“Wait,” he said. “You don’t remember how you started dating your high school sweetheart?”
“We were always together anyway,” Chloe said. “One day, there was more.” She really didn’t want to talk about it, in the daylight, in a compartment rife with stink and strangers. She didn’t want to tell Johnny that three years ago the grave was unquiet, the wind did blow and rain did fall. She needed comfort, and Mason was the one who had comforted her.
“What about Hannah and Blake?”
“They started about the same time.”
“Who first?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, who started going together first, you and Mason or Hannah and Blake?”
Chloe said she wasn’t sure. She said she didn’t remember. She didn’t want to talk about it! “It wasn’t as if we could just play musical brothers,” she said. “They weren’t interchangeable, Mason and Blake.”
“That is certainly true,” said Johnny.
“Go easy on Blake,” Chloe said with a small sigh. “He’s not usually the way he’s been.”
“Which is how? Ornery? Tendentious?”
“Yes. Not usually like that. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
“Don’t you?”
“No.” She shrugged. “It’s weird.”
“Anyway. You were saying. Mason and Hannah?”
“I wasn’t, but okay. Mason was too young for Hannah. I don’t mean age-wise, I mean … maturity-wise. He was—is—really into sports, and she isn’t at all.”
“And you?” Johnny appraised her Ural gem shirt, her thin white arms, her flushed face. His scrutiny forced her to turn to the window. The fields, the trees, the rivers, raced away beyond. Lithuania wasn’t as heavily forested as Maine, and it didn’t have mountains like New Hampshire. Flat fields stretched across green plains. Clouds floated in the blue skies. White flowers blanketed the grasses like cotton.
Suddenly Johnny widened his eyes and laughed. Everything was clear, he said. “I forgot, your dad is chief of police, isn’t he?”
“So?”
“Well, that would explain why Mason is so respectful around you.” Johnny shook his head. “My sisters weren’t allowed to date until they were almost out of college.”
“Why, is your dad the chief of police?” Chloe snapped. “And Mason is not respectful. Why would you say that?”
“It offends you that I said your boyfriend is respectful? For the love of God, why?” Johnny smiled. “Chivalry truly is dead.”
Chloe didn’t know why that offended her. Maybe because it made Mason seem courteously distant, and the fact that Johnny, who’d known them for all of two days, could see it bugged her.
She sprang to Mason’s defense. “He’s a very good boyfriend,” she said. “He behaves like a gentleman. He’s in an unfamiliar house. Otto scares him. He was trying to be extra polite so he wouldn’t accidentally insult our hosts.”
“You’re saying back home Mason is not polite?” Johnny was smiling like he was teasing. And she kind of heh-heh smiled back, but remained tight-lipped. At home Mason was also polite. Also respectful. Chloe remembered what she had written in Mason’s yearbook. It had taken her a long time to find the right words. High school sucks but you made it so much better. You’re literally my best friend, and the best boyfriend. I love you so much, because you’re the best, funniest, cutest boy ever. I hope we can stay together for a long time. Thanks for making my life not suck. I love you, babe.
Why did she write she hoped they could stay together? She was going to San Diego. She knew what happened to long-distance sweethearts. And yet she couldn’t imagine her life untethered from the people she had grown up with. That was the truth. What she wrote in Mason’s yearbook, that was the last tether.
Here on the train, she tried to remember what Mason had written in her yearbook so she could submit to Johnny this further proof of Mason’s devotion, but could not.
She did, however, remember what Blake wrote. A lawyer or a florist, that or something else, anything, everything, the gold drum is beating and the cannon is firing for you. I can’t wait to see what you do next.
Because there was no pressure with recalling Blake’s words. God, it was so obvious! Johnny was confounding her and she couldn’t think. Frowning, she avoided his eyes. They were dark, impenetrable, today the iris and the pupil nearly the same color. It was hard to see inside him. Yet he was able to see inside things that weren’t him. Here was Chloe failing to figure him out, and here was Johnny figuring out things that were not meant to be figured out in the slightest. Chloe didn’t want to explain Mason. She didn’t want to explain Hannah. She didn’t want to tell Johnny about Hannah’s Silver Pines restlessness, or why Blake and Hannah started going together and were now pretending to be happy. She didn’t want to tell Johnny about college, or that this twenty-one-day trip was like the last thing you did before you loaded the rest of your bags onto the moving truck waiting downstairs. Is this what Johnny was intuiting from their waning teenage intimacy?
“You know what it is,” he said. “You four seem more like brothers and sisters than boyfriends and girlfriends.”
Oh, that pricked her. Why did so many things he say feel like sandpaper on her skin, making her constantly want to explain, defend? Shut up and sing, she wanted to say. She couldn’t figure out why the conversation wasn’t easier. He wasn’t meaning to offend, was he?
“No, that’s not true,” she said. “Why do you say that? We’re comfortable together, sure. That’s because we’ve known each other for so long.”
“You don’t seem that comfortable together,” Johnny said. “Familiar, yes. But not comfortable.”
She said nothing.
“I could be wrong,” he said.
“You’re completely wrong.” She dropped the subject. But here was the thing. He didn’t drop the subject. As the train sped on toward Kaunas, he kept inquiring about her quiet life, as though she were Phileas Fogg and not Chloe.
“What did your mom do before she met your dad?”
“She was a dancer.”
“Really?”
“Is that surprising? She studied hard. Imagine, in Pembina, North Dakota, a fifth-generation Chinese-American woman dances because she thinks it’s her ticket out.”
“Was she good?”
“She was good.”
“But then she met your dad.”
“Yes, and stopped dancing.”
“She does a lot of other things now, it sounds like.”
“Not dancing.”
His eyes mined her face. “Does this upset you? She can’t be a mother and a dancer.”
Why couldn’t she be both, Chloe wanted to say.
Johnny was fascinated by Lang and Jimmy and the green cabin in the pine needles in the clearing. She couldn’t understand it. Why couldn’t Johnny see how small her life was?
“Excuse me for a moment,” she said, standing up. She bolted from the compartment. Making her way down the narrow single-file corridor, she slid open the heavy door and stood between the train cars, wind blasting her face and tangling her hair. Johnny sat too close to her, all over her personal space, and stared at her too intently. The conversation panicked her, made her skin clammy, her throat dry. There was no water, and no AC, and no respite, and there was no way to change the subject. He was too single-minded; he would not be diverted. She had to find her inner voice, tell him to stop asking her things. She briefly and insincerely wished she hadn’t run to the station with him, but stayed with her safe friends instead. They never asked her things. She marched forward but felt battered and knocked down. She could not get away.
What was she going to do for the next nine hours, changing trains, eating, drinking, talking, sitting, all with him? And what if she needed to go to sleep? Was she going to fall asleep with her head on his shoulder? Was he going to watch over her as she slept?
It wasn’t fair to Johnny that Chloe was so inept at dealing with boys other than M
ason, other than Blake. It wasn’t his fault she lived on a sheltered lake, protected from all sides by parents and flowers and pines and old friends, friends like family. Why in the world did he listen to her stories about it like it was better than Barcelona?
She carried so many illusions about the city of dreams she hadn’t yet seen with her own eyes. What if it didn’t exist, this mythical place of sacrificed virgins and roses? She had decided to give Johnny a day of her life, but what else would he take from her besides?
Unfamiliar thirst darkened her veins, a pitted hunger her abdomen.
The train hadn’t stopped, but there were two new people in their compartment when she returned to her seat. It was full up. Eight for eight. There was a British man and a French woman who spoke briefly to one another and then opened their books.
Johnny was in her seat next to the window, his U.S. Army Survival Handbook opened. “Law of adverse possession,” he said when she demanded her seat back. “You move, you lose.” He waved his book around. “Do you realize that with the help of this manual, we could get lost, jump off the train, make our way through the woods with almost nothing, and be okay, find our way?”
She pulled him by his slender but steely forearm. He didn’t budge.
“Have you found your way?” she asked. “Come on, shift.”
“No, but I have no fear with the manual of life in front of me.”
Finally done teasing her, he moved. Relieved, she assumed her rightful place next to the window. The glass was a place to hide. “Uh, why would we jump off the train?”
“Just saying.”
“What about if we remain on the train? Does your dumb book tell us how to procure food on fast-moving public transportation?”
“Yes, indeed.” He pretended to turn to page 230. “It says right here, wait an hour, get off at Kaunas, buy some extra sandwiches at the coffee shop at the station to tide yourselves over until Sestokai.” He grinned at her, and she returned it with a youthful smile of her own. There was something about Johnny Rainbow that pierced her heart with both sorrow and gladness, cut apart the place which all of herself came from. She didn’t know what it was. His friendly smile, his elfin face, his pulled-back hair, his dark stubble, his face young and yet grown up, full of youth, yet having seen too much, his calm eyes full of some preternatural somber knowledge, all of it swaying her, frightening her.
It’s just the motion of the train, she convinced herself, as his shoulder bumped her shoulder.
People were listening, no matter how quietly they talked. The gentleman who’d been trying to get some rest since Vilnius said to Johnny, “Do you mind?” after Johnny laughed especially loud at something Chloe had said.
“Do I mind what?”
“Keeping it down. I am trying to sleep.”
“I’m not telling you not to sleep,” Johnny said.
“I can’t sleep with you so loud.”
“So move to another car.”
“You move to another car.”
Johnny opened his hands. “Dude. Tell it to the conductor. Complain to him about my laughing.”
The man cursed under his breath.
“You should feel grateful,” Johnny said. “In the car next to us, they’ve been drinking for hours and singing songs completely out of pitch and out of time. You want to sit in that car instead?”
“I made a polite request.”
“You’ve been hissing since Vilnius. This car doesn’t say no talking. It doesn’t say no laughing. And this car is definitely not a sleeping car. I know that for a fact. Because the sleeping cars are down the corridor and cost more money. You should’ve gotten a berth there.”
The guy shut up, but after that, it was hard to be cute, to giggle, to talk nonsense.
Johnny asked her to take out her journal and pen. In it he wrote, The man needs to get laid. She barely stifled a laugh. Let’s play a game, he wrote. He drew a tic-tac-toe board. She beat him seven times. Okay, what else? He drew a hangman. They played for five minutes. Got bored.
How do you know how to speak Russian, she wrote.
Oh, we’re playing the Socratic game, he wrote. Okay. My dad studied it in school. Taught me.
Where did he go to school?
Somewhere exclusive and elite on the Hudson River. You got two questions, now I get two. Who do you want to be when you grow up?
A lawyer, she wrote. Or maybe a florist. Because I love the law. But flowers are so pretty.
He laughed out loud, and four people woke up, including the grumpy unlaid gentleman.
Don’t do that, he wrote. Don’t make me laugh. You’ll get us thrown off the train for mirth.
How bad would that be, thought Chloe.
He smiled at her, and that brought her happiness. When they passed the pen back and forth, his long flexible fingers scraped against hers. His pads were rough and calloused from playing guitar. She wanted to touch the bony knuckles on his hands. She wanted to place her little white hand over his. What do you want to be when you grow up, she wrote.
And he wrote back, Alive.
The Red River flooded, he wrote. Pembina got wrecked. Your dad was sent up to help people out of homes that were like boats.
Yes, she wrote.
So he rescued your mother? Why was Johnny smiling?
Yes, so?
That is so great.
It is? Why?
Was it love at first sight?
Eww. I don’t know. Weirdo. This was her parents they were writing about! Talk about awkward. As if her parents could ever be young, or in love.
While she wrote down things, he studied her in a way that was almost prehensile, almost as if he were grasping her with his hands, outlining her cheeks and nose and lips with his fingers.
How did your mom and dad meet? she wrote.
She was a music teacher at my aunt’s school. My aunt introduced them.
Like set them up on a date?
Exactly like that.
Did your dad like your mom’s singing? she wrote. Kind of like I feel about your singing. Like I’m dropped abandoned into all the colors of the crayon box.
I think he liked her face, wrote Johnny.
Is your mother pretty? Chloe was certain she must be.
She was a beauty queen.
A beauty queen for real?
A real bona fide, no kidding beauty queen. She won Miss New Mexico. She was third runner-up Miss America.
What??
Oh yeah.
Why didn’t he look more proud when he wrote that?
A beauty and a singer.
Yes. You’d think she had everything. Johnny stopped looking at Chloe.
Didn’t she? Chloe wrote. Didn’t she have everything?
You’d think so.
Your dad must have been smitten.
You’d think so. She watched him blink. He wasn’t smiling when he wrote down his answer. My dad wasn’t young when he met her. He was older. She was twenty-three. He knew other women before my mom. She was always jealous. She thought he loved them more. She’d ask, do you love me? Would you give your right arm for me? And he’d say, I’m thinking, I’m thinking. She never thought that was funny. She’d ask, would you run out onto the breaking ice for me? And he’d reply, the question is, dear Ingrid, would you run out onto the ice for me?
Chloe didn’t know what to ask next. That made her sad and she couldn’t say why. Maybe because he looked sad.
Tell me your favorite song, he wrote.
Dunno, she wrote. “She Will Be Loved” by Maroon 5?
Why is there a question mark? Don’t you know?
She almost giggled, suddenly bashful. She was unsure of her own opinion, watching his hands as he held the pen, writing things in her journal, words she would keep, like a recording of their trip, etched on lined paper, for her posterity, for her forever.
The train chugged along, windows grimy, fields outside, rivers, flatlands, marshes, pine forest, sometimes all at once. She wished they could have wa
lked around Vilnius. Why did she suddenly want that? To stop writing, to start talking. To walk together, maybe down the street, to a park while he told her things. This headline approach wasn’t working for her. She wanted all her nerves exposed by his reckless voice.
Who sings it to you?
No one, she wrote, frowning. I just like it. Little Jimmy gone less than a month, her mother had forced her to go to an end-of-year karaoke barbecue on the Academy common. The kids dragged out the karaoke machine, and all took turns pretending to sing the pop songs of the year. No one sang “She Will Be Loved” to Chloe. Accessible to all, it was just sung into the balmy June air. There were other songs sung that night under the Maine stars. “I Will Survive,” the perennial karaoke favorite. “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” another. “Piano Man.” “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
The memory of the last one plucked Chloe out of the blue tumult of the Lithuanian moment and dropped her into the blue tumult of the Maine moment. A dozen boys were on one side, with Mason, with Blake among them, a dozen girls on the other, with Chloe, with Hannah, the karaoke machine on the ground between them, new hot coals on the fire, parents coming soon to retrieve them, and for nine minutes, at the top of their screeching voices, they harmonized with Meat Loaf about teenage frenzy and adult disillusionment. Those nine minutes to this day remained one of Chloe’s favorite memories. Who would love her forever? She needed to know right now. Those nine minutes and the couple of minutes at the hidden-away picnic bench that followed. The minutes she never let herself think about.
Why are you smiling? Johnny wrote.
She shook her head, tried to stop smiling.
Even Hannah had sung along with the girls, and she was usually above such infantile activities. It was later that night that she and Blake first got together. Maybe it was the Meat Loaf song that tipped the scales in Blake’s favor. Or was it in Hannah’s favor? Blake was certainly the most exuberant of all the boys, swearing he would love her till the end of time.
The wetlands, the marshlands, the pines drifted by.
If you could be anywhere in the world, where would you want to be? he wrote.
Here and now, she wanted to say. But couldn’t and wouldn’t.
Lone Star Page 30
