Lone Star (64 page)

“What's happening?” he says (in pretend confusion?).

She lies back down. She doesn't want him to see her tremble. Big bodied and half-naked he lies next to her. He looks normal, pleasing, twinkling, not . . . full on, the way he was in her reverie, and he looks
at
her normal too, not the way he just looked at her in the reverie when all the outrageous gifts of the universe were about to be bestowed upon her body, on the lake, in full view of eight summer homes, parents coming back, young Latvian boys running into the water, moms bringing out pitchers of lemonade, dads displaying the hunky new tools they brought back from the DIY store, maybe an impact drill or a sabre saw. Holy mother,
hear my prayer. The mad beast with a thousand mouths. She can never look at him again. What's wrong with her? It's Blake!

Finally Chloe dares to speak. “Did you just say to me that binary boys like sentient girls, or did I dream that?”

“I don't know how to answer that,” Blake says, after a measured pause of staring up at the drifting clouds. “Did you dream it because you wanted me to say it?”

“No, I want ontological absolutism. Just so that I don't ascribe to you things you didn't say.” Or ascribe to you brazen things you didn't do.

“I didn't say it,” Blake says. “Though I can say it right now if you want me to, because it's true and I believe it. But I don't always say true things that I believe.” Another gaze into the blue heavens. “Like that one.”

She dives into the water to cool herself down, and starts swimming to shore. “Must have been some dream,” he says into her back, diving in after her.

Why does that word—
sentient
—bang the drum of her heart, the drum of her everything, with such wanton longing? Is it because it's a responsive word? If the girl begs to be touched, then here is a binary boy ready to touch her.

Nonchalant and Indifferent

Ray was trampling her flowers, pretending he was weeding, while Chloe and Blake straddled the picnic bench under the pines by the lake. Indifferent to the havoc Ray was wreaking in her prized garden, turned to each other, they were playing cat's cradle with a long piece of string.

She was very good at the game, and he wasn't good at all but, as always, pretended to be. Ray was hiding from them in the bushes, they were chatting with each other, the light was waning, the mosquitoes rising, the summer almost gone, when Chloe, her mouth full of a teasing smile, looked into Blake's face, only inches away, and recalled the pose, the proximity, almost the same light,
a third of a life ago. She inhaled a short
ahh
of pungent memory, blushed, and then caught the look in his eye. He was relaxed in body, but intense of expression. They stared at each other. She said nothing. He said nothing. There wasn't a breath, just a thickening of the dusky air, and an inclination forward. He tilted his head. At her elbow, Ray nudged her. “Okay, I weed your stupid flowers,” he proclaimed. “Now what do you want me to do?”

“Go inside and fetch us some lemonade, bud,” said Blake, not taking his eyes off Chloe. His forearm rested on the table against her forearm. Their four hands were intertwined in the string.

Lang came outside. “Not lemonade, it's time for dinner, you three. Blake, are you staying?”

Chloe blinked, exhaled, moved away. Blake held her elbow to steady her off the bench. He stood up. “Thank you, Mrs. Devine, but no. I'm coming tomorrow for Chloe's last night. Tonight I'm having dinner with my own mother. She says she hasn't seen me. My books were supposed to arrive today. I hope to be able to give your daughter a copy before she flies back. Maybe you can read it on the plane, Chloe?”

“I'd like that,” Chloe said. “I'll be right in, Mom. I just need a minute.”

Lang ushered Ray inside, and Blake turned smiling to Chloe. They sat back down at the picnic table, more demurely. Chloe took a breath. Before anything else could happen, she had to ask Blake a question. Not a riddle. An actual question. She didn't know if he knew the answer. She didn't know if he would tell her even if he did. But she was out of options.

“Blake,” she said, “I need to ask you something . . .”

He leaned forward. “Yes?” The smile still played on his face.

“Do you remember the bus ride to Treblinka?”

Slightly he stiffened. “What about it?”

“Do you remember Yvette or Denise telling you about how they knew Johnny's uncle?”

He moved away. “I think so.” His smile faded.

“They mentioned a town, either where they met the uncle or knew him from.”

“Yes, so?”

“Do you by any chance remember the name of that town? It was something like Casual, or Nonchalant, or . . .”

She wished she could take it back. His wounded face grew so immediately cold. She regretted asking for the ten seconds it took him to rise from the bench, to step away from her toward the clearing, to get ready to leave, to run, go back to his house, to not look back. But she didn't regret asking after he spoke.

“Carefree,” Blake said, his face anything but.

Chloe sucked in her breath, afraid to miss a syllable. “Carefree where?”

“Carefree, Arizona.”

What relief. He remembered. “Thank you,” she mouthed to him. “Thank you.”

Without saying a word, he started to walk away.

“Bye?” she said into his back.

“Bye,” he said, the pine needles crunching under his boots.

“Blake,” she called after him. “Are you upset or something?”

“I'm not upset or something,” he said. “See ya.”

But he didn't see her. He begged off the farewell dinner the following night, saying he had other plans, and he didn't bring her a copy of
The Blue Suitcase,
and he didn't answer his cell, but that could've been because he'd lost it again. When she called his house, his mother said he wasn't there. When Chloe had walked halfway uphill to check, his truck wasn't under the carport.

The morning she was leaving for Logan to fly back to San Diego, he had gone out, he wasn't even home!

“Please tell him I said goodbye, Mrs. Haul,” said a dejected Chloe, standing at his screen door.

“I will, honey. He'll be sorry he missed you. But we'll see you at Christmas, right?”

“My parents are coming to San Diego instead, Mrs. Haul.
Please remind Blake to send me his book when he finally gets his copies.”

“What do you mean, they came days ago.” Janice shook her head. “That boy. Sometimes I don't know about him. Wait here. He probably thought he already gave you one. You know how absentminded he can be. Do you know he lost his phone again? Third time this summer. Boys, right?”

Janice brought out the slim tome. Glossy white cover, with nothing on the front but an embossed electric-blue suitcase and Blake's name.

She was walking back to her house, clutching the book to her chest like in high school, when his black truck came barreling up the hill. She waved and stepped to the side of the narrow road so he wouldn't run her over. The truck slowed down, almost reluctantly, Chloe thought. She approached the driver's window. He rolled it down, almost reluctantly. They didn't speak for a moment.

“I got your book,” she said, showing him.

“Ah, good,” he said. “I was sure you'd left already. Isn't your plane in a few hours?”

“Five hours,” Chloe said, frowning at his grim face, at his not getting out of the truck, at his not even putting the truck into park, judging by the vehicle's irregular spin of black tires. “Why didn't you bring me a copy like you said you would?”

“I was going to send it to you.” His unsmiling eyes, the color of wet sand today, looked somewhere left of her face, left of her inquiring gaze.

Her father yelled for her from down the hill. Come on, Chloe, we have to go, you'll miss your plane.

“Better run along,” Blake said.

“Why are you upset with me?”

“I'm not upset.”

“Come on.”

“Why should I be upset? You owe me nothing. You made that clear. I'm fine.”

Her blood went up. Hostile but not knowing what to say, not having a defense for herself, she stepped off the narrow path, into the underbrush, to let him pass, to let him go.

“Don't you know anything?” he said. “Don't they teach you anything in that damn school of yours?”

Clearly not how to find your way out, or make your way back, or use detective skills, or be the kind of girl a boy might come back for, or the kind of girl who wouldn't go around disappointing her closest, most intimate friends. And worst of all, the very worst of all, not to be the kind of girl who was so overjoyed to get a single word that meant something or might lead somewhere that she didn't even have any regrets except one. That she hadn't asked Blake sooner.

“They teach me everything I need to know, thank you very much.”

“Not the important things.”

“And what in your opinion are those?” Chloe said, snide as snide can be. Both her parents were yelling now.

“That the dude who goes off to war never comes back.” Blake raised his hand before Chloe spoke again. “
Never
. I can't believe you don't know that basic fact.”

“No, that's not true, his grandparents . . . you don't know about them, don't—”

“It's been three years!” Blake's voice broke with strangled emotion. “A thousand days. I may not know much about chicks or the fucking meaning of life, but I'm a guy, and I know this—that if I wanted to find you again, and there was breath still left in my body, there would be nothing that could stop me.
Nothing!
”

She opened her mouth to speak.

“Save it,” he said. “I don't give a shit anymore. I'm done, Chloe. I'm fucking done.”

“Blake . . .”

He cut her off. Not by arguing, or yelling, or raising his hands, or getting out of the truck, or grabbing her or shaking
her, or anything her. He cut her off by stepping on the gas and dusting her with the wheels of his F-150 as he revved away, not looking back.

The Blue Suitcase

A young, extremely good-looking man named Alastair thought he was going to haul junk for a living, but he became a private detective instead. He lived in Maine, and ran his small business with his brother Marley. They thought they would do well since private eyes were a rare commodity in their area. But the business struggled. No one was interested in their services.

One day, a local woman named Lenora DuPrix called to hire them for a “small but very important job.”

Lenora was a stern humorless woman who had recently lost her mother. Lenora told the brothers that she had hired a junk-hauling company to clear the unwanted things from her mother's house, but they accidentally, or on purpose, took something that was never meant to be taken. This is where Alastair and Marley came in. Lenora wanted the brothers to locate the junk dealers and retrieve the missing article: a shiny hard-shell electric-blue Samsonite suitcase.

She offered them a thousand dollars for this seemingly simple job, but when they called the number for the junk dealers, they discovered it was a bogus business. There was no such thing as BCN Junk Professionals in Denmark, Maine. There was not even a house at the fake street address the two men had given Lenora.

Alastair and Marley were ready to give up. Lenora wasn't. She increased the price for the recovery of the suitcase. She offered them fifty thousand dollars plus all expenses. At first the amount seemed startlingly large. It was two years' profit.

But then Alastair asked what was in the suitcase. After Lenora told him, he began to suspect fifty thousand dollars wasn't nearly enough. The suitcase contained all the jewelry that
had been given to the mother by the father over seven decades of their marriage. The mother had been partial to rubies, her birthstone. Most of the bracelets, necklaces, rings, and pins were rubies. The jewelry had tremendous sentimental value. It was irreplaceable. But it also had actual value. It was worth over a million dollars. Lenora suspected that the men who took it were not junk dealers but jewel thieves who had come to rob her.

Alastair and Marley set out to find the purveyors of this theft. They learned that near the fake address in Denmark, two men with foreign accents had recently rented a broken-down shack in the woods. A few weeks ago they vanished. One of the men, a creepy guy with a long greasy ponytail, went by the name of Giancarlo. The other one was called Rubio, but he was the assistant, not the ringleader, according to the landlady. They told the landlady they had come from Latvia, but she thought they were lying. They looked vaguely Mediterranean. She said she was glad they were gone because the neighbors kept complaining about the noise and the filth. Late at night they would get drunk, break bottles, and sing very loudly, even though they were both terrible singers, absolutely atrocious.

During a search through and around the dump of the rented house, Alastair and Marley found an empty matchbook from a restaurant in Riga. They asked Lenora for additional funds to cover international travel and followed this thin trail to Latvia. They met many unsavory characters, dark shady men doing dark shady things. They learned there was an active black market for precious gems.

Pretending they wanted to buy some expensive jewelry at a discount price, our heroes were finally led to Giancarlo. He was a real charmer. They hated him immediately. They confronted him about the blue suitcase.

At first Giancarlo fiercely denied ever laying his hands on this suitcase. After Alastair and Marley persisted, he admitted that he and Rubio did indeed take it from Lenora, and then as a joke, swore on Rubio's life that there had been nothing in it of
any value. When he saw that the brothers were in no mood for jokes, Giancarlo changed his story slightly. He told them that he took the Samsonite, but didn't realize he wasn't supposed to. He and Rubio were paid to clean the house of junk, and that is what they did. He was very sorry for the inconvenience. He had sold the blue suitcase to another junk dealer in Warsaw. For a price, he agreed to take the brothers to him.