Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

“Come on, where did I meet you?”

  “Just around.” Josie ruffled the air with her fingers and smiled. The words Taco Bell were not going to pass her lips. She shifted her weight delicately on the car seat. His car was so classy. A real grown-up car, very new and clean-looking, with one of those leather covers on the steering wheel.

  Mitchell Crook narrowed his eyes at her, thinking. “You know Tom Cook?”

  “Nope.”

  “Bobby Cook? Kim Burlingame?”

  She shook her head. She wondered how long she could keep up her Mystery Girl act, before he figured out she was nobody. To change the subject she said, “Thanks for being so nice to me the other night.”

  “Well, I wasn’t that nice.”

  “Sure you were. You could have thrown my little punk ass in jail. It was such a totally messed-up situation.”

  “It was a drug dealers’ gunfight and you’re lucky you didn’t get hurt.”

  Josie tried to look chastened at this. But in fact nothing had happened, her heart was beating as if it would live forever, and joy was something she could almost hold in her hands. He was only sounding stern because he felt obliged to, the cop part of him that had to keep making cop noises, or perhaps it just came easier to him. She thought about how she had drawn his face down to hers, the shock to her senses. She thought about doing it again. She said, “So you changed your mind and you came back to bust me.” “No, just to make sure you’re staying out of trouble.”

  Now there was a flirting note in his voice that she recognized and knew how to answer. “Trouble? Me?”

  “Yeah, you.” He smiled, his first real all-out smile. It just about finished her. The wild bad thing between her legs was making itself known, agitating, putting crazy pictures in her head, and again she had the sensation of wanting to slow things down, make sure they were really happening. She missed a beat and didn’t smile back the way she should have. When she finally got her face working, it must have twitched or blanched, because his smile lowered a notch.

  She felt she had to apologize. “I’m sorry, I was just thinking how weird this is.”

  “You think I’m weird?”

  “No, it’s weird that you’re talking to me and you’re an actual human being.” Could she have said anything stupider? “I mean you being a cop and, all. How do you like it, ah, police work? Was it something you always wanted to do?” Lame. Conversation 101. But Mitchell Crook appeared to give it serious thought.

  “I used to want to play ball.”

  “Ball, like basketball?”

  “Baseball. I played semipro for a while. In Texas.”

  “Really?” Weak. But she couldn’t think of one thing to say about semipro baseball. Not one.

  “Yeah. Pitcher. I had a fastball that clocked at eighty-fve miles an hour.” She knew to be impressed with that, although she didn’t want him to keep going on about baseball. It made her anxious, it was nothing he should be thinking about right now.

  “Yeah. Then I blew out my arm. So much for that idea.” He shrugged as if to shake himself loose from the memory. “My Dad’s a cop. My uncle too. I kind of grew up with it. You know.”

  Josie nodded seriously, to indicate the depth of her understanding. Then he said, “So you’re what, still in school?”

  It killed her to admit it. She tried to make it sound as if school was something she only did in her spare time.

  “I would have figured you for older.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. A year or two, maybe.”

  The radio filled the silence. Josie knew what he was thinking about. Her stupid driver’s license that said she wasn’t eighteen yet, wouldn’t be until next April. That made her some kind of illegal, so that if he ever God … God. She couldn’t even think it. But it was what she wanted most in this world.

  She said, “I bet girls lie about that stuff all the time. I bet nobody ever blames the guys.” That sounded like she was desperate, begging. She tried again. “Age is just a number. It’s nothing you should let define you as a person.”

  Mitchell Crook said Sure, in an absent way, gazing out the windshield at nothing at all. That earlier joy was turning slippery and liquid and dense, like the mercury in a thermometer, falling away. She willed herself to keep silent, not to make things even worse. He leaned forward and turned off the radio. The only sounds were the engine and the air-conditioning whoosh that had been there all along. Was she supposed to leave now?

  Then he said, “You still aren’t going to tell me where you know me from?” Josie shook her head. “You’re something else, you know?”

  “Something good or something bad?”

  “Oh, very good,” he murmured, and that heavy, silvery joy began to crest in her once more.

  “You mean you don’t have girls throwing themselves at you all the time?”

  “Not such pretty ones.”

  Lord God Almighty.

  She said, “I guess I just wanted to …”

  She didn’t get any further than that, and Mitchell Crook didn’t find anything to say for a time either. Then he spoke up, sounding almost angry. “Look, I don’t want to get you in trouble. Or me in trouble.”

  For once in her life, she was inspired to say exactly the right thing. “I can keep a secret.”

  “… or hurt you. Take advantage.”

  “You wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t.”

  “I’m twenty-five,” he said moodily.

  “That’s nothing. That’s not even ten years more than me.”

  “I don’t know why, I just can’t stop thinking about you.”

  Their voices had dropped, as if they were already telling secrets.

  They bent forward. Josie wondered if she would ever see his face in daylight again, or he hers. The darkness was so perfect. Everything had slowed way down. She could count her breaths in heavy beats. He shook his head. “What am I supposed to do with you?”

  She raised a finger to her mouth, meaning he was not to talk, and he wrapped her hand in his and that was how they began touching. She let him pull her toward him. Her bare shoulders shivered from something other than cold, she even shrank back because she was almost afraid, he was so clumsy and so strong. But she made herself be fearless, she wanted to meet him at least halfway and she did. She took a step in her mind and her body followed.

  They were all tangled up in each other, kissing and touching as if their hands were mouths also, when a car door slammed nearby. Josie broke loose and twisted around to see the pimp manager grinning at her from the front seat of his own car. “Oh Christ.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Nobody. Arrest him, OK?”

  The pimp raced his engine, then pulled out, tires squealing. Mitch said, “He was jealous. I can tell from the way he was driving.”

  “Oh screw him.” Josie sat back, exasperated. She knew that now she’d be in for all the idiocies he could think to inflict on her. “Did you change over to working nights?”

  “Yeah, I used to work second shift. You knew that. How did you know that?”

  Josie did Mystery Girl again. Smiled. “I was just thinking, I probably won’t work here much longer. So I’ll have my evenings free.” She was about to quit her second cruddy job because of him. Good.

  “Oh wow, it’s late. I gotta go. Fight crime and/or evil.” He reached out and tousled her hair and they kissed again, more practiced this time, with something serious and knowing behind it.

  Josie said, “So I guess …”

  “Hey, I’ll be around.”

  He really was waiting for her to go, so she smiled in a way that she tried to make carefree, and walked to her car just as cool and slow as she could manage. He waited for her to start her engine, then he waved and pulled into the street.

  Unreal. Unfuckingreal.

  She drove around for a while, thinking about everything, but she didn’t want to run into him again while he was being Officer Cop, so she gave up and headed home. There was no one in the world
she could tell. Not Tammy, God knows. And not her mother, who, when she parked her car in the garage and tried to creep up the stairs, called out to her from the den.

  “Just a minute.” Josie checked herself in the powder-room mirror for any visible signs of depravity, then went to stand at the open door of the den. “What?”

  “Come in and sit down, please.” Her mother motioned her over. Oh shit, did she have some kind of instant sex radar? But no. Her mother was absorbed in one of her shows, one of the hospital shows. She followed the screen for a moment, then turned back to Josie. “Sit, honey. How was work?”

  Josie perched on the arm of an overstuffed chair and stared the television down. “OK.”

  “You’re home early.”

  “Yeah, it was kind of slow.” Sometimes she thought that she and her mother hadn’t said anything new to each other in years. Meanwhile, her real life was going on all around, it lit up the sky like neon, it sang out loud. Her mother’s wineglass was empty, and she had her hand in a bowl of crackers, just resting there, ready to resume the automatic cracker-feed. She was wearing her glasses and the lenses were all smudged and fingerprinty, from the crackers, Josie supposed. She made a move to get up but her mother waved her back down.

  “Just a sec, this is almost over.” The television music reached its swelling, roll-credits conclusion and her mother turned her smudged glasses in Josie’s direction. “You ever watch this?”

  “No.”

  “It’s so good. It’s enough to make you go into medicine. Of course you’d have to be gorgeous like all of them.”

  “Was there something you wanted?”

  “Your father has to make airline reservations for Aspen.”

  “Who’s stopping him?”

  “If you still don’t want to go, you need to call and tell him.” Josie waited. “That’s it?”

  “Well, nobody’s going to tie you in a sack and make you go. I think it would be nice if you could bring yourself to appreciate the things he tries to do for you. But you’re getting old enough to make your own decisions. Live with the consequences.”

  “Gee, thanks.” She was sarcastic, because of course her mother was trying to make her feel guilty, but her stomach went hollow as she thought about Mitchell Crook and everything she had already decided. It was as if she stood once more on that cliff edge, or no, she had already jumped, and it was a lonely feeling, all that empty air.

  “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

  “What what is?”

  “You just have this funny look on your face.”

  Josie could have kicked herself. She knew better than to be caught with her face showing anything at all. “I’m just kind of tired.”

  “It’s not Jeff, is it?”

  “Jeff? Excuse me while I vomit.”

  “Then who is it?”

  “God, Mom, give me a break.” Was she drunk? Sometimes her mother drank a lot of wine and fell asleep in front of the television with her mouth open. Sometimes she got the idea she was very funny and made remarks that were supposed to be clever. But she was never nosy like this; she’d been trained too well. Josie gave her a look of polite indignation and her mother stared blandly back. “How would you like it if I started asking you a lot of personal questions?”

  “I don’t know, I might like it. Something new and different.”

  “Well, I’ll try to come up with some.” There had to be a way to get out of this room.

  “Just because you walk around in your own little world and you don’t pay attention to anyone else, that doesn’t mean you’re invisible.”

  Josie stood up, really alarmed now. This was creepy. “I’ll talk to you sometime when you’re sober.”

  She headed up the stairs but her mother was following her. “A word to the wise. To the wiseass.”

  “All right, Mom. Sleep it off.”

  “Go ahead, make fun. I’m not drunk. I’m just in a ruminative mood. Wondering what illicit activity my only child is up to. Insurance fraud? Product tampering? I ask myself. Je me demande.”

  “Good night, OK?”

  She closed her bedroom door. But her mother stood outside it. “I was thinking, maybe we could do something together sometime.”

  “Do something?”

  Beneath the bottom edge of the door was a crack of light, and in its center was the dark space that was her mother. “Lunch. Shopping. Or you could come to India with me next time.”

  This last was so unexpected that Josie laughed a little barking laugh. “India? What would I do there?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Her mother seemed to abandon the idea as soon as she voiced it. “You could meet some of the people I know there. Well, good night, honey.”

  “Good night.” The space beneath the door lightened, then almost immediately she was back.

  “Jose? Sweetie? I’m sorry to keep bothering you. It just makes me sad that we don’t like each other more.”

  Josie put her fingers to the door. Her mother sounded as if she was breathing through the cracks in the door frame, it was as if the wood itself was breathing. “What are you saying, Mom, you don’t like me?”

  “Baby, how could you even think such a thing? I love you more than anything in the whole big blue-eyed world.”

  The blue-eyed world?Where did that come from? “Yeah, but you just said you didn’t like me.”

  “I love you more than this boy whoever he is that you won’t tell me about. Open the door.”

  “No. Go to bed. I hope you don’t remember any of this in the morning.”

  “I just want to give you a hug.”

  Josie opened the door. Her mother had a fixed, sorrowful expression, and her eyes were small and red. “Don’t be mad at me, Sunshine.”

  “I’m not mad, Mom. I just think you’re a little out of it.”

  “Whoever this boy is, he doesn’t deserve you.”

  “Mo-om.”

  “Come here.”

  Josie allowed herself to be hugged. It was awful. She and her mother were exactly the same height, and her mother’s hair caught her full in the face. It smelled perfumey and it made her nose itch. “All right,” said Josie, trying to get loose from her mother’s sagging weight, the soft insistence of her breasts. “All right.”

  Her mother kissed her on the neck in one of the places Mitchell Crook had kissed her. “You’ve just go so much to learn, baby.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m trying.”

  “Don’t let anybody ever tell you you’re less than absolutely precious.”

  Josie promised she wouldn’t, and her mother retreated down the hall to bed. It was probably some menopause thing.

  Just when she thought things couldn’t get any stranger.

  Why hadn’t Mitch told her when she’d see him again? Why had she let him get away without making plans? If she thought she was crazy before, now she was worse, remembering all their greedy touching and wanting more. Maybe he was afraid to call her at home, she could understand that. Or maybe there was some kind of police/crime emergency, except there wasn’t anything in the papers, or maybe he’d just been playing her, but no, he wouldn’t do that. Most likely she was supposed to wait, be patient, which was of course the adult thing to do. But she had gone to her odious job for the last three nights, had endured the pimp calling her Parking Lot Peg, had loitered around afterward as long as she dared, and there was still no sign of him. Didn’t he want to see her, didn’t he want it as much as she did? Everything that she’d thought was so certain was now in doubt. And yet it could be restored in an instant.

  She was going to call him. She’d call some morning when she was sure he was home, wake him up if she had to. She would think of some good excuse, except she didn’t have one. She felt how she could hate him, truly hate him if she had to, and how she could love him again in spite of it. Meanwhile the world went on and on about its stupid yakking business, and each day was as hot as a year of fever.

  Was it possible to take some kind of amn
esia pill and go back to the way she was before, when she was only unhappy? No, you had to remember everything you ever knew or felt or saw. Everything stayed with you forever and marked you like blobs of paint on a canvas, so that by the end of your life you were one big blobby mess.

  On the fourth night he came into Beefeater’s. She saw him the instant he walked in. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and he smiled straight at her and the pimp manager sneered and swaggered and Mitch was right, he was jealous, which seemed to her both sad and awful, but she was too blissed out to care.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself.”

  “Would you like to see a menu?” Josie asked, playing it serious.

  “I don’t know. Is there anything good here?”

  “Ooh, I’m not sure I want to touch that one,” she teased, and he rested an elbow on the counter and leaned back to survey the restaurant and it didn’t matter that they were talking like total flakes, he was perfect, everything was perfect.

  “You have to work?” she murmured, because of course everybody, the line cook and the waitresses, were gawking at them, even the dishwasher was peeking around the corner with his child-molester leer.

  “Not unless they call me in because of civil insurrection or something.

  He had to move to one side so a man could pay his bill. Josie rang up the customer and gave him change and told him to have a good evening. Then she reached beneath the cashier’s stand for her bag and hooked it over her shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  It was like in An Officer and a Gentleman where Richard Gere comes into the factory and carries Debra Winger away. Well, not quite like that but almost as good.

  Now they were drifting out over the hot black asphalt. The night sky was enormous and blazing with lights. Even the pink streetlights that always reminded her of the sun on some ghastly planet had a shimmering look to them. Josie said, “You would not believe how glad I am to get out of that place.” And she laughed, out of nervousness. They hadn’t touched yet, but she felt him walking beside her, that zone of almost-touching.

  When they reached his car he kissed her, stooping just enough to graze her mouth. “You didn’t tell anybody who I was, did you?”

  “Of course not.”