Four Three Two One

by Courtney Stevens

  Do you ever dream you’re back on the bus?

  I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.

  I hope you’re not mad.

  He attached a photo—an excellent photo by a photographer I admire—of a mongoose sticking out its tongue.

  I thought of Rudy, Caroline, Chan. Of the exclusive and privileged club we belonged to after last June. Of Carter Stockton’s heart. Of the six thousand plus people who had already given to the fund.

  I wrote him back.

  I’m not mad at you. Are you ready for this? My morning got interrupted by a fake bomb threat at school. And believe it or not, that, plus everything else, is conspiring to make me . . . The cursor blinked. I finished the sentence. . . . want to attend the opening of “Accelerant Orange.”

  9. THE PERSON IN THE BACK ISN’T ALLOWED TO STEER.

  $35,611.00

  Chan loved movies, often obscure movies, the way I loved photos. He was the one who initially suggested we re-create Gran’s photo wall. “Think of it, Go. We’d be the next generation’s past. We do this, and our lives are elastic.” He’d said that right after his mom died, and looking back, it was an eleven-year-old figuring out death more than an eleven-year-old choosing a weird-ass hobby. But when a hobby is tied to your heart, part of you is hooked in that space forever.

  He was also the one who demanded we watch films corresponding to the photos. That first summer we checked movies out of the Braxton Springs Library no one had checked out in decades. When word got out Chan and I were viewing films starring Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, James Stewart, and Ingrid Bergman, to name a few, the Hive requested we project them on the barn wall and watch as a group. That was probably illegal, but we happily obliged. Sometimes Casablanca, for me, is the smell of wild onions and Chan’s yellow Dial soap because I watched with my head on his shoulder in an itchy field.

  On those nights, Gran prodded us with her cane when we reached the reenactment scenes she’d done with Granddad. Chan hit Pause, which always caused an uproar. “Hey, this is my favorite part!” someone would call, as if worried we might stop the movie early. I’d snap photos of the scene for Chan and then we’d settle down again. Him watching the movie, me watching him.

  I wasn’t a girl who ogled her boyfriend. Chan was nearly always concrete. A firm thing with solid edges. When he watched movies, he dreamed. And when he dreamed, he was a different version of himself. Maybe it’s shallow, but I loved dream-him so much more. If I wanted Chan to drive to New York with me to shoot the final picture in our series, I needed to engage the dreamer.

  Wherever he was, he would likely know about my school suspension. News traveled swiftly, carried on the whispers and social media accounts of Braxton Springs High students. He’d been eerily silent over text, so I jogged across the quad, petting the various stray animals and occasional toddlers as I went. His truck was parked by the woodshop. The hood, cold. He didn’t care about the bomb threat, because he wasn’t there.

  Inside his shop, sawdust coated the air. Sap flew. A heavy mist fell on my shirt like dandruff. The whole place smelled like Christmas. Chan had his head bent over a pine log. In his hands, the chain saw was a peeler and the tree a potato. Bark sloughed off in long elegant strips. I climbed atop a stack of ten-foot logs he’d felled before last September and watched him work. This was also Chan the dreamer, and I was in love all over again.

  Eight-foot statues of Mary and Joseph, each feature carved with such precision and humanity that they might have birthed baby Jesus two minutes ago, were positioned around a crude crèche. No wonder churches kept hiring him to build these displays. I was tracing the lines in Mary’s face when he turned around. Happy as he was at my surprise appearance, he checked his watch and called over the rumbling saw, “You sick?”

  “You skipped?”

  “I was taking a mental wealth day.” He attempted a dance, chain saw in hand.

  People didn’t think someone as handsome as Chan could be a dork; they were wrong. “You’ll cut off your leg,” I said.

  “For five thousand dollars, it might be worth it.”

  “Ha. Ha,” I said, not amused.

  Saw powered off, he walked over and arranged his body in my lap—220 pounds of grubby dude on 120 pounds of girl. I grunted like the weight was too much, and he buried his nose in the hollow of my neck. “Ugh. You should not have come here freshly showered. Haven’t I warned you about that, you vanilla witchwoman?”

  “Indeed you have, but . . . I was suspended by our fine educational establishment and thought I’d mosey over here to persuade you, Mr. Clayton, to get creative with me.”

  He tossed his safety goggles and hat toward the workbench and gave me his full attention, his green eyes impossibly large and curious. “Seriously? What’s up?”

  I held his earlobe, which was also covered in sawdust; massaged it until he squirmed. Smug as anything, I said, “Told you. I was suspended.”

  “Okay, I’ll play. Why?”

  “I left school without asking.”

  “I do that all the time. They don’t ask me to be gone longer.”

  “I had a good reason.”

  “Come on. Don’t stall. You know I can check Facebook or something.” Without saying a word, Chan swapped so I was seated on his lap. His voice was careful and kind. “Tell me, Golden.”

  His heartbeat idled stronger than a chain saw.

  “Some idiot called in a fake bomb”—he flinched. Viciously. And then squeezed me harder—“threat. They tried to put us on a bus.” Another shudder. “So Becky Cable and I left.”

  He pressed his forehead to my skull and breathed deep. “I’d like to kill that idiot.”

  “Trust me, I was fantasizing about that in the shower. But he’s not the real problem.”

  “I beg to differ—”

  “Chan, I looked at that school bus, which, by the way, was the precise one we rode to elementary school—Bus Nineteen—and it was . . . I don’t know . . . like staring at my executioner.”

  “Your fear seems logical to me.”

  “Sure. Maybe. But that doesn’t mean I like it.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  Chan had always had a certain sensibility regarding fear. Face the necessary. Ignore the unnecessary. And it wasn’t that I didn’t understand. The reason was fine for him, but fear was a slippery slope for me. I said, “I don’t like thinking a single event changed something benign into cancer and now every bus is Bus Twenty-One. Every bus is New York—”

  “Go.”

  “Do you think airplane crash survivors ever fly again? Do New Yorkers who were on the street during September Eleventh always flinch from low-flying planes? Do you—”

  He covered my mouth with his dirty hand. I tasted pine on my lips.

  “I don’t know about them, but I promise you, for the rest of our lives, you will never have to get on another bus.”

  This was not dreamer Chan. This was the most-concrete-of-concrete Chans.

  “I cannot avoid this.”

  “We’re seven hundred miles away.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  He took a dramatic look around the workshop. “I don’t see any buses in here.”

  “So you’re never going to a city again?”

  He scrubbed a hand through his hair. Sawdust ground into his scalp like wooden glitter. “Why would I?”

  I’ve never ridden a two-person bicycle, but I assume the person in the back isn’t allowed to steer. That was what I felt like watching Chan sweep the workshop in a glance and decide that this teeny world was enough for him. That, if I wanted to be with him, we would only go places that didn’t scare him. I twisted the ring on my finger all the way to the knuckle. “When we were young, I remember us talking about the Great Wall of China and how we’d climb to the top and dance.”

  “We were little, Go. And we were stupid.”

  I wiggled free and held his face with my hands. I had a dreamer face too, and I suspected Chan could spot mine the wa
y I spotted his. I wore it loudly and said, “What if I wanted to go to New York and try that photo again? If you won’t go for you, would you go for me?”

  He turned away so I couldn’t see him. He pointed to his chain saw. “I’ll build you a set better than the real thing. We can make the shot here. Same as all the other shots we’ve made. Gran won’t care.”

  She wouldn’t, but I would. “That’s a cheap imitation,” I whispered. Gran and Granddad’s photo from Ellis Island was the only photo not made on-Hive.

  “Not to me.”

  “You’re only half the equation.”

  “Hey.” His voice lightened considerably, the way it always did when he wanted to exit the conversation without a fight. “I thought I was your favorite half.”

  I made a noise somewhere between a sigh and grunt.

  “We don’t have to travel to be happy, Golden. We were happy as larks for sixteen years and where were we? Right here. On good ol’ Kentucky dirt. What more could we possibly need?”

  Emerson College in Boston.

  Diversity.

  Joy.

  Photos of the world.

  Windmills in the Netherlands.

  Namib desert after a dust storm.

  The Pepto pink of Lake Retba.

  Machu Picchu at sunset.

  Mongooses with their tongues out.

  Accelerant Orange.

  Courage.

  Everything.

  10. THEN THERE’S THE CHILEAN WARLOCK.

  $39,791.72

  There was no fight. Chandler buried his mood under the brim of his lowered hat and returned to carving Jesus, and I called Becky Cable. She was on her way to the grocery store for a rotisserie chicken but assured me she had time to meet. All the time in the world. “Four days. Technically six because of the weekend.” I gave her directions to the blue hole.

  Blue holes occurred where underground rivers burrowed their way to the surface. A single droplet of water tunneling upward through soil and rock and gravity, desperate for sunlight. Pure magic, and I needed some of that.

  I heard the Mustang coming. Through the tinted glass, I watched Becky reapply lipstick and check her teeth.

  “Nice place!” she yelled through the window.

  “You got that chicken?”

  “Am I bringing it with me?”

  I shrugged, because I wasn’t going to force her, but I didn’t have lunch. She put the chicken container and a loaf of bread under her arm like a football and made the climb. The teeny half-moon basin was nestled between two rises in the land not large enough to be hills and too large to be mounds. We crammed our bodies side by side on the narrow ledge and after a quick survey of me, Becky turned on music. Cat Stevens. Fleet Foxes. The Tallest Man on Earth. We let the songs speak as we pulled chicken off the bone and ate. Finally, Becky wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said, “That’s enough foreplay. You have to talk now.”

  “Which part?”

  “The loudest part.”

  I shrugged first—a habit I’d gained from my father. “Shrugging makes people believe you don’t care,” Gran always said. I cared. Probably too much.

  “When do you think a promise is for real?” I asked.

  “When is a promise not for real?” she retorted, but then softened. “You still thinking about Chan the Man?”

  I was. Usually, with me, a promise made was a promise kept. I liked people who did what they said. Chan always did what he said, but in this case, his commitment was the problem. He wasn’t leaving the Hive, so who was I if I left? A promise breaker? An idiot? The last time I demanded something I’d put us on a bus that blew up.

  “We disagree about the future,” I told Becky.

  “You’re not married.”

  “So you don’t think it’s wrong if, hypothetically, I go to New York without him?”

  “Chica, I’m a feminist. I think it’s wrong if you go to New York with him.” She laughed and handed me another piece of bread.

  “I feel responsible.”

  “For what?”

  “Ruining his life.”

  There, I said it.

  Becky tweaked the placement of two bobby pins around my ears. In a very even tone, she said, “Did you know there’s supposed to be a cave in Chile where warlocks hid stolen babies and deformed them? Like . . . they made their heads turn around backward and cut off their right arm and sewed it elsewhere on the body.”

  “What’s that have to do with Chan?”

  “Oh, I just thought you needed a reminder of what ruining someone’s life actually looked like. There’s you, ruining Chan’s life”—she used air quotes—“for not keeping some asinine promise you made, and then there’s the Chilean warlock baby deformers.”

  “They’re not real.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe so. But lucky for us, I have more examples. There are plenty of life ruiners among politicians. Shall I make an alphabetical list starting with last or first names?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Help me. Because as far as I can see, Chandler Clayton is doing fine.”

  Could I take her into that terrible day and explain how I felt when I couldn’t even make Chan understand? And he was with me. There’s no way to Xerox a feeling. There was only telling someone the story and letting them apply their lens. Instead of trying, I told her about Carter Stockton rebuilding Bus #21 into an art installation. “The exhibit opens this Sunday.”

  “That’s messed up. Amazingly messed up.”

  I nibbled on the bread. Thought about all those people who believed in me. I googled the current donation amount—$39,791.72—and showed her the generosity of strangers. She was properly astounded and impressed.

  “So are you going?”

  I stared at the blue hole and then the pines towering above us like stubbly overlords.

  “Because if Becky Cable ran the world”—she looked as though this might be a solid plan—“Golden Jennings would climb aboard that fucking bus and show all those people she’s alive and she’s doing something phenomenal with her life.”

  “One problem.”

  There were a host of problems.

  “This is Kentucky, and that’s New York? Chan’s a reluctant dick and you’re a Go-getter?”

  If only.

  “I’m terrified of buses.”

  CAROLINE

  There’s something about three a.m. that makes you examine your life. I was parked at the Bath Dunkin’ Donuts waiting on the drive-through lady to deliver two dozen doughnuts, three coffees, and an apple fritter. The smell of glazed icing made me want to lick the air; the smell inside the Beamer, well, we needed another cardboard pine tree to combat the contact high. Simon lounged in the passenger seat; Dozer and Johnny were in the back. They were all coming off something and demanded I drive them for decaf and pastries. So, it was three a.m. and I was thinking about suicide, really thinking about it, for the first time, and they had the munchies.

  I’d never been a sad person. I’d never been the life of the party either.

  But I used to have goals—college, write a book, watch Game of Thrones—and now, I had Simon.

  I’d tried to leave him. I didn’t know whether my efforts were pathetic or his efforts were extraordinary. Maybe both. Simon told me once, “There’s a moment in every caterpillar’s life when he knows it’s either him or the butterfly, and, honey, the butterfly always wins.” He was the butterfly.

  Sometimes, at three a.m., like now, I let myself wonder the most terrible things. Like if Simon was the reincarnation of H. H. Holmes, who built a murder hotel in Chicago in the 1800s. Holmes supposedly constructed halls and staircases that led to nowhere, bricked-in doors, trick locks that imprisoned guests. He tortured and killed them. That sounded hyperbolic, but Simon might as well have built a hotel around me brick by brick. Every time I found a way out, the exit led nowhere.

  Death was the only sure exit that led somewhere else.

  Dear Butterfly, suck it. Love, Caterp
illar.

  I wasn’t sure how I would kill myself—if I followed through—but it should probably be somewhere significant. Somewhere out of Steuben County. Somewhere it would take a while to identify my body. Maybe even somewhere historic. Simon should have a few days to think, She escaped.

  11. SIT DOWN, SUPERMAN.

  $44,591.00

  I was online again.

  Hidden away in my room after begging off Hamburger Helper and a rewatch of Die Hard with Chan. All in the name of a raging headache. (Which wasn’t a lie.) Accelerant Orange episode 22—one of my favorites—played in the background. Facebook was also open. There was a new message from Rudy.

  I’m not sure how I would handle a fake bomb threat. Sounds like you took it in stride. Amazing. Even more amazing, you’re thinking about going to New York.

  A surge of pride hit my gut. I was, wasn’t I? Gran wanted me to go. Even Becky seemed to think I should. If the bombing of Bus #21 had happened just to me instead of Chan and me, this would be simpler. As it stood, his feelings were grafted to mine. Going to New York would scare Chan. Going to New York with Rudy—maybe even having this conversation with Rudy—would betray him.

  Thud. Shuffle. Shuffle. Thud. Shuffle. Shuffle. I smiled, marveling at Gran, who always knew when to appear. She’d been watching some crime drama with my folks and was now tapping her cane on my bedroom door. The world righted a little.

  “Just checking in,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Any”—she lowered her voice dramatically—“New York news?”

  Mom and Dad were bound to be on their way to bed, and if they—they was Mom—caught us mentioning the bombing of Bus #21, they’d overreact. Because New York! Terrible things happened in New York! Mom trended toward “You’re our baby” in a tone that meant You in pain tortures us as an excuse to avoid the topic.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Is that episode twenty-two?”

  I nodded. She took her chair and an earbud.

  Carter Stockton was in his garage, reattaching a crushed mirror to the bus. The blowtorch was off, the protective shield propped on his forehead. He rubbed the sweat off with the back of his hand, a dozen beads instantly replacing the ones he’d wiped away. He said, “Now, let me tell you about the bus driver. His name was Oscar Reyes. I spent a few hours with his widow last Saturday, so you’ll get to meet her later in the episode. This amazing lady is writing a memoir about her husband called Life on the Bus.”