Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (27 page)

“Or maybe she was selfish and shortsighted, and she never stopped to think how you would feel about any of this.”

“I don’t believe that.”

He shouldn’t do this. He didn’t want to. But it made him so fucking
mad
to think about Susan, blithely ignoring Ashley. Keeping the sale from her, the cancer, the chemo, packing up those boxes but never picking up the phone.

It made him so mad, he needed to make Ashley understand.

“Of course you don’t. You never see unpleasant stuff. You never see what’s going on at all. You think you’ll be happiest if you move back to Sunnyvale, change your name to Susan, and start wearing ugly pants suits.”

“She wore classy pants suits!”

Roman took a step toward her, leaning in. “She wore polyester. Pink and blue. And really terrible scarves. She ate too many candy bars. Her thighs rubbed together when she walked. She ran up gambling debts she couldn’t pay and took out a second mortgage on the property, and then she ran through that, too, and then when she was totally fucking broke, she
still
hard-balled me on the sale and made me pay her three times what the place was worth so I could get it before foreclosure, because she knew I’d have a bitch of a time getting the land if the bank owned it.”

He wasn’t supposed to tell her that.

He wasn’t supposed to be this close to her, pushing her back against the wall, their noses nearly rubbing, her breasts against his chest.

He wasn’t supposed to catch her wrists and pick them up and pin her in place with the truth.

God, it felt good, though. Righteous and fucking satisfying.

“She gave me everything,” Ashley whispered. “She was
great
.”

“She was
flawed
, Ashley.”

“She loved me.”

“I know she did. She talked about you all the goddamn time. ‘My granddaughter Ashley’s making jewelry. She has a new boyfriend, and he seems like such a nice young man. She’s going to be a doctor. She’s in Bolivia, helping people get clean water.’ I’m not saying she didn’t love you. Everybody knew that.”

She looked right into his eyes. “Then what are you saying?”

Roman dropped her arms and stepped back, struck suddenly by the selfishness of what he was doing. By the raw hostility of it.

I’m saying that she didn’t love you as much as you deserve to be loved
.

I’m saying it’s starting to look like nobody does
.

Who wanted to hear that? What right did he have to say it, even if it was true?

Her mother was dead. Her father had turned her away, or she’d turned him away—Roman didn’t know which.

She’d had no one but Susan.

Roman had no right to take Susan away from her.

He backed up until he ran into the sink and the rest of the Mardi Gras beads fell in with a clatter.

It was too hot in the trailer. Sweltering. His head hurt. He needed to get out of here and calm down. Let the sediment settle, clear his mind so he could think rationally.

Instead, he asked her, “What’s the deal with your dad?”

Her throat flushed red, her cheeks pink. “What do you mean?”

“I mean your dad’s a senator, and he never talks about you, and you never see him. What’s the deal?”

She crossed her arms. “There’s no deal.”

“There’s got to be. If there were no deal, you’d be giving speeches at rallies for him.”

“We don’t have the same politics.”

“Even so. He could use you. Just your face—you wouldn’t even have to talk. But he doesn’t. He acts like you don’t exist.”

Ashley looked at her feet, bare against the trailer’s shag carpeting. “Okay, so we have an arrangement.”

“What arrangement?”

“I keep a low profile. Don’t embarrass him.”

“And in return?”

“He leaves me alone.”

But the loneliness in her voice—the desolation in her body—told Roman she was lying. Her father didn’t leave her alone. He ignored her.

Roman thought of Ashley in her tap shoes, clamoring for attention, and he could hardly breathe.

Someone needed to give her what Heberto had given him. A purpose. A sense of her abilities, so she could focus on the future and what she could have instead of letting everything she didn’t have drag her into darkness.

He could do that.

But to do it, he’d have to hurt her.

Roman exhaled, eyes on his shoes. On the ugly carpet. On anything but Ashley. “You need to grow up,” he said.

When he looked at her, she’d gone still. Her cheeks were stained red, as though he’d slapped her.

It’s for her own good
.

Not his. Hers.

“Stop moping around like a teenager,” he said, “and start thinking about what you want to do with the rest of your life. Because you get to keep the boxes. That’s more than most people get. But I’m knocking down Sunnyvale, and you’re just going to have to deal.”

She sank to the floor, eyes closed, hands braced on her knees, wrists dangling. “I don’t like you very much.”

“You’re not supposed to. I keep being a dick to you.”

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

It was that movement—her hands, how hard she pushed, her sharp elbows and thin ankle
bones and the way she pressed into herself—that made it impossible for him.

Impossible to break her.

Impossible even to try to mold her into someone more like himself.

He dropped into a squat, needing to get closer to her. “The thing is, Ash? I don’t want you to hate me.”

She nodded, as though she’d known that all along.

They didn’t say anything for a while. Roman didn’t know what to say. He had no handbook for this. No mentor to mimic. No rules.

No skills.

Ashley asked, “You want to see a ghost town?”

He wanted dinner. And calm.

Five hundred more push-ups that would give him aching shoulders and a smooth mind.

He didn’t get to have that. Here they were, and there wasn’t any getting around it. Whether he liked it or not, whether he wanted to or not, it had been like this with her from the beginning.

She would keep asking him to do things, and he would keep saying yes.

“Sure, if we grab something to eat first.”

“Let me find my shoes.”

They scrounged up microwave pizzas from the camp store, nuked them, and ate them with burning fingers. Afterward, Ashley showed him the road just beyond the back edge of the campground property.

“This used to be the front,” she said, “but in the nineties they had to reroute the highway and abandon this section because it was too dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?”

“There’s an underground fire. This is coal country, and the coal caught on fire. It’s been burning ever since—fifty years or so. They can’t put it out. Or they won’t, because it would be too expensive.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“Yeah. So for a long time, it wasn’t noticeable, but then in the eighties and nineties, I think, there started to be all these dangerous things. Like, Stanley says the highway was venting clouds of gas, and plus it was so warm that the temperature difference caused banks of fog, and people couldn’t see where they were driving. He said it was like driving into the Twilight Zone sometimes.”

The surface of the road undulated and shifted. Gullies opened up, then disappeared. She kind of loved this road. She loved thinking about what it must have looked like when it was exhaling heat into the air, the strangeness of it, how beautifully broken it had become since it was abandoned. Most of the surface was covered with graffiti. One section featured hundreds of identical spray-painted phalluses—cartoonish wangs with proud, bulging balls, all pointing in the same direction. The words and colors hit out of order, making a profane poetry.

Ziggy. Cami. Creamy snatch
.

Never forget
.

This is where she appears in the dark of the night
.

Wark
.

Asian people love golf
.

Welcome to Hell
.

Be kind whenever possible
.

Roman studied it with his forehead furrowed, like it was a puzzle he might find the clues to solve.

It was all very Roman of him. She was starting to get how he approached the world. As though he were just visiting, trying to understand the best way to blend in with all these messy humans.

Though sometimes he surprised her by blending perfectly well. In the trailer, he’d surprised her, and then he’d cut her down at the knees, and then he’d surprised her all over again.

She’d kept thinking he was going to say it.

She didn’t love you
.

Nobody loves you
.

But he hadn’t. He’d pulled the punch, and afterward he’d looked punch-drunk himself, and full of shame.

Ashley had lost her resistance to him. The boxes, her disappointment, her tears, their argument—all of it had emptied her out, left her feeling as though she’d been scoured with sand and water and now she was just a clean shell, receptive.

She looked at Roman, and she wanted to draw him inside.

They crossed over a torn-up section of road and reached the outskirts of Centralia. Here, too, there was life—not in abandoned houses, because the houses had all been cleared away, but in the intersections of roads like veins, the bones of a body that had lost its flesh but not its spirit.

“What happened?” he asked.

“The government decided it was too dangerous for people to keep living here, and it would be more practical to get rid of the town than to get rid of the fire. They started paying people to move away and knocking down their houses. When some people still wouldn’t move, the state evicted them. It took a long time, but it’s nearly empty now.”

“It doesn’t look dangerous.”

“Right? Some people think it’s a conspiracy,” Ashley said. “They think the state government wants to kill the town to get the mineral rights.”

“Please.”

“This is one of the richest coal seams in the country. Sometimes the ground is worth more than the people who live on it.”

Roman stopped asking questions. She hadn’t meant to make the comparison to Sunnyvale, but there it was.

She didn’t want to think about Sunnyvale.

“You want to go see the church? There’s one that still holds services.”

“For who?”

“A lot of people who used to live here moved close by. They come back.”

“Okay.”

She led him uphill, toward the spire. “Stanley was born here,” she told him.

“In Centralia?”

“Here on this street. There were row houses. Michael told me. Stanley was supposed to be born in Bloomsburg, at the hospital, but his dad ran off and left his mom without any money, so she was afraid to go and then it was too late.”

“Did he move away because of the fire?”

“No, a long time before that. His mom remarried, and they went to some other town. Michael was born there. They didn’t buy the campground until later. Michael says Stanley wanted to come back because Centralia is hard to leave. I asked Stanley once if he thought it was because the place was special or if it was more that what had happened to the town haunted him.”

“What did he say?”

“He kind of grunted.”

They followed a road uphill, past power lines, and then ascended a steep set of stone steps that belonged to the church. Halfway up, Ashley turned around and sat down. Roman found a seat beside her, one step above.

They looked downhill, over the carpet of trees to the rise of the valley beyond. Everything green and quiet.

“My parents were refugees,” he said.

That was all. Just those four words. But it was the first thing he’d ever told her about himself voluntarily, and the words pinged against the pain she carried inside her, setting it resonating.

This was why she’d brought him here. If there was any place that felt to her the way Roman did, it was this one. Every time she visited, Centralia dredged up all these unstable
emotions in her. Anguished empathy for the people who’d lived here and had to leave, and a sense of the earth itself, the loneliness of it, the confusion. She thought of hidden heat, of faith that kept burning, and it filled her with fierceness and longing.

And now, bound up with all that, she thought of Roman.

Behind her, he shifted and exhaled.

“You know the Mariel boatlift?” he asked.

“Sort of. A lot of Cubans came to Florida then, right? In the eighties?”

“Nineteen eighty. Castro opened the Mariel port and said ‘Anybody who wants to go, go.’ More than a hundred thousand Cubans came over, mostly in private boats. President Carter said the United States would welcome them with open arms, but he didn’t think there would be so many.”

Roman made a sound that was supposed to be a laugh, but it had no humor in it. “Maybe half of the people had family who met them in Miami or Key West, but that still left a lot of people with no one. The government stuck them in refugee camps. They sent a whole bunch to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin.”

Wisconsin. There was the link.

“My parents hooked up at the camp. They were young, both of them alone. My mom was only fifteen. I was the first baby born to Mariel refugees on American soil.”

Born in 1981. That made him thirty-two.

“There was a picture in the paper. Patrick said my mom wanted to name me America, or George Washington. Libertad Roman Ojito Díaz was a compromise, so I guess I should be grateful.”

“Who’s Patrick?”

“He was my foster father.”

“Oh. Your parents …”

“Kind of a story there.”

She sat very still, because she felt its presence. This skittish narrative creature, drawn out by the quiet, the view. Drawn by the smell of her tears, the trauma of what had happened in the trailer.

When he didn’t speak, she reached out and insinuated her hand beneath the cuff of his pants. She found the skin above his sock—hot, slightly damp—and slid her hand up to wrap
around his calf.

He went so still, his body a held breath. She situated her hand against his muscle, snugging in, and left it there.

Tell me
.