “I said I know.”

  Coop put the fingers of both hands through the half inch of open window. Kyle pressed the button to raise it; Coop pulled his fingers out as quickly as he could. Two fingers on one hand got stuck. “Dude!”

  Kyle lowered the window enough to release him, started the engine, and backed out carefully while Coop watched, stunned and holding his fingers to his chest. Kyle stayed in reverse, backing all the way across the lot. Coop recovered enough to flip him off.

  He meandered from neighborhood to neighborhood in his car. His phone buzzed with texts and calls, all from Nadia, he knew. The situation with her was pretty much like it was with the team: time was up. He’d been given a kind of relationship probation for his avoidance, which Nadia at first thought had to do with Jack being at that party and Kyle being possessive and punishing her somehow. No matter how many times he told her it wasn’t that, she didn’t believe him.

  Why are you breaking up with me? she’d texted a couple of nights ago.

  I’m not.

  Sure feels like it, Kyle.

  It was more like a long, slow process of trying to get her to break up with him because he couldn’t do it himself. Because he couldn’t bring himself to say what it really was. What if she told someone else at school and word got around? What if his mom’s boyfriend was someone connected to school? Or to his parents’ company?

  Kyle saw every male teacher and wondered, Is it him? Every random dad doing after-school pickups or drop-offs at the traffic circle. Every Baker & Najarian subcontractor or delivery guy. Him? Him? Him?

  Not only that.

  He didn’t have the family he’d thought he had at Thanksgiving, the one he’d brought Nadia into, showed her off for. Pictured her being a part of.

  It was like he’d already lost her, along with his whole concept of what it meant to be him.

  He turned off his phone, drove around a little more, hit the car wash. When he got home, he went in the side door and slipped through the quiet kitchen and straight to his room. Later, he was in there trying to do homework with a movie on when there was a gentle knock on the door. His mom’s knock.

  This was exactly the situation he didn’t want to be in—trapped in a room alone with her. The fact that he’d managed to avoid it for so long kind of made him think she’d been avoiding him too. She hadn’t asked about his games or school or Nadia or anything else since he got back from Arizona, and he’d only given her the two-minute summary of the trip before making some excuse to get out of the conversation.

  Now, she had on jeans and a light blue tank top that showed off arms she’d obviously been working on in the gym. Normal So-Cal mom clothes, but now Kyle thought about guys . . . men . . . maybe seeing her as attractive. When she sat on the foot o
f the bed, he scrunched against the wall on the other end with his laptop.

  “West Side Story again?” she asked. “I thought I heard it through the door.”

  He should have put on his headphones. Rookie mistake.

  She gave him an uneasy smile. “Nadia looks a little like young Natalie Wood. Don’t you think?”

  Natalie Wood aka Maria was on his screen now, frozen, smiling, feeling pretty. Nadia did have dark hair like that, and expressive eyes. “I don’t know,” he said, and closed the screen.

  “Kyle, so . . .” She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, and Kyle could see her hand was shaking. “Dad and I were talking last night. And he mentioned that he told you.” Her eyes met his for half a second. “About me. Weeks ago.”

  He pressed his back to the wall, wishing it would absorb him as if he were a ghost in a movie. The Sharks and Jets sang in his head. Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it.

  “I can’t believe you’ve been carrying this around for weeks,” she continued. “And neither of you said a word.”

  He couldn’t look at her. “He told me not to,” he muttered. “He said it’s in the vault.”

  “It is. You weren’t supposed to know.”

  “But I do.”

  “I’m sorry. He promised he wouldn’t tell you.”

  A flare went off in his chest, and he tried giving her a hard stare. “People break promises, I guess, so.”

  She gave him a hard stare back. Outstaring his mom had never worked, not once in his entire existence. He flinched first, looked away. Just play it cool, boy.

  “I’m allowed to have a life, Kyle.”

  What was that supposed to mean? “You had one already.”

  The pause got long, flat. And, in his mind, hissing like a ballgame crowd waiting for something to happen. She lowered her eyes, smoothed out the blanket. Her hands, no longer shaking, looked strong.

  “I came in here planning to be in mom mode. I wanted to say something to make it better and reassure you that Dad and I have this under control. That we have a plan, you don’t have to worry.”

  “But?”

  “But . . .” She laughed through her nose and looked straight at him. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Being forty-eight doesn’t mean you have it figured out and don’t make mistakes. All it does is show you how little you know.”