A Ticket to Ride

by Paula McLain

  I’d watched several hundred of hours of detective shows, cop shows, and murder mysteries in my life. I knew the rules, the handful of plot possibilities, and understood the way cases got cracked and solved—or thought I did. Once I’d made my confession to the Fletchers, I was sure that the police would have the leads they needed to put the whole situation behind us. They had a full description of the park by Lake Michigan, the four guys, Bruce’s car, and had canvassed all of Lincoln Park and the surrounding neighborhoods with flyers of Claudia’s eighth-grade picture. And still, Claudia stayed missing. I started to pray for her at night, though I had never done this before and wasn’t exactly sure how it was done. I lay in the dark and focused on her face, her freckles, her ribboned ponytail and skates—and wished as hard as I could for her to be safe.

  I prayed for Fawn too—though even as I did so it occurred to me that her absence was pretty irresponsible. And selfish too. There was a huge difference between being a girl who disappeared, like Claudia, and one who chose to run away. Fawn was just fed up with Raymond and me, and probably liked to think of us worrying over her. In fact, she was probably living it up—having a gay old time, as she’d hypothesized about Claudia—with no restrictions, no one trying to control her or tell her what to do. I wasn’t sure where she was living, where she had to go, but couldn’t help remembering how earlier that summer she’d described hanging out on a mattress in an abandoned warehouse as “cozy.” Even if she was sleeping in the back of Murphy’s van, she probably preferred that to being at Raymond’s—and as the days turned into a week, then two, with no word from Fawn, I found myself feeling angry with her—that is, when I wasn’t worrying about her or missing her like crazy.

  My emotions were so volatile in those days, my anxieties so acute, I took to carrying my inhaler with me again, like a talisman, and using it every now and then, even when I didn’t need to. I found myself coming to rely on it. One night I was out walking after dinner and stopped by 7-Eleven. I don’t know what I thought I’d find there—Claudia skating blissfully through the aisles eating Swedish Fish? But suddenly it was so palpable: her absence. Would I ever see her again? Was she even alive? It was the first time I let myself think, even for a moment, that she might not be. And it was too much. I had a panic attack, right there in the candy aisle.

  The guy behind the counter got worried. “Are you all right?” he asked and moved toward me. That’s when I ran out into the parking lot, sucking air, shutting down. I must have sat in back of the store for an hour, crouched by the trash cans, which all smelled of rank soda pop and canned meat, crying hard and thinking, What have we done, Fawn? What have we done?

  It was now the tail end of August. The heat and humidity were stultifying, as difficult to bear as everything else. Some afternoons, I couldn’t bring myself to do much more than walk room to room in Raymond’s house, feed Felix his pinkies, sit on the living room rug next to Mick and wait for something, anything else to happen, for the facts of the moment to reverse themselves or dissolve or simply move on. One day I dug out a bunch of Raymond’s old records—The Dave Clark Five, Shirley Bassey, The Zombies—and sang along as well as I could, humming unfamiliar bridges and chord progressions. Swaying in time, I studied myself in the bathroom mirror, leaning so close my nose nearly bumped the glass. My haircut had grown out beyond all repair. Strawlike sprouts jutted over my ears; my bangs threatened to take over the world. My tan had faded to a sallow yellow, as if the effects of a summer’s worth of beauty treatments were reversing themselves, canceling themselves out. It made me unbearably sad to think that in just a couple of weeks without Fawn, I could return to being exactly the same girl I was before she arrived. Did that mean if she never returned, I would be stuck with this body, this face, forever? Slathering myself with cocoa butter, I grabbed my suit and towel and went outside to get some sun. It didn’t feel the same without Fawn, and unlike Raymond’s music, which cheered me with easy harmonies and innocuous lyrics, every song on the radio reminded me of Fawn and of the perfection of our early summer—“Baby I’m-a Want You,” “Lean on Me,” “American Pie.” I flipped the transistor off, and in the silence found myself thinking, strangely, of Collin’s mother’s gravestone, of Claudia telling me, in the dark of the cemetery, how young and beautiful she had been. Now I knew my mother had never reached the age of thirty. Had she been beautiful then, the year she died, or just sad?

  Raymond had told me about my father too. His name was Benny, and he was dead too—had died the same year as Suzette, in fact. Apparently, his identity had never been a secret. He’d lived in Bakersfield, right down the street from where I went to school, and Berna and Nelson had never felt it was the right time to tell me. Or didn’t trust me enough to let me know? Raymond insisted they were trying to protect me, but I didn’t feel protected, I felt lied to. Stolen from. It was all so hurtful and confusing. I couldn’t even fantasize about my parents anymore. They had both been ordinary people with lots of trouble and sadness in their lives. I had liked thinking of Suzette managing to reinvent herself, spinning a happy ending out of unhappy odds and ends. It made me feel better about her—and about myself. About what might be possible for me. But if Raymond was right, Suzette had lived and died unhappily. Was this my future too? Had any attempt Fawn made to change and improve me been pointless from the start? And Fawn? Was she doomed too?

  When I called Collin, I told myself it was the first step in making not a new life, but a real one in Moline. Besides Claudia, Collin had been the only one there who had seemed to understand me. He had treated me kindly, and with him I felt like the fifteen-year-old girl I was. At the time, I had felt impatient with that quality in him, but now I believed I saw everything clearly.

  I was scared when I got on the phone. After all, I had been pretty cruel to him to please Fawn. Also, surely he knew everything that had happened with Claudia and Chicago. That I’d lied to the Fletchers and the police, and tried to blame it on someone else, when really Claudia’s going missing was partly my fault. It was possible he’d never want to speak to me again, but I felt I had to take the risk.

  Collin answered the phone himself, on the second ring, and it took me a while to spit it out, how sorry I was for everything, how much I wanted us to get back on the right footing again. When he agreed to meet me in Turner Park later that night, I was grateful and thrilled, and spent all that day fantasizing about how good it would be to have a friend again—the right sort of friend, finally. Maybe Collin would offer to give me piano lessons. Maybe we’d just walk around town and talk about stuff that mattered. We had a lot in common, beginning with our mothers and ending, well, who knew?

  As I waited for evening to arrive, it occurred to me that the return to school was just around the corner. I would need a friend then, badly. And somehow when I started to think about school—tenth grade, high school—I let myself get a little carried away. I imagined myself and Collin having lockers side by side, getting stuck in the same badminton class, going to school dances to lean against the bleachers and make fun of other couples while secretly wanting to be them, out on the polished floor, spinning to Bread’s “Guitar Man.”

  I realize now how ridiculously shortsighted I was being, how wildly I was swinging toward any dream that might support my weight or blot out all I had lost, all I could still lose. But at the time, there was too much else to think about. Like what to wear. I found myself wanting to please Collin, to show up at our meeting place looking like the Jamie he’d had a crush on in June—though that time seemed a universe away. So I dug through my closet until I found the jumper I wore the day we picked Fawn up at O’Hare. Under it, I wore a clean white T-shirt and white panties, Keds without socks. I rinsed my face of any trace of makeup, put clips Fawn would have sneered at in my hair—and when I was ready to go, I did something I hadn’t done in weeks: I told Raymond where I was going and with whom. He seemed surprised but pleased, and I walked out the door feeling completely virtuous.

  Collin was alread
y in the playground when I arrived, sitting on a tire swing with his legs dangling. He looked like a little kid that way, which was fine by me. He also looked exactly the same, with his Bobby Fisher hair, toffee eyes, and bright white T-shirt. Everything, in fact, began by being exactly what I wanted. I sat down in one of the swings myself, and used the rocking motion to kick-start my urge to confess. I couldn’t quite see his face in the dark, and this made it even easier to tell him everything—about Fawn’s running away and how maybe it was the best thing for everyone. About how I realized I’d tried, for her sake, to become someone I’m not. Finally, I told him about learning my mother was dead, and how I knew we had that in common. “We can talk about her if you want to. Your mom, I mean,” I said, feeling generous.

  “What about Claudia?”

  “Yeah, sure. We can talk about her too.”

  “No, I mean you haven’t even mentioned her name. Have you forgotten about her already?”

  “Of course not. I think about her all the time.”

  “You don’t seem to. All you really seem to care about is yourself.”

  How eerie, I thought. Those are the exact words I used with Fawn.

  And then Tom walked out of the dark, saying, “I couldn’t agree more.”

  At first I couldn’t quite believe Tom was there—had Collin only agreed to meet me so he could hand-deliver me to Tom? There was a split second’s pinch, and then I remembered that Collin and Tom had been friends since they were kids. It was a relationship I didn’t understand, but I did know that for Collin, choosing me over Tom would have been the betrayal.

  I stuttered something unintelligible, trying to defend myself, but then gave up. Tom stood in the wood chips a few feet away, lanky and hostile as ever, but there was something different about him too.

  “Claudia’s dead,” he said, and then he began to describe in agonizing detail how the police had found her body in the Chicago River that afternoon. While I’d been imagining badminton and ninth-grade dances, they had lifted Claudia out of the river with a crane, to find her mouth full of muck and leaves, her body spongy and badly decomposed, her beautiful face nearly unrecognizable. As Tom talked, I began to cry hysterically, but he didn’t stop. How could he? His sister was dead, and though it seemed he was reveling in the ugliness, wanting me to feel bad all the way down and to know a truth I could never again hide from or revise, this wasn’t about me. He was remembering her, grieving for her. I had thought about her every day, but now I realized that most of that thinking had centered around my own guilt in the story of her disappearance. As the story fell away, there was just Claudia—how kind and pretty and happy and alive she had been. How she didn’t deserve to suffer for a second in life or death, how much we were all losing now that she was gone.

  I don’t know how I found my way home, but when I got there and could speak again, I told Raymond everything, repeating the details over again with horror. He cried too, and held me in a way I could barely feel and when, after several hours, I still hadn’t calmed down or taken an unlabored breath, even with my inhaler, he went to his medicine cabinet and brought me two sleeping pills—sky blue, baby blue. They looked like heaven.

  MORNING HAS BROKEN

  When I heard the knocking at the window, I thought I was dreaming it at first. The pills Raymond gave me had sent me into a sleep that felt more like a small coma, and it was hard to surface, though the knocking was even and ceaseless. I opened my eyes to see it was black in the room, the blinds blotting out streetlight. My head felt like it belonged to a cotton-sock monkey. I tried to sit up, then collapsed back onto my bed as the rapping came again, this time accompanied by a voice asking to be let in. Immediately, adrenaline coursed into my bloodstream, trying to displace the narcotic. My first and only thought was that Claudia’s ghost had come to avenge her. “Who’s there?” I managed to croak.

  “Who do you think, twit?”

  Not a ghost: Fawn.

  My limbs were numb and uncooperative, but I moved to the window as quickly as I could to throw open the blinds. “What are you doing here?” I couldn’t even manage a whisper in my state. “Where have you been?”

  “What’s wrong with you? You’re acting weird. Are you on drugs or something?”

  She didn’t wait for me to answer, but looked past me, her eyes circling the room. “What a pit,” she said. “I can’t believe I stayed as long as I did.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Sort of between places.” She shrugged noncommittally. I noticed that Fawn’s ponytail was drab and hand-combed. She looked like she hadn’t had a shower in a few days. “Do you have anything to eat in here?”

  I went to the kitchen and brought back bread and cheese, suddenly realizing I was famished myself, and as we sat on our cots, eating, I told her about Claudia.

  “That’s awful,” she said. “So how did she die?”

  “They’re not sure yet. Tom said that at the initial autopsy, they hadn’t found a mark on her.” I felt sickened even saying the word autopsy, and put my bread down on the blanket.

  “Well, that’s good news then, isn’t it? Maybe she just fell in the river or something. She was pretty drunk too, if you remember. Maybe she died painlessly, and it’s no one’s fault at all. An accident.”

  “I don’t know, maybe,” I said, feeling skeptical. “In any case, whatever happened happened after we left her there. There’s still plenty for us to feel bad about.”

  “You can feel bad if you want to, Jamie. Feel bad from here to eternity, it’s not going to change anything.”

  Raymond was right when he’d said it wasn’t enough to feel bad about Claudia, but Fawn hadn’t even begun there. She felt no responsibility, it was true, but she also didn’t feel Claudia’s absence at all. I couldn’t make her feel it. I couldn’t hope to change a single molecule in Fawn’s nature. She was who she was, for better and for worse. I loved her and I hated her, and that was something else that wouldn’t change.

  Fawn finished her bread and asked for the rest of mine. “Anyway, I just came by to tell you I’m on my way out of town tomorrow. To New York.”

  “Really, why?”

  “Why not? I have a few friends there, a place to stay. And it’s not Moline.” She uncrossed her legs and stood up, straightening her ponytail. “Anyway, I was going to say you could come with me if you want to. There’s room.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got us a ride and everything. An old friend from Phoenix is passing through. He’s moving there to start a band, and has a place lined up to stay and everything. He says it’s cool if we crash with him for a week or so.”

  My skull was still stuffed with cotton. I couldn’t think clearly enough to really process what she was saying, but I found myself nodding anyway, just so I could lie down again and go back to sleep.

  “Great. All right then, get all your stuff together and meet me at midnight tomorrow at the greenhouse.”

  “The church?”

  “Yeah, and get your hands on some money too, at least fifty bucks. We’ll need it.” She started to move away from the window but turned back, looked critically at me. “God, your hair grew out overnight. It’s a mess. We’ll definitely have to do something about that.”

  My first thought the next morning was of Claudia. There would be a memorial service sometime in the next few days, and although I couldn’t imagine facing Collin, Tom, the Fletchers, I also couldn’t imagine not going. She had been my friend, and I owed her. I also wanted to say good-bye to her, whatever that meant. My second thought was of Fawn. Had she really come back to the house and invited me to run off with her? Why? What did she need me for, fifty bucks and some food? No, she could score those things on her own. With Fawn, though, there was always an ulterior motive, or several. I lay in bed and thought it over as the sun rose higher, and the only thing I could come up with was that Fawn was afraid to go to the city. For all her talk, she needed me—and particularly me, since I made her feel infinitely
superior and in charge. But if she thought she was going to make a life or even just get by in New York, either with or without me, she was in for a rude awakening. Anything could happen there, it was true, but what did she think we’d do for money? Where would we live once her friend got sick of us and threw us out? How could we get jobs when neither of us had finished high school? No, it was a suicide mission, this trip.

  Still, as the morning passed and afternoon came on, hot and insistent with only soap operas and the radio for company, I found myself wondering hard about what my life would be like in Moline if I stayed. I had no friends and no prospect of friends. It was a small town. When I returned to school, I would be marked. Everyone would know my story and I would be even more lonely and ostracized than I was back in Bakersfield, and that was saying a lot. I had nothing to look forward to, no one to share my thoughts with. It would just be Raymond and me, and would we be all right alone? Would he stick by me even though no one else ever had?

  I showered, grabbed several bills from the pile on Raymond’s dresser, and walked to the bus stop. I spent the afternoon walking from shop to shop downtown, up Fourth Avenue, down Fifth. I liked the look of the old dark-brick buildings with their awnings and facades; liked the town square with its clock tower and pigeon-shitted wrought-iron benches. The buildings seemed to whisper a history, to tell of the time before, when people, if not less complicated by nature, at least had fewer choices. There was one tailor, one grocery store—a dinky IGA—one dry cleaner. I crossed the street to Morgan’s Coffee Shop, where a window sign boasted five kinds of pie, and went inside to order a sandwich and a glass of milk. I’d never eaten in a restaurant alone before and it made me feel both grown up and terribly lonely.

  Outside again, the clock tower struck three thirty. I stood on a patch of grass in the square and turned slowly, taking in the panorama, such as it was, the benches and dirty-pewter pigeons, a toddler and his older brother fighting over a white balloon shaped like a rabbit’s head, the barbershop with candy-striped pole and jar of combs on the windowsill, pickling in Windex-blue fluid, the parking meters casting big-eared shadows on the sidewalk. Could I live here for good if I had to? Fawn couldn’t. She was bored silly by small-town life and had been ready to leave Moline from the moment she arrived. Would I be petrified with boredom if I stayed or would I be fine? Could Raymond and I make a go of it together, make something that looked like a family in time? I just didn’t know.