I’m relieved to have dodged a violent bludgeoning, but then, up on the left, I spot a sign that says SWAIN MOUNTAIN with a little picture of a downhill skier.
Oh, no. Total Sam flashback.
In early April, about a month after Sam and I started hanging out, he invited me to come to Swain with him and Luca. It was the last weekend the lifts were running, and even though the snow was slushy, he convinced me it was going to be great. Sam and Luca brought their snowboards. I’d never been on a slope before, so Sam suggested I rent skis instead because they’re easier for stopping. I remember thinking how my father was supposedly this champion downhill skier, so maybe I inherited some skills from him.
I totally didn’t. As Luca hopped on the lift to the black diamonds, Sam led me to a bunny hill and showed me how to snap my boots into my bindings and explained about snowplowing and told me how, if I felt out of control, I should sit down. He held onto my hips as I inched sideways up the incline, but then as soon as he let go, I toppled over, twisted my knee, and smacked my head on the ice.
“I suck,” I moaned.
“It’s okay,” Sam said, wiping the snow off my cheek with his gloved hand. “It happens to everyone.”
After my fifteenth nosedive, Sam conceded that it seemed to be happening more to me than most people.
“Why don’t we take a break?” he asked. “We can try again later.”
I urged Sam to find Luca and do some snowboarding, but he insisted on coming into the lodge and buying us hot chocolates and nachos. We found a table off to one side, and we were being all cuddly, kissing and feeding each other cheese-drenched chips. As I stood up and clomped toward the bathroom, Sam took my picture with his phone. “To commemorate your illustrious stint as a skier,” he said, laughing.
“Ha,” I said.
I went to the bathroom and then bought some water. As I was clomping back to the table, I noticed that Luca had joined Sam. Their backs were to me, but I could see they were looking at the picture on Sam’s phone.
“. . . but it still sucks about today,” I heard Luca say.
“I don’t mind,” Sam said. “I mean, she’s worth it.”
“Flaws and all?” Luca asked.
“I like the flaws best,” Sam said. “They make her real.”
I remember standing there in my damp jeans and those heavy ski boots, thinking how that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me.
Okay, I’ll admit it, I don’t know where the hell I am. It’s getting dark and I’m surrounded by hulking hills and I know I had everyone convinced I’m this experienced driver, but the truth is that when I went to Syracuse for a show last December, I smoked too much weed in the parking lot and this other kid had to drive my car home.
Plus, I just saw this warning sign about black bears, so every time I spot a tree, I think it’s an animal and I swerve into oncoming traffic. Luckily, there’s no oncoming traffic. That’s the upside of wandering this web of unmarked roads with barely any shoulder to pull onto and look at my map. Even if I did, I’m so lost, I’d have no idea where to begin. Also, there’s the black-bear factor. It’s not like they have signs saying, PLEASE DON’T ATTACK THE PEOPLE.
I think I got lost somewhere near Swain. I was distracted thinking about Sam and took a left instead of going straight and then —
Shit!
I see what appears to be a bear on the side of the road and jerk the wheel, but this time there’s a pair of headlights coming toward me. The other car honks, swerves hard onto the gravel, and then continues by. I keep driving, too, but my heart is racing and I’m biting so hard on my lower lip, I think I can taste blood.
I pull out my phone to call Aimee or Mara or even the twins, just to hear a familiar voice. Of course, there’s no cell-phone reception, which means if I get mutilated by a bear, I can’t even dial for help.
I see a motel coming up, so I slow down a little. There aren’t any cars out front, but I notice a faint light at the far end, near a sign labeled office. I steer into the parking lot, scan for bears, and then hurry through the door.
I step inside a small room that reeks of stale cigars. It’s covered floor to ceiling in dusty bundles of newspapers, and there’s an ancient guy hunched over a scratched desk, so motionless that for a second I wonder if he’s dead. But then he pushes his glasses down his fleshy nose and growls, “Whaddya want?”
I chew on my thumbnail. “Uhhh . . . a room?”
He scrounges around in a drawer, tosses me a rusty key, and barks, “Room seven.”
Then he shoves his glasses up on his nose and goes back to his newspaper.
“Don’t you want me to pay?” I ask.
“You planning to run off?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
“Can I ask you . . .” I pause. “Could you tell me where we are? I got a little lost on my way to Buffalo.”
“From where?”
“Brockport.”
He stares up at me, his eyes milky with cataracts, and then launches into this phlegmy laugh. “Honey, you’re in Steuben County.”
“Where?”
“Southern Tier, near the Pennsylvania border,” he says. “You sure did get lost.”
I rush down the dark walkway until I reach a door labeled 7. I fit the key into the lock, turn the knob, and reach for a switch.
Nothing.
I hesitate for a second before fumbling along the wall until I get to the bathroom, where I find a functioning light.
I turn and look around. There’s a lopsided bed, a wobbly nightstand, and a small table sagging under the weight of the television. I attempt to turn on the lamp next to the bed, but it doesn’t work. I hurry over and close the front door. As I’m rotating the lock, I can’t help but notice that it’s just a dinky sliver of metal, easily kick-through-able, if someone were so inclined.
I sit on the edge of the bed. It’s so quiet my ears are ringing. As I run my palms over my knees, I suddenly remember that, oh yeah, I hate being alone. No, I don’t just hate it. It freaks me out. My brain starts racing fast while the rest of my body is moving in slow motion. It’s scary, almost like I can’t control my thoughts.
I cross the dark room and press the power button on the television. Of course, it doesn’t work, so I dig in my bag for my headphones, but then I remember that I left my iPod in the car. I check my phone one more time. Still no reception. My breath is coming in short, panicky gasps. I collapse on the bedspread, press my hands over my eyes, and wish for all of this to be over.
I have to pee all night, but I’m refusing to walk to the bathroom because I keep hearing little mice toenails scurrying around the floor. And that’s not the worst part. Neither is this sorrowful moaning coming from outside my door. It started around midnight and has been going constantly for hours. And that’s not even the worst part. Neither is the fact that I’m die-of-frostbite cold. Of course, I’m only wearing a tank top and a skirt, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to my car to get warm clothes and there’s less of a way in hell I’m pulling back this bedspread and crawling into the mouse droppings that are most likely lurking underneath.
The worst part is that I’m completely alone.
All night I feel like I’m hovering outside my body. I’m looking down and watching myself lying there, my hair splayed on the pillow, my hands over my eyes, and I keep thinking, This is why I chase guys. This is why I do the plays. This is why I go to parties. Because then I never have to be in a situation like this, crumpled on a motel bed with nothing but my pathetic self to keep me company.
“So you’re the girl who got lost on her way to Buffalo?” the woman in the office asks.
“Yeah.”
She chuckles. “You really left from Brockport?”
“Yep.”
“Do you realize you drove more than a hundred miles in the wrong direction?”
“I guess.”
It’s ten thirty in the morning. Sometime around dawn, the moaning stopped
and the mice took a break and I dashed to the bathroom. I peed, grabbed a towel to wrap around my icy feet, and then collapsed onto the bed. When I woke up a few hours later, I gathered my hair into a ponytail, washed my face in the rust-hued water, and shoved my phone into my bag. As I stepped into the office, there was a woman at the desk. She had thinning hair and a big brown mole on her cheek. Actually, calling it a mole trivializes the whole thing. It’s more like a continent.
She chuckles some more, but when she notices I’m not smiling along with her, she tells me how much I owe for the night. I hand her some cash and ask if she can help me get to the thruway.
“Where to now?” she asks. “London? Paris?”
I calmly explain that I’m going to Texas to see my mom and need to figure out how to get to I-90. She studies my face for a long moment and then rips a piece of paper out of a notebook and draws me a map. She labels all the lefts and rights that will lead to the Southern Tier Expressway. Once I get on that I can cruise to Erie, where I’ll finally pick up 90.
As I’m heading toward the door, she calls out, “I just have to say . . . I’ve been working here for thirty-three years, and I’ve never heard of anyone getting that lost.”
“You have no idea,” I mutter before walking to my car.
As I’m pulling out of the motel, I consider glancing at that compass from my grandma, just to make sure I’m headed in the right direction. But then I think how proud it would make her, so I switch on my blinker and wing it instead.
I find the expressway no problem. Right before the entrance ramp, I stop at a gas station and fill my tank. I end up splashing gasoline all over my fingers, which, of course, reminds me of Sam because there was this one night we drove into Gates to see a movie, and on the way, he got gas on his hand and I joked that I wouldn’t share a popcorn with him, which I totally did anyway.
I hurry into the bathroom and scrub with soap, but the smell lingers. As I’m buying a cup of coffee and a box of brown sugar Pop-Tarts, I ask the woman at the cash register if she has any suggestions for getting gasoline off my skin, but she just stares blankly out the window.
An hour later, as I’m cruising down the highway, I’m still feeling awful. Every vehicle on this road is an SUV jam-packed with a family. It’s the Great American Road Trip, sing-along bonding, license-plate counting, twenty national monuments in ten days. To be perfectly honest, it makes me want to scream.
I never told Sam this, but it used to drive me crazy when we’d be hanging out at his house and his parents would swarm in and Rachel would join us and someone would produce a plate of snickerdoodles and they’d all start reminiscing about their trip to Japan and then they’d lapse into some memory from nine years ago and then, invariably, Sam’s mom would open her scrapbooks or Sam’s dad would put on a home movie and Sam and Rachel would groan, but you could tell they were loving it.
Maybe I wouldn’t hate families so much if I knew more about my dad. I’m not that stereotypical fatherless child who spends weeks and months imagining her dad is some rich guy who will come rescue her and then they’ll ride off together into the sunset. But I just wish I had a little more information, like maybe it’d help crack some code about what makes me operate. Aimee has said I have his nose, but I have to imagine there’s more.
Also, even though it’s sunny and blue, I still haven’t gotten over last night. That silence in my ears. The scary way my brain was racing. And especially the horrible sense that when I don’t have anyone around to acknowledge my presence, I don’t actually exist.
I’m driving along the northern rim of Allegany State Park when I pull out the number of Linda’s cousin from Erie. I wasn’t planning to take Linda up on her offer, but I’m starting to feel this urgent need to have immediate contact with another human being.
“Hello?” a man’s voice asks.
“My name is V,” I say. “I used to work with Linda Anderson at Pizza Hut, and I’m driving to Texas and I —”
“Well, hello! This is Linda’s cousin Darren. We were hoping to hear from you. Are you going to be stopping by?”
I tell him I’m on the Southern Tier Expressway, heading toward Erie. He insists I sleep over at their house tonight. He tells me that he and his wife are about to leave for a concert in Chautauqua and won’t be home until later, but his son will be around and maybe even his daughter.
“Let me give you directions to the house,” Darren says.
I can hear a woman’s voice in the background.
“Hold on . . . my wife says we’re too hard to find . . . we’re all the way out on the lake . . . hold on a minute.”
After much conferring and what sounds like a hurried telephone exchange, Darren tells me that when I get to Erie, I should go to this place called Café Diem. He gives me the directions and tells me it has an orange flag with a bright yellow sunshine out front. His son, Nate, is working at the nearby mall, and he’ll meet me there when he gets off at three. After that I can follow him to their house.
“Do you have a pen?” he asks. “I’ll give you Nate’s cell phone, just in case.”
I rummage through my glove compartment. As he recites the number, I scribble everything onto the back of my hand.
“And you have the address of the café?”
“Peach Street,” I say. “On the left, across from the hospital.”
“It has an orange flag with a sunshine.”
“Got it.”
I make it to Café Diem by two thirty, so I order an iced mocha and settle into a table near the windows. I’m just reaching for my phone when Aimee calls.
“Hey!” she says. “Where are you?”
“Erie, Pennsylvania,” I say. “And that’s so funny because I was about to call you.”
“Erie? Didn’t you leave yesterday?”
I tell her how I didn’t leave until really late and then I got lost and ended up in some motel in Steuben County and it was filthy and gross and, in all our moves, Aimee never made us stay anywhere that awful.
“Of course we did,” Aimee says. “You were probably too young to remember.”
“Well, I bet it wasn’t this bad.”
“Honey, you’re doing great. You’re trying, right? That’s more than most people can say.”
I sip some mocha. “May I ask you a huge question?”
“How huge?”
“Well . . . you’ve told me that you never knew my father’s last name, and I —”
“The Sperm Donor?” Aimee asks. “That’s huge.”
“I was just wondering . . . do you know his last name after all and you were trying to protect me?”
“Oh, V,” Aimee says, sighing.
“What?”
“I wish I knew more. I was so young and, honestly, I didn’t know better. His name was Brian and he was a ski instructor, but I was at Vail and he was over in Aspen. I only saw him a few times. He was Irish . . . I know that. He had an Irish last name.”
“Like what? There are a lot of Irish last names.”
“God, I’m so sorry. . . .” Aimee is quiet for a moment. “Tell you what. I’ll try to remember everything I can, and when you get to San Antonio, we’ll talk all about it.”
I exhale softly and then say, “That sounds good.”
As soon as we hang up, the door jingles and this guy walks in. His jeans and shirt are dusty, but it’s obvious that he’s hot. And built. Seriously built.
As he scans the café, I wonder whether this is Linda’s cousin’s son. Linda is black, so I’m assuming her cousin is black. This guy looks multiracial, like part black and part white or maybe part Asian. When his dad said he worked at the mall, I imagined Taco Bell or the Gap. I didn’t picture construction. I definitely didn’t picture all those muscles.
If I were in any other head space, I’d be pouncing all over this guy, working it hard. But right now . . . I don’t know. I just don’t feel like myself these days.
You have to try, V. This is why you’re here, to forget about Brockpo
rt, to reclaim some of who you used to be.
I grab my phone and dial the number on my hand.
“Hello?” he asks, lifting his phone to his ear.
So it is Nate.
“You know,” I say, chewing on the tip of my straw. “Your dad didn’t tell me you were hot.”
He quickly looks around. When he sees me by the windows, he grins and says, “Maybe my dad doesn’t think I’m hot.”
I smile back at him. As he walks toward me, I start wondering whether maybe this won’t be so hard, after all.
It takes me six minutes to realize that Nate Anderson is going to be the perfect remedy for getting over Sam. When he joins my table, he swigs his bottle of water and tells me how he’s doing a construction job at the mall, tearing up parking lots and putting in new ones. Or at least it’s something like that. As he talks, he keeps getting texts on his phone. He reads them, dashes quick responses, and then looks up at me and goes, “So what were you saying?”
“You were telling me about parking lots.”
And he launches back into the details of the decimation process, but then his phone vibrates and he glances down, and then, a moment later, he’s asking what I was saying again.
Nate’s attention-deficit problem is perfect. Even though Sam would sometimes call and text people, he never let it take priority over our time together. But when a guy spends half his time pecking away at his phone, you just know it’s not going to get too serious.
Nate’s day job doesn’t hurt things, either. I swear, his biceps look like he’s been ripping out those slabs of concrete with his bare hands.
“So that’s what you do?” I ask as Nate finishes replying to his latest message.
“You mean construction?”
“Yeah.”
“Just for the summer.” Nate chugs some more water. “I go to Ohio State. . . . I’m studying athletic training.”
“What’s that?”
As Nate describes how he’ll be the guy who runs onto the field when a professional athlete gets injured, I’m about to point out the scar on my forehead. But then his phone vibrates, which is a good thing, because if I told him about the hockey puck, the conversation might have strayed to Sam. So instead, I watch Nate and I think, athletic training . . . so jocky . . . so physical . . . so different from Sam. Sam was going to study history and political science. Sam would rather spend Super Bowl Sunday in the library, reading about an obscure uprising two hundred years ago in some country that no longer exists.