I’ll Meet You There

  The afternoon had gone gray, and wind was battering the trailer, the gusts sending thick, dark clouds that promised rain. Usually I loved the few rainy days we had in Creek View, but it felt like a bad omen.

  “Great. I’ll probably be getting soaked all night helping stranded travelers into their rooms,” I muttered.

  “And I’ll have a bunch of gringos with car problems,” he said. “Just wait until you, too, wear the honorable orange tunic.”

  “Don’t remind me,” I said.

  Chris was wearing the offensively bright orange Pump and Go shirt that I’d be putting on for the first time in just a few days. I’d gone into the gas station that morning, telling myself that getting a second job meant I was taking control of the situation at home. I filled out the application, chatted with the manager, and became a weekend clerk ten minutes later.

  “So I’m guessing I shouldn’t mention that I thought the whole reason you went into P&G was to get your madre a job.”

  I sighed. “That was the plan, but we need cash now, you know? And she’s … I just thought it would be better to get more work for me, then I’ll find something for her.”

  “Sky.”

  I looked over at him, and he made the wash-your-hands-of-her motion. I shook my head.

  “Not possible,” I said. “C’mon, you know that.”

  I stood up and grabbed the address book with the faded daisies on it that we’d had pretty much all my life and turned to the E’s for Celia Evans. The address book was mostly empty—neither of my parents had had many friends, and we were out of touch with all of our family, so the numbers were mostly for coworkers and neighbors.

  I pushed through the pages. Looked again. One more time.

  “It’s gone,” I said, staring at the book. I could feel the panic spreading from my gut up to my chest. Choking me.

  “What’s gone?”

  “My aunt Celia.”

  I held up the address book, open to where the entry had been: an empty page with the torn remnants of another page beside it.

  “Hell,” he said.

  I threw the address book against the wall, and it slid under the couch, where it would probably stay forever. Chris took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s officially bad.”

  “It’s been officially bad for weeks,” I snapped.

  Seriously, Chris could be such an idiot sometimes. It was like the closer he got to leaving Creek View, the more clueless he became. A few months ago, he would have been freaking out on my behalf.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “It’s cool.” He sat there for an awkward few seconds, then stood up and pulled me close for a hug. But I didn’t want that. Didn’t want him. When had Chris and Dylan stopped being enough?

  But I knew. I could pinpoint the exact moment. Damn bottles.

  I stepped back, out of Chris’s arms. “I don’t care if she’s sleeping. I gotta talk to her about this.”

  “Talk to me about what?”

  Mom.

  I turned around. “Where’s Aunt Celia’s number?”

  She flinched a little, but then shook her head. “We don’t need her.”

  “What are you gonna do when I go to school?” My voice rose, and I could almost feel the weeks of frustration stacking up inside me, waiting for me to shove them all onto her.

  She pulled her robe closer, like it could shield her from reality. “I’m figuring it out. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I do. I worry about you. A lot. I mean, God, look at you! When’s the last time you took a shower?”

  Chris coughed quietly behind me. “Um. Sky, I’m gonna…” He gestured toward the door, and I nodded.

  Neither of us looked at him as he left, but when I heard the door shut, I stepped closer to my mom.

  “Give me her number. Please. I’ll call her. I’ll set everything up. You don’t even have to see her if you don’t want to—”

  “Can’t.” She turned back to her room. “I threw it away.”

  I opened and closed my mouth, suffocating on those three words: threw it away. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been holding on to that one name written in our address book until it was gone.

  “That’s the only family I have!”

  The words rushed up from somewhere inside me that I’d never wanted to look, an ugly abyss where I’d stuffed Dad’s death and Mom’s bad days and those afternoons with Blake when I’d just wanted to lose myself.

  “Did you think about me at all?” I was screaming, spit flying out of my mouth, all the stuff I’d tried to forget pushing up, up.

  “You don’t need family like that!” Her voice came out in a half-articulate screech. “That woman walked away from us. Don’t you remember how she left you standing out front with your dad’s ashes? Just drove off, even though you started running after her. That’s the kind of family you want?”

  And I was right back there. The cold February wind. Dad reduced to a cardboard box with a death certificate taped on top.

  “You were drunk,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  I’d hated that Mrs. Garcia or Dylan’s mom would see us like that, when they came to pay their respects. You gotta have some pride left. Some dignity.

  “That was the worst part. Dad was dead, and you were drunk, and there was no one to help.”

  “That’s not fair,” Mom said. “Anyone in my place would have—”

  “No.” I shook my head. It was like I could finally see that day—and all the years after it. “I was twelve years old. Cleaning up after you, night after night, when you’d had too much to drink. Taking care of the house, doing the laundry, the bills. Calling in sick for you. Making you get out of bed and trying not to take it personally when you kept saying you wanted to die. And now here we are again.”

  She leaned against one of the chairs at the kitchen table. “I know you had it pretty bad, okay?” she said. “I know.”

  “But you don’t. You have no idea what it’s like to grow up without any family and then have the only person left in your life fall apart. At least you had grandparents and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters—”

  “And I ran away from them, Skylar!”

  Her eyes were deer-in-headlights wide, her voice raw from too many cigarettes and too little talking.

  “Okay, but why? Can’t you just—”

  She shook her head, her eyes dark. “No.”

  There was no point in pushing her. I’d never know anything about that side of my family. Even before Dad died, that had been an off-limits topic.

  I had to get us back on track. Aunt Celia—our only hope.

  “But Dad’s family … maybe they’re just waiting for us to, I don’t know, try. Like, maybe they think we don’t want to see them.”

  Mom snorted. “Trust me. They don’t want anything to do with us.”

  “We don’t know that—not for sure.”

  She wouldn’t look at me. She seemed so frail and broken, like she’d given up long ago.

  “Mom, I’ve got nobody but you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, her voice low.

  I was dry kindling, and all I needed was that tiny spark to set me off.

  “That’s the problem!” She flinched as though my words were a whip, and I took a step back. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m … this is just…”

  Why is it that some people in the world get to wake up in beautiful houses with fairly normal parents and enough food in the fridge while the rest of us have to get by on the scraps the universe throws at us? And we gobble them up, so grateful. What the hell are we grateful for?

  I kicked the couch, understanding why Josh had maybe wanted things to shoot at, if only for a little while. I would have felt better, I thought, if the couch were made of flesh and bone. Preferably Billy’s.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “If I can’t call Aunt Celia, and you won’t go up there … I don’t know ho
w we’re gonna make it.”

  Mom placed her hand on the wall to steady herself and bowed her head. “Just leave me alone, Skylar. I want to be alone.”

  She turned around and shuffled back into her bedroom.

  “Mom—”

  The door shut, then I heard the TV turn up. My body slid onto the couch, and I curled into a ball, my eyes shut tight. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and I heard the first raindrops fall onto our metal roof with sharp pings.

  I didn’t have another thought for hours, just let the sound of the rain soak into me. At some point I fell asleep, fighting battles in dreams I couldn’t remember when I woke up.

  chapter fifteen

  Rain slid down the glass door, a thick gray honey that muted the drabness of the Paradise courtyard. It was later that night, after midnight, everything outside cloaked in sinewy darkness. Marge was asleep, and the storm was keeping the guests tucked away inside their rooms, so the lobby was silent, save for the occasional burst of thunder and the rain that pummeled the roof with angry fists of water. I looked past my reflection in the glass door, watching as the pool overflowed and the palms thrashed around like crazed dancers.

  After months of drought, it was strange to see so much water everywhere, all at once. I wondered if I’d come home from my graveyard shift and see the trailer floating toward Los Angeles. Our piece-of-shit excuse for a home would flood and the used appliances and dollar-store decorations would burst through the door and windows, riding on tiny waves. My bras and my mother’s chipped dishes from Goodwill would float merrily down the middle of the highway all the way through the Grapevine, the mountain pass that separated us from LA. I’d collage it—maybe the title would be The Flood: Part II. But I knew it was too much to wish that Creek View would be wiped off the face of the earth forever. The other towns needed us: you can’t have the light without the dark, right? Maybe our darkness was necessary for other people to see their light.

  I went back to tearing up a magazine for Marge’s collage, the feel of paper familiar, soothing. Picasso was right when he said, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” Just as the rain outside drenched Creek View, my art was washing me clean.

  My stomach growled. I ignored it. All I’d had since my meal with Josh the night before was the can of Chef Boyardee in our now-empty pantry. I told myself this was good practice for being a starving artist.

  I laid out a fresh piece of the thick poster board I was using as the collage’s base on the carpet. I was almost finished with my strawberry field—I’d used all kinds of reds to create the tiny berries. It was like a Seurat—not good like a Seurat, but the sort of thing where if you got really close, the picture wouldn’t make sense, but it came into focus with some distance. That was what I hoped, anyway.

  There was a burst of thunder, then a crack of lightning. I closed my eyes for a minute, just listening to the rain and the low voices on the radio, a late-night call-in show. Something bright danced across my eyelids, and I opened them up to see headlights sweep across the lobby wall. I put my collage on the battered table in front of the cat pee couch, then went over to the window to see what poor person the weather had brought down our driveway. Through the sheets of rain, I could just make out Josh’s truck. He’d parked as close as he could get to the entrance and when he saw me at the window, he waved. I held the door open for him while he stumbled in from the storm.

  “You’re soaked,” I said.

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

  “Ever heard of an umbrella?”

  “Umbrellas are for pussies.” Josh shook his body out like a wet dog. “How’s the Sky today?”

  “Chance of rain.”

  I didn’t want to tell him what had happened, but I didn’t want to be fake either—not after our night at the gas station. I walked over to the closet where we kept our towels.

  “One of these days, you’re going to tell me it’s sunny,” he said. His voice had gone soft, like when he grabbed my hand by the pool after I’d told him about my mom.

  I took out three towels and threw them at him, keeping my eyes away from his. “Maybe. What brings you here in the dead of night?”

  I pretended to organize the ancient brochures we had for things to do around the area—tourist traps like vineyard excursions and tractor rides. I needed to give my hands something to do. They kept wanting to touch him.

  “Nine and three have issues with the roof, and I was worried they might start leaking with all this crazy rain. No one’s in those rooms, right?”

  “No. The hippies are still in seven, and there’s a couple in two. That family with the minivan is in one.”

  Their van was at the Mitchells’ shop, and they’d been stuck in Creek View for three days.

  “Sucks to be them,” he said. “My dad ordered the wrong part, and—” He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, we got any buckets around?”

  “I’ll check the storage closet.”

  I walked down the hall to where we kept all the cleaning supplies. I wondered what had really brought him out into the storm: the leak in the roof or me? Because I’d tried to think of a million excuses to come to the Paradise during the day, when he was normally here.

  When I came back with the buckets, he was looking down at my collage.

  “This is awesome. It’s Creek View, right?”

  I nodded, feeling like someone had just read my diary.

  “Yeah. It’s sort of a going-away gift for Marge. I’m gonna do the creek next.” I pointed to the pile of blue paper I’d been collecting. “It’s nothing. I mean, you know, I’m just screwing around. Graveyards are boring as hell.”

  “Can I see it when you finish?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  He picked up the buckets. “Thanks for these. Wish me luck!”

  “Are you sure you want to—”

  He opened the glass door. “Trust me, it’ll be a lot less work in the long run.”

  I watched him hurry across the courtyard. In seconds he was soaked. It was slow going with his leg, and I could tell from his extra-long strides that he was trying to move as fast as he could. Just as Josh made it to the first room, I noticed his keys sitting on the counter.

  I grabbed them and walked up to the glass door. He turned around, realizing his mistake, and I held them up. He shook his fist at the sky and started walking back, but I pulled open the door and ran out. I didn’t even realize what I was doing until I was halfway across the courtyard. I gasped as the rain hit me. It came down like bullets, and I shrieked, holding my arms above my head to protect my face. I kicked off my flip-flops so that I could run toward Josh more quickly.

  “You’re insane!” he said, when I got to him. “I was gonna come back.”

  But he was smiling, and when I handed him the keys, he kept my hand in his for a few beats.

  “It didn’t seem fair that I got to sit in there all cozy and dry,” I said, breathless from my mad dash across the courtyard.

  He shook his head and reached out a hand to brush away the strings of wet hair on my face. I felt my body lean into his, like it was tired of asking me for permission first. For a second, I was certain he was going to kiss me. Every cell in my body started fluttering, like I was made of thousands of tiny butterflies. We stood there, balancing on the maybe of the moment, until he dropped his hand and backed away.

  “I still think you’re crazy,” he said. “But since you’re here, wanna help me?”

  I nodded, pushing my disappointment away because it was so stupid, wasn’t it, to think he’d want to kiss me—or that I’d want him to want to kiss me. I followed him into the first room, holding the buckets while Josh figured out where the leaks were. He would crane his neck up at the ceiling and then gesture for me to hand him a bucket and then we’d wait to hear a drop of water hit the plastic. It wasn’t funny, but for some reason, all we could do was laugh as we waited for those hollow-sounding plops. Every time we found another leak, it was like the most hilarious t
hing in the world, and I didn’t care about the not-kiss anymore because I just wanted to laugh with him.

  I loved watching Josh laugh. It transformed his whole face. He’d throw back his head, and the sound would come from some deep place inside him, like it’d finally been let out of hiding.

  When we’d finished, we stood under the eaves, staring out at the warm light of the lobby.

  “Guess there’s only one way back,” he said.

  “Guess so.”

  But we kept standing there, waiting. For what, I didn’t know. Just … waiting. The rain slowed up a little; it was still pouring from the sky, but not as hard, and I could hear something underneath the thrash of water against concrete. A soft strumming.

  “Hear that?” Josh asked.

  “Mm-hmm. The hippies.”

  It was the couple in room seven, a guy and his girlfriend straight out of 1969. They’d been at the motel for a few days and were often by the pool, playing guitar and singing. Usually Marley or the Beatles. Bob Dylan, that sort of thing.

  “He’s good.” Josh listened closely for a second, then laughed and looked over at me. “Do you know what song this is?”

  The rain slowed even more, and I strained my ears to pick out the chords.

  “‘Hotel California.’”

  The guy’s voice was warm, strong, and his girlfriend would occasionally join in, their voices darting around each other, then coming together in sweet harmony.

  Josh held out his hand. “May I?”

  I saw that hand reaching toward me, and I wanted to take it and not let go, but I couldn’t move. I remembered my mom and dad, dancing in the trailer to that Céline Dion song, “Because You Loved Me,” their lips always meeting during the chorus. I’d come home to Mom playing it over and over after he died. So I made my hands into fists and gave Josh a throwaway smile.

  “I thought you had to be drunk to dance.”

  “Not in the rain. It evens the playing field.”

  He took my hand and undid my fist by slowly pulling my fingers away from my palm. Then I let him draw me back out into the storm. My heart beat a steady rhythm against the guitar and the hippies’ voices and the rain. I could barely see with the water streaming down my face as Josh pulled me closer to him. He sang along, his voice soft.