Four Three Two One

by Courtney Stevens

  “That’s not fair.” But wasn’t it?

  “We’ve far exceeded fair.”

  “There’s nothing romantic between Rudy and me.”

  “I wish I could believe that, but . . . fool me once . . .” He stopped.

  I had no idea what fool me once meant. I said, more a breath than a sentence, “I wish you were here.” What I meant: I wish you’d been the one willing to listen.

  “Funny enough, I was thinking the same thing.” There was another long, dreadful sigh. “I love you, Golden, but you have to see this from my side. This morning you were in my bed. Tonight, are you in Rudy’s?”

  “I am not in Rudy’s bed.”

  I imagined Chan seated on the gray-and-black-checked rug beside his bed, pressing the top of his spine into the mattress, his face tipped toward the fan. His chain saw Christmas ornament spun from the string and clanked quietly against the light fixture. He was seeing the faces from the bus, the ones he drew. He was seeing me with Rudy.

  “I believe you. But . . .”

  I wanted to separate his pain from mine. To see it as its own entity, but I didn’t have the bandwidth for that much generosity and I suspected he didn’t either.

  “But what?” I asked.

  “We’ll talk when you get back.”

  The call ended there.

  24. WESTWOOD IS A FAIRLY COMMON SURNAME.

  $61,969.00

  If you dissect anger, do you find fear?

  I texted Chan: I don’t want to lose you.

  Chan: We survived one breakup.

  So he counted our three-day tiff last week as a breakup. Was that supposed to be encouraging? We survived one. We’ll survive another? Or We’re already broken so you better be extra careful?

  I kicked Dolly’s tires. How could Bus #21 keep taking things from us?

  Me: This trip is about facing what happened and finishing what I started with Gran’s photo.

  Chan: Are you taking the photo with him instead of me?

  I typed Should I? but didn’t press Send. Partly because that was cruel and partly because Becky leaned out the door and called, “Jennings! Get your ass in here.”

  The neighbor gave her a two-finger salute.

  Becky raised a hand like she lived here, forever comfortable. “Marco,” she yelled before she disappeared inside. If you dropped that girl in a pit of vipers, they’d weave her wardrobes from their molting skin.

  I told Chan no, I was not taking the photo with Rudy, and lifted my luggage. A raised El Camino inched down Chamberlain Street, music thumping so hard the shocks couldn’t keep the car level. The Elky’s high beams caught the reflective tape on two mailboxes across the street, names: Richards and Westwood. The W on Westwood was damaged, like someone had tried scraping it away. Seeing those gold-and-black weathered letters worked me over instantly.

  Westwood is a fairly common surname in the United States. Open a phone book—any phone book—and you’ll find at least two or three. Type Westwood into White Pages: entries galore. There were even three Westwood siblings who attended Braxton Springs High School. I went the other way when I saw one. Logically, they had nothing to do with Bus #21, and percentage wise, bus bombings were quite low. According to a statistic from 2016, one in every 160,487 people was killed in bus, train, or streetcar incidents. That’s super low. Especially when you consider that one in every 10,785 died from heat and one in every 3,409 died from choking. Logic wasn’t always logical. I knew nineteen people who died on Bus #21.

  My nose was bleeding again.

  Buddy Holly wagged his way over to where I crouched beside Dolly’s tire, hiding from a mailbox. His tongue tickled my cheek, and his love was the kindness I needed to holster my anger. I’d traveled eleven hours today; I would travel many more if Rudy and Becky remained willing. Facing Accelerant Orange would be harder than sighting a mailbox. I looked again at the Westwood name. Made myself stay on those letters.

  I nearly passed out.

  Was Chan in his room at home, SportsCenter on, drawing my photo from that day on the bus? Did he draw our hands? I’d held him so tightly I’d fractured his pinkie. I considered the other drawings in his journal. The details clear as photographs. Could I handle New York if an onslaught of faces zombied around in my brain?

  Could I handle New York without Chan?

  I sent him a message.

  Golden: I want to take that photo with YOU. Watch Accelerant Orange. Buy a Saturday ticket to NYC with the money I left in your cigar box.

  I wanted him to meet me halfway to healing.

  He didn’t answer.

  I jammed the underside of my sweatshirt against my nose and went inside.

  25. PLENTY OF HUMOR AVAILABLE

  $62,255.00

  Raucous laughter billowed from the kitchen and there was no doubting why when I got inside. The foursome gathered in the one air-conditioned room in the house and Becky galloped around the table impersonating either the Flintstones’ vehicle or a rodeo. In the most hick voice I’d ever heard, she explained how we’d slid down a dinosaur back and run here barefoot from Kentucky. They gobbled it up. By “they” I meant Rudy, Victor, and Jane?, if I’d heard her name correctly.

  Jane saw the blood first. “Good God. Did my brothers leave you dying in the yard?”

  “Fountain started after they left,” I said.

  Jane popped Victor and then Rudy with a kitchen towel and tossed it my way. “Probably because of them.”

  “Not at all,” I assured her.

  I pressed the rag against my nostrils and declined a beer. There must be adult-adults around here somewhere—folks who might care about an invasion from Kentucky—but they weren’t in the kitchen, and none of the other teenaged occupants seemed particularly concerned about underage drinking. Victor had three bottles lining the rim of his placemat. Becky had two. Rudy was drinking a Gatorade and eating carrot chips. The air was kicking, and kicking hard. I put my sweatshirt back on and sat next to Rudy.

  Facts slotted into place as I stole carrots from Rudy’s plate. This wasn’t the Guthrie house. This was Rudy’s dad’s girlfriend’s place. I didn’t catch her name, which made me feel guilty, as I was staying the night. Jane was Rudy’s half sister. Victor was their dad’s girlfriend’s son. Not even a true stepbrother, but they didn’t care. Except for being tan in the same perfect Orlando way, Rudy didn’t look like Jane, but Victor somehow looked like Rudy. Nurture over nature. They’d been together since Jane was fourteen and Rudy was twelve and living here for nearly as long. Jane’s boyfriend, Josef, lay sacked out on the couch because he had to be at work early. They called him Jane’s husband, but he wasn’t. Evidently, he was the only one among them who could coax Deuce to fall asleep in his own bed or eat a food group that didn’t involve sugar. Jane had been warned. If she broke with the husband, Victor and Rudy were keeping the husband in the divorce.

  “You met the girls where?” Jane asked.

  When Victor and Rudy said Parkers, they buried their heads in the crooks of their right elbows to avoid Jane’s wrath. “Parkers is not suitable.” Her disdain worsened when they copped to hitting the farm for fireworks. “These two wombats warn you there were alligators, like big frickin’ alligators, at the fireworks spot?”

  “There was a sign,” I said, and Becky asked, “That was for real?”

  Victor held his left hand up for us to see; his ring and pinkie fingers were partially missing. “One of them got me.”

  “And it was a baby.”

  “Four or five foot long.”

  Rudy finished off his drink and tossed the bottle across the room into the trash bin.

  “Two points,” cooed Becky, when the bottle rimmed the trash can and fell in. She must have a decent buzz going.

  Rudy was still on the alligators. “Tell them what you were doing, Vic.”

  “I may or may not have been taking a selfie. I didn’t think the little ones could run that fast.”

  “Was the photo good?” I asked.
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  Victor offered me his knuckles. “Thata girl, you know it was.”

  “That photo was a blurry mess,” Rudy said.

  “But I looked very handsome. Am I right? Give me three and half.” Rudy smacked Victor’s hand hard. They laughed even harder.

  They’d clearly recounted this story many times to others and still enjoyed it. They’d enjoy it twenty years from now. There was plenty of humor available, because two fingers were something Victor could live without. Two fingers—well, one and a half—was worth the glory. “You really don’t care?” Becky asked.

  Rudy cocked his head toward Victor. “Better to lose two fingers than the rest of him.”

  Jane explained. “Vic was supposed to be with Rudy in New York. Their fairy godteacher, Ms. Jay, paid for them to attend after Aunt Linda started her culture campaign.”

  “But then I stopped being able to count to five on my right hand and had to bail.”

  “We gave that alligator a big-ass medal,” Jane said, looping an arm around Victor’s neck and squeezing his face against hers. She turned to me. “Ru says we should give you one too. That he wouldn’t have gotten off the bus without your encouragement.”

  All three of them eyed me, but it was Victor who said, “Do you need a medal, Golden Jennings?”

  The only thing I gave Rudy was my beanie. “Lord, no, but I’ll take a beer.”

  We had another round of drinks and conversations, and then Victor and Jane said they were too tired to exist and must depart to bed. There was some discussion of how zapped Becky and I must be after our day of driving. And it was true, my eyes were on fire and there was a low-grade hum happening behind my temples. The clock on the stove read 2:03 a.m. when Jane dragged a groggy Josef off the couch. She paused, supporting his weight on her shoulder, and said, “The sofa doesn’t pull out, but it’s better than your truck,” and that seemed true enough to accept the offer.

  Becky tromped to the kitchen sink with her toothbrush and Rudy rolled behind me into the living room. It was the first time we’d been alone since the bathroom at Down Yonder.

  “Your mom should have named you Penny. You keep turning up.”

  I probably shouldn’t have asked, but I did. “Is your mom around?”

  “Nah, but Charlotte will get home about the time we leave. She works nights at Waffle House down the strip. She won’t mind that you’re here if you were worrying about it.”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “Upstairs.” He grinned; he seemed to be made of grins, like there was an insatiable spring of grins inside him. But then I caught on and smacked his arm for teasing me. “I’m down that hall. You can wake me if you need anything,” he said.

  I’d been down the hall on an earlier trip to the bathroom. There were only four doors. If one of those doors was a closet, then I guessed all those rooms were filled to the brink with beds and kids. A dormitory family. A teeny commune. And I figured, we were not so different.

  This guy, the one who rolled back and forth in his two-hundred-square-foot living room, and the one who had stood at Down Yonder’s bathroom door, were the same, despite the changed circumstances. He had to have known his world was enlarging with that unofficial acceptance to Emerson. That his days of evening drinking with Victor and Jane might be paused or over; that to charge ahead was to leave them behind. But he’d gone on to New York without Victor, so maybe that was something he knew how to do. I wanted to ask him about Emerson, if he was moving to Boston in the fall, but I didn’t.

  “You doing okay, Golden?”

  I was. My head was an aquarium stocked with swimming thoughts. I gave him a resolute nod. “You?”

  When he raised his head, doggedness and determination twinned through his eyes. “Tomorrow morning, let’s visit Caroline before we hit the road. We should try convincing her to come along. It would mean a lot to Carter to have the three of us there. And maybe even to the crowds. I do think there’ll be crowds. And if the donation thing is an indicator, they’re going to be overwhelming. What about the boyfriend? Could you change his mind?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Becky was flashing her freshly polished teeth at me from the kitchen sink. I was thinking of people at their computer desks sliding credit cards from their wallets and typing sixteen digits of their hard-earned cash into a GoFundMe with my name on it. I was thinking of those same people boarding subways, Ubers, taxis, planes toward the Green-Conwell. How they’d file through Accelerant Orange on Sunday. And then Caroline’s name registered. “Caroline?” I asked.

  Rudy gave me a look that said: The only Caroline we know. “She’s my cousin. Moved down to live with our aunt over Christmas. Lives about ten miles from here now.”

  Oh.

  CAROLINE

  Palace Theatre has the best popcorn. It’s the butter, even though Johnny always claimed it was the oil. Let me tell you, it’s not that orange salty shit they leave on the counter by the straws. Sometimes, to punish myself, I eat the stale puffs and kernels off the sticky, concrete theater floor. Then, I sink into a stadium seat, eyes closed while the movie reels, and think about how a trip to Ithaca became a bloody dripping battle of screws. I think about melted metal and the broken stained glass Jesus of New Wesley Church. The explosion punched holes in the panes, directly into Jesus’s side, and a pastor there was quoted as saying, “Jesus knows our very sorrows,” which might be true, but I was more interested in a Jesus who stopped our sorrows, and He didn’t seem to do that for me.

  “Caroline, did you know Simon had a bomb?” the investigators had asked. “Do you know where he got a bomb? Do you know what made him snap? Was he supposed to sell the bombs to someone in New York? Is that why the two of you drove into the city?” The interrogations are never-ending. Local police. ATF. FBI. Everyone had nearly the same questions. How and why?

  “Caroline.”

  “Caroline!”

  “CAROLINE.”

  The inside of my head grinds and grinds. I answer in short, nearly inaudible bursts. Simon had the dynamite for months. I made him snap. He told me his dad was trading the Porsche to a dealer in NYC. The investigation confirms my story. His computer is seized, his emails read, his text messages examined; he was supposed to sell the vests. He kept pictures of the bruises he made on my face.

  Their questions change after that. I am a victim again.

  “Z” will put details together eventually. Or maybe he won’t. Maybe he was one of those men who only watched fishing channels and Wheel of Fortune, and I was stuck with the knowledge that we’d created a monster together.

  I think about the Caroline I used to be and how she launched popcorn in the air at Angela. How that Caroline laughed when her girlfriend bumped into strangers to catch wayward kernels. I think about us buying Gobstoppers and crunching the candy so loudly other moviegoers asked us to stop. That used to be me watching the next Fast and Furious. And now, I’m licking the floor.

  I do not call Angela.

  I do not call anyone.

  I try college and fail.

  When I return home, the sun is too bright, Keuka Lake is too blue, the tourists too drunk and chipper. I sleep in the cabin of our neighbor’s boat for a week before Dad sends me to live with my mom’s sister in Florida. “You need a change of scenery,” he says. But really, I am the only failure in his life. Small towns have keen memories for scandals. They have something entirely worse for me.

  If I had the energy—thank Jesus who knows our sorrows I don’t—I’d drive to New York and end this the way I meant to the first time I got on Bus #21.

  26. SEMI-TYPICAL NIGHT

  $67,255.00

  Nightmares have the legs of Olympic sprinters. They chased me all night long; they caught me around three.

  My blood spreads into the sidewalk cracks and runs down to the street. It was a proper nightmare, so the blood became a river. A man in a buttoned-up trench coat paddled a kayak across the street when the sign read Walk Now. The paddles were
dismembered arms.

  Chan lay on the sidewalk beside me.

  “I’m tired of always being second to your agenda. We’re done,” I said. Tears welled in his eyes. I was merciless. “I mean it,” dream-me said.

  Bus #21 was now a marooned train on Third Avenue. Near the middle of the vehicle was a digital clock that looked as if it belonged to Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The numbers counted up. One. Two. Three. Four. They became a voice. “One. Two. Three. Four.” They became a scream. “ONE. TWO. THREE. FOUR.” The numbers grew louder than a scream. “SEVEN. EIGHT. NINE.”

  The world was ash. A cool wind blew down the street and the ash lifted off the ground. The man in the kayak traded one dismembered arm for another. I watched him row away.

  Becky woke me.

  “Did I scream?” I asked when I was finally aware that she was holding me and singing softly. My hair was a damp, tangled mess, and she finger-combed the strands. “You were moaning,” she told me.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Shhhh.” She kept singing.

  I fell back into the haze.

  Three hours later the house awoke. Coffee perked. A two-year-old clapped. A Great Dane licked his paws and then our faces. “We’re awake,” I told Buddy Holly, but Becky and I didn’t budge. We slept like lovers, spooning on the couch, because we’d decided we were too tired to care about the conditions and I suspected Becky felt majorly protective after my nightmare.

  She flopped toward me, our faces inches apart. “Rough night?”

  “Semi-typical night.”

  Becky was about to say something, when Rudy’s voice sifted through the wall. “I know, Ms. Jay. I know.”

  “That’s his teacher, right?” Becky whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  We listened again.

  “Two survivors, maybe even three, return to the scene. . . . Yep. . . . I can’t turn anything in until I get back, but I’ll send you updates. . . . The heart of the story. . . . Thanks for covering me. . . . Yes, I have all my equipment. They’ll understand. . . . Will you let Dad know when he calls? . . . You’re the best, Ms. Jay.”