by Jessi Kirby
Instead, I stood on my tiptoes, wrapped my arms around his neck, and whispered it again. “Thank you, Wyatt, for saying that, and thank you for . . . this.” I gestured at the water behind him. “It was perfect.” His arms came around my waist and, despite the coolness of his skin, wrapped me in solid warmth. Where the general’s arms around me had communicated a respect and shared grief, Wyatt’s were comfort and compassion. And I wanted to stay like that as long as I could, because I knew that on the other side, I’d keep moving, like he had said.
I was pretty sure he knew too, because when we let go of each other, he stood there looking at me the way you look at something you wish you could have but know you really can’t. He smiled at me, sad, in the warm morning light, and we were one of those songs that talk about a missed moment or chance that you go back and think about over and over, wondering, What if?
He straightened his shoulders and shook the disappointment from his smile. “Well . . . we should maybe get back . . . before your good ol’ boy wakes up and thinks you ran off with me or something.” He held my eyes a long moment. Long enough to be an invitation.
“Wouldn’t want him to think that.” I sighed, wishing for a second I could accept. And then I just stood there. I didn’t want to move from where we were or go back to Rusty or leave here with one of those “what if” moments to wonder about down the road—literally. Instead, I took a step into Wyatt, stood once again on my tiptoes, and kissed him lightly on surprised lips that took a heartbeat to catch up. It didn’t last more than a few seconds, but when we pulled back and smiled shyly at each other, it felt a little more like a sweet conclusion than a missed chance.
That sweetness lasted even after we exchanged phone numbers, promises to keep in touch, and more than one lingering hug. It lasted right up until I ducked through the trail in the bushes between our campsites. And then it ended abruptly. Just as I saw Rusty leaning shirtless into the open hood of the Impala. He stood casually at the sound of my footsteps, and I felt myself tense up with irritation as he wiped the grease from his hands on his balled-up shirt. He eyed me a moment, then shut the hood, hard.
“Mornin’.”
He said it just like nothing. Just like he hadn’t been a total ass the night before, just like he figured I’d forgiven him and all was well. He didn’t even ask how the dive was or if I was okay. Which made me even more angry. I’d expected him to be asleep still when I got back, or maybe awake and wondering when I’d be back, feeling bad for what he’d said the night before. Instead, he was up, showered, and indifferent. I walked past him without saying anything and leaned into the driver’s side to pop the trunk.
“When’s the last time you got this thing a tune-up?” He leaned against the hood, squinting into the sun.
I ignored him and huffed back to the trunk, pulled out underwear, a tank top, and a pair of cutoffs. And socks, too, for under my boots. I didn’t want to give him anything to complain about. Then I ducked behind the open trunk and rearranged my towel so I could change beneath it.
Rusty raised his voice over the trunk. “Looks like it’s been awhile. You’re lucky nothing’s gone wrong.” His words left off, and I heard the unmistakable crunch of boots over dirt as he came back to where I was changing. “You listenin’?” I yanked my top over my head and pulled it down, lightning quick, before I dropped the towel.
“Oh.” He stopped short as I smoothed my shorts over my legs.
I rolled my eyes, then leveled them right at him. “I heard you, Rusty. And yeah, it’s probably been a while, but it’s not the car that something’s gone wrong with, it’s you.” My voice came out icy. “Actually, it’s all wrong, if you haven’t noticed. See . . . my brother’s dead. Oh, wait—you reminded me of that last night in front of everyone.” Something like confusion, or shock, spread over his face, and I stepped right up into it, strengthened by his reaction. I lowered my voice. “But. My brother, who used to be your best friend, sent me this letter and these tickets, and now I’m on this trip, which wouldn’t be so bad, except for . . . you.” He flinched, and I took a step back, losing a little of my bluster. I looked at the ground and hoped he couldn’t see that I’d gone from shaking mad to hurt left over from the night before. And now my voice faltered more than a little. “You had no right last night.”
He didn’t say anything.
“And you have no right to say anything about how I handle this. You let him go, a long time ago.” It was cruel, I knew, because no matter how it had been between them when Finn left, I knew how much Rusty cared about him before, and that wasn’t the kind of thing that just disappeared all of a sudden. But once Finn enlisted, Rusty wrote him off, and that was a complete mystery to me. Best friends don’t do that. And if he was gonna tell me how wrong it was to be here the day after we buried him, I was gonna let him know how much more wrong it was to turn your back on a person who mattered to you.
Rusty was silent. Jaw-clenched silent.
And then I was too, and we stood there fuming at each other in the middle of the desert in New Mexico, with the heat beginning to rise all around and who knows how many miles in front of us.
He gave first. Looked at the ground, cleared his throat, and nodded. Then he raised his chin and stared right at me, and I saw something I thought I recognized in the green of his eyes. Sincerity, maybe.
“I’m sorry, H. About what I said last night.” He paused. “I didn’t have any right.” I waited. First, because it sounded genuine, and second, because I wasn’t ready to forgive him yet. He looked at the car, shiny black in the morning sun, and when his eyes came back to me, it seemed like a tiny thing had shifted somehow. For a moment, anyway. Then he held his hands out to his sides in a question. “What do you want me to do? To make it up?”
That was it? I fought the urge to shake him and realized that this might actually be the best he could do. And I was worn out. And starving.
“Buy breakfast,” I said flatly. A slow, knowing smile crept over his stubbly face, and I rolled my eyes. But I dug in my bag anyway and came up with Finn’s beat-up leather key chain looped around my finger. “And then drive awhile.”
I glanced out the window as I pulled out of our spot, and a twinge of emptiness hit me as we rolled past Wyatt’s bare campsite and back onto the road. It was that same emptiness that’s there when you wake up in the middle of one of those perfect dreams you can’t get back to, no matter how hard you try. I thought of his phone number tucked away in my purse and knew I would probably never call, because that’s just what Wyatt had been. A good dream that would linger a while and eventually melt into a tiny wisp of a feeling.
9
We didn’t say much over breakfast. I asked him to pass the syrup. He asked the waitress for more coffee. The clinking-dishes-and-fork restaurant noise and chatter of summer travelers ready to hit the road filled in the background until we finished. But when we stepped out the door and headed to the Pala, there was no avoiding it. I was still tense. I’d let go of being mad at him, but I wasn’t sure how to go back to acting normal around him. Whatever that meant now. For his part, Rusty didn’t seem to notice. The parking lot was already baking, sending wobbly waves of heat up to the cloudless sky, and I tried to think of ways to avoid strained silence in the car—small talk, loud music, windows rolled down, feigned sleep . . . With him there, this was gonna be a much longer trip than if I’d taken it alone.
Rusty stopped at the hood. “You still want me to drive?”
I nodded and tossed the keys over to him. “Yeah.” I almost said something about how long it had probably been since he’d driven or even ridden in the Pala before yesterday, but I stopped short, realizing that could be a tangly path to go down.
He swung open the heavy door and ducked into the car, and I did the same. We yanked them shut, almost at the same time, then sat there a moment in the obvious quiet that followed. I searched for something to say to fill it up, because the thing that was between us now wasn’t him being a jerk or me being m
ad. It was that small space in the car, with just him and me and no Finn. We both felt it.
Rusty looked like he was about to say something, then put the key in and revved the engine instead. He turned up the radio, adjusted the mirrors, got reacquainted, then sat back and surveyed the view from behind the wheel. “It’s been a while, Pala.” He gave the dash a satisfied pat and grinned over at me, one eyebrow raised. “California? Go see what’s-hername’s concert?”
I wasn’t sure if he was mocking me or if he really meant it. “Her name’s Kyra Kelley. And you should stop acting like you don’t know who she is, since you once rode in this car to one of her concerts, then drooled the whole time she was up on the stage. And yes, going to her show is still the plan, unless you can think of something better.” I said it like I was still absolutely sure, then waited for the smart-ass comment that was sure to follow.
Rusty put his arm on the seat behind me and cranked the wheel hard as he backed out. “I can think of a helluva lot better things than that, but this is your deal and your car, so . . .” He twisted back around and put the car into drive. “You’re the boss.” With that, he laid hard into the gas, gunning us out of the parking lot and back out onto the dusty I-40 with a jump. It was kind of charming in his redneck, Rusty sort of way, and I forgot for a moment what the other side of that coin looked like.
Out the windshield, the road stretched forever in front of us, an endless strip of black dividing the cracked dirt of the desert. The sky expanded brilliant blue in every direction, and the sheer vastness of it made the morning feel full of possibility. I rolled my window down all the way and stuck an arm out into the heat, soaking it up. In about two blinks, we flew past a sign that read YOU ARE NOW LEAVING SANTA ROSA. COME AGAIN!, and as we did I heard the familiar first notes of “Wayward Son,” one of Finn’s favorite songs of all time. Also one that I used to put up a big fuss about, rolling my eyes and covering my ears. I’d thought it was the cheesiest song ever. He’d loved it for that. Rusty looked over at me with a cool smile, then nodded and cranked up the volume just in time for the chorus to open up:
“Carry on my wayward son,
there’ll be peace when you are done.”
I sat back in the seat and opened my mouth to protest, but he shook his head. “Nobody talks during ‘Wayward Son.’ Car rules.” He turned the volume up another notch.
I tried to hide it, tried to look exasperated, but it was no use. I felt a true, happy smile rise in me as Rusty sang along. He pounded a fist on the wheel to the beat, and I rolled my eyes again, even though I was about to join in. I liked this. This moment. It was one Finn would have loved, and I pictured us kicking up a billowing trail of dust as we headed out into the great wide open, in honor of him.
Easy silence settled between us as we sailed over mile after mile of flat, brown desert. It felt different in the passenger seat, with Rusty driving steady and fast. He seemed at home in Finn’s car, like he belonged there as much as me. And to tell the honest truth, he did. It was Rusty who had gone with Finn to talk its previous owner into selling it to a fifteen-year-old without a license for half the asking price. Finn had worked all summer, hauling dirt and doing whatever else at a neighbor’s ranch, and he’d decided this was the car.
It was a piece at the time, all peeling paint and torn vinyl, probably worth closer to what he had in his pocket than what the guy was asking. But when they rolled into Aunt Gina’s driveway in it, he and Rusty were kings. Kings who spent every waking moment working on that car and emerged from the garage covered in grease and boy stink.
I mostly tried to steer clear when Rusty was out there. He was the type of boy who’d either come at me with the hose on full blast or completely ignore me while he and Finn talked about Sydney Bennett, the senior girl Finn (along with the entire male population at school) loved from afar. She was a girl of myth and legend who stopped even the most cocky guys in their tracks with her long dark hair, blue eyes, and smile that was just the right combination of naughty and nice. She had perfected the art of hinting at possibility—a smile or a fleeting moment of eye contact that could keep a guy hoping for god only knew how long.
I knew all this from listening behind the half-open door between the garage and the kitchen, and I would’ve given anything to learn just how she did it. They talked about her outfits and speculated about what type of underwear she’d been wearing, if any. They proudly rehashed any little moment she gave them, whether she’d passed them in the hallway and glanced in their direction or smiled at them from the top of the cheer pyramid. Never mind that Finn and Rusty each had their fair share of football groupies who were more than happy to throw themselves pathetically at their feet. They would’ve traded any of those girls in a second for Sydney Bennett. Being sophomores, they never had a shot in hell with her, but they worked on that car like it would somehow give them one.
Once Rusty went home, I’d head out to the garage and survey their progress. I had no idea how they knew how to work on the car and was half-amazed whenever they did it right. Finn always claimed that once a guy turned thirteen, he automatically knew everything. He told me that every time I asked him how he knew how to do something, and after a while, I mostly believed him. I even thought maybe once I turned thirteen I’d know all the girl things I needed to know, like how to do a smoky eye or walk like Sydney Bennett or look at a guy and say a whole lot without saying anything. But thirteen came and went, and I was none the wiser about any of it.
Lilah was a lot better than me at all those things, and she did her best to help me along, whether it was talking me into wearing something I had no idea I could pull off or starting up a conversation with the boys we had crushes on and somehow working me in so that I became a part of it. And I loved her for all those things, but back then I was most myself when I sat with my legs dangling out the Pala, while Finn worked and made plans for everything—the next football game, the upcoming summer, his senior year, college with Rusty, everything. I’d be willing to bet he spent his free moments on the other side of the world planning what he’d do when he got back.
Before I fell too deep into the sadness of the thought, Rusty turned the radio down. “She’s runnin’ a little warm,” he said. He looked over at me when I didn’t answer. “The car.”
“What’s that mean?” I hoped hard it was nothing. We didn’t need car trouble in the middle of the nowhere. I couldn’t afford it. I’d planned on sleeping in the car and eating cheap. There was no room in my budget for a motel, let alone for the car to break down. And Kyra Kelley wasn’t going to postpone her last show for us.
Rusty chewed the toothpick he’d had in his teeth since we left the restaurant. “I dunno. Maybe just needs some more water.” He shrugged. “Or it could be somethin’ else.”
I looked across the expanse of shrub-dotted desert. The dark outline of mountains stood barely visible in the distance. In between us and them was absolute nothingness, except for cracked dirt and a lone airplane streak across the cobalt sky. “So . . . what are we supposed to do, then?” I watched Rusty for some sort of clue and tried to keep from sounding panicky.
He flicked the toothpick up and down between his front teeth, thinking. “How bad you wanna go to that concert?”
He said it like it was a perfectly acceptable idea now, which I appreciated. Because it still sounded ridiculous out loud. But then it didn’t. I knew it would’ve been near impossible and obscenely expensive to get those tickets here in the States. Yet Finn somehow did it from his dusty base camp in the middle of a war. It felt like I owed it to him.
I tapped my toes on the floor. “Bad enough to wanna keep going.” It came out sounding unsure, more like a question than an answer. Rusty didn’t say anything, so I turned to him directly. “You think it’ll be all right to make it there?” I thought of Finn’s letter in my purse and his one simple request. “It has to be.”
Rusty breathed in deep, like he was about to say something important. Then he shrugged like he couldn�
�t care less. “Maybe. If not, we can stop off at my mom’s. Work on it there.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but habit kept me quiet. Since Rusty was fourteen and she took off, his mom was a topic I’d always figured it was best not to mention, but now he brought her up like it was nothing at all. He must’ve seen my reaction, because his eyes flicked over to me a second, then back to the road. He shifted the toothpick in his mouth.
“She lives in Sedona. Came to my games once I was at school. I went down to her house a time or two.” I nodded, knowing better than to ask any more than he was willing to tell, but curious all the same. He never talked about her after she left. I hadn’t known where she was or if they spoke or anything. I wondered if, when he’d gotten to school up there, he’d been the one to get in touch with her or if it was the other way around. Maybe he’d gotten homesick for someone who knew him, or maybe she felt guilty and wanted to know her son again. He didn’t leave any room for questions, though. His eyes slid over to me again, and he laughed a little. “She won’t even recognize you.”
I didn’t know if it was his tone or his face, but something caught me in the way he said it, and a little nervous tingle went through me. I straightened up and looked out the window, conscious all of a sudden of his eyes on me. Then I caught a flyaway strand of hair and twisted it around my fingers. “Why?” I asked, a little too loudly.
Rusty smirked and put his eyes back on the road. “Nothin’, H.”
Irritated, I reached down for a package of licorice I’d stashed in my bag. “You shouldn’t do that, you know.”
“Do what?”
“That. Where you say something like it’s some sort of joke or like it means something and then just say, ‘Nothing, H.’” I imitated his nonchalant answer in the worst possible way, mocking myself, really.
