Where Love Goes (41 page)

“I think Ursula and I should leave this town,” he says. She knew this was coming. “I know you don’t want to see me anymore, and without you I can’t bear to stay.”

Her finger strokes his hand. She touches his hair. The gestures of a mother, not a lover.

“Can you come to bed with me?” she asks him.

He can never say no to her. He watches Claire undress the way Ursula would watch the unveiling of the most perfect doll anybody could ever give her, only it isn’t being given to her, actually. Only shown. She unfastens her bra and lets her breasts tumble down over his face.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair
.

He raises his head from the pillow to meet her nipple—first one, then the other, with the same wild, desperate foraging of an infant left without milk for longer than Claire would ever leave any infant of hers.

“Will you ever know how much I loved you?” he says.

He speaks in the past tense, she knows, not because he has stopped loving her. He speaks in the past tense as if he were a dead man. If dead men could speak.

U
rsula wakes even earlier than usual this morning, so early that her father is still sleeping. Alone.

She finds a sweatshirt and sweatpants in the pile on her floor, also her Little Mermaid backpack. Into it she packs Phillip, a set of smell markers, her Bend ’N Stretch Barbie, Jenny’s collar, her Halloween candy, and the shell her mother gave her that time. She fastens on her bicycle helmet and tiptoes down the stairs. She lifts the kickstand of her two-wheeler and settles onto the seat. She doesn’t know where she’s going, except that it will be away from here. She pedals fast as the wind.

S
ally isn’t pregnant after all. Not anymore, anyway. She checks the color key on the back of the home pregnancy test she finally administered and rereads the directions twice to be sure she’s read them right. White circle: no pregnancy. She’s free. Within half an hour of taking the test she has begun to bleed.

She would call somebody up and tell them, but the only one who ever knew in the first place was Travis and he’s been acting so weird he’d probably be disappointed. She has to do something though. She wants to dance. She wants to run. Most of all she just wants to get out of here.

Just at this moment Travis sails up on his skateboard. Last time he saw her, when he showed her his tattoo, she was in such a terrible mood, but seeing him now, with his arms outstretched and his hair flying and all four wheels in midair, she can’t help but be moved by him. She grabs his shoulders in both her hands and whirls around in a circle with him. “Let’s drive someplace,” she says.

T
hey take her mother’s car and head for Wilson’s Dam, out behind the old reservoir. Sally drives. He has brought her the new Dead Milkmen tape. He is just so happy Sally isn’t mad at him anymore. He feels sad about the baby. But mainly he just has to touch her again.

Sally is so grateful she isn’t pregnant, nothing else matters. I won’t ask for anything ever again, she is thinking. I’m so lucky.

“Hey, why don’t you keep both hands on the wheel and let me take the wrapper off?” Travis tells her, reaching for the tape. “You know how much shit you’d get in if somebody caught you driving with no adult in the car and no license? Me too.”

He removes the wrapper from the tape and sticks it in the cassette player. He puts his hand up inside the front of Sally’s short shorts. He begins to nuzzle against her neck.

“Hey,” says Sally. “Not now, okay?” She hasn’t figured out how to tell Travis yet but she isn’t going to do it with him anymore.

“Man, you don’t know how bad I missed you,” he says. “All morning when I was bagging groceries, all I could think of was what I’d do if you wouldn’t see me anymore. I’d go crazy. I don’t know what you did to me. I still got a brain and a liver and intestines and stuff, but it’s like my dick rules. And you rule my dick.”

“I’ve been thinking about the sex part, too, Travis,” Sally tells him. “I mean, I like you so much and we have all these great times and everything. But I’ve been thinking I shouldn’t have rushed the other so quick. I want to take it slower.”

“I will, I promise,” he says. He figures she’s talking about this foreplay stuff Adam was telling him about. “I’ve been a jerk. I’m always so fucking anxious to get it off, I sometimes forget how it is for you.”

“I wasn’t talking about that,” says Sally. “I meant sex in general. Slowing down.”

“Not doing it anymore?” he says. “You gotta be kidding. I’d die.”

“Either that or you could just find somebody else and get laid by her,” says Sally. “There’s probably lots that would be happy to do it with you.” She hopes she sounds a little sad but the truth is it would be a relief. She thinks about doing things like lying on the hammock and reading Agatha Christie mysteries. Sewing. Dancing. Going for bike rides with her friends. Why was she in such a hurry to get on to the next step?

“I thought we’d be together always,” Travis says to her. “I didn’t picture us ever breaking up.”

“Are you still onto that marriage weirdness?” says Sally. Now she isn’t even sorry at all anymore. She’s almost mad, that he could be so dumb. “Jesus, I’m not even sixteen years old.”

“You don’t know how much I love you, Sally,” Travis tells her. “I want to be with you forever.”

“We just screwed a few times is all,” she says. “No big deal.”

“It was to me,” he says. “It is to me.”

“Listen,” she says. “I think maybe I’d better just go home now. I’m not in the mood to go to the dam with you at the moment and you probably aren’t, either.” She begins to pull a U-turn on the narrow dirt road that leads up to the dam.

Travis grabs her arm. “Don’t go,” he says. The car swerves back out across the road. Sally turns the wheel again, points it toward home.

“Sally,” he cries. “I want to show you how I feel about you. It’s like my whole self is exploding.” He reaches for the wheel again, but she fights him off this time. The car jerks to the left. Sally sees a VW bug heading in their direction. “Travis,” she yells. “Stop it!” Their car is pointed straight for the bug.

“Jesus!” Travis screams. Sally swerves wildly to avoid the other car. She means to hit the brake, but her foot slams down on the accelerator instead. They careen over the guardrail of the bridge and into the water.

C
laire is already at the hospital when Sam arrives, straight from his building job. For once, seeing him, she doesn’t think about slammed doors or dinners poured down the garbage disposal or lawyers’ bills and child support. She actually forgets for a second who he is to her now except for what she can’t ever forget, that he is the father of their daughter, who lies on a table somewhere on the other side of the double doors at the far end of this room, where she has been for over an hour now without anybody saying what’s going on.

She puts her arms around him; he doesn’t resist. “It took an hour just to get the two of them out of the car once they pulled them out of the water. There was an inch or so of airspace or they would have drowned,” she tells him. “Sally was driving, God knows why.”

Sam can’t speak. “What—” he begins.

“Her arm is broken. Also a couple of ribs,” Claire tells him. The easy part. “They’re still checking her for internal injuries.”

Even now, in the terrible fluorescent light of the waiting room, Claire can’t help thinking what an astonishingly handsome man he is, this familiar and elusive stranger who is her children’s father. In all the years she’s known him—half her lifetime, practically—she has never before seen him weep. They weep together, actually: wild, heaving sobs in each other’s arms. She pounds her hands against his back. He buries his head against her breasts. Crazily, the words come to her now that she said to him last time he picked the children up:
“How many times do I have to ask you to please wait on the porch?”
If he laid his head against her her lap she wouldn’t push him away.

As abruptly as they fall against each other, they break apart.

“When are they going to know something?” he asks.

She shakes her head. They don’t explain the rules here, you just wait for somebody in a green tunic to call your name. Two hours ago Claire had certain other hopes and dreams, though she’s at a loss to say what they might have been. Her universe now is the waiting area outside the emergency room. All she wants out of life now is a doctor to come and tell her Sally will be okay.

One emerges, with a couple Claire realizes must be Travis’s parents. She’s suddenly ashamed that she’d forgotten about him. One look at Eleanor Goforth and she knows it can’t be good. Her husband—Don? Dave?—looks blank and stricken.

She would go up to them, only they have nothing to offer each other right now, except the mutual wish that their children had never laid eyes on each other. The doctor is writing down something for them on a piece of paper. Another woman has joined them—not a doctor; not dressed like one, anyway. She has an arm around Eleanor’s shoulder and a hand on Dave’s arm. It is Dave. She leads them into an elevator.

“Any word on Sally yet?” Claire asks the doctor. He says the broken arm has been set and it looks like there weren’t any serious internal injuries. “You and your husband can go in to see her in just a few moments,” he says.

“How about Travis?” Claire asks him.

“He’s lucky he’s alive, the way he hit the windshield. Another half-inch and we’d be looking at a broken neck,” he says. Claire feels her body relax slightly.

“As it is, he’s got two broken legs, multiple fractures,” he tells them. “The fracture to the left leg is relatively simple. The problem is, the boy has a compound fracture to his right femur and a smashed kneecap. It’s too early to tell yet if we can save the kneecap, but we’re definitely looking at severe limitation to motion in the right hip and knee, combined with the possibility of sciatic nerve injury and severe chronic pain, long-term. He’ll be in traction twelve to sixteen weeks. After that we’ll know better what we’re going to be dealing with.”

Who knows how long Claire stands there then? At some point Tim comes rushing into the emergency room, dragging Ursula behind him. He lurches toward Claire and throws his arms around her so tightly he knocks the wind out of her, then pulls back. He’s like some prisoner in the visiting room of a jail, looking at her through the glass but forbidden to touch her.

“We heard about the accident,” he says. “Is she going to be all right?”

He doesn’t add that he heard the news at the police station, where he had gone to pick up Ursula, who was found late this afternoon pedaling her bicycle down the highway five miles outside of town.

“Is there anything I can do?” Tim asks.

Later she will change this view, but what Claire feels at that moment is that there is nothing any of them can do, there is simply no way anything will be all right ever again. Looking into the face of this man who would give her anything he had, only he has nothing to give her, Claire can only say, “Please go home. I need you to leave me alone.”

B
ecause he’s in traction they have set up a television on the ceiling for Travis. He’s watching a snowboarding video at the moment. At least that’s what’s on. Hard to say whether he’s actually watching.

Flat on his back with his hair fanned out against the sheet, Travis looks like an angel to Claire. His hair forms a halo around his face, which is extremely pale. His cheeks have the soft blond fuzz of somebody who has not yet shaved long enough or often enough that the hair has turned to stubble. He wears a white tunic onto which somebody has pinned a button that reads
SHIT HAPPENS
. A troll holding a skateboard is propped on the table next to his bed, along with a ceramic jack-o’-lantern full of jelly beans and several vases full of lowers and a Mylar helium balloon that reads “When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Lemonade.” The balloon must have been here awhile. It has begun to droop.

When Claire suggested that they go visit Travis, Sally said she couldn’t handle it. Travis’s mother, Eleanor, has called every day since Sally got home from the hospital a week ago asking her to please come. Her son is so depressed, maybe Sally could lift his spirits. After ten hours of surgery, the orthopedic surgeon was able to piece together Travis’s kneecap and femur with the aid of a considerable amount of hardware, but it’s doubtful whether he’ll ever walk without a cane. No more skateboarding, that’s for sure.

Hearing this, Claire called Nancy, who used to be a physical therapist. “Let me put it this way,” Nancy told her. “The femur is one big bastard of a bone to break. Only thing worse would be to mess up your kneecap.”

“But he’s so young and strong,” Claire said. “And he’s in such good shape.”

“That’ll help, all right,” she said. “But I can tell you the kid isn’t going to win any dance contests. It’s Tiny Tim Time.”

So here they are finally: Sally in her cast and Claire carrying a plate of the peanut-butter-chip cookies Travis always liked so much. She wanted to get him a tape, too, but when she asked Sally for a suggestion, Sally said, “Give it up, would you, Mom?”

“Hey, Travis,” Claire says to him. She figures it would make him uncomfortable if she kissed him, so she just pats his shoulder. “We’ve missed you. Pete wanted me to say hi.”

“Hi to him, too,” says Travis, who is making an effort, Claire realizes, to cover a bedpan that lies beside him on the bed. “Hey, Sally.”

“Hi, Travis,” she says. “You look better than I expected.”

“Yeah, well, you must have expected something pretty disgusting, then,” he says.

“No, really,” she says. “I like your hair like that.” They must have shampooed it for him here. The dreadlocks have been replaced by fluffy curls, like baby hair almost.

“You still going to be able to get your license?” Travis asks her.

“It doesn’t matter,” Sally tells him. “I don’t care about that.”

“I guess you know the deal, huh?” Travis says to her. “They had to put me back together with a bunch of steel rods and screws. I’m a cripple. Not to mention I’ll never pass through another metal detector without setting off alarms, huh?”