Four Three Two One

by Courtney Stevens

  I sympathized.

  Did I want to tell Rudy about the morning of June 15?

  Chan’s bag hadn’t been delivered. Or it had, but to a different room at the hostel. We didn’t find out until a week later, when the owner mailed the bag to the Hive with an apology and twenty dollars “for your trouble,” the note claimed.

  Chan droned on and on about the luggage—how the drawings were irreplaceable—and while I understood his great loss, that his plan had gone utterly awry, his ongoing rants drove me bonkers.

  “I’m sorry, Chan, but no one can magic your bag to us.”

  My comments didn’t suit. He threw a pillow against the headboard and put his hands on his hips. “Is that what you want me to tell you when your computer crashes and you lose all of your photos?”

  “First of all, I back up my photos.”

  He shot me a Yeah, right look.

  “Forget the photos,” I snapped. “What I’m really pissed about—”

  “I lose something irreplaceable and you’re pissed at me.”

  “I’m not pissed you lost something. I’m pissed about your attitude.”

  Our adjoining neighbor pounded the wall.

  And then Chan, pacing back and forth across our tiny room, said, “I’m doing all this for you.”

  For me rather than with me. Sure, the timing was bad. And yes, the trip was expensive. Did I realize he might need to be at home carving or felling logs so he could finish his latest nativity project by deadline? Sure. But what was three days?

  “Do I need to remind you that it was your idea to get this photo for Gran?” I let the words bite. “This was not some pity trip that I forced you to attend. So you can put that passive-aggressive shit back up your ass.”

  “Go, that’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean then?”

  “I needed this to go differently. My bags were . . .” He shook with a frustration I hadn’t seen on him since we were in middle school. Squeezing the rolled brim of his hat as he spoke, he bit out words. “They were supposed to be with me. So I could . . . sketch. I need to sketch.”

  It was childish, but I threw the free memo pad at him and said, “I’m going to shower. Sketch all you want.”

  This was one of the few times we’d let our words get away from us.

  When I returned from the shower, wrapped in my towel, I expected things to improve. He’d admit he’d been an obsessive ass, and I would apologize for not being sensitive about his sketchbooks. We’d get rid of my towel in a creative way and then head to MoMA.

  But Chan was on his phone and he was joyfully effervescing to someone, taking notes, as if our previous argument hadn’t occurred. He said, “You’re saying if I catch a flight home on the sixteenth instead of the seventeenth I’ll be able to harvest from the Weymeyers’ land. . . . Yeah, it’s terrible timing. . . . I’ve been sending the man emails for months. . . . Right. Right. I get that he wants to be there. . . . You’re sure there are no other dates? None at all. . . . All right. Yeah. I’ll meet you there. This is fantastic.”

  And then he saw me and remembered it was only fantastic for him.

  Without a consultation, the decision had been made, a new plan forged: we were heading home a day early so Chan could cut down trees.

  He knew it was awful, so he didn’t try to bake his crap into a brownie and pass it off as something edible.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he said. The words sounded true, but his face was glowing. “Look, if I cut those logs, I’ll be able to afford to bring us back next year. Then everything will be perfect. Every detail exact. I’ll make this up in a way you’ll never forget.” He tried to touch me, and I shook him off.

  “We were seeing MoMA today. And Central Park. And Times Square. And Wicked tonight. What about our plans for this year?” How could Chan, who never handled a change in the schedule without weeks of warning, shift this fast?

  “The tickets were in the missing bag, so it’s not like—”

  “Shut up.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “Great. Excellent. I’ll take a picture of that apology and label it Times Square.”

  “You’re being a jerk.”

  That’s when I remembered Rudy’s invitation to ditch my boyfriend and see the city. I seized it. “Well, this ass is catching a bus to Battery Park and taking the ferry to Ellis Island today. Alone.”

  “Which bus?”

  “Who cares? You have planes to catch and trees to cut. I, on the other hand, have one day to do this photo for Gran—remember, Gran? The whole reason we came on this trip.”

  “But the day will be off. It’s the fifteenth. We should come back next year. On the sixteenth. When it’s perfect.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “The airline’s. I’m coming with you.”

  We dressed for the day. Well, I dressed for the day. Chan wore the same thing because he had nothing else. There was a moment when I nearly forgot how much I despised him. He was sitting in a straight-back chair in the corner, legs crossed, tugging his T-shirt taut to eliminate the wrinkles, and I actually thought, Chan, we should blow dollars at a street vendor and get you an NYC T-shirt. Then I remembered Chan was going home. And even if we weren’t, he’d want that shirt washed before he wore it.

  “Your hair looks pretty,” he said, trying to mend some fences.

  I pulled my knitted red beanie over my hair as a response.

  I said to Rudy, “Our fight started before the bus.”

  “Before we met?”

  “The airline lost his bag and he was out of sorts from the very beginning.”

  And then I told Rudy an abbreviated version of our argument. When I finished, he said, “That blows!” and pulled my red beanie over his eyes.

  From the back, Becky said, “I’m hungry,” and Caroline said, “There are worse things a boyfriend can do.”

  30. STARTING WAS HARDER.

  $69,540.00

  When it was time to swap drivers, Rudy assured us riding in the nest was safe. No one agreed, and Caroline told him he had “shit for brains,” and he said, “Shit for legs, Care, get it right,” and hauled himself through the sliding window and tumbled into a heap. Becky gave me a glare that meant, Put the cousins in the back, but I followed Rudy through the window. He wiggled deeper into the nest, and I put my spine against the truck bed so I could feel the road vibrating.

  “I’m driving over sixty-five,” Becky threatened.

  “We’ll see how that works for you,” I said through the glass, but then I put an arm through and choked her neck. “I love you, Becky Cable.”

  She did the perfect thing again. She said, “Why?” because I had said “Why” the night before and that’s what we said. I played Paul Simon as loud as my phone allowed.

  “I hate this song,” Caroline said.

  “You hate everything,” Rudy told her.

  I let that comment hang in the ether before I asked, “Do you really? Hate everything.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  That reply made everyone dive into pools of unspoken thoughts. In the wake, Rudy opened an ancient laptop and clacked the keys—presumably on some article for Ms. Jay. Caroline went back to humming, Becky turned on our playlist, and I closed my eyes to think about hate.

  Hate made things ugly.

  Simon had defended his hate because he thought the circumstances warranted it—hate was his passion; hate was his movement; hate would change his world. And it had. Hate had spiraled like an airborne toxin and crawled inside us all. I felt the infection.

  I wanted to talk about what happened, but when I played that conversation with Caroline in my head, it went like this:

  Me: What good will hate do us?

  Caroline: It’s all that gets me up in the morning.

  Me: But if we hate, how are we different from Simon?

  Caroline: Maybe we’re not.

  Me: What if hate like his starts with hate like ours?

 
; Caroline: Screw you, Mary Sunshine.

  That Screw you was why I didn’t start the conversation. When you knew something might end poorly, starting was harder. But maybe that’s how everyone felt, and that was why no one pulled Simon Westwood aside years before, when he was setting puppies on fire or jabbing the skin on his thigh with a butcher knife or whatever the hell he’d done that indicated he was catapulting toward violence. Maybe no one asked Simon, “Hey, what are you doing with your hate?” If Carter Stockton were in this truck, he’d do something. He wasn’t here, so that left me.

  “Caroline,” I said. “Tell me why you shaved your head.”

  31. IT’S TIME TO TALK ABOUT YOUR VOCABULARY.

  $70,005.00

  Caroline’s purple headband had a seam where the narrow fabric gathered. When she was nervous or self-conscious, she adjusted the seam to the center of her forehead and palmed her skull like a basketball. I watched her slide that seam around for nearly sixty seconds. “Ask me about shaving in South Carolina,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I like Georgia, and I don’t want that to change.” She stopped fidgeting with the headband and curled against the passenger window. That was all. She was done.

  “What do you love, Go?” Rudy asked to keep some semblance of conversation.

  “Lots of things.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, my camera.” I whisked the Canon into my hands, removed the lens cap, and made a few adjustments before pointing at Caroline. She didn’t smile, but she let me see her through the lens without turning away. “The way a photo captures history before it’s even history. And . . . I love our house. It’s an old Methodist chapel we’re slowly restoring. Watching movies with Chan is pretty awesome. Let’s see. I love my kooky little town and our kooky little community. And I love the idea of leaving my kooky little town and our kooky little community, even though my gran is one of the best people on the planet.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  I looked over at Rudy, wishing we were alone somewhere instead of trapped in this cab. My response would matter to him. “I was thinking of Boston. Well, maybe.”

  Rudy beamed. “Boston, eh?”

  I was incredibly pleased that I had spoken the desire out loud. So much so I said it again, just to hear it roll off my lips. “Yeah, Boston.”

  “I like Boston too,” he said.

  And then there was Caroline, inserting her opinion. “Aren’t you two more precious than words,” because it wasn’t like they couldn’t tell we were talking about far more than a city.

  It crossed my mind to confess how I felt when I realized Emerson had a degree in media studies. That the school was just as good a fit for me as it was for Rudy. The degree excited me. The city excited me, or at least googling it did. Boston was home to museums, baseball, history. I could shoot North Church, ducks on the water, cobblestone streets, the Gardner. I’d missed the application deadline for this year, but if I was able to face Bus #21 and if Carter’s scholarship money was a real thing—possibly, I could apply by November 1 and transfer in next fall. Golden Jennings, girl about New England.

  Those were big ifs.

  “Guys, I have bad news.” Becky didn’t wait for us to say, what? She said, “Dolly is getting dodgy. Like seriously dodgy.”

  The truck lurched.

  “I do not love car trouble,” I said.

  “Anyone here mechanical?” Becky asked.

  Caroline said, “I made a birdhouse in shop class.”

  A loud pop drowned out class. The day had cleared, so when clouds of smoke rose from seams in the hood, they were like cotton balls on a bright blue canvas. Something hissed like an exorcised demon and Becky eased Dolly to the shoulder. I scrambled from the back with a water bottle. Becky popped the hood, emitting a much larger cloud and flames large enough to roast marshmallows. The two of us doused the fire and coughed away smoke.

  “I told you not to drive over sixty-five.”

  “And I told you I was going to anyway.” Becky snapped out the response, but I knew she was angry at herself instead of me.

  “It’s okay,” I said, even though it sucked. Dolly Dodge had been Granddad’s truck—a prized possession—and I’d killed it on a highway in South Carolina, miles from our final destination.

  Caroline was already on the phone to AAA giving them our location. After a few minutes of sitting without the engine running, the temperature spiked to 94, felt like 108. The average temperature under the camper cab was seventy-eight when Dolly was running. Exiting seemed preferable to heat stroke. We stripped down to tank tops. Truckers and cars whipped by, batting us with wind tunnels of baked air.

  “This isn’t better,” Caroline said.

  “We could play a game while we wait,” Becky suggested.

  “No. Games are for road trips. This is not a road trip.”

  “Maybe it’s time to talk about your vocabulary, Care. Because this is a road”—Rudy gesticulated to the highway—“and we seem to be traveling it.”

  “Well, not right now,” she insisted.

  Immediately following their exchange, Becky’s face lit. “I feel like we’ve been here before,” she said, at the precise moment Caroline said, “Does anyone feel like we’ve all been here before?” The girls turned toward each other in a spasm. “Hey, whoa, déjà vu!” And then there was a four-person chorus of “Jinx,” and then another, “Double jinx.”

  That was the first time we all cracked a smile. The first time we’d all been on the same page. The second came later, when the AAA dude pulled alongside Dolly. We went through the particulars, arranged to tow the truck to the closest town, which was only a mile away, but when the time came to climb into the cab, the AAA man thrust out his hand and said, “Oh, by the way, my name is Simon,” and all of us said, “No, thanks, we’ll walk” at the same time. Except Rudy, who said he’d roll.

  32. AN UNMARKED GRAVE IN BATH

  72,754.00

  Four kids, one in a wheelchair, walking the shoulder of the interstate drew the attention of passing motorists. Semis slowed. Young, bright-eyed muscle cars rubbernecked and then revved off. Half a mile from our exit, a lady in a black Lexus two-seater pulled off and suggested one of us ride with her to a nearby service station. She was insistent, even after Caroline said, “We’ve already called AAA.” With her high ponytail and hot pink yoga outfit, she didn’t appear dangerous. Still, we looked at each other like none of us were sure if stranger danger was still a thing, but perhaps it was. “If only serial killers wore uniforms,” Becky whispered laughingly in my ear. I shushed her, highly doubting Lexus Two-Seater was a serial killer, but Simon hadn’t looked evil either. Accepting the ride meant we’d have to split into two groups, and I wasn’t comfortable with that. Her Lexus zipped onto the highway and two bumper stickers stated her loud and proud second-amendment rights.

  Rudy wheeled out in front and spun in wild circles, making a passing motorist honk with delight. “Boy, that was close!” he said, completely animated.

  Becky, who had never hitched in her life, said, “Man, I remember when hitchin’ used to be safe.”

  I threw in, “Watch out for those yoga moms,” and cocked a fake handgun.

  “You guys go on and laugh, but that’s how all the horror movies start.” Caroline almost pulled off her seriousness, but a smile crept in at the last moment. And then we were all doubled over laughing again.

  Considering Dolly went kaput and we were huffing I-95 in eighty-nine-degree weather, we were in remarkably good moods. The conversation turned not to Dolly’s malfunction or the cost to fix her or even the long, muggy walk, but to the déjà vu we experienced in the aftermath.

  “Why does déjà vu happen?” Becky asked.

  Rudy’s hands paused on the wheels. With all the traffic, holding a conversation was difficult, and his voice often matched pitch with the rumblings of large trucks. We came in closer. He said, “I don’t know about why, but if déjà vu is feeling
like you’ve lived through something in the past, what do you call that sensation when you’re sure you’ve already lived through something in the future?”

  “Premonition,” I said.

  Becky said, “I’m not sure that happens to me.”

  Caroline tsked. “Oh, sure it does. Say you’re driving and you think I shouldn’t take Miller Lane home. You take Lakewood instead and wind up at your house in time to watch Law and Order, believing you dodged some cosmic bullet.”

  “But there’s no way to know if that’s true or not,” Becky argued.

  “There is if you take Miller Lane and life goes sideways,” Caroline said.

  “But who does that?”

  I shrugged at Becky. “Lots of people.”

  Caroline seemed intent to prove her point. She darted directly in front of Rudy and dropped onto his lap. “Rudy, list three things you knew were going to happen before they happened.”

  Rudy popped a wheelie and then used the forward movement to dump Caroline out of his chair onto the grass. The cousins poked at each other, and he acquiesced. “I knew Victor was going to tell me his girlfriend was pregnant with Deuce. And . . . the day I won the Bob Reid Journalism Award, I felt like something good was going to happen even though I didn’t know what. I can’t think of a third.” He smoothed the leather across his palms. “Oh, wait, yeah. Remember when Jane and I lived over on Calderon?” he was asking Caroline, who nodded. “I took a bag of my favorite stuff to school the day the house burned and it wasn’t even show-and-tell day. Something told me to take them.”

  “Something? Or someone?” I asked.

  He responded, “Are we getting religious?”

  “I don’t know. Are we?”

  Becky shooed us forward with a loose wave of her hand. “How did a question about déjà vu turn into whether there’s an official puppet master of the universe?”

  Caroline answered, “Because for us to have premonitions of a future event, there has to be someone bigger who exists outside of time who already knows what will occur.”

  Becky’s Why? was all over her face, but she didn’t ask.