by Deb Caletti
For the last three summers I’ve worked at Johnson’s Nursery. Libby Wilson, who bought the nursery from the retired Johnson couple about five years ago, was an old friend of my mom’s. Libby’s father and Mom’s father both worked at the same accounting firm when they were growing up, and Libby was one of the few people around who could contribute her own memories of my mother’s parents, one of whom died when I was a baby, the other when I was two. Libby wore leather sandals and dresses with beads sewn on and had those kind of eyes that looked at you long and hard and made you feel like she knew things. She was one of my favorite people. If you saw the way she examined the underside of a leaf with her strong, kindly hands, you would understand why.
I really liked working at Johnson’s Nursery. I liked transporting the seedlings from the steamy greenhouse to the big world. There were the flowers with their tender shoots, newly brave, as well as the vegetable starts, which seemed small and hardy and sure as little kids showing you their muscles. I liked unloading the shipments of phlox and impatiens, stinky geraniums and Chinese lanterns. I liked the heavy, floppy bags of peat moss and the sneezy smell of bark; losing myself in the rows of fruit trees and garden trellises; and turning the squeaky faucet handles of the overhead sprinklers, a complicated maze of thin iron pipe. I liked the customers with dirt under their fingernails and serious, satisfied expressions and humble questions of where to find the bonsai, the prickly pear cacti, the gourd seeds, the cure for an ailing magnolia.
That summer when school finally let out, I also liked being a two-minute walk from Travis Becker’s house.
The next time I saw him after our first motorcycle ride, he was there on the lawn in the same place, as if he were waiting for me, as if he knew I would be coming back to him.
“Hello again,” he said
“Hey. My favorite pathetic rich boy.” I didn’t even know who was talking. I was like one of those annoying kid toys that spoke when you pulled a string.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.
A feeling rose up, beginning from my toes. Thrill. “I haven’t thought of you at all,” I said. Then I pulled the necklace out from my shirt and showed him. God, I felt powerful. I never felt that kind of power before. I understood why people liked it so much.
Travis stepped toward me. He combed his fingers through my hair, stopped his hand at the back of my neck and pulled me to him. He kissed me, hard. He sure was good at that.
“Let’s ride,” he said. His mouth was shiny from the kiss.
I got on behind him. When he accelerated this time, I put my cheek to his back and closed my eyes. I breathed deeply, imagined waves going in and out. The roar of the ocean was what I heard, I told myself. It was not wind that could send me flying, my body scraping to pieces along the asphalt, not the mechanical ugliness of an engine recklessly pushed to its limits. When we slowed, Travis reached behind him, rubbed his hand up and down my leg. It was a gentle touch. It felt like care and tenderness. But I might have been wrong.
I saw him every day after that, when I walked home from my job at Johnson’s Nursery. He was usually outside, waiting for me—waiting for me!—or working on his motorcycle. We would just go for a ride, lie on that long, rolling grass, and talk. The first time I saw his friends there I started to walk on, but Travis yelled my way.
“What, are you ignoring me now?” he said. When I joined them, Travis whispered into my hair, “You should at least know my friends.” He introduced me to Seth, a guy with gaunt smoker’s cheeks who was trying to pretend that he didn’t care about anything, and a girl named Courtney, blond, big hoop earrings and a shirt so small it could have fit a Barbie.
“Speaking of ignore,” Courtney said. She put her hands on her hips.
“Oh, man,” Seth muttered.
“Lover’s quarrel coming,” Travis said to me.
“He’s been giving me the cold shoulder ever since I wouldn’t kiss him because I had just put my lip gloss on.”
“Am not,” Seth said.
“He has. He’s been barely speaking to me. I mean, I just put my lip gloss on.” She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “God. Can you believe it?” She ran her hand down the length of her hair, fussed at the ends of it with her fingers.
“Uh uh,” Seth said. Seth was a real conversationalist.
I shook my head as if Seth, the ghost figure, had just committed first-degree murder.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to kiss her with that slimy shit on,” Travis Becker said. “Might as well kiss a slab of raw fish.”
“Tastes like candle wax,” Seth said. To his credit, it was almost a full sentence.
“Right. And then what happens when we don’t look good.” Courtney gathered up her hair and let it fall again. Then she tucked a bit behind one ear.
“These two never stop fighting,” Travis said.
“We do too,” Courtney said. “We didn’t argue at all last night. We were trying to decide on our song. I was looking on MusicMadness.com. I really wanted ‘She’s Everything,’ but Seth wanted ‘Love Doesn’t Die.’”
“Like hell,” Seth said.
“Or ‘Billy Doesn’t Walk Here Anymore,’ which is just stupid. It’s not even a love song. It’s about a guy who gets shot, for God’s sake.”
“Good song,” Seth said.
Courtney rolled her eyes. “Do you guys have your song? Go look on MusicMadness.com.” I knew this was stupid, looking for a song in the same way you might look for the best buy on car insurance. But I had another feeling, too. A little jolt of happiness that Courtney had assumed we were a couple. A little jolt of happiness that Travis Becker did not correct her.
There was a musical beeping. “My cell,” Courtney said. She reached around to her hip pocket, where a little pink holder was attached. She took out this tiny phone, popped it to her ear. “Courtney,” she sang. She held her hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s Brandon for you,” she said to Seth. “Call him on his own line,” she said back into the phone. She hung up on Brandon, whoever he was, tucked the phone back into the pink holder on her hip. It had the unintended effect of reminding me of a law enforcement officer finishing up his job at the scene of a crime; notebook back in pocket.
“What did you do that for?” Seth said. Another phone started ringing. This time from the direction of a convertible sports car in the driveway. The license plate said MOMZ TOY.
“Let him call your cell. I hate everyone always calling on my cell.”
Seth jogged to the car, swearing. Courtney followed him. “We gotta go meet Brandon anyway,” she said.
I was glad they were leaving. I suddenly felt exhausted. When the people I knew spoke of cells, they usually were referring to the microscopic beings.
Travis walked them to the car. Seth started the engine, but I could still hear Courtney, even from where I stood. “Your friend sure is quiet,” she said.
Here was the strange thing. I didn’t desperately want to disintegrate on the spot, to disappear instantly from the shamed bucket of water thrown over the top of me. For some reason, this time I didn’t feel any of those things. Instead I remembered my mother and Fowler talking one night, ranting, really, about a class full of Courtneys that came into the library that day. The lights of the library were dimmed, the doors locked for the night. Mom’s purse sat on one chair, looking as if it were patiently waiting to leave. The surrounding quiet made me want to raise my fingers to my lips and shush their raised voices.
“Media monsters with junior platinum credit cards,” my mother said.
“With parents who say yes to it all so they don’t have to be bothered. Or trying to hang on to their own fleeting coolness through the kid. I saw this guy the other day with a BMW whose cell phone tinkled Pink Floyd’s The Wall. We don’t need no ed-u-cation played in goddamn tinkly bells. It’s over, man.”
“Anyone who spends a lot of time in a shopping mall is out to get someone, that’s all I know,” Mom said.
“Shallowness,” Fowler
said, “is a disease.”
I watched Courtney in the passenger’s seat of Momz Toy. She was a cotton-candy person, wearing a cell phone in a pink case on her butt, and earrings a small kid could hula hoop in, and she believed that even love was something you could manufacture and purchase with no money down and no interest for a year. Travis walked back toward me. I started to turn away. I wanted to go home. Too much cotton candy made me sick, and I was hit with the fact that these were not my people, and this was not my place. I didn’t belong with a person who could afford gold-plated Jockeys. I like science cells. I had so much wanted to be behind those gates, but now it was like the time we went to Disneyland when I was small and the boat had gotten stuck on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. They had to turn on the lights. Zap, magic gone. If shallowness was a disease, then it was probably contagious and Travis had it too.
Travis came toward me, put his arms around my waist. I pulled back from him. And then Travis Becker said the one thing that could make a difference. “I’m glad you’re not like her,” he said.
With that, I would have done anything for him. I did do anything for him.
“I’ve got a special place to take you to today,” he said not long after.
I got on the back of his bike and we rode through town, got on the highway until we reached the exit for Snoqualmie Falls. It was a beautiful day to see the falls, one of those days that shows off the Northwest in the best light, when the greens are so bright they hurt your eyes and everything looks clean and new. The falls, higher than Niagra, thunder down into a pool of misty white, and a lodge sits at their very edge, surrounded by firs and sheer rock. But we weren’t going to see the falls themselves. Travis passed by the parking lot for the lookout, took a back road that curved to the other side of the Snoqualmie River. A pair of railroad tracks snaked alongside the riverbank. When Travis shut off his motorcycle you could hear the thunder of the falls, and just see their frothy white top.
“Is this a behind-the-scenes look?” I said.
“Oh, no. Believe me, you’ll be right up close.” Travis pointed down the empty railroad tracks.
“No trains come here. There haven’t been trains here for a thousand years,” I said. At least that’s what it looked like. Weeds grew all around the tracks. Tall, dry grass grew between the railroad ties.
“Look for the light,” Travis said. “Watch for it. And listen. You’ll hear it before you see it. Let’s walk.”
I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe any train would come down those old tracks, or maybe it did once every decade. And I didn’t believe he’d be walking around here if trains did come regularly. The motorcycle was one thing, but train tracks, with their steep bank on one side and a hill on the other, were another.
We held hands, walked for a while. I balanced on the rails, one arm on Travis’ shoulder, the other out straight for balance. Travis described the food at the fancy lodge restaurant. “Lobster bisque,” he said. “Oh, God, it’s fantastic. You’d love it. I gotta take you sometime. Roasted saddle of fallow venison. Amazing.”
“Sounds like something you’d eat only if your emergency rations had been depleted,” I said.
He ignored me. “And the breakfast. Of course you know it’s world famous.”
“Oh, of course, dahling,” I said.
“Wait,” he said.
“What?”
“Listen.”
I stopped.
“It’s coming,” he said.
“Very funny,” I said.
Travis held my waist and smiled.
“What a joker,” I said. “Ha ha.”
He put his finger to my lips.
“God, Travis!” He was right. A train was coming. I could hear it. The rhythmic, heavy pumping. Louder. Louder still. “Move, Travis!”
He held my waist as I tried to pull away.
“Tell me when you see the light.”
“Oh, God, Travis. Oh, God, let me go. Let me go! I see it! Shit!”
He grabbed me, basically threw me to the bank by the side of the tracks. The ground was shaking under me. The noise was thunderous. I’ve never heard anything so loud. A huge tunnel of wind blew my hair into my mouth; the air clattered and shook and sounded like it was exploding. My fingers dug into the ground, holding on, clutching dirt and gravel.
“Open your eyes,” Travis shouted.
“Oh, my God.” I breathed.
“Open them!” Travis said. He was half lying on me. I opened my eyes. The train was behind my head. I could see it there, upside-down. The wheels turning so fast, the underneath of the train, the narrow slice of open air that was the hill and ground on the other side of the train. Travis held me against the clatter and rumbling. Rocks were literally jumping under my back. Finally the train passed. I turned my head where I lay, watched the metal railing of the caboose get smaller and smaller. I hoped I was still alive, but I wasn’t sure.
Travis looked down at me. “Ruby,” he said. I’d never heard anyone say my name like that before. He took my hand, held it against his heart. He put his own hand on mine. “Do you feel that?” he said. “Feel? They’re beating together. They’re beating in time.”
I was fearless, because that’s what he wanted me to be. Maybe it was better to be who he thought I was than who I thought I was. Anyway, all I know is that I played my part, which was to get on the back and hold on tight through everything we did. From that day onward, we went too fast, frighteningly fast. Travis Becker may have been a little crazy. But our hearts had beat in time when the ground shook underneath us, and that was what mattered.
I started wearing that necklace all the time. It still had that bad feeling about it, that wrong feeling, but I wore it anyway. Like I said, I would do anything for Travis Becker. He dared me to stand on the white line in the middle of Cummings Road while he kissed me, and I did it, the long baarrr! of a panicked truck driver’s horn in my ears for hours after Travis had taken my hand and we had run to the side of the road to safety. The horn in my ears, my heart in my throat. He had lifted me up, and I wrapped my legs around his waist as he twirled me in circles. Oh, God! I had screamed. Ruby! he had whooped in exhilaration, my name a battle cry.
And then one day Travis Becker came into Johnson’s Nursery and challenged me to leave right then and there, to get on his bike and step away from the counter and the customer I was helping. Right as kind Libby Wilson watched with a box of vegetable seed packets in her arms. I did it. I just walked out of there. I decided I must be in love with Travis Becker. Something that horrible and wonderful had to be love, because what else could it be?
I was sure that wearing the necklace would make my mother ask questions, but this didn’t happen. I was also sure she would hear from Libby about me abandoning work that day, but this didn’t happen either. My mother, to whom I usually told everything and who noticed everything, was lost in the blue haze of grief. We avoided any talk of my father and this person now in the world who was related to Chip Jr. and me. I went one step further and avoided any thought of it. My mother seemed to have the opposite problem, the thought having moved in and taken over, same as she worried one of those musicians might. She was a figure in a thick fog, recognizable as a human form but fuzzy and appearing more distant than the physical reality.
Mom’s lack of concentration was obvious; she put her car keys in the refrigerator and made us strange, haphazard meals she didn’t eat herself—a hot dog, a bowl of yogurt, an orange on a plate. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face raw and bare in the way it gave away what she wouldn’t say. Her whole personality seemed to be on that fragile edge of near tears. I would see the light on under her door until late into the night. I didn’t want to add to her worries. My mother was one of those rare, truly good people. She still felt guilty about the one time she put her old baseball cap on one of those huge bags of dog food that was in the backseat so that she could drive in the carpool lane.
I was angry at her too. She should have been better at losing him.
She’d had enough practice.
If I were Libby Wilson, I would have told on me, but she didn’t. She only called me into her office, a small shed piled with books and paper and plant crates used as file storage, and had me sit in the big leather chair that was worn to a soft pale on the arms. Libby herself was a bit like that chair, big and worn with kindly wrinkles. As I sat there, shame crept around my insides and found a comfy spot, settling heavy in my chest.
“His face is too pretty,” Libby said.
I folded my hands in my lap. I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course she was right.
“And he wears his money like a cologne. Frankly, I don’t like the smell.” She poked her finger in the white rock of a cactus garden on her desk.
“I’m really sorry about what I did,” I said.
“Ruby . . .” She sighed. “How do I say this?” She tilted her chin up, as if the words might be up there on the ceiling. “I once ditched my mother at a chemotherapy session for a man. I’ve hated myself every day for it since. I know how these things can make you wacky. He liked enchiladas, I liked enchiladas. I hate enchiladas. You know what I mean?”
“I promise it won’t happen again.”
“To tell you the truth, there are a thousand things I want to say to you right now, but the most important is that, as you know, I never was lucky enough to have kids, but if I had a daughter I’d have wanted one like you,” she said. “So, you know. Stay true.”
For the first time since we’d met, I went straight home that day and didn’t stop to see Travis. It was almost a relief to walk home a different way, behind the nursery, the way I used to go home from school with Sydney. Libby was right. The stuff with Travis was getting bigger than me, overtaking who I was. I felt strong and clear, proud of my stride, of this passing up. I felt like a burden had been lifted. When I got home, though, and was alone for a while again, that restless summer feeling filled me and I let go of Libby’s words, sure as the string on a balloon. They drifted, like that released balloon, until they were too far to see. I regretted not stopping and seeing Travis. He gave me something I wanted, that much was clear. What I wasn’t entirely sure about was what that something was. I didn’t think having something you wanted could make you feel so bad.
