Saving June (16 page)

“What the hell is this?” I demand.

“Uh, it’s Captain Beefheart,” Jake explains, nonplussed.

“It’s crap.”

“It’s avant-garde.”

“No. It’s
crap.”

“Okay,” he relents, “it’s not the most listenable album ever. You have to experience it a few times in its entirety before it grows on you.”

I seriously doubt that. I almost throw the damn thing out onto the side of the highway, except Jake snatches the disc out of my hand before I can roll the window halfway down.

“All right, all right! I’ll play something else.” He glances away from the road and at the stack of CDs on top of the dashboard. “How about…Pink Floyd?”

“Blah. No.”

“Bob Dylan?”

“We’ve listened to him a ton already.”

“Okay,” he says slowly, and I can tell he’s working to not let his impatience creep into his tone, “so what music
do
you like?”

“I dunno.” I shrug. “Usually I listen to whatever Laney listens to.”

“I didn’t ask what music you
listen
to. I asked what music you
like.”

I stop and think about it for a minute. “Well…I like some of the more indie stuff. You know—Arcade Fire, Regina Spektor, Magnetic Fields, Tegan and Sara, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Rilo Kiley’s first album was awesome. Laney listens to this Sri Lankan female rapper, I forget her name, but I enjoy her.” I pause. “And the Beatles. I can’t lie. I love the Beatles.”

“Now
we’re getting somewhere,” he says with the hint of a smile. He squints at me appraisingly. “Let me guess. You’re a Paul girl?”

“Please! I happen to think Ringo is severely underrated,” I say. “But let me guess—you’re a Lennon fan?”

He’s totally that type. Probably thinks he’s bigger than Jesus, too.

I know I’ve pegged him right when he shrugs and says, “Guilty as charged.”

So predictable.

He roots through the stack of CDs and slides one out, pops it into the stereo. I realize what it is when I hear the
first song—the
Let It Be
album. “The last Beatles record ever,” I say.

“Well, to be released,” Jake amends. “Technically it was recorded before
Abbey Road.”

Whatever.

We drive for another ten minutes or so before the title track comes on. Paul sings the words with a quiet, strong conviction, accompanied by striking, solemn piano notes. As the song goes on, I think about June. Surprise, surprise. All of a sudden anger bubbles up in my chest so hot and furious I can barely breathe.

I want what Paul had. I want the faith that there will be some kind of an answer, something more than these endless questions taking up so much space in my head, this feeling that nothing matters and nothing has a point. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that I have no answers. It isn’t fair that June isn’t here to give them. Most of all it isn’t fair that she did this to me, that she left me to deal with this mess on my own. That’s how I feel: completely and utterly alone. Even with Laney here. Even with my mother. I’m still alone.

Hot tears prick behind my eyes like tiny searing needles. The feel of them there surprises me as much as it does Jake.

He glances over at me, confused. “Hey. What’s—”

“Shut up,” I retort reflexively.

I turn to the window and watch the ground slip by through my unfocused vision, trying to keep myself under
control. I can’t get June out of my head. The worst part is not knowing if I want her out of there or not. But I don’t have a choice when I’m listening to this song, to these lyrics all about guidance and comfort, so sad and hopeful at the same time.

A minute later the headlights wash over a sign indicating an upcoming rest stop. I try to blink the wetness out of my eyes, but it doesn’t work.

“I need to pee,” I say, my voice wavering.

Without a word, Jake pulls off at the next exit and drives down the sloping road. The tears form thick in my throat until I can’t hold it in anymore.

I grab the door handle. “Stop the car.”

“Harper—”

“Stop the goddamn car!”

I unfasten my belt and tumble out the door as he skids to a stop. The lot is mostly empty; thankfully no one is there to witness my mad bolt toward the bathrooms. But I don’t even get that far before I stumble and drop to my knees on the grass.

A song. A stupid song is making me cry like a baby, when I couldn’t even muster up a single tear for my own sister’s funeral. What does that say about me? The sobs that have been building in my chest burst out, ragged and painful. I rock on my heels, crying and crying, ripping out chunks of grass by the fistfuls. I hate this. I hate feeling too
much and not enough at the same time. I go on ripping at the grass and crying and hating myself some more.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been doing that before I sense Jake behind me. I don’t turn around.

“Paul is wrong, you know,” I say as I wipe my grass-stained palms on my knees. I’m still crying so hard I’m barely coherent. “There’s not going to be an answer.”

There will never be answers. Just more and more questions. And maybe I’d be okay with that if I didn’t have to hear someone sing those lies so beautifully that it makes me want more than anything to believe that I’m wrong. That one day this all might make sense. That my life is shattered now, but one day I’ll be able to glue the pieces back together and make it whole again.

Jake hovers a step closer. “Hey—” he starts.

“Don’t,” I say. I put my head in my hands and try to get a grip, get myself under control. Stop acting like an idiot. I hate that it’s Jake who always sees me when I’m acting like an idiot.

“Don’t…what?”

“Don’t say something nice. It’ll make me feel so pathetic I’ll want to die.”

Jake kneels down and sets one of his hands lightly on the middle of my back. It’s like his touch cracks open my insides, and I start crying freely again, even harder than before.

“Good news,” he hisses in a stage whisper. “I was just
going to tell you how puffy and red your eyes are. You look like you tested out Seth’s gas mask.”

I laugh a little through my tears, brushing them away with the back of my hand, and the sound surprises me as much as the crying. I can’t remember the last time I laughed.

I blow out a shaky breath. “Jerk.”

Everything’s starting to feel a little more normal now; my breathing coming a little easier, my voice a little steadier. The hysterical feeling fades and leaves me with the all-too-sharp awareness of my stupid meltdown.

“This is so ridiculous,” I say, embarrassed. I want to dig a hole in the ground right here and crawl inside it. “Crying over a
song—
“

“It’s not dumb,” he tells me. He hasn’t moved his hand from the center of my back. I kind of like it, though, its weight and warmth. Holding me together. “It makes sense.”

What is he talking about? It totally does not make sense. It is the opposite of sense making.

I roll my eyes. “Whatever.”

“I mean it,” he stresses. He pauses, the silence between us lengthening until I finally meet his serious gaze. “You want to know why I love music?”

“Enlighten me.” I sniffle. My face must be such a mess right now.

“Eric Clapton had a four-year-old son who fell forty-nine
stories through an open window of their apartment and died,” he says.

I stare at him in return, waiting to see how this could possibly be relevant to his point.

“Clapton wrote this song about it, after, and it just—It rips your heart out,” he continues. “It is the best kind of devastating there is. He took his pain and he turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that’s what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.” Jake leans in toward me a little closer, voice softening. “What I’m trying to say is, it’s just nice, I guess, knowing that someone else can put into words what I feel. That there are people who have been through things worse than I have, and they came out on the other side okay. Not only that, but they made some kind of twisted, fucked-up sense of the completely senseless. They made it mean something. These songs tell me I’m not alone. If you look at it that way, music…music can see you through anything.”

I close my eyes as his hand rubs a small circle on my back. It’s the first time in so long that I’ve been touched by someone—anyone—without my every instinct screaming at me to run away. The first time when I feel like someone is reaching out without expecting anything from me in return.

“Everything is so screwed up.” My voice trembles, tears flowing again. “I’m doing this all wrong.”

Jake looks unsure of how to respond. “You seriously need to give yourself a break here, kid,” he says after a minute. “There’s no right way to do this.” He stands, moving his hand from my back to the top of my head. “Look, it’s not ever going to stop hurting. That’s the reality. But after a while, it’ll get…easier. You’ll get used to living with it.”

I don’t want to get used to living with it. I want things to go back to the way they used to be.

Jake gives me a hand up, and I notice the way he doesn’t let go right away when I’m on my feet. But then, I don’t really want to let go, either. I like having something to hold on to.

We walk back to the lot in silence. Joplin is parked next to a blue minivan, where a mother shepherds three sleepy-looking boys out of the back and toward the bathrooms. The shortest of them carries a raggedy blanket that drags across the ground as he follows his brothers.

Jake opens the back doors of the van, and the two of us sit on the ledge, feet dangling. We eat two slices of Dottie’s peach crumb pie and then chain-smoke cigarettes, watching the sun begin its slow climb over the horizon.

“I need a nap,” he sighs. “I’m going to clear out the back and lie down.”

“I’ll help.”

We manage to toss the bags and Laney’s suitcases into the front without waking her. The only thing we don’t move is the trunk holding June’s urn—Jake just gently pushes it
against the wall. He spreads a blanket over the floor, pulls out two pillows.

“I can take the backseat,” he says. He glances at Laney, still asleep. “Uh, if we can get her to move.”

“That’s a pretty big if. I don’t think we’ll be able to render her from unconsciousness for hours.”

“Well, what do you want to do then?”

“We can sleep together.” I immediately blush. “I mean—you know what I mean. I could use a nap, and there’s enough room.”

Jake stares at me, stammers out, “Um, yeah, sure,” and tosses over one of the pillows.

I set it under my head, curling up on my side and sliding off my shoes. Jake shuts the van’s back doors and lies down next to me. He’s really close, so close I can feel him breathing on the nape of my neck. I could put more space between us, but instead I scoot backward, leaning into him, my back pressed into the pleasant warmth of his front. Jake holds his breath for a moment, but he doesn’t say anything. And he doesn’t move away.

“Have you played me that Clapton song?” I whisper. I don’t want to wake up Laney. I don’t want her to find us like this. Even though we’re not really doing anything. Still, it feels like we’re doing…something. I don’t know what, exactly, but this—the way I’m curled into him, the way his face is in my hair—it isn’t nothing.

Jake stirs behind me. “No, I don’t think so.”

“How does it go?”

He moves so his mouth is right under my ear, brushing the skin there, and one of his hands slides up, resting on my rib cage. My whole body tingles as he starts to sing softly into my ear. I’m not facing him, my eyes are closed, but I can imagine the look on his face. I listen to the words, and I have that feeling again, the same one I had right before I started sobbing in the grass. A tidal wave of emotion rises inside of me.

It’s like I’m on the cusp of something desperate and dangerous, but I don’t know what it is. And then it doesn’t matter because I’m asleep.

It seems like only minutes pass before Laney shakes me awake by my shoulder. I sigh and roll onto my back, blinking up at her. She folds her arms on top of the backseat and grins down at me. She’s practically glowing, even sans makeup.

“Nice nap?” she asks innocently, shooting a pointed glance at Jake’s rumpled pillow.

The memory of Jake singing, his arm wrapped halfway around me, comes flooding back, and my cheeks heat up against my will. I don’t know how much Laney saw. If anything.

I struggle into a sitting position. “What time is it?”

“Almost ten,” she informs me. “Jake’s taking a leak. Wanna go freshen up?”

We traipse to the bathrooms to wash our faces and brush our teeth. Mine feel fuzzy and gross; I really, really want
a shower. Maybe we can check into a motel at the end of the day. I wonder how far we’ll be by nightfall.

I’m splashing water on my face at the sink when Laney emerges from the stall, comes up behind me and says, “You know, Jake’s pretty cute.”

“S-seriously?” I sputter. I’m dripping water all over the counter.

“What? I’m just saying!” She approaches the mirror and whips out her dental floss, but totally looks at me the whole time. “Don’t worry, it’s not like I’m interested or anything.”

What is that supposed to mean?

I meet her eyes in the mirror. “Why would I be worried?”

“I’ve decided to adopt Seth’s philosophy.” She continues like she didn’t hear me as she twists the floss around her hand and runs it through her bottom teeth. “I’m embracing a life of celibacy. Everything above the waist is fair game, but that’s it.”

“Wow. You’re practically a nun now.”

“I know, right? Maybe I’d become a real one if the outfits weren’t so terrible.”

She snaps off the mess of floss string and takes out her lip gloss, rubbing it into her lower lip with her index finger. I want to tell her that she’s prettier without all of the makeup. It kills me a little, the fact that I’ll never be effortlessly beautiful the way Laney is.

“Sex turns boys into idiots,” she says sagely, like she’s imparting some profound wisdom. “Since they’re already idiots to begin with, it just makes them worse.”

“Do you think Seth is an idiot?” I ask.

She presses her lips together, weighing the question. “Bottom line, Seth is a boy,” she says after a minute. “Ergo, idiot.”

Is Jake just a boy? He’s only eighteen, but he seems older sometimes. Like he’s not hung up on the same things as most kids his age. And yeah, he can be insufferable, but he’s insufferable in different ways than other boys I know. So where does that leave him?

I’m still mulling it over when we go back to the parking lot to find Jake leaning up against the driver’s side door, munching on some pretzels from the vending machine.

“Took you long enough,” he says gruffly.

“It takes hard work to look this good,” Laney retorts, flipping her hair and flouncing around to the back door. “Learn it, live it, love it.”

Jake looks at me briefly, but it’s not any different than usual. It’s almost like he never saw me cry, or like we didn’t fall asleep together in the back of his van.

Okay, so I guess we’re pretending none of that happened. I can roll with that.

We get lost for the first time not long after we’ve crossed the Oklahoma border and into Texas. Jake stops to pick
us up some fast food, and we get all turned around trying to get back on the highway. Somehow we end up heading back east.

“You were supposed to turn left!
Left!
“ I yell over Mick Jagger. Jake’s been blasting the Stones for the past hour. I like them, a lot, actually, but come on. Enough is enough.

“Jesus, Scott, maybe you should’ve let me know when that fact was relevant. Like, five exits ago.”

“You two are driving me insane.” Laney squeezes up front between us, cell phone in hand. “Get off here,” she instructs, pointing at the next exit.

Jake’s mouth falls open. “But—”

“Just do it.”

He does. Laney calls out directions from her BlackBerry to navigate until we’re back on the highway, going west again, the right way.

When we pass a billboard advertising some Texan steak house, I look over my shoulder at her and say, “I bet your father would be horrified that we’re going through Texas without stopping for steak.”

“Probably.” She’s lying across the backseat, scrolling on her BlackBerry, her long legs stretched out across the seat. “What about your dad? Think he’s freaking out?”

“No,” I say. I stare out the window; the next billboard is for a Hooters restaurant. Ew. “I think he’d rather pretend
my mom and I don’t exist.” That much has become crystal clear since June died.

Jake cuts his eyes toward me for a moment before focusing on the road again. “What about the urn?” he asks. “Isn’t he going to be pissed about not getting the ashes?”

“Maybe.” I shrug. I don’t particularly care about his reaction.

I’m probably being unfair. June was his daughter, after all. But for the first time, I think I truly understand the intensity of my mother’s anger at him. It hurts to be treated this way, like a mistake, like something someone is trying to erase. Melinda is his clean slate. Mom and I, we’re his baggage, the kind you abandon on the side of the road because it’s inconvenient.

“It’s his own fault,” says Laney. “He’s just like my dad, dumping the first wife for a newer model. It’s sick.”

Jake catches her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Your mother is the newer model in this scenario, I assume?”

“I have no illusions about my parents’ marriage,” she replies. “My mom didn’t really want a kid—stretch marks, oh, the horror—but I was, you know, an investment. Financial security. Tummy tucks cured the rest.” There’s a bitter edge to her voice underneath the flippancy. She shrugs. “At least they stay off my ass most of the time. As long as it doesn’t interfere with their lives, they don’t care what I do.”

“My mom—” Jake starts, and then stops just as suddenly. I turn my head to look at him, but he keeps staring out at
the stretch of highway. The line of his throat works as he swallows. “She never cared, either. Sometimes I feel like things would’ve been really different. If she had.”

We drive along in contemplative silence for a few minutes.

“Parents suck,” Laney eventually comments from the back.

“True that,” Jake concurs.

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel as Keith Richards bursts into a guitar solo, and it strikes me then that this is the first thing the three of us have agreed on since we started our trip. For once, we’re all on the same page.

The harmony between us lasts most of the day, until a few miles outside of Santa Fe, when Jake stops to use a pay phone so he can check in with his brother.

“A cell phone without a monthly plan that you can’t even text from? No iPod?” Laney scoffs when he returns a few minutes later. “Are you technophobic or something?”

“It’s time to embrace the twenty-first century, Tolan,” I tease.

“You know what they say. If it ain’t broke…” Once he’s pulled onto the highway again, he turns around to look at Laney. “Besides, you’re sixteen. What does a sixteen-year-old need with a BlackBerry anyway?”

“I’m seventeen,” she corrects, like that changes everything. “Harper’s the baby here.”

“Being ten months younger than you does not make me an infant!” I protest. “We’re in the same grade! It’s not my fault I got a head start and you went into kindergarten late.”

“Whatever.” She turns to Jake. “Remember, this BlackBerry just saved your ass. Have a little respect.”

“Sorry, but I don’t have respect for—”

I raise my Polaroid camera and take a picture of the two of them bickering. They both stop to glare at me. Well, at least they’re not arguing anymore.

“Give me a little warning next time!” Laney runs her hands over her tousled hair in distress. “I have total bedhead, and my makeup melted off my face hours ago, and my left foot is asleep, and—” She stops abruptly mid-sentence, looking past me. “Hey, what is that?”

I face the front just as we fly by a hand-painted sign that reads Fridgehenge: Next Exit.

Laney strains forward against her seat belt. “What do you think it means?” she wonders.

“It’s code for Stupid Tourist Trap,” Jake deadpans.

She grabs his shoulders and shakes them from behind. “Come on, we should check it out! We’ve been driving all day. I am so bored I could die. I want to breathe in New Mexico’s fresh summer air. I need to
breathe,
Jake!”

He rolls his eyes and looks at me. “And what do you think?”

“I think it’s probably dumb,” I say, which elicits a sound
of protest from the backseat.
“However,
I’m required to automatically side with her in this situation in fear of violating extremely sacred best-friend codes. Let’s stop.”

Laney beams. “Now, that’s the spirit!”

Jake reluctantly turns off at the next exit, following a series of hand-painted signs until they lead to a bumpy dirt road. It stretches out for about half a mile before ending abruptly. Joplin’s headlights click on, swarms of bugs catching in their light, and illuminate another sign that reads Fridgehenge. An arrow points straight ahead toward a worn path in a brown field. We all look at each other as the engine idles, wondering what to do next.

I shrug. “I guess we park and walk.”

When we unload from the van, I dig out a can of bug spray from my backpack and spray each of us down thoroughly, until we’re all coughing from the fumes. Not the most pleasant aroma, but it does allow us to hike up the hill without constantly fending off the feasting mosquito herds or having to fear dropping dead of malaria or West Nile or whatever. At the top is a circular wire fence surrounding what looks to be a landfill.

“Well, isn’t this exciting,” says Jake. He swats at a fly near his face.

“It’s a dump,” I say to Laney, trying to catch my breath.

“There’s got be something more to it—” She peers around on her tiptoes, then points. “Look, that must be it! Fridgehenge.”

Jake and I swivel our heads to find whatever she’s gesturing to. And then I see it: in the middle of the landfill, someone has stacked old refrigerators on top of each other in an artful—and surprisingly accurate—replication of Stonehenge.

“Can we get any closer?” I ask, but Laney’s one step ahead of me, already headed toward a break in the fence. She ducks through and motions for us to follow.

Up close, the spectacle is even more strange—and somehow, also weirdly magnificent. The refrigerators, yellowed with age and many of them tagged with graffiti, all look sort of beautiful and majestic, what with the vividly colorful purple-and-red sky lighting them from behind. I snap a good deal of Polaroids in the fading twilight, trying different angles, doing my best to show the scope of the arrangement someone has built here.

Laney tips her head to the side thoughtfully. “What does it mean?”

“I think it’s supposed to be a statement about America’s reliance on and addiction to rampant, wasteful consumerism,” Jake says.

“Interesting.” She then turns to scan the horizon with one hand on her hip. “Hey, do you think there’s a Starbucks around here? I would punch a monkey for a macchiato.”

“I would punch a monkey for a shower,” I groan, yanking at my sweat-ringed shirt collar to let some air in. I take
the developed photos from between my teeth and stick them in a zippered pouch of my backpack.

“Me too,” Laney agrees. “And mmm, a nice, comfy bed.”

“You can have your shower, but don’t hold your breath on the comfy bed part.” Jake smirks. “Girls, we’re going camping.”

There has to be some irony in the fact that we use Laney’s BlackBerry to find directions to the nearest rustic campsite. When I point this out to them, however, neither is amused. Guess you can’t win ‘em all.

I can tell Laney is trying really hard not to complain; she must know that if she did, I’d call her out on her “sense of adventure” crap she wouldn’t shut up about earlier. It isn’t until Jake pays for the site that it seems Laney can hold it in no longer.

“Where do you expect me to pee?” she demands indignantly.

“They have bathroom facilities,” he says. He slaps the sticker on his windshield. “And if that’s too far, you can walk around and find a spot where no one’s looking. Just be on the lookout for rattlesnakes.” I can’t tell whether or not he’s kidding.

Laney’s eyes go comically wide. “There are
rattlesnakes?
”

After that, she vows to barricade herself inside the van until we’ve crossed state lines. As soon as we park, she digs
up some blankets, clears out the space in the back, and burrows under them, clicking away on her BlackBerry. I bet she’s googling to see what kind of snakes are native to New Mexico.

When Jake steps outside, I follow without thinking. No way am I ready for sleep yet. I worry that if I do sleep, I’ll dream of June, even though I haven’t yet, except for that one time. And that wasn’t the nightmare I keep bracing myself for—some terrible reenactment of the morning I found her. In the garage. I’ve successfully repressed that memory so far, but I can still feel it, bubbling right under the surface, ready to jump out at me when I’m least expecting it. A poisonous snake hidden in the high grass.

Jake jumps onto Joplin’s hood, extends a hand and hoists me up beside him. We stretch out side by side, arms laced behind our heads, gazing up at the stars. It’s amazing—they seem bigger out here, brighter, and there are more of them.

“Do you know any constellations?” I ask.

“Not really,” he says. “There is this one, called the Southern Cross. But you can only see it in the Southern Hemisphere. Actually, there’s a song about it—”

“Of course there’s a song. There’s
always
a song.”

He ignores me and continues “—by Crosby, Stills and Nash. I prefer most of their stuff when Neil Young was in the group, but it’s a great song.”

Jake starts singing it under his breath, voicing the verses
he knows and humming the rest. It’s a pretty song. He has a pretty voice. Though I’m pretty certain if I called him “pretty,” he’d get royally pissed off, regardless of the context.