by Leah Stewart
After college graduation, Sonia and I drove west together, on a trip she kept calling our farewell tour. It had been almost a year since her father died of a heart attack, walking between his office and his car. In the last few weeks, as we planned the trip, Sonia had started to seem more like Sonia, instead of the remote, brittle person who had been inhabiting my room, staring out the window at the parking lot, drinking bottles of white wine. She had let a junior take over most of her duties at the paper, and she’d all but dropped out of her sorority after they called her before the comportment committee for public drunkenness.
When Mr. Gray died, I was in Korea, where my father had been transferred, and it was days before Sonia found me to tell me the news. I missed the funeral. When she first heard, Sonia was in Nashville, in the summer sublet we had rented with Owen and two of his friends, and Owen was the one to take the phone from her hand after her mother called, screaming as if Sonia herself had killed him. Owen was the one who packed her bag and booked her a ticket home. They had seemed irritated with each other ever since, and I thought perhaps Owen couldn’t cope with Sonia’s grief and need, and Sonia couldn’t cope with his having witnessed them.
After refusing for months to think about the future, Sonia decided a week before graduation to move to Boston with Suzette. She said she would find a job and try becoming a Yankee. There was no reason to stay in Nashville, and certainly no reason to go home. I was headed to the University of Michigan to start a doctoral program in literature. Owen had decided, in the last month, that he wanted to come with me. We had gone up to Ann Arbor and picked out an apartment, and I’d spent the entire weekend clinging to his hand like a new bride. For years he had talked of moving to Memphis with a friend to start a record label. Now all he wanted was to be with me.
Sonia and I planned to spend two weeks exploring Texas and New Mexico. Then together we’d pay a brief visit to her mother before I went back to Tennessee to pick up Owen for our move. As we headed west, the trees grew more and more sparse, until finally we were back in the flat, brown lands of our adolescence. “Ah,” Sonia said, waking up from a nap as we sped across the plains of Texas. “Don’t you feel like you can breathe?”
In preparation for this trip I’d bought all manner of guidebooks, but Sonia refused to be drawn into planning our route. She said that, for once in my life, I needed to just let a thing unfold. She said, “Every night, in whatever seedy motel room we’re in, we’ll study the map and pick where we want to go the next day.” I let her talk me into this, and later, when we lost many hours of driving by doubling back to see something we’d missed, I tried unsuccessfully not to say I told you so. Sonia said, “The drive is the point, Camazon. Say it with me now: ‘The journey, not the destination.’ ”
In Santa Fe, we bought each other turquoise earrings. We went to Bandolier and took pictures of the holes in the cliffsides where people, unbelievably, used to make a life. We went to Taos, where, sick of crappy motels, we splurged on a room in a bed-and-breakfast. There was a tray in the room upon which were an ice bucket and champagne flutes. There was a fireplace, with logs, kindling, and matches provided. We used up all the fire starter but still we couldn’t get the fire lighted. In the morning the kindly couple who owned the place spent half an hour describing a lesbian commitment ceremony that had been held in the inn the month before. We listened politely. In the car on the way out of town, Sonia said, “God, that was a long story. Why did they tell us that?”
“Oh,” I said. “Wait a minute . . .”
“Champagne flutes in the room,” Sonia said. “That was the honeymoon suite, wasn’t it?”
We laughed so hard that tears came into our eyes, but I could understand the innkeepers’ mistake. I thought, but didn’t say, that there were ways in which a friendship like ours was like a love affair. Hadn’t I been jealous of Sonia’s bond with Suzette? Hadn’t she accused me, once, of spending more time with Owen than with her? Hadn’t we spent four years living together, fighting and making up, cooking each other dinner?
One afternoon we stopped in Roswell, where we had driven many times for high-school football games. Since then, the town had embraced its science-fiction past. Fast-food restaurants welcomed alien invaders, and signs told us where we could park our spaceship. We wandered around the UFO museum together, marveling at the framed documents, the photos, the vast and fantastic paintings of space donated by amateur artists from around the world. Sonia pointed at a picture of Pegasus flying over the moon. “Who looks at the sky and sees this?” she asked.
“Oh, I do,” I said. “All that and more.”
“This place is demented,” she said. “Everything about it is completely insane.”
I was more credulous than she was. We watched a documentary about alien abductions, and Sonia cracked jokes about the abductees until a fat man in a baseball cap turned around and shushed her. After that she satisfied herself with sighing. I couldn’t take my eyes off these people, these plump and twitchy intergalactic travelers. I found myself half-persuaded by their crazed conviction. What if all of it were true? What would it be like to go so far?
“I just had no idea,” Sonia said in the gift shop. She was looking at “Believe” key chains. “All those times we were here. I just thought of Roswell as a rival football team.”
I picked up a green lollipop shaped like an alien’s head. “I took the SATs here,” I said. “At New Mexico Military Institute. I was trying to do math, and they were playing the trumpet and marching outside. It was damn hard to concentrate.”
“This place is part of a myth.” Sonia picked up a red alien lollipop. “For me it was just another crappy town.” She unwrapped the candy and popped it in her mouth. “Life is funny,” she said.
That night a guy who hit on Sonia in the hotel bar told her she hadn’t lived unless she’d seen Big Bend, so the next morning we headed back into Texas and down to the park. We spent the day hiking, amazed by the strange, almost lunar landscape, and then rented a room at the seventies-era park motel, an odd, ugly building lodged among the startling and austere mountains like something washed ashore. We sat out on the balcony and watched it get dark, passing the joint the guy in the bar had given Sonia. It was so quiet, the landscape around us so beautiful and unforgiving and large. Sitting there I felt as though I had stopped to think for the first time in months. I had made my plans with such methodical confidence that even I had failed to notice the depth of my uncertainty.
“You want to know something?” I said.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”
“What do you mean? You’re sitting on a balcony in Big Bend. With me.”
“No. With my life.”
“Cameron, you always know what you’re doing.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m glad it looks that way.”
“You’re going to grad school, like you wanted.”
“Yeah, but is that what I wanted? Or what I thought I wanted? Or what I thought someone else wanted for me? I mean, how do we make decisions, anyway? How do we know we’re right?”
“I don’t know.” She laughed. “Are you asking me for the meaning of life?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Have you got it with you?”
“In my pocket,” she said.
The moon was a white crescent, the stars so plentiful they seemed to multiply as I watched. I could see all the shades of darkness. The silhouette of a tree was the deepest dark, but the sky looked as though it had once contained light, and would again. I knew that the sky was space, the stars light that had traveled across the universe to be here, but I also believed the sky was nothing but a black curtain, the stars just holes in the fabric, poked with a steady hand and a straight pin. Everything was at the same time real and imaginary, true and false, beginning and ending. I wondered if the sky would ever look this beautiful again, and if so, when that would be and who I would be with.
“I’m just glad Owen is going with
me,” I said. “I’m really glad. I think I might marry him.”
Sonia gazed up at the sky. “Good,” she said.
That night, as I lay in bed and listened to Sonia breathe, I was both in that motel room and back in the dorm on our very first night at school. That first night, lying in my new bed with the lights out, I’d listened to Sonia’s breathing, so familiar, but also foreign in a way it had never been at home, and it struck me that it could have been a stranger I heard, that I might have lain there, unable to sleep, and listened as a person I didn’t know whimpered and rolled over in bed. The girls in our hall had been moved in by parents and younger siblings. The parents shook hands and rented dorm refrigerators from the tent on the lawn and hoisted beds up on cinder blocks, and then parted from their children with tears or warnings or jokes, and the girls sighed with relief and regret when their parents were finally gone. Sonia and I were without our families. I thought, with some amazement, of the long way we had come.
Now I realized just how completely this part of my life was going to end. For years I had listened to the sounds of Sonia sleeping, the deepening of her breath as she drifted off, the inscrutable things she murmured in her sleep, messages from the dream world. I wouldn’t hear those things anymore. I wouldn’t hear her.
When I woke, minutes or hours later, Sonia wasn’t in the bed beside mine. It took me a moment to process this. Then I heard the sound that must have awakened me, high-pitched and airy, like a ghost drawing breath. “Sonia?” I said. No answer. I got out of bed and saw that the bathroom door was closed. Confused, I opened it.
Sonia was in there in the dark. She was crying. I turned on the light, and we blinked at each other. She was sitting on the closed toilet, her arms wrapped around her stomach, and as she looked at me her throat convulsed. Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
“Sonia?” I said. I’d never seen her cry, not even after her father died.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She began to rock back and forth. She lifted her hands to her face.
“What’s the matter?” I was bewildered. Nothing in our day had called for this. My first coherent thought was that something must have triggered a memory of her father. Perhaps she’d dreamed of him.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” she said, as though I knew what she was talking about.
“Do what?”
She stopped rocking, but she kept her face in her hands. “Sleep with Owen,” she said.
I put a hand on the doorframe. I didn’t seem to be dreaming, so maybe she was. “You didn’t sleep with Owen,” I said, in a voice you’d use to reassure a silly, frightened child.
Now she looked at me. “Yes, I did,” she said.
I didn’t understand. She’d never wanted Owen. Will had been hers. Owen was mine. “Are you in love with him?”
She sighed, almost as if she were exasperated with me. “No, of course not.”
I felt a numbness spreading through my body. “When?” I asked.
“After I found out my father died. That night.” She sniffed hard.
“That night?” I repeated.
“I was freaking out,” she said.
I nodded. “You needed comfort.”
“Yes,” she said. She looked at me with some hope.
“Was that the only time?”
She said nothing. She began to rock again.
“Just tell me the truth.” I noted with detachment how calm my voice sounded. “I just want to know that you’re telling me the truth.”
“Christmas break, the night before you came back from Korea,” she said. “It happened again. We got drunk.”
“So two times,” I said. “Twice. That’s all.”
She nodded. She opened her mouth to speak but managed only a tiny, helpless squeak.
“That’s all,” I repeated. “That’s all.”
“I’m a bad person,” she said. “My mother was right.”
I just stared at her.
“Please don’t tell Owen I told you. I promised him I wouldn’t tell you. Please don’t tell him.”
The first wave of fury swept over me. “How can you ask me that?” I said.
She put her hands to her face again, rocking and rocking. I looked at her soft hair falling forward and wanted to put both my hands on it and pull. Never in my life had I had such an urge to be cruel. I could have hit her. I could have asked her whether her father would be proud of her now. I didn’t do it, but I thought of it just the same.
I took a step back. She looked up. “Please, Cameron,” she choked out. “He loves you.” I shut the door, gently, in her face.
For the rest of the night I pretended to sleep. She came out of the bathroom as the sky began to lighten. She stood beside me and said my name. I kept my eyes closed. She got into her bed and cried until she fell asleep.
I got up, dressed, and packed my things. I went outside and watched the sun come up. I’d been replaying the last year, the strange behavior of Sonia and Owen that I had taken, in my naïveté, for grief and irritation and mutual dislike. I wondered about the conversations that must have ended when I walked into the room. I still felt numb, my movements automatic, but I could tell that that numbness was a scrim, and that on the other side was rage. How ridiculous that I’d ever felt guilty about Will, about things that I’d wanted to do but had never done. This was how she repaid me for all those years of putting her first, by fucking my boyfriend, a man she didn’t even love. There was nobody you could trust with your heart. I saw now that I’d be going to Ann Arbor alone, that in one fell swoop she’d robbed me of best friend and boyfriend. I thought, with a strange dispassion, that she had made a lie of my existence, when all this time I’d considered her part of what made it real.
I woke Sonia up when I was ready to go. I barely recognized her. She seemed like a stranger, the sort of familiar-looking stranger you cross the street to talk to, only to find, when you get close enough, that she’s no one you ever knew. “Get in the car,” I said, and then I went outside and waited in the driver’s seat until she did. I didn’t even look at her. I hit the gas before she had the door closed. I heard her intake of breath, but she said nothing, just yanked the door shut. We’d planned the night before to head next to White Sands, but that morning I’d studied the map and found the fastest route to Clovis.
I didn’t know if Sonia noticed when I took us due north instead of northwest. She didn’t say a word, and neither did I, for nearly three hours. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep. I drove twenty miles over the speed limit, certain that no cop would stop me. I kept my eye on the odometer, ticking off each mile. We’d gone about two hundred miles, not quite halfway, when Sonia said, “I really have to pee,” in a small, timid voice, like she was afraid of attracting my attention, afraid that if she did I might hit her. I swerved into the right lane to catch the next exit. A car blared its horn, but I didn’t turn around. Off the ramp was a rundown gas station, with a metal door around the back with LADIES scrawled across it.
I got out of the car when she did and watched her walk to the door and open it. “Oh, disgusting,” she said, hesitating there. She shot a look back in my direction. I could tell she was tempted to wait and find another bathroom, but afraid to ask me to drive on farther and stop again. She took a deep breath and went inside.
While she was in the bathroom I opened the trunk of the car. I took out everything that belonged to her and piled those belongings outside the bathroom door. I was setting down the last bag when I heard the toilet flush. I hurried back to the car, locked the doors, and turned the key. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the bathroom door begin to open. I stepped on the gas, and the car squealed into motion. I looked into my rearview mirror and saw her mouth open in shock and dismay. She ran after me, shouting my name, but when I hit the highway she stopped.
As she disappeared I thought about driving the farm roads outside of Clovis, cutting straight lines through the fields, “Take It to the Limit” on the radio, Sonia sh
outing “Drive, Camazon, drive!” clouds of dust behind us, the sky big enough to swallow us whole. Me pressing the pedal down, wanting to see how fast we could get the car to go.
I looked for her in the mirror long past the point when it was still possible to see her there.
Eight years later, I relived all this—involuntary time travel, as Oliver had called it. It wasn’t just what Sonia had done I hadn’t wanted to remember. It was what I had done. I didn’t abandon her impulsively. I planned to do it. I wanted to leave her somewhere so isolated she’d have no choice but to call her mother to come get her, far enough from Clovis that they’d have hours in the car together, hours for her mother to tell her again and again what a bad person she was. It was the worst thing I could think of to do to her, to give her up to her mother for punishment. Even after all those years of friendship, when she hurt me I did the worst thing I could think of to do. That was the kind of person I was. I wanted to break her heart, I wanted her to cry. I wanted us both to be alone, but her aloneness was to be desolation, mine was to be freedom. I lay awake all night imagining it.
Three
17
At the end of our freshman year, Sonia comes home drunk from a frat party at two in the morning. I hear her key in the door, but I don’t really wake up until the lights come on. Then I sit up, blinking. A blond girl is holding Sonia by the arm. Even with the support Sonia is listing to the side, and her mouth is covered with blood. She waves a bloody tissue at me. “Cameron,” she says loudly, although I’m already sitting. “Wake up!”
“What happened?” I ask, but before they can answer I get out of bed and go to the bathroom for a damp washcloth. Sonia winces when I press it to her mouth.
