Don't Stop Now

by Julie Halpern

“Chicago! The Windy City. I’ve heard good things.” Leo genially sips his coffee. Ruth has yet to say anything, but involves herself in the conversation by turning her head, complete with pert, neat blond bob, toward each speaker. What could Josh think of Ruth? A mom in the present. Josh has never said a word to me about his mother except to say that he won’t say a word about her. Can he really go through the rest of his life pretending that he doesn’t have to deal with anything?

  As if on cue, Catherine Ann blurts out, “Is he your boyfriend?” Mary Margaret tsks her tongue and looks at Catherine Ann, incredulous.

  “Catherine Ann.” Ruth finds her voice to scold, “Don’t pry.”

  “No big deal,” Josh answers to Ruth, then looks at Mary Margaret. “We’re—”

  “Good friends,” I interrupt. I don’t know how Josh would have completed that sentence, but I decide that I’d rather hear it coming from my mouth than his. He’s had too much say in where we stand for too long.

  I stab at a blueberry muffin with my fork, and it rolls off my plate onto the spotless floor. Catherine Ann dives under the table to grab it, then pops back up into her chair.

  “Here.” She beams and hands the floored blueberry to me across the table.

  “Thanks,” I say with just a hint of what-the-hell-do-you-want-me-to-do-with-this? in my voice. I tuck the blueberry under my plate and finish the meal in silence. No one notices, as the Model Family parental units begin their assault of never-ending stories of the Redwood Forest, the Grand Canyon, and the Hoover Dam. Josh and I finally convince them we need to be on our way, and get back on the road around ten a.m. I keep occupied by studying the map and figure we have four hours tops before we arrive somewhere in Portland. I turn my phone on, and even with the weak reception, a text message manages to buzz its way into my phone. Mom. Just checking in. I shut it off again.

  I know technically I could call Penny from the B and B or even a pay phone. All I have to do is pull the number off the cell and make life a little easier. We’re getting so close, though, that I don’t feel the need to rush. And really, right now, Penny isn’t the main perturbance in my mind. No, that one is right next to me in his junky car.

  The drive to Portland is gorgeous and green, mountainous and lush. The air in the car smells like forest, and the sky is patched with clouds like the opening credits of The Simpsons. I attempt to yell to Josh over the rumbling car sound to check out the clouds, but after three “What’s?” I wave my hand to indicate, “Forget it.” Something’s not sitting right with me, and I don’t think it’s the twelve muffins I pounded to avoid asking inappropriate questions about middle names to the Leo family. If what happened last night with Josh was what I always wanted to happen with Josh, why does it feel like nothing even happened? Is it because we’re not in reality—driving through limbo, destination: our uncertain futures? Is it only real if it happened before we graduated from high school? When “Cutest Couple” meant something? Once that yearbook’s printed, who else in the world really gives a crap? Does Josh ever really give a crap?

  And I can’t get my mind off Leo. Not in that way, but there was something off about those girls for sure. How the mom didn’t talk that much. The double names, like, I give you two names, so that you see how much control I have over who you are. Or not? My mom claims my dad wanted me to be named Ryan, boy or girl, after some tool on the Chicago Cubs from seven hundred years ago. The way I ended up with Lillian? My dad wasn’t actually at the hospital when it was time to name me. No, he was at a Cubs game. Which is fine. Life was harder with him around than without him. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get to me a little when I see a dad who seems to care. Would it have been nice to have my dad at my high school graduation? Probably. Would it have been nice to at least get a card in the mail? Yes, it would. But I didn’t. And here Josh sits, bunged that all his dad gave him for graduation was an ultimatum to get a real job or go to college. Oh, and that new drum kit. I can’t help it. “Hey!” I yell so loudly that I sound more angry than just trying to make Josh hear me. And maybe I am.

  “What?” he yells back, an answering note of anger in his voice. Or maybe that’s just him trying to be loud, too.

  “I’m going to turn on my phone,” I say, toning down the yell when I decide to just roll up my window. The abrupt quiet on my right side makes my ear pop.

  “Think you’ll get any reception?” he asks, rolling up his own window so we can speak in civilized tones. What a novel idea.

  “Maybe. I at least need to text my mom back. She says hello.” Josh nods. “You want to call your dad?”

  Though the windows are up, Josh answers with a head shake.

  “Text him?”

  Another head shake.

  Even with his stubble and deliciously defined chest (the shirt came off about an hour into the drive), he looks like an obnoxious, spoiled kid shaking his head like that.

  “Sorry I asked.” I turn my head toward my window, already lowering it to let the welcome din back in.

  We drive out of the more scenic views and into city views, announcing our arrival in Portland. If and when we find Penny, is that it? Quest over? And will connecting with Penny bring me back to high school, make what happened with Josh and me more real? Or will it finally get me past, over, and out into real life? Oddly, my answer comes in the form of a road sign. milwaukie, it reads. Spelled wrong. Like home, like where we started, but not quite.

  “Almost like we never left, huh?” Josh yells to me.

  “I’d say we’ve actually gone pretty far,” I muse, not so mad as before. Signs are signs sometimes.

  “I wonder if it’s like a Twilight Zone parallel-universe Milwaukee. Something not quite right about it. You can tell by the i.”

  “Definitely something not quite right about the i,” I say, and can’t help but smile a little. I bet Josh has no idea that I’m even thinking about last night. He’s probably writing songs about blueberry muffins or something in his head. His beautiful, shirtless head. I decide to regain focus on why we’re here. Or, at least, why we’re supposed to be here.

  We follow signs toward the city center, and I know it’s time for the fateful cell-phone-power-on moment. Josh pulls into a parallel parking spot so I can hear—if there is anything to hear. I hold the power button down, and the phone lights up. The battery image flashes, indicating it’s now or never to make the call. I flip through the call folder, received calls. I want to have more of a plan of what I’ll say, but I’m already wasting time by having to sift through the folders to get to the numbers. I find the unfamiliar digits and will my thumb to hit Call. The phone on the other end rings. And rings. And rings again. I look over at Josh with a panicked head shake, and the rings turn into voicemail.

  “Hi, this is Ethan. Leave me a message,” Ethan’s pleasant voice tells me. Do I leave another message? I’m not quick enough with the decisions today, but the message beeps anyway, forcing me to either hang up or speak. I manage to speak. “Hey, Ethan, this is Lillian Erlich again?” I’m speaking in question form, and I hate the wimpy sound of it. I shift gears and state, “She needs to call me. I’m in Portland, and I have to talk to her. My cell number is…” I leave the number, say thanks, and hang up. At that moment, my phone beeps the message, “Battery low,” and the screen goes blank. You’ve got to be shitting me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “What’s going on? You left a message?” Josh looks confused by the defeat on my face.

  “The phone’s dead,” I say with a pout.

  “We can go try and find a car charger. There’s got to be a phone store around here somewhere.” He scans the street vigorously, making a huge effort to prove he’s making a huge effort. It’s nice and all, but I can’t help but feel like the phone death was a sign.

  “What does it matter? She’ll probably call back when the phone is dead and not leave a message.”

  “She’s not that stupid. She’ll leave a message and you’ll call her back. Ain’t no thang.”

/>   “I’ll call her back, and then I’ll have to leave a message, and then she’ll call me back, and so on and so on and so on. It’ll be a never-ending cycle of phone messages until we have to rent an apartment and find jobs in Portland because we can’t get in touch with her and we can’t go home because the FBI will be camped out on my doorstep and Penny’s mom will sell commemorative Penny plates on QVC and…” I’m delirious. The quest crushed. Stuck in limbo.

  “Lillian.” Josh leans toward me and puts one hand on each of my shoulders. He butts his forehead up against mine and says calmly, “It will be okay. The worse thing that can happen is we don’t find her, you call home, and turn her in. You’ll look like a hero, and life moves on.”

  “What’s the best thing that could happen?” I ask, entranced by his closeness.

  “We find her and make her turn herself in, thus ending our journey and ridding ourselves of the plague of Penny for good.”

  I guess that’s the best, although it seems weird to have a “best” of anything include the word plague. And if he thinks she’s such a plague, does that mean he thinks this road trip was a bad thing? Am I overthinking Josh’s underthinking brain?

  “I need coffee,” I huff.

  “That’s my girl,” he says, and kisses my forehead.

  “You missed,” I deadpan.

  “Yeah, well, my aim’s not so good today.” He winks. I’d like to poke a stick in that winking eye.

  We drive around for a few minutes until we spot a sign reading, VOODOO DOUGHNUT. “Doughnuts and voodoo?” Josh enthuses, “I’m sold!” It does sound good. And weird. As argumentative as I’m feeling, who can argue with that?

  We enter through a red door, into a tiny grimy counter store with pinkish mood lighting and stacks of doughnut boxes everywhere. The crowd inside is hipster extreme and reeks of smoke and last night’s pub crawl. The too-cool-to-be-nice character behind the counter exudes the right amount of service and snub. I feel stupid ordering some Voodoo Doughnuts (shaped like voodoo dolls, of course) and coffee to go. There are other quirky-cool options, like the Triple Chocolate Penetration and Butter Fingering, but I can only assume the cool counter character (say it fast three times) has snarky comments for pervy items on the menu (Or maybe not. Maybe he’s too cool for snark. Either way, I’m not pushing it before my morning coffee).

  We leave Voodoo Doughnut with our bag of dolls and coffee cups and decide to walk around and check out the city instead of enduring the hipsterosity. The day is nice, the air not too hot, sun shining but not too roasty. It feels like we’re in another place, which, of course, we are. But sometimes when you fly places, it just feels like you never left home. Driving here exposes the differences: street signs shaped differently from ours, unique WALK and DON’T WALK buttons, and even foreign garbage cans. I can almost see why someone would choose to run away. Or at least get away. To experience the slight differences of everyday life. And the huge ones, too.

  We wander the streets, not paying strict attention to how far or which direction. My dead phone weighs heavily in my pocket, so I pull it out and hand it to Josh. “Can you carry this? I don’t need the reminder.” I’d rather pretend for a few seconds that I’m just visiting. Just living life in a different place.

  “Sure thing,” Josh says and tucks the phone into the pocket of his shorts.

  We get to an area near water, and I don’t know enough about Portland to know if it’s a river, a lake, or an ocean. I mean, I know Portland is near the ocean, but this could be anything. A tributary? I search my brain for watery words learned in elementary school. People are set up to sell their artsy-craftsy wares, while others, with clearly nothing better to do, sit on boxes, a hat out for spare change. One guy, a particularly grungy, bearded fella, attempts a tap dance to coax some money out of us as we walk by. Josh pulls out a dollar bill from his pocket and tosses it into the worn baseball cap the man presents as a finale to his performance. “At least he entertained us,” Josh concedes.

  A bridge connects our side of Portland to the other side, and we decide we might as well cross it. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Josh chuckles. “And we’ve come to it.”

  “Yeah.” I roll my eyes. The bridge itself isn’t particularly lovely, mostly for cars, but the view is interesting and exposes numerous bridges connecting Portland on either side of us. I’d maybe take a picture if my phone worked. Dang. Thought I almost forgot.

  The traffic on the bridge makes it too noisy to talk, and when we get to the other side, we hear a familiar sound.

  “Skaters?” I ask.

  “Sounds like it,” Josh concurs, and we discover a skate park located near the base of the bridge. A group of young guys, and even a few girls, ride ramps and bowls most impressively. “I always wanted to be good at skating,” Josh laments, stroking the road-trip stubble on his chin.

  “I didn’t even know you skated,” I say.

  “I never have, actually. I just wanted to be good at it.” He gives me a wry smile.

  “Oh. Well, then, I always wanted to be good at synchronized swimming.”

  “And are you?” Josh asks.

  “Don’t know. I’ve only done it by myself.” I smirk.

  We’re smiling at each other, kind of dumbly, when I catch something written on an alley wall near the bridge. It strikes something familiar in me, so I walk toward it. When I get closer, I can’t help but exhale, “No. Way.” Then I call back to Josh, who hasn’t moved, and yell, “No way!” I wave to him to follow me, and we walk into the alley. I stare at the brick wall in disbelief, where an exact replica of my spray-painted Badlands rock mantra stares me in the face: DON’T STOP NOW. “This is what it said on the rock! The rock where we kissed in the Badlands! It’s the exact same thing!” I’m yelling like a loon, completely blown away by this discovery.

  Josh is predictably underwhelmed. “Maybe the guy who painted it likes to travel,” he suggests.

  “Maybe,” I say, annoyed at his nonchalance. “And maybe it’s a sign.”

  “That we should kiss again?” Josh waggles his eyebrows at me, but I’m not so sure. I study Josh’s face. I remember how he felt, so close to me as I slept in his arms. The way his lips pressed against my shoulders, my neck, my lips. My eyes feel heavy, and I’m taken in as he leans into me with a soft kiss. His lips taste like doughnut and coffee. I kiss him for a moment, a minute, and then I hold him away from me, my hand on his chest.

  “No,” I tell him. About the kiss. About the sign. “‘Don’t stop now’ means we have to keep going. To find Penny. To complete the quest.” I need Josh to understand that there are other things in my world besides him. As much as my heart wants to stay on this bridge, this close to Josh, indefinitely.

  He shrugs off my dismissal and agrees in mellow Josh fashion, “Why not?”

  We watch a few guys circle one another on the wavy skate landscape. While I’m scanning the skaters to find a friendly face, an insanely good-looking bleached-blond guy with icy blue eyes rolls past us in what feels like slow motion. We make eye contact, and my face gets involuntarily hot. I think about asking him, or any of them, if they know Ethan or have seen Penny, but that seems so random. So Josh and I keep moving.

  “I like the idea of keeping to the water,” I say.

  “‘Keeping to the water?’ With your mare named Lucy?” Josh chides.

  “What? What does that even mean?”

  “What does ‘keeping to the water’ mean?”

  “It means that we walk along the water. Like when you’re in Chicago, and you know what direction you’re headed if you know where Lake Michigan is.”

  “But I never got that. Because, like, if I don’t know where I am, how the hell am I going to know where the lake is? Unless I’m standing right in it.”

  “Good point. But if we don’t remember where the water is, then we don’t find the Eurosport when we walk back. So let’s just go either this way”—I point to what I think is north—“or this way,” which I t
hink is south.

  “Flip a coin?” Josh asks, and I nod. He pulls a quarter from his pocket and flicks it perfectly with his thumb. The coin spins in the air and lands on the concrete, rolling into a sewer grate. “You didn’t call it,” Josh presses.

  “Would you have been able to read it if I did?”

  “True enough. Take two.” Josh pulls a penny out of his pocket. “I’m going penny this time. Just in case, you know, it falls into the abyss again.” Flick. Fall. Roll. Grate. “Dude, you still didn’t call it.”

  “Dude, it fell through a hole again. This doesn’t really bode well for the future of this journey, does it?”

  “Will you stop looking for things to mean other things? Sometimes coins just fall down holes. That doesn’t mean the world is going to end or you’re going to grow a beard or anything.”

  “What?”

  “I just mean that you make such a big deal out of everything. Life doesn’t have to be so complicated.” He looks at me as if what he’s saying is the god’s honest truth. That I should just accept it. But I’m tired of accepting things from Josh.

  “Life doesn’t have to be so complicated?” I ask him, trying to hold it together so I can make a point instead of start crying out of frustration. “Tell that to Penny, who had to fake her own kidnapping to get away from something, or someone, that made her paranoid enough to do such a crazy-ass thing. Tell that to my mom, who had to raise me while trying to deal with the fact that her husband was a selfish bastard who made our lives hell until he decided to just leave. Tell that to your dad, whose idea of love is giving you his credit card and access to his liquor cabinet.” Josh is about to say something, to defend himself maybe, to tell me off, but I keep going. “Tell that to me, who has to deal with all of these people, plus one who has made my life nothing but complicated since the moment I laid eyes on his perfect face.”

  I run out of steam but manage to hold my eyes on Josh’s face. He doesn’t look so comfy, as relaxed as he usually does. His lips are pursed, the corners of his mouth tipped downward. He pulls his dick shades out of his back pocket and puts them on, so now what I see is my fake red hair and distorted face reflected back at me.