A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  A nurse jostled me toward the door, pushing me into the hall. I grabbed for the door as another nurse rushed in, shrinking from her petite features drawn tight and angry. “Go to the waiting room,” she snapped. “Don’t come in here.”

  How much more did I really need to see? I wanted them to take the broken parts of Lamb and give him back to me whole. I let the door close and stood alone in the empty hall.

  48

  After I hung up with Fischer I turned off all the lights in the diner and let myself out. The heat was like Vaseline, sticky and close. I was locking the door when I heard a sound behind me. I could just make out the thin shape of a woman smoking a cigarette in the corner of the porch, her figure illuminated by Christmas lights. If I hadn’t seen Flaca in exactly the same spot so many evenings in a row, waiting for Penny, I wouldn’t have recognized her now.

  “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

  She brought the cigarette to her lips and took a drag.

  “Flaca!”

  “Come with me,” she said, “if you’re looking for her.”

  “You don’t know where she is.”

  “I know where she isn’t.” Flaca dropped her cigarette on the porch and crushed it out. I watch her bend down to pick up the butt. Instead she yanked the Christmas lights, plunging us into darkness. When my vision cleared she was standing closer than before, her features obscured in shadow. I felt her hand groping for my arm, squeezing tight. This close I could smell alcohol on her breath, but her grip was sharp. She had drunk just enough to lubricate herself for whatever she meant to say or do.

  “You were supposed to help me,” I said. “What did the sheriff say? Christina Cruz. Hasn’t seen your friend and has no idea where she might be.”

  “I already told you. No cops. You want to be Sherlock Nerd, come with me.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Why not? You’d go anywhere with her.”

  “I actually like her!”

  Flaca dropped my arm. For a moment I was certain she would leave. Then she said, “She told me all about it, Cale.”

  I felt my heart beat faster. “All about what?”

  “She told me about Carr.” She sighed, suddenly weary. “What did you think?”

  “I asked you if you heard from her that night. You lied to me.”

  “Maybe I wanted to see if you would tell me yourself.”

  “Why would I!” I paused. “What did she say?”

  She smiled. “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”

  “Flaca. The longer she’s gone—”

  “What? The more dead she gets? She either is or she isn’t.”

  I brushed past her down the stairs, but I heard her following behind. Of course Penny told Flaca what happened. They had always been close; Flaca would always know Penny in a way I never could. Still, I had felt certain that Penny had been changing, growing into someone else. Yet if Penny was really gone, then all the girls we had been, or could have been, were gone, too.

  “Come on!” Flaca called after me. “What else are you going to do?”

  I had reached my truck in the back of the lot. Flaca had parked her beat-up gold hatchback next to it. What had Penny called this car? A deathtrap.

  “What else am I going to do?” Flaca said behind me. When I turned around, she had stopped a couple feet away. “Do you know, since Penny’s been gone, the thing I’ve felt most is bored? There’s not one fucking person in this town even a little bit interesting.”

  “That’s not true. What about Luz, and—”

  “Lifeless! Penny was a disaster but at least she was always fun. At least until she started hanging out with you.”

  I couldn’t make out her features clearly in the dark, why she kept using Penny’s name in the past tense, Penny as a was. She had been gone only a week—or was it two?—but it felt longer, a lifetime.

  “A few weeks ago she asked me to do her this favor,” Flaca said. “You know Penny doesn’t do that? She suggests things. She bosses people, which I taught her. But she asked me a favor. I put it off. Now she’s gone, and I feel like shit that I never did it. I don’t want to go by myself.”

  “Where?” I wished I could see her better, but even in the dark, I could feel her frustration. Penny, not the only one uncomfortable asking for help. Flaca didn’t answer.

  “Are you going to be a jerk the whole time?”

  “No.” Flaca said. “Maybe.” After a minute, “I’ll think about it. Just get in the car, Cale.”

  I did think about it, but eventually I walked the long way around the hood to wait for Flaca to climb in, sliding across to pop the lock. I bent into the deathtrap’s low seat, trying to avoid crunching the soda cans underfoot. In the reflection of the headlights, Flaca’s skin looked wan, as if she hadn’t slept in days. She looked older than Penny. For all I knew, she was.

  She patted around the console for a lighter and pulled a joint out of a hard pack of cigarettes and lit up, the skunky scent filling the car.

  “What about Lourdes?” I asked her.

  She rolled down her window and blew a supple coil of smoke, passing the joint to me.

  “Got a kid now,” she said. “Very annoying.”

  I sucked in too fast, as if the joint were a portal I might jump through to travel back in time, to find the precise moment when, as children ourselves, one of us might have offered the other a crayon or a push on the swings, some gesture that might have landed us here as something more like friends.

  Flaca pulled out of the lot and headed down Main Street. For the first time, Pomoc felt unrecognizable, the road a long black strip with no sign of life in either direction. How different was Pomoc from Carr, really? I had no idea where we were headed, but if we never returned, there’d be no one left to notice I was missing. They would find out days later, when the dogs began to howl.

  I handed Flaca back her joint. “Tell me,” I said.

  Flaca took another hit and held it for a moment before exhaling smoke through her nose. “I called her late Thursday afternoon and left a message. She must have still been with you. I wanted her to do a drop at the Tex. By the time she called back it must have been three, four in the morning. She knew I’d be awake; I never sleep. She sounded . . . bad. Said you guys went to Carr and some guy lit upon you when you were leaving.”

  I picked out the joint from between her fingers and took another hit to steady my nerves. “Is that it?”

  “She said he grabbed you.” Flaca looked over from the road. “Is that true?”

  “Did Penny go to the Texaco?”

  “No, that’s what I’m saying. She wouldn’t. She sounded upset.”

  “Could you tell if someone was with her?”

  “No. Who would she have been with?” Flaca glanced over again, her attention diverted from the road. She was speeding now, heading toward the palo. Was this how Penny felt when I was careening through the desert, she stuck in the passenger seat next to me? Not entirely sure that the driver wouldn’t kill her. We passed the thrift store, the drugstore, the windows dark, shuttered against the night.

  “Flaca, the road.”

  “I got it.” She wanted to ask me a second time, I knew. She said he grabbed you. Is that true? What would I have said? Yes. It is true. It can never be undone.

  “I thought she just didn’t want to do the drop,” Flaca said. “But it sounded like maybe she didn’t want to drop anymore, ever.”

  “Would that be such a big deal?”

  “Are you kidding?” Flaca slit her eyes over to me. “She was making good money.”

  “Maybe the money didn’t matter to her anymore.”

  Flaca snorted. “The money always matters,” she said. “And she was saving for something. Penny—nunca es suficiente. She always wanted something.”

  “That’s not tru
e,” I said. Penny never spoke of things, clothes, possessions. Despite the attention she always paid to her appearance, she shopped for her clothes at the thrift—like everyone else—she just put them together better than anyone could. And she had managed to save all that money rolled up in the coffee can. But maybe what Flaca meant was that Penny wanted something more, something intangible. Hadn’t she suggested the same?

  We were in the heart of the palo now, passing strips of familiar businesses and buildings turned vacant, a discount store, a dry cleaner gone bust. As we passed the panadería Flaca didn’t even look up. Her mood seemed to be improving from the diner, the pot taking effect. I felt nothing. A few miles down the road she turned left, away from the Crossroads. We drove so long I thought about reclining the seat, but the minute I felt my eyes beginning to close, she veered off onto a dirt road and I clenched my hands around the seat, the tires bumping over rocky earth. I checked the side mirrors, expecting to find the zombie sneaking up behind. How easily the 4x4 would run us down! But there was no monstrous sound, no suped-up colossus lurking in the shadows, though in an instant I was transported there again; the sandman’s indecipherable hollering, the flash of his pale hand gesturing in the window as he drove by. I tried steadying myself. Flaca was watching me again.

  “Were you mad Penny didn’t want to do the drop?” I asked.

  “Not mad enough to kill her, if that’s what you’re getting at.” Her eyebrows knotted in the backlight.

  “Of course not,” I said. But I wouldn’t be as naïve as Flaca thought I was. I forced myself to consider it.

  Flaca cut speed and we turned into an undeveloped plot, a singlewide mobile home parked next to a large truck. A sweep of Flaca’s headlights across the cab illuminated the hunter-green logo of a pine tree on the door. Your father runs the nursery in Noe.

  “He’s always hated me,” Flaca said, turning off the engine, the small car shuddering from the effort. “So you’re going to have to ask the questions.”

  “Wait. What questions? Flaca?”

  She was already getting out of the car. I followed her, hanging back as she climbed the steps and rapped on the flimsy front door. Before I had a chance to press her, the door cracked open and a chubby girl poked her head outside, her long black hair split into two braids. She could not have been older than ten or twelve, her features still soft, prepubescent. The heavy eyes were familiar, but where Penny had always been fit, mean in her lines and the economy of her movement, this girl moved slowly. She let out little puffs of breath from an open mouth. Penny’s little sister? Adorable but inept. Her name something I had never been told.

  “Guapa,” Flaca said, “¿dónde está tu padre?”

  “Aquí.” The girl hesitated, her enormous eyes trained on me. I tried to say something, anything, but the longer I stared at her, the more unsettling her resemblance to Penny became. She grabbed Flaca with both hands, pulling her inside. Penny’s father might have hated her, but the girl liked Flaca just fine.

  “¿Quién es esta?” the girl asked, loud enough for me to hear. I let the door shut behind us. The room was an icebox, a large window unit blasting cold air with a clattering hum, bare walls made close quarters by several large stacks of boxes behind the long couch, another in a corner partially covered by an old sheet, the exposed cardboard sagging with age and the weight of its contents. An older man sat on the couch looking as if he had been waiting for someone to arrive, his age an indistinct figure between forty and sixty, impossible to pinpoint on the fleshy, broad planes of his face. Though his features had none of Penny’s classic symmetry, I knew he must be her father. I scanned the room for whatever might have been holding his attention before we came in, but there was no TV, no book discarded on the couch. I had the feeling he could have been sitting in the exact same spot for five minutes or five years. The girl broke away from us and crawled up on the couch by her father, settling herself against his bulk.

  “She asked you a question,” the man said. His voice was resonant and firm. I had no trouble imagining it booming across a room. He turned to the girl, laying her bare cheek against his arm, and nudged her with his shoulder. “Again.”

  “¿Quién es esta?”

  “A friend of Penny’s,” Flaca said, and I could tell whatever uplifting effect the pot had on her was suffering in this man’s presence. Her voice shrank into something small. I felt a wild, desperate desire for Lamb’s tall and steady presence, the checkered shirts I grabbed on to as a child whenever I felt shy or scared. The ease of being able to hide behind someone bigger who had always kept me safe.

  “Cale,” Flaca said, “meet Alvaro.”

  39

  I rode the hospital elevator downstairs to the wide, dingy emergency room, the air-conditioning pumping in sweet, cold air. There were no mothers now, only more broken men. A beefy man in a soiled T-shirt held a blood-soaked handkerchief to the top of his head. A wan teenager expectorated into a handkerchief. In the far corner of the waiting room a weary, sunburned father allowed a young boy to lean drowsily against his arm. I watched the father and son until it got too cold, and then I walked outside into another torpid night, no hint of a breeze. A group of smokers was huddled in plain view of a no-smoking placard nailed to the stucco. I stood a few feet away and bent my face to the sky. Pinned underneath the sandman, the stars had seemed like shimmering flares winking code, astrological talismans capable of granting mercy. I wanted to visit them again, to ask what they had seen. I heard someone approaching and turned to find a vaguely familiar face: a tan boy no older than twenty, a black bandanna tying back riotous dark curls. He had broken away from the group of smokers and held out a single cigarette in offering. I took it, leaning in to share his light.

  “I remembered you smoked,” he said, and the longer I studied him the clearer his features became. A couple years older in school, friendly with the goths but too sociable to commit. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why he was here, but I stopped short, lest he feel compelled to return the favor. He tilted his head up to the sky, where I had been looking.

  “Do you know any constellations?” he asked.

  “Not really. Do you?”

  “All of them. But sometimes it’s better if you just look.” He dropped his gaze earthward and smiled. We smoked in companionable silence, his friends sending occasional furtive glances our way.

  “How did you learn?”

  “You know Mr. Rowlands?”

  “The science teacher?”

  His smile widened. “He’s my uncle.”

  He finished his cigarette and threw the butt on the ground. A petite girl from his circle was glaring at me across the distance, twirling her parrot green hair. His girlfriend, I assumed, seeking reassurance, a signal that I knew what wasn’t mine to take. But any desire I had to bend, to comfort, evaporated more each day.

  “We’re heading out,” he said. “Are you staying?”

  “I don’t want to. I mean, I came in an ambulance. Are you heading back to town?”

  “Yeah. You need a ride? Where do you live, exactly?”

  I smiled, hoping it was enough of an answer. I felt the way Penny must have that first night she slept over. I don’t want to be dropped off anywhere. He signaled to his girlfriend and she broke away from the pack, scowling as she came near.

  “This is Leslie,” he said, introducing her to me. Then, to my surprise, “This is Cale, from Vista. We’re giving her a ride home.”

  I followed them through the parking lot to a charcoal two-door, the bumper covered in band decals. I climbed into the back seat. The girl leaned over and turned on the stereo to a trippy synth beat on loop. I could see them clearly now, they were ravers, not goths at all. But what were any of us, really? Once we were on the highway, the girl rolled down her window. The rush of air melted into the music, creating a soundtrack of white noise discouraging deep thought. The boy in the bandanna drove t
oo fast. I found his eyes in the rearview.

  “Drop me at the Texaco,” I said.

  42

  We slept in Lamb’s room, where the dogs most wanted to be. We piled on top of one another on the mattress in a heap of flesh and fur. Every now and again one of the dogs sighed and stirred, readjusting itself against an arm or a leg. Each snuffle, an inquiry: Lamb? Lamb? Lamb? A question I didn’t know how to answer. I smoothed Trixie’s soft ears and cupped her leathery paw in one hand. All of us, looking for comfort.

  I woke to some sound—the foundation settling, a creak of the floorboards. I sat up in bed and listened for it, everything coming back at once; Lamb in the hospital, Penny gone. I forced myself to get up and walk to the bathroom, to peel off the shirt I had slept in. I stood under the shower’s hot spray until the marbled window began to grow light. I toweled off and cracked the door, the house already growing warm. When the steam began to lift, a narrow, clean girl transpired by degrees, taking shape in the mirror. I leaned in to examine the pattern of discoloration marking the side of her face. At some point without my noticing, the bruising had begun to patch apart like the stippled, varied flesh of an Anjou pear. I rummaged through the medicine cabinet for a pair of cuticle scissors and pointed tweezers, snipping the sutures in my brow, tugging the stitches free. In my palm, the short, slimy threads looked like excised parasites, the rejoined flesh a tender pink ridge.

  Finally, something beginning to heal.

  47

  The person I wanted to see most was Clara, lone, enigmatic Clara. When I arrived for my shift at the diner she was taking an order by the window, and the way the afternoon light hit her platinum hair and thin arms and legs, they filled up with light. I wanted to tell Penny, We have mistaken her all this time. She was a witch, or an angel. She headed to the counter carrying a stack of dirty plates and cups, and when she saw me standing with my apron dangling by the hand, she slowed, the expression on her face reminding me of one of the nurses in Lamb’s hospital room. I had become something people were frightened to look upon.