Lone Star

  Mason

  At four in the morning someone was trying to pry open the door. Four in the morning! Blake jumped up and pressed against the door, but the key was turning and a voice, not too loud, but a voice I recognized, whispered, “Dudes, let me in, dudes …”

  It was Johnny.

  “It’s only Johnny, Blake,” I said, relieved, falling back to bed. “Open the door.”

  It took Blake a few moments to back away, almost as if he didn’t want to.

  “Where’s Chloe?” was the first thing he said; not even a hello.

  “She moved to another place because this one sucks ass. She was supposed to come back and leave a note with the address, but she forgot.”

  “So did she wake up in the middle of the night because she remembered?”

  “I guess so. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Why didn’t you wait till morning?”

  “That’s what I told her,” Johnny said. “You think I wanted to walk at this hour? She insisted. She said you’d all be frantic.” Johnny cast a glance at sleeping Hannah and at me, barely awake, lying in bed, covered up with a blanket. Only Blake, standing up, tense, angry, looked to be remotely frantic.

  He was stiff, agitated. I could see this even half-conscious. “Blake, bro, it’s all right,” I muttered. I don’t know why he was so upset. Chloe wasn’t lost. I knew she wouldn’t be. I thought Blake would be relieved, like I was, but he took a step toward Johnny. That’s when I knew I’d better shake myself awake, try to talk some sense into my brother. He can be so hair-trigger sometimes.

  “Why were you and Chloe up at four in the morning?” Blake asked.

  “I wasn’t,” Johnny said. “I was sleeping. But then she woke me up.”

  Blake, fists clenched, glared at me from across the room and then at Johnny. It was dark; the dim light from the tall window was blue. Johnny raised his hands. “Whoa, dude, what’s up?”

  “We had no idea what happened to her.”

  “If you listen, I’ll tell you. You see this place, right? She didn’t want to go on tour with me, and I didn’t think it was safe for her to stay here by herself. Don’t you agree? I found her a nice joint. She was supposed to come and leave the address for you.”

  “Why didn’t she?”

  “You’ll have to ask her,” Johnny said. “I’m not Chloe’s keeper.”

  “Why didn’t you ask her when you came back from your tour?”

  “It slipped my mind,” Johnny said. “It’s not my responsibility to remind her to notify her friends, is it?”

  Johnny and Blake stood at an impasse for a few moments.

  “So now what?” Blake said.

  “I don’t know. Now what?”

  I didn’t understand what was happening. My eyes kept closing, and their conversation was fuzzy like my eyeballs. I kept losing the thread. Now what? Now we go to sleep. Was there something I was missing?

  Next thing I knew it was morning, and I was being shaken awake. I opened my eyes. It was Johnny. “Come on, dude, wake up,” he said. “We gotta go if you want to come with me to Treblinka.”

  I wasn’t so sure I did. It took me a little while to get my head clear. Hannah wasn’t in the room. Neither was Blake. The sun was coming through the courtyard window in streaks. It was stifling, the air thick and dense.

  “Where’s Hannah?”

  “In the bathroom,” Johnny replied. “Throwing up, from the sounds of it.”

  I assumed Blake was with her down the hall. I needed a shower myself, and a change of clothes, and a big breakfast. Then I could figure out all the right questions to ask. Hannah came back. But she came back by herself.

  “Where’s Blake?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Blake,” said Johnny, “is with Chloe.”

  Now I was fully awake.

  “What?”

  “I think your brother had a problem with me going back to Castle Inn and staying with her. You were dead asleep, and he didn’t want to leave her alone. So I gave him the address, the directions, and he left. I slept here.”

  I absorbed this. “Why didn’t he wake me?”

  “He tried, I think. You were out.”

  I absorbed this too.

  I’m not saying I wasn’t unconscious. But I’ll give you an example of what was troubling even untroubled me. Two summers ago when Blake’s German Shepherd died, it died in the middle of the night. Blake needed me because he couldn’t deal with it alone. I was asleep, possibly as deep as I was last night, and do you know what Blake did? He shook me and shoved me, and yelled at me, and woke me. He woke me so that I could stay by his side while his dog died.

  That’s all I’m saying. He found a way to rouse me. Then, I mean. Not now, obviously.

  Hannah

  How am I going to get dressed? How am I going to get on a tour bus? How am I going to leave this gross bathroom? How am I going to eat, talk, be normal? How am I going to go on a tour of anything, especially Treblinka? Chloe came to Poland for Treblinka. This is what her grandmother gave us money for. What am I going to do? Eventually Chloe and Blake and even oblivious Mason are going to notice that I’m still throwing up in the vilest bathrooms all over Europe, where my vomit is probably the most pleasant thing to happen in them. Eventually they will ask why, and also why I’m not eating, why I’ve stopped eating, and why I look as if I’ve emerged from the Dead Sea.

  What am I going to tell them?

  I need to talk to Chloe, is what I need to do. Right now, at length, and desperately. When I raced out to the bathroom this morning, Johnny was already awake, sitting up in bed, looking at maps or I don’t know what. The small lamp by the round table was on. He might have been smoking.

  He said to me, “Need the bathroom? It’s down the hall.”

  “I know where it is,” I said.

  “I’m sure you do,” he said.

  And when I was in there, I wondered what he meant by that.

  I’m so scared right now. I’m so scared. I don’t know what’s happening to me. And why was Johnny in the room? I didn’t even ask. And where was Blake? I didn’t ask that either. I can’t even be bothered with the important questions. I want to tell Mason and Johnny that I don’t think I can go to Treblinka with them today, but I don’t know how to say it. I have to go so that I don’t have to explain it. But I can’t stay here by myself while they’re off gallivanting around Poland, having fun at Dachau or whatever. There are zombies in the corridor waiting for the bathroom. Who are these people? They’re like cadavers. I hope that’s not what I look like to them. I can’t stay here. They’ll suck the blood right out of my veins. Perhaps that’s exactly what I deserve.

  Please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no please no.

  Please.

  No.

  Chloe

  Chloe opened her eyes, for a moment unsure of where she was. It was morning. The ceiling was painted blue, trayed, high above her. She was quite familiar with the design of the ceiling. A sheet covered her body. She touched her hair, still damp from the shower she had taken late last night after Johnny left to run to the hostel to salvage what remained of her European adventure.

  It had taken all her will to force him to get dressed and stop sitting mute by her knees, to go into the night and rush to the hostel to tell them about the Royal Castle and the adjacent inn with the geometrically odd rooms, and Chloe lying in bed in one of them, overlooking the flowing Vistula. He didn’t want to leave. And she didn’t want him to. He went anyway. After all, this was Roman Holiday not Nightmare on Elm Street.

  Would he come back? Would he come alone, or bring the whole brood back with him? Would he not come back? He’d left his guitar. She knew he would have to return eventual
ly. The guitar was his heart. And one always returned for one’s heart, didn’t one?

  After her shower, she tried to wait but, spent and ruined, fell into a troubled sleep, full of vivid, ludicrous dreams of gates and churches and fields and bombed-out buildings; things she’d never seen and never dreamt of, and yet there they all were hovering behind her eyes. In the dreams she had lost her friends and was wandering around the cathedrals of destruction, praying to find them, alarmed at the geography of the new city that made up the immense reality of her visions.

  Now she woke up, came to, remembered things. Like snowflakes in fire, the dreams melted away. She jumped up out of bed, wearing tiny silk shorts, an even tinier tank top, loose everywhere, and sheer. But at least she was wearing something. She wasn’t naked. Because in the armchair by the window sat Blake, staring at her with cold and accusing eyes. For a minute she thought (or prayed?) she was still dreaming. Because at the altar in one of the ancient towns, she had found Blake, and he had carried the same scowl in his formerly happy eyes he was carrying now. Chloe even looked back at the bed, half expecting to find herself still in it, peacefully slumbering, but no, the bed was empty, and Blake really was in the chair.

  “Why are you sitting up?” was all she could think to ask. Her arms drew up to her breasts to cover herself. Too late, probably. Too late. She might as well have been naked. That’s how she felt.

  “That’s your question? Because I have a few of my own.”

  “Blake, what … I don’t … what time is it?”

  “Time to tell me what the hell is happening here.”

  “I don’t know. What’s happening with you?” She stood awkwardly by the side of her untidy bed, five feet from Blake’s stretched-out feet, in a room lit up by morning. Quickly and, she hoped, furtively, she threw a glance at the two beds. Oh, thank God. The other bed was unmade too, rumpled up last night by Johnny. But when she turned her gaze back to Blake, she saw that he was thinking the same thing. Both beds were unmade, Blake was thinking. This shamed Chloe. She wanted to ask him if he was pleased that the new room she got for them had private facilities instead of a communal narcotics toilet, but he didn’t look pleased by much this morning.

  “Do you have any idea how worried we were?” he said.

  “I know. I’m sorry. That’s why I sent him when I realized I forgot.” She couldn’t even speak his name aloud in the daylight.

  “How could you forget to let us know?”

  “I don’t know, Blake. I just forgot.”

  “And he was in the room with you until four in the morning?”

  She blinked. “Where else was he going to go?”

  “How is that your business?”

  “We traveled together. What was I going to do, throw him out?”

  Blake glared at her incredulously. “Um, yes, Chloe,” he said. “That is exactly what you would do. Throw him out.”

  She rubbed her eyes, her repentance yielding to annoyance. As usual, Blake always managed in seconds to animate her from relative peace to irritation. “I don’t know what you’re upset about. I said I was sorry for not leaving the new address. I fell asleep and forgot.”

  “Oh, well, if you said you were sorry. What, did you fall asleep for an entire day? The day, the evening, the night, all the way down to four in the morning?”

  Chloe swallowed. She didn’t want to keep secrets, other than the mammoth ones she was already keeping. She didn’t even want to confess that Johnny had gotten her stoned, way back in Kaunas, although what a minuscule infraction that had been.

  “I wasn’t feeling well,” she said slowly. Lies should be spoken extra deliberately. “I think it was the sandwich at Sestokai. I never felt good after I had it. Perhaps a touch of food poisoning. I was bad yesterday. I couldn’t go on tour with him.”

  “Yes, he told me.” Blake wouldn’t say Johnny’s name either. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “That’s because I don’t owe you an answer, Blake,” said Chloe.

  “Don’t you?”

  “No. I may owe it to Mason, but not you.”

  “So there’s an answer you owe Mason that you can’t tell me?”

  “No! I stayed in the room. I slept. I went out for a little while.”

  “Alone?”

  “I was alone all day, so yes.”

  “He wasn’t gone all day on his little tour, was he?”

  That was true. He had come back around nine and said to her, come on, let’s go out, we’ll go have some food, walk around. I didn’t get a chance to show you Vilnius, but I’ll show you beautiful Warsaw. She had put on a soft coral dress she had bought that day. She put gold clips in her brushed out hair and red gloss on her lips. Jovan Musk was behind her ears and in the swell between her breasts. They went out. They had some food. They walked around. He told her things. He showed her things.

  “Where’s Mason?” asked Chloe. “Why didn’t he come?” Mason would be so chill right now. That’s what she needed. Mason to ask her no questions.

  “Back at the hostel with Hannah, I assume. Sleeping.”

  She nodded. She wanted to ask where Johnny was, but didn’t dare. Blake didn’t look quite up to answering that one. For a few silent moments he sat, and she continued to stand, braless in front of him, in a barely there tank, barely there shorts. She wasn’t a warm, peach-colored nude, although the way Blake was staring at her, half-full of condemnation, half-full of other things, she might as well have been. She tried not to move, fearing her breasts were trembling with her every breath, as though she were on the floor trembling from pleasure. She sighed a deep and overflowing sigh. And then, before she could figure out how to control her inappropriately animate breasts or her even more inappropriately erect nipples, the lock in the door turned, the door opened, and Mason and Hannah walked in, rolling their suitcases behind them. They were followed by Johnny. Suddenly the indecorousness of her nipples a few feet away from Blake’s face became incidental to the impropriety of her entire barely clothed body scrutinized by Mason and by Hannah. And by Johnny. Though his wordless scrutiny was the least of her problems at the moment.

  No one said anything while they thought of something to say.

  “Chloe, when will you be ready to go?” That was Johnny, after a prolonged throat-clearing. “Because Emil is meeting us downstairs at eight-thirty.”

  “What about your group?” She was having a terrible time forcing her arms to remain at her sides and not fly up and hide the self-conscious confession that was splayed across her breast. Covering up would be an admission to every person in the room, the ones who were looking at her and the ones who weren’t, that there was something dissolute and unrestrained in every single thing she had done since Mason ran back to Varda’s house to find his passport.

  Ah. That was something to say.

  “Mason, did you find your passport?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said quickly. He opened his mouth to say something else, then paused.

  Blake came out of his trance. His eyes drifted from Chloe to his brother, still standing holding the long handle of his suitcase.

  “Mase,” Blake said, frowning and confused. “What is she talking about? You didn’t leave your passport. I did a final check. There was nothing in that room after I left it. It was passportless, dude.”

  Do you know why my grandmother sent me to Latvia? Chloe says to Johnny over pierogi and vodka at a dimly lit café after he comes back from Majdanek. Because it’s not hot there. She doesn’t think I can get into too much trouble in a country where the temperature doesn’t usually rise above sixty degrees. There’s never been a Girls Gone Wild in Riga.

  Has there been a Girls Gone Wild in Warsaw? Johnny asks.

  Inaudibly, Chloe says no.

  Johnny shakes his head. Grandmothers know very well you can get into trouble anywhere. My own lived somewhere colder than Poland and she managed to get into a lifetime of trouble.

  Really?

  Really.

  C
hloe drinks and thinks. My father says that he and my mother were able to form a lasting marriage only because they both came from the same climate.

  Johnny laughs. I love them. I love your parents. Why are they so funny?

  He is not so funny, my father, Chloe says. He says people who live in cold climates are physiologically and psychically different from people who live in warm climates.

  Johnny smiles. Do you want him to be wrong, Chloe, or do you want him to be right?

  I don’t know, Chloe wants to say. It all depends where you’re from, Johnny Rainbow. They drink some more. She asks him to order wine not vodka because she is a lightweight and light-headed. She giggles when he speaks. He keeps telling her things to make her laugh, to make her smile. And when she laughs, he sits and watches her. She drinks some more because she can’t withstand the ebony gaze, the caramel scrutiny, the parted mouth. It feels so grown up to sit like this, to drink, to talk, to be alive.

  It wasn’t an accident, you know, that I sat by your side on the Liepaja train, he says to her after they’ve been ambling and meandering down the noisy Warsaw streets. He has offered her his arm, and she has taken it.

  She says nothing. She can’t breathe and listen to his low intoxicated voice all at once.

  I was looking for a place to perch, he says, and all the cars were full. There was a seat by a man, a seat by a woman, a seat by a child. And a seat by you.

  I walked by once. I glimpsed you through the dusty glass. I kept on walking. Three cars down, I finally found a compartment with three seats empty. I opened the door halfway. But I was thinking of you. You had been glancing up from your book and staring out the window. He smiles, remembering her. You had a sweet spellbound face and hippie hair. You were staring at a field like you’d never seen a field before. And you were hiding your body. He nods approvingly at her colored face, at her coral dress. I couldn’t see what you were hiding, but I knew you were hiding it. Chloe stumbles over the cobblestones and grabs tighter onto his arm. She is not hiding anything now in her Polish-bought halter sundress that swings as she walks, that reveals soft skin illuminated by city lights.