Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  In the middle of the night Chloe woke up because she was thirsty, and when she looked over to the other bed, she was almost sure Blake was lying on his back with his eyes open to the ceiling. She wanted to whisper to him, but couldn’t find the words to whisper. He was upset with her, and she couldn’t defend anything. She climbed back into bed next to Mason and lay quietly, burning with fever, with life and death, reconstructing one by one the kisses that had fallen upon her body, recalling the clearing piled with bodies, begging for troubled sleep, which was so much more preferable than troubled wake.

  28

  Warsaw

  THE NEXT MORNING THEY HAD TO DECIDE: EITHER STAY IN the room one more night or check out by eleven. Johnny was nowhere to advise.

  “Let’s check out,” Blake said. “We can’t afford it. And we’ll never see him again. We should ask at the front desk where the American consulate is.”

  “Stop. Let’s go get some coffee and wait. He said he’d be back.”

  “He said a lot of things.”

  The first words of the morning were already heated. How were they going to spend the rest of today? Mason agreed with Hannah: Chloe should call her grandmother and ask for replacement money.

  “What is that, Mase?” Chloe wanted to know. She was stroppy, unpleasant. “There’s no such thing as replacement money. There’s just money. And why would she give us more? She’s not a money tree. She already gave us two thousand dollars, and paid for our airfares and our Eurails. She’s done.”

  “So what do you propose we do?”

  “Let’s wait for him.”

  Hannah refused to eat, and didn’t want them to bring her anything back. She stayed in the room, locked in the bathroom, while the three of them went out. Warsaw was hot, sunny, beautiful, huge. Enormous Palace Square, long straight boulevards leading away from it, the River Vistula twice the width of the Daugava. No one cared how nice the city was. They got coffee and sweet buns with jam, then returned to stand by the front door of the hotel.

  What if Blake was right? What if Johnny didn’t come back? Chloe didn’t believe this was how everything would end. Johnny vanished, the trip ruined.

  To pass the merciless time, she and Blake bickered about what to do with their luggage. Chloe said there was nothing to do. They would check out, put it into hotel storage and wait. When Blake asked how long she intended to wait, she said as long as it took for him to come back.

  “While we wait, do I have to remind you that we don’t have four hundred dollars to pay Castle Inn for two nights’ lodging? Makes you regret not staying in the hostel, doesn’t it?”

  Chloe regretted nothing. But with gritted teeth, she resented much.

  Johnny appeared at the hotel half an hour after checkout. They were still in the lobby. Chloe was so happy to see him, she nearly sobbed. See, she wanted to say to Blake. You were wrong about him. He did come back. See? She didn’t dare look in Blake’s direction.

  “I have your passports,” Johnny said. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all night.

  “Do you have our money?” Hannah asked in reply. “That’s really what we’re interested in.”

  “I don’t have all your money,” he said, giving them back the passports and the boys’ wallets. There was not a dollar left in them but the Eurail cards were there, and their driver’s licenses. The girls’ Eurails were gone. Another blight. “I have enough for the room, if you haven’t already paid.”

  “What about our backpacks?” asked Blake. His journals were irreplaceable.

  “Yes, Johnny, my brother is right,” Mason said. “We really need the backpacks.” He looked keenly disappointed. Chloe couldn’t figure out what was in Mason’s backpack that was irreplaceable.

  “I’m sorry, dudes,” Johnny said. “Chris and I found Emil’s bus parked at the airport, broke in, ransacked it. There was nothing in it. He’d already cleaned it out.”

  “What about our money?” Hannah repeated.

  “Here’s four hundred dollars. I haven’t been able to get the rest yet,” Johnny said. “Hannah, don’t worry. I’ll play all day. How much did you lose, total?”

  “You make it sound as if we lost it gambling, Johnny,” Blake said. “As if it’s our fault. The only thing we gambled on was you. And we lost there, didn’t we?”

  “So you admit we were robbed?” That was Hannah, assailing him.

  Johnny tilted his head sideways in grudging acknowledgment of the plain truth. Chloe stood back, behind her friends. She needed a buffer of anger between Johnny and her sick happiness at seeing him again.

  “Did you see Emil?” Blake asked. “Did you confront him?”

  “I really need my backpack back, dude,” Mason said quietly. “Is there anything you can do about that?”

  Johnny shook his head. “Sorry, man. Really. I had to transgress some serious Polish laws to look for them, and then to get your passports back. Asshole was fast. He’d already sold them. Lucky for us, Chris knew the guy he sold them to. We had to burgle him to get you back the most important things. So you can travel again. Denise and Yvette were upset about their Nikons, too. Their husbands had to explain the priorities to them.”

  “So you got us into a situation where we were robbed, where everything we had was taken from us,” Blake said. “And now you’re chiding us for not being grateful to you for returning the bare minimum? That’s rich, man. That is fucking rich.”

  “Passports are not the bare minimum,” said Johnny. “And you didn’t have everything taken from you. You can buy new journals.”

  “Can’t replace what was in the old ones, can I?”

  “I don’t know, dude. I’m not a writer. But I promise you, I have a plan. I will sing all day on every corner in Warsaw. One way or another, Emil will seek me out. And even if he doesn’t, I’ll get you your money.”

  “I had two hundred dollars!” cried Hannah. “It took me two months to earn that. I need that money.” She put her face into her hands. “Please.”

  “I know you do, Hannah,” Johnny said. “I’ll get it. Trust me one more time, please.”

  Chloe watched him. She didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t give her away. That she didn’t care about the money? That she barely even cared about the passports? If she couldn’t go back home, maybe she could stay in the primordial present with him, in the space of Alps and juniper berries, of honey and salt mines, of loamy earth. Maybe if she didn’t have her passport, he wouldn’t leave. Because a soldier, even a future one, didn’t leave his girl behind. Wasn’t that right?

  Reluctantly she took her passport from him. With regret she held it in her hands.

  “Do yourselves a favor,” Johnny said. “Buy yourselves some cheap backpacks and never part with them.”

  “Advice we could’ve used fucking yesterday,” Blake said.

  Johnny didn’t lean into an argument. “It would probably be safer for you to cut loose and head down to Krakow.”

  “Why? What do you mean it’s not safe?”

  What do you mean head to Krakow, thought Chloe. You mean with you, right? Head to Krakow with you?

  “How can we go to Krakow?” Hannah cried. “We have no money.”

  “Patience, and you will. Don’t worry, my friends,” Johnny said, with a brief profound glance at Chloe. “I’ll sing for your supper tonight.”

  “You mean sing for your life,” Blake muttered, turning away. “And we’re not your friends.”

  They meandered around the Old Town, walked down ancient stone steps to the River Vistula, paced through Market Square, looking at paintings, antique photographs, clay sculptures of fat funny Polish men. They bought nothing except new backpacks, the cheapest they could find. Otherwise no dresses, no ties, no souvenirs, no ice cream. When they got hungry, they got two sandwiches and two Cokes and shared them. Slowly they walked to the church that held Chopin’s heart in its crypt. Not a replica, and not a metaphor, but his actual heart. He had died in Paris but asked for his heart to be brought back to
his beloved Poland. And it was. They sat for a long time in that cold, starkly beautiful gray cathedral. Afterward they schlepped to the vast flat plaza of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

  They found Johnny there, in a corner under the trees, just him and his acoustic. He was singing Polish war songs, judging by the tearful reaction of some of the veterans in full military dress, who had gathered to hear him. When he saw Chloe, he played the Artur Gold waltz he had sung for her in the Treblinka woods. Chloe wanted to give him all the money she didn’t have anymore. She needn’t have worried. The teary veterans had turned out their pockets. A few songs later he called them over. He handed them the equivalent of four hundred dollars. “Took me all afternoon to make this,” he said. But it was already five in the evening. They were still twelve hundred short. Chloe gave two hundred of it to Hannah to stop her from fretting.

  “What about the rest of it? For Barcelona?”

  “He’s doing what he can,” Chloe said. “We can turn on him after he stops working.”

  They had pizza again, because it was cheap, and then sought Johnny out in the crowded Old Town streets, which were still sunny although it was evening. They could hear him from blocks away. This time he was amped up; he held in his hands an electric guitar, and his friend Chris was on makeshift drums behind him, a floor tom and a snare.

  Two hours later, Johnny was still shredding the electric, still singing. He had found a great corner in the Market Square, and while the happy people sat and drank in the cafés that lined the cobblestones, he played them slower music to chill by, to drink by, to love by.

  Chloe, Mason, Hannah, and Blake stood like posts after they found him, leaning against a blue wall. Everything was fuzzy, real and unreal at the same time. After a break in the set, he called them over and stuffed a few bills into Chloe’s hand.

  “Here,” Johnny said. “Get yourself some food, a beverage, grab a seat, chill, take a load off.” He had given them hundreds of zloty. Two hundred more dollars. Things didn’t seem quite as hopeless. They bought three plates of sausage and potatoes, three beers, sat, ate, and listened to him sing.

  He knew everything, played everything. His repertoire included Sam Cooke and the Bee Gees, Deep Purple and Metallica, Fleetwood Mac and the Yardbirds. He sang Van Morrison, Pink Floyd, he sang “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” He sang Bowie’s and Nirvana’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” Smashing Pumpkins and Eddie Vedder, and “Jolene,” “Jolene,” “Jolene,” “Jolene.” He killed Johnny Cash covering Trent Reznor’s “Hurt” and followed it up with “The House of the Rising Sun,” so vocally astonishing that the crowd instantly demanded an encore of it, and got it.

  Dusk was falling when Hannah stood up and said, “Chloe, can you come with me to the store over there? I want to see if I can find something for my mother. No, Blake, no, Mase, you two stay. We’ll be right back. We’ll browse. I hardly want to spend a penny of my money. But I have to buy something for my mother.” When they were barely ten feet away, she said to Chloe, “I don’t really want to buy anything. I just want to talk to you. Let’s stand in front of the dress racks, like we’re shopping.” Chloe was glad. Though she didn’t really want to talk. All she wanted was to listen to Johnny sing “Eighteen Till I Die.”

  “Chloe, listen to me.”

  Chloe pretended to. “What’s going on?” She was gazing at Johnny. What in the world was like him? He didn’t rob them. Emil did. He wasn’t responsible for someone else’s actions. He wasn’t even a thief. He hadn’t stolen her heart. She had given it to him.

  “My period is over a month late,” said Hannah.

  Chloe turned and faced her friend. She paled. She became white like Hannah.

  “No.”

  “Very unfuckingfortunately, yes.”

  “Hannah …”

  The tall girl put her face into her shaking hands. She said nothing as she dry heaved. Chloe said nothing. After a few minutes Chloe embraced her, but had to let go quickly, because Hannah buckled as if about to crumple, and Blake, watching them, rose from the café table. Waving him off, Chloe straightened Hannah out.

  “Could it just be late? Maybe …”

  “No. It’s real. Face it. I didn’t want to. I don’t want to now. But I’m going to have to. And so do you.”

  “You haven’t taken a test, have you? I’m telling you, it can’t be! You told me yourself, Blake and you are very careful …” Chloe stopped speaking.

  “It’s not going to help me if you remain in denial, Chloe,” Hannah said. “Wake up, will you? Have you not noticed I’m puking every minute of every day? Have you really been that deaf and blind? God! What’s going on with you?”

  Chloe didn’t think Hannah was in any state to hear what was going on with her. She muttered a muted apology. She didn’t know what to say, what to ask. The things that swirled in her brain were incompatible with one another: shock, deep worry, raw compassion, pity, and a slight small sadness flitting around, banging its head against the ceiling like the last ladybug of autumn. Oh no, the ladybug cried as it threw itself against the sheetrock in a suicide attempt, will Blake have to marry Hannah now? And who was Chloe most sorry for in that scenario? The ladybug crashed. It hoped to die before it had to answer that question.

  “All right,” Chloe said. “It’s all right. Hannah, listen to me. We’ll work it out. It’ll be okay.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s going to be the opposite of okay.”

  “We’ll figure it out. We’ll talk to Blake when we get home, we’ll decide what to do.”

  Hannah’s gaze was deep in the cobblestones. The top of her bleached white head faced Chloe, who waited a while for Hannah to speak and then leaned forward and kissed her friend’s hair.

  “Come on, poodle,” she said. “One way or another it’ll be okay.”

  Hannah said nothing. Johnny was singing “Smoke on the Water.” Poles and tourists alike were going nuts. Blake and Mason sat at the tables, twenty feet away. It was crazy loud.

  “I haven’t told you everything,” Hannah said.

  Chloe almost thought she’d misheard. “What you just told me is not everything?”

  “It’s not Blake’s,” Hannah said.

  And then Chloe fell quiet. Really quiet. What was there to say? Through it she heard Johnny’s primal scream that no matter what happened, he would never forget smoke on the water. This is what happens when you sleep with more than one person at a time, Chloe thought. Like a bee that leaves a part of itself with every sting, you disperse the essence of your true self among human beings, you divide your good soul into smaller and smaller fragments of what you once were and hoped to be, until all you’ve got left is suffering, and all anybody who knew you and loved you has left is suffering.

  Wasn’t she a fine one to throw that stone, Chloe thought, living in her own melting glasshouse. That’s not fair! she wanted to cry. She and Mason were just two kids fumbling toward ecstasy. Everything with him had been heavy lead-up. The opening act. Not the main show. The ecstasy was with Johnny two nights ago. That was the above and beyond Lollapalooza.

  Like all human beings, when faced with someone else’s pain, Chloe couldn’t help but dive into an ocean of her own. She blinked, came to. She tried to find something to say to Hannah that sounded like either help or comfort. But the problem was that Johnny stood near his microphone, the electric guitar in his hands untouched, and, unaccompanied, cried out straight into her heart the first verse of “Go Your Own Way.” Except Chloe could swear he sang that loving her was the right thing to do. And then the heavy strum of his guitar. And then the chorus. Chloe didn’t realize it, but tears were trickling down her face.

  Don’t go your own way. Don’t do it.

  “Why are you crying?” Hannah said. “Don’t cry.”

  “I thought I drove you to Bangor to break up with him?” Chloe said. “I thought it was all over.”

  Everything is waiting for you, my love. Everything is waiting for you, just don’t leave me. Chlo
e wiped her face. Johnny was rasping, gargling shards of glass in his mouth. Instead of a chorus there was operatic gravel pulled through his open throat over and over and over.

  Don’t go your own way, beautiful girl. Stay with me.

  “It was,” Hannah said. “I thought it was. I wanted it to be. But he called and wanted to see me one more time. The last time. And then one more time after that. And then one more. I tried, Chloe, I really did. But you don’t know how persuasive men can be.”

  Sometimes not even that persuasive, thought Chloe. Gently they blow on you and you float away like anthers of a dandelion. Or they blow you away with “In the Midnight Hour.” Yes, they do, oh yes, they do.

  “Do you know what Martyn said to me?” Hannah got a mixed-up, dreamy look. “Young people like me didn’t understand themselves, he told me, and that was fortunate for him, because we could still be hypnotized by those who did.”

  Chloe blinked to focus. “Dear God, Hannah.”

  “I know. Isn’t it something?” She put her hand on her chest. “I guess that’s what I am: hypnotized.”

  Chloe rubbed her face. Not for a moment did she stop hearing Johnny looking for another place to take her when it was all over, as dusk fell, as darkness descended on the things that mattered most.

  “It could still be Blake’s, though, couldn’t it?” Chloe asked. Why was her tinged voice so small?

  Hannah shrugged neutrally. “Blake and I … no. He was such a gentleman. He either wore something, or pulled out. And we cooled it off until after the prom. I wanted it that way. It’d be more special after, I told him. We kept it at everything but. Like you and Mason. Blake said he didn’t know how you two managed it. By the time we got together again, it was July, after graduation, not even a month ago. I’m over a month late, not five minutes late. It was the end of May or early June that this thing happened. I’m telling you. It’s not Blake’s.”