A Ticket to Ride

by Paula McLain

  “What the hell is wrong with you? It’s been a week since Claudia Fletcher disappeared, and I don’t see you feeling at all responsible for her. I mean, I sat and listened to you say the words to her parents, but I don’t think you have a clue about how serious this all is.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “I feel really bad about Claudia.”

  “I don’t want you to feel bad. It’s not enough to feel bad. What happens next time you get drunk and get into someone’s car? Or the time after that? That poor girl”—he paused to collect himself—“is probably dead right now, and it could just as easily have been you.” His voice cracked, shook. “Do you get that?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, hugging one of the couch’s pillows into my body, trying to make myself as small as possible. Raymond was scaring me a little. He was livid, disgusted. If he had ever trusted me, he didn’t anymore. I wasn’t sure that he even liked me. He looked at me once hard, as if I made him want to spit, and then he walked away down the hall.

  “Raymond? Uncle Ray?”

  He kept walking, slowly and deliberately, and I snapped. Without thinking about what I was doing, I ran after him, barreling into his hard back with my whole body, all of my sadness and confusion, my wish to break into pieces right there so he’d have to put me back together again. I beat at his shoulders with my fists, the flats of my hands. I screamed, “I hate you,” over and over until he finally turned and firmly grabbed my wrists.

  “Settle down, now.”

  But I couldn’t. Currents of grief ran through my body, quickening my muscles. I pulled and jerked back, tried to hit him again. “I hate you, I fucking hate you.” I said it over and over. I was shouting, I was crying, and somewhere in there the words twisted and reversed to become, You hate me. You hate me.

  “Shhh.” He pinned my body against his with vise-grip arms, caging me. “I don’t hate you, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You do too. You blame me for everything.” My face was buried in his chest, my voice nearly incomprehensible.

  “C’mon, now. Come sit down. I guess we’d better have this out.” He led me back to the couch where I ducked my head, refusing to look at him, to let him see my need and my shame.

  “I’m angry with you, I am. You’ve made a lot of stupid choices, and it seems you won’t be happy ’til you’re lying by the side of the road somewhere or hacked up in someone’s trunk. Do you think you’re invincible?”

  “No. I don’t know,” I said. I unburied my head and put the pillow in my lap, where I tugged at the green fabric, the rough tassels. “Do you really think Claudia’s dead?”

  “There’s a better chance of that right now than anything else. I hate to say it, but there are things worse than dead, and if you want to know what I’m talking about, you keep heading down the road you’re on. The world can be an ugly place, Jamie. Part of me wants you to learn the hard way, to really get your knocks this time, or how else are you going to get past this? Part of me wants to send you packing on the next plane. I’m just too old and too tired to do this anymore.”

  “Are you thinking about Fawn? I guess we’ve been a lot to deal with.”

  “Yeah, Fawn too. But mostly I’ve been thinking about your mother.” He looked at me sadly and wagged his head. “You remind me a lot of her, though I didn’t think so at first.”

  “Really?” The question was accompanied by a steady measure of trepidation. As always, it felt safer to keep Suzette firmly and blankly behind me.

  “Maybe we should have had this talk a long time ago. Berna and Nelson thought it would only make things harder for you to get on with your life, but I haven’t been so sure. Especially lately.” He paused and looked off into some middle distance. When he began to speak again, he was talking to himself more than to me. “She was never very happy. I don’t know why, it was just part of her makeup. I have a theory that maybe she didn’t think she deserved to be happy. That she didn’t think she deserved to be alive even.”

  And that’s when everything clicked into place. My mother wasn’t a grown-up runaway. She wasn’t off living a glamorous life in Barcelona or Montreal or Cape Cod and trying to forget she’d ever had a daughter. Still, I had to say it out loud: “She’s dead.”

  He nodded.

  “When?” It was all I could manage to ask.

  “A long time ago. You were seven, I guess. Do you want to know how?”

  I shook my head lightly, but Raymond must not have seen, because he told me anyway.

  NOWHERE TO RUN

  Once Raymond was free of the peninsula, it was a piercingly bright July day, the sun like hard candy. It felt good to drive, to be attentive only to the dipping road and its demands. When he stopped for gas in Sausalito, the attendant filled his tank as Raymond watched a couple in the car next to his fight silently behind glass. The man’s mouth was drawn taut and the woman’s face looked like it was made out of rubber. She was talking a mile a minute, like a Charlie McCarthy puppet, her lips wagging emptily. In the backseat, a toddler waved a crumpled paper bag absently in front of its face. And Raymond knew he really would leave then, no matter what it took. He would drive Suzette back to Oxnard, to the boat made of ice cream and the doctor who wrote prescriptions and asked no questions, or leave her to work her own way in or out of whatever was happening between her and Leon. The fight in the tent she had likely already forgotten—and matter-of-factly, the way children forget, as if her life was a mirror fogged over with her own breath and wiped clean with the edge of her sleeve. She would be well into the new story of herself now, the new dream of this baby, her second chance. Apparently, her second chances lined up endlessly, senseless ducks at a dime game on the midway.

  As soon as he had made his mind up, it was easy just to keep driving, to skirt the Golden Gate altogether and head north and east instead. He turned himself over to the highway and just drove without thinking, his hands loose on the wheel. When he came to the sign for Interstate 80 in the late afternoon, he didn’t plan to take it, but his car seemed to want to head that way, farther and farther east. And the more he simply let the car take over, the more he felt the pressure in his chest release him and float out the open window. He didn’t have to go home that night or the next night either. He didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to.

  Stopping only for gas and hamburgers, Raymond found himself in Utah by midnight, Nebraska by midday the next day. He’d never been to Nebraska before, and found it unbelievably soothing. There was nothing whatsoever to see—just cornfields and wheat fields and the horizon line. The sky was immense, and under it he was wonderfully insignificant. He slept for twelve hours in a motel near North Platte and then began driving again, letting the flatness pull him on. He didn’t know how far he planned to go, and liked not knowing. It wasn’t until he got to Illinois near the end of his second day on the road, and heard his engine knocking like a time bomb, that he considered something might stand in the way between him and the Atlantic. That’s when he saw the red oil light had come on and stayed on, the smoke rising from his hood in black-streaked plumes. He had no choice but to pull over and get out. He was just outside the Quad Cities, a middling town called Moline. When a trucker came along to rescue him, it was dusk, so he asked to be taken into town and dropped off at a motel. He would figure out what to do with the car in the morning.

  Later, when he would think about this drive—the farthest he had come or ever would come from California—Raymond would have the hardest time getting his head around the fact that it was the car, the stupid car and stupid blind luck and boredom that made him think to call home that night. Only one channel came in on the motel’s black-and-white television set, and that was fuzzy. He took a bath, took a walk, had dinner, and still it was barely eight o’clock. If Moline had had more to offer, he might not have begun to think of Suzette at all, but once he did, he couldn’t turn the switch off in his head. He and his sister had never had a fight of this magnitude before. It was likely he was right and that
she had forgotten all about it, the way she did everything she couldn’t stomach. But if she hadn’t, she might go careening off the deep end fast, and he would have that on his conscience. He would just make the call, check in, and once he knew she was okay, he really could afford not to think about her for a while—not to think about anything at all.

  At the Laundromat up the street from the motel, he changed a ten and found a pay phone. It was just after ten p.m. in California, so he wasn’t troubled at first that the phone rang and rang. They were probably out. He waited two hours then called again, letting the phone ring ten, twenty, fifty times until he began to feel a growing panic. He couldn’t hang up, and couldn’t help feeling, as well, that somehow the planets had realigned themselves or the force of gravity had changed enough that he could be in his sister’s place: on the blank end of an anonymous pay phone in a nowhere town. Seventy-five rings, a hundred, and he thought he might hyperventilate.

  That’s when someone picked up. “Hello?” a woman’s voice said suspiciously. It wasn’t Suzette, wasn’t anyone he recognized.

  “Who is this?”

  “Who is this?” The voice asked back, a familiar slowness and strangeness in the pacing of her words. It was Katrina Unger.

  “This is Ray Pearson, Katrina. Do you want to tell me what the hell you’re doing in my apartment?”

  “Oh. Oh! Just a minute,” she said and he could hear her heavy footsteps on the hardwood floors fade away. Two or three minutes later, Mrs. Unger came on the line, clearing her throat like an old lady on a bus. It was midnight there or later. What the hell was going on?

  The details came quickly once she began to speak. In fact, Raymond couldn’t quite keep up, the sense of one phrase escaping him as soon as he reached for the next. Leon and Suzette had been in an accident? How? Where? The highway patrol had come to the house following the address on Leon’s driver’s license. “No one knew where you were,” Mrs. Unger said. “And your mother’s been calling.”

  Raymond hung up then and, his hands shaking, called Berna. Nelson answered the line after a few moments. Suzette was unconscious in a hospital in Sacramento. “I have to tell you, it’s bad, Raymond. Your mother’s been there since Sunday and she hasn’t woken up.” He recited the name and address, and that’s when Raymond realized he still didn’t have a car. He had no choice but to hitchhike. He didn’t even go back to the motel, just headed toward the interstate with his thumb out, his stomach lurching sickeningly, his heart half-dead already in his chest.

  The next thirty-six hours passed impossibly slowly, the way nightmares do, each moment of anxiety hanging on by its fingernails before being replaced by the next. When he got to Sacramento Mercy, to the hospital where Suzette had been taken, a nurse led him to the intensive care unit on the fourth floor, and then into the room where Suzette was turned out in a bed that looked a little like a rocket ship, a little like a puppet theater. Raymond collapsed into a chair and began to shake. Her left leg was in traction to the hip, and because much of her body was covered with second-degree burns, the sheet was tented to her neck. Under a good number of bandages, her head seemed too large and bulbous. Part of her right eye and both her lips were purpled with dark stitching. A rigid tube was taped to her mouth and there were other tubes snaking out from under the sheet, running into bags or away. This was his sister.

  After several minutes, the door swung open and there stood Berna, holding a box of Kleenex. “You look terrible” was the first thing his mother said to him, and he did. He was unshaven, with sideburns that grew thickly into his cheek line, curving toward his mouth as if they meant to take over everything. He wore a rumpled T-shirt and Levi’s and dust-covered work boots and hadn’t showered. “Did you sleep in a field or something?”

  Raymond didn’t answer her, just waited for the details of what had happened—but his mother seemed to know very little. There was little to know. No witnesses saw the accident, and no one knew yet when it had occurred, only that a family in a station wagon had found the site when they pulled over to the side of the road on Highway 20 in northern California. It was the father who spotted the wreckage, the bodies, when he’d led his young son to the side of a steep embankment to pee. He was the one who’d notified the authorities.

  “That poor little boy,” Berna said. “I only hope he didn’t see too much.”

  Berna pulled a chair over to sit near Raymond, and then dug around in her large handbag until she’d located her knitting. “I went to visit the other one, the one who was driving the motorcycle.”

  “Leon Jacobs.”

  “That sounds right. Was he a boyfriend or something?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Well, he’s not in any better shape. They don’t think he’ll pull through.”

  Raymond nodded somberly, and watched Berna’s needles rise and fall with a soft snicking noise. He was surprised at how blithe she seemed, but then again she’d been at Suzette’s bedside for five days while he’d been off trying to forget he even had a sister. If the accident had happened sometime on Saturday, he’d have been somewhere in eastern California or maybe Nevada. And Leon and Suzette, what had they been doing so far north? Why hadn’t they just gone back home from Point Reyes, and what on earth had happened to Holly? Did she have to find her own way home? Did he somehow miss her that morning when he’d returned to the campsite to find the tents and equipment packed up and vanished? Or did all three of them just assume Raymond had gone home in the middle of the night? The more he tried to make sense of the story, lining up possible events in a plausible order, the more it eluded him.

  “How’re things at home?” he asked, wanting to change the subject. “How’s Jamie?”

  “She’s fine.” Berna’s mouth pursed and tightened, as if she were chewing on a small button or bit of string. “She will be fine, anyway, though your sister has put me in some position, hasn’t she?”

  And Raymond understood with perfect clarity that his mother had been expecting something of this sort from the beginning, since the moment Suzette had shown herself to be weak, malleable. Human. Berna had expected it, waited for it, and now that it had occurred she could move on to what she was really built for, tidying the mess. In that moment he wished that he’d never taken Jamie to Berna, but rather found a way to care for her on his own. At least he would have that now.

  “Are you going to be all right?” she said, reading his face.

  He shrugged and looked away. All around Suzette’s bed stood machines that made heat and breath. They hummed like generators, lights blinking, flashing series of numbers that meant something. The machines were the only things keeping her alive, and who knew for how long. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “I never worry about you,” she said, and they both knew she was lying.

  Berna had gone back to her room at the Travelodge, then, to freshen up and take a short nap, and Raymond was alone in the room. He sat watching the machines because he couldn’t watch his sister. He thought about the first time he’d held Suzette and the last time, how much distance stood between those two moments, how much sadness and cowardice. What had been the last thing Suzette had seen, her last clear thought? Had she been afraid or exhilarated? Had she gripped Leon’s waist tightly as the bike pivoted over mountain roads or lifted her hands to place her fingers like a blindfold over the visor of Leon’s helmet because Benny had told her he’d see her soon in death? Because Raymond had made her doubt, in some final way, her chance of starting over with this new baby?

  It had always been the thing Raymond liked least about Suzette, the way she was able to reinvent herself with force over and over—but now he wondered if he wasn’t wrong to think so. Wasn’t it a small miracle that someone like Suzette, or anyone at all, could be bruised and beaten down repeatedly and still find a way, a reason to pick themselves back up again? Could still find faith or make it from scratch? It was a loaded gift, Suzette’s infinitely renewable innocence, and a dangerous one
, but a gift nonetheless. Raymond didn’t have it. What did he have, in fact?

  In the hospital bed, his sister slept like a broken bird. He tried to sleep himself, slumped in a plastic chair against the wall, but the monitor lights flashed onto his eyelids. He opened them, closed them, opened them again. He tried to still himself on the spinning world, to hold himself steady by watching a line of green dashes pulse over the face of a machine that was keeping his sister breathing; tried to hold himself above the line of thinking that would surely, if he’d let it, take him down.

  Over the years, Raymond imagines and reimagines the accident. It comes like a persistent visitation—Leon’s motorcycle careening down a winding road or a dark road or a road blinding white with summer, sun glinting off mica as the bike spins, rolls, bellies through jagged gravel or explodes into roiling smoke. He can’t stop running the changing film of the accident in his head because at the time it had actually occurred, he hadn’t known or sensed or even guessed it was possible. No tendril of Suzette’s consciousness had sought him out. He didn’t feel her, didn’t hear her call or cry out. Maybe she hadn’t thought of Raymond or needed him in the moments before the bike lost contact with the road, or as she lay in the ravine, floating toward a final oblivion. Or maybe she had and he just hadn’t been listening. He’d traveled too far from her too fast, the string between them snapping.

  He casts back, feeling for the memories between them that matter, for some essence of her, the person he’d known best, had loved more than anyone or anything—but when he does, his mind settles and shifts over an emptiness. It’s like trying to gather handfuls of wet yarn. His yearning, his grief collapses on nothing. She’s just not there.

  EVERYTHING I OWN