Damaged

  We decide to sleep at a campground a few miles off the freeway. But first, dinner. A sign for the next exit lists a bunch of fast food chains, a pizza place, and a Kountry Kitchens.

  “Ooh, let’s go to Kountry Kitchens,” I joke.

  “I’d rather kill myself than set foot in one of those places willingly,” Hunter says a little too sharply.

  “Jesus, I was kidding.”

  “It wasn’t funny.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “I just didn’t think it was very funny.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  We decide on the pizza place. I load up at the salad bar and Hunter calls me a hippie. I think of crazy Mountain and Chesapeake. I think of my mom’s weird friends. I think of my mom and how she uses being a “free spirit” as an excuse to not deal with her problems.

  “My mom’s the hippie,” I say. “I am not.”

  “But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” He has no idea how much that burns right now, how scared I am of taking after her. Eating vegetables is one thing; mental illness and being a failure at life are other things entirely. It’s not Hunter’s fault, but I still want to hurt him back.

  “Then that would also apply to you and your dad, wouldn’t it?” I regret the words as soon as they leave my mouth.

  Hunter doesn’t say anything, just looks down at his pizza sadly.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “I guess we’re even as far as bad jokes go.”

  We finish eating and drive in silence the rest of the way to the campground. Hunter’s phone rings a few times but he doesn’t answer. After the fourth call, he turns it off and throws it in the glove compartment.

  “Forgot to turn it back off,” he says.

  “Who was that?” I ask, but I already know.

  “Nobody,” he says. His parents. The world he’s running away from.

  The campground isn’t much more than a crowded RV park with a couple of dusty patches of grass for tents. It’s already dark as we set up the tent, but the night is lit by the glow of RV windows and the blinking of the televisions inside. As ugly as it is, it makes me feel safe. This is not the kind of place ghosts hang out.

  “Should we make a fire?” Hunter says.

  “No, I’m tired. Let’s just go to bed so we can wake up early and get out of here.”

  “I’m going to stay up a little longer to read.”

  As I zip myself up in my sleeping bag, I hear Hunter opening the car trunk and rooting around inside. I hear the clink of a bottle being removed.

  NINE

  Hunter manages to wake up without a noticeable hangover and we get on the road early. He’s surprisingly easy to motivate when he has something to look forward to.

  It suddenly strikes me that we’ve never once discussed San Francisco since we left. I’ve told him nothing about my plan and he’s told me nothing of his, if he even has one. What if his expectations are different from mine? What if they get in my way? We have to talk about it soon. Before we get any more wrapped up in each other’s lives and it’s too late.

  But I can tell now is not the right time to bring up San Francisco. Hunter’s in the passenger seat, finally listening to his voice mails, and he is not happy. His eyes are squinted in anger and his jaw is gnashing. His left hand is a pulsing fist.

  He turns the phone off and slams it into the glove compartment. He looks out the window like he wants to smash everything he sees. I could pretend I don’t see how upset he is, I could try to keep us safe from that discomfort. Or I could just ask him what’s wrong. Maybe we’re capable of being that honest with each other.

  “Fuck,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Fuck,” he says again.

  “Hunter, what happened?”

  “What happened is my dad’s a fucking asshole.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  Silence. He looks out the window at the miles and miles of pasture. “Fucking cows,” he says.

  “What’d the cows ever do to you?”

  “Did you know they’re one of the top contributors of green­house gasses?”

  “Yes, I did know that.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “Is that what you want to talk about?”

  He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and leans his head back. “So my mom leaves these messages, crying,” he says, his eyes still closed. “Begging me to come home, to at least call her and tell her I’m okay.”

  “That seems reasonable,” I say, wondering what it feels like to have a mom who wants you around that much.

  “Yeah, except my dad’s in the background screaming the whole time about how he’s going to kick my ass, and my mom’s like whispering now, ‘Your father’s really mad,’ like that’s going to make me want to come home. And then he starts leaving these messages saying how he’s going to call the cops and report the car as stolen, how he’s going to cut me off for good, he can’t believe a piece of shit like me is even his son, he can’t understand why my mom keeps forgiving me and making excuses, and he calls her an idiot, a dumb-ass piece of shit just like her son, and I can hear her in the background crying, and who knows what that asshole did to her, and—”

  Hunter’s voice cracks. His throat is full of tears. But his eyes are steel. Dry. Hard. “Fuck!” he says, and pounds the dashboard with his fist.

  “I’m sorry,” is all I can think to say. I reach over and put my hand on his. My fingers wrap around the rock of his fist. I hold it there until the fist loosens, until the rock becomes flesh again.

  “Can we stop here?” he says.

  “Stop where?” I put both hands back on the steering wheel, suddenly aware of the warmth of our touching, the thin strength of his fingers.

  “Right up there.” He points at a tiny white roadside chapel next to a hand-painted sign that says, STOP. REST. PRAY.

  “I need to stop, rest, and pray,” he says, trying to sound sarcastic, but I have a strange feeling he’s not really kidding.

  I pull over and we get out, Hunter grabbing his camera from the glove compartment. “I’m going to check that place out,” he says, motioning to the building, just barely big enough to fit four people, like a fancy dollhouse with its tiny stained glass windows and little cross on top. Someone spent a lot of money building this thing.

  “Want to come in?” Hunter says.

  “No thanks, I’ll stay out here.” Any kind of religious building, especially miniature ones on the side of the highway in the middle of a cow pasture, creep me out. “Can I use your phone to call my mom?”

  While Hunter’s inside the chapel taking pictures or praying or whatever it is he’s doing, I dial my number. I half expect to get the answering machine; Mom sometimes goes weeks without answering the phone. But after the sixth ring, just as it’s about to click over to let me be a coward and leave a message, my mom picks up. “Hello?” she says, her voice weak and sad and far away.

  My first instinct is to hang up. I hold the phone against my ear, not breathing.

  “Hello?” she says again. I still can’t speak. “Kinsey, is that you?”

  “Mom?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m good. I just wanted to call and tell you that.”

  “Thank you.”

  She’s being too polite. Something is wrong when she’s too sad to be mean.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Yes, of course.” She makes a feeble attempt to sound cheerful. “I’m fine. Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I got a cat.”

  “A cat?”

  “Yeah, isn’t that wild? I named him Frida, after Frida Kahlo of course.”

  “Why’d you get a cat?” br />
  “Oh, my friend Marnie—you know her, she’s the Reiki healer—she said it’d be good for me to have a companion, someone to love and be responsible for, to keep me accountable, you know? It’s really helping.”

  A cat. A cat is helping my mom be responsible. A cat is giving her something to love.

  “Are you taking your medication?” I say.

  She sighs. She hates it when I talk to her like she’s a child. This is when she usually blows up. This is what makes her slam doors and not talk to me for a week. But all she does is say, “Yes,” softly.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Oh, Kinsey,” she chokes. I hear the tears. I can hear the echoes of her all alone in that empty house. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

  “But I left you there by yourself. I shouldn’t have left.”

  “Kinsey, I’m proud of you.”

  In all my eighteen years of life, I can’t remember her ever saying that to me, not for the perfect report cards, not for the soccer trophies, not for the races won, not for the countless spelling bees and science fairs and various academic awards I’ve been collecting for as long as I can remember. None of that has impressed her, none of my hard work and training and sleepless nights studying. And now she finally says it, now that I’ve done possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, now that I’ve run away from home with a troubled boy she’s never even met in a car that may be reported stolen.

  “Why the hell are you proud of me?” I can’t help the acid in my voice.

  “You’re brave, Kinsey.” Her voice is tired, almost pleading. “Braver than I ever was. You’re not going to get trapped like me.”

  “Mom,” I say, and nothing else.

  “I love you.” She says it for me.

  Hunter emerges from the chapel. The highway rumbles with passing trucks and the air is thick with the smell of exhaust, hay, and cow manure.

  “Mom,” I say again. It must be so quiet there, so dark with the shades drawn, so still.

  “I’m going to let you go now,” she says.

  “No, Mom. Wait.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Silence. Wind. Cars. My mother proud of me for finally being lost.

  “Did you get ahold of your mom?” Hunter says, suddenly and miraculously cheerful.

  “Yeah,” I say, handing him the phone, offering nothing more. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to think about it. “Did you get ahold of God?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did.” Hunter grins, and I’m pretty sure he’s serious.

  * * *

  “Is this Chicago?” I say.

  “This crap? No way.”

  “Is this Chicago?” I say fifteen minutes later.

  “Jesus, Kinsey. We’re still in the suburbs. We’re in the suburbs of the suburbs.”

  The buildings keep getting taller and taller and the houses closer together.

  “This is called stop-and-go traffic,” Hunter says, my cynical tour guide. “It means we’re almost there.”

  I feel silly being so excited. I’m practically breathless. My face is glued to the window. I know I look ridiculous, but for now, I don’t care. How sad is it that driving through suburbs feels like the most exciting thing I’ve ever done?

  “That apartment building is huge,” I say. “How can ­people live like that?” A series of massive window-dotted concrete blocks at least twenty stories tall block the horizon.

  “Those are the housing projects,” Hunter says. “Now we’re in Chicago.”

  The freeway takes us through a poor part of town. We are elevated, cut off from the city by fence and barbed wire, but I can still see the weed-cracked sidewalks, the broken playgrounds, the rows and rows of dilapidated, boarded-up houses. The few people on the sidewalks seem to be moving in slow motion. There’s no point in hurrying if you’ve got nowhere to go.

  “This is Chicago?” I say, unable to hide the disappointment in my voice. My giddiness has been replaced by something like embarrassment. Why did I expect the city to be all sparkling chrome and art museums? Of course people suffer here like they suffer everywhere.

  “This is part of Chicago,” Hunter says. “I’m trying to get through it as fast as I can.”

  “We don’t have to rush,” I say. “I’m not in a hurry to get anywhere.” He turns to me and gives me a funny smile, and I realize how out of character that was of me to say.

  “Good girl,” he says.

  “Don’t patronize me.” That just makes him smile bigger.

  We crawl along the freeway half an hour longer. The residential area gives way to office buildings that get taller and fancier until the sky opens up for a brief moment, revealing in the distance the tallest of them all.

  “Is that the Sears Tower?”

  “Yep,” Hunter says with, I think, a tinge of pride. “Second tallest building in North America, after the new World Trade Center in New York. Except it’s technically called the Willis Tower now. But no one calls it that.”

  “Are we going there?”

  “Nope,” he says, then suddenly changes lanes and gets off at the next exit.

  We weave through city streets, a mix of retail, offices, apartments, and condos. I can’t imagine living on top of ­people like this, knowing that just under you are floors of people eating, sleeping, bathing, having sex, literally feet away doing all these intimate things, separated by just inches of drywall or brick or concrete. Everything is so tidy—the trees are young and trimmed, poking out of the sidewalk through perfectly round holes of dirt. The only flowers grow out of boxes or heavy pots. Hedges frame apartment building doorways with perfectly chiseled ninety-degree angles. Everything, as far as the eye can see, was planned by someone.

  “And here we are on the Magnificent Mile,” Hunter an­nounces, turning onto a busy street. “The only magnificent thing about it is there’s lots of expensive shit to waste your money on. But the Museum of Contemporary Art is a few blocks over there, and it actually is pretty magnificent.”

  “Are we going there?”

  “Maybe tomorrow. Tonight we have plans.”

  “What plans?”

  “You’ll see.” He taps on the steering wheel in time to the music on the stereo.

  Women in high heels totter down the sidewalk carrying shopping bags marked with labels I recognize from the fashion magazines Camille loved. These are not the kind of stores they have at the mall an hour away from Wellspring.

  Hunter opens his window and yells, “Consume! Consume!” at the top of his lungs.

  “Hunter!” I scold, though I’m not sure why. It’s my instinct to not want to make too much noise, to not draw attention to myself. But right now, we’re on the move, anonymous, in a big city. Right now, none of my usual fears seem to matter.

  “Woo hoo!” he shouts. “Hello, Chicago! Kinsey, say hello to Chicago.”

  “Hello, Chicago,” I say.

  “That’s all? You’re in the big city for the first time in your life and all you have is that wimpy ‘Hello, Chicago’?”

  “Hello, Chicago,” I say louder. I can feel my face getting hot with embarrassment. Why should I be embarrassed? Who am I afraid is going to see me?

  Hunter opens my window with his controls. “Now out the window,” he commands. “Really tell Chicago how happy you are to meet her.”

  “Hello, Chicago!” I yell out my window.

  “Hello, Chicago!” Hunter yells out of his.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Chicago!” I yell, then start laughing. A woman with giant boobs and a bad fake tan squints at us from the sidewalk, and her equally badly tanned boyfriend yells, “Shut up!” but I don’t even care. I’m in Chicago. For the first time in my life, I’m somewhere.

  After blocks and blocks of shiny retail, we cross over a small bridge, take a left, and are s
uddenly at the foot of Lake Michigan. “Oh, wow,” I say. The tall buildings of downtown are to our right, the endless expanse of blue at our left, and we are tiny, driving straight through the middle.

  “Pretty awesome, huh?” Hunter says.

  “The lake looks so different from this side. It’s so much more . . .” I search for the right word.

  “Magnificent.” Hunter finishes my thought.

  He starts pointing in various directions, listing all the places within a few blocks of where we are—the Navy Pier, Millennium Park, the Art Institute, Buckingham Fountain, Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, the Field Museum. “If you want to go to an art museum, it should definitely be the Art Institute. It’ll blow your mind. There’s a traveling exhibit there right now I really want to see.”

  “Is that a jogging trail?” I say, pointing to the left.

  “Yeah,” Hunter says. “That thing goes on forever. The best part is where it goes through this like bird sanctuary where there are some cool sculptures and a pretty nice beach. My buddies and I used to love getting high out there and walking around.”

  My body suddenly aches for movement. I need to get out of this car. It’s been so long since I’ve run, so long since I’ve felt my lungs and muscles burn. I don’t care if my ankle isn’t completely healed yet. “I need to go for a run,” I say.

  “Not today,” Hunter says, pulling off Lake Shore Drive and onto a side street. “It’s dinnertime.”

  We drive a few blocks as Hunter consults a scrap of paper in his lap. “Aha!” he says, and does the quickest parallel park I’ve ever seen. “We’re here,” he announces, practically glowing. There’s something childlike about his excitement, something pure.

  We carry our bags to the front door and Hunter presses an apartment button. “We don’t want any!” calls a scratchy voice over the intercom.

  “Well, you’re gonna get some anyway,” says Hunter with a grin. The buzzer sounds and we climb the stairs to the third floor.

  A tall and very handsome black guy in an apron greets us with a huge smile. He and Hunter embrace for what seems like a long time for a dude hug, and I can’t help smiling a little at yet another one of Hunter’s surprising quirks—the photography, the reading highbrow books, the possibly ­praying in a roadside chapel, and now this open affection for a male friend.