Lone Star (32 page)

“You should feel grateful,” Johnny said. “In the car next to us, they've been drinking for hours and singing songs completely out of pitch and out of time. You want to sit in that car instead?”

“I made a polite request.”

“You've been hissing since Vilnius. This car doesn't say no talking. It doesn't say no laughing. And this car is definitely not a sleeping car. I know that for a fact. Because the sleeping cars are down the corridor and cost more money. You should've gotten a berth there.”

The guy shut up, but after that, it was hard to be cute, to giggle, to talk nonsense.

Johnny asked her to take out her journal and pen. In it he
wrote,
The man needs to get laid
. She barely stifled a laugh.
Let's play a game,
he wrote. He drew a tic-tac-toe board. She beat him seven times. Okay, what else? He drew a hangman. They played for five minutes. Got bored.

How do you know how to speak Russian?
she wrote.

Oh, we're playing the Socratic game,
he wrote.
Okay. My dad studied it in school. Taught me
.

Where did he go to school?

Somewhere exclusive and elite on the Hudson River. You got two questions, now I get two. Who do you want to be when you grow up?

A lawyer,
she wrote.
Or maybe a florist. Because I love the law. But flowers are so pretty.

He laughed out loud, and four people woke up, including the grumpy unlaid gentleman.

Don't do that,
he wrote.
Don't make me laugh. You'll get us thrown off the train for mirth.

How bad would that be, thought Chloe.

He smiled at her, and that brought her happiness. When they passed the pen back and forth, his long flexible fingers scraped against hers. His pads were rough and calloused from playing guitar. She wanted to touch the bony knuckles on his hands. She wanted to place her little white hand over his.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
she wrote.

And he wrote back,
Alive
.

The Red River flooded,
he wrote.
Pembina got wrecked. Your dad was sent up to help people out of homes that were like boats.

Yes,
she wrote.

So he rescued your mother?
Why was Johnny smiling?

Yes, so?

That is
so
great.

It is? Why?

Was it love at first sight?

Eww. I don't know. Weirdo.
This was her parents they were writing about! Talk about awkward. As if her parents could ever be young, or in love.

While she wrote down things, he studied her in a way that was almost prehensile, almost as if he were grasping her with his hands, outlining her cheeks and nose and lips with his fingers.

How did
your
mom and dad meet?
she wrote.

She was a music teacher at my aunt's school. My aunt introduced them.

Like set them up on a date?

Exactly like that.

Did your dad like your mom's singing?
she wrote. Kind of like I feel about your singing. Like I'm dropped abandoned into all the colors of the crayon box.

I think he liked her face,
wrote Johnny.

Is your mother pretty?
Chloe was certain she must be.

She was a beauty queen.

A beauty queen for real?

A real bona fide, no kidding beauty queen. She won Miss New Mexico. She was third runner-up Miss America.

What??

Oh yeah.

Why didn't he look more proud when he wrote that?

A beauty and a singer.

Yes. You'd think she had everything.
Johnny stopped looking at Chloe.

Didn't she?
Chloe wrote. Didn't she have everything?

You'd think so.

Your dad must have been smitten.

You'd think so.
She watched him blink. He wasn't smiling when he wrote down his answer.
My dad wasn't young when he met her. He was older. She was twenty-three. He knew other women before my mom. She was always jealous. She thought he loved them more. She'd ask, do you love me? Would you give your right arm for me? And he'd say, I'm thinking, I'm thinking. She never thought that was funny. She'd
ask, would you run out onto the breaking ice for me? And he'd reply, the question is, dear Ingrid, would you run out onto the ice for me?

Chloe didn't know what to ask next. That made her sad and she couldn't say why. Maybe because he looked sad.

Tell me your favorite song,
he wrote.

Dunno,
she wrote.
“She Will Be Loved” by Maroon 5?

Why is there a question mark? Don't you know?

She almost giggled, suddenly bashful. She was unsure of her own opinion, watching his hands as he held the pen, writing things in her journal, words she would keep, like a recording of their trip, etched on lined paper, for her posterity, for her forever.

The train chugged along, windows grimy, fields outside, rivers, flatlands, marshes, pine forest, sometimes all at once. She wished they could have walked around Vilnius. Why did she suddenly want that? To stop writing, to start talking. To walk together, maybe down the street, to a park while he told her things. This headline approach wasn't working for her. She wanted all her nerves exposed by his reckless voice.

Who sings it to you?

No one,
she wrote, frowning.
I just like it.
Little Jimmy gone less than a month, her mother had forced her to go to an end-of-year karaoke barbecue on the Academy common. The kids dragged out the karaoke machine, and all took turns pretending to sing the pop songs of the year. No one sang “She Will Be Loved” to Chloe. Accessible to all, it was just sung into the balmy June air. There were other songs sung that night under the Maine stars. “I Will Survive,” the perennial karaoke favorite. “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” another. “Piano Man.” “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”

The memory of the last one plucked Chloe out of the blue tumult of the Lithuanian moment and dropped her into the blue tumult of the Maine moment. A dozen boys were on one side, with Mason, with Blake among them, a dozen girls on the other, with Chloe, with Hannah, the karaoke machine on the ground between them, new hot coals on the fire, parents coming soon to
retrieve them, and for nine minutes, at the top of their screeching voices, they harmonized with Meat Loaf about teenage frenzy and adult disillusionment. Those nine minutes to this day remained one of Chloe's favorite memories. Who would love her forever? She needed to know right now. Those nine minutes and the couple of minutes at the hidden-away picnic bench that followed. The minutes she never let herself think about.

Why are you smiling?
Johnny wrote.

She shook her head, tried to stop smiling.

Even Hannah had sung along with the girls, and she was usually above such infantile activities. It was later that night that she and Blake first got together. Maybe it was the Meat Loaf song that tipped the scales in Blake's favor. Or was it in Hannah's favor? Blake was certainly the most exuberant of all the boys, swearing he would love her till the end of time.

The wetlands, the marshlands, the pines drifted by.

If you could be anywhere in the world, where would you want to be?
he wrote.

Here and now, she wanted to say. But couldn't and wouldn't.

Ibiza,
she wrote. She didn't even know where Ibiza was. She had read about it in one of the
National Geographic
s Blake had bought for her from Polly in Fryeburg. Ibiza was paradise.
What about you?

Here and now is pretty good,
Johnny wrote.
Like I'm still in junior high on a crowded train.

She didn't want to show him her pleased face. She showed it to the spruce and elms flying by.

But if not here and now, then Manitoulin Island,
he continued.
Check it out. It's in the middle of nowhere surrounded by water. And it's got Misery Bay. Who could ask for anything more.

I'm hungry
, she wrote.

Kaunas is next. There's a park outside the train station. We'll have time to buy food and drink. I'll buy beer and Coke, and you'll buy water and Coke. We'll get sandwiches and potato chips and cookies, and a whipped cream cake that is surely going to melt. You'll forget your daily
budget and spend all your per diem on food for the train. My survival handbook demands it. What if the train gets stuck between stations? What if the engine blows out? What if there is a mishap, an accident and we're forced to live in the woods for days? You'll need a cream cake then, won't you?

Chloe read his words, longing for a minor mishap. Then for a few minutes out of the rest of her life she would be forced to live in the woods with him without other eyes on her. Strangers' eyes. Friends' eyes.

Where are you going to learn to be a legal florist?
Johnny wrote.
Or is it a floral lawyer?

And just like that, back in reality, Chloe was cornered. She could either lie to him as she had been lying by omission and commission to her friends, or tell him the truth. She could trust him with the truth as he had trusted her with his guitar. Tottering on the beam between light and lies made her pen fall silent.

Kaunas. The red domes of the Gothic castle swim by her eyes. She sees but doesn't see, is hungry but is not, thirsty but not really. She just wants the minutes to slow down. She'll tell him anything, confess anything, profess anything, just so Enrico Caruso, masquerading as Einstein with his eternally repeating transcendentals, figures out a way to sing a brake onto time.

He watched her conflicted face with amusement. “You'd think I asked you about the meaning of life,” he whispered. “Chloe, you do know where you're going to college, don't you?”

She didn't want her answer to appear on irrefutable paper.

Wait, I remembered,
he wrote.
Hannah said UMaine, right?

Chloe's pen hovered in the air.

He took her hand and drew it to the paper. Still she refused to write it.
He took her hand
is what she was feeling. Squeezed it into a ball inside his palm.

Ah,
he wrote.
Not UMaine?

She leaned over to his ear, to his ponytailed head. She was so close to his stubble, she could kiss it if she moved a lyric note forward. “San Diego,” she whispered into his cheek.

In confusion and delight, he laughed, banging one loud slap on his black velvet case.

!!! Now I understand everything,
he wrote.
It's not they who are detached from you. It's
you
who is detached from
them
.

That's not true!

Why San Diego?

She scratched out his question.

They gave me a full ride
, she wrote.
And it's warm.

It's very far from Maine.

It's warm.

It's far.

I'm not running away,
she wrote, defensively.
My mother approves.

I didn't think you were running away from your lovely mother.

Chloe lost interest in doodling back and forth. Gripping the pen, she pressed her head to the window and wrote nothing.

He grabbed the pen from her.
Do they know?

She didn't reply.

Oh my God, Chloe. No one knows? Not even Mason?

Mason can't keep a secret.
Was Chloe going to scratch out the whole thread of this conversation? Easier to just rip out the pages of the journal and stuff them down her throat.

You don't think?
wrote Johnny. He drew pictures of bass clefs and treble clefs over and over.
When do you plan to tell them?

Dunno. After Barcelona?

Johnny shook his head in mock disapproval. Maybe not mock.

Listen to me,
he wrote after a few minutes had passed.
I know you're afraid to tell them, to tell Mason. Don't be afraid. Tell him. It'll be fine. You'll see.

How do you know?

I know.

How?

I just know.

You don't think he'll be upset?

No.

Why not?

He won't be upset,
wrote Johnny,
because he doesn't love you.