“Do you really care that I didn’t say goodbye to Hannah?” Chloe asked quietly.
“Let me finish. But what did I do to you? I thought we were friends. And then you left, and didn’t come back for Thanksgiving, didn’t come back for Christmas, and didn’t even come back last summer!”
“I was working … I have two majors. It wasn’t personal …”
“I thought we would clear the air then, but no. You didn’t come back, you didn’t write, you didn’t call my house, you didn’t send me a birthday card. I turned twenty. And nothing.”
“We celebrated your twenty-first, didn’t we?” Chloe was guilty as charged. He had turned twenty-one last month. She and Taylor and Joey took him boating and had gotten him so drunk on the shores of Lake Sebago that Chloe had to drive him home in his F-150. It was a great day. She was hoping he’d forgiven her for her previous absence from his life. Guess not.
“Your mom must have told you I’d won the story prize,” Blake continued, “but you didn’t send so much as an email saying congrats, old buddy. You and I have been friends since we could walk, and you acted as if you weren’t my friend anymore.”
Blake looked away. He lugged the anchor out of the water, bent over the little wooden boat. She watched his broad back in a white T-shirt as she tried to fight through her remorse, yet find words to explain why she had shut him out too.
Silently he rowed back. She sat in the nose of the boat, in front of him.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I didn’t think you’d care very much, but that wasn’t right. I just didn’t think about it in the terms you put it.”
“How did you think about it?”
“I was really mad at you,” said Chloe.
“What did I do?”
“You didn’t behave like my friend, Blake”, she said. “You want to talk about friendship? Let’s. You knew Mason didn’t like me anymore, you knew he had a hard-on for another girl, and you said nothing. That’s not how friends behave in my book.” Chloe felt she made a pretty good case for herself.
Blake stopped rowing. He hooked the oars onto the sides of the boat and leaned toward her, slightly breathless, completely unsmiling, and incredulous.
“You must be fucking kidding me,” he said. “Chloe, of all the things to be upset with me about. You have some nerve. Mason never told me a thing. I had my suspicions, just like you must have had yours, and I did think he didn’t act enough like your boyfriend, but he and I didn’t have midnight chats about it. But you know who did have midnight chats about things? You and Hannah. You knew Hannah was fucking around! You knew she was going to motels with Professor X, you knew and yet you let me go to Europe with you! You let me believe everything was all right. You knew for sure what she was up to, and yet you never said to her, if you don’t do the right thing and break up with him, I’m going to tell him myself.”
“She was my best friend!”
“And Mason is still my fucking brother!”
Their loud voices, brimming with injured hearts, echoed up and down the tranquil little lake. Anyone sitting in a lawn chair could have heard every word of the injustice, as if through a megaphone.
“She was supposed to tell you, talk to you,” said Chloe.
“You know she didn’t. Because we went to Europe. You think I would’ve gone if I’d known she was knocked up?”
“I didn’t know that myself!” Her head shook from side to side in protest. “She told me in Warsaw. But you absolutely knew Mason was pining for the airhead back home.”
“We were in Riga by then. What was I supposed to do?”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Maybe if you hadn’t been completely subsumed by other things, you would’ve known what to do.”
“Well, what’s your excuse? You weren’t subsumed by other things and yet look!”
“How do you know I wasn’t subsumed?”
“By effing what?”
He didn’t say.
They backed off, regrouped.
“It’s not rational for you to be upset with me about Mason,” Blake said.
“I’m not upset with you. I didn’t start this conversation.”
“If you’re not upset, then why didn’t you talk to me for almost two years?”
There was wounded pride in his eyes, and hurt, and incomprehension. He was right. She was subsumed. She had been focused only on what she left behind in Trieste. Which was everything.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know what to say to you, or to Hannah. Or Mason, of course.” She still didn’t. She hadn’t seen Mason all summer.
“Did you think we ruined your dream trip?”
That wasn’t it at all. Her trip wasn’t ruined. Her life was changed.
“No.” My heart is broken, though not dead. The empty ring inside me is still filled with agony. “I wanted to begin my adult life. That’s all. Sorry.”
“Okay,” he said, but cold. He picked up the oars.
“And I didn’t stay away last summer,” she said. “I told you I was working two jobs, taking classes. It wasn’t deliberate.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’ll keep in touch from now on. I promise.”
“Whatever.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she dipped her hand into the water and splashed him. He didn’t react. She splashed him again. He blinked, said hey. “You can’t do that,” she said, splashing him again. “You either accept my apology, or don’t, but if you accept it, you can’t sit and brood. That’s not what friends do.”
“Oh, now you’re all about what friends do. And who’s brooding?”
“You.”
“Stop splashing, I can’t see where I’m rowing.”
“Stop brooding and I’ll stop splashing.”
“Okay.”
“Blake!”
“What?”
“Do you accept my apology?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” She splashed him again. He put down the oars and stood up. Without saying another word, he took one wobbly step over to her, picked her up, and before she had a chance to protest, threw her in the lake. Then he sat back down and picked up the oars. She thought he would jump in after her, like he used to when they were kids, but he didn’t.
“What are you doing?” she called, blowing water out of her mouth and nose.
“Stop splashing me, or you can swim back home.”
“You’re going to leave me in the middle of the lake?”
“It’s forty yards to shore, Miss Melodrama.”
“Help me get into the boat right now.”
“Are you going to stop splashing?”
“Are you going to accept my apology and stop brooding?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not going to stop splashing.”
Calmly he moved the boat away from her, and resumed rowing.
“Blake!”
He’s impossible, she thought, and didn’t call out his name again. She simply turned over onto her back in the lake and drifted toward her dock, her arms every once in a while fanning through the water to propel her body forward.
Bartering
A few days before Chloe left for California, Blake drove her to Jackson to say goodbye to Hannah.
“Are you going to stay in the truck again?”
“I’m going to visit my girl by the covered bridge,” he said.
“What girl?”
“Jealous, are we?”
Chloe rolled her eyes.
“Lupe in the yellow shack.”
“You still see her? Splain.”
“Nothing to splain. I started bringing her Meals on Wheels after you left, and then she wanted me to come read to her every other Tuesday, and then she wanted me to take her to the doctor every Friday, and then do her shopping, and fix her roof and her windows and install her new oven. Then she made me pie in that oven. On and on. She pays me almost a full-time nut. I’m with her four day
s a week. She needs my help. She has no one.”
“She has three sons!”
“They’re in California, like you. What if your mother needs help? You’re going to help her lying in your little bikini on Mission Bay beach?”
Chloe scoffed. “Like I would ever wear a bikini.”
“I don’t know what you do over there,” he said, leaning over and reaching across her to open the door and let her out, his entire large Blake arm nearly sweeping against both her breasts. He didn’t touch her at all.
“Chloe, I beg you, if you’re still my friend, talk to him for me. Please.” Forgetting about her other tables, Hannah parked across from Chloe, grasping her hands. Her face plain, beautiful, her eyes moist, pleading, her hair all slicked back, oh God, what boy could resist that face and those eyes, childbirth be damned.
“What could I possibly say to him?”
“You’re a college student. Figure something out.”
“Having book smarts doesn’t make me smart.” Chloe nearly went moist-eyed herself.
“Yes, but he still listens to you.”
“No, he doesn’t. Where do you get that? He’s not too thrilled with me either.”
“Oh, please. You know you can do no wrong. But I really screwed up. Tell him I’m sorry.”
“He knows.”
“Tell him again. Tell him I miss him. I’m going to be good to him. We had it so good once.”
Chloe’s head went from side to side, in a swing not a shake. “What if he thinks you just want to get out of your mom’s house?”
“Well, I do.”
“Right. But maybe that’s not enough to build a whole relationship on?”
“Who says? And we don’t have to build. We already built. We need to rebuild.”
“It’s been leveled,” Blake said on the way home when Chloe tried to persuade him of Hannah’s sincerity. “Can’t build on scorched earth, baby. Gotta get what’s left of your shit and get the fuck out. It can never, and I mean never, happen.”
Chloe shook her head. “Blake, you don’t think people deserve a second chance? Everybody makes mistakes. Come on. Don’t be such a hard-ass.”
“I see where you’re coming from. Second chances. Mistakes. She’s ready to turn over a new leaf, maybe?”
“Absolutely!”
“Ready to give me what I need?”
“Goes without saying.”
“Willing to commit to a real relationship?”
“That’s the point.”
“So let me ask you, this new Hannah who wants to try again, with a baby by another daddy and a waif she’s dragged here all the way from Latvia, do you think that turning over a new leaf includes her giving my friend Orville head a few weeks ago when he gave her a ride home from Yesterday’s?”
“What?”
“Oh yeah.”
“It’s a lie. Who told you?”
“Orville.”
“What—why would he tell you that?”
“Because I told him she wanted to get back together with me.”
“No!”
“Oh yeah.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What’s not clear? He gave her a ride home, and she wanted to say thank you.”
Chloe, completely flustered, turned toward the side window. “Why did your dumb friend say yes?” she muttered.
Blake was silent a moment. “Are you asking why a twentysomething dude with a 24/7 hard-on would say yes to a blowjob from a pretty girl? Have you ever met a dude, Chloe? Any dude?”
“Wait, hang on …” She tried to compose her words. “I’m saying, I didn’t know this was a thing.”
“Me neither! Would that I did. I’d have had a completely different high school experience. Because I was always driving chicks around. Back and forth. Blake, take me here, Blake, take me there. Come pick me up. If only I’d known this secret barter system for rides. I would’ve slept with a smile on my face every night.”
They arrived at her house. He pulled into the clearing, stopped the car, idled it. “Well, here we are,” he said.
“Yes.” She unlatched her seatbelt, took her purse from the well. “Thanks for the ride.”
“That’s it? Thanks for the ride? I thought I explained to you how these things work.”
Chloe fixed him with an appropriate blinkless stare. “I’m leaving the truck right now.”
Laughing he circled her wrist. “I’m kidding.”
She unfurled herself from his fingers. “Yeah, sure.”
“What, you don’t think I’m kidding?” He was so twinkly cute.
“You said it yourself. Are you a dude or aren’t you?”
“Well, I’m not a dude with you,” he said, getting out of the car to walk her to her front door because her father was a cop and cops didn’t like their daughters dropped off at the curb like UPS packages. “I’m Blake.”
Back at her other life, Chloe scrutinized the audition message boards on her laptop. Her mother was in the kitchen. A thousand meaningless posts. Come see this band, come buy my Les Paul, my steel drums, audition for my band, piano for sale, cat for sale, cat lost, looking for a lead singer, looking for a new lead singer …
Looking over Chloe’s shoulder, Lang said she’d look into that one, auditions at the Blue Moon in Santa Fe, because it was posted three weeks in a row. A cover band called Lone Star looking for a singer, a small but intensely loyal following. Auditions this Friday at the university practice rooms down in the basement.
“Mom, how is this helpful? We don’t even know if Lone Star was the name of his band.” He lifts up his shirt on the train and, beaming, shows her the tattoo and says how do you know I don’t already have a band? She has just told him he is going to own the world with his voice. Johnny Rainbow and the Hail of Bullets. He is going to live forever.
“Maybe it’s his old band,” her mother said. “Maybe they’re auditioning for a new singer.”
“What, they’re looking for a singer, five years later?”
“Why not?” Lang said to Chloe. “You are.”
38
Junior Summer
San Diego University Junior Year Course Load
FALL SEMESTER:
Tai Chi Multi-level
Advanced Voice
Plant Pathology
Plant Propagation
Topics in Modern Europe
Modern U.S. Fiction
SPRING SEMESTER:
Kung Fu
Advanced Hiking
Applied Entomology
Herbaceous Landscape Plants
Studies in Continued Continental Philosophy
Law and Society
Holocaust: Death of God or Death of Humanity
Introduction to the Brain
She has forgotten an introductory science class to satisfy her graduation requirement and apparently plant biology doesn’t satisfy.
So half-asleep she soldiers on through an 8:30 a.m. class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, learning about the amygdala and the hippocampus.
Of some interest is the transfer of information between neurons. The end with the dendrites receives the information. The other, with an electrical charge, sends it. The neurons don’t touch; it’s all about the strength of the electrical impulse in the synapse and the sensitivity of the branchy receptors.
Eureka! Now she understands why she can never remember anything. The distance between her neurons is a micrometer too long.
She has been combing through twenty days of her life, trying to find a star, a proton, a quantum particle that might point her in the direction of the boy who had promised her himself in the palm of her hand. In the Introduction to the Brain, she learns why she can’t find him. And maybe why he can’t find her. The neuron that holds the data she needs is spaced too far apart from the neuron that throbs to receive it. In the end, Chloe and Johnny, the forever lovers, are felled by nothing more than biology.
All the philosophy courses Chloe doggedly takes—because that??
?s what pre-law undergrads do, that’s what abandoned lovers do—can’t answer the unsolvable riddle.
Here’s one he and his mother would like. Chloe knows how much those two enjoy unsolvable riddles.
What if she doesn’t wait and he comes for her?
What if she waits and he never comes?
The riddle, not for Ingrid or Johnny but for Chloe, is: which is worse?
Johnny!
Promise me you’ll never forget me, you whispered to me the night before the day you left me.
I promised you I never would.
How I wish to God I had.
How I wish to God I could.
Why did you make me a promise you couldn’t keep?
Despite her neurological limitations, Chloe tries hard to remember something, anything. She keeps returning to the traveling butterflies who accompanied them to the mass graveyard at Treblinka. She doesn’t know why her mind keeps sifting through that barren ground.
The bus, the walk, the woods, something about those people and their incessant chatter keeps ringing a dim bell inside the belfry of her head. Look here, the bell thuds. There is something here.
Chloe fears it’s something irretrievable. On the bus, while their mouths had been going like go-cart wheels, Chloe was either staring out the window or gaping at Johnny as he talked about Majdanek and cyanide. Yet through it, Yvette’s voice, or Denise’s, keeps poking in with something revealing. But try as Chloe might, she can’t catch the end of the string of their words. Yet the bell keeps chiming. There is something there.
Lupe
The Haul Spring Fair conceived by Blake and sponsored by Chevy grew a tad in its second year. Attendance jumped from ten to thirty thousand people. Old vendors returned, new vendors called him directly, wanting to participate, to license a booth, to sell their products. His mother remained the treasurer and publicist, and his father, with his brand-new titanium back and a new sponsored-by-Chevy Chevy, gifted to him as a promotional gimmick, drove around town, shaking hands and lugging lumber. Burt described it all to Chloe in rich detail when she came to call on Blake after she returned home for the summer. The Hauls built a new deck and two new carports. The wheelchair ramp to the lake had been dismantled. “Her next car, she tells me, is going to be a Cadillac,” a beaming Burt told Chloe. “My wife, in a Cadillac!”