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“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” I shut my eyes. “We need to minimize this as best as we can, and that means I need to tell jokes. I’m not really in the mood to make them up right now, though. So that’s on you.”
“Is this serious?” Her voice is subdued.
My father has been doing cocaine. He’s been doing it even after he watched it kill his best friend. If this isn’t serious, I don’t know what is.
“I don’t know,” I lie. “I hope not.”
Tina is pulling into the hospital parking lot.
I shake my head. “I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.” I end the call.
Tina finds a spot. But instead of grabbing our stuff and going, we sit there in the car. She’s parked right under an overhead light; it washes us with a pale, fluorescent light.
There are a lot of things we need to say to each other.
I put my hands on the dashboard. “I know we’re supposed to end this when I go back to Cyclone. But…don’t. Please.” I glance over at her. “Stay with me.”
She shuts her eyes. Her fingers curl around the edge of the steering wheel and she bows her head. “Blake. This isn’t the time to have this conversation. Your life has just been turned around, you—”
“It’s exactly the time,” I tell her. “This isn’t temporary, Tina. I care about you. I care about you a lot. And you know that.”
Her voice breaks. “And I care about you. But—”
“Don’t tell me that this can’t happen.” My heart is beating roughly. “Don’t tell me that this isn’t the time for you to break up with me. Don’t tell me that you don’t fit in my life. Whatever it is you’re thinking, don’t tell me that.”
She raises her head and looks up at me, turning her face to mine.
“All I’m saying is that this is not the time to work out those details. Your dad is sick. Let’s just…”
“No,” I tell her. “If you’re going to come into that hospital with me, I don’t want it to be because you think I’m too fragile to handle the truth. This isn’t hard. If you walk in there with me, if you’re there for me through this, I don’t know how I can make myself let you go. If that’s not okay with you, walk away. I won’t even feel it if I lose you now. There’s too much else that hurts. Don’t wait until tomorrow or the day after. Do it now.”
She doesn’t say anything. Her fingers clench around the wheel. She makes a little noise in her throat. I want to reach out and put my arms around her. I want everything to be okay.
We don’t get everything we want.
She looks at me in mute, pained agony. But she doesn’t reach out to me. She doesn’t say she’ll be there for me. And that means she won’t. One more ache in my heart—I can scarcely feel it.
“That’s that, then.” I open the door.
“Blake,” she says.
“I know,” I tell her. “I know you care about me. We both have to keep ourselves safe. I know you. It’s okay. I’m going to be okay.”
“Blake.”
“Stay in my house as long as you want.” I cast her a glance. “I’m probably not going to be back any time soon.”
“Blake…” The last iteration of my name. Her voice trails off. She looks over at me. There’s a hint of tears on her lashes.
But she doesn’t say anything for a long time. She doesn’t lie. She doesn’t tell me she wants us to keep going.
“Take care of yourself,” she finally says.
“Yeah.” I hoist my overnight bag and look over at her. “Take care of yourself, too.”
Then I’m pushing off.
It’s better this way. My heart aches with an almost physical pain. I feel hollow and empty and bruised. But I would feel hollow and empty and bruised even if she were by my side. I’m half-unconscious as it is.
I raise my chin and walk forward. The hospital doors slide open automatically as I approach, and I step inside.
I don’t look back.
TINA
I don’t know how I manage to get on the freeway. My hands are shaking. My tears give haloes to the streetlights, turning them into avenging angels frowning at me over three lanes of asphalt.
I drive. I can’t do anything else—just drive, drive, and even then, I still can’t push myself to go above forty, even on a deserted highway. When the freeway bends north, I get off. Not because I have somewhere else to be, but because if I continue on, I’ll end up back at Blake’s house in Berkeley and that will break me down.
I don’t have any idea where I am, and I like it that way. I pass signs in Spanish advertising hair salons. There are residences with cinderblock walls and steel gates enclosing modest yards. I punch off the map displayed by the car. I want to lose myself.
The road slips away behind me. My hands squeeze the steering wheel; I stare straight ahead over slick asphalt.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. I knew it would hurt. I knew I would miss him.
It wasn’t supposed to feel like love.
But it had tonight. It had.
And I don’t know what to do with that.
I’d seen the rest of the day in one long rush. I’d go into the hospital with him. In a few hours, his staff would converge on him, and I’d be there—holding his hand while they coached him through the altered launch, offering him the comfort he so badly needed. I’d be there when he was at his most vulnerable, his most hurting. I’d be there in the audience when everything was broadcasted to millions around the world, translated into seven simultaneous languages. I would be there, and when it was over—when press from the entire world converged on him to ask about the future of Cyclone, he’d make his way to me.
It’s one thing for us to comfort one another in private, but in public, I’m the daughter of a Wal-Mart baker and a janitor. I don’t know how to be with him—him and his media training and his SEC regulations and his private jokes with his father, born from corporate sensitivity training.
I don’t want to love Blake. Loving him will never be safe.
The road I’m on narrows from two lanes to one. Sidewalks give way to rough gravel roadsides. I turn right just before the street peters out in a residential neighborhood nestled against foothills.
After a few minutes of winding hither and thither, the new road I’m on begins to climb the hills in earnest, hairpinning up slopes that I can’t see in the darkness. My headlights illuminate only in flashes: a house, huge, hidden behind an ornate gate; the glimpse of orange rock where the road has been carved into a steep incli
ne. Eucalyptus branches stretch overhead as the road continues twisting up and up.
It’s a road that finally matches my speed, a road where my thirty miles an hour seems safe. I keep going, glimpsing the scenery only long enough to leave it all behind: grassy banks covered with oak leaves shift into moss-covered fallen logs. A private gate comes up on the right and then disappears in dark fog.
Eventually, the private homes I catch sight of turn into farmland. I glimpse a stile to the right, the arched sign of a ranch home on the left. The road takes on a meditative quality, something quiet and unending. It fits what I need right now.
I can go slowly. I have to, here. One flubbed turn and I’d be careening off the hillside. This is my life: I have to play it safe.
I have to play it safe.
My eyes are stinging and for a moment, I have the strange impression that the windshield wipers aren’t working properly. But of course it isn’t the car. Blake would never own a vehicle that would dare malfunction. I’m the thing that has broken down, my vision blurring with tears that I refuse to acknowledge.
I always play it safe. What choice have I had?
That’s what dries my tears. Not words of wisdom or comfort, but a deep-seated anger.
I always play it safe. I have to. I’ve chosen my future as if it were a blown-glass artifact, whorls and loops that needed to be packed away in tissue paper, put up high to keep it safe. I don’t go out. I don’t take risks. I never know when my parents will need an extra ten dollars. It’s an illusion that Blake and I could trade lives. Because he’s always known that he’ll get back to his—and I’ve always known I’ll fall back into mine.
He’s always had someone to catch him. And me? Unless I’m careful, I can lose everything.
The higher I go, the wilder the landscape becomes. I pass through a spooky forest. Wizened, wizard trees reach many-fingered branches to the sky. Moss drips from their branches like tattered scarves, and they look down on me like judgmental aunties.
Look at that girl there. Can’t even drive a car safely, let alone manage her life.
