But she wasn’t there. He was getting ready to leave when he noticed the boyfriend, his cap skewed ever so consciously an inch to the side, walking back toward the building with two others. Both boys. Their strides grew manlier the closer they came to the building.
Maybe she was sick today. Maybe she spent her lunch with other friends, or stayed inside to eat in the cafeteria. What did he know about how they worked things here? He started the car and (looking in the rearview, someone he at first didn’t recognize: himself, without hair) pulled back into the street, drove two blocks to Weir and headed north, toward home. Home, where he had resigned himself to going. He could shingle the roof, or reinstall the insulation. Today could be the day he became a bachelor wilderness-survival type, living inside a healthy aura of self-sufficiency and masculine calm. He would keep to himself, own flannel shirts.
And then he saw her, sitting alone at an outdoor table in front of Taco Treat. Het hair wasn’t purple anymore. She’d dyed it red over the weekend and had it combed down over the shaved sides in a sad approximation of normal hair. Her head was propped up by the V of her hands. She looked glum.
Impulsively, he turned onto Sixth and into the restaurant’s narrow parking lot. He wedged the car between a pickup and a microbus and turned off the ignition.
Now what?
Through the side window and windshield of the microbus, he saw that she had a tray of food in front of her, but had made no move to eat it. He decided to go get some himself—it would be a chance meeting, him stopping here for lunch, her being here, except that he didn’t much like Mexican food and the omelet he’d eaten that morning still sat in his stomach, undigested, like an unwanted guest who has fallen asleep. But he was here, he had parked. He went inside.
He watched her through the window while he waited for his food—just an iced tea and a single fish taco. She was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt zipped up to her chin. Two knotted cinch ropes dangled from the hood, and she played with one of them as she poked her food.
When the taco came, it made him a little queasy. He pushed it to the far edge of his tray and carried the tray out to her table. Nobody else was sitting outside. It was too chilly. Cars raced past on Weir, and their smells drifted over them, faintly toxic.
Alyssa looked up.
“Hey!” Paul said. He put his tray down. “Mind if I join you?”
Her eyes widened. She didn’t recognize him.
Paul touched his head and sat down. “It’s Paul Beveridge.”
Nothing.
“I work for your dad.”
Now she leaned forward, squinting. The ropes from her sweatshirt trailed into her food, a wide, cold-looking plate of red beans and rice. After a moment, she opened her eyes and smiled.
“Oh, you! Hi!”
“Hi.”
“What are you doing here?” she said. And then, soberly: “I think my dad’s looking for you.”
“Is he mad?”
“Not really. Well, maybe a little. I guess your wife called him, looking for you.” She smiled again. “But here you are.”
Your wife called? “I just stopped for lunch, and here you were.”
“Uh-huh. Here I am.” She rolled her eyes.
“So why aren’t you in school?”
She snorted. “Oh, right. You’re an adult.” She hitched her shoulders once, let them sag. “I already learned everything,” she said.
“Lucky you.”
She rolled her eyes again, then shrank back a little. “Can I touch it?” she said.
“What?”
“Your hair.”
“Oh! Right.” He leaned forward, pushing his head across the table at her, until his nose hung just above his taco. His stomach groaned.
“Wow,” she said. He felt her hand tickling across the tops of his hairs; each tingled at the root, starting a chain reaction that careened down his back, setting off every vertebra like a string of Christmas lights. Now she was using both hands, her fingers pressing into his scalp. He felt very warm. And then suddenly it was over, her hands gone. When he looked up they were out of sight, in her lap. “Cool,” she said, and they both laughed.
“You haven’t touched your lunch,” he told her.
“I should have gotten that,” she said, pointing to his tray.
He looked down at the taco and back at her. “Here,” he said, and pushed it toward her. “Take it. I’m not as hungry as I thought.”
* * *
She was eating the taco in the passenger seat of his—Anita’s—car, the paper basket held beneath her hand, catching drippings. They were heading south, toward the strip, toward her father’s office, her house. “So you want to go home?” he said. “Or do you want to go to your dad’s office?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Well, think fast,” he said. “The turn for the office is coming up.” Ponty’s street approached and passed. Paul watched as the office sped by. What would he think, if he knew where his daughter was? “Home it is, then,” he said.
“How about we go somewhere else?” she said.
“Somewhere else.”
“Yeah.” She unzipped the sweatshirt to reveal a white T-shirt with the name of a local rock band on it. “I’m not, you know, expected anywhere,” she said, her voice heavy with mock sophistication, and for a moment, Paul found himself imagining her in his arms, her ribs finding the grooves between his. And then the voice dissolved into giggles and the image disappeared, leaving him embarrassed and his mind soured with guilt.
But he didn’t turn onto South Avenue, which would have brought them to her house, and he didn’t turn onto Merriam Boulevard, which was their last chance to stay in Marshall. The light at Merriam was interminable, but neither of them said anything to the other, because to do so would mean admitting they were leaving town. Paul was so consumed with not speaking that he didn’t notice when the light finally changed, and Alyssa bumped his arm with her shoulder. “Go, already.”
Paul started. She sat up in her seat, alert. Horns blared. He rolled up the window, and they pulled away from the intersection.
And then they were on the highway, moving southwest toward the state line at sixty miles an hour, and neither had mentioned it. Paul pretended interest in the mountains and Alyssa, he could see, stared at the road with real excitement. Ten minutes later, when they’d crossed the Sapphire city line and Paul slowed down for the town’s three lights, Alyssa leaned her crossed arms against the dash. “Up there,” she said. “The second light.”
He could hear the challenge in her voice as she said it, wielded uncertainly, like it was a weapon too large or complicated for her. He got the sudden urge to turn the car around and bring her home, but then there was the problem of the trip back, of what to say in the sullen silence after he backed down. And, of course, he wanted to know where she was taking him. He signaled right and turned onto a smoothly paved two-lane that snaked into the mountains and Idaho. For several minutes they said nothing to each other. And then, as if it were part of a conversation that had been interrupted, she said, “So he dumped me, and I didn’t feel like seeing him.”
“What?”
“This guy,” she said. “He dumped me. And I didn’t want to see him, at school. So I left.”
“Can’t you get in trouble for that?”
She shrugged.
They passed a pasture at the base of a foothill, where some horses stood languidly eating grass. “How come?” Paul said.
“How come what?”
“Why’d he dump you?”
She shrugged again. “No reason, I don’t know.”
It was the sort of thing Paul would have said in high school; in college, even. But if adulthood had taught him anything, it was that there was always a reason. He thought about his mother, the way she used to react to such an answer: she would hold her gaze on him an extra beat, then capitulate to the lie with a tired nod and leave his bedroom without closing the door. And with his friends—none of whose n
ames he could remember now—that kind of answer was de rigueur, so much so that none of them ever really knew one another beyond what drinks each liked, the way each held a cigarette.
He was wondering how he could express this to Alyssa, what he could say that wouldn’t sound…adult, when she chuckled. It was a deep, strangely mature sound. She deadpanned: “Because I wouldn’t.”
“What?”
“He dumped me because I wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t.”
“Do it.”
Paul’s armpits began to itch. “Oh.”
“Oh, geez,” she said. “Does that make you uncomfortable?”
“Well.” He kept his eyes on the road, reluctant even to catch a glimpse of her reflection in the windshield.
“Because, you know, he just wasn’t the one. I mean, everybody does it”—bolder now, enjoying his reaction—“but I don’t think you ought to without a good reason.”
“Well, good,” he said, fatherly.
She fiddled with the seat, adjusting the angle until she was lying on her back, laughing. Then she straightened up a little, and stopped when she was a few degrees farther back than he was. She picked up the roll of drawings from between the seats but didn’t unroll them, only looked through the tube out the windshield. Her voice came from behind him. “So what’s your story? Where were you? Why’d your wife call our house?”
It irritated him that she knew this, and he groped for blame, landing briefly on Ponty and skimming over Anita until he settled, finally, on himself. “I went away for a few days.”
“Why’s that?”
He glared at her. She was leaning back, looking out at the mountaintops and clouds through the rolled drawings.
“She had an affair. She decided to leave me.”
She said nothing for a while, then set the drawings back where she found them. “So I guess we’re in the same boat.”
“No,” he said, as harshly as he could muster. “I’m married.” And immediately he regretted it. Alyssa took a few minutes to absorb this, then curled her legs up under her and leaned against the door.
“Can I put this on?” she asked him quietly, pointing to the heat controls.
“Sure.”
Soon they reached Sapphire Pass, where a sign told them that Lewis and Clark had camped only a few feet away. Those two seemed to have been everywhere. Paul parked at the visitors center to pee, and Alyssa stayed in the car. In the men’s room he worried that this looked funny, like a man plunging into the wilderness with a girl half his age. Which is what it was. When he got back into the car, Alyssa said, as if she had read his mind, “How old are you, Paul?” She bobbled his name on her tongue like a ball tossed to her without warning.
“Thirty-two.”
“Whoa,” she said. “You’re old enough to be my father.”
He calculated. “I guess so.”
“You have kids, you two?”
“No.”
She nodded. “Good.”
Paul paused before he pulled back onto the road. “Home?” he asked her.
“Not yet. A few more miles.”
He obliged her, taking the steep decline in third gear, to save the brakes. When they had gone several miles, she pointed to a graveled lot on the right. “Here,” she said, and he signaled and turned in.
They sat for a moment in silence. “Okay!” she said.
“Okay what?”
“You coming?”
“Where to?” he said. He wondered what a teenage girl could know about the Idaho woods, why she would bring him there. What would Ponty say if he could see them together, pulled over in Anita’s car? She crossed her eyes.
“Don’t be a dork, Paul.”
Maybe this was what fatherhood was like: going along with things. He thought of all the times he’d begged his friends to go along with him—crashing parties, shoplifting, driving around—and how irritating that must have been. Then he pushed open his door and stepped onto the gravel.
A footpath led them through thick, close conifers. Alyssa ran ahead, suddenly childish and happy. The forest was much richer here than near his house, with a healthy dampness in the air and moss hanging from the branches of trees. He wondered briefly if, in the past three years, he had ever even been to Idaho.
No, he hadn’t left Montana.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” she said. Something in her voice was excited and fearful at once, as if they’d come to hunt bears. “I can’t believe you’ve never come here before.”
They were quiet then, and the sounds of the woods mingled with their footfalls: birds and squirrels chattered, and off in the trees, Paul could see deer stepping carefully over logs. Somewhere, out of sight, there was a river running, and its noise grew louder and softer as they changed direction.
And then the path emptied out into a wide clearing that the river rushed through on its way elsewhere. Between the water and the ground beyond its banks, which lay bare except for thin moss and small boulders, were a series of still, clear pools, steam rising off them in thick, wind-twisted curtains. Hot springs. “Wow,” he said, and Alyssa yelped with excitement and ran down to them, her hair tossing side to side like the flag on a child’s bike.
He followed her. For a minute they stood and watched. Bubbles crept up from under rocks in the pools before them, the river running cold only a few feet beyond. The air was warm. Alyssa took off her sweatshirt, and then her shoes and socks: white tennis sneakers, white socks with gray pads.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting in,” she said, seemingly unable to believe the question.
And then, to his astonishment, she pulled her T-shirt up over her head and in almost the same motion pushed down her jeans, revealing a white cotton bra and a pair of underpants with carrots printed on them. The carrots were bright orange, and looked as out of place in this clearing as a tractor-trailer.
He gawked, at this woman’s body exposed to the air, and was almost surprised when he looked to find her face still attached to it. Her eyes were wide, and she was breathing heavy and fast, through her mouth, from the run down the hill.
“What?” she said, but there was no concealing that she knew what effect this had had on him; her voice was full of it.
“You’re not—” he said. “We can’t—”
She turned from him, and brought her hands up behind her, to the hook of her bra, and unclasped it. She held the ends there, waiting, and said over her shoulder, “Either you’re in, or no looking, pal.”
Without thinking, he touched his head. He moved his hand to his face, and rubbed it, and said, “I’ll meet you in the car.” Then he turned and began the walk to the road.
In the trees, beyond where he thought he could see, he stopped and looked back. She was there, sitting in one of the pools, facing the river. Her shoulders were thin and bowed like an old woman’s, as if she were no more substantial than a piece of paper, curled to conceal what was written on it. He thought of the photos he’d taken of her, and realized they were still in the glove compartment of Anita’s car, where he’d left them the day he reported back to Ponty. Alyssa had been sitting inches from them for over an hour.
He jogged back down the path to the lot and took out the photos. He remembered them differently: Alyssa, he thought, was smaller in the frame and only distinguishable by her hair, and he recalled both her and her boyfriend hunched over slightly under the bright sun, shielding their eyes. But in fact Alyssa’s face was clear, and the two of them walked easily, seemingly without worry. In one, Alyssa was punching his arm, and he was recoiling in mock offense.
Paul walked a hundred yards back up the mountain, to where the river met the road. He climbed down the rocky bank and crouched by the water, in the mild, cold breeze the current made, and he thumbed through the photos again. Now he had another picture in his head, this one of himself, walking slumped and alone off the school grounds long before the three-o’clock bell, on his way to meet h
is dealer so that he could get high in the car and drive our into Mississippi to visit the river. Rivers were different in the South, meandering and slow, and he often imagined he could lie down in one and wend through farms and homesteads and towns for days, wanting for nothing, swallowed by a larger whole that would let him forget who he was. He thought of himself washed out into the Delta, where he would simply vanish, quietly dissolved into the waters of the Gulf.
And if he did that now? He felt, for a split second, what it would be like to be broken on the rocks, and shuddered. Instead, he tore up the photos and scattered the pieces in the water. The river carried them away, and before they had gone a dozen feet they were indistinguishable from the play of light on the current.
He thought he had been spying on a young Paul Beveridge those days outside Alyssa’s high school, but he could see he’d been wrong. She was at home here, and fearless, and needed nothing. The young Paul Beveridge was still him. What was he doing here? Why wasn’t he in Marshall, doing his job? From now on, he decided, he would be an employed adult, and nothing more, and take it from there.
He stood up, his knees cracking. The river rounded the bend, laughing. He wiped the dirt off his hands, climbed the bank and walked back to the car to wait. The torn pictures, he imagined, were sweeping toward Alyssa Ponty, and heading for the ocean. They would reach her, pass her by, any second now.
17
Tuesday morning, when Lars showed up at Montana Gag, there were six police cars parked in the lot, their lights flashing, and as many cops walking around inside. He pretended to try the door of the Chinese place, which he knew was closed. Walking back to his car, he shook his head theatrically and thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Sooner or later they would need to ask him questions, and Lars was content to let them track him down on their own time.
Light of Falling Stars Page 27
