by Lara Avery
The prairie lining I-70 whipped past her, and now she was deep into the Flint Hills, rising in waves just as she had described to Peter so long ago.
He had asked her to come see him.
“Are you sure?” she had replied, because this was a time for family.
He had told her that aside from his family, she was the only person he wanted to see.
He wanted her there, and she would go to him, and even if she couldn’t touch him, even if she couldn’t put her hands on his face and her mouth on his like she wanted to, she would be happy enough at the sight of him in the same space as her, the sound of his voice, the mere feeling of him in the next room.
It would be enough that he had the ability to enter the same room, and put his hand in hers, to send warmth throughout her body, to her fingertips, her hair.
That Peter would not be just the idea of Peter, even for a short time; this was enough to press her foot down on the gas until the landscape became a blur.
Physical possibilities. Land moving under her tires. The miracle of physics. She would see him in three hours.
At the hospital, Kelsey followed the attendant in scrubs to the second floor, and there, in the hallway waiting for her, Peter stood in his fatigues.
“Peter,” she said.
He turned, and his face lit up. There was the old Peter, the smile that reflected on the walls.
She squeezed him, feeling the chain of his dog tags against her chest. “Did you come here straight from the plane?”
“This morning,” he said, still holding her. “I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours.”
Peter took her hand, leading her into the room. Carnations, daisies, and chrysanthemums bloomed from every corner, covering up the smell of stale bleach.
Peter’s mother was pale but sitting up, her hospital gown under a zip-up sweatshirt that read EL DORADO WILDCATS.
She looked at Kelsey with the same blue eyes Peter had.
“This is my mom, Cathy.”
Kelsey smiled and found another pair of blue eyes in a girl slightly younger and shorter than herself, with sandy hair like Peter’s, pulled into a high ponytail. “That’s my sister, Meg.”
A stocky, brown-haired man with a thick mustache nodded at Kelsey and put an arm around his daughter. “And my dad, Bill.”
Peter touched the small of her back. “Everyone,” he said, “this is Michelle.”
“Hello,” Kelsey said, waving to all of them and none of them, trying to unclench her jaw at the sound of Michelle’s name. “I’m glad you’re all right, Mrs. Farrow. It’s so wonderful to meet you.”
Peter’s mother gave her a small smile in response.
“Nice to meet you in person. Is it one ‘l’ or two?” his father asked.
People used to ask Michelle how to spell her name all the time. This was Peter’s family she was deceiving, the people he trusted most in the world. The lie had sprouted another branch.
“Two ‘l’s,’” Kelsey said with a forced smile, and looked at the floor.
“Where do you go to school?” his sister asked.
“Lawrence High.”
Peter began to tell them about Paris, and occasionally, Kelsey would jump in with a detail.
Every time she spoke, his mother looked at her as if she had popped out of the floor. Which was understandable, because she had kind of done just that.
Peter and his father started talking about how the KU basketball team had performed in the NCAA championship, how much of the season he had missed overseas.
Peter’s sister pulled her mother’s blanket around her legs, glancing at Kelsey.
Kelsey wished she had been painted white to blend in with the wall.
She was happy Peter wanted her to meet his family, but the smell of flowers and all those blue eyes looking at her, wondering…
Even if she hadn’t been lying, she didn’t quite belong here. Who would want to see an unfamiliar face when they were feeling sick? What good could she do?
“You all must be so tired,” she announced. “Can I go down to the cafeteria and get you some coffee?”
Her voice must have been quieter than she thought. No one turned, including Peter.
“Soda?” she said louder.
“What?” Peter’s sister said.
Kelsey coughed. “Coffee or soda?”
Peter’s father paused what he was saying for a moment to answer, “That would be great,” and continued railing on the Jayhawks’ inability to play fundamental defense.
Kelsey stepped out into the empty hall, looking around. Which one? Coffee or soda?
Exit signs hung at either end. She could hear Peter say something. His family laughed.
She didn’t even know if there was a cafeteria in the small hospital, let alone where it was. She blew out a breath and decided to go the way she came, toward reception. Maybe she could drop coffees off with one of the nurses and wait for Peter somewhere else. She wondered if she should have come at all.
“Hey!” she heard behind her.
She turned around.
Peter was walking toward her. “Coffee machine’s this way,” he said, pointing behind him.
“Oh” was all she could manage to get out, and she walked quickly past him with a cursory smile.
“Wait for a second, I’m going to get some change,” he said.
“No, no, that’s all right,” she said, continuing toward the exit.
“Please wait?” he said, a puzzled smile growing on his face. “I want to come with you.”
“Okay,” Kelsey said.
He must have sensed she was feeling out of place. Those faces looked at her with Peter’s eyes, Peter’s nose, his childhood, giving her the wrong name. Her body, her trusted self, mislabeled in a tiny room.
But with him by her side, she was simply someone he had chosen.
When he emerged from the room, putting his arm around her, a grateful feeling spread in her that she was not used to. She could get used to it, though. She wouldn’t even have to try.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When they left the hospital that evening, Peter insisted that Kelsey stay over at their house so she didn’t have to make the four-hour drive back in the dark. As he said it, he subtly ran his hand down her back. Kelsey bit her lip, wishing, but politely refused.
Peter’s sister said, “You should totally stay,” but Kelsey declined again. She was surprised to see Meg’s mouth fall in disappointment. When Peter mentioned that Meg was trying out for El Dorado’s dance team at the end of the year, the girls had slipped immediately into dancer talk, discussing pirouettes and fouetté turns and high kicks. She had to explain she knew all this through Kelsey, careful not to get too excited.
“Please stay?” Meg said.
“Come on,” Peter said, and he had that look again. The look that said, I’ve already won.
“Thank you, but I don’t want to impose,” Kelsey said, and they entered the parking lot.
Peter’s father unlocked their car and said, “Stay, or we’ll tell everyone in Lawrence you should be jailed for treason.”
Kelsey opened her mouth, aghast. “Why?”
“Anyone who doesn’t know the starting lineup of the KU basketball team is committing a gross betrayal of the state.”
They laughed, Kelsey shrugged, and Peter muttered, “He’s serious, though.”
She answered her mother’s multiple voice mails with a text that she was staying at Ingrid’s, and followed them in her car to pick up ingredients for dinner at the nearest grocery store, a Kroger with the R portion of the sign flickering in and out.
“Welcome to the finest twenty-four-hour food store in El Dorado,” Peter said as they went through the automatic doors. The store was empty except for two cashiers manning the late shift.
“The only twenty-four-hour food store in El Dorado,” Meg said, rolling her eyes. Kelsey had to suppress a smile at how much Meg reminded her of herself at that age, right down to the attitude and the high
ponytail.
“Carly, Todd,” Peter’s dad said in greeting to the cashiers.
“Hey, Bill,” Carly said. Kelsey noticed that she didn’t even have to look up from her manicure to recognize him.
“Welcome home, Pete,” called Todd.
“All right, you know the drill,” Bill said to his children, looking at a list he had pulled out of his pocket.
Meg sighed. “Do we really have to do this? Even with Mom in the hospital?”
“Wait, what are we doing?” Kelsey asked, looking around the fluorescent, empty store for a clue.
“No excuses,” Peter said, bracing himself against the shopping cart as if he was about to run. “Mom would have wanted us to get a good score tonight.”
“It’s not like she’s dead,” Meg muttered, but then she posed on the other side of the cart, also ready to run.
Bill cleared his throat. “Peter, you’ve got spaghetti noodles, garlic bread, romaine lettuce, onions, and mushrooms. You know what kind of mushrooms. Meg, you’ve got marinara, ground beef, Caesar dressing, Parmesan, and croutons. Stopwatch set,” he said, setting off a beep on his watch.
“You’re going down, Meg,” Peter said, and then he raised his eyebrows at Kelsey.
“I may be small, but I’m fast,” Meg said, leaning forward.
“On your marks, get set, GO!” Bill yelled, and Meg and Peter bolted to their respective aisles.
“Go, Peter!” the cashier, Todd, yelled from Lane 3, putting his fists in the air.
“Is this a regular thing?” Kelsey asked Bill.
“If ‘regular’ means ‘every time we get groceries,’ then yes,” Bill replied.
Peter hurdled out of the pasta aisle, tossing a couple of bags of spaghetti in the cart before he jetted off to produce. “Help me!” he called back to Kelsey.
“Not fair!” Meg yelled, tossing a few jars of red sauce into the cart before running to the meat section.
“Michelle with two ‘l’s’!” Bill pointed at Kelsey. “Ice cream sandwiches, eggs, bacon, orange juice, and bread. Go!”
“What?” Kelsey was too busy laughing at the sight of Meg putting Peter in a headlock to pay attention. Did Peter’s dad actually want her to run around with them?
“Go!” Bill pointed again, the first traces of a smile appearing under his mustache.
“You better go,” Peter called from under Meg’s arm.
Kelsey walked quickly to the frozen aisle, trying not to slip on the linoleum in her boots.
“No walking allowed!” Bill called to her.
On the edge of embarrassment and mirth, Kelsey broke into a sprint. There was no point in not playing along. And hell, she was kind of fast. She could win this thing.
“Thatta girl,” Bill said as she threw ice cream sandwiches into the cart with force.
On her way to get eggs, she ran smack into Peter, and they bumped heads.
“Ow!” He collapsed to the floor, red-faced, with mushrooms in hand, and they cracked up.
“Here, let me help you,” Kelsey said between laughs as she keeled over.
When he reached for her hand, she pushed it aside, leapt over him, and pretended to laugh villainously. “Muahahaha!” she cried, and turned the corner to the eggs and dairy.
“Treachery!” Peter called, but when he was on his feet, he followed her, leaping in front of the eggs as if he were a mother hen, protecting them.
Kelsey snatched around his side, but he was too quick, blocking her again.
“Do they really do this every time?” she asked, out of breath.
“Only when I’m home,” he said, and while he was distracted, she reached under his legs and got her prize.
“I’m impressed,” she said over her shoulder on the way to the cart, eggs under her arm.
Then it hit her: She was having a great time. With Peter’s middle-aged father and his kid sister. In a mostly empty supermarket in El Dorado, Kansas.
She set the eggs gently in the cart, feeling a pang of envy. She thought of the day she and her mother and father had tried to go to the market. Since that day, they had not tried again.
It wasn’t like the Farrows had it easy. They had a son in Afghanistan and a mother in the hospital. But they were making the best of it. They were quite a family.
Meg ended up victorious, with a time of five minutes and thirty-two seconds, mostly because Peter and Kelsey met in the aisles too often, out of sight, getting distracted by each other.
Back at their cozy, ranch-style home, the four of them sat down to dinner, where Kelsey learned about Cathy’s job as an art teacher at El Dorado High School. Bill talked less about his work in insurance and more about his passion—college basketball. Kelsey told him about the game she had seen against Nebraska at Allen Fieldhouse, conveniently forgetting the rest of that night, with Davis.
When Meg expressed how nervous she was about the dance tryout, she offered to “send her twin sister” over to El Dorado sometime, to help her with her moves.
She saw the pride in Bill’s eyes when he looked at Peter, and the closed-mouth way he encouraged his dream to study at a good school far away from Kansas, though he didn’t quite understand it.
When Kelsey and Peter offered to do the dishes, Bill and Meg said good night, and the two of them were left to wash and dry.
They stood in silence for a while, their forearms occasionally touching as their hands worked, submerged in the soapy water, waiting for the sounds of teeth brushing and doors closing from down the hallway.
“I don’t know how else to say this,” Peter said, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. “But the thing is, unless you want to sleep on that polyester couch, there is only one open bed in this house.”
Kelsey knew what he was saying, and feeling the way she did about Peter, she would have to choose her words carefully. She turned to him, taking his still-wet hands, and placed them around her waist until they soaked through her shirt.
His palms went lower, to where the straight line of her back curved. She kissed his neck, slowly, many times, until she was right near his ear.
“I have a deep hatred of polyester,” she said.
His fingertips found their way under her shirt, and then out again, leaving hot traces. He took her hand.
“We can’t have that,” he said. “You need your privacy.”
“We need our privacy,” she replied, and kissed him softly on the mouth.
“Would you like to follow me to my room?” he asked, but before he could finish the question, she was already ahead of him, down the hall.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The next day, Peter woke Kelsey by kissing her at dawn. She snuck out to the polyester couch.
They drove alone in the overcast morning to the hospital, where they found Cathy so medicated that she didn’t wake when Peter shook her and said her name.
The nurse tried to calm Peter’s panic, assuring him that his mother was just sleeping. He had only a short time to see her before he had to ship out again, and most of the time she wasn’t able to say a word.
They sat as he held Cathy’s hand, her breaths steady against the beep of her heart monitor.
After three hours, Cathy emerged out of sleep to say a slurred “hello” to her son, and then sank back into slumber. Peter stood up, brushed his mother’s hair aside to kiss her forehead, and told Kelsey it was time to go.
“I want to show you something,” he told her.
They drove back to his house, but when Kelsey started to walk to the front door, he motioned her away.
“Back here,” he said, and they went around the house.
Peter’s backyard extended far past where she thought it would, past the mowed lawn and down a hill covered in wild grasses and weeds, to a clump of trees and bushes lining a small creek that seemed to connect all the houses on their block.
They hopped over the creek and ventured into the woods until all they could see were trees behind them, in front of them, to the right and le
ft.
Then Peter led them farther, until the trees broke.
They stood at the edge of what appeared to be a wheat field, golden stalks reaching to Kelsey’s shins, hitting nothing but big gray sky for miles and miles. It was beautiful and still and clear. Everything a person could love about Kansas.
“Is this someone’s land?” Kelsey asked.
“Probably,” Peter said, looking around. “They don’t use it, though. I think it used to be wheat, but now it’s just a bunch of dried-up grass. It was like this when I was a kid. Which reminds me…” He snapped off a stick from one of the surrounding trees. “You’re going to want a stick.”
Kelsey found a relatively stiff, skinny branch and snapped it. “Why?” she asked.
Peter looked at her with a sly smile. “You want to know what I call this place?”
“What?”
He whipped his stick through the grass, stirring it. “Snake Country.”
Kelsey clenched her stick, trying not to show that she was afraid, and whipped it through the grass around her.
“Don’t worry too much,” Peter said, feeling the ground for a dry place to sit.
Kelsey let out a “ha!” and sat down next to him, running her stick over the bending blades.
“I played all sorts of games here,” he said. “Just a lonely little kid, talking to himself about ninjas and dragons.”
Kelsey smiled at the thought, picturing him leaping through the grass, wielding his stick as a sword. “I’m sure you were a great fighter.”
“Against all things imaginary, yes.” He laughed shortly. “I was undefeated.”
They were quiet, listening to the wind rustle the new leaves.
“I’m not a fighter, though,” Peter said, looking out. “I wasn’t built to be over there.”
“I don’t think many people are,” Kelsey said.
“No, but they can adjust to it. They trained us well. They make everything you ever thought you couldn’t do, like—” He swallowed. “Just brutal stuff. They make that stuff into a habit. Into a reaction. And then it becomes necessary, in your mind. My whole world is flipped. Last night, while you were getting the groceries from the car, my sister dropped one of her textbooks on the floor by accident, and it made a banging sound, and do you know what my hands did?”
