Future Perfect (16 page)

Laura sighs and Jolene is frowning.

“Please,” I say.

Jolene digs in her pockets and hands dollar bills to Laura. Laura looks at them, and then sighs again and feeds them into the ticket machine. She punches numbers while the white guy in dreads strums loudly and badly on his guitar.

“I have no idea how much money I paid,” Laura says when she hands over our tickets.

“Which way is Oakland?” Jolene says as the narrow escalator carries us down to the train platform.

“Let's just take the first one,” I say. “Random chance. No planning.” No cords are attached to me, pulling me back. They've all snapped, or they're stretched so thin they could break and we could all go hurtling forward, all of us together. I skip down the last three steps. A train is waiting for us with its doors open and I'm on it without waiting to see if they're behind me. I know they are.

“It's
carpeted
,” Jolene says. She's a little out of breath. “Who would carpet a train?”

“Don't touch anything,” Laura says, balancing in the middle
of the car, but I am already crawling onto a seat and putting my head on my knees. They slide in across from me. I know they're talking but I can't hear any of it. I concentrate on the noise of the train and the announcements of every stop and the doors chiming open and chiming closed and everything is swimming, spinning, then gone.

I think I sleep for a while. When I lift my head, it feels lighter. Everything is more focused. Laura and Jolene are asleep curled up on the seat across from me, Laura's head tucked into Jolene's shoulder, Jolene's arm draped around her back. Jolene frowns and the blond wings of her eyebrows draw together and she shifts. She isn't even still in her sleep.

I wake her when I laugh. Her eyelids flutter and she looks at me sleepily. I say quietly, “Land cow.”

She furrows her brow.

“That guy at the show. He called me a
land cow.
Did he moo at me? I think he mooed at me.” I start laughing again, covering my mouth, realizing exactly how stupid that was. “At least I'm not a sea whale,” I say. “Or a sky blimp.”

She snorts, and then she looks sad. “I don't even know why you were talking to him,” I go on before she can say anything. “I mean, land cow? Seriously. I saved you from that.”

She says, “Don't do that.”

“Save you?”

“Save me,” she says.

“I didn't mean—” I say, but she's still talking.

“Do you remember what you said?”

I did.
Next steps,
I had said.
Transitioning
, I had implied
.

“Don't tell me what to do. Don't do it. Don't tell me what I need to do.” Every word is deliberate and careful.

“Jolene,” I say, but I stop before I can say any of the other words in my head, all of which are wrong and unhelpful. She sighs and puts her head down and we're quiet again. Soon she falls back asleep and I lean my head against the black window and look through my reflection. My head aches. I watch the pitted tunnel walls fly by, the stations speed into view, pause, and then recede, listen to the hum of the tracks and let my eyes close and let us be carried forward to wherever it is we're going, just for tonight.

M
y head hits the window hard and I snap up.

“Hey!” the cop says. “Hey, there's no camping out on the train. All of you get up.” He is a giant white guy, just big all over. His hands are balled on his hips primly.

“We're not camping out,” Laura says as Jolene pushes herself up. “We fell asleep and that's not a crime.”

“It sure as hell is,” he says. “How old are you kids? This is the end of the line. You have to get off here.”

“Where are we?” I say, and I'm peering out the window but I only see trees, and then the yellow lights of a parking lot below. We're way above ground and I think we're not in San Francisco any more.

“Pittsburgh Bay Point,” the police officer says. “Where are you from?”

“Santa Ansia,” Jolene says.

He looks at all of us. “What the hell are you doing here?
Someone needs to call your parents.”

Laura looks superior and Jolene looks terrified and the look on my face must be similar because he smirks at us. “I'm going to radio you in,” he says. “Get off the train. Follow me.”

“No,” I say. “We're just going to go home, okay?” The ache in my head has turned into a pounding. I pull out my phone but he snatches it. “Hey! You—hey! Give that back.”

He's swiped it on and he's expertly flipping through my contacts until he finds my recent calls. “Grandmother,” he says. “She's called a few times. Should I call her back right now? I think I'll call her back right now.”

“Hey!” Laura says. “I do not consent to this!”

“This is Officer Richard Bryan Smith of the Pittsburg City Police,” the cop says. “I'm calling about your granddaughter, who is embroiled in immoral, delinquent behavior and will be taken into detention at the Pittsburg City Po—”

I fling myself at him, trying to snatch the phone out of his hand, and he turns abruptly, his elbow catching me in my breastbone. I stumble against the side of the train, which is still standing there hissing with the doors open. My chest hurts. The lights are blinking inside. Jolene and Laura are crowding the officer but he's at least six-five and his shoulders make him twice as wide as me and he is telling my grandmother how he found us drunk and passed out on the train, hundreds of miles from home, did she know that? He pulls the phone away from
his face and looks at the screen.

“Too bad. Your phone is dead,” he says. “You're in pretty big trouble at home.” He reaches out for my wrist but Jolene snatches my phone away from him and Laura is shoving me from behind and we're sprinting down the train platform toward the exit and down the stairs so fast I lose a shoe like I'm Cinderella but the cop's footsteps are heavy and he's shouting something and I keep running, my bare foot slapping against the tile and metal of the stairs. Laura is chanting “bad idea, bad idea, bad idea.” She launches herself over the turnstile and Jolene scrambles under it and I hop up and swing my legs and we're sprinting for the parking lot, dodging the cars that are pulling out of spots as people head out back to their homes, tired and satisfied after a good night or maybe a bad one. I'm limping, my right foot bruised and smarting from the gravel and I'm going too slow and I cannot believe this is happening. I can't remember if he has a gun. A cab with its brights on pulls around the corner and shrieks to a stop in front of us.

“What the fuck?” the guy yells out the driver's window, but Laura is already pulling open the door and pushing Jolene and me into the ripped vinyl of the backseat. The car smells like cigarette butts and take-out Chinese food. Laura slams the door with one hand as she's opening the front door with the other and diving into the front seat.

“Go,” she says. “Go, go.”

“The fuck I will,” the driver says to her. He twists around in his seat to glare at us. “What the fuck are you kids playing here?”

“Just go and we'll explain,” Laura snaps.

“Please,” Jolene says, and he sighs and I'm looking back through the rear window to see if the cop saw us dodge into a cab. My heart is thrumming so hard I don't even feel the individual beats anymore, and Jolene is wild-eyed, her hair tangled. There's an itch between my shoulder blades where I imagine a bullet going. Just another brown girl shot.

Laura says, “Look.” She's fishing around in her giant purse and she sounds so calm and unhurried. “How about a hundred bucks cash to take us back to San Francisco?” She snaps her wallet and waves it at him.

He reaches for it but she snatches it back. “Hang on to this for me,” she says and passes it over the seat to me. My fingers feel weak and I almost drop it. I stuff it into my bra. He grunts and puts the cab into gear, whipping around the rows of cars and bouncing back out on to the street.

“How about I get to see your tits too,” the guys says casually as he veers around another corner and guns it down a residential street.

My throat catches, but I find myself saying, “How about you just drive us and we won't report you for child molestation,” meeting his eyes in the rearview mirror and tensing because I think I am larger than him and I think I could stop him if I had
to. Jolene is frozen next to me and Laura has her hand on the door latch.

He snorts. He doesn't say anything, but his foot is down hard on the gas pedal and I see signs for the 242.

“How are we going to buy gas?” I say to no one. My voice sounds high and thin.

“I have my credit card,” Laura says.

The driver reaches over and turns the radio on loud, a talk station full of men shouting at one another. Jolene reaches over and squeezes my hand, which manages to squeeze tears out of my eyes. I squeeze back and keep my head resolutely turned toward the window, watching towns pass us by. I've never been to the East Bay before, and it looks flat and pleasant interspersed with strip malls, and then flat pleasantness again, all with a backdrop of hills dotted with houses.

Over the Bay Bridge and there is Alcatraz, dark in the water, and the Transamerica Pyramid and Sutro Tower and I wonder what it's like to see this every day, to have chosen this view for yourself. It is imposing. It is beautiful.

We glide through the streets, around the traffic that's still heavy, and then there's another argument when the cabbie wants to just let us out on a corner.

“I'm not driving up there,” he says, pointing up the block and into the Tenderloin.

“You're already in the Tenderloin,” Laura says.

“Technically this is the Mission,” the driver says.

“The Mission is two blocks that way!” Laura says and he mutters
for fuck's sake
under his breath and swings the next right he can off Market, circling the block until I see the lit-up sign for Grand Liquors.

“There,” I say, “right there!” I'm pulling my car keys out and ready to jump out of the moving car but he stops in the middle of the street and says, “Give me your money.”

I'm pulling it out of my shirt when he grins and says, “Don't forget my tip,” and all the doors lock with a click.

Jolene reaches forward to give him two twenties and he grabs her hand. “How about a kiss?” and I stab at his wrist viciously with my car key and he's screaming at me, but we can't hear what he's saying anymore as we scramble at the locks and crowd out and sprint to the car, which doesn't seem to have gone up in flames. We pile in and the cab driver has thrown open his door and is stumbling over to us, clutching his wrist, but a police car is pulling up behind him and I pull out very carefully, putting my blinker on, taking the left slowly, and meandering up the block and away.

“Oh my god,” I say.

“Holy shit,” Laura says.

“How did that happen?” Jolene asks weakly.

“It's my fault—” I start to say, but Laura interrupts me.

“We're okay,” she says. “We're fine.”

“Well, Grandmother knows. Is that fine? That doesn't feel like the definition of
fine
.”

Laura laughs, but I can't stop gripping the steering wheel.

“I'm never going to leave my house again,” I say.

Laura reaches around the seat to squeeze my shoulder, and then we're silent until we're passing the exit to Carmel.

Jolene turns to me. “Did you give him the hundred?” she says.

“No,” I say.

“Good.”

“My grandmother—” I start again but then I stop.

We're quiet the rest of the way home.

Laura falls asleep in the backseat and Jolene is curled up in a ball on the seat next to me. I pull off my left shoe and drop it onto the floor behind my seat. My right foot is throbbing, but it's still an ordinary ride home, a straight shot down five lanes of highway through a corridor of scrubby trees. We are alone for a long time but as it gets lighter and lighter other cars appear, pacing us and pulling ahead. I'm not driving very fast. I am driving under the speed limit sometimes, I realize, and put my foot back down on the gas before I start just drifting aimlessly down the highway and off some random exit and park among the trees on a dirt side road and live forever somewhere in Big Sur, eating nuts and berries and telling the squirrels about all the plans I used to have, once, long ago.

I still haven't plugged my phone into the car charger. I focus on aiming us straight down the highway and nothing else, with the sky starting to get lighter and brighter and my headlights weaker in the gray light.

We drop Laura off first. She glides up the walk and slips into her dark house. No one home, or no one waiting up for her, I think with a rubber band–snap of jealousy.

When we swing into the driveway behind Grandmother's Mercury, the sun is just about to rise and all the lights in the house are on. I think for a second and then back out and park on the side of the road. I've forgotten that I'm not wearing shoes. I feel perfectly calm, the way I imagine a circus performer does with her foot about to come down on the wire strung a hundred feet in the air. Jolene seems sleepy. I edge the front door shut behind me, but it screams and creaks at me just the way it always does. When I pause at the bottom of the stairs, Jolene stops.

“Do you want me to come talk to your grandmother with you?” she whispers but I shake my head. She pats my arm and whispers, “It'll be okay,” and I nod at her and let her go up first. I follow before I can change my mind. She smiles at me when she slips into her room at the top of the stairs and closes the door behind her. I take the next flight of stairs up and stop when I hear Grandmother's voice.

“Ashley,” she says.

It's not a question, of course. I head down the hall to her
rooms. She's sitting in her study, upright in her armchair, wearing her long dark robe and with her hair loose on her shoulders. I can't say anything to her. She looks at me, all of me, and I realize I am grubby, my hair is a tangled mess, I stink like beer and pot and pee, and my feet are filthy and my tank top and skirt are just wrinkles hanging off me.

“I was expecting a return phone call from the police department, not for you to actually arrive home.”

“I'm okay,” I say.

“You're a disgrace,” she says. Her expression hasn't changed. “You will explain what happened.”

I lift my chin and look at the picture behind her head, a nondescript landscape in muddy browns and scratches of green. I wonder if it's a picture my father has painted, because why else would it be hanging on the wall? My grandmother has good taste. But my grandmother is not sentimental. I squint to see if there's a signature, but her voice is a crack across my face.

“Ashley.”

I try to meet her eyes but each time I am unbalanced by the way she is looking at me. I am hovering for a horrible instant over the idea, the tiniest sliver of an idea, of lying. I could lie to her. How could she ever prove I was lying? Why not just—

“Don't lie to me,” she says, and I sigh, the quietest sigh, which she raises an eyebrow at.

“Laura's boyfriend had an art show,” I say.

“Omar,” she says. “That small boy from . . . San Francisco.” No one could have delivered the words “San Francisco” with more derisiveness.

“So we drove up there. And later we took the train but got lost.”

“Yes. That's what the police officer seemed to have thought. Though
lost
wasn't the word he used.”

“We weren't passed out,” I say, but I realize that isn't true even as I say it. That overwhelming tiredness and the feeling that time had stretched so far and wide that I couldn't find the edges of it anymore. “I didn't think we had passed out,” I say lamely, miserably.

“Well, you found your way home,” she says. She glances at me, up and down, her eyes dragging over every stain and wrinkle and bulge. “It looks like you crawled home from whatever filthy hole you were in. And now,” she says, “you're standing there with that foolish look on your face like you've no idea how
ashamed
you should be of yourself. You have spit in the face of every single thing I have ever done for you. You make me regret everything I have ever given you.”

I jerk back like she has just slapped me hard. She has never, never thrown her generosity in my face this way.

“I've never asked you for anything,” I whisper.

“Ah, but that isn't true,” my grandmother says. “I have had to work every day since you were born to ensure that you turn out
nothing like that mother of yours.”

“You told me to follow in her footsteps. Go to Harvard. That if she could do it—” I'm losing my fight to keep my voice even and I have to stop talking.

“She couldn't do it,” my grandmother says flatly. “She wasn't good enough to get in.”

“She dropped out,” I say hesitantly. “I mean, she had to drop out—” But Grandmother keeps going.

“Do shut up, Ashley. You sound quite stupid when you don't listen. Your mother
did not go to Harvard.
She barely finished high school with a GED. She lied to your father about that for years.”