Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (9 page)

“Is this a behind-the-scenes look?” I said.

“Oh, no. Believe me, you’ll be right up close.” Travis pointed down the empty railroad tracks.

“No trains come here. There haven’t been trains here for a thousand years,” I said. At least that’s what it looked like. Weeds grew all around the tracks. Tall, dry grass grew between the railroad ties.

“Look for the light,” Travis said. “Watch for it. And listen. You’ll hear it before you see it. Let’s walk.”

I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe any train would come down those old tracks, or maybe it did once every decade. And I didn’t believe he’d be walking around here if trains did come regularly. The motorcycle was one thing, but train tracks, with their steep bank on one side and a hill on the other, were another.

We held hands, walked for a while. I balanced on the rails, one arm on Travis’ shoulder, the other out straight
for balance. Travis described the food at the fancy lodge restaurant. “Lobster bisque,” he said. “Oh, God, it’s fantastic. You’d love it. I gotta take you sometime. Roasted saddle of fallow venison. Amazing.”

“Sounds like something you’d eat only if your emergency rations had been depleted,” I said.

He ignored me. “And the breakfast. Of course you know it’s world famous.”

“Oh, of course, dahling,” I said.

“Wait,” he said.

“What?”

“Listen.”

I stopped.

“It’s coming,” he said.

“Very funny,” I said.

Travis held my waist and smiled.

“What a joker,” I said. “Ha ha.”

He put his finger to my lips.

“God, Travis!” He was right. A train was coming. I could hear it. The rhythmic, heavy pumping. Louder. Louder still. “Move, Travis!”

He held my waist as I tried to pull away.

“Tell me when you see the light.”

“Oh, God, Travis. Oh, God, let me go. Let me go! I see it! Shit!”

He grabbed me, basically threw me to the bank by the side of the tracks. The ground was shaking under me. The noise was thunderous. I’ve never heard anything so loud. A huge tunnel of wind blew my hair into my mouth; the
air clattered and shook and sounded like it was exploding. My fingers dug into the ground, holding on, clutching dirt and gravel.

“Open your eyes,” Travis shouted.

“Oh, my God.” I breathed.

“Open them!” Travis said. He was half lying on me. I opened my eyes. The train was behind my head. I could see it there, upside-down. The wheels turning so fast, the underneath of the train, the narrow slice of open air that was the hill and ground on the other side of the train. Travis held me against the clatter and rumbling. Rocks were literally jumping under my back. Finally the train passed. I turned my head where I lay, watched the metal railing of the caboose get smaller and smaller. I hoped I was still alive, but I wasn’t sure.

Travis looked down at me. “Ruby,” he said. I’d never heard anyone say my name like that before. He took my hand, held it against his heart. He put his own hand on mine. “Do you feel that?” he said. “Feel? They’re beating together. They’re beating in time.”

I was fearless, because that’s what he wanted me to be. Maybe it was better to be who he thought I was than who I thought I was. Anyway, all I know is that I played my part, which was to get on the back and hold on tight through everything we did. From that day onward, we went too fast, frighteningly fast. Travis Becker may have been a little crazy. But our hearts had beat in time when the ground shook underneath us, and that was what mattered.

I started wearing that necklace all the time. It still had that bad
feeling about it, that wrong feeling, but I wore it anyway. Like I said, I would do anything for Travis Becker. He dared me to stand on the white line in the middle of Cummings Road while he kissed me, and I did it, the long
baarrr!
of a panicked truck driver’s horn in my ears for hours after Travis had taken my hand and we had run to the side of the road to safety. The horn in my ears, my heart in my throat. He had lifted me up, and I wrapped my legs around his waist as he twirled me in circles.
Oh, God!
I had screamed.
Ruby!
he had whooped in exhilaration, my name a battle cry.

And then one day Travis Becker came into Johnson’s Nursery and challenged me to leave right then and there, to get on his bike and step away from the counter and the
customer I was helping. Right as kind Libby Wilson watched with a box of vegetable seed packets in her arms. I did it. I just walked out of there. I decided I must be in love with Travis Becker. Something that horrible and wonderful had to be love, because what else could it be?

I was sure that wearing the necklace would make my mother ask questions, but this didn’t happen. I was also sure she would hear from Libby about me abandoning work that day, but this didn’t happen either. My mother, to whom I usually told everything and who noticed everything, was lost in the blue haze of grief. We avoided any talk of my father and this person now in the world who was related to Chip Jr. and me. I went one step further and avoided any thought of it. My mother seemed to have the opposite problem, the thought having moved in and taken over, same as she worried one of those musicians might. She was a figure in a thick fog, recognizable as a human form but fuzzy and appearing more distant than the physical reality.

Mom’s lack of concentration was obvious; she put her car keys in the refrigerator and made us strange, haphazard meals she didn’t eat herself—a hot dog, a bowl of yogurt, an orange on a plate. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face raw and bare in the way it gave away what she wouldn’t say. Her whole personality seemed to be on that fragile edge of near tears. I would see the light on under her door until late into the night. I didn’t want to add to her worries. My mother was one of those rare, truly good people. She still felt guilty about the one time she put her
old baseball cap on one of those huge bags of dog food that was in the backseat so that she could drive in the carpool lane.

I was angry at her too. She should have been better at losing him. She’d had enough practice.

If I were Libby Wilson, I would have told on me, but she didn’t. She only called me into her office, a small shed piled with books and paper and plant crates used as file storage, and had me sit in the big leather chair that was worn to a soft pale on the arms. Libby herself was a bit like that chair, big and worn with kindly wrinkles. As I sat there, shame crept around my insides and found a comfy spot, settling heavy in my chest.

“His face is too pretty,” Libby said.

I folded my hands in my lap. I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course she was right.

“And he wears his money like a cologne. Frankly, I don’t like the smell.” She poked her finger in the white rock of a cactus garden on her desk.

“I’m really sorry about what I did,” I said.

“Ruby . . .” She sighed. “How do I say this?” She tilted her chin up, as if the words might be up there on the ceiling. “I once ditched my mother at a chemotherapy session for a man. I’ve hated myself every day for it since. I know how these things can make you wacky. He liked enchiladas, I liked enchiladas. I
hate
enchiladas. You know what I mean?”

“I promise it won’t happen again.”

“To tell you the truth, there are a thousand things I
want to say to you right now, but the most important is that, as you know, I never was lucky enough to have kids, but if I had a daughter I’d have wanted one like you,” she said. “So, you know. Stay true.”

For the first time since we’d met, I went straight home that day and didn’t stop to see Travis. It was almost a relief to walk home a different way, behind the nursery, the way I used to go home from school with Sydney. Libby was right. The stuff with Travis was getting bigger than me, overtaking who I was. I felt strong and clear, proud of my stride, of this passing up. I felt like a burden had been lifted. When I got home, though, and was alone for a while again, that restless summer feeling filled me and I let go of Libby’s words, sure as the string on a balloon. They drifted, like that released balloon, until they were too far to see. I regretted not stopping and seeing Travis. He gave me something I wanted, that much was clear. What I wasn’t entirely sure about was what that something was. I didn’t think having something you wanted could make you feel so bad.

That afternoon Chip Jr. came back from his best friend Oscar’s house. He went there most summer days when Mom was at work since Oscar’s mom was at home. If I used the word
baby-sat
he’d kill me. Chip Jr. met up with me in the kitchen. I was peeling an orange into the sink, staring out the window. I guess I was thinking with both guilt and pleasure about that too-pretty face of Travis’s, his fine, silky blond hair. I was thinking about this dark pact we had seemed to make, this ugly and
thrilling partnership of going too far. Lately I could think of nothing else. The hidden life I’d been leading took up a place in me, and I wondered what I had done before it was there, what I had thought about, how I filled that time. That no one knew about all of this gave me a delicious feeling of my own separateness. Like a CIA agent, I was creeping around doing huge things and no one even noticed. I wished I’d gone to see him.

“What are you looking at?” Chip Jr. asked.

“All of the holes Poe’s dug in the backyard. It looks like the surface of the moon.”

“We should stick a flag out there,” he said.

I ate my orange. My fingers were covered with those mysterious white scales you get in the process, and I wiggled them at him.

“Mummy fingers,” I said.

“I like apples better. No squirting.” Talking about apples apparently inspired him to have one. He opened the refrigerator, tumbled the apples around in the bin until he found the one he wanted. He took a loud, crunching bite.

“You’re supposed to wash it.”

“I love pesticides. Yum, yum,” he said.

He chomped on his apple, appeared to think awhile. We sat in silence, eating, until he finally spoke again. “What’s the heaviest thing in the world?” Chip Jr. asked me, his cheeks puffed with apple.

“A blue whale.” I slid in a slice of orange. I thought it was a science question.

“Nope. The
heaviest
thing.”

“A skyscraper.”

“Nope.”

“A mountain.”

“Uh uh.”

“A mountain
range.”

“Nope.”

I was getting tired of this game. “I give up.”

He looked at me a real long time. He saw me, that I could tell. He saw me, and he wanted me to see me too. “A secret,” he said. “A secret is the heaviest thing in the world.”

That Chip Jr. was too smart for his own good.

“I like you with your hair wet. It looks brave,” Travis Becker said.

“Brave?” We’d just gone for a swim in Marcy Lake. It had been my idea. We were sitting on the dock, at the same place we’d come when my father had been in town, that one right day.

“Sleek.” He pulled my neck toward him and kissed me. “Mmm, baby,” he said. I had my hand around his shoulder. It was wet and cool, though the sun was quickly trying to change that. His mouth was cold from the lake.

He moved his fingers over, tried to feel around my bikini top. I grabbed his hand and yanked it away. Then I put my shoulder into him and gave a shove, sending him crashing off the dock and into the water. He created quite a splash; a couple of boys about Chip Jr.’s age on the other
end of the dock started to laugh. A minute later Travis’s head bobbed up.

“Ha,” I said to him. “That’s what you get.”

“You bad little girl,” he shouted. He swam to the dock’s edge and pulled himself up. Water dripped off him; his swimsuit, fifties surfer shorts with pineapples and palm trees, clung to him as if they’d had a sudden fright and were too scared to let go.

“Served you right,” I said.

He grabbed me in revenge and I shrieked and then went flying. I held my nose just in time so I didn’t get water in it, and a moment later saw an infusion of bubbles underwater next to me where Travis had jumped back in. I was trying to rise, swimming broad strokes upward, and I could see Travis swimming toward me, a flash of pineapple brightness in the murky water, his hair floating out all seaweed-like.