Infinity + One

  “Are you laughing?”

  “No.”

  “You are. Here I am feeling like a dirty old man because I’m about to suggest that we make a bed and cuddle up to keep warm, and you are laughing.”

  “You were going to suggest we . . . cuddle?” My shock immediately cured the giggling problem.

  Finn ran both hands over his face, scrubbing at it like he wanted to erase what he’d just said.

  “Okay,” I said in a tiny voice. He looked at me in surprise, and I couldn’t help it. I smiled. A big, wide, you-are-my-sunshine smile.

  “You do realize we’re in trouble here, right?” Finn shook his head like he doubted my sense, but a smile teetered around the corners of his mouth. “This isn’t a slumber party with your girlfriends and trips to the fridge for snacks.”

  “Hey, Clyde?”

  “Yeah, Bonnie?”

  “You will have officially slept with Bonnie Rae Shelby after tonight. You aren’t going to ask me to sign an autograph, are you? Maybe sign your hiney in permanent marker so you can take a picture and sell it to US Weekly?”

  “Got a little ego, there, huh?”

  I dove over the seat into the back, laughing. “Dibs on the pillow with a pillow case!”

  Within ten minutes, we had rearranged Finn’s boxes and our gear between the front seat and cargo area so we could lay the middle seat flat, making it approximately the size of a double bed, an extremely handy feature of the 1972 Chevy Blazer. At least, I thought so. Clyde said it wasn’t a “handy feature,” it was a broken seat, but I thought it was awesome.

  We laid the sleeping bag down, topped it with the two pillows, and then shucked our wet shoes, pulled on several pairs of socks each, donned our coats and beanies, and then Finn turned off the Blazer. He didn’t want to open the door and let in the cold, so he crawled over the seat too. Six foot two didn’t fold down very small, but he made it, and then lay down next to me, pulling the layered blankets up and around us.

  There was a little adjusting and wiggling until we each found a position we could live with—or sleep with—which ended up being my back to Finn’s chest, a pillow clutched in my arms, and my head on Finn’s left bicep. We lay there quietly, trying to find comfort in an awkward situation. My mind raced but Finn seemed content to let the silence win, and his breath above my head was slow and steady, his weight against my back pleasantly heavy but distracting in a way that made sleep difficult, and the detail that had been demanding introspection all day took center stage.

  Clyde had kissed me. Just when I’d thought he was gone, he’d come back. And instead of yelling or pointing his finger in my face, like I’d expected him to do, he’d kissed me. I felt the frustration in that kiss. But I felt something else too. His mouth had been several degrees hotter than mine, and the heat was delicious. He had tasted like toothpaste and buttered toast—a combination that shouldn’t have worked but did, like he’d eaten breakfast, brushed his teeth, and then blown my mind, all in the space of ten minutes. I hadn’t been lying when I’d teased Finn earlier. It was the best kiss I’d ever received.

  It had been rough and abrasive, invasive even. No practiced technique, no smooth manipulation. Lips, teeth, heat . . . and hurt. His hurt, not mine, and I felt remorse for causing it and surprise that I even had the power to do so. He’d said he’d kissed me so he wouldn’t kill me. And maybe that was true, but it hadn’t felt like that.

  The desk clerk at the motel had been falsely sweet and apologetic when Gran’s card was rejected, and she had oh-so-regretfully told me that she would need a card for incidentals if she was going to rent me another room. She’d also hovered when I asked to use the phone, and I knew then, even if I could convince the woman to take cash, I wouldn’t be staying another night at that motel.

  That’s when I’d sat beside the orange Blazer and waited for Finn, knowing I was going to have to explain myself, knowing I was going to have to trust him. And yet, when he finally showed up, I didn’t do either of those things. I couldn’t find my voice, the voice that never failed me. And even though I stood, bags in my hands, and watched him leave, I didn’t try to stop him. I was still undecided. And in that moment, all I could do was watch him go.

  But then he’d stopped. He’d gotten out of his truck. He’d walked back to me. And he’d kissed me. If he’d done anything else—yelled, cajoled, tried to explain or intimidate, I wouldn’t have gotten in the car with him, not again.

  But he’d kissed me. And I woke up. The Bonnie that sassed and sparkled and didn’t let Gran push her around, the Bonnie that laughed hard and fought harder, the Bonnie that had made the world love her against impossible odds, that Bonnie, that ME, woke up.

  Some people might laugh or roll their eyes and accuse me of tired clichés. But there it was—hot food in an empty stomach, water on a parched throat, that first glimpse of home just around the bend, or that first bite of something you thought you’d never have the courage to try, only to realize it was the best thing you’d ever tasted. That was what Finn’s kiss was like. And in that moment, I realized I was starving and had been for a long time. I was starving. Hungry for companionship, affection, connection. And strangest of all, hungry for Finn Clyde.

  Maybe it was because I was raised in Appalachia, raised in faith and poverty and little else, but I believed in things like fate and destiny. I believed in angels, and I believed in God’s ability to direct our paths, to guide us and move us in unseen ways, and I believed in miracles. Suddenly, Finn Clyde felt like a miracle, and I felt sure that Minnie had sent him to me.

  “What do you believe in, Finn?” I whispered, giving voice to my thoughts, the darkness and quiet necessary ingredients for a discussion so important. I thought for a minute he wasn’t going to answer, that he’d fallen asleep beside me and there would be no sustenance for my suddenly ravenous appetite. But then he spoke, his voice drowsy and slow, and I tipped my face toward him to soak up the safety of his voice in the dark.

  “I believe in numbers. The ones you can see and the ones you can’t. The real and the imaginary, the rational and the irrational, and every point on lines that go on forever. Numbers have never let me down. They don’t waffle. They don’t lie. They don’t pretend to be what they’re not. They’re timeless.”

  “You’re smart then . . . aren’t you, Finn?” I heard the awe in my own voice. It wasn’t a question. I had never been school smart, and marveled at those who were. “I thought you were. I was never any good with numbers. Math has always been like a murky pond, and me, a hillbilly stabbing at the fish with a pokey stick, trying to get lucky.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Bonnie.” Finn laughed softly.

  “That’s my point, Clyde.”

  “You’re your own kind of smart.” I loved the way he said the word “smart.”

  “Smat,” I mimicked softly, and he pinched my side in response but continued his argument.

  “Music doesn’t make any sense to me. I couldn’t pull a pitch out of the air the way you do no matter how hard I studied, no matter how many theorems I proved. Some are born with an ear. I was born with a calculator.”

  “Does it come that easy for you? Like music does for me?” I marveled at the idea. “I’ve never had to work at it . . . or maybe it’s just that it never felt like work to me. The music was just always there, easy for me to hear, easy for me to re-create. I can’t imagine math being like that.”

  “When we were little my dad would ask me and my brother to tell him about numbers. He would say, ‘Tell me about the number one.’ Fisher wasn’t interested, but I was. I would tell my dad everything I knew from my limited perspective. I would point to myself and say ‘one.’ I would point to Fish and say ‘one.’ And he would say, ‘Ah, but Finn, together you are two, aren’t you?’ And I would say, ‘No. One Finn. One Fish.’ As if we were the same—two halves of a whole.

  “As I got older my dad would demand more. And I would recite everything he’d taught me, everything I’d learned. ?
??Tell me about number four, Finn,’ he’d say. And I’d respond with something like ‘the first composite number, the second square, and the first square of a prime.’ Not difficult stuff, but more difficult than the ‘one Finn, one Fish’ stuff of my three-year-old answers.”

  “That’s not difficult stuff?” I asked, and I could see my breath puff out from my lips as the temperature in the Blazer continued to fall.

  “No. By the time I was in my mid-teens, my answers included things like Fermat’s last theorem, or Euler’s assertion, or Goldbach’s conjecture.”

  “Holy crap! You won’t feel bad if I don’t ask you to explain what any of that means, will you?”

  “No.” Finn laughed, creating a heavy white plume above my head that dissipated immediately. “Math is lonely in that way. Isolating. It’s the reason my parents split. My mom always felt excluded. She said my dad would go off into his own little world. Then he started taking me with him, and it was the final straw.

  “My dad got offered a position at a college in another state, and my mom said she wasn’t leaving. They gave me and my brother a choice about where we wanted to go. But I was almost seventeen—I’d spent my whole life in Boston. I had friends and I played ball, and deep down, I didn’t want to leave Fisher or my mother, even though I blamed her for the fact that my dad was leaving us. I should have gone, though. Looking back, I should have gone. Because in the end, I left my mother anyway.” Finn stopped short and changed the subject. “You asked me what I believe in. What do you believe in?” I sensed his discomfort, talking about his family, and decided to let him pass the stick this once.

  “I believe in music. I guess music is for me what numbers are for you. There’s power in music. There’s healing in it. God is there in it too, if you let him be. Growing up, in Grassley, everybody was so poor, Jesus was the only thing we had left . . . so I believe in him too. And God and music, once they are truly yours, are the two things people can’t take away from you.”

  “I haven’t figured God out yet.”

  “What’s there to figure? God is all the good stuff. God equals love.”

  “Hmm. You just wrote an equation.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” I felt kind of proud of that, like I’d said something smart . . . or “smat.” I smiled in the dark.

  “So why is everyone so poor in Grassley?” Finn asked.

  “Lots of reasons. It’s a tradition, I guess. A tradition of hopelessness. Drug addiction and alcoholism are high almost everywhere in Appalachia because people are hopeless, and when you’re hopeless you look for ways to feel something else . . . anything else. Drugs are good for that. So parents let their kids down because they are slaves to the pills. Politicians sell pills for votes, keeping them that way. The government gives us stuff but then when someone gets a job, they take it away, so everyone becomes afraid of work, not because they’re lazy, but because the job doesn’t cover what the handouts do, even if the handouts make you feel like trash and keep you poor. Being poor becomes the easiest thing to be . . . and the hardest too, because nobody really knows how to do something different.”

  “You did something different.”

  “Yeah. Look at me! Ain’t I somethin’?” I laughed softly, mocking myself. “I’m not poor, but I haven’t beat hopeless yet.” I tried to laugh again, but the truth wasn’t especially funny. My laugh didn’t sound very convincing. Time to talk about something else.

  “How’s this for an equation: Bonnie plus Finn equals one big Popsicle,” I said and shivered for affect.

  “Yeah. It’s damn cold.” Finn rose up onto one arm, the arm beneath my head, dislodging me and the blankets and making me squeal and burrow down even farther as he looked out the window. “It’s stopped snowing. Someone will come along eventually. And if they don’t, we’ll find a mile marker in the morning and make another call.”

  “Come back down here, heat supply,” I commanded. “I’m going to close my eyes and you are going to tell me about math so I can fall asleep. Tell me some theorems. Is that what you called them? Tell me how Einstein knew e equals mc squared. And start with once upon a time . . . okay?”

  “You’re a little bossy, you know that?”

  “I know. I have to be. It’s to make up for not being born with a calculator. Now share your wisdom, Infinity.”

  “Once upon a time—”

  I giggled and Finn immediately shushed me, continuing on with his “story.” I closed my eyes, more content and less hopeless than I’d been in months.

  “Once upon a time, there was a man named Galileo.”

  “Galileo Figaro!” I sang, interrupting the story immediately. “Name that song.”

  “‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen.” Clyde sighed with pretended long-suffering.

  “Excellent. I just had to make sure you and I could be friends. Continue.” I nestled down again and prepared to be bored to sleep.

  “Galileo isn’t usually considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He was a physicist, a scientist, but it was people like Galileo that made me believe that math was magic.” Finn’s voice was a rumble in my ear, his breath tickling the hair against my forehead, and I closed my eyes as he began to expound on something he called Galileo’s Paradox—how there are just as many even numbers as even numbers and odd numbers combined, which should defy reason, Finn said, but which made perfect sense if you compared them in terms of infinite sets. My eyes started to feel heavy immediately, too tired to try to follow the concept for long. Who woulda thunk it? Big, blond, and beautiful also had a brain.

  RUMORS CONTINUE TO swirl about the reported disappearance of country superstar, Bonnie Rae Shelby. Police are now involved after several sightings of the star with an unknown male have been reported. One sighting resulted in an assault against a salon worker, another sighting led to an altercation outside a Motel 6 just east of Buffalo, New York, where Shelby attempted to use a credit card that had been reported as stolen and was later seen arguing outside the establishment with the same, still unidentified, man. The desk clerk at the motel was concerned for Shelby’s safety after the man grabbed Miss Shelby, at which point the desk clerk called the police. The clerk, in an interview with police, said she had talked to the singer before the altercation and claimed Miss Shelby seemed frightened and under duress. The singer asked to make a phone call when her credit card was declined but was unable to reach whomever she was trying to call. Shelby’s family has issued a statement that they are very concerned for Bonnie Rae and will cooperate with police to ensure her safe return.

  IT WASN’T SUNLIGHT that woke him. It was brighter than that. The world around the Blazer was so white he wouldn’t have been surprised if a chorus of angels had surrounded the partially buried vehicle and pointed him toward the pearly gates. But heaven couldn’t possibly be this cold. And the girl in his arms was no angel, though she looked pretty damn sweet with her short brown hair sticking up at her crown and her bow-shaped lips parted on a soft snore. Her hat had come off in the night, and her face was buried where his armpit met his chest.

  Finn looked down into her face and waited for the dread and disbelief he’d been feeling, in varying degrees, since becoming shackled with Bonnie Rae Shelby. Instead, he remembered the way she’d looked after he’d kissed her, her lips all pink and swollen. He thought about her diving over the seat to claim the pillow with the case, the way she’d returned her gran’s phone by chucking it out the window, how she’d sung “Bohemian Rhapsody” and fallen asleep to his mathematical mumblings, all in the middle of a crisis. It made him curious as to how she would behave when she wasn’t overcome with grief, when her world wasn’t coming down around her ears, when she wasn’t stranded in a snowstorm with someone she’d only known three days—two and a half, actually.

  He grinned and laid his head back down.

  “You’re scaring me. Grinning like that, at nothing,” Bonnie mumbled.

  “It wasn’t nothing. It was something.”

  “Ha ha. A
re we going to die in this Blazer?”

  “No. But I can’t feel my left arm, and that place where you drooled on my chest has frozen solid, freezing my nipple in the process.”

  Bonnie started to laugh and rolled away from him, sitting up and throwing blankets this way and that, looking for her hat. Finding it, she pulled it over her bedhead, yanked her boots on her feet and threw herself back over the front seat, like she’d done it a thousand times.

  “Ladies first, and it’s not dark anymore, so no peeking out the windows. I’m going to test you on the color of my panties, and you better not know that they’re red with black skulls.” Bonnie pushed the passenger door open, snow falling from the roof onto the seat as she climbed out.

  An immediate image of Bonnie in red panties decorated in black skulls filled Finn’s mind and he half laughed, half groaned.

  “Skulls are not sexy,” he said out loud. “Skulls are not sexy.” He pulled on his boots, taking the time to lace them tightly, his eyes on his hands, keeping his focus from wandering outside. “Skulls are sexy, dammit, and my boots are still wet.”

  He ran his hands through the strands of his hair and pulled it off his face with an elastic band he’d shoved into his pocket the day before. He folded up the blankets and the sleeping bag, righted the seat, and moved their gear from the front seat. Then he pulled on his beanie and climbed out of the Blazer after Bonnie.

  An hour later, after a bit of recon, Clyde had a much better idea of where they were, along with the number of the exit they’d taken the night before. But another call for roadside assistance was unnecessary. As he made his way back to Bonnie and the Blazer, his feet frozen solid in his wet boots, a pick-up truck pulled alongside him, and an old man wearing a Cleveland Browns hat with furry ear flaps stuck his head out the window.

  “That your vehicle stuck up there in the snow?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve got chains. I can pull you out. Jump in.”