Anywhere but Here (11 page)

“Did he find what he was looking for?”

“He got all the way to the coast.”

All the way to the coast. I look down at the blue and try to trace it west, but my eyes are stopped by rock and forest before they get anywhere.

“So explain to me why we're up on this rock? We should be down there paddling.”

“Are you kidding?” she says. I can barely move, but somehow Hannah scrambles up. “This hike was for posterity, baby.”

“Posterior?” I check out her ass as she walks a few steps to the waist-high stone cairn on the peak. Confidently, she pulls a few rocks from the marker and reaches inside. When her hand emerges, she's clutching a small canister.

“Posterity, you idiot. Not posterior.”

“What have you got?”

“A logbook,” she says, shaking a yellowed notepad out of the canister. “The guidebook said it would be here.”

Sitting down and flipping the log open on her bent knees, she scribbles something and passes it to me. Underneath the date, she's written

First Topless Ascent of Mount Slando

Hannah Deprez and Cole Owens

I'm laughing when I hand it back. But I'm uncomfortable, too. I feel as if I've been engraved on this place, the same way the rocks have etched themselves into my calves. I feel as if I've signed in when I really, really wanted today to be all about checking out.

“You could come to my place for dinner tonight,” Hannah says quietly. “If you want to.”

I'd rather follow David Thompson down the river.

“I should work on my film,” I tell her. Which is obviously the most lame excuse ever but the best I can do on short notice. When I look at Hannah, glowing and half-naked, I understand how people get stuck in this town permanently. They meet a great girl, get a job at the mill, buy a bungalow, drive a minivan, retire at the old-folks home, and end up in Valley View Cemetery.

This can't happen.

“I have to get some more footage so I can start editing.”

“Sure,” she says. “Another time.”

And we start downhill, back toward the bungalows and minivans.

I don't actually intend to do any filming today, but I bump into Tracy, my mom's nurse, at the strip mall late in the afternoon. I'm trying to buy aloe cream for my back, which is as fried and blistered as the pork rinds I never ate thanks to Hannah.

When I see Tracy, I figure it's serendipity—a great subject, standing in front of a perfectly kitschy strip mall. Grocery store, health food store, coffee shop, and dry cleaner's. It's not quite as perfect as the gingerbread bakery backdrop I used for Greg's interview, but it has the same small-town feel to it.

Tracy eyes my camera warily, as if I might ask her to dance or break into song.

“It will be painless. I promise,” I tell her.

“It's a good thing you're cute,” she says finally.

Ignoring that, I set up the camera. I've been trying to remember the rule of thirds lately—things slightly off center carry more inherent tension. With Tracy a little to the right and the windows and signs of the stores extending off to the left, it seems to work.

“Okay. Let's start with an easy one. How long have you lived in the Web?” I ask.

“Two years,” she says. Which is perfect. As a relative newcomer, she'll have objective opinions about this place.

“What made you move here?”

“A job offer, mostly,” she says. “And I wanted a place where I could have a house, a dog, and a big vegetable garden.”

Tracy doesn't seem like the vegetable garden type. On a scale of one to ten, where one is “grows organic produce” and ten is “eats baked beans out of the can,” I would have pegged Tracy at a nine, at least.

“Since you've been here, has it met your expectations?”

She smiles. I don't know if I've ever seen Tracy really smile before. There've been sympathetic half smiles in the hospital. Bedside-manner smiles. But not a real, cheek-stretching, eye-crinkling smile like this one.

“It has far exceeded my expectations.”

This is not helpful, project-wise. Scrapping the rule of thirds,
I focus her squarely in the center of the screen, as if that will force the truth from her.

“How? How has it exceeded them?”

“It's more open than I thought,” she says. “You worry that people will be narrow-minded in a small place, but I haven't found that at all. I fell in love. And my neighbor—even though she's about a hundred years old—she's teaching me how to grow biodynamic blueberries.”

“Biodynamic blueberries,” I repeat.

“I know!”

I lower the camera. This is completely useless. Still, I can't help feeling good for Tracy. I mean, she looks so damned happy.

“So you fell in love with the town or with a person?”

“Both!” She beams.

“Well. Congratulations.”

When she walks away, she takes her bubble of levity with her and leaves me feeling tired. Making this film is going to require some less chipper characters. It's as if everyone around me is living on a
Sound of Music
set, wearing green curtain dresses and singing in trees. Do I have to be the one to tell them that life can go downhill, faster than that Nazi kid can blow his whistle?

When I started this project, I thought there were plenty of people in Webster wishing they could escape. It turns out I might be the only one.

I shove my camera deep in my pocket and push into the drugstore in search of my aloe. If I'm alone in this feeling, that's fine. It will make it easier to leave them all behind. Everything according to plan.

•  •  •

On the Saturday after school starts, there's supposed to be a massive party at the gravel pits. Hannah's picking me up.

“Dad? Are you listening to me? I'm heading out.”

Parked in the recliner, Dad's focused on the TV. He's watching a doc about Gulf War syndrome.

“I'm going out.”

When he still doesn't respond, I plant myself between his chair and the screen.

“You look more like a door than a window,” he mumbles, taking a pull of his beer and leaning around me to see.

“I'll be back late.” I move slightly to the side.

He belches.

“Are you okay?” He and I aren't warm and fuzzy types, but this level of conversation is especially lame. It strikes me that for someone who's into nonfiction, like me, Dad doesn't seem too interested in dealing with reality these days.

“Fine. Fine. Get out of here.” Dad waves his beer in the direction of the door. Then he hoists himself out of the chair, presumably to get himself another bottle. He doesn't fold down
the footrest of the recliner, and as he tries to swing his leg over the top of it, his foot doesn't clear the upholstery. He hops a couple times. I lean over, trying to help, but I'm too far away and the chair's between us. He lands sprawled on the floor, groaning. On the television, a scientist describes how experimental vaccines and chemical contamination may have affected the brains of Gulf War soldiers.

“Are you all right?” I kneel beside him.

“Son of a . . .”

This close, I can smell the fumes coming off him, a stench like Dallas's living room on a Sunday morning.

“Are you drunk?”

“No, I'm not drunk,” Dad says as he hauls himself to a sitting position. The unsteady swoon of his head atop his neck says otherwise.

“How about I make a pot of coffee before I go?”

“Gone, Cole.” He shifts to lean heavily against me. Which is bad for the survival of my clean shirt. Good, in that I can no longer see his face and I have a sinking feeling that my dad might actually be crying.

“She's gone,” he says.

And then I get it. It happens to me too. The sudden, acute awareness of Mom's absence. On TV, the narrator explains armor-piercing uranium. This is like armor-piercing grief.

They don't warn you about it when they explain the stages of loss. My aunt, for example, said the stages were anger, and shock, and some sort of bargaining with God. “Unforeseen periods of mental collapse” wasn't on the list.

I pat Dad's back in sympathy.

“She's gone to work the Okanagan circuit. They move around, you know . . . the dancers. People get tired of seeing the same bodies, so they switch towns. She's been able to stay at her cousin's house until now. . . .”

My whole body turns cold.

It's Sheri. Dad's crying over Sheri.

I shove him off my chest and scramble to my feet. Then I smooth my shirt, checking for snot. I'm clear.

“I have to go.”

No response.

“You just grab yourself another beer.”

He doesn't reply. I leave him staring at the carpet and, with the sounds of falling bombs in the background, slam the door behind me.

I'm trapped at a gravel pit party with a bunch of people I don't want to see.

I'm ignoring them. All of them. In front of me, a bonfire sends sparks swirling and swarming like living creatures, so bright they seem certain to last forever. Or drift into the pine branches and ignite. Or spiral into the stratosphere. Except every time I think one is going to make it, it's extinguished.

“ ‘Extinguished' is an ugly word.” I say this to the guy in the red plaid jacket and foam-front baseball cap who's slumped next to me on the tailgate. Far beyond talking, he raises his beer bottle in a vague toast.

Around us, bodies circle as wildly and erratically as the
sparks. Bass is thumping from another pickup. The whole world smells of smoke and beer. People are talking about nothing, loudly. When I let their voices blend, it seems as if they're speaking another language, one that I can't understand.

If I were sitting on the back of my own truck, I could go home right now. Maybe take the other guy with me, as an act of human kindness, and roll him out of the cab into his front yard.

But I came in Hannah's mom's Saturn. It was the only way to avoid meeting Hannah's parents. She wanted me to stop by and hang out for a while before the party.

“My dad needs the truck,” I said.

Of course, then I had to explain why the truck was in the driveway when she picked me up. I don't think Hannah believed my story about his sudden-onset sinus infection. I should have just told her that he was piss-ass drunk.

She's near the fire now, glowing and giggling, greeting people as if she hasn't seen them in years—even though she probably saw them downtown this afternoon.

I've given up trying to convince her to leave. She's already called me an old man and told me to go have a drink and stop being so curmudgeonly. That was her word. “Curmudgeonly.” As I stare into the fire, the sparks start to look like code. They're probably telling me to blow this party and go home to bed.

A shrill voice pierces the blur, draws my attention.

“. . . and you stand here looking like the queen of Sheena. You think you can just grab a guy like an extra handful of candy from the bulk food aisle?”

I recognize Lex's voice, but I can't find her in the crowd bobbing around the fire. Beside me, the plaid-jacket guy has managed to raise his head. “Interesting comparison,” he mutters. “Think she meant queen of Sheba, though.” He goes back to rocking to his own internal beat, not quite in sync with the stereo bass.

“So. Completely. Unfair.” Lex is shrieking now, and I finally find her silhouette near the flames. With each word, she gives her target a shove. It's Hannah. I realize belatedly that her target is
Hannah
.

“Catfight!” someone hollers.

I'm halfway off the tailgate when my companion throws an arm across my path.

“Never, ever interfere in a girl fight,” he tells me, his eyes suddenly wide, boring into mine as if he's imparting some cosmic piece of understanding.

It's too late anyway. Someone else hugs Lex from behind, pinning her arms. Hannah spins and stalks away, away from Lex and away from my tailgate and into the crowd, where I see Greg step forward and Dallas throw a consoling arm around her shoulders.

Those two are good guys. Always around, always wearing the same easygoing smiles. If one of their friends decided to
build himself a grizzly-proof suit, they would be there, every weekend, strapping on his armor and passing him his beer.

Hannah probably wishes I were more like them.

I watch her until she's pasted her smile back on and accepted another drink, which takes all of three minutes. And probably means I'm driving her Saturn home tonight.

I've been sitting on this tailgate for a long time.

“Going for a walk. See you later, bud.”

My companion doesn't even raise his beer this time. His eyes have turned back into slits and his mouth is slack.

I sort of envy him.

I suppose what I should do is check on Hannah, make sure she's okay. That's what a good boyfriend would do. Hannah and I aren't officially boyfriend and girlfriend, though, and that has to have some benefits. Right? Benefits such as not having to meet her parents. Let Greg and Dallas take care of her. Besides, there's the cosmic wisdom to consider.

Turning away from the fire, I head down the dirt road—the one leading back toward town. The early September air feels suddenly crisp, prickling my lungs. As I walk, my eyes slowly adjust to the darkness. The woods separate themselves into individual tree trunks and the road appears as a faint gray strip in front of me. After a while, I see a flash of orange, like an ember, glowing at the side of the road.

“Is that Cole over there?”

I stop.

“Cole Owens? The one with Academy Awards in his future?”

Lauren's words float like a string of silvery bubbles in the dark. The smell of pot wafts after them.