The Long Ride Home

by Tawni Waters

  She and I had been fighting about cleaning the bathroom. She’d been asking me to do it for days, and I’d been pointedly ignoring her. Finally, she lost it. “Do I have to do everything around here?” she asked, tossing my toothbrush into the drawer. “I’m not your maid!”

  I knew she had a point but didn’t want to admit it. Instead, I went to my room and slammed the door. When she knocked a few minutes later, it pissed me off that she couldn’t leave me alone to cool down. “Go away, you bitch!” I was fourteen at the time, going through puberty. I know my hormones were out of control, but I still feel guilty every time I think about that day. If I could change one thing in my whole life (besides the fire, obviously), it would be that.

  I didn’t say I was sorry though. Instead, I climbed out my window, took a train to the beach, and collected a basket of seashells, the ones Mom loved, the ones that looked white and ugly on the outside but inside were radiant, pearlescent blue. When I returned hours later, she was sitting on the couch, looking like she’d been crying. She swiped at her cheeks.

  “I got these for you,” I said.

  “Thank you, kid.” She came to me and kissed me on the head. “God, baby. I was worried sick about you. I was about to call the cops. Next time you’re leaving, tell me, okay?”

  I nodded. We never talked about the incident again.

  I decide to do something similar for Dean. I pull over at a twenty-four-hour convenience store. It’s lit up from the inside, bleeding neon light into the sweaty night. I walk in, and a scrawny, old guy slouches behind the counter. He has this weird mustache. It looks like an aging hamster attached itself to his top lip.

  “Hi, sexy,” he says.

  Oh, dear god. What a perv. Ignoring him, I head for the back of the store.

  He doesn’t get the hint. “You fill out those jeans NA-ICE!”

  I am impressed at his ability to turn one-syllable words into two.

  “Dude,” I say, “even if I was into creepy old men, that pedo-stache would be a deal killer. Now leave me alone, or I’ll come in here tomorrow and file a complaint. Bet your boss would love to hear how you treat customers.”

  He seems to think about saying something not very na-ice, then thinks better of it.

  I go to a rack filled with key chains. One that says Harley-Davidson jumps out at me. I grab it, deciding that I will give Dean the key to my bike. He’s always wanted to drive it.

  I don’t want to talk to the creep at the register, so I throw a ten on the counter and keep walking. He says something as I’m leaving, but I can’t hear it over the jingling of the doorbell. I roll.

  When I get back to the hotel, our room is dark. I knock on the door. No answer. I knock again. “Dean, it’s me.” Nothing.

  On cue, thunder rolls. Fighting back panic, I walk around the hotel to the lobby. The door is locked, but a sign says RING BELL FOR NIGHT ATTENDANT. I ring it. Once. Twice. Three times.

  Finally, a short, bleary-eyed woman comes out. “What do you want?” she demands. Clearly, this establishment does not pride itself on exceptional customer service. Normally, I’d say something snarky. But I’m too scared to care.

  “I seem to have locked myself out of my room,” I say.

  She rolls her eyes. “Which room?”

  “Room 222.”

  “Your boyfriend checked out an hour ago,” she snaps.

  I stare, stunned. “Are you sure?” I finally ask.

  “He woke me up,” she says. “Made me call him a cab.”

  “There are cabs out here?” I ask.

  She snorts as if I’m an idiot. “The train station is twenty minutes away. Of course there are cabs.”

  “Oh.”

  “I assume you want back in?” she asks.

  I feel like barfing. Not knowing what else to do, I nod. She rustles around behind the desk and slaps the key on the counter.

  “Thank you,” I mutter.

  Clutching the key, I wander back to the room and unlock the door. When I turn on the light, the ghost of Dean stands there, crying because of the horrible things I said.

  The pizza box still sits on the bed.

  “Fuck you!” I say, meaning it, but not to Dean. Who am I talking to? Mom? God? The stupid pizza girl? I rush to the bed and throw the pizza as hard as I can. It hits the floor with a disappointing thud. What I want is a crash. What I want is broken glass.

  As I set my backpack on a chair, I notice a piece of paper on the nightstand. I pick it up and read:

  Harley,

  Do you know why you’re the only girl I’ve been with? Maybe this makes me a pussy, but I was waiting for someone special. I had chances with other girls, but they all felt wrong. And then I met you. I never told you this, but I loved you the first time I saw you sitting under that dock. I know it’s pathetic, but I did. I sat here all day waiting for you, trying to tell myself I didn’t love you anymore. The truth is, I still do. I always will. But I love me too. And if you’ve been lying to me, seeing other guys, I’m an asshole for sticking around. We need to figure out this baby thing. If it’s mine, I’ll do whatever I need to do.

  Dean

  I wad up the note, fall on the bed, and curl into a tiny ball. The fetal position. The baby inside me is sleeping just like this.

  Dean was right about ghosts. They are everywhere. Maybe not everywhere. Maybe only inside my head. They scream like Mom. They cry like Dean. They have eyes like black holes that go on and on into forever, sucking me back into the past. The ghosts talk about how important seconds can be, how they can make or break you. Again and again, they show me that night I lit the candle. I see the flame leaping from the lighter, the wick sputtering to life. How long did that take? Two seconds? Three? An act that burned my world to the ground. And today with Dean, I did it again. Turns out I am good at incinerating the things I love. I’m a regular pyromaniac.

  I think about going after Dean. How far can he have gotten? I consider texting him. I’m sorry. Come back. I type the words and then delete them. I’m not ready to talk to him. I’m not ready to hear him say all the horrible things he must want to say to me right now.

  Instead, I lie on this stinky motel bed, holding my belly, wondering if the gnawing there has something to do with the pregnancy or if it is simply the empty spot Dean left when he walked away. I hear Dean saying, “I love me too.” And I want him to be standing in front of me so I can say, “You aren’t the only one in this room who loves you. I love you, Dean.” I type out those words, then delete them too.

  My last text to Dean glares at me.

  Fuck. Off.

  “I’m such a bitch,” I whisper.

  I think about Dean’s Navajo ghosts. I never thought I’d feel this way about poltergeists, but the notion is hopeful. If American Indian women can hang around for centuries after their deaths, maybe Mom could be hanging around too. “Momma,” I say. My voice breaks between the m’s in the middle; it shatters like glass.

  I hear Mercy say, “Honey, your mom died.” I mean I really hear it. More than I heard it in the hospital that day. More than I’ve heard it in the ten thousand times I’ve remembered it since then. It’s real. Mom’s dead. I remember when the coroner first handed me that jar of ashes. This is all that’s left of her, I thought. I stared at the jar, waiting for her to scream again from inside, the way she did during the fire. She didn’t.

  I look around the empty motel room. A noise comes out of my mouth, more than a cry, more than a scream, more than a wail. It’s a noise I never knew I could make. It’s grief incarnated as sound.

  “Momma,” I whimper again.

  Mom’s ghost doesn’t answer. I am utterly, irreversibly alone.

  Eight

  Every day, I wake up with a song in my head. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because music is the only friend I have so I’m bound to hear its voice in my dreams. I be
lieve that the song I wake up with is an omen for the next twenty-four hours, mostly because the day I set the house on fire, I woke up with Pink’s “Funhouse” in my head. I should have known waking up hearing a song about burning a house down was bad news.

  My omen theory isn’t always accurate. For instance, last year when I found out I had gotten chlamydia from the Asshole, I woke up with Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” in my head. No shit.

  A song about dancing fishies was my omen for motherfucking chlamydia, which turned out not to be that big of a deal, medically speaking, though there was a fishy smell involved. (Maybe it was an omen after all.) I only had to take a round of antibiotics to get rid of it.

  Emotionally speaking, I was a train wreck. I had to sit on a cold table in a hospital gown under the gaze of Mom’s very disapproving ob-gyn, who gave me a lecture about condoms and told me I was lucky I hadn’t contracted HIV or gotten pregnant. As if I wasn’t already traumatized by losing my virginity to a douchebag who said he loved me before he fucked me and never called again, the doctor offered to show me how to put a condom on a banana.

  “No, thanks,” I told her. “I took sex ed.”

  Apparently, I was a bad student. The first time I had sex, I didn’t use protection and got an STD. The second time I had sex, I didn’t use protection, and I got pregnant. Am I the stupidest/unluckiest person in the world or what?

  Today, my omen theory is proven right. I wake up with that old Tori Amos song “A Sorta Fairytale” in my head. What blows my mind about music is that it’s capable of replicating feelings exactly. I could tell you my heart was broken, and it might not mean shit to you. I could paint a broken heart, and you might think of Valentine’s Day. But if I played “A Sorta Fairytale” for you? Well, it sounds exactly like a broken heart. It sounds like emptiness and longing and the death of dreams.

  Because of that damn song, I remember Dean is gone before I even open my eyes, which seems unfair. Shouldn’t I have a few moments of peace before reality comes rushing in? I bury my face in the stinky hotel pillow and “cry it out,” as Mom would call it. Whenever I scraped my knee or got picked on, she’d hold me and say, “That’s it, kid. Cry it out.”

  When my sobs subside, I get up and go to the bathroom. I almost laugh at how ugly I look. My eyes are swollen halfway shut. My skin is mottled. I’m pretty sure my hair has snot in it. I can’t quite laugh though because there is a chasm in my belly—you know, the kind of emptiness that grows in you when the worst thing that could possibly happen has happened. I’m pretty fucking familiar with this particular brand of pain. Angrily, I slough off my clothes and turn on the shower. I step in.

  “Shit!” It’s cold. I back out of the water, turn the knob, and step back in. “Shit!” It’s hot. By the time I finally get the temperature adjusted to an acceptable level, I’m sure I have both frostbite and third-degree burns. I wash my hair with a crappy motel shampoo and pat myself dry with a suspiciously unwhite towel. I’m afraid to really commit to the drying process because I’m almost 100 percent certain the towel smells like someone else’s ass, which means it hasn’t been washed in god knows how long.

  When I’m done combing my hair, I throw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, grab my bag, and head for the door. I glance around to make sure I’m not leaving anything behind. The pitiful pizza is wadded up against the wall, looking desperate and alone. “You and me have a lot in common,” I say to it. It occurs to me that I’ve finally completely lost my mind. I’m talking to Italian food. I see an image of Dean walking out, and my eyes burn. Instead of crying, I get pissed. “Fuck you,” I tell the pizza, wondering what this particular cuisine did to deserve so much abuse. It had the nerve to be toted by a supermodel. That’s what it did. Why couldn’t the delivery girl have been the female equivalent of the dad on Family Guy? Why couldn’t she have acne and an odor problem? Then Dean would still be here. We would be curled up together in that ugly bed, probably having just had sex. He would smell like deodorant and sweat and sunshine, which actually does have a smell. Any biker knows this.

  “Hasta la vista, baby,” I say to the pizza. It doesn’t answer. I turn and walk out the door.

  My motorcycle doesn’t want to start, which is just like her. She rarely starts easily in the mornings. Usually, I coax her, muttering encouragement. Today, I kick her. She responds and sputters to life.

  The seat burns me through my jeans. I’m grateful for the pain. I need something to snap me back into reality. I wonder if there is a hidden camera somewhere. I have to be the brunt of some cosmic joke, right? No way this can be real. I mean, it was bad enough with Mom’s death, but now this? I imagine celebrities jumping out from behind the bushes yelling, “You got punk’d!”

  “I got punk’d!” I scream as I start the bike. I must look like a crazy person, but I don’t care. I pull out onto the road, then out onto the freeway again. I drive until I see golden arches beckoning. As I pull into the McDonald’s parking lot, the weight of my predicament descends on me. It’s like someone turned the sky into a slab of concrete and dropped it on my head. Holy shit.

  I take off my helmet and stare at the horizon. Wavy lines of heat rise from the pavement. Birds flurry above a lone tree. Cars roar by on the freeway. I rub my eyes, trying to clear my vision, hardly believing there is a potential human growing inside of me, and I have to figure out what to do with it. Hell, I can barely decide what to eat for lunch most days.

  For the first time, I think the word abortion. A surge of relief comes with it. I could walk into a clinic, and this whole thing would be over. Dean would come with me. I know he would. Even if he hates me now, he wouldn’t make me go through that alone. But the thought of putting an end to my maybe-baby makes me sick to my stomach. I remember that feeling I had on the highway, like I loved the possibility of it. I remember the way thinking I loved that maybe-baby stopped me from crashing into a tree.

  It’s not that I think abortion is bad. Mom was pro-choice. She told me she never had doubts about keeping me, but she wanted women to have the option of choosing abortion if that was the best decision for them. She believed so strongly in abortion rights that she went to a lot of pro-choice rallies. Sometimes, I went with her. And I still believe in all that. I don’t want women to have to get back alley abortions. I don’t want women not to have the right to choose what to do with their own bodies. But somehow, now that it’s my decision, the thought of abortion seems scarier than it ever did when it was an abstract idea. Now, it’s a fetus. A real, live fetus. And if I let it grow, it will become a baby. And if it becomes a baby?

  Well, if it becomes a baby, I’m screwed.

  “Mom,” I whisper. “How was this so easy for you? How did you know what to do?”

  I look over and see a small kid staring at me from a car in the drive-through. He’s cute—red hair and a curious expression. I wave at him, and he waves back, smiling tentatively. When he doesn’t look away, I start to feel awkward, so I head inside.

  Waiting in line, I remember Dean feeding me my very first McDonald’s cheeseburger. How stupid is it that the two things that remind me irrevocably of my boyfriend, or whatever the hell he was, are cheeseburgers and bourbon? This has to be a bad sign, right? How could a guy like that be good for me? For a second, I think about what it might be like if Dean and I decided to raise this baby together. I imagine us living in some apartment in LA, working odd jobs, taking turns babysitting, trying to make ends meet. I bet Dean would be a great dad. I bet he’d be one of those guys who throws the kid up in the air and catches her or him making weird “bub bub bub” noises and laughing.

  “May I take your order?” The woman behind the counter is forty-five. Maybe fifty. I wonder what life events lead her to work at McDonald’s at her age. Normally, I probably wouldn’t think anything of it, but right now, everything is about babies. So fair or not, I can’t help but think she probably had a kid when she was nineteen. My
fantasy about Dean and the “bub bub bub” noises evaporates.

  “I’ll get the two cheeseburgers meal,” I say, because if there is one thing in the world that is better than one cheeseburger, it has to be two.

  “That’ll be six dollars and seventy-eight cents.” The woman manages as a smile as I hand her a ten, but she looks tired. I wonder what she will do when she goes home tonight. Sit on a cheap couch and watch Netflix? Drink whiskey?

  When my food comes, I take it to a table near the ball pit and watch kids scramble around. There’s this one girl wearing overalls with zebras on them. She has these amazing spiral curls, and she never stops squealing with delight. Normally, the noise might bother me, but as I shove the cheeseburgers down, I try to imagine that she’s mine. A wave of love washes over me. I take in her rounded nose, her wide eyes, and her tiny fingers. I get why mothers love their kids so much. I think of my own mom, the way she loved me. It didn’t matter what I did wrong, how badly I screwed up, she was always on my side. I touch Mom’s sun necklace, and tears spring into my eyes. I give myself an internal lecture. No more nervous breakdowns while eating cheeseburgers.

  Miraculously, it works. My eyes dry up. Carefully, I unclasp the necklace and look at the silver orb resting in my palm. I turn it over to read the words engraved on it. Los Milagros.

  “No matter what anyone said, I always knew you were my miracle.” How was Mom so sure? Because the truth is, I’m not. I don’t know if the fetus growing in me is a miracle or the worst thing that ever happened to me.

  My cheeseburgers are gone. I wolf down the fries, toss my trash, and head outside.

  “Awesome Harley,” a woman says as I climb on.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “You live around here?” she asks.

  “Nah. Just passing through.”

  “Where you headed?” she asks.