I almost swerve off the road. “What did you say?”
“Huh?” Terry says.
“Hunter, did you just hear what Terry said?”
“I stopped listening to Terry several miles ago.”
“Terry, what did you just say?”
He looks at me, perplexed. “I don’t remember. If you haven’t noticed, I just sort of talk all the time. I don’t really pay attention to what I’m saying.”
Sweat pours down my face, and my legs stick to the black leather seat. My brain is probably boiling inside my skull, becoming a mushy stew. It is so hot I’m hallucinating.
“Terry,” Hunter says from the backseat. “Why the hell are you wearing that scarf?”
“My granny made it.”
“It’s over a hundred degrees. Don’t you think your granny would want you to take it off? Just looking at you is making me ill.”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh shit,” Hunter says. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t kill her. Or at least I don’t think you did. You don’t seem like the killing type to me. She had old-timers’ disease. The one where you forget stuff and then you die. I took care of her for a long time. Then the hospital did because I’m no doctor, in case you didn’t notice. Then she died. But she never forgot how to knit, even after she forgot who I was. So even when she couldn’t talk anymore and was peeing her pants all the time, she still kept knitting. It’s not the prettiest thing, I’ll admit. I didn’t say she could knit well. I mean, how well can a person possibly knit when they’re busy peeing their pants? It still smells like her. Not like pee, like her skin. Without pee on it.”
“What about your parents?” I say. Maybe it’s the heat and I don’t have the energy for blind hatred, or maybe it’s his sad story, but I feel a sudden warmth toward Terry, like maybe I don’t want to leave him on the side of the road anymore.
“Oh, they were already dead. Meth lab explosion when I was five. I’m not even kidding. Cross my heart and pinkie swear. There should be a reality show about me!”
“I’d watch it,” Hunter says.
“The worst part was cutting her toenails. Old people feet are gross. No offense, Granny, may you rest in peace. The nails just keep growing and growing, all thick and yellow-like. Did you know that nails keep growing after you die? So my granny’s in the ground with some long fingernails and toes. But not my mom and dad or your friend because they burned up.”
“You did it again!” I say. “You said something about Camille!”
“Kinsey, you’re tripping,” Hunter says.
“I don’t know anyone named Camille. Pretty name though. If I was a girl, I’d like my name to be Camille. Sometimes I wish I was a girl. After Granny forgot who I was, she kept thinking I was a girl. The nurses thought it was funny. I liked it when she called me ‘she.’ Do you think you get manicures in heaven? I hope so. Like there’s angels there that go around with their little lunch boxes full of colors, and you’re sitting on a vibrating cloud chair? That would be great. I never got one before. I tried but Cathy, the lady in town who cuts hair out of her trailer, she wouldn’t do it since I’m a boy and all. Oh well. Hey, did you know that I have a lot of money now? Because of my granny’s life insurance policy?”
“Terry, you shouldn’t tell people that,” I say. “They might take advantage of you.”
Terry sighs loud, melodramatically. “What I wouldn’t give to be taken advantage of.”
After a moment of silence, Hunter laughs. Then Terry laughs. Then the two of them are chuckling together like old friends, and I know something was just funny but I can’t bring myself to feel it. So I just keep driving while they laugh without me, my sweat pooling beneath me on the leather seat.
“Terry, my friend,” Hunter says. “You’re like pathologically cheerful. It’s not natural.”
“What choice do I have?” he says, then sticks his head out the window, closes his eyes, and grins.
* * *
“Oh no!” Terry cries. “It’s closed!”
His face is smashed against the front-door window of Wall Drug. The sign says it closes at 9:00 p.m. It is currently 9:13. We’re just barely out of the Badlands and the cooler temperatures of the Black Hills are still so far away.
“Maybe we can go in the morning,” Hunter says, patting Terry on the back.
“Promise?”
“Sure. Yeah.”
It’s Monday night, and the only things open in town are a cheap motel, a gas station, and an all-night diner.
“Guess we’re splurging on a room tonight,” Hunter says.
“Good thing I’m rich,” Terry says.
A bell rings off-key when we enter the motel office, which smells like burned coffee and sweaty socks. The windows are steamy and an old TV in the corner is turned to the Home Shopping Network. Bulletproof glass separates us from the front desk.
Hunter dings the bell on our side of the bulletproof glass. A small, hunched creature comes lurching out of a dark back room.
“How can I help you?” the person says with a croaking, indefinable accent. His (or her) face is droopy and unmoving on the left side, that eye bulging out like a frog’s.
“Do you have any rooms?”
“One left. Two queen beds.”
“Ooh, cozy,” says Terry.
“Forty-nine ninety-nine. Complimentary bar of soap.”
“Do you have a cot or something we can use?”
“A what?”
“A cot.”
He/she just looks at me like I’m speaking a different language.
“Nonsmoking?” I say.
“All rooms are smoking.”
“We’ll take it,” Terry says, slapping his ripped and bulging pink wallet on the counter.
To say the room is disgusting would be an understatement. Everything is old and dingy and unmatching, with cheap aluminum ashtrays on every surface and sad faded decorations from the 1970s. It smells like a mix of decades-old cigarette smoke and heavy-duty, probably toxic, cleansers. I try to open a window but they’re all painted shut.
“I’m not sleeping in those sheets,” Hunter says.
I press on the bed and it is nothing but squeaky, loose springs. My hand feels immediately dirty. I go to the bathroom to wash my hands and there, as promised, is the complimentary bar of soap wrapped in plastic. I look at myself in the cracked mirror and what I see scares me. It could be the fluorescent lights, it could be a combination of poor sleep and so many days on the road, but I look disturbingly like someone who belongs in a place like this. Disheveled. Broken. Lost.
“I can’t tell if I’m hungry or if this place has made me lose my appetite,” Hunter says.
“I’m starving,” Terry says.
“Let’s go to the diner,” I say from the bathroom, attempting to pull my hair into a tidier ponytail. “It can’t be much worse than this.”
The night is black and violent. The hot wind howls apocalyptically and seems to grab at us from all directions, more like hands than air. A small child could be lost in this kind of weather; if you let go, he’d be swept away to disappear into the night with all the other garbage.
The diner is empty. A faded sign on the wall reads DOT’S DINER. It has been decorated to look like something nostalgic out of the 1950s, with red-and-white-checkered tabletops and red vinyl booths, except all the booths are ripped, exposing yellow cigarette-smoke-stained stuffing; the linoleum floor is peeling; and the ancient jukebox in the corner is empty of records and isn’t even plugged in.
“Let’s leave,” I say, suddenly feeling so depressed I can barely stand. But Terry is already spinning in circles on a stool at the counter.
An ancient, wiry woman pops out from the back. “Hi there!” she says way too cheerfully. Her hair is blue in the way only old ladies’
hair can be blue, done up in a rat’s-nest bouffant that appears to be held together by about a pound of bobby pins and a gallon of hair spray. Her face is caked with makeup, as if it’s been spackled on over the years, layers and layers of it, applied with the expertise of a toddler. She’s wearing a short skirt that might have been cute on someone fifty years younger, but all it does for her is show off her wrinkled knees and spider veins and orange-tinged support hose.
“You’re in for a treat,” she says. “You got me all to yourselves tonight.”
I want to flee.
“Great! Are you Dot? My name’s Terry. Pleased to meet you.”
“I’m Cindy,” she says. “But you can call me anything you want.” She winks at Hunter. “Sit wherever. But if you sit at the counter you get to talk to me.” She smiles big and reveals a huge pink smear of lipstick on her cracked yellow teeth.
“I’m staying here then,” Terry says, but Hunter slides into a booth and I join him. “Don’t worry, Dot,” Terry whispers. “It’s not that they don’t want to talk to you. They have some things to work out. You know, lovers’ quarrel.”
I open my mouth to protest, but realize it’s not worth it. Hunter and I sit at the booth, facing each other but not looking up. I pretend to be looking at my menu, but mostly I’m wishing I had gone straight to bed instead of coming here.
“Where’s the cook?” Terry says.
“You’re looking at her,” says the waitress.
“Where’s the dishwasher?”
“That’s me.”
“You’re here all alone?”
“Yep.”
“Aren’t you lonely? What if you get busy and you need help? Are you scared? Is it safe? Should I be worried about you, Dot?”
“I’m a tough cookie.”
“Will you make me some pancakes?”
“Absolutely.”
“And a chocolate milk shake?”
“Coming right up.”
“I like your positive attitude, Dot. You remind me of my granny. That’s like the biggest compliment I could ever give you.”
“Well, thanks, sweetie. What about your quiet friends over there? Are you two eating? Or are you just going to stare at your hands and not talk to each other while Terry eats the best pancakes of his life?”
“I’ll have pancakes, too,” Hunter says. “And bacon.”
“Same,” I say, too tired to even think about what I want to eat.
We sit there in silence, our heads turned to watch Cindy’s back as she pours what looks like a cup of oil on the already greasy grill. She whistles while Terry drums off rhythm with his silverware. It’s excruciating. I don’t care about the pancakes. I don’t even care about the bacon. I want out of here. I can’t stand being so close to someone I feel so far away from.
“I have something I need to ask you, Kinsey,” Hunter says severely, as if he’s reading my mind, as if he too is obsessing on what has happened between us in the last few days. Part of me desperately wants to talk, to answer whatever question he’s about to ask me, but part of me still wants to run.
“What?” I say, instantly tensing, readying for war.
There’s a dramatic pause. Bacon sizzles and fills the diner with its intoxicating aroma. Terry’s stool squeaks as he spins around and around. I turn my head and look Hunter in the eye.
He looks at me very seriously, then finally speaks: “Was that person in the hotel office a man or a woman?”
I blink. Then he smiles. Then I smile. “I was wondering the same thing,” I say.
Cindy delivers our food, two plates stacked with pancakes and bacon swimming in grease. Hunter and I thank her and start eating and I’ve never tasted anything so delicious and disgusting in my life.
We eat quietly for a few minutes, but the silence is not as uncomfortable as before. Something is salvageable. A chasm has been crossed between us; our lonely worlds have touched.
“What are we even fighting about?” I say after a few bites.
He takes a bite of his bacon and chews as he considers this question. “We’re fighting over which one of us is the most broken.”
The sad truth of this sinks in. “So which one of us is the winner?” I say.
“We both lose.”
I pick at my food. I press the pancakes with my fork and watch them absorb the grease and butter and fake maple syrup like sponges.
“The way I see it,” Hunter says, “we have three options. One, we can spend the rest of this trip not talking to each other. Two, we can be polite and talk bullshit small talk. Or three, we can get real.”
“I’m guessing you’d prefer the third option.”
“Don’t you?”
I honestly don’t know. I know I’m sick of our silence, but I also know I don’t want to tell him the truth about Camille, the truth about how crazy I am. I don’t want to talk about me.
“Okay,” I say. “Fine. Let’s get real. Were you trying to die when you took all that Valium?”
“No,” he says automatically, then looks down at his plate. After a moment, he looks up at me. “Maybe,” he says. “But not consciously. I don’t remember a whole lot. I don’t remember what I was thinking most of the time.”
“What do you remember? What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I remember knowing I had gone too far. I was sitting in the car and all I could see was black, and it felt like my world was so small, just a black box that I was never getting out of, and it kept getting smaller and smaller until I couldn’t move. I remember trying to move my arms and not being able to. I tried to call to you, but I couldn’t make a sound. It was getting hard to breathe. The last thing I remember thinking was, ‘Oh shit, I really fucked up.’”
“I don’t understand how that can happen,” I say. “Unless you really want to die.”
“I lost track of how much I had taken, so I kept taking more.”
“But don’t you feel it? Doesn’t your body tell you when it’s enough?”
“It’s never enough,” Hunter says. “That’s the problem.”
We sit there in silence while Cindy scrapes the grill clean and Terry tells her about everything he wants to see at Wall Drug. Somehow their being here seems to be making this conversation possible, like we trust that nothing too bad can happen with them as witnesses.
“There’s no in-between, you know?” Hunter says. “There’s no space between too fucked-up and not fucked-up enough. That’s the place I keep looking for, the place I’ve always looked for, the perfect spot where everything feels just right. But it doesn’t exist. And I know that. But I keep looking for it anyway.”
“You were talking to her,” I say. “To Camille.” It hurts to say her name. “When you were half-conscious. Do you remember?”
“No.”
“Did you see her? Was she there? Was she talking to you?”
He looks at me strangely, and I realize I’m acting too eager, too excited. “What? You want to know if her ghost came to welcome me to the world of the dead?”
Yes, that’s exactly what I want to know. It sounds so stupid when he says it. He laughs the question off.
“Now your turn,” he says.
“What?”
“You know what. On the cliff. Were you trying to die?”
I don’t know the answer. I don’t know who it was that decided to hike to the top of the quarry, who decided to step over that fence.
“I don’t know,” I tell him, and I know it’s the exact thing he doesn’t want to hear.
“Oh, come on, Kinsey. I talked.”
“But it’s the truth. I don’t know what I was doing there.”
“You were going to jump. I saw you. You were walking toward the edge. If I had gotten there ten seconds later, you’d be vulture food at the bottom of that quarry.”
“I wa
sn’t going to jump,” I say, but I know it is a lie.
“Yeah, you were just looking at the view,” he says, disgusted. “Cindy, can we get our bill?”
“No can do, handsome,” she says. “Your friend here already paid. He’s a real high-roller.”
“Thanks, Terry,” I say, and start to get up.
“Are you even capable of being real?” Hunter demands, grabbing my hand and forcing me back down. “Are you even aware of all the ways you’re in denial?”
“Denial?” I say too loudly. “You’re asking me about denial?”
“I’m talking about Camille. You can barely even say her name out loud, but I know you think about her all the time. You think if you die you get to be with her again?”
I shake my head, trying to knock his words out of my ears. But no matter what I do, I can’t unhear them. “No,” I say, choking on the lie.
“Talk to me.”
“I can’t.” I try to pull my hand away, but he holds on tighter.
“Yes you can. You’ve talked to me before.”
It’s true, but now he is too close. If I let him in any more, he’s going to see too much. He’s going to see something that’s going to scare him, something that will make him go away.
“I’m tired,” I say, looking away. What a cop-out. Everything I say and do anymore is a cop-out.
He sighs and drops my hand. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m tired too.” And I know how to complete that sentence; I know the words he thought but didn’t say: I’m tired of you, Kinsey.
Hunter’s the first to walk out the door.
Terry gives Cindy a big hug and says, “I’ll never forget you, Dot,” then runs out the door after Hunter. Then it’s just me and Cindy and the aftermath of our conversation.
“Something else for you, honey?”
“No thanks,” I say, getting up.
FOURTEEN
I thought sleeping in my sleeping bag would make me feel cleaner, but all it did was remind me how dirty my sleeping bag is. The air conditioner rattled and groaned all night long. I would have almost preferred sleeping in the car on the side of the road.