Miss Misery (34 page)

I took a long sip of Sanka and turned back to my inquisitor. “Oh, ah…creative writing!” From her terrified perch against the fireplace, Ashleigh let out a squeak. My cell phone buzzed angrily in my pocket, and I did my best to silence it through my jeans.

A stormcloud darkened Roger Bortch's healthy features. “Creative writing?” He rolled the words around on his tongue as if they were a foul-tasting lozenge. “I didn't think my alma mater would offer graduate study in
that.
”

“Well,” I said, hoping my brain would be able to keep pace with my mouth, “it's a fairly new program. But, ah, we're making some great progress and attracting some very talented students just now. Such as your daughter.”

Ashleigh squeaked again, louder this time. I couldn't bring myself to even peek in her direction. Roger harrumphed and leaned forward. “My daughter? My daughter is premed. She doesn't have time for any nonsense.”

“I'm sure she'll be a fine doctor,” I said, figuring,
screw it—what else have I got to lose?
“But her writing isn't nonsense. It's very evocative and, um…worshipful.”

Roger placed his coffee mug down on the table. Emily scurried forward like a mouse and slid a coaster under it. “Worshipful, you say. My little girl?”

He was buying it. I had no idea why or how, but he was buying it. “Yes, sir,” I said. “After all, our great…ah, leader Brigham Young had a full library of poetry and literature in all of his homes. He even entertained Mark Twain here in Salt Lake!” My mind was flipping through the pages of Rulon I had skimmed on the plane. Why hadn't I finished that chapter? “Individual expression is a truly wonderful way to, um, know God?” My voice cracked, but I covered it with a lusty swig of Sanka.

“Well, I must say it's nice to have a religious and respectful young man like yourself talking to my daughter.” Roger shot Ashleigh a look. “And to hear that her…pursuits aren't leading her in the wrong direction.” He sighed and shook his head. “Sometimes I feel like she was put on this earth just to test us.”

I watched Roger Bortch's giant, overly muscled eyes soften. I felt as if our roles had become muddled—that I was now the parent with all the answers and he was the needy child. “I'm sure that's how all parents feel about their kids, sir.” I drank more of the coffee. It was grainy and bitter. “That's the gift and the challenge.”

Emily Bortch seemed shocked and thrilled to find the conversation going so smoothly. She wasn't the only one. She placed a skinny hand on my arm and asked, “Are you from around here, Rulon?”

“Ah, no, ma'am,” I said. “I'm from, uh…Fort Duchesne.” I gripped the sofa with my right hand. It was the only other town I could remember and my pronunciation of it was a wild guess.

Roger Bortch clapped his hands together. “Fort Duchesne! Why, you've got the biggest and best pow-wow in the West!”

I grinned stupidly. “Yes sir, that's right!”

Roger turned serious. “Rulon, did you do a mission?”

I took a breath and then nodded. “Yes, sir, I did. I believe it's an important thing for all young men to do.” I peeked at Ashleigh, who was clenching her fists so tightly I was afraid she'd draw blood.

Emily refilled my coffee mug. “Where did you serve?”

I was ready for that one. “In New York City!”

Both Bortches gasped as if I had said a dirty word. “New York City?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, starting to enjoy myself. “Might as well go to where the evil is, wouldn't you agree?”

Ashleigh burst out laughing, and then so did Roger. I laughed too, and Nancy the dog started howling, which made Emily giggle—and soon we were all laughing until we had tears in our eyes, even though for the life of me I wasn't sure just what they found so funny.

“Wonderful, wonderful.” Roger Bortch wiped at his eyes. “Is that your car parked out there, son?”

“Ah, yes, sir.”

Roger nodded as if I had confirmed his most private wishes. “The Ford Tempo. That's a very reliable automobile right there. I like the look of it, too.”

“It's the best, sir,” I said, biting my cheek to keep from laughing. “Listen, folks, you've been too kind, but I should be going. I'm staying with my brother tonight in town and I hate to keep him up too late.”

Emily Bortch stood with me. “So soon? Why not stay for a moment—we have some pound cake I could defrost…”

“Oh, no thank you, ma'am. I couldn't trouble you any more.”

Roger stood. “No trouble at all, son.” He shook my meaty paw. “Thank you for driving our daughter home. And for
steering her straight.
” He held my gaze and nodded sagely. I tried to look properly pious and nodded back. “And listen here, if you ever have any sort of physical injury or need to rehab, feel free to give me a call.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card, which he pressed into my palm. The card said
GET BORTCHED
! I exhaled slowly. “You do work out, don't you, son?”

I opened and closed my mouth. “Try to!” I said hopefully. “Try to!”

“It's the most important thing in the world.” Roger flexed his shoulders. “I always say, we are given two temples in life. The one we pray in and the one we live in!” He pounded on his chest for emphasis. I kept nodding and tried to maneuver my way to the door.

But before I made it there, Ashleigh leapt forward and took my hand. “Good-bye, Rulon!” she said. “Thank you for getting me home safe.” Her eyes were huge and hungry.

I shook her hand tightly, holding it for an extra minute. “My pleasure,” I said, trying to make my look say things like
Be strong; be good; be careful.
But all I said out loud was, “Anytime.” I opened the door. “Good night Mr. Bortch, Mrs. Bortch.” I paused, felt their eyes still raking me, desperate for more information. I knew then that tough as it might be in the future, Ashleigh was going to be just fine. As desperate as she was to hide herself from her parents, that was exactly how desperate they were to find her. I turned back to them and said, “You have a very fine daughter.”

Emily Bortch beamed and threw her arm around Ashleigh, who flinched at the contact. “We know. We are extremely blessed!”

I smiled at the family, thinking, You have no idea what you've got. Then I stepped out into the warm night air and nearly sprinted to the car. I pulled a U-turn so quickly I fishtailed in the middle of Homecoming Avenue, then roared out of the open security gate without so much as looking back.

When Reunion Village was more than a mile behind me and the lights of the temple were just a faint, glowing smudge in the rearview mirror, I pulled over to the side of the road, flicked on my hazards with still shaking fingers, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

THANKS TO THE EFFICIENT city planning of the estimable Brigham Young, I had no trouble steering the Tempo back to the airport and checking in for my red-eye flight with time to spare. I left the guidebook in the glove compartment. I figured I had had enough Rulon Barber in one night to last a lifetime. Better to offer his florid services to someone else.

Despite the late hour, the departure terminal of SLC International was still buzzing with the harried mania of travel. On my way to the gate, I stood leisurely on the moving walkway—letting it do all the work for a change—while commuters in business suits and overwhelmed young parents pushed by me, peppering my ears with exasperated sighs as they passed. It felt good to stand still and still be moving for a change. With the adrenaline wearing off, I realized that I was exhausted. My legs felt like two dumbbells sutured onto my torso for the express purpose of weighing me down, and I felt a creaking tightness in my shoulders and neck. As I approached the end of the walkway, I reached backward and made a feeble attempt to massage myself. Maybe I should have stuck around for a few days, taken Roger Bortch up on his offer of free rehab. The thought made me laugh out loud, and I earned a “you're hopelessly insane” look from a passing, prim stewardess.

As I waited to board, I picked out a stack of magazines from the newsstand, but I changed my mind just before paying and put them all back on the rack. I didn't need to read about the “100 Most Rock 'n' Roll Events of Rock 'n' Roll” or the “100 Songs to Download Before You Die.” I picked up a box of sleeping pills and a bottle of water. What I needed was to rest.

The plane took off on time and without incident. I had an entire row to myself, so I stretched out by the window and stared out over the wing as we climbed through the stratosphere. I tried to get the lay of the land, but all I could see was blinking lights, then clouds, then nothing. Good-bye, Utah. Or, as I realized I should say, Good-bye, Utah! I never had gotten a good glimpse of the mountains, but I was happy to be rid of them; I felt like they had gotten more than a good enough glimpse of
me.

When the
FASTEN SEAT BELTS
sign went off, I stretched and lay out across my row before realizing I had forgotten to switch my cell phone off. Red-faced—and certain that the federal government had somehow been made aware of my lapse in judgment and would be waiting at JFK to drag me off to Guantanamo in handcuffs—I pulled it out and saw that I had a message. Oh, yes—the ill-timed buzz at the Bortches'. I flipped open the screen.

I scratched at my stubble. What the hell could he mean? What was he up to now? I felt a twinge of anxiety and then shook it off. Whatever it was, it could wait until morning. Or so I hoped.

When the stewardess came by with drinks, I paid four dollars for a lukewarm Heineken, then used it to chase the sleeping pills. I balled up two pillows, shut the window screen, and closed my eyes. I thought of Ashleigh Bortch, then, and how she must have been both the most successful and least successful runaway in history. I chuckled to myself, then felt a pang of missing her. The thought that someone had chosen me as a destination, as a place to run away
to
instead of
from
—well, to be honest, it boggled my mind. I wondered if I'd ever see her again and figured that chances were that I would. Something had bound us together across miles and cultures and years. And it was the sort of thing that proved awfully hard to untie. My relationship with Ashleigh—like nearly all the relationships in my life—had started loosely and then had suddenly gone taut. I never did seem to notice the gravity of things until it was too late. I was just glad I had been able to fulfill my half of the bargain this time, even though I hadn't been aware of making said bargain to begin with.

Thing was, there were real consequences to talking to people, to involving yourself with their lives. There was nothing casual about communication, no matter what form it took. I felt the sleeping pills pulling me down into sleep and I didn't fight them. I was like a rowboat shot full of holes. The water came up to greet me and then sank me down into its warm liquid embrace.

 

I dreamed about Amy. Which was odd, really, because she rarely figured in my dreams—almost as if my subconscious assumed that if I was sleeping she was right there next to me, so why not give other characters a shot? But not this time. The details were hazy and kept shifting: I was on some sort of barge traveling between islands. The water was more like a swamp than the sea, and the air was thick and humid. Every so often my passenger would be Amy, and she'd smile helpfully, as she was the one doing all the work. But then other times I was alone on the boat, and I knew that she was on one of the islands—either the one I was rowing toward or the one I was just leaving; it was hard to keep track. Near the end of the dream there was a procession of puppies marching through the swamp. The first group looked like foxes and the second looked like Nancy—the Bortches' pristine pile of
yip.
I had a new passenger then—a female one, though I couldn't tell her identity. She shook me by the arm gently and I turned to see who it could possibly be.

But it was only the stewardess, with her hand on my arm, calling me sir and telling me that we would be landing shortly. My mouth tasted like ashes, and my hair felt like greasy straw. There was a heavy weight behind my eyes, and my stomach churned with hunger. I was nowhere near rested, but I thanked her and somehow managed to sit up straight and open the window shade, letting in a piercing beam of sunlight. It was morning. I was home.

 

My eyes were bleary and bloodshot as I stumbled past the early-morning line at Au Bon Pain, the desperate scrum in the baggage claim. I had a funny tickle of a thought in my brain that felt like freedom: I owed no one anything; I was off the grid. But even then I felt the responsibility hood snap down on my brain, nudging me into the taxi line, pushing me roughly toward routine. I pretended I was back on the moving walkway again and directed the cheery Sikh driver toward Brooklyn.

Looking back on it now, I realize it should have been obvious that something was wrong, even before I entered my building. The taxi ride from the airport had been too smooth, too easy. There had been no traffic, no delays, and no feigned confusion on the part of the driver pertaining to the quickest—which is to say cheapest—route to my neighborhood. When I stepped out of the cab, I saw no clouds in the sky, and I felt the faintest rustle of a cooling breeze blow through the trees. It felt like the photo negative of the moment before a thunderstorm. Everything was so perfect, it felt ominous. It was then I noticed that my bedroom light was on and the windows were open wide.

If there was one habit that Amy had drilled into my skull it was never to leave any lights on, so my heart skipped at double time as I unlocked the doors. I walked straight into Mrs. Armando standing stock-still in the middle of the foyer. She had her arms crossed and she wasn't smiling.

“You used to be a good kid, David,” she said.

“Good morning, Mrs. Armando.” I tried to look cheerful.

“Don't you ‘good morning' me. After what you do last night, I should throw you out right now.”

“What I did?”

“Don't act like that to me. I let you live here in my house! I pay for it, I own it! And you disrespectin' it. Have wild people over, keep up half the block with the crashing and yelling. I'm scared to see what you do to my third floor.”

Oh, God. I wasn't even back for five minutes and everything had already fallen apart. “Mrs. Armando,” I said, my hands out in front of me in a sorry attempt to appease her. “How did he…how did I get in?”

She cocked her head. “You foolin'?”

“No…I'm sorry. I wish I was. But I'm not fooling.”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “You ask me for the key! First you say you lose the key—meaning I gotta change the locks—and I give you a spare because you always used to be a good kid, David. None of this noise and nonsense.”

He was here. In this house. In my home. “I'm so sorry, Mrs. Armando. I promise it won't happen again.”

“I'm not cleaning up no more messes for you, David. I tell you to throw out that bucket and you throw it into my garden? Mess up my tomatoes?” She shook her head at the inhumanity of it all.

I started up the steps. “I'm sorry,” I stammered. “I'm so, so sorry.” I felt violated, terrified.

“I give you another chance, but only because of Amy. I always like her!”

But I was already halfway gone. I galloped the steps two at a time, reached the third floor, and turned the doorknob. It was unlocked. I pushed open the door, and what I saw sent my stomach into freefall.

Everything was wrecked. My living room looked like a vengeful TV cop had blown through the place sans warrant, overturning everything just because he could. The mail table was upside down, the easy chair was ripped down the middle, its cheap, fluffy intestines spilling out like it had seen the business end of a bayonet. The floor was littered with crushed beer cans, some still leaking their sticky, flat contents. There were fast-food wrappers and empty bags of Doritos. The coffee table was a graveyard of red plastic cups, some of which overflowed with cheap vodka and soggy cigarette butts. There was a thin film of smoke in the air, and the entire place smelled like the inside of the Marlboro Man's left lung. There was a nasty, jagged hole in the middle of the television set. The mirror that used to hang by the front closet was lying face up on the far end of the futon, its surface covered with a fine dusting of white powder. And crumpled up on the other end of the futon, her legs barely brushing the edge of the mirror and her pale arms wrapped around a throw pillow stitched by Amy's mother, was Cath Kennedy.

I raced over to her, crushing cans and kicking over an empty bottle of Popov en route. I could hear music playing faintly in my office. “Trouble” by Lindsey Buckingham.

I shook her arm. Her skin was clammy, and there was a thin film of sweat on her brow and upper lip. “Cath.” I shook her harder. “Cath!” Was she even alive?

Yes, she was. But she didn't seem happy about it. She let out a low groan, and I could see her eyes swimming around behind her closed lids like fish beneath a frozen pond, desperate for sunlight. I shook her again, shouted out her name. Finally, her eyes fluttered open. She looked confused, startled. Then she flashed me a lazy smile of recognition. “Heyyyy,” she said breathily, sinking deeper into the couch and stretching out her legs like a house cat. “You came back.”

“Cath.” I shook her again. “What the hell happened?
Where the hell is he?
”

She sat up, rubbed at her brow. “Who?”

I stood up, stomped toward where the music was coming from. “Me!” I yelled, unable to see straight from anger. “The other me!” My office was a sea of CDs and wide-open jewel boxes, and my desk was lined with a barricade of empty Budweiser bottles. My laptop was open and on, a screen saver languidly flashing across its screen. I snapped off the stereo, steeled myself, then threw open the sliding wooden doors to my bedroom.

It was empty. The contents of my dresser were spread out across the floor like an extra layer of carpeting, and an innocent breeze blew in from the open windows. But no one was there. I felt the sheets. They were cool and untouched. I spun around and stormed back into the living room. I sputtered at Cath, impotent with rage. She was sitting upright now, taking small sips from a bottle of 7-Up. She looked like she had been thrown from the back of a horse, her hair sticking out wildly to the left, her face pinched and battered.

“He's not here,” she said in a small voice. “He left.”

I took two deep breaths, kicked a can of Rolling Rock across the floor, then sat down amid the ruined innards of the easy chair. “Cath,” I said, more sad now than angry. “What happened?”

She blinked. “What time is it?”

I looked at my watch. “It's eight fifteen a.m.”

She groaned and sat back. “There was a party.”

“I can see that.” From where I was sitting, I could see into the kitchen. The floor was a Picasso of swirled, dirty footprints, and the far window was, as I had feared, completely devoid of herb garden.

“He called me, invited me over last night.”

“What time?”

She scratched at her arm. “I dunno. Maybe nine? He said he was at your apartment. That the two of you had made some sort of agreement. Like a truce. And that you both wanted me to come over.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So I had nothing better to do. So I came. And it was totally out of control. The entire VSC was here. Some band that I saw play at Lit once—from Detroit—they were all here and so were their roadies. That creepy dude with bleached hair—the Asian guy from Smashing Pumpkins who's always hanging around the East Village?”

I rubbed my eyes hard, until I saw stars. “James Iha?”

“Yeah, that dude was here all night. And you—the other you…he was completely out of control. He was drinking everything in sight, snorting drugs, making out with strangers. He had his shirt off and was just, like,
cackling
with laughter. He kept repeating, ‘Why not? Why not?' Over and over again. It was kind of scary.”