Damaged (24 page)

“Camille!” I scream into the void.

I hear her laughing.

“Camille!”

I conjure her into being.

Her footsteps padding beside me.

Her long legs and thin waist, her graceful arms pumping.

Her face, smiling. But it is not her smile.

I run as fast as I can, track team fast, star of the soccer team fast. Camille could never run as fast as me. I feel like I've been running for miles, like if I turned around I wouldn't even be able to see the road anymore. But the view in front of me hasn't changed a bit; the horizon is still forever away. There is no end to this. There is no destination. I could keep running and running forever and never get anywhere. I could run until I died, and I'd still end up here anyway, a restless ghost like Camille.

Is that what I want? To just keep running? To keep going nowhere? Even out here, in this alien place, I carry everything from home with me. I carry Camille. I carry fear and sorrow and emptiness. I carry myself. As fast as I run, I will always carry myself.

So what happens if I stop running? What happens if I stop being scared?

Take away fear, and maybe Camille will just be a memory; maybe she will stop being a ghost. Memories still hurt; they can rip you apart with loss and pain. But they're not monsters. Not things that kill.

I stop running.

Every muscle in my body burns and my lungs scream from pumping the smoky air, but I am not dying. I turn around and Camille's ghost is standing in front of me with dark nothingness behind her. The sun has set. There is no moon. The red of the sky has been replaced with black. But Camille is perfectly illuminated, dressed in the same jeans and tank top she was wearing the night she was killed, the same thing she was ­wearing when she led me to the top of the quarry and asked me to join her.

“This isn't you, Camille,” I say.

“Who am I?” She smiles.

“It's not you.”

“Who am I, Kinsey?”

She stares at me and I look deep into her eyes. I see right through them, into the blackness behind her. She is transparent. She is nothing.

“If I'm not Camille, who am I?”

All of a sudden, it's so obvious.

The image of Camille in front of me flickers. Like bad reception, like faulty wires.

It's not her. It never was.

The girl in front of me is only a hologram, projected out of my own mind. She is a shadow puppet made out of fear. There is only one person who could ever hate me this much, only one who could be capable of causing me so much pain.

“Kinsey!” the voice pleads. It crackles like radio static.

“You're not real,” I say.

“Oh yeah?” The ghost laughs. “Then why are you talking to me?”

“I'm done talking to you.” I start walking. I walk right through her. She is not real. She cannot hurt me.

“I'm ready to let you go,” I say.

“What if I'm not?” says the voice, wavering in the darkness.

“You have no choice.”

The image of Camille flashes in front of me. Her face goes in and out of focus. Her screams whip through the air with wind, but they have lost their sharpness. I close my eyes and breathe. I inhale and my chest opens to memory, to the real Camille, the one I've been trying to escape.

Images flash through my mind— Camille in her jeans and tank top; Camille in her favorite yellow bikini, with curves I will never come close to having; Camille in her prom gown, stunning and elegant; Camille at twelve, gawky and only just turning beautiful. Here we are playing dress-up as little kids; here we are staying up late and gossiping in the darkness. Here is Camille's first love; here is Camille's first heartbreak. Here I am watching her life, saving mine for later, always later. And here is her patience, her love, her loyalty, despite all my demands.

And now here she is in front of me, on the ground in a pool of blood, her face gone, her skin charred, her arm twisted in a way no arm should ever be twisted. Just the memory of a body, now ashes buried in the ground back home, dissolving back into the earth. The image fades until there is only the lifeless, flat clay of the salt flat in front of me.

No ghost, no monster. Just memory.

Just feelings that cannot be seen or measured.

Just love and loss that is infinite.

“Good-bye, Camille,” I say. That is all I ever needed to say.

And then, in the darkness, two eyes shining white. The black broken by headlights, Hunter searching for me.

I walk slowly toward the light, for once not in a hurry. I look up and the sky is suddenly clear, the cloud of smoke from the forest fire pushed away by the wind. A gentle breeze now blows, cooler than the hot blasts of before, as if trying to soothe the parched earth, as if telling it
you have gone through enough
. Stars poke through the black, little twinkling beacons of hope.

The headlights get closer, shining a long, straight path to me. I hear the hum of the car's engine. I am held by the spotlight.

Hunter turns off the car and gets out. The sound of the car door closing is so sharp in the empty night. With the light in my eyes, I can make out only the barest outline of him in the black.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” he says.

“Turn the lights off, will you?”

The world goes dark again.

“Come here,” I say. I reach for his hand, pull him gently down to the ground. “Lie on your back,” I say.

We are side by side, holding hands, warmed by a blanket of diamonds.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Hunter says softly. His words float up to the heavens and mingle with the stars.

“Yeah. I think so.”

“You scared me a little.”

“Maybe it's not so bad to be scared.”

Silence holds us. We could stay here forever.

The world is drained of color and we fill up the emptiness.

Hunter squeezes my hand. “Do you think she's up there?”

“Sure,” I say. “Why not? She could be anywhere. Up there. Down here. In some other dimension we don't even know about.”

“I believe in heaven,” Hunter says. Like a confession, like an apology.

I do not respond. There is nothing to say to faith.

“You think I'm stupid,” Hunter says.

“No I don't.” I turn my head to look him in the eye, to make sure he knows I mean it. “Why would you think that?”

“You must think I'm stupid for believing. You strike me as the kind of person who would think that. No offense.”

I sigh. He's right. I have been the kind of person who would think that—cynical, superior, untrusting of mystery. But that was me before this, before everything happened, before I chased a ghost across the country and convinced myself it was chasing me.

“You believe in heaven,” I say. “I believe in ghosts.”

“So we're both delusional.”

Looking up at the sky like this, I can understand why people would think there was something up there, some kind of magical, mysterious promise, something better than down here. Even now, with all the things we know through science, the mystery is still there—we can imagine all those stars as other suns, with worlds like ours orbiting around them.

“You never thought about it?” Hunter says. “With Camille's death and everything? You never thought about where she is now?”

“I was too busy freaking out that she was still here,” I say, knowing he can never fully understand what I mean. “And maybe if I let myself think about where she went, then I'd have to admit she was really gone.”

We are quiet for a while. I feel my hand warm in Hunter's. And that is all I feel. There is no sense of Camille stalking behind me, no Camille hiding behind the car, no Camille in my head, no Camille hanging on to life. For once, no me hanging on to her. I don't know how I know, but I am certain she is gone for good.

I have never seen so many stars.

“Maybe I believe in something like reincarnation,” I say. “Like how science has proven that matter never really dies, it just moves around as energy and eventually becomes part of something else. Maybe souls are like that too, made up of a bunch of little soul atoms that get recycled over and over again, forever. So maybe you could have atoms in you that Jesus did, or Buddha, or a whale, or a tree, or a rock, or even an alien from another galaxy.”

“And maybe Camille's soul is getting blown around,” Hunter says. “Getting recycled and becoming parts of new things being born.”

“Like babies.”

“Or algae.”

“Or starfish.”

“Or stars,” Hunter says.

I start crying. The tears run down the side of my face and drip onto the parched earth below me. “And maybe we are breathing in pieces of her, and they get caught in our lungs and spread through our bloodstreams.”

“And maybe one little piece made it into our hearts,” Hunter says. “And it's just going to hang around there for a while.”

“Keeping us company.”

“Yeah.”

Hunter lifts my hand and places it on my heart, puts his hand over it, and pushes gently. I can feel the slightest rhythm.

“You feel her?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Me too,” he says.

We lie there for a while, our tears turning the salt earth back into sea, feeling the tiny pieces of Camille pulse through us, watching her above us, her soul as big as the sky, turning into stars.

* * *

We are drained. We are zombies. We are colorless, powdered white with the fine dust of the salt flats.

We do not speak the half hour it takes to drive across the border into Nevada. I don't consult Hunter as I pull into the first casino/hotel I see. I know he's as ready to stop as I am.

From the blank, colorless nothingness of the salt flats, we are thrown into its exact opposite. The casino is a different kind of nightmare, where we have to find our way through a maze of ringing, blinking slot machines. We float through the smoky haze, the air heavy and poisoned with cigarette smoke illuminated by the false cheerfulness of flashing lights. Old, haggard faces are bent and distorted, glued to their slot machine screens, multicolored lights reflecting off thick bifocals. Clawlike hands grasp buckets of quarters. We are the only youth in a sea of dead eyes and loose skin.

We cannot get to our room fast enough. The elevator smells like mothballs and cigars. We do not look at each other. The only words we have spoken in the last hour were what was needed to ask the clerk at the front desk for our room.

I open the door and a blast of air-conditioning welcomes us. The room is clean enough, with a bare minimum of decor and comfort. The dust of the salt flats sticks to my skin, mixed with my sweat like a layer of concrete paste. I throw my bag on the floor and walk to the window, look out at the sad nothing of a town, the few lights in the sea of desert beyond. How did anyone decide to settle here? Why would anyone want to make a life in such an empty, dead place?

I feel Hunter's hand on my shoulder, see his reflection in the window. We are only half there, just outlines filled in with darkness. I watch him behind me as he unbuttons and takes off his shirt. There is only the black of night where his scars should be. He kicks off his shoes and unbuttons his jeans, keeping his eyes locked on mine the whole time. He turns around and walks, naked, to the bathroom. And I follow.

Our bodies fill the small shower. Dust turns into mud and pools at our feet in gray puddles. We are human colored once again. Hunter unwraps the small bar of soap and runs it up my arm, my collarbone, my neck. I close my eyes as he washes me, as his touch makes me clean.

I trace his scars with my fingers. His ravaged skin is like a map of his suffering, all the mountains and valleys the sites of historic events. I place my finger on a spot on his shoulder. “This is where we crashed,” I whisper. “Right here.”

He moves my finger a centimeter to the right. “This is where Camille died.”

I move my finger a centimeter more. “This is where you saved me.”

He takes my hand in his and holds me close. Every part of us is touching, the maps of our bodies becoming one big world.

The bed is hard and the sheets are scratchy, but it is heaven enough for us. We leave the lights on as we make love; there has already been too much darkness. It feels like dying, like being born, like it's both our first and our last night on earth. We push ourselves together, erasing the boundaries between us. But through the heat and the sweetness, it feels somehow like we're saying good-bye. This is the closest we're ever going to get. No matter what, we'll have to come apart. Tomorrow we'll be in San Francisco and this journey will be over.

* * *

We wake up early, but neither of us wants to get out of bed. We don't say it out loud, but we both know this is our last day on the road, our last morning, and we want to make it last. We splurge on room service breakfast and eat it naked. For some reason, this makes me feel more grown-up than I've ever felt in my life.

Checkout is at ten. We pack in silence. Hunter takes my hand as the door closes behind us and I squeeze it tight as we pass through the casino to get to the parking lot. I try not to look at the handful of people slumped over their slot machines, many with cocktails. Whether their drinking is a continuation of last night or a start to today, it's equally depressing. I try not to imagine how sad the rest of their lives are that this is where they'd prefer to be at ten in the morning. Have they been here all night, parked in front of the same machine, convinced that if they stay in the same place long enough, their luck will change? Don't they know that's not how luck works?

After so many days and nights and miles of tension, Hunter and I are finally relaxed. I think back to the crazy night with Mountain and Chesapeake—which seems years ago now—when Mountain asked if I was “loose” yet. Even in his inebriated state, he already knew the answer; I could tell by the smirk on his slobbery lips. Even in the middle of the forest, miles away from home, I was still the uptight girl sitting primly on the ­sidelines, not participating, just judging, thinking everyone so foolish for having fun. And now, finally, I feel somewhere close to the “loose” Mountain talked about, except it didn't take copious amounts of alcohol or pot brownies to get here. It didn't even take running away from home, driving almost the entire way across the country, and making love to a beautiful boy in the saddest hotel in the world. It could have happened anywhere, anytime, if I wanted it to. The key is wanting to. And then it's so simple. Then all you have to do is let go.