Wherever Nina Lies

  I turn to Amanda, who’s still staring at the clipping. And she just has this look on her face, maybe it’s shame? Maybe it’s horror? I don’t know. I don’t care.

  “It’s time for you to go now,” I say to her.

  Amanda reaches out, trying to grab my hand. I move away.

  If it is time to pick sides, I am choosing. I have chosen. I lean against Sean. Amanda looks up, her mouth open. “Just go.” My voice is cold, hard. Amanda flinches. Things will not be the same after this.

  Twenty-seven

  The moment the door closes behind Amanda, everything changes. It’s like she took all the bad air in the room, packed it into her cherry-print LeSportsac, and took it downstairs with her to catch a cab to the airport. And now that she’s gone, Sean and I can finally breathe again.

  I am about to apologize for what happened, for everything Amanda said, but before I can even start, Sean is turning toward me, a sweet dreamy smile on his lips. “Thank you,” he says. He puts one hand on either side of my waist and pulls me toward him. “Thank you.” He holds my head against his chest and whispers into my hair. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” And although I’m not even entirely sure what he’s thanking me for, I nod and hug him back. His T-shirt is warm against my skin.

  He puts one hand on the side of my neck and brings my face toward his, brushing his lips so gently against my cheek I can barely feel them. He kisses me again, right next to my mouth, again on my chin, my forehead, the tip of my nose, again and again all over my face. When he finally presses his lips against mine, my insides turn to liquid. “Come,” he says, and leads me toward the bed. He lies down and pulls me on top of him, arranging my body like a doll’s, my head on his chest, my arms around his neck.

  “This is fate,” Sean whispers. “This is fate, Ellie.”

  I know there are things I need to tell him, about meeting Monster Hands, what they said about Nina, about the house in Big Sur, and I know I need to call Brad, and maybe my mom, too, but when I look up and see Sean’s face, so close to my own, sweet and peaceful, I decide all that other stuff can wait. For the first time in a long time, I’m happy exactly where I am and I’m exactly where I know I need to be.

  Twenty-eight

  At some point during the night, I am jolted awake by motion and noise. Sean kicks at the blankets, his arms are around my shoulders, tightening, releasing his fingers, scratching at my back. He’s sweating, his skin hot against mine. I can just barely see him by the moonlight that’s coming through the window. His eyes are closed. His face is contorted in pain. Strangled animal cries escape through his clenched teeth.

  “Sean,” I whisper, and then louder. “Sean!”

  He’s trying to say something, but the words come out garbled like he’s just now learning to speak. “Indint safe-im, Indint safe-im.” He’s thrashing around.

  “You’re having a nightmare,” I say. I wrap my arms around him. “Everything is okay. You’re having a nightmare. Shhhhh.” He puts his arms around my waist and clings to me, his head against my chest. I move slightly to adjust the pillow under my head. “Mmmmmm,” Sean says. And he shakes his head, like “don’t go away,” like “stay here with me.” Like he’s scared I’m going to leave. I stroke his hair. “I’m not going anywhere,” I say. And I just lie there with my arms around him. I lie there like that until the cool blue light of morning starts coming through the window. And only then do I finally fall back asleep.

  Twenty-nine

  I wake up with sunlight streaming through the window and my face in Sean’s armpit. When I lift my head up, he smiles, and he kisses me on the lips. “Morning, sunshine,” he says. “You’re an awfully gorgeous thing to wake up to.” And he kisses me again.

  “Hey,” I say. My mouth is dry. I start to get up out of bed.

  “Awwww.” Sean pulls me down on top of him. “Not yet.” He gives me a squeeze. I feel a rush of warmth course through me.

  I lean back against him. “Those were some crazy nightmares you were having last night,” I say.

  “Nightmares?” Sean looks confused. “I was?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “What were you dreaming about?”

  Sean frowns. “Don’t remember. And it doesn’t matter anymore, anyway.” He pulls my head back down and presses it against his chest. I can feel his heart. My phone starts buzzing on the nightstand. I grab it and glance at the screen, the caller ID says Mon Coeur.

  I look at the clock on the nightstand. 11:17. I was supposed to be at work over two hours ago. Hundreds and hundreds of miles away. “Ooops,” I say. I flip open the phone.

  “Braddykins! Oh my goodness, I am so sorry.” But I am smiling because I know as I tell him about me and Sean, he’ll be so excited, he won’t even care.

  “Hey, Ellie,” Brad says. He doesn’t sound terribly happy.

  “I completely forgot to call you!” I say. “I should have asked for today off, too. I’m so sorry! I somehow didn’t think of it when I was talking to you on Sunday.” I untangle myself from Sean and start to stand up. He grabs my wrist. I smile and blow him a kiss, and then pull away and walk toward the bathroom. “But you won’t be mad when you hear where I aaaaaam! I’m in a hotel room with…”

  “I know,” Brad says.

  “You do?” I glance at myself in the mirror. My hair looks insane. I try and de-knot it with my fingers.

  “I saw Amanda earlier.” Brad’s voice sounds strained. “She got in at like ten this morning and came by on her way home from the airport.”

  “Oh?” I freeze.

  Brad doesn’t say anything for a minute. “Look, Braddy, whatever Amanda said isn’t true. And she was a real bitch.”

  “El.” Brad’s voice softens. “You know I love you, but Amanda sort of freaked me out a little bit this morning when she was here. She was really worried about you.”

  “She’s not really worried, she’s just jealous,” I say.

  Brad sighs.

  “What did she say?” I ask.

  “Just that the guy you’re with might be…a little weird.”

  “Amanda thinks everyone is weird!”

  “Well, you have a point there.” I can hear Brad smiling through the phone. “When are you coming back?”

  I think about the address Peter gave me that’s still in my pocket, and I think about Sean back in the bed. “In a few days?”

  “Ooookaaaaay,” Brad says. He’s trying to sound begrudging, but I can tell from his voice that he’s happy for me. And that is why I love him. He wants to be happy for other people. Unlike Amanda, who just wants to be controlling and dramatic.

  “Thank you, oh Braddiest,” I say. And then I pause. “I think he might be my Thomas.”

  “Well, I think I will have to be the judge of that!” Brad says. “Bring him in to meet me for real and then we’ll talk.”

  “Okay!” I say. I rinse my mouth out with water and then start walking out of the bathroom. I hear a beep and look at my phone. The red battery icon is flashing. “Shoot, Braddykins, my phone is out of batteries. I don’t have my charger with me so it’s about to hang up.”

  “Okay,” Brad says. “I expect stories when you get back! Kissies!”

  “Kissies!” I click the phone shut and wander back into the main room.

  Sean is still in bed. “Hey, who are you giving kissies to that isn’t me?!”

  “Brad, from work,” I say.

  “Well, don’t use up any kissies on him that are rightfully mine!”

  I smile. “Hey, would it be okay if I used your phone for a second? I’m out of batteries and I should call my mom, I guess.”

  “Go crazy.” Sean tosses me his phone. I open my phone and punch my mom’s number into Sean’s phone right before my phone powers down. I don’t even know my own mother’s phone number without my cell phone. How sad is that?

  She works the overnight shift on Monday nights, and now it’s Tuesday, which means she’ll have turned her phone off and she’ll be sleeping. I dial her
number, it goes straight to voice mail: “Hello, you have reached Jane Wrigley. I’m unavailable at the moment, leave a message and I will call you back as soon as I am able.” I can hear the stress in my mother’s voice, the lack of joy. It somehow seems even more obvious now than it used to. Maybe because I haven’t heard it in a few days, maybe because I’m suddenly so happy. “Hi, Mom,” I say. “Just wanted to let you know I’ve been at Amanda’s house these last few days, which you probably assumed. And I’m still here. Anyway, okay. Hope work is going okay. Bye!” I hang up. A tiny part of me feels the tiniest bit guilty for lying, but what’s the alternative?

  Sean reaches up and grabs me around the waist, pulls me down into bed with him.

  “I was supposed to work this morning. And I totally forgot,” I say.

  “Oh, what a terrible shame,” he says. He nuzzles my neck.

  “It’s okay, though, Brad’s not upset.” I sit up.

  “Cool,” says Sean. “But, y’know, you don’t have to have a job anymore if you don’t want to.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, as you know, I have plenty of money, and I hope this offer won’t make you feel weird or anything.” Sean blushes. “But you could just have some.”

  I can feel myself blushing, too. “That’s really sweet,” I say. “But I’d…”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Sean says. “Get that no look off your face. I’m just saying that if we decide we don’t want to come back for a while, if we just want to go on a road trip somewhere else, maybe drive over to my family’s vacation house and just relax there for a while, you shouldn’t feel like we can’t because you have to go back to work, that’s all I’m saying.” Sean smiles again. “Maybe we should go to the vacation house. It’s really beautiful up there and I haven’t actually been in like two years. Or we could go visit, I don’t know, anyone. We could just pick some random person on the Internet and then ask them, ‘Hey, can we come over for dinner?’ and then we can just drive to wherever they are. We can bring a pie! Or we could go to the Grand Canyon. Have you ever seen it? Not just a big hole in the ground! Makes a person feel tiny in the best way possible.”

  I smile. “That all sounds really wonderful…but there are some things we haven’t even talked about yet!”

  “Oh!” Sean says. “Of course. I should have brought it up already, I’m really sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, I mean it, I’m sorry. I swear I wasn’t hitting on her, things were just so awkward between you and me then and I wasn’t sure what you were thinking and I didn’t want to pressure you about anything. I was just trying to be friendly to that girl, but I can see how that would have been awful for you. If it’d been the other way around, I would have been so jealous. And don’t worry, I’m not mad about that dude.”

  “What dude?”

  “The one from last night, the one you were dancing with,” Sean says. “None of that matters now. That feels like so long ago, anyway.”

  “I was talking about Nina,” I say. “And me meeting Monster Hands.”

  “Oh,” Sean says. “Right, of course.” He shakes his head. “Tell me.”

  I repeat the story and show him the record. “And that guy Peter wrote down the address of that house they dropped her off at.” I take the tiny slip of paper from the pocket of my jeans.

  I hand it to Sean.

  “Thirteen seventy-two Ledgeview Pass, Big Sur, California,” he says very slowly, very deliberately. “This is where they dropped her off ?” He sits down on the bed, his back to me. He coughs. The tips of his ears are turning red.

  “Yeah,” I say. “So I guess that’s the next stop!”

  Sean coughs again. “I don’t know.” He shakes his head. I walk over to the bed and sit next to him. “Didn’t you say Monster Hands already looked for her there?”

  “But no one was at the house.” My voice sounds weird. “I just figured it’d be worth the trip just to check the place out, because that place obviously meant something to her, she definitely went there once…I mean, y’know, like the rest of the places we’ve been going.” I’m suddenly very confused.

  Sean takes a deep breath. “Are you sure you want to? I mean are you sure you want to just keep going like this?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Just”—Sean breathes out through his nose—“well, I’ve been thinking about it, and I wonder if this”—he moves his hands back and forth between us—“is the reason you found that drawing of Nina’s. Not so you could find Nina, but so we could find each other.” He puts a warm hand on my arm, and looks me straight in the eye. I feel that flash again, the one I felt when I first met him. Only now for some reason it makes me nervous.

  “But what about what we talked about?” I say. “About how it’s impossible to just get over a thing like this? About how…” I stop. He’s staring blankly at the wall. My face grows hot. What’s going on here? I turn away.

  “Hey, heeeey.” Sean’s voice softens. “Oh shit! I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ellie.” Sean sighs and shakes his head. “I’m not trying to keep you from searching for her. Forget what I said, okay? We’ll go to Big Sur and look for her.” He wraps his arms around my waist. “We’ll leave right now, okay?” He squeezes me tight. I can feel his heart pounding hard through his shirt. This is Sean, sweet, wonderful Sean.

  I nod, and then I smile as relief washes over me. “You’ll love her,” I say. “When you meet her, you’ll really love her.”

  Sean doesn’t even smile back this time. He just steadies my face with his hands and looks me straight in the eye. “I couldn’t love anyone else now,” Sean says. “Because I already love you.”

  Thirty

  According to the clock, we’ve been driving for an hour, but it feels like it could have been a minute or a week or a year. Time doesn’t matter anymore.

  And for that matter, neither do words. We’re immersed in silence, not the cold jagged silence of yesterday, but a different kind, like warm liquid. Everything we need to say we communicate through our hands clasped together between the seats, through the tiny gentle motions of finger against finger, palm against palm.

  And all I can think is This is it, this is what it’s like to be falling in love.

  Sean pulls off at an exit for a rest stop. “We need snacks,” he says. “And gas, too.” He drives for another minute and then parks. He stares out at the parking lot, and I try to interpret the look on his face. He looks a little anxious. I squeeze his hand and smile. He smiles back. “I’m just going to run in here,” he says. He unplugs his phone from the car charger, squeezes my hand, and gets out of the car.

  I lean back against the seat and watch him walk across the parking lot. I love the way he walks, shoulders squared, head hanging down ever so slightly. I put my bare feet up against the dash, the cool air blows against my legs. Over the soft hum of the air conditioner I can hear the muted blend of sounds from outside. Laughter and shouts and cries and car horns. Sean disappears into the rest stop.

  I watch a couple in matching khaki shorts and matching white baseball hats walk toward their car, drinking sodas. A mother is walking in, carrying a screaming little boy who is tossing french fries onto the ground. A group of college-age girls stand near the trunk of an old Toyota while one of them changes into a pair of flip-flops. If it were a week ago I might have felt nothing for these random strangers. But now, in this moment, I love them all, and at the same time I feel sad for them, because none of them could possibly be feeling what I’m feeling now—the bliss that comes from being with someone who loves you, whom you are starting to love.

  I always thought it was so silly the way Amanda’s friends were always meeting guys and then a week later claiming to looooove them. I always figured they were just caught up in the moment, being immature, and not understanding Real Life. But I realize now, Real Life is lots of things, not just the hard stuff but the wonderful stuff, too. I guess I was the one who really didn’t understand. And n
ow, because of some sort of crazy miracle that I can only barely comprehend, I think I’m starting to.

  A minute passes, and then another one. And I stare anxiously at the door. And I feel a gnawing in my stomach and I realize something so silly it makes me laugh out loud—I miss him. Sean has been in the rest stop for all of four minutes and I miss him. I laugh again. I will tell him this when he gets back. He will love this. He will laugh, too!

  And then we will drive to Big Sur where I very well might, no, scratch that, where I will find a clue that will lead me to Nina. And then my life will be perfect. Then my life will be absolutely complete.

  I watch the door. Four guys emerge with McDonald’s bags. The woman with the screaming kid is walking out with a ketchup-stained shirt and a pile of napkins. And then there’s Sean walking through the door; he’s so beautiful, so incredibly beautiful. I remember the first moment I saw him, back at the Mothership. Back then, if someone had told me what he would end up meaning to me only four days later, I never would have believed it. How could I have? How could I have even begun to understand?

  As he gets closer, my heart pounds harder. I smile, giddy with anticipation for the moment when he opens the car door, for the moment when I’ll get to touch him again. He’s close enough now for me to see his face clearly. He’s staring at the car window, at me. But he doesn’t smile. He has this crazy look on his face that I don’t understand.

  He walks past the driver’s side door, around the front of the car. I roll down the window. “Hey? What’s going on?” My heart is pounding. Did he lose his wallet or something? He doesn’t answer. Just keeps walking until he’s standing right in front of the passenger side door. “Hey?” I reach out and put my hand on his arm. “Is everything okay?”