A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  I looked in a few, discovering rows of spices, sugar, a variety of boxed teas: orange clove, cinnamon, lemon, mint. I took down a fragrant bag of grounds and leveled several spoons in the machine’s catch. We carried our plates to the mirrored table and took seats on the futon. Penny turned on the small TV, flipping the channels until finally settling on a rerun of I Love Lucy. It was the episode Lucy and Ethel volunteered to duet a Cole Porter song for a variety show, surprising each other by showing up in the same elaborate, gauzy dress. I stopped short of asking Penny if she’d already seen it, too. Something in the way she set the remote down on the armrest signaled the comforting gesture of routine. Penny had come home from a hundred overnight shifts at the diner to unwind on the futon with a black-and-white rerun and a meal. If you’re ever in a jam, here I am. Ethel Mertz snapped her fingers onstage, holding focus in the frothy gown. If you’re ever in a mess, S.O.S.

  Sitting side by side, it felt like we were grown, like we, too, shared years of fused history between us. In a way, we did. Penny’s posture, leaning over her plate, and her rabid attention to the show, was already affectionately familiar. I felt somehow sure that, despite their closeness, she’d never shared this particular intimacy with Luz or Flaca or Lourdes. They had spent their entire childhoods dressing alike, passing notes, sharing secrets—but I couldn’t imagine any of them sitting still while Penny indulged in an afternoon of singular preference—any of them letting Penny be Penny, outside of who they all had to be, together.

  “You’re right,” I said to her then. “I never had any friends, not really. I never wanted to pay too much attention to anyone, because what if that meant Lamb would stop paying attention to me? But I know that’s not how parents work. That’s not how you lose them.”

  “You can lose them all sorts of ways,” she said distractedly, her attention still absorbed by the television. When the show ended, Penny handed me the remote—her good humor, unlike my own, always so easily restored. I flipped through channels while Penny stood up and disappeared into the other room. I knew she would return with a board game, a deck of cards, one of the magazines she was always browsing through, the book of magic tricks we had checked out from the library the day before. She emerged a few minutes later carrying a slender box, one of the thousand-piece puzzles she’d purchased from the thrift. I groaned at the sight of it. We had already spent three sweltering afternoons trying to finish the last one she’d bought, only to discover a quarter of the pieces were missing. Still, when she turned one of the boxes over on the floor, I climbed down from the couch to sit beside her, studying Florence’s romantic cityscape portrayed on the lid. I had little patience for the task, I could never manage to assemble more than a single uniform corner of sky before losing interest. Only Penny had the scrupulous eye of an architect, the ability to see, by handling only a few obscure pieces, how to forge the path toward a viable, coherent world. I envied her this, but I could begrudge her nothing.

  “You definitely need a guard dog,” I said. “What if someone broke in and stole your puzzles?”

  She arched an eyebrow in my direction.

  “I am getting a dog,” she said. “And I’m making you come with me.”

  “Oh, fine,” I said. And because I had already hurt her feelings, I skipped the obligatory jokes about Carr, our townie disdain for any CDP whose desolation surpassed Pomoc’s own. Nor did I mention the strange, nebulous feeling that had begun to surround us, which I couldn’t yet begin to parse. The night before, alone in my bedroom, I felt it creeping in as I tried to fall asleep—a bleak, overwhelming sadness; despair—but the next morning I woke up and forced myself downstairs. I made omelets for the dogs. I let them out in the backyard, stepping barefoot off the porch onto dew-dampened earth, winding up a tennis ball for them to catch. So many things seemed to be floating by the edges of that summer; I felt them brushing past. I had yet to ask Penny about her own mother, the pot of flowers on her landing, her greatest living fear. There would still be time to ask tomorrow. We would walk through this summer side by side. We would blossom, we would swagger. Everything, I knew, would be fine.

  22

  The next day the heat broke, and there were no new brush fires on the mountain. The dogs remained on the porch through dusk, licking the fading smell of soot from their coats and paws. I remained poised for a gentle rain to wash away the dust that lingered, the shower that would leave the desert as soft and open as a peach. I woke up in the middle of the night, clammy with perspiration. I climbed out of bed to turn on the lamp, pulling down my damp underwear, expecting to find it soaked with blood. Yet nothing bodily had changed. I was only sweating again, a heat that came seemingly from nowhere and built steadily along the base of my spine.

  Somewhere in the night, Eric was driving down the highway out of town, heading toward Golan’s Texaco. Here was a sandpapered boy from the cornfields of Illinois who had formed a crush on a beautiful waitress he would never have. Maybe he had spoken to her before; maybe she had turned him down. Maybe he never tried. Who knew better than I, how a lonely mind could construct invisible towers, how quickly they could fall? A boy who can’t get the girl he wants drives to the whore place and uses another. I imagined their fucking: a painted face used hard against his truck’s back fender for fifteen minutes. I stripped off my clothes and the sheets from the mattress, bundling them into a pile in the corner of the room.

  There would be no simple way to bring it all up with Penny. It had to be done with patience: the finesse required to dig splinters from Wolf’s swollen paws, dodging his bared teeth, the instinctive animal wisdom of self-protection. Talks like this could lengthen into long labyrinths of theory and conjecture; they were like cake between girls, something to savor.

  I grabbed a clean T-shirt and went down the hall to the bathroom, taking a quick shower in the dark. On the way back to my room I paused in the hall. There was a thin bar of light coming from underneath Lamb’s bedroom door, a tacky, wet cough that no longer bore any similarity to the habitual throat-clearing I used to know. He had been avoiding me, securing himself behind books and buttoned collars, his cinched belt, his age-worn brash. In the quiet of night, the truth was laid bare. Before I could change my mind I crossed the hall to his bedroom door and turned the knob.

  Lamb was propped up in bed by a cluster of pillows, his nightshirt baggy around his winnowing frame. His features, behind his wire-rimmed glasses, appeared hawkish in the lamplight. There was a book lying open on the mattress beside him, a prop meant to divert attention from his resting. He peered at me over his spectacles, all at once an old man. We said nothing to each other. I walked past him into his bathroom, bracing against the possibility of more blood in the sink. But there was no blood now. On the bottom row of his medicine cabinet was a new box of fentanyl suckers. I brought one back to Lamb. I sat on the edge of the mattress, the sucker dangling between my fingertips like fruit too ripe to claim. But I had asked nothing of him all summer long; hadn’t I practiced wanting less? He coughed again, a rasping, guttural sound. I steeled myself against the strain of his body on the mattress.

  The less concern for Lamb I chose to display, the more comfortable Lamb seemed to feel. It would have been easier to issue a contract extolling my precise loyalties: I, Cale Lambert, do solemnly swear to avoid any emotion pertaining to your wasting. I will not be a daughter, a child, a girl. I will pretend you are not my everything. Yet in order to succeed, to leach myself of all pity, I would lose something essential. So I would double myself, I would sever: two hearts, one body. My fine twin unwrapped for Lamb his fentanyl sucker, her murky sister twisting on the wire. I will leave him if he takes it, I will pretend this isn’t real. The gloom girl materialized in secret, categorizing Lamb’s decline on the pages of a waitress pad at the diner downtown: the last time Lamb ate dinner (Thursday); Lamb’s expression toward cornflakes in a bowl (apathy); the last time Lamb set his wide, warm palm on the crown of my head (April); the freq
uency with which Lamb appeared as the person I used to know (nil).

  Amid his growing inattention, all new freedoms were mine to steal. I could escape this modest home like either of those two mothers, dead and disappeared, but all I wanted to do was stay with Lamb, Lamb, Lamb.

  My Siamese set the fentanyl on the nightstand, and walked away.

  40

  The Texaco was like any other gas station, with rows of motor oil and packaged cakes and sticky buns on display, glass refrigerators stocked with sodas and beer, cigarettes and thirty-seven varieties of chewing gum up front, the grisly bathrooms in a small stucco outhouse ten yards behind the building. The Texaco’s distinction lay in the small pancake house attached through a short hall, consisting of one flat gas griddle and a handful of cramped acrylic tables. The quality of the food was, even by trucker standards, low. Every year a rumor circulated that it would close, yet it survived on the drips of business accumulated between shadowy meetings, pickups and drop-offs, pills and girls. As a child, whenever Lamb stopped at the Texaco, I feigned a need for crackers or pop, only to pass through the aisles of candy and kneel at the glass door connecting the two businesses, trying to spy on the large, hardscrabble men who occupied the tables and the varied and listless women that came and went. Sometimes they made eye contact through the glass and smiled. Mostly they stared straight through.

  I was older now, I should have been the wiser. I arrived in the evening lull preceding the late-night surge of girls. They came after midnight, like jackrabbits and kit foxes venturing across the scrub to feed. The Texaco was their last stop of the evening, the restaurant’s tight quarters discouraging loiterers. At least the room smelled of coffee. Two men sat at a small table, their heads bent toward one another under harsh light. One of them was older, skinny with a thinning pate, dressed in a striped nylon windbreaker that it was much too warm for. The other man was big boned, caramel skinned, a hangdog face that made him appear, when he looked up, like a sorrowful witness to bygone tragedy. It could also have been the sight of me that left him disheartened: a whippet-slim girl with messy hair in jeans and a tank top, no makeup, a stitched bruise.

  I took a seat by the window and tried to imagine Penny doing the same; Penny ordering a soda, pushing her long hair out of her face, preparing to massage dull egos. After a moment the men returned to their conversation. The restaurant was too small, their murmurs floated by. I could have tried to make out what they were saying, but I was distracted, imagining the type of man who would pick up a girl the same way he picked up a tube of toothpaste or a cup of coffee, the inconsequence paid to trivial objects. Eventually the regular waitress, an immortal spirit in a hairnet and flesh-colored compression hose, stopped by with her pad. I ordered a Coke. When she brought it, I sucked it down so fast I felt my brain freeze, then asked for another. I had no distinct plan, no clever strategy. That’s all Lamb said. I don’t think she has any kind of plan. It seemed too late to acknowledge this new understanding of myself, feeble in a way Penny would never be. When the girls came, I would ask them how often they saw her, the last time Penny was here, who she might have left with. The caffeine was constricting my attention to pinpricks. At the other table, the men finished their meal and rose to stand. They dug in their pockets for crumpled bills and littered them across the table. As they passed by, the man with the hangdog face slowed, trailing a beefy hand on the back of the opposite chair.

  “You waiting for someone?”

  I kept my eyes down and drew a heart in the condensation on my glass, the side they couldn’t see.

  “No,” I said.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before. How about you?” The man turned to his companion before retraining his attention on me. “Why don’t you come with us?”

  “I’m fine here.” I tried a smile, and felt it falter.

  “Are you?” When I didn’t move, “You know what happens when you get picky?”

  I looked up then, examining the scruff on his cheeks, the fold of skin underneath his chin, his cheerless expression. If this man had ever tried to pick up Penny, I wanted a sign, some divine clairvoyance. But how would I know who Penny might choose to leave with, when the entire reason I was here was that I didn’t know Penny at all? He set a heavy hand flat on the table, a thick, strong hand capable of breaking a glass, an arm, a person. He wanted me to know.

  “You skip meals,” he said. “You don’t eat.”

  I looked up at him. “Maybe I’d rather starve.”

  Big Bones looked, briefly, murderous. The skinny man, working a toothpick in his mouth, pulled on his friend’s shoulder. “Forget her,” he told him. After a beat, his friend relented, turning away. I watched them go, listening to their heavy footsteps fade through the short hall into the Texaco. A minute later they were outside, their voices low through the glass.

  Somewhat cheered, I ordered a stack of pancakes to keep the hairnet waitress at bay, but when they arrived I watched the pendant of butter melt on their surface. Sometime later, a pair of burly truckers came in and took seats by the window, skimming their attention over my table. It was impossible to know if they were the ones I needed to talk to, the vague, formless enigma who would know where Penny had gone.

  “Something wrong with the food?” This voice was familiar. I twisted around in my seat to find Fischer standing there, holding himself stiff, his anger palpable. The truckers glanced over, too, trying to gauge Fischer’s purpose. In his jeans and collared shirt, he could have been anyone: a boss, a father, a spurned date. He came around the table and took the empty seat without asking, motioning to the old waitress. When she came by, he handed her a folded twenty.

  “Eat up,” he said to me. “Because you’re leaving now.”

  “You can’t do that. You can’t make me leave.”

  He flashed a thin smile. He was Ava’s daddy no longer, the jovial cop playing a classroom of innocents. “Where do I begin?” Fischer asked. “Should I explain to you all the things I can make you do?”

  “I’m free to eat wherever I please.”

  “Yet you’re not touching your food.”

  “Maybe I’m working up an appetite.”

  “There’s an officer parked outside by the back fence. He’s not in his station car, so you might have missed him when you came in, unless you knew where to look. He’s been watching you sit at this window for the past hour. Neither one of us can figure out why you’re here.”

  My mouth felt dry. I resisted the urge to reach for my soda. “What’s he doing watching me? Shouldn’t he be looking for Penny?”

  “He isn’t here for you. He’s on patrol. This place gets busy at night, a certain type of crowd. But you knew that. From what I’ve heard, your friend was a regular.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “A better question is, why didn’t you? You say your friend vanished into thin air. You didn’t think to mention how she makes her money?”

  Vanished. It was worse than missing, a word retaining the feel of something temporarily mislaid—a shoe, a lock—an object soon to be rediscovered.

  “She’s a waitress,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Before Lamb was a manager at the ice plant, he’d drive up to Washoe every weekend with the guys. They painted houses, remodeled bathrooms.” I tried one of Penny’s careless shrugs, a roll of one shoulder, like working back a kink. “It’s called supplementing your income.”

  The truckers were staring openly now. Fischer, too. I was having difficulty meeting his eyes. I dropped my attention to his mouth, the creases on either side that must have come from laughter, the repetition of it, though I could hardly imagine it now. The heavy, swollen center of his lower lip like a drop of milk not yet wiped away.

  “The problem with opening yourself up to risk,” Fischer said quietly, “is that it’s impossible to know what kind of trouble you’re inviting until it’s too la
te. Your friend had to know that. You ought to, too. You’re doing the same thing, just by coming here.”

  “You’re saying she made her bed.”

  “No. I didn’t say that.”

  I glanced over at the truckers, who looked away. What I wanted to say, but didn’t know how—who decided these rules in the first place, the kind of danger risk must follow?

  “I have to know she’s okay.”

  He sat back in his chair. I could feel his eyes roving over my face, my bruise, the doctor’s knotted stitches poking from my brow. The waitress returned with Fischer’s change and left it on the table. He laid his hand over the money but stopped short of collecting it.

  “I want you to promise me you won’t come here again,” he said. “You won’t interfere. Can we make a deal? And I’ll do everything I can to find her.”

  “You’re supposed to be doing that anyway.”

  “I’m making you a promise.”

  “Why?”

  “You think I do this for my health? Let’s say you’re right—your friend didn’t skip town. I prefer one missing girl to two.”

  I felt tired then, weary. A part of me wanted to be transported back to the hospital and Lamb. I didn’t believe Penny would just skip town. But she had probably done all sorts of things she’d never bothered to tell me, things I hadn’t known to ask. The clock on the wall read ten to midnight. Soon the girls would come. Fischer stood up, tucking the change in his wallet, replacing his chair. He motioned for me to follow. “Come on.”

  “No.”

  “Cale.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  Fischer came around the table and leaned so close I could smell the cedarwood on his skin, a muted but distinct soap. The scent would be there in the creases of his arms, the panel of cotton lying flush across his chest, the island-shaped nook behind his ear. He was close enough that when he spoke I could feel his breath on my cheek. He laid a warm, wide hand on the back of my shoulder, rubbed his thumb up and down the base of my neck. My ears flushed red, a white-hot feeling shooting straight down to my gut. The men at the other table were staring again.