The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  I opened my purse and began rummaging through it. “Yes. Here’s one of the guys.” I pointed to a photo I’d taken of Gideon, posing with about six other boys on their graduation day. Jeremy was standing next to my brother in the picture. “And the other guy is to his left.”

  “Do they look familiar to you now?” Donovan asked her.

  “Kinda,” Kim said, nodding.

  I did everything I could not to roll my eyes. No way had she ever seen either guy before in her life.

  I motioned with a quick head tilt toward the bartender, hoping Donovan would get the message. I was pleased when he asked Kim, “Think anybody else might recognize them? The bartender, maybe?”

  “Nah. He’s from out East somewhere. Massachusetts, I think,” Kim said. “He’s only been in the area since March.”

  I thought about the music in the bar. The bartender wasn’t playing a radio station but, instead, Boston’s debut album—in its entirety. I’d listened to it all the way through at Betsy’s house and liked it. A lot. But it’d been released just a few weeks after Gideon disappeared, and in a gut-punching way, it always reminded me of him. These were my brother’s kind of songs. Roll-the-car-windows-down and turn-the-volume-up songs of the open road. Strains of “Hitch a Ride,” faded as another tune began.

  Kim wandered off again and, since Donovan had turned suddenly silent while devouring his ham-n-Swiss sandwich, I nibbled at my coleslaw and watched Kim make the rounds.

  The waitress was over by the pool players within moments, flirting with one of them and letting a tall, scraggly-looking man put his arm around her and run his chalky fingers down the length of her side, from shoulder to hip. Was she hoping this spectacle would make Donovan jealous? If so, it was wasted effort. Looked like Donovan only had eyes for his sandwich.

  More people had filtered into the bar, but I kept a watch on our waitress, unable to stop observing her desperate attempts at connecting with some guy. She was as easy to read as a kindergartener. I could tell Kim was the type to have barely squeaked through high school. She reminded me a lot of Sandy from work. Nice enough, but not exactly the sharpest tool in the box.

  I sensed Kim’s decision to relocate to the wilds of western Wisconsin for a trucker named Hal had been an impulsive one. That every night at the bar was another opportunity to meet a new man and, hopefully, make her escape again. But with a happier ending this time.

  I also more than suspected that Kim both pitied and envied me. Pitied me because, in her eyes, I was every bit the uninteresting kid sister that Donovan had painted me to be. And, yet, she envied me, too, because, however platonic the relationship, I’d be the one leaving with him. Or, maybe, it was as simple as the fact that I’d be leaving—period.

  With “Let Me Take You Home Tonight” playing loud and ironically, a second waitress came into the bar, stopped to chat with Kim and the bartender and, then, grabbed her order pad and got to work. It wasn’t long before Kim dragged the new waitress over to our table, glad to have another excuse to chitchat with Donovan.

  “Hey, this is Cindy,” Kim said of her friend, who looked like a slightly older version of Kim, but with lighter hair and less of an air of hopefulness. “She’s worked here for longer than me and also at Jacky’s, the bar halfway down the block. Maybe she knows those guys you were looking for.”

  Donovan cranked up the charm level with his grin again, and even the older waitress wasn’t immune to it.

  “These guys in any kind of trouble?” Cindy asked when I handed her the photo, showing she was brighter than her fellow waitress.

  Donovan shook his head. “Not that I know of,” he lied convincingly. “Haven’t seen them since a party we were all at a couple of years ago, and I thought they might be traveling together. Maybe through the area.”

  Cindy looked relieved. She also looked at the picture with far more genuine recognition than Kim had, I realized, but she was holding her tongue.

  I tried to help her along. “They were so funny,” I gushed, faking the kind of girlish laugh that my best friend Betsy did so well. “It’d be really cool to catch up with them again.”

  Donovan bobbed his head heartily.

  “I’m pretty sure they were in town before,” Cindy admitted. “I remember this one in the middle real well.” She pointed to Gideon. “Speedy white and blue car, right? Taped up back window?”

  I saw Donovan’s Adam’s apple slide up and down a few times before he could compose himself enough to answer. “That’s right.”

  He sent me a careful, knowing look. Kim might have told Cindy about the colors of Gideon’s car, but no one had said anything about the broken window. It had been a detail even I hadn’t thought to mention until that moment.

  “Yeah. Those two stood out. Had to be about two years back, though,” Cindy said. “Pretty sure they were here a couple of times with Ben Rainwater, God rest his soul.”

  Donovan shot her a very sharp look. “Who is…or was Ben Rainwater?”

  Cindy sighed. “He was from the Rez. A nice guy, I always thought. Sad story, though. He died in an accident. We still miss him ‘round here.”

  “What kind of an accident?” Donovan asked.

  “The Bonner Mill explosion,” Cindy said.

  “You brought that up earlier, didn’t you?” Donovan said, directing his question at Kim. “When, uh…when did that happen?”

  Kim looked pleased to be asked. “Two summers ago.”

  “Fourth of July weekend,” Cindy added. “The night before the Bicentennial.”

  Donovan caught my eye, but I wasn’t able to breathe—let alone speak—after hearing this news. This was the same time frame, the same time frame exactly, that Gideon and Jeremy had disappeared. What were our brothers doing in this town? What were they doing with a man who died the same weekend they disappeared? Was it just some strange coincidence? Had they gotten caught in the same explosion as Ben Rainwater?

  Or—an almost inconceivable thought—were they the ones who’d caused it?

  I finally recovered my voice, though it was shaky and soft. “That’s…so sad. Does Ben have any relatives nearby?”

  Cindy and Kim exchanged a look. “Just his cousin Ronny,” Kim said. “His mom and sister moved away.”

  “Ronny?” Donovan parroted.

  “Ronny Lee Wolf,” Cindy said. “He owns the corner grocery store. Works there ten a.m. to five p.m. every day. Even weekends.”

  I knew, whether Donovan liked it or not, that we’d need to have a little conversation with Ronny tomorrow.

  “Hey, Kim! Where’s my beer?” one of the pool-playing guys bellowed across the room.

  “I’m comin’, Jesse!” the younger waitress bellowed back. She raced toward the bar to grab what he needed.

  Cindy, older than her coworker by eight, maybe ten, years, glanced at the pool players for a moment, thoughtfully, then said, “I gotta get back to work. Y’all let me know if you have any other questions. I hope you find your friends.”

  “Thanks,” Donovan murmured. “Appreciate your help.” As soon as she was gone, though, he pushed himself to standing and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  I caught one last look at Cindy taking orders on the other side of the room while Donovan shoved some cash at the bartender to cover our bill and a tip for Kim. Despite our age difference of a decade, Cindy reminded me more of myself than Kim did. And I wondered if that sense of hopelessness I read in her gestures would be my fate someday, too—especially if I kept working at Dale’s Grocery Mart, kept living with my parents in Chameleon Lake, kept postponing my dreams indefinitely.

  I recognized something particular in Cindy’s gaze. Sensed she knew Kim had limited time to make her escape. Knew her own days of doing so were probably closing in behind her. And I felt a warning in Cindy’s wistful expression that led me to thoughts of college again.

  It wouldn’t be easy for either me or my parents if I finally applied to a college and moved away, but I wasn’t helping them by remain
ing frozen in time in Minnesota. Leaving would be better than numbness, better than becoming yet another disillusioned girl who wrote eloquently about topics like women’s lib and equal rights in my high-school history papers but hoped some white knight would ride into town in his King Cobra and rescue me.

  And, God, if Gideon and Jeremy were still alive, not only might I get to see them and make our families whole again, but I could be free. Really and truly free.

  When we walked out into the night, it had turned darkish, past twilight, and I remembered with a sudden panic that I hadn’t yet called home.

  “I need to find a payphone,” I told Donovan.

  “Why?” He looked frustrated by what we’d just learned, and I could see the anger inside him simmering again, burning hot enough to leave beads of sweat on his skin.

  “I promised my mother I’d call her tonight.”

  He stared at me. “Why?” he repeated. “What are you gonna tell her?”

  “Just that I’m fine and that the party’s going well.” My mom might barely notice my movements back at home, but her parental worry kicked into high gear when I was away.

  “The party? Where does she think you are?” Donovan spit out.

  “Not here,” I spit back. “And not with you.” He’d horned in on my weekend research expedition. I didn’t owe him any damn explanations.

  He blew the air slowly out of his mouth, as if trying to control the flow and sizzle of his temper. Recognizing, I suspected, on some more mature level that I wasn’t the person he was actually mad at that night.

  “The bartender back there, Mike, said there’s a decent motel in Ashburn Falls. They’ll have a phone.”

  I glanced at my watch. “I can’t wait that long. She must be worried already.”

  “Fine.” That he didn’t argue with me about this was proof he’d witnessed his own mother’s unbearable pain of loss. Knew it was an emotional hole that could never be filled, no matter how many reassurances followed.

  Crescent Cove may have been a town without a gas station, but it did at least have a glass-sided phone booth, even if it was hidden in the shadows, around the corner in an alley, near the last bar on the street.

  Donovan insisted on standing right next to me as I dropped my coins into the box. He scowled through the entire phone call as I fibbed to my mother about how much fun I was having at the birthday party for Betsy’s cousin. After a minute, I actually had to turn my back on him so I wouldn’t have to face his expression of disapproval.

  “Well, what did you expect me to tell her?” I said to him, once I’d hung up. “The truth? Hmm? You try explaining that.”

  He gritted his teeth, but I knew he didn’t have a good answer to these questions, which was why I didn’t call him on it when he said instead, “Are we free to go now?”

  “Yeah,” I told him.

  Technically, this was true. However, lost momentarily in the tension over my phone call home was the fact that we’d discovered some new information about events surrounding the time of our brothers’ disappearance. Aside from Gideon’s journal, this was the first real lead we’d had in two years! Just wondering what we’d learn at the little store the next day made my stomach churn with anxiety.

  Then again, I had yet another reason to be nervous.

  Although I’d managed to avoid thinking about spending the night with Donovan until we were on the road to Ashburn Falls, once we were actually in the Nite Lite Inn’s parking lot, I couldn’t ignore the reality of it.

  Crap.

  When he killed the engine on the Trans Am, he stared hard out the window before abruptly pulling his duffle bag up to the front seat. I watched as he began digging through it, eventually retrieving a thin gold ring that looked a lot like a wedding band.

  “What’s that for?” I blurted.

  He thrust it at me. “Put this on your left hand, at least while we’re checking in.”

  I thrust it right back at him, too shocked to even bother trying to disguise it. “Are you joking, Donovan? Back at the bar, you said I was your sister. Now you need for us to pretend to be married? That’s ridiculous! It’s not the 1800s. It’s 1978. Couples check into motel rooms all the time now without even being engaged and, besides, no one knows us here.”

  Donovan glanced between my face and the flashing neon lights of the motel’s “Welcome” sign and, for a moment, I was touched that this big Army guy was so interested in propriety and preserving my good reputation, even among strangers, that he’d come up with such an absurd idea. That he’d actually planned for it while packing…

  But he didn’t take back the ring, and he was not at all joking.

  “Small-town business owners tend to be old-fashioned, Aurora,” he said. “Anyone with decent eyesight can tell you’re not my sister. We don’t have any of the same features. Kim at the bar wanted to believe that, but no hotel manager will think so. There’ll be fewer questions, and we’ll be less conspicuous this way.” A small smile replaced the words but there was no mistaking the seriousness of his command. Especially after he added, “Put it on and size it to fit.”

  In examining the ring more closely, I could see it wasn’t real gold. It was kind of like a Cracker Jack prize and had a slice in it so it could be adjusted with an easy squeeze.

  Sighing, I did as he requested, pressing the gold-colored band just hard enough to keep it firmly on my ring finger. Then I held up my left hand and waved it at him. “Happy now?”

  He grunted something that sounded like “happiness is overrated,” but I wasn’t completely sure because he’d already jumped out of the car.

  I trailed him into the motel’s office unit and hung a step or two back as the lady owner greeted us coolly, shuffled some paperwork around and made Donovan fill out a few registration sheets.

  “It’ll be twelve dollars for a double bed,” she informed us, eyeing my ‘wedding’ band with undisguised curiosity. “You two newlyweds?”

  “Very much so,” I told her, forcing a smile. Like as of three minutes ago.

  “Congratulations,” the woman said with almost no emotion. Definitely not a romantic. “From around here?”

  I shook my head and Donovan said, “Nope.” He pointed to something he’d written on the first sheet. “St. Paul,” he told her, ignoring both my sharp glance and the ten-dollar bill and two ones that I tried to hand him. “I got this…honey,” he said firmly as the older lady took a step back to snatch our room key.

  “Number Nine.” The woman sniffed as she dropped the key in Donovan’s palm, and then she gestured toward a bright yellow sign hanging near the counter. “No smokin’ in bed. No, uh, real loud noises—”

  Donovan raised his eyebrows at her.

  “Like TV, yellin’ and…such,” she clarified. But there was no denying the suggestiveness of her words.

  I fought a blush and studied the dirty tile floor as Donovan handed over the cash.

  “Checkout time’s eleven a.m. tomorrow,” the woman added. “You can park your car out in front of your unit, and there’s a drop box for your key just by the office door, if you don’t have to pay for any extras, like phone calls, in the morning.”

  He nodded once and swiveled toward the door. “Thanks,” he said over his shoulder, as he strode outside. As usual, I followed him. Then he repositioned his Trans Am in front of “9” and grabbed our bags.

  When we were safely in the privacy of our room, I whispered, “Why do you keep telling everyone we’re from St. Paul?”

  “Because people here wanna think we’re big-city folks. They let their guard down with us more when we seem to be just what they expect. Human nature.”

  I shook my head. “It’s human nature to be more comfortable around people who are similar to you. We should be pretending we’re from a town as small as theirs. It’s not like we have to try all that hard, Donovan. Chameleon Lake is miniscule.”

  He snickered. “You’d be right if the people here would believe that, but you’re not as small-town
as you think you are.” He gave me look that bordered on condescending. “And I’m sure not.”

  He dumped our bags on a nubby orange armchair, flipped on the TV and adjusted the antennas. “The Rockford Files” was on. As we watched actor James Garner puzzle through a case, Donovan got more comfortable in the room, kicking off his sneakers, propping up a few pillows against the headboard, stretching out on the side of the double bed with his arms folded up and resting behind his neck.

  If it’d been math class and there’d been a line intersecting the bed longitudinally, dividing it into halves, he would not have been charged with crossing over the midpoint. I’d give him full credit for geometric fairness, and I knew he’d keep a chaste distance from me all night, too. But I couldn’t deny how imposing he was, lounging there on the mattress, filling up such a large amount of space without even trying.

  I sat awkwardly on the other side of the bed, struggling to keep myself from remembering our brothers’ graduation party and how once—very briefly—I’d felt Donovan’s big body up against mine. How I had been temporarily sandwiched between his hard torso and a hotel-room wall...

  Weird to be so close to him, having that whole scene play out again in my memory, like a movie of someone else’s life. Focusing on the feelings hurt too much, though. There was always that low, jagged ache whenever I remembered my early attraction to Donovan (a.k.a. the “older mystery man” that I’d been so drawn to back then), or whenever I let myself inhale for a split second the happy silliness of summertime. The lusty, breezy freedom of it. I couldn’t help but associate those feelings with the trauma that came later.

  But when I just let myself get caught up in the mental motion-picture screening of that night, it was a different experience. Easier. I could be detached from that former me, from living in a time and an emotional state that no longer existed, because it was as if I’d just been an ordinary character in an ordinary film.

  And that ordinary character had been gazing at Donovan all during the grad party.

  Admittedly, I’d felt a lot like an actress that night. For one thing, I wasn’t remotely as reserved as usual, thanks to being away from home and, also, being a little buzzed. At one point, the bourbon and the careless abandon of summer made me kind of bold, and I walked up to him when he was alone in the kitchenette part of the suite.