Damaged

  But worse was my regret. Worse was wishing I could redo our conversation in the diner, wishing I was brave enough to tell Hunter the truth. Terry fell asleep on the couch immediately, so lucky to have nothing rattling around in his strange head to keep him up at night. It took me forever to fall asleep. The three feet of floor between Hunter’s and my bed wasn’t enough, but it was also too much. I wanted to reach out and touch him. I wanted to crawl into his bed and wrap his arms around me. I wanted him to make me warm.

  We make good on Hunter’s promise and go to Wall Drug before we get on the road. I sit in the restaurant section staring at half a doughnut while Terry runs around the place like a maniac and Hunter does who knows what. I have the familiar toxic feeling in my gut, the combination of sugar for breakfast and the agonizing push and pull of wanting and fearing the same thing. And what that thing is, I can’t quite define. Is it Hunter I want? Or do I just need to speak, to tell the truth to someone, anyone? Do I want a warm body? Do I just need someone to be close to, and he’s the one who happens to be here?

  Or maybe Hunter has nothing to do with it. Maybe Camille has nothing to do with it. Maybe I’m going crazy and it’s as simple as that.

  I am so sick of all these maybes.

  “Hey, Kinsey!” Terry yells, and falls into the booth. He is soaking wet. His scarf looks like an animal that died by drowning.

  “Why are you wet?”

  “The Train Station Water Show. It’s out back. You want to see it?”

  “No thanks.”

  He holds up a handful of stuffed plastic bags. “I got souvenirs,” he says proudly.

  “You shouldn’t waste all your money like that. It’s not going to last forever. You should save it for something important.”

  “I’m not wasting it,” he says with conviction. “These are memories. They are important.” He starts pulling out his treasures and displaying them proudly on the table: a stack of postcards, a kid’s picture book about gold mining, a cheap imitation turquoise necklace, a set of plastic cowboys, a huge shiny belt buckle, a handful of colorful rocks, a souvenir ­thimble, a couple of T-shirts, and tons and tons of candy.

  “What is this?” I ask, pointing to a stuffed animal that appears to be a rabbit with antlers.

  “That’s a jackalope,” Terry says. “Duh.”

  “Hey,” Hunter says, sitting down next to Terry with a giant cup of coffee.

  “Did you see the T. rex?” Terry says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did it scare you?”

  “Totally.”

  “Are you going to eat that?” Terry says, pointing to the half doughnut in front of me.

  “Nope, knock yourself out.”

  “Ready to go?” Hunter says.

  “Wait one minute,” Terry says, stuffing a piece of fudge in his mouth before he’s even done chewing the doughnut. “I’ve asked to see the manager. Oh, goody, here he comes.”

  A pale girl in an apron leads a fat man with a clipboard over to the table. “Larisa said you asked to see me,” the man says. “Is everything all right?” The girl named Larisa shifts on her feet, frightened.

  “Hunter and Kinsey, this is Larisa. She’s from Latvia.” Her name tag does indeed say, “Larisa, Latvia.”

  “Do you have a complaint?” the man says, his fake smile showing the beginnings of impatience. “Was the hospitality you received from Larisa less than satisfactory?”

  “No!” Terry says. “I love Larisa! I love everything about this place!”

  Larisa blushes and looks around, as if for an escape route. The manager stands there blinking.

  “I just wanted to tell you that,” Terry says.

  “Tell me what?”

  “That you’re doing a great job.”

  The manager blinks some more.

  “Also, I have an idea. I met a bunch of your wonderful employees today. Larisa from Latvia, Boris from Serbia, Maria from the Philippines. I was thinking a great way to make sure your visitors get to know them a little better would be to make a game, like a scavenger hunt kind of, where you have a scorecard and you have to go around and find each employee and ask them a personal question, like how do you like working at Wall Drug? Or how do you like living in America? Or what do you want to be when you grow up? What is your favorite TV show? Are you right- or left-handed? And when you get all the answers, you bring your scorecard to the gift shop and you get a prize, like a T-shirt or a coffee cup or something.”

  Hunter slaps Terry on the back and laughs. “I for one think that’s a great idea.”

  “Thank you, Hunter.”

  “Is that all?” the manager says.

  “Also, this fudge is great. And the T. rex almost made me pee my pants.”

  Oh, what I wouldn’t give to live inside Terry’s blissful, unsullied mind.

  * * *

  As we climb into the Black Hills, the temperature drops down to a reasonable level. With it, Hunter’s and my spirits rise, and we seem to forget that we still haven’t completely made up. Terry finds a radio station with cheesy old pop ballads, and we all sing along at the top of our lungs, serenading the rocky crags of South Dakota.

  “I’ve never had my own phone,” Terry says as he fiddles with Hunter’s cell phone, which has been on airplane mode for days.

  “Me neither,” I say.

  “How do I get on the Internet?”

  “You have to turn airplane mode off.”

  “Airplane mode?” Terry says. “But we’re in a car.”

  “Why do you want to get on the Internet?” Hunter says.

  “Why don’t I want to get on the Internet?” Terry answers. “It’s the information highway, Hunter. Get with the program.”

  I show Terry how to turn the phone on and it immediately starts dinging with text messages.

  “Do you want to read these?” Terry asks.

  “Nope.”

  “There’s like twenty messages.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “What if there’s something important?”

  “Fine, then you read them to me.”

  “What if there’s something private?”

  “I keep no secrets from you, Terry.”

  “Well, I’m honored,” he says. He starts scrolling through the messages. “The first one’s from someone named His Majesty. Who’s that?”

  “My dad.”

  “Your dad’s a king?”

  “He thinks he is.”

  “Well, he says, ‘Turn your ass around and come home right now.’” In Terry’s übercheerful, Midwestern drawl, the demand sounds comical.

  Hunter laughs. “No thanks, Dad.”

  “‘I mean it.’”

  “Ha.”

  “This is fun!” Terry says. “It’s like role-playing.”

  “What else, Dad?”

  “‘Your mom’s worried sick.’”

  “Oh, that’s a nice touch.”

  “Your mom probably is worried sick,” I say, not liking where this is going, not finding this amusing at all.

  “Next,” is all Hunter says.

  “‘You’ve been nothing but a disappointment from the day you were born,’” Terry reads. “Oh, that’s not nice at all.”

  Hunter stays silent.

  “I don’t want to read any more,” Terry says.

  “Keep going.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Keep going.”

  I don’t know what the point of this is. I don’t know what he’s trying to prove. Is this the way he works through things? Making himself hurt for no reason?

  “‘You know you’re probably not even my son,’” Terry reads carefully. “‘My son would never be this stupid. Ask your dumb whore of a mother.’” Then Terry starts crying.

  Hunter reaches
over, calmly plucks the phone out of Terry’s hand, opens his window, and throws it onto the freeway.

  “Oops,” he says.

  “Now we don’t have a phone,” I say.

  “Now we don’t have a phone,” Hunter says.

  “Why is your dad so mean?” Terry cries.

  “What if we need it?” I say.

  “Who are you going to call, Kinsey? Your mom?”

  I don’t know if he was trying to hurt me, but all I feel is numb. No, I’m not going to call my mom. Who else is there? Camille is dead. There’s no one left. I’m attached to no one. The weight of that takes my breath away.

  “You know what’s funny?” I say.

  “What?” Hunter says.

  “You’re probably the only one of us who actually has someone looking for you.”

  “That’s not funny at all,” says Terry.

  “I’m totally alone. So are you. So is Terry. We all are.”

  “That’s silly,” Terry says. “How can we be alone if we’re all sitting right here in the same car?” He reaches back and takes my hand, and for some reason I let him. His skinny long ­fingers wrap around mine and I don’t let go. We drive like that for miles.

  Signs for Mount Rushmore, a reptile zoo, a dinosaur park, and several other tourist attractions dot the highway as the desolation of southern South Dakota transforms into Rapid City. In the silence of the car, during a short lull in Terry’s monologue and without the music on Hunter’s phone, it hits me that I haven’t seen or heard from Camille for quite a while. In all that time, I barely even noticed. I should be thrilled, relieved, something. I should feel something. Wasn’t that the whole point of this trip? To stop the hauntings? To stop the nightmares? So why does it suddenly seem like it’s about something entirely different, something that is not at all about Camille?

  Where is she? Have I really outrun her? Is this too far for a ghost to travel? Is she fading the farther I get from home, the closer I get to my destination? Or maybe it has something to do with getting closer to Hunter. Maybe letting him in is pushing her out.

  But she’s not gone. Not completely, not yet. I can still feel her presence. I can feel her watching me, laughing silently to herself.

  “FAIR!” Terry screams.

  The car swerves. “Jesus, Terry,” Hunter snaps. “Don’t shout like that. I almost drove off the road.”

  Terry is beside himself, practically crawling over the back of his seat to get a better look at the sign we just passed.

  “County fair!” he cries. “Right NOW.” He is breathless. He is so excited he can barely speak. “Right there!” He points and we all look. In the distance are the fairgrounds, packed with tents and rides and acres of parking.

  “Please, Hunter,” Terry says so softly and earnestly, it pulls at my heart a little despite how ridiculous the idea is. His eyes are glassy with yearning. “The sign said there was a rodeo.”

  I can tell Hunter is trying not to laugh. We share a moment of smiling eye contact in the rearview mirror.

  “Okay, Terry,” he says. “If it means so much to you, we’ll go to the fair.”

  Terry practically jumps into his lap with a hug.

  * * *

  The parking lot is full of trucks. Terry jumps out of the car and wraps his scarf around his neck with a swish, and I instinctively scan the area to see if anyone was looking. This is the kind of place where bad things happen to guys like Terry.

  “Elephant ears!” he cries, and runs ahead to a rusty old box on wheels housing a girl and a deep fryer.

  I see cowboy hats everywhere. Plaid shirts. Belt ­buckles. Stiff jeans. Boots. A young girl leads a tiny cow proudly through the crowd and people look on approvingly. We pass a tent that says POULTRY AND SMALL ANIMALS, where people sit around on folding chairs to watch the judging of chickens.

  “You guys!” Terry runs up breathlessly, his face sticky with cinnamon and sugar, his elephant ear already half gone. “There’s a rodeo happening right now.”

  “Then we better go to the rodeo,” says Hunter.

  We take our seats behind a family of rowdy boys high on cotton candy. As Hunter and Terry cheer and yell with the rest of the crowd, I watch the mother, beside herself, begging her sons to stop climbing on the bleachers. Her husband is no help. He sips on his giant Mountain Dew between spits of chewing tobacco, yelling various obscenities; at whom, I’m not quite sure. The rodeo rider? His horse? The calf he’s trying to rope? The boys are all tiny versions of their father, in dirty sleeveless T-shirts and ragged jeans, their sinewy, frenetic arms constantly grabbing, hitting, pulling. The only thing they’re missing is his collection of faded, globular tattoos. An American flag. A pinup girl. A beer can. An Aryan-looking Jesus. Their necks are all sunburned red.

  I can hear my mom’s voice in my head saying, “Look, they really do have red necks,” with her judgmental snarl. But then I realize I was thinking the same thing. I’m no better than her. I’m no better than any of these people. And then another realization hits me—I may never hear her actual voice again. She could be in Italy right now. She may never come back. I may never see her again.

  The crowd roars as the cowboy ropes up the calf’s legs. A blond woman in an American flag bikini rides sidesaddle around the arena on a white horse, holding a flag with the event’s sponsor’s logo on it. For a moment, I picture Camille in her place. I’m sure they started out in life much the same, as pretty, horse-loving girls from small towns. And now this girl is the lucky one simply for being alive, despite the fact that she’s riding around half-naked in a pit of mud and horse shit, bombarded by whistles and catcalls.

  “Oh, I love this one,” Terry says as the next event is announced over the loudspeaker. I can see a rider being prepped behind a metal fence. “This is the one with the bucking broncos.”

  A bell buzzes and the crowd erupts as the horse and rider are released. Terry gasps. The man is a real-life cowboy, with tasseled chaps and a big black hat, his right arm raised for balance while the left holds on to the reins for dear life. The horse bucks and writhes, but still he holds on, his body undulating with the horse’s violent jerks. His face is stone concentration. When he’s finally kicked off, he lands gracefully on his feet and glides to the fence.

  “I love him,” Terry says breathlessly, hands clasped at his chest.

  “Terry, don’t talk so loud,” I whisper-shout.

  He doesn’t hear me. His eyes are glued to the rider being led out of the area by the bikini woman, the fence flanked by adoring fans.

  “I’m starving,” Hunter announces. “Let’s go get some food.” I have to shake Terry out of his daze and pull him to his feet.

  After a lunch of corn dogs, French fries, and nachos and an unwise ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl, we lie on our backs in a grass field by the stables, trying to stop the spinning. The clouds are fluffy sculptures above us, morphing into animals, faces, entire landscapes.

  “The good news is I don’t think I’m going to puke anymore,” Terry says.

  “I’m not there yet,” I groan, squeezing my eyes shut with a new wave of nausea.

  “This is almost as bad as a hangover,” Hunter says.

  “This reminds me of being a baby,” Terry says.

  “You don’t remember being a baby,” I say.

  “Sure I do. I remember lying in my crib like this, looking up at the ceiling.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I had one of those light show things that make stars spin around in the dark.”

  “Sounds like a bad acid trip,” Hunter says.

  “Terry, what are you talking about?” I say.

  “You know, those things people put in baby nurseries. Like there’s a lightbulb inside a box, and the box has all these cutouts of stars or animals and stuff on the sides, and there’s a motor inside that makes it spin around an
d the light shines through and the cutouts dance around the room. Like shadow puppets.”

  A bluegrass band starts playing somewhere in the distance. A woman’s voice calls out bingo numbers.

  “The lightbulb is like your brain, see?” Terry continues. “And the cutout patterns around it are like all the stuff your subconscious wants you to see, all your fears and self-hatred and misery and mistakes, and maybe sometimes if you refuse to see them, your brain does something to force you to. Like it turns the lightbulb on and puts on a light show so you can’t ignore it anymore. It projects all the stuff around you so you’ll see it, except it gets all distorted and warped and magnified as it wraps around the furniture and walls and your stuffed animals and everything, so it turns out way bigger and scarier than it really is. But the light show isn’t real. All it really is is shadows.”

  Someone somewhere yells, “Bingo!”

  “Frankly, I don’t know what babies see in those things. I think they’re terrifying and I’m practically a grown-up.”

  “Terry,” Hunter says. “You have a fascinating mind.”

  Terry reaches over and grabs my hand. Again, I feel an uncanny, instant comfort. I turn my head and his pale blue eyes are looking right at me. He speaks to me directly when he says, “If you’re lonely enough, even a ghost will keep you company.”

  I shiver as Terry’s eyes bore into me. I have to look away.

  “I think you need to stay off the sugar for a while,” Hunter says.

  My heart pounds in my chest. For a moment, I feel weightless, airborne, as if I’ve been picked up and thrown. Terry is still looking at me, his eyes warm and somehow ancient. His hand squeezes mine, and for some reason that’s the thing that breaks me. Just that simple gesture and my eyes are waterfalls. Tears pool in my ears. If I stay on the ground like this, I will drown. The sadness will wash me away.

  “I need to walk,” I say. I sit up too fast and am instantly dizzy.

  “Good idea,” Hunter says. I wipe my face clean before he has a chance to notice the tears.

  “I’m going to the stables,” Terry says. “I’m going to see if I can get that cowboy’s autograph.”

  “Are you sure?” I say, feeling a fierce need to protect him, to wrap him up and keep him safe. But there’s also another feeling, like all the rules I’m used to have been turned upside down—maybe his presence is making me safe.