Wherever Nina Lies

by Lynn Weingarten

  “Yeah,” I say. “For two years.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry, hon,” Rosie nods. “You two really look alike, you know? If I didn’t know you were looking for her and I saw this picture, I might think this was you. You don’t know where she was headed or anything?”

  I shake my head.

  “Yeah,” Rosie says. “Guess not or she wouldn’t be missing.”

  I look down at the beige Formica tabletop, at the white and green paper Sweetie’s place mat, and I feel my insides squeeze again.

  “Is there someone else we could talk to?” Sean asks. “Someone else who might have seen her?”

  “Don’t think so,” Rosie says. “Most of the other girls just started. People don’t usually last too long here.”

  I nod.

  “Can I get you kids anything?”

  “Three large iced coffees,” Sean says. “And a grilled cheese.” He closes the menu.

  “For you, hon?” I shake my head.

  “You sure?” Sean says. “You must be hungry by now.” His voice is soft and sweet, as though my hunger is his concern. He reaches out and takes my hand.

  “I’ll have a grilled cheese, too, I guess,” I say. Rosie nods and then walks away.

  Sean leaves his hand on top of mine, squeezing rhythmically like a beating heart.

  A minute later the three iced coffees arrive and a few minutes after that, our food.

  Sean’s phone starts vibrating on the table in front of us. He looks down at it. “Leave us alone!” he says. And he smiles at me. I try and smile back, but I can’t. It’s late at night and we’re so far from home. And our mission has failed. And now we are just two people sitting in a diner in the middle of Nebraska for, as it turns out, no reason at all. I just want to get back so I can pretend like none of this ever happened.

  “Attention passengers on bus two fifty-seven.” A short man in a navy blue uniform is standing up at the front of the diner. “We’ll be leaving in five minutes. Five minutes! Anyone not on the bus will get left behind so I suggest if you haven’t already settled up your checks that you do that right now.” Everyone starts moving.

  We continue eating in silence. Or rather, Sean eats and I just stare at my plate. The place is emptying out. I look up at Sean and ask what is at once the most pointless and obvious question of all: “Now what?”

  “Now we pay, and then we go find somewhere to crash for the night. And in the morning we figure out the next step.” And Sean looks so determined and so hopeful, that all I can do is nod even though I’m thinking that there is no next step. The next step is we go back home and I try and forget that I ever found Nina’s drawing in the first place. “We’re going to find her, Ellie,” Sean says. He looks me straight in the eye. “There’s going to be another clue, okay? There just will be. I know it. But if you give up now, you might not be able to see it even if it’s right in front of you.”

  I look down at my plate. I am suddenly very, very tired. I could fall asleep right here with my grilled cheese sandwich as a pillow. Sean takes the last sip of his second iced coffee and puts the cup back down. He points to the third one. “There are ideas in there. Brilliant ideas that are going to blow your mind, I just have to drink it and then I will tell you what they are.”

  I try and smile. This trip was a failure and we both know it. It’s sweet that he’s being so positive but that doesn’t change the facts. I feel like I’m about to cry.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say. I get up. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

  I can feel Sean watching me as I walk toward the back. I push against the wooden door. Every bit of the bathroom is covered in graffiti—the walls, the sinks, the floor, the ceiling, the toilets, the paper towel dispenser, the trash can, the windows. Jack loves Sarah is written on the outside of one of the stalls in thick black marker. And there’s AJ and CJ forever in pink right near my foot. There’s Lindsay and Jeanine next to a picture of two sets of lips, kissing on one side of the garbage can. And on the other side of the garbage can there’s SP would never toss TM in the trash!

  A woman comes out of one of the stalls, sniffling, her eyes red and puffy. “Don’t believe any of it,” she says. I turn around.

  “Excuse me?”

  She blows her nose loudly on a piece of toilet paper.

  “All that crap people on those busses say about that first bus driver and the first diner waitress when this place first opened and their special love and blah-blah-blah and how because of them this bathroom is all magical and shit, and how people love each other forever after they write their names together on the wall? Don’t believe any of it.” She bends down and points to a spot on the floor, which reads Desmond loves Annie. “It’s all bullshit.” She reaches into her back pocket and produces a dark-purple Sharpie. She crosses out the loves Annie and replaces it with has a skinny penis. She looks up at me. “It’s true, you know. Like a Twizzler.” Then she puts the cap back on and walks out.

  I am alone again, staring at the wall. I pee. And then while I’m washing my hands, I look at the mirror, which is entirely covered in scribbles.

  And right there in the center of the mirror above one of the sinks is a simple line drawing of a guy’s face—strong jaw, wide mouth, big eyes—and right there in Nina’s graceful curved script, Cakey ♥’s J.

  I reach out and touch the mirror. The glass is cool, but the letters feel hot under my skin, like they’re alive.

  I race back to our table where Sean is draining the last sip of coffee number three.

  “I found something.”

  And I grab Sean’s hand and drag him toward the bathroom.

  I go inside first and bend down to make sure no one is in any of the stalls. I motion for Sean to follow me in.

  “Nina did this,” I say and point to the spot on the mirror. “So I guess I know why she left.” My voice is shaking a little.

  Sean is just staring, not saying anything. My sister had an entire life I knew nothing about, apparently. An entire life and an entirely different name to go along with it. So that’s it. She left to be with some guy. Now I know.

  “People in love do crazy things sometimes, I guess,” Sean says quietly.

  I shake my head. “That’s not an excuse.”

  Just then I hear the slow screech of the bathroom door creaking open. “Shit,” Sean says. He grabs my arm and in one swift motion pulls me into one of the stalls and shuts the stall door behind us. I can smell him, the warm scent of his skin, the slight saltiness of the grease on his lips. I look up, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen someone’s face from this close. I stare at his dark lower eyelashes, at the smooth curve of his cheekbones. His body is radiating heat. I can feel his heart pumping against mine. I start to laugh for no reason at all. Sean clamps his hand over my mouth.

  We hear the click-click-click of a woman’s shoes tapping against the tile floor. The rush of water from the faucet and then the creak of the door opening. “You don’t have to hide, you know,” the voice calls on the way out. “You think you’re the first two people to come in here together?” And then the door creaks shut.

  Sean looks down at me, and I can feel myself blushing. We leave the stall, go back to the sink. My mouth is still warm where his hand was. I look at Nina’s mark on the mirror one last time, reach out the tip of my finger and trace the lines, following the path she must have followed with her pen. And I notice something that I hadn’t noticed before, there next to the mirror, drawn on as though it is driving up the side, is a tiny little bus, dark deep red, drawn by Nina, with three tiny numbers written on the front: 257.

  I hold onto Sean’s arm. I point, suddenly breathless with my own realization. Our eyes meet. And then I am grabbing Sean’s hand, or maybe he is grabbing mine, and we are running back through the dining room, which is almost completely empty now. Through the front window we can see bus 257 starting to pull away. Sean takes out his wallet, tosses a couple twenties onto our table and together we tumble out into the night
.

  Fourteen

  We run, our feet slapping against the pavement, and fling ourselves into the car. Sean peels out of the parking lot and we hold our breath until we catch up to the bus right before it pulls out onto the highway. It is only once we are safely situated behind its giant chrome bumper, that Sean turns to me and shakes his finger, saying, “Well, see? I told you so! There’d be a clue! A clue for which I have now decided to give myself full credit.”

  And I grin. “Thank you,” I say. I lean back against the seat. I’m not tired anymore. It’s not an I’ve-gone-to-sleep-and-woken-up kind of awake, it’s an all-this-adrenaline-has-shifted-me-over-to-a-slightly-different-reality kind of awake. I sit back up. “But really, thank you for everything, for all of this.”

  “Eh, don’t mention it. I have ulterior motives.”

  I feel my face getting hot. “Oh?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Because there’s nothing I can do to find my brother. So going with you on this trip makes me feel like, I don’t know, like I’m doing something.”

  Oh.

  “For siblings everywhere!” He punches the air, smiling, like he’s trying to make things light, but his smile doesn’t reach up to his eyes.

  My stomach tightens. I’m an idiot. Both for somehow thinking he was flirting with me just now, and for somehow forgetting how hard all this must be for him. Going on a hunt for someone’s sister can’t be easy when a hunt for your brother would only lead you underground.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry that…”

  “Don’t.” Sean turns toward me. He reaches out and puts his hand on my arm. “It’s nice that you want to, but you don’t need to.” My skin feels hot where he’s touching it. “We’re the same, you and me.” Something is happening in the car, the energy is changing in here. I hold my breath. We sit there like that, his hand still on my arm, his fingers moving ever so slightly. And then suddenly he takes his hand away.

  He clears his throat. “So she was full of surprises, huh?”

  I miss his hand. I want him to put his hand back. I shift in my seat. I put my own hand on my arm where his hand was.

  “Your sister I mean. She was surprising.” There’s an edge to his voice and just for a second I feel protective of Nina, which is, of course, ridiculous. Sean doesn’t know anything about Nina other than what I’ve told him. And what I’ve told him certainly doesn’t make her sound like a rock of reliability.

  Sean is staring straight ahead at the bus in front of us. The taillights are making his face glow red. I lean back against the seat and close my eyes. The images flash through my brain—the red ink on the mirror, the guy’s face, the heart, at once comforting and terrible. Comforting because she was okay, she was happy. She was in love. Terrible because she left us all for a guy and she never looked back. “Yeah,” I say. “I guess she was.”

  Maybe there was a sign and I missed it.

  A month or so before Nina disappeared, I had gone into her room to look for a pencil, or that is what I told myself I was doing to have an excuse to snoop without feeling bad about it. The few months prior, Nina hadn’t been around much and I missed her. The house felt different when she wasn’t there, like no matter how many lights I’d turn on, it was always too dark.

  I remember pushing her door open, the smell of oranges and ginger curling out to greet me. Her room looked the way it always did, jeans and tank tops tossed on the floor and the bed, a few bottles of hair dye on the desk, and drawings everywhere: on the walls, on the desk, on the f loor, on the dresser, on her bed, torn up, crumpled, folded, in varying degrees of doneness. I remember looking at a row of faces, wondering who the people in the pictures were supposed to be. Were they all from inside Nina’s head? Or was Nina’s life populated by a whole world of people who I’d never even seen before?

  There were the pencils in a can on the desk. I grabbed one and let myself look around her room one more time. There on the floor was a half crumpled piece of paper covered in tiny handwriting. I poked it with my toe, hoping to “accidentally” get it to uncurl so I could read it. I dropped my pencil and bent down to pick it up. I looked at the paper again, I love you was written on it over and over and over in blue ballpoint pen. The marks were extra dark, whoever had written the letter had pushed so hard with their pen that it had torn the paper in a few places, because that’s how much they meant it. I stared at that paper, and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be Nina, to be so loved by everyone, that one individual person’s love could mean so little to you. That you could just toss it on the floor. I felt a stab of something then, similar to jealousy, but not jealousy exactly, mixed with a little twinge of pity for whoever had written the letter. I remember having an urge to pick that letter up, to smooth it out and take it to my room, to pretend it had been written just for me.

  For the next six hours, the view out the front window doesn’t change—six red circles, four enormous wheels, a big chrome bumper. I might think we hadn’t moved at all, except for the fact that when we started driving, it was dark, and now the sun has risen, turning the sky the cool light blue of morning. And the bus has finally stopped, on a side-street bus depot. And now here we are in Denver, Colorado.

  Denver is what a city looks like when it’s not afraid of running out of room. The buildings are far apart and the streets are wide. There’s a giant dome of open sky over us, reminding us that the city is not all there is.

  The bus door opens and a line of dazed and sleepy-looking passengers emerge. A girl just a couple years older than I am comes off the bus and claims her sagging red duffel bag from the pile of luggage on the sidewalk. Two years ago, this could have been Nina. The girl turns around, she looks like she’s looking for someone, like she’s worried they might not be here. I can’t stop staring at her. I feel like I’m watching a movie about the past and the part of Nina is being played by this girl. I catch her eye and she smiles and I feel weirdly relieved, as though if this girl is okay, it means Nina was, too. This makes no sense.

  I think I am very, very tired. I think maybe it is time to lie down now. I turn toward Sean who is leaning back against the seat, his eyes half closed, his hand resting against his stomach. An image flashes through my brain, the two of us together in a bed, my face resting against his chest.

  I force myself to look away and concentrate on what’s in front of me. What I see now is what my sister saw two years ago—this wide street, tall gray stone buildings, lush green trees. I step out of the car. What was in her head when she walked down the stairs of the bus onto this concrete sidewalk? Joy? Relief ? Excitement? Sadness? I breathe in the clear morning air and try to imagine what it would feel like to be Nina arriving in this very spot. I reach up and touch my hair, imagine it ocean blue. I stand up straight and tip my head slightly back the way Nina always did. I close my eyes. When I open them, I notice there’s a slightly crumbling community bulletin board in a grassy clearing about fifteen feet away, perfectly placed as to be directly in the line of vision of anyone getting off the bus. I walk toward it. It’s covered in colored fliers: ads for a cheap motel, for restaurants and coffee houses, for rooms for rent and people looking for roommates. And up at the very top of the bulletin board are a few permanent ads behind glass. Rocky Mountain Tours—See Denver With the People Who Know It Best. Keep Denver Beautiful—Get a Tattoo at Bijoux Ink. 2740 Colfax Avenue. Bijoux. I stop, reach my hand out, and touch the thick glass.

  Bijoux. As in “Bijoux wheere aaaaare yooou?” And I know it seems crazy, but I suddenly have this flash and I feel like I can picture perfectly how it must have gone: Nina standing here, new to this city, fresh off a fifteen-hour bus ride, and she reached out and she touched this sign, just like I’m doing now, in a city of unfamiliar people and unfamiliar things, this comforted her, she saw this and she thought yes. I can feel this yes coursing through my body as if it were coming from inside me. Maybe I think this because of some special connection I still have to my sister. Maybe after all this time
the strength of our bond can cross space and time and I can understand one thought she might have had, even though I cannot understand them all.

  Or maybe I just think this because I’m tired, and slightly delusional because of how badly I want this to be true.

  I guess there’s only one way to find out.

  Fifteen

  But first, we need sleep.

  Sean and I drive to the closest motel, a run-down place that rents rooms by the hour. And now the woman behind the counter stands in front of us, the room key dangling from her skinny index finger. “And you’re sure you kids are over eighteen, right?” She raises one heavily penciled eyebrow and nods slowly.

  “Of course,” Sean says, nodding back.

  “Okay, good.” She hands him a key on a white plastic Travel Route Inn key chain. “Checkout is tomorrow morning at ten. Continental breakfast is served until nine.” She looks at Sean, then at me, then back at Sean. “If you’re up by then.” And then she smirks like she knows something about why we’re here and what we’re up to. And even though what she thinks she knows is wrong, I blush.

  We walk back outside, up a small set of concrete stairs and into the room. It smells like mold in here, and someone’s bad breath. There are two twin beds covered in sad floral comforters and in between them there’s a small chipped nightstand and above the small nightstand is a framed picture of what I think is supposed to be a pineapple made by someone who has obviously never seen one.

  “Honey, we’re home,” Sean says. He pulls back the covers on one of the beds and crawls in, still wearing all his clothes. Before I’ve even taken off my shoes, I can hear the slow rhythmic breathing of sleep. I look over at him. His lips are parted and his face is relaxed. His eyelashes brush against his cheeks. My heart squeezes. He looks different to me now, just ever so slightly different than he did yesterday. I cannot explain this and I don’t understand. All I know is I suddenly feel like I could sit here and watch him all day. But instead I change into some of the clothes I tossed in the bag with me last night and force myself to get in bed. Within minutes, I am sleeping, too.