Check in at the Pine Away Motel (ARC)

by Katarina Bivald

  “They’ll definitely keep her.”

  “Yeah, they’d be crazy not to.” MacKenzie shrugs. “And I’ll always be fine.”

  “But that’s what I’m trying to say…”

  “Come with me, Camila. I want to show you something.”

  She takes hold of Camila’s arm and leads her up to her room. Camila still seems tense, but she follows MacKenzie blindly, as if she can no longer think for herself.

  The box that MacKenzie left in Camila’s room contains a gown.

  A ball gown.

  An utterly fantastic gown, but I think the word Camila might be looking for is senseless. Or incomprehensible. The kind of gown you would wear once at prom and then never again. It looks like something from a Disney film: shimmering pink, with tiny embroidered pearls on the bodice and a sea of tulle and satin beneath. On a teenager, it would look enchanting; paired with Camila’s dogged face, it seems more like the mice smoked something before they were let loose on the fabric.

  Camila is staring at it with a skeptical expression.

  “What’s going on, MacKenzie?”

  “What do you think’s going on? I’m giving you a dress.”

  “I’ve worn dresses before.”

  “But never one like this.”

  There’s no arguing with that.

  “Meet me in the parking lot at seven.”

  * * *

  The parking lot is dark and empty when Camila steps outside at seven on the dot. She strides down the metal steps with as much dignity as she can muster in her pink tulle gown. The skirt sweeps over the steps, and in the glow of the streetlights, the pearls glitter against the dark asphalt. Her hair is tied up in a deceptively simple bun, with two soft curls framing her face.

  She looks heartbreakingly beautiful. MacKenzie follows her every movement. For once, she can’t think of anything to say.

  Camila tugs nervously at the dress. “I look like an idiot,” she says.

  “You look incredible,” MacKenzie tells her. She is still just staring at Camila, and only springs to life to open the car door when she notices Camila raise an eyebrow.

  “And I look like an uncomfortable teenage boy who’s been forced into a tux against his will,” she says.

  But if you ask me, they both look fantastic, and they can’t help but steal glances at each other as MacKenzie drives toward the school. I’m in the bed of the truck and can’t tear my eyes away from them.

  MacKenzie pulls up outside the gymnasium.

  “Should we really be here?” Camila asks.

  “Relax,” MacKenzie tells her, which only makes Camila more nervous. MacKenzie leads her across the yard and around the freshly painted building.

  “The dress is great, but can we go home now?”

  “You worry too much. You’ll get premature wrinkles.”

  “MacKenzie! You can’t break into the sports hall, and I can’t run from the cops in these heels. You promised you wouldn’t do anything to piss them off.”

  But the doors swing open as MacKenzie turns the handle. “After you,” she says.

  “If the alarm goes off, I’m…”

  Camila’s voice trails off.

  The sports hall has been transformed for the evening, decorated with the same confident taste as all school dances. Delicate pink drapes hang from the ceiling in an attempt to soften the lighting. There are fabric runners on the walls, all dramatically lit by spotlights. The hall smells like rubber flooring and teenage angst, but there is also a disco ball. It spins lazily on the ceiling, scattering beams of light across the empty floor to the tones of…

  Bruce Springsteen.

  “Michael convinced Coach Stevenson to let us hire the gym for the night. We even got to use the decorations they save for prom. Clarence and Buddy helped out.”

  I take a deep breath.

  Camila does the same. She steps forward onto the empty dance floor and gazes around in wonder. The light dances over her and her dress as she slowly spins around.

  I wonder whether she has also been transported back in time, whether she can see our old classmates just as clearly as I can. I take a step forward, just like I did back then.

  I’m a firm believer in decisive moments in life. Instants in which we change radically and irrevocably. I experienced one of those moments on the dance floor fifteen years ago, as I stood next to MacKenzie in the compact silence that greeted us.

  I should have been terrified. I was afraid, but it was as if I had decided I was brave enough to ignore their glances, to raise my chin and refuse to care.

  It was the biggest step I had ever taken, and it might not sound like much now, but it tore me away from everyone else in town and put me firmly on the side of the motel. I never looked back.

  I don’t think I was aware of it at the time. Not really. I knew something had happened, but I wasn’t quite sure what. I think maybe that’s what happens in these decisive moments. They can be so brief that we don’t even realize we’ve changed course. It might only be by a few degrees, but it’s enough to shift us onto a completely different course, and as the years pass, those few degrees take us further and further away on our new trajectory. For better or worse, I’m not entirely sure, but I’d like to believe that our lives choose us for a reason. Think of it as a new course, rather than being knocked off course.

  I wonder whether Michael experienced the exact opposite back then. His face was haughty, his gaze ice-cold. He looked at everyone around us as though nothing they said or thought would affect him in the slightest. Camila was half a step behind him.

  But it was our evening all the same. I felt remarkably free. Everyone’s opinions of me, their views and remarks; all those things got pushed back. Just like the other students as we walked across the dance floor.

  After a while, the conversations started up again. The people on the dance floor started dancing. MacKenzie and I danced together, and argued about who would lead. I danced with Michael after that. He led. I was amazed that everything seemed so normal. I guess I had imagined the roof of the sports hall crashing down on us.

  Michael’s back was tense beneath my hand. I could feel his knotted muscles, but I also couldn’t stop smiling. I was wearing a tuxedo and was drunk on the freedom of having escaped people’s expectations without making the world go under. The dark arm of my jacket looked absurd against the matching fabric on his shoulder.

  Michael’s gaze softened as he looked at me, and that made me feel even stronger.

  He can’t leave, I thought. There’s no way he can want to leave, not if he can look at me like that. Green Day’s “Good Riddance” was playing through the speakers, and I decided it would be our song from that point on.

  I think I thought of Michael as a tense knot of contradictory impulses. Wants to, doesn’t want to. I thought that with time, the knot would loosen, whether because of me or because of life, but what I didn’t realize was that knots don’t loosen when they’re pulled in opposite directions. They just get tighter and tighter.

  Still, then and there, he laughed and shook his head and spun me around, and I remember thinking: See, he loves me.

  * * *

  The memory dissolves before my eyes. I’m still spinning around on the dance floor beneath the disco ball, but I’m alone again.

  Camila is standing perfectly still, staring helplessly at MacKenzie. She has tears in her eyes.

  “Camila!” MacKenzie sounds dismayed and instinctively moves toward her.

  “I know you said you’d break my heart,” Camila says quietly. “And I know I told you I could look after myself, but Jesus Christ, MacKenzie, I didn’t realize how completely you’d do it.”

  She blinks several times.

  “I’m sorry, I thought I could manage to keep things easygoing and no strings, but…”

  “Shh,” MacKenzie tell
s her, holding out a hand. “May I?”

  She takes Camila’s hand and wraps an arm around her waist, leading her out onto the dance floor. Bruce Springsteen is singing that he’s tougher than the rest, and Camila finally relaxes in MacKenzie’s arms. She closes her eyes and lets herself be taken along on yet another of MacKenzie’s adventures.

  I stick to the shadows along one wall, watching them dance. Here and now, I think Camila would follow MacKenzie anywhere, and MacKenzie will never be able to leave her after this. But I wonder whether that’s what this is really about. Regardless of which path they take in the future, no one can take this moment away from them.

  The memory will always be there inside them, in a place where time doesn’t work the way it does here. A small part of them will always be able to dance around this empty sports hall, not caring about the fabric starting to come loose from the wall, or Clarence and Buddy having forgotten to fold up the basketball hoop.

  MacKenzie pulls Camila closer. “You know when I said I would never fall for you?” she says quietly.

  Camila nods.

  “I was lying.”

  Chapter 50

  One Day, I’ll Leave All This Behind

  The next day, I join Michael in his car as he sets off somewhere. My mind keeps returning to the image of MacKenzie and Camila dancing together, but no matter how hard I try, I don’t seem to be able to hold on to the feeling I had yesterday. I’m tired, hungover on feelings, and oddly anxious.

  Something is refusing to leave me in peace. It isn’t quite a memory. More a shadow of one. Something itching and rubbing and irritating me, like a splinter I can’t quite see to extract or even ignore.

  I stiffen up next to Michael.

  It can’t have been, I think.

  If those decisive moments change the course of our lives, that must mean we were already moving away from each other on prom night. I was free and happy, and “Good Riddance” was our song. How can a happy moment go on to make us unhappy? That’s not how life is meant to work.

  “If only you’d asked me then,” I say to Michael. “I was invincible that evening. I would have followed you anywhere. You could’ve dragged me out to the car and driven me off into the world.”

  But as the words leave my mouth, I wonder if it’s true. Would I have done that? Maybe I was already moving away from him, however incomprehensible that sounds.

  I stare out through the windshield. I know where we’re going. He’s driving to our place. The place he first kissed me, and where we always went when we wanted to be alone.

  The whole of northeast Oregon is so beautiful that it was pure chance we picked this place, but ever since that spring, it’s how I’ve always pictured paradise.

  I never went there during all the years Michael was away. To me, it became somewhere half-mythical and half-real.

  I cover my face with my hands to make the memories disappear.

  “Why are we going there?” I ask wearily. “Why are we torturing ourselves with memories? It happened. It’s over. Dwelling on it won’t change a thing.”

  But when he parks the car, I follow him. Of course I do.

  You get to our place by walking for an hour along a narrow, winding path through the pine forest. It’s uphill all the way, until your thighs burn and all conversation stops because you need every last bit of air in your lungs.

  It’s an odd sensation to walk up there without getting the least bit out of breath.

  I wish I did feel exhausted. It would give me something else to think about, at the very least. Michael is going to move on with his life without me, just as he did fifteen years ago, and I don’t want to think about it anymore.

  “I’ve thought about everything I want to think about,” I announce to Michael’s back. “Why couldn’t it all just end at prom, while we were dancing and laughing and you spun me around? Surely that was as good a point as any to leave us.”

  What do the last few weeks matter? They’re my memories. I’ll do what I want with them.

  The trees become increasingly sparse, and we reach a small ledge, just big enough for a camping stove and two people. Beneath us, Pine River flows sluggishly, as it always has.

  But Michael’s eyes are fixed on the ground, on a piece of rock. He takes out his hammer and carefully hits one edge of it until the section he has chosen breaks loose. The sound of his hammer on the rock echoes around us.

  He is re-creating his photo album of rock.

  “You came back here before you left, didn’t you?” I ask quietly.

  Michael sits down on the rock. I gently lower my head to his lap.

  This was how we used to sit. He would run his fingers through my hair, slowly and gently, as if unaware he was doing it.

  Then he always said, “One day, I’ll leave all this behind, Henny.”

  As though he needed to remind himself.

  * * *

  Prom definitely gave our classmates something to talk about, but more than anything, it changed us. MacKenzie had made up her mind. She was going to work at the motel and ignore what anyone in town thought. Camila was quiet and withdrawn, the way she had been before getting involved with the Measure Nine campaign. When she came out to me, I thought that was the reason, but looking back now, I think it was more to do with the fact she had realized she would need to leave Pine Creek in order to be herself. Prom had simply confirmed that for her. I noticed she had started looking at MacKenzie with some kind of fond distance, as though she was already thinking of her as a memory. And then she forced herself to leave MacKenzie and the motel without ever looking back. Until I died.

  Michael became increasingly tense during the last few weeks of school. I knew he was fighting constantly with his dad. It had started during the campaign, but things escalated after prom. Mr. Callahan didn’t like Michael’s political views, and he really wasn’t happy when people started talking about how he had gone to the dance with another man.

  Before that, their arguments had mostly centered around Derek and Stacey’s wedding. They were getting married right after school ended, and everyone was expecting great things from them. Derek may have lost his scholarship, but he was still destined for something big. Someone with that much talent forged their own path, they said; normal rules didn’t apply.

  One week after prom, Michael showed up in town with a black eye. He wore it with a kind of strange pride. Everyone knew it was his dad’s handiwork. That evening, he moved into the Redwood Cabin.

  I didn’t know how he could afford it, but maybe the black eye had convinced Juan Esteban. Back then, he was still incredibly generous. MacKenzie was already living at the motel by that point, so I guess it made no real difference whether he was helping out one teenager or two.

  I went to see Michael as soon as I heard about the bruise. He didn’t tell me about it himself. I had to hear it from someone else in town, and though I had been forewarned, I still got a shock when I finally saw it for myself. The purplish-blue parts were surrounded by yellowish-green.

  I swallowed nervously as I glanced around the cabin. The walls had been given a fresh coat of pale-gray paint. I knew that—we were the ones who had done it, after all. But somehow it felt wrong, immoral almost, to be there as a guest. As if we were stealing an experience that didn’t belong to us. Everything still smelled new.

  Michael’s backpack was on the couch, and his geology books were spread out across the table.

  “By the time you get to UC Berkeley, you won’t have anything left to read,” I said.

  “I like to be prepared.”

  “Your eye looks much better today,” I lied.

  Michael turned to me and gave me an intense look. “Come with me,” he said.

  “To college?”

  “Anywhere. First college, then the world. We could live anywhere. Go wherever we want. Travel together.”

&nbs
p; “How would we ever have a home, then?”

  “We’d find somewhere we loved, somewhere we’d chosen ourselves. We’d still travel from time to time, but we would have a home to come back to. A real home. With a barbecue in the backyard. A full set of plates and glasses. A white picket fence out front. We’d even have one of those doormats that say Welcome.”

  “We already have a home here. We know what it’s like. We know everyone, and…”

  “I know! That’s exactly my point. We know what people are like here. There are so many other people to meet.”

  I shuddered. “So we would travel the world until we found the perfect place?”

  “Not every day. We could stay longer from time to time. But you know what I mean. I’d be happy to stay in boring motel rooms so long as I was with you.”

  “But we have a whole motel here!”

  “You’re my home. You’re the only thing I need. If you want me to, I’ll pack a doormat for you. Spread it out in front of the door wherever we stay.”

  He took hold of my arms as if trying to convince me by using some kind of inner strength. It worked. I felt it. I was standing in front of a precipice and could hear some ancient, primordial power calling to me. Whatever he was radiating said Jump. As if it was a simple matter of taking a small step forward and letting myself fall. This whole fantastic view could be yours. Don’t worry about hurtling downward. It’s only temporary.

  It was terrifying and it was perilous; that’s how it felt.

  “Michael,” I said hopelessly.

  “And then, once we’ve seen a few places, we’ll find our home. I could make you happy. I swear. I’d give you the world, millions of years of it, and no matter where we are, we’ll wake up together. That’s all I need. That’s home to me. Falling asleep and waking up next to you.”

  “Michael!”

  He finally fell silent.

  “I can’t,” I said, sounding desperate. “I can’t just leave everything like that. My whole past and my life and…Dad! What would he do all on his own?”