The Fragile World (13 page)

curtis

“So?” Olivia asked, coming toward me.

I nodded at the boy beneath the beach umbrella who was openly staring at us. “I see you made a friend.”

“I’m fine, by the way,” Olivia snapped, ignoring my comment. “No one managed to snatch me off the side of the road while you were gone.”

I looked down the road, which showed few signs of life. “Liv, of course you’re fine.”

“What’s going on with the car?”

I repeated what Jerrod Ellis, brother of Raymond and sole proprietor of J & E Automotive, had told me, with all the gravity of a surgeon notifying the family. “It’s the transmission.”

Olivia said, “That’s bad, right? The transmission?”

I nodded.

“I mean, expensive,” she clarified.

“It’s not your job to worry about that.”

“I worry about everything, remember?”

“Not this,” I told her. “This one is solely my territory.”

A new transmission, Jerrod Ellis had informed me, wiping his hands against his work pants, would cost a thousand at the least. A rebuilt transmission was cheaper, but would take longer—it would be a day before he could get the parts from Rawlins. It was our only real option, save for abandoning the trip entirely and settling down in Lyman—which may have been the fate of the drivers of the rusted-out cars at the front of the property. When I leaned against the counter to sign the triplicate form, the handle of the Colt had dug into my paunch. If it wasn’t for Olivia, I would have been on the next bus out of Lyman, Oberlin in my sights.

“So.” Olivia dug in the dirt with the toe of her combat boot. “Now what?”

“Now we settle in. We’re going to be here for a couple days, at least.”

“Days?” Olivia echoed doubtfully, casting a glance down the street. I could see what she was thinking—a couple of days
here?

“It’s okay. We’re not in any hurry.” Saying this, I almost convinced myself. What were a few more days, after I’d been waiting four years? Robert Saenz had a few more days of life, liberty, and the pursuit of whatever happiness he could find at the bottom of a pill bottle.

“I guess.” She looked down at the small mountain of dirt she had displaced. It was kind of her not to point out that our options were extremely limited.

While Olivia unloaded her belongings from the trunk, I sat in the driver’s seat, pretending to gather a few bits of trash. I ran a hand beneath the seat to where I’d stashed the six bullets, and one came loose, dropping into the palm of my hand. I froze.

“We’ll need the laundry bag, right?” Olivia called.

“Right.”

There was no time to retape the cartridge, so I slid it into the pocket of my jeans, where it made a small clink against my loose change. I looked up to see Olivia balancing her pillow on top of her suitcase. The boy she had been talking to earlier was still staring at us from his seat behind a rickety folding table. I nodded to him.

“You need a ride?” he called. “I could take you to the motel. That’s my truck.”

Olivia looked at me.

“We’d appreciate it,” I called, and he ambled over to help us with our bags.

“I’m Sam Ellis,” he said, shaking my hand. “That’s my dad you were talking to, Jerrod. Well, stepdad.” Even if there wasn’t a biological connection, Sam had the same confident handshake. He loaded our bags into the back of his pickup in two fluid movements. Since he barely came up to my shoulder, I realized I’d probably mistaken him for being younger than he actually was. Up close, he looked more like twenty than Olivia’s age.

“You’re just going to leave everything out there?” Olivia asked, indicating the card tables.

Sam shrugged. “Not a lot of theft around here. And not too many suspects, either.”

Olivia pressed up against me as she had in the tow truck, her knees angled to avoid the gearshift and, I suspected, Sam Ellis. She braced herself against me as we made the few turns and I flinched, hoping she hadn’t noticed the hard body of the Colt.

What the hell was I doing, riding around with my daughter, a young man and a gun in the middle of nowhere? With every moment that passed, what I had long suspected was becoming incontrovertibly true: there were two kinds of people in the world, and I was the kind that didn’t like guns. I was no Zach Gaffaney, comfortably at home amid dozens of loaded weapons. With Olivia’s body bumping up against mine, the gun felt like a huge mistake. Only a giant red Bozo wig or one of those flowing black capes worn by some of Olivia’s friends, the Visigoths, would have made me feel more conspicuous right then. Yes, I’d determined that in order to do what I was going to do, I needed a gun—but actually having one made me feel less, not more, safe. I might as well have had sticks of dynamite strapped to my chest.

“So, you’re going to be in town for a few days, then?” Sam asked, startling us out of our silence. I’d been staring out the window, noticing again the restaurants I’d spotted earlier, a small convenience store, window displays in need of some updating. The question, I knew, wasn’t directed toward me.

“I think so,” Olivia said, looking down at her lap. She was rolling the hem of her sweatshirt back and forth between two fingers.

“Maybe, um...” Sam began, and then stopped. I glanced at him; his entire neck and face were flushed as red as a sunburn. “I mean if...maybe...”

His voice trailed off, and the pickup slowed for a turn into the parking lot of The Drift Inn. I counted eight rooms in a single row, backing up against a field of scrub brush that would soon break away into tumbleweeds. I tried to pretend that this field was very interesting, that it required my attention and concentration. The truck was in Park now, the engine idling, but still Sam hadn’t found a way to finish his sentence.

I expected Olivia to have some excuse at the ready, since she could surely see where this conversation was leading. But then I realized she was looking up at me, expecting me to say something. I cleared my throat, choosing my words. He seemed like a nice enough kid, and I didn’t want to crush him too flat.

But Olivia surprised me. Quietly, so that I almost couldn’t hear, she said, “I would love to.”

olivia

When Sam knocked on our motel door at seven-thirty, he was wearing the same shirt with the “humerus” joke under an oversize flannel jacket. “What’s in there?” he asked, spotting the backpack on my shoulder.

“Nothing, just stuff.” Actually, it held my phone, which Dad had programmed with local emergency numbers for Lyman and the surrounding county; an extra sweatshirt in case my giant hoodie wasn’t enough; a chocolate bar that I could break into pieces and ration in case I got stranded alone in the wilderness for days; my Fear Journal and a couple of pens. In case Sam turned out to be someone horrible and dangerous, I could stab him with the pen, call the authorities and be warm and reasonably well-fed when they arrived.

Sam was smiling at me and I smiled back at him sheepishly. It wasn’t exactly the premise for a lovely first date.

Dad asked Sam, “Where are you taking her?” as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world, that a boy I’d met only a few hours earlier, who I knew next to nothing about except that he made snow globe art of the great human tragedies, was going to take me on a date. I was surprised both that I’d said yes and that Dad hadn’t said no—not that I’d absolutely wanted him to.

“Just...dinner, and a drive around town,” Sam told him, and then to me, “If you’re only going to be in Lyman for a short while, there are some things you definitely have to see while you’re here.”

This made me think of the
New York Times
travel section, back when Mom was home and her favorite thing in the whole world was to drink her way through a pot of coffee while reading the Sunday paper. No matter that we didn’t live anywhere near New York, or that she’d only been there one time in her life. She particularly loved the travel section, with its practical articles informing people how to spend three days in Cozumel, or eighteen hours in Bangkok, places where she would probably never find herself. Maybe I could pitch this idea to the travel editor of the
Times:
Three Days in Lyman, Wyoming. Agenda for Day One: Break down on I-80. Get towed into town for expensive repair. Meet strange boy who makes even stranger art. Dinner with said boy. Take in the sights.

Dad said, “She needs to be back by ten sharp. Not ten-oh-two, not ten-oh-one. Ten o’clock. Got it?”

Sam nodded seriously. He didn’t seem nervous at all, but why should he be? There was nothing particularly threatening about either me or Dad, who was fiddling with the remote. He’d already dismissed us. He was probably going to spend the night in front of the TV in his sweatpants, glad for the time without me.

“We’re synchronizing watches right now,” I said, amazed at how glib I sounded when my whole body was a quaking mess of nerves. Was I actually going on a date? With a person I had known for about five whole minutes?

Sam opened the passenger door of his pickup for me, and I scrambled up into the seat, hoping my jerky movements somehow looked cool. As I was fastening my seat belt, I saw Dad’s face at the window, a pale oval. I gave him the A-OK sign with my thumb and forefinger, but he didn’t react. I had the unsettling feeling that what he was seeing wasn’t what was actually in front of him. Maybe the danger wasn’t me going on a date, but leaving Dad by himself.

“Where are we going, exactly?” I asked as Sam turned left onto the main road, heading away from town. I wondered if I’d made some massive miscalculation. I suddenly remembered an episode of
Criminal Minds
where the serial killer had a clear advantage since he knew the terrain like the back of his hand, and the Behavioral Analysis Unit was left to try to triangulate his movements through a complicated series of computer commands. How long would it take the BAU, working with local law enforcement, to locate one tiny me in the vastness of the Wyoming landscape?

I flinched when Sam spoke. “What?”

“I said it was going to be a surprise. What are you so afraid of, anyway?”

I shrugged, my code for a question too complicated to answer.

“Well, don’t worry. You’re completely safe. I packed us a dinner—” he indicated a cooler tethered to the trunk of his pickup, something I’d failed to notice until that point “—and I’m going to take you to one of my favorite places.”

“We’re going on a picnic?” I asked. It was barely fifty degrees. Thank goodness I’d brought the extra sweatshirt.

“It’s going to be great. So, Olivia. Where in California are you from?”

I relaxed a bit, telling him our story—or an edited version, at least. I left out the complicated facts of a dead brother and a father who may or may not have been planning to jump from the roof of the school cafeteria, but mentioned that we were going to see my mother in Omaha. Sam was a steady driver, shifting gears smoothly, keeping his eyes on the road—except for when he was glancing at me. I was glad for the dark, since my face felt warm.

Soon Lyman was behind us, and we were on a single-lane road, paved but only barely, like some kind of Depression-era WPA project that had been neglected ever since. Sam had slowed down, and we were barely crawling through the sparse landscape. The headlights illuminated only the area immediately in front of us, so rocks and shrubs appeared in brief flashes and disappeared into the darkness.

“What about you?” I asked, my voice spilling into the silence.

“Well, my parents are divorced, too,” he began.

I didn’t correct him. Most people I knew thought that my parents were divorced. It seemed kind of lame to protest, “Just because they live thousands of miles apart and refuse to talk to each other, doesn’t mean they’re not still married.” They might as well have been divorced, even if it wasn’t written on any official document.

Sam, it turned out, had just turned nineteen, although he’d finished with high school two years earlier, dropping out and doing what he called a “GED-type thing.” He was taking classes right now online, and maybe in a year or two he would go to Laramie, to the University of Wyoming. Or maybe not, because he wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to study, and besides, he said, he wanted to give his art a chance to really take off. He lived with his stepdad, did oil changes at the shop. His mom lived in Cheyenne with his ten-year-old brother, who he only saw a few times a year, a side effect of what had been an ugly divorce.

“Do you miss him a lot—your brother?”

Sam was wistful. “I’ve been thinking about him lately. Like, maybe I should just drive over there once in a while and hang out with him.”

“You should,” I told him. “You absolutely should.” I started to say “My brother...” but my throat constricted, and whatever I was going to say came out like a little squeak instead. I gave a weak cough to cover it.

We slowed further, and I realized we weren’t even on a road anymore. My heart started hammering again, and I wished I had packed one of those when-all-hell-breaks-loose survival handbooks. Dad had bought me one for Christmas because I’d pestered him endlessly. We’d taken turns reading from the book over our holiday break. Dad had found the advice to be hysterical, but it had all seemed incredibly practical to me.

“Just a little farther,” Sam said.

The ground had been basically flat for the most part, but when we turned to the right, I saw we were heading toward a raised outcropping of rock. Sam pulled up as close as he could and gestured with his head. “Here we are.”

I looked at him doubtfully. “We’re going up there?”

“Yep.” He hopped out of the truck and began to maneuver the cooler out of the back. “Grab those blankets, okay?”

“Sure.” The
blankets.
I found a stack of old quilts, battered but soft. Sam was already ahead of me, starting toward the rock. “I have a great fear of climbing rocks,” I said, but quietly enough so that he wouldn’t hear me. It wasn’t really a climb, though; it was more of a steep walk. Sam reached out a hand to help me steady myself, and I thought:
I’m holding hands, sort of, with a person who doesn’t know the first thing about me.
Okay—the first things, maybe, but that was it. Sam’s hand felt like the exact right size for a hand to be.

When we made it to the top, Sam dropped my hand and gestured around. “Top of the world,” he said, grinning.

We were only about ten feet off the ground—high enough so that a person with a mildish fear of heights would take notice—on a smooth, level surface of reddish rock. It occurred to me then, as Sam spread out a blanket, that we were miles from any kind of civilization or streetlight, and yet it wasn’t completely dark. I looked up and saw stars that were intensely, almost cartoonishly, bright.

“Whoa,” I breathed, craning my neck backward.

“It’s cool, huh?”

“Very cool.” I settled onto the blanket and leaned back, propping myself up by my elbows. “I don’t ever think I’ve seen the sky like this. Or maybe I just haven’t noticed it.”

“Too many lights around, maybe,” Sam said, easing himself down next to me. I wasn’t looking at him, but I could feel his nearness, his thigh practically touching mine. “Even in Lyman, small as it is, there are too many streetlights. It makes the sky seem kind of hazy.”

“I don’t really know what I’m looking at,” I confessed. “I mean, the moon, sure. And three stars in a row—that’s Orion’s Belt.”

He leaned closer, pointing so that his arm reached across my body. “Over there, you’ll see Sirius—the Dog Star, brightest star in the sky. That’s what people used to navigate with by night in the ancient world, when they were on the sea or in the desert and didn’t have other landmarks to go by.”

“Or GPS,” I breathed, my entire body on alert. “I gotta figure the ancients would have killed for GPS.” I giggled nervously at my own joke, but Sam continued, extremely serious.

“And, yeah, over there, of course, you see the handle of the Big Dipper.”

I followed his gesture. “Like a giant measuring cup in the sky.”

“You’re funny,” he said, but he wasn’t laughing, or even cracking a smile. I know this, because his face suddenly seemed very close to mine, and I thought if I concentrated hard enough, I might hear his heart beating alongside mine. It was cold, and in a few minutes I would probably need to put on the other sweatshirt, but right then my whole body felt embarrassingly hot. If I leaned even slightly to the side, our faces would be right next to each other.

“I’m not going to kiss you,” I said suddenly, my heart thumping.

He was quiet for a moment, and I knew that I’d blown it. What an idiot I was, how ungrateful and inconsiderate. He’d shown me his art, he’d given Dad and me a ride to our motel, he’d brought me to one of the most amazing places on earth, he’d shown no signs of being a creepy serial killer, and besides, I realized as soon as I said that, I
did
want to kiss him—I was just more or less terrified of it. My experience with kissing was embarrassingly slim.

“Oh,” Sam said, sounding wounded. “You mean ever, or just right now?”

“Fair question.” I laughed. “Right now, I guess.”

“That’s cool,” he said, and we leaned back to look at the stars.