I knew you’d change your mind, I say. And everything we do we need to do so quietly, careful not to wake the others. She gasps every time I touch her, and she digs her fingers into my back because she’s never felt as good as I’m making her feel.
Suddenly, there is a clicking sound. Brightness behind my eyelids. I open my eyes to Bev digging through her purse in a white tank top and tiny yellow shorts. She’s moved a lamp from Meg’s bedside table to the floor next to her. I watch her open a little white tube and put stuff on her lips, and even though she’s across the room I know that the stuff is clear and smells like mint and makes her lips shiny. She screws the cap back on and drops it back into her purse. She finds a pen next, rips a strip of paper from one of Meg’s trashy magazines, and writes something down. Then she folds the scrap of paper in half and drops it into her bag. This is what Bev does instead of making to-do lists or writing words on her hand. I wonder what she’s hoping to remember.
She sets down the bag and walks silently to the foot of my bed. I close my eyes again, and hope. There is the noise of the blanket rustling, but no weight on the mattress, nothing whispered. I look for her again. She’s moved my comforter to the couch, and now she’s draping it over her lap. She moves the lamp closer, takes a piece of driftwood in one hand and a carving knife in the other, and works all night long.
I know this, because I don’t sleep either.
Monday
Sunlight in an unfamiliar room.
A scratchy pillowcase.
The smell of coffee and eggs and burned toast.
I open my eyes and sit up, and Meg, pink haired in a red dress, hands me a mug. Steam rises.
“You’re amazing,” I say.
“I know,” she says.
When I carry my coffee into the kitchen, Bev is already seated with her toast half finished, reading Meg’s gossip magazine. Her hair is messy, sticking up on one side. Normally I’d make some joke and smooth it down for her, but I keep my hands by my sides. I don’t know what it would feel like to touch her anymore. I sit in a green vinyl chair, and Meg sets a plate in front of me.
“Alex-a,” she calls. “Your eggs are getting cold.”
There are only two chairs, so Alexa hops onto the windowsill.
She stares in wonder at the eggs and toast, and I know how she feels, how everyday things are rare and exciting when they turn up in unfamiliar places.
“How did you do this?” Alexa asks.
“Breakfast is only a part of it,” Meg says. “Today is going to be fantastic. What happened is this: I woke up really early and came in here because I was thirsty. So I opened the cupboard and saw that there were plates and a pan and some mugs, and then I looked up and I saw…” Meg pauses for effect. I take another bite of eggs.
“This!” She points to a woodcarving on the wall. Like the well-trained art students we are, we stand and gather around it.
“It looks pretty old,” Alexa says.
“Yeah,” I say, “but the colors are still so saturated.”
The colors are the arches of a rainbow, and a sun rising over the dips in two green hills. In black italics, under the hills, is written: Good morning, sunshine. Despite our cocked heads and intent gazes, this is not something that would ever hang in a museum. It’s more like something a kid would make in a wood-shop class, or something left over from the seventies, hanging on a motel wall because there is no better place for it.
But, still. I like it.
“So I thought, This is perfect! Obviously. And then I knew right away that I needed to get it tattooed. I’ve been searching for the right tattoo forever, and now I’ve found it. My next step was to find a good tattoo shop nearby, so I went into the market and that girl was there again and she said that her friend, some guy named Jasper, works at a place half a mile from here and that he’ll be there today at eleven. And then I bought some eggs and bread and coffee.”
Alexa steps back from the carving.
“Don’t you think you should think about it?” she asks. “This feels kind of fast.”
“It doesn’t matter that it’s fast,” Meg says. “It’s perfect.”
“Maybe you could think about it for the next couple of days, though. You might regret it. This is your body and your body is sacred.”
Meg shakes her head as though she is hearing crazy, incomprehensible things.
“But, Alexa,” she says, “the beautiful thing about me is that I never regret anything. Ever. If I had gotten your question last night I would have disappointed all of you.”
Meg looks at me. She looks at Bev.
“Guys,” she says to us. “Help a girl out.”
I can see that Alexa’s worried, so I feel like an asshole when I say it, but I can’t lie.
“I think it’s rad,” I tell Meg. “I think you should do it.”
“Thank you,” she says. “Bev?”
Bev leans against the wall and contemplates. I follow her gaze as it moves from Meg to the carving and back to Meg. She takes a slow sip of coffee and swallows.
“Yeah,” she says. “It suits you.”
“All right!” Meg smiles, triumphant. “It’s three against one. Jasper, here I come.”
The conversation shifts to the carving itself, and how Meg will need to bring it with her, and how it will probably require stealing—a prospect that in no way excites Meg, who never steals and never lies and believes wholeheartedly in karma. I don’t listen that closely, though, because I’m busy watching Bev lean against the counter and sip her coffee, not sure how I feel about this small agreement.
Finally, Alexa stands on her tiptoes to reach the carving, and, sighing, removes it from its hook.
“Done. Okay?” And she shakes her head as if to ask if she really has to do everything for us.
The tattoo parlor is in the upstairs of an old building with high ceilings and shiny white walls. Huge windows open to telephone wires and blue sky. Meg plops down on a couch; Alexa and Bev and I grab binders of tattoo designs; and a skinny kid walks out from the room in the back and says, surprised, “Hey, I know you guys.”
He has full-sleeve tattoos and a lip ring and, despite these things, he looks young and wholesome, like a twelve-year-old in a really good Halloween costume.
“I was at your show last night,” he adds. “You guys were awesome.” He sort of falters when he says the word awesome, and smiles wider to appear more convincing.
“Are you Jasper?” Meg asks.
“Yeah,” he says, still smiling and bobbing his head. We all shake hands, and I’m amazed at how good even shaking hands feels now that we’re away from home and on our own time and old enough to get tattoos if we want them.
Before Meg disappears into the back room with Jasper, she turns to her little sister and says, “Lex, it’ll be okay. People get tattoos all the time.”
And maybe it’s because Jasper is so chill and approachable, or because his voice doesn’t falter at all when he tells us that the Good Morning, Sunshine design is going to make “like, the most kickass tattoo ever,” or because when sitting on a couch in a tattoo parlor with designs hanging on the wall and cataloged in books, getting a tattoo seems entirely natural—Alexa says, “Oh, I know. I can’t wait to see it.”
Bev takes Meg’s seat on the couch and I sit across from her in a red chair, and for a while we just flip through the binders and listen to the buzzing of the needle and Elliott Smith playing faintly in the back room. Alexa takes a collection of one-act plays from her purse and reads, absentmindedly twisting her brown feather earring when she isn’t turning a page.
I find a stack of calendars on the table, hand-stapled and unevenly cut. Each month features a client’s tattoo, obviously shot with some cheap digital camera. Now that my days aren’t dictated by school bells and homework, I could really use a calendar.
“Hey, Jasper,” I call. “Are these calendars free?”
The buzzing of the needle pauses.
“Yeah, bro, help yourself. January
and March are my designs.”
Buzzing resumes. I flip to the months. January: a necklace of leaves. March: an owl. Meg got lucky; his work is really good.
Alexa hands me a pen and tells me our plan for the rest of the week. This afternoon we’ll drive to Arcata for a show at a bar called The Alibi. Tuesday morning we’ll head east to Weaverville for an afternoon café gig. Then we’ll make our way north, toward Oregon, and stop somewhere off the highway.
“What should I write for Tuesday night?”
“Hopefully Yreka or something, but I don’t know yet. We could end up anywhere.”
“I can’t write ‘anywhere.’”
“Write ‘Unknown Motel,’” she says. I do.
From there we’ll go to Ashland, where Meg and Alexa’s aunt and uncle live, and spend the night with them. And then, we’ll drive to Portland for The Disenchantments’ last show, and move Meg into her dorm room. We’ll drive home after that, in one ten-hour day.
“Then what?” Alexa asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”
I glance at Bev. She’s flipping through the binder pages, pretending not to hear us.
I shake my head. “Not yet,” I say.
“Maybe you should teach art lessons to little kids. There are tons of summer camps. I’m sure you could find one.”
I don’t say anything.
“Not interested?” Alexa asks. “I’ll keep thinking.”
She crosses the room and peers through the doorway, and I get out my sketchbook and start drawing. Alexa comes back and whispers, “Jasper looks super focused, and Meg gave me thumbs-up, so I think things are going okay.”
She looks at my drawing, then over to Bev.
“Bev, you have a pretty neck,” she says. “I didn’t really notice it until Colby drew it.”
I shake my head. My drawing doesn’t even compare. But more than that I’m angry at myself for drawing her. Over and over. As if there isn’t anything or anyone else that can distract me from her. But Bev just flashes Alexa a brief smile and turns back to the binder—I’ve been drawing her forever, she’s used to it by now—and my face feels hot and I need to think of something else to say.
I’m about to ask Alexa to show me her notebook full of professions when Bev says, “Oh my God, Colby, look at this.”
She’s staring at a page in one of the binders. She doesn’t turn the page toward me, so I slide onto the sofa next to her. Laying the binder across our touching thighs, she says, again, “Look.”
I’m not sure I want to sit here, together, but even after everything that’s happened it doesn’t feel different to be close to her. Her body feels the same.
She points, but she doesn’t need to. In the binder is an image I’d recognize anywhere: a bluebird perched on a telephone wire, holding a bouquet of red flowers in its beak. A rain cloud hovers right above the bird, but the raindrops part above its head, leaving the bird dry and content.
“What is it?” Alexa asks.
“Holy shit,” I say.
“How could it have gotten here?” Bev asks.
I shake my head. “I have no idea,” I say. “This is impossible.”
“I know, right?” Bev says.
“What?” Alexa says.
“This is my dad’s old album cover. It’s exactly like this except that across the top of the tape it said The Rainclouds.”
“Someone’s obsessed with your dad’s band?” Alexa guesses. “Or maybe the picture’s been used on other things?”
“I don’t think so,” Bev says. “Colby’s mom painted this just for the cover.”
“The painting’s hanging in my dining room,” I add, and I think of us all sitting at the table, eating dinner together—first my mom and my dad and me and sometimes Uncle Pete, and then all of us and Bev, too, who in eighth grade started to join us at least a few times a week. We spooned countless bowls of carrot ginger soup and ate hundreds of plates worth of grilled vegetables and tofu and rice and spinach salads, and we did it all under the gaze of this fortunate, blue-feathered bird.
I reach into my pocket for my phone, and have to lean into Bev a little to do it. The image of the tattoo appears on the screen of my phone and I snap the picture and send it to my dad.
“Send it to your mom, too,” Bev says.
A moment later the phone rings and it’s my dad saying, “This is wild!” And as we’re talking my mom texts me back with IS THAT A TATTOO!? Alexa takes out a journal and starts writing, probably notes for her play.
Bev sends Mom more details because I can’t text and talk to my dad on the same phone, and then Bev takes her own picture of the tattoo and sends it to Uncle Pete, who writes back with, NO WAY! And it’s all very fun and chaotic, with several conversations going on at once, but as Dad tells me about the concept for the painting and Mom describes her amazement over the idea of her artwork being permanently on someone’s body and Uncle Pete keeps appearing in my call waiting—I’m thinking about how we used to all be together. How after dinner Bev and I would go back to my room to talk and do homework and record ourselves singing while Mom and Dad and Uncle Pete would hang out in the living room with the record player spinning, listening to music from when they were young and trying to hide the marijuana smell by holding their joint out the window. If this were a year or two ago, Bev and I would have put ourselves on speaker phone and talked to the three of them gathered together in one room, and I wouldn’t have to avert my eyes when I caught myself watching her, and this conversation would not be in any way lonely.
A little later, Jasper walks into the waiting area.
“Meg’s in the bathroom,” he tells us, taking the chair I was sitting in before I moved next to Bev. “She did great.”
“How does it look?” Alexa asks.
“Check it out for yourself,” he says.
Meg emerges from the back with a sunrise and a rainbow on her chest. Her makeup is smeared under her eyes but she’s glowing.
We gather around her. Meg: her own piece of art.
“Rad,” Bev says.
Alexa smiles. “It’s like an affirmation or something. You’ll never have another bad morning.”
“It looks even better than the original,” I say to Jasper.
“The original’s on a piece of wood,” Jasper says. “This one’s on a hot girl. Ready to get bandaged up?”
Meg nods yes.
“So, hey,” I say. “How long have you worked here? I have a question about something.”
“Sure, come on back,” Jasper says. I perch on a stool while he covers Meg’s tattoo with gauze and tape.
“See this?” I ask.
He peers over to get a good look at the bird tattoo in the binder and I tell him about where it came from.
“That’s crazy,” Jasper says. “It’s like you guys were, like, destined to come here and find this.”
“I completely agree,” Alexa says from the doorway, her journal and pen in hand.
“Alexa’s really into fate,” I say.
Jasper says, “Well, yeah. If this isn’t fate then what is, right?”
Jasper explains that he’s only technically worked here for a couple years but that he grew up in the shop because his older brother is also a tattoo artist there.
“I started apprenticing when I was fourteen,” he says. “They made me practice on myself for a while and then they let me practice on them and then after like a million years I started to get my own customers.” He looks down at the binder and strikes The Thinker pose, shoulders hunched, chin on fist and says, “Well, this is one of the oldest binders—way before my time. This is from, like, the early nineties. All I can tell is that it’s on a back, and it’s a dude’s back. My brother might know something about it. I’ll try to reach him, but he’s at a convention right now. And if he doesn’t know then Spider’ll definitely know. He’s the owner.”
He keys my number into his phone and promises a spee
dy follow-up, and we’ve said good-bye and are almost out the door to go for lunch, when I say, “Hey, want to come eat with us?”
His whole face lights up when I say it and he jumps off the stool he was sitting on. He rips a light-colored page from a magazine.
“Got something to write with?”
I grab a Sharpie from my messenger bag and he writes Be back in like an hour or something and sticks it on the window with black tape.
We walk a few blocks to a burger stand with outdoor benches, place our orders, and pay far less than we should because Jasper knows the girl working.
“Are you sure?” I ask her as I hand over my share of cash.
“They make me wear this hideous hat,” she says. “So yeah, I’m sure.”
Bev and Jasper and I claim a bench while Alexa and Meg wait for our food to be ready.
Beat-up trucks and old American cars pass on the main road as we wait in the sun. Jasper takes off his hat, runs his hand over his shaggy hair, replaces the cap. Bev’s phone vibrates. A text appears on the screen: SWING BY BEFORE U LEAVE. She deletes the text, then finds a name in her contacts and deletes it. I don’t even try to hide the fact that I’m watching her do all of this.
“What’s the point of getting someone’s number if you’re just going to erase it the next day?”
“It’s awkward not to.”
“And it’s not awkward to ignore him?”
She shrugs. Jasper’s leg bounces up and down, shakes the bench. He looks into the distance as if something has caught his attention.
Bev says, “It’s what I always do. It’s better for everyone this way.”
“You mean it’s better for you.”
Bev sighs like I’m a little kid she has to deal with, and slips her phone into her bag.
“So, Jasper,” she says, “do you like living here?”
“No,” he says. “You don’t have to be polite.”