Kiss the Morning Star (22 page)

I close my mouth. Empty, empty.

“I’ve always loved you, Anna.” She puts her stupid orange sunglasses on, though the sky is dark. “You don’t even see me. You only see your own reflection.”

“Excuse me, ladies. Is everything all right back here? The guy wears a uniform and a severe-looking mustache. His jacket says B
ORDER
P
ATROL
. I’m still crying, mutely, and the sight of him makes me freeze, petrified with terror. Kat glares at him.

“Everything’s fine,” she says. “Or it will be, as soon as we can get off this boat.”

What does she think will happen then? Is she just going to leave me? I deserve to be left. Everything she says is true.

The guy gives us both a stern look. “We’re almost there. We’ll be heading into customs in about ten minutes, but it looks like it might take a little longer than normal this evening. Nothing to worry about, but security has been tightened at all our borders.”

Kat smiles at him. She is perfectly composed. “Thank you, Officer. Have a good night, now.” He does not smile back, but he nods and steps back inside.

I try to catch her eye, remembering.
What about the gun?
“Katy—”

She holds up one hand. “Not speaking,” she says.

The headlines scroll across my brain.
Teenager Held on Charges of Terrorism. Girl Gunslinger Captured at Border: Authorities Call It a Victory for Homeland Security
. “But Kat—”

“Anna, shut the fuck up before I say something I can’t take back.”

I look up. We’re quickly approaching the shore. She can’t go through customs with that gun or she’ll be in so much trouble. I don’t know what to do.

I have to do something. I lunge toward her, reaching for her orange satchel.

“Anna, what the—”

I catch hold of her arm and pull, but Katy tugs back, and we struggle back and forth a few times. She grabs a chunk of my hair, and her elbow smashes into my cheekbone, but I blink away the tears and keep clawing for the bag. “The gun!” My fingers close on velvet, and I yank the bag toward me, but I’m thrown off balance by the movement of the ferry.

“There’s no gun!” She jerks the bag out of my hands. “I left it in the—” The velvet satchel flies over the rail and hits the water. It floats for a moment, and then the waves drag it slowly under the surface—a bright orange sunken treasure.

“Car,” says Kat.

I thought I could find faith without choosing something to believe, which is sort of like thinking that I could keep what I had with Katy while trying out something new with Seth. Like we thought we could be dharma bums while we carried a cell phone. Or a gun.

Kat wants me to say that I love her, and of course I do. Do I love her the most? All I know is that the emptiness I feel when she will not look at me is so solid and heavy I can almost hold it in my hands, like a weapon. I carry it, wishing it would crush me, knowing its weight is my fault.

The beach is littered with drift logs—giant tree remnants bleached smooth by water and sun, charred by beach bonfires. We climb over several of them until we find a limb that is so wide and flat that the two of us can lie side by side on our backs on top of it, looking up at the stars and listening to the roar of the waves rolling in.

“I could kill you,” says Kat.

“Well, you still have a gun.” I slide my eyes cautiously in her direction, hoping she understands how absolutely horrible I really feel. About everything. Hoping she knows it’s my stupid idea of a joke.

She doesn’t look at me. “Homicidal Katherine is not ready for humor,” she says.

Homicidal Katherine has not spoken to me since the customs officials took a brief, bored glance at our passports and waved us into America, along with the rest of the passengers on the ferry from Victoria. I had every expectation that Kat would unload my belongings on the asphalt of the parking lot and squeal out of town without a backward look. Instead she hands me the car keys in absolute silence, crawls into the passenger seat, and falls asleep. Or at least, she pretends to be asleep.

You can cry while driving but only a little because you have to be able to see the road. I listen to music and let the road carry me away—no maps, no Kerouac—as though I can erase the whole business with a few hundred miles in any direction. I’m sorry I threw her bag overboard. I’m sorry for everything that led up to that moment, and I’m sorry that in the end it was an unnecessary loss. If they had searched her and found a gun in her possession—a concealed weapon, unregistered, loaded—who knows what could have happened. Maybe they wouldn’t have let her back into the country. Maybe they would have thrown her in jail. I had to make a decision, and if there’s anything I’ve learned from this trip—from Katy, actually—it’s that avoiding a difficult decision doesn’t make it go away. Still, I should probably talk to her next time instead of throwing her stuff into the ocean.

My tears are drying up, the way tears will, even though the empty hole remains. My phone chirps. I find a sign for the beach and pull into the parking lot to blow my nose and see who messaged me. I’m relieved to see it isn’t Seth.

Happy Birthday to my daughter, all grown up. You know your heart, just like your mother did. All of my love to you, and to Katy, as ever. Dad.

So is that true? Do I know my own heart? Can I find my way into the future? I look at Kat, who pretends to wake up. She won’t look at me, but she quirks one eyebrow up as she gazes out the dark windshield, the way she does when she’s about to tease me but isn’t sure if she should.

I sit there for a minute, my fingers poised over the keyboard, and I think about what to say, what to do. How to face at least one of my fears. At last I start to type.
Trying to let my heart lead instead of my fear. Do me a favor? Save all those college applications. Love and thanks, Anna.
I hit Send and then get out of the car and walk toward the sound of the ocean, hoping she will follow.

“So do you want to talk?” I kind of don’t know what else to say, but I guess it’s what comes next.

Kat sighs, swinging her legs off one side of the log, facing the ocean. Ahead of us, the moonlit surf rolls in and in, crashing into the infinite expanse of stones—stones smoothed and sorted by shape and size in the pounding and pounding of the waves.

Kat hops off the log. “I’m super pissed at you, Anna, and I can’t see that changing anytime soon. But I know why you did it.”

I sit up, awkwardly twisting a pocket of emptiness in my hands. “Do you mean…” Her satchel? Seth? More than that?

She faces me, looking me in the eye for the first time since she walked away from me on the ship. It’s dark, but the little moon carves out her face in shadows and silvery highlights, and I can tell that she is scowling at me. “I mean everything, okay? I know. I understand. I just wish for one second you would have thought about me, about what I’m feeling. We agreed on some things. And I
love
you, Anna.”

There’s a little pause, and then she brushes her hair back from her forehead with both hands and twists it almost violently around all her fingers, looking back out to sea. “I don’t need you to say you love me back. I don’t even need you to know if you do. I just need you to be open with me.” She drops her hands and makes a gagging sound of disgust. “God. Could I sound any stupider?”

“No, I—I’m glad we’re talking.” After all this, I still can’t do anything but stand here and stutter like an idiot.

She rolls her eyes a little, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, and her hand fills the empty space in mine as she drags me up off the log. “I know you love me, Anna babe. It’s like my art exhibition. The impact of the Good Lock key exists, even if it’s unspoken. Even if it’s hypothetical.”

I can’t talk because of these stupid tears. She leads me toward the water’s edge and doesn’t stop when she gets there; she wades right in, shoes and all. The water is so cold that my feet are almost instantly numb, but I don’t care. It has to be past midnight. The only thing I need to feel is the relief that this terrible birthday is over. I pull her close to me, so close not even the sea can separate us.

We walk back to the car in dripping silence, still holding hands. The salt smell in the air permeates our clothes and our hair, filling the car. “We never did sleep in a bed or get our laundry done.”

“I know.” Kat sighs.

“I’m just glad my birthday’s over.” I roll down the window, leaning my head out to see the stars. “Do you remember Sage Creek, when you said you wanted to stay up all night? To see the moon kiss the morning star?”

She smiles. “That feels like a million years ago.”

It does, too. “What if it’s all just words, Katy? What if all of this”—I gesture helplessly—“is only running away? Maybe we should just give up and go back home.” I pull the green scarf the shaman gave me from my hair and press it up to my nose, searching for the scent of jasmine, but the smell of my mother is gone—replaced with the ocean and Katy and me.

Kat tilts her head to one side, thinking. “I think we’ve come too far for that. We can’t go back now, or we’ll always be wondering what was going to happen next. Maybe we’re about to make the biggest discovery of all.”

“Maybe. But what if we don’t make it?” Everything seems so fragile right now.

“That’s life, Anna. It’s uncertain. You can be a good person, or you can be completely flawed. You can be on the road without a destination or you can stay in your bed all day long. You still never know what’s going to happen next.”

I look closely at the scarf in my hands, noticing for the first time the wandering lines embroidered into the silk fabric with gold thread. “This isn’t my mother’s scarf,” I say. For a moment I’m caught in a wave—a riptide of loss—as though she’s being torn from me all over again. I clench the imposter, the silk tight in my fists.
Be open
, the shaman said.
You know what love is.
Outside the car, the sound of the ocean is softer, soothing, the sound of a mother hushing her infant.
A shadow to comfort you.
I miss her, but it’s okay; I know what love is.

“Let’s move,” I say, reaching for
The Dharma Bums.

I flip the rain-warped pages of the book, and there it is. My mouth falls open. The most beautiful Good Lock key of all—Celtic knots winding delicately and intricately around a tiny glittering ruby that Kat has pasted in the center. My birthstone.

“Art should change things,” she whispers. “Open something up inside.”

I read from the place marked by my key. “‘That night I went to sleep in my bag by the rosebush and rued the sudden cold darkness that had fallen over the shack. It reminded me of the early chapters in the life of Buddha, when he decides to leave the Palace, leaving his mourning wife and child and his poor father…and embarks on a mournful journey through the forest to find the truth forever.’” I close the book, my heart so full. I press my Good Lock key tightly against my chest.

“Oh, but that’s a sad part, when the dharma bums split up and go off all alone,” I say. I’m afraid, thinking about the meaning of the passage. Are Katy and I supposed to go our separate ways?

The thought tears me apart, atoms splitting. She takes my hand.

Kat takes the book from me and opens it back up, flipping a little until she finds the page again. She softly reads the next part out loud, the quote from Ashvhaghosha, “‘Like as the birds that gather in the trees of afternoon…then at nightfall vanish all away, so are the separations of the world.’”

“But I don’t want to separate from you, Katy.” I mean it. “Not ever.”

Separations. The word slices my thoughts into the wounds of separations I’ve already tasted. The fissure of my mother’s absence still trying to knit itself into a shiny scar. Her auburn hair, her flashing eyes, her singing voice. The loss of my father—his crumbling into red dust and his fragile new faith waiting for me at the end of the long road home. And now the thought of losing Katy.

Be open.
I reach for Katy, whisper into her ocean-heavy hair—all the words inside me. We hold each other with all we have, our arms and our hearts, trusting in their strength even as we know they’re not always enough.

I pull away gently and reach into my backpack for the notebook I’ve guarded so close all this time, opening it up to the finding God’s Love list. The shaman was right—I can’t chase after a checklist of experiences to prove God’s love, or I’ll miss the chance to prove myself. Taking a deep breath, I tear them out, each list, paging through the journal until I come to the very last one—What I Cannot Say. This one I place on top before handing them to Katy.

She takes them, holds the pages for a moment against her chest before folding them into the Kerouac book, smiling gently as she looks at the page. “‘A mournful journey through the forest to find the truth forever,’” she says, reading again from the book. She starts the car. “We can take that journey later. Right now, I could go for some pie. Some pie and a big cup of coffee. You with me?”

I nod, closing my eyes. “I’m with you,” I say, and I rest my head on Katy’s shoulder. Like my father said, I do know my own heart. The strong, sure heart of a girl who both cares and dares. For the first time on this journey I am perfectly content here in the passenger seat—my destination both known and unknown, my future both full of promise and empty of expectations.