The United States of Us

by Kate Sundara

  ‘Mia… The tides will turn…’

  She blows her nose, pulls her hair behind her ears.

  Wil takes a breath. ‘I want you to know… I’ve got your back. I’m on your side.’

  She looks at him, not caring now about her puffy disarray.

  Rain begins to spit, tapping lightly on the fallen leaves, a gust of wind flares up sending the foliage scurrying about. Birds dart for cover across a patch of pink-green sky, a roll of thunder in the far-off mountains.

  ‘It’s gonna be alright, Mia. One door closes and another door opens’, Wil’s voice cranks up an octave and he comes over all awkward and taciturn. ‘C’mon, you’ll catch cold sitting in the rain.’

  A chilly breeze slices the humid air, bringing goosebumps to the skin, blowing dry her sweat and tears. Mia closes her eyes against flying dirt, lets the rising wind blow through her. Everywhere there’s blossom, not supple and lovely as once it was, but a bruised soggy brown trodden into the ground.

  ‘I’m sorry for crying on you, Wil. Don’t you have a party to be at?’

  ‘You don’t ever have to apologise,’ he tells her, looking into her eyes, then gives her a calming smile. She wheels his bike alongside the pretty wooden church.

  ‘Fancy one of these?’ he offers, picking up his crate of beers.

  ‘Only one?’ she jokes. ‘I’m not sure I’m in the mood to party.’

  ‘Want me to walk you back to April’s?’

  ‘Your place is closer.’

  Wil looks at her, his lips gently parting, his honey-amber eyes searching her eyes.

  ‘Another door opens, you say? Brent’s been offering me his king-size bed for how long? I may as well take him up on it.’

  ‘Mia, I wouldn’t want you to do anything you’d regret. You’re in shock, not thinking clearly.’

  ‘It’s not that. I can’t go back to April’s, can I? It’d feel completely wrong and inappropriate given what’s just happened with me and her step-brother. Besides, I don’t want to be reminded of him.’

  Mia doesn’t trust talon-tongued April either, but she doesn’t want to say that.

  ‘Of course,’ says Wil. ‘I get it. You want a clean break.’

  ‘I’m frazzled. I need to sleep.’ Mia hasn’t slept right for days. ‘Mind if I use your shower first?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Thanks, Wil. You’re the best.’

  When they arrive back at the Dale house, together they slip in quietly through the back door.

  Brent responds with both surprise and delight to Mia’s request to sleep in his room tonight. To her, Wil looking on with quiet disapproval, is too much a mirror of her not-herself-ness. ‘Just to sleep, that’s all,’ she tells Brent emphatically and well within Wil’s earshot.

  I’m not exactly thrilled about it either.

  Mia lies in the darkness of Brent Dexter’s bedroom, thunderstorm crashing overhead. The storm an echo of her wrath. She hears people squealing and slamming doors, party music drowned out by hammering hail. How she wishes everyone would stay inside; she doesn’t want anyone struck down because of her. If guilt finds her through the water then it can find her through the rain.

  Turning over on her front, she watches weeds and dandelion fairies dart through night, trees raging, swaying madly, fork-lightning cracking the sky.

  In the early hours, waking from sleep, she rolls over in bed to the shining whites of Brent’s eyes. And finding no sense in resisting his affection any longer she lets their lips find each other through the dark. Guilt won’t let her go any further.

  * * *

  The light came calling again this morning. But I can’t leave her. Especially not now. I have to see her through… at least to a point… a point at which I know she’ll be okay.

  Waking up in Brent’s bedroom, he leaves her with a kiss. He’s off to teach chemistry to undergrads – Mia heard him say a few weeks back how he hoped there’d be a few hotties in his class. And how liberating it is, lying here in his oversized bed, a soft light falling through the squeaky-clean blinds, not minding if he’s pressing himself against girls as he experiments with Bunsen burners and test-tubes, not minding a bit… not a millilitre, a fluid ounce! She’s done with attachment.

  She pulls the covers to her nose, savouring the smell of freshly washed linen. Brent’s room is spotless. Fishing plaques, boxing posters and illustrations from science magazines neatly characterise his walls, in frames along the polished, ordered bookshelves stand childhood photos, encapsulating big-catches by the river, Brent with his mom and a cute one with wrinkly grandparents at a birthday party. For all his cock-sureness, there’s a subtle sentimentality to Brent, if not a touch of OCD. He’s exceptionally clean (at least in the domestic sense), the smell of his duvet reminds Mia of her laundry days in Utopia; she figures it best not to dwell on island memories – that means she’ll start thinking about Zak and she doesn’t want to have to think of him ever again. She listens to the chirping starlings, takes comfort in the golden light on the bed-sheets and the simple ambiance of this luxurious haven.

  The Dale House is so quiet Mia assumes she’s alone. She pads across Brent’s shag-pile carpet and is acquainted with the home-made sign on his door Pleasure Palace: Ladies Welcome Anytime. On her way to the bathroom she finds Wil in the kitchen, cleaning up mess from last night’s party. He looks at her and looks away. Mia looks ashamed.

  She’ll no longer live with April in her caravan. Instinct tells her they’re not the good friends she once believed they’d be, she hasn’t the energy to be deciphering April’s back-handed compliments and rude remarks and, with her being Zak’s step-sister, it’s healthier to cut ties, as she told Wil last night. Today she’ll go thank April for putting her up and collect her things, then figure out where the heck to go from here, one step at a time. At least she still has the Dale crowd, and Ruth. Mia’s worked every shift with her at the shelter. Maybe Ruth has a lead to where she can stay. Until then, the Dale House couch looks like the best option.

  ‘Brent Dexter?’ exclaims Ruth when Mia calls in to see her at home.

  ‘Nothing happened, Ruthie. Not really. I was distraught and confused and Brent was there and–’

  ‘–and he’s been pursuing you ever since you met at the Dale party.’ Ruth pours brandy into two tumblers on her balcony.

  ‘It was purely reactionary,’ adds Mia.

  ‘Zak,’ says Ruth, shaking her head. ‘I’m just so sorry you had to find out that way. It’s awful. I can’t believe he’s been leading on so many others just like you!’

  ‘What a sucker I’ve been.’

  ‘The infuriating thing about guys like him is they never have to make the plans and promises they do–’

  ‘That they want to live with you, travel together, marry you, have babies…’

  ‘Then take no responsibility for drawing you into their illusions.’

  ‘I had my part to play with Zak. I got carried away.’

  ‘No wonder!’ says Ruth. ‘Reading the emails he sent you! He led you down a merry path, my friend.’ The girls clink glasses, knock back the drink and shudder. ‘But straight into the arms of Brent, Mia? Isn’t that going from bad to worse?’

  ‘I didn’t think about it, my head was full and, for a minute, I just wanted to forget everything, to not think. We didn’t…’

  ‘Good, because you’d regret it. Letting your first time be with Dexter?! He’s the least likely person I’d put you with. I know he’s easy on the eye and all, but my foot-spa has more depth than him.’

  ‘One night of kissing and a fumble, that was it, I told him things won’t go further.’

  ‘You know he’s going to see that as a challenge, right? He was already getting all territorial with you that night at the bonfire.’

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘Pour you another?’

  Mia holds out her glass. ‘What do I do now? Where do I go from here?’

  ‘You go nowhere. You bought your return ticket? How long do y
ou have left?’

  ‘Two whole months.’

  ‘Awesome, then you’re staying right here with me. Here…’ Ruth ducks inside the doorway for a second, comes back out onto the balcony and hands Mia a key. ‘My house is your house. I love your company and I’d be gutted if you left now.’ Everything about Ruth says her offer’s genuine.

  ‘I don’t know, Ruthie. Maybe I should just go…’

  ‘Go where? Back to London?’

  ‘I wasn’t happy there.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And I’d have to return with my tail between my legs. To the friends who told me I was crazy to come out here to begin with.’ To Lucy.

  Ruth smiles empathetically.

  ‘It’s really generous of you, Ruthie, but I don’t want to outstay my welcome. And what would I do? The relationship I came for has collapsed to ruins, it’s illegal for me to take a paid job here…’

  ‘First up, you would not be outstaying your welcome, it would be my absolute pleasure to have you stay with me. Second, third and fourthly, you’d have time and space to work on your writing and seek out stories and to explore all the natural beauty around us. It’s the perfect place to figure out what you want from life. Cherish and enjoy being young, free and – yes – single! Plus, we could really use the extra help at the shelter. And there are so many parties and cool trips coming up what with graduation season. You’ve the potential to have the time of your life!’

  ‘You’re very persuasive.’

  ‘You’re already making friends here, too. You have me, all the Dale bunch, and Rosa from the shelter… you mentioned you’d enjoyed hanging out at her place.’

  ‘That’s true. I’ve made friends faster out here than I ever usually do.’

  ‘Do I hear a yes?’

  ‘What about money?’

  Ruth frowns. ‘Why would you need any more here than you’d need at Zak’s?’

  Mia shoots her a look.

  ‘Oh. No. No, you can forget that right away. I’m not taking a cent of rent from you, especially since you’ll be sleeping on my couch. The new guy’s due to move in any day now.’

  ‘There’ll be space for all three of us?’

  ‘Plenty enough, now all that junk’s been cleared out.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a story out here yet…’

  ‘For sure! Oh and feel free to use my bike when you’re out looking for it.’

  ‘You’re amazing. Thank you. For everything. I vow to make myself a helpful house-guest.’

  Ruth does a little leap in the air and claps her hands together with a wide grin. ‘Yay!’

  I’m so grateful for Ruth.

  * * *

  Up, down, up, down. Mia’s moods are mirroring Zak’s, she thinks.

  It’s only now, after the shock and Brent and the brandy are gone, that her reality – and hangover – hit home.

  Mia is alone at Ruth’s, who’s gone to work. ‘My house is your house,’ she said.

  Heartache. What an incredible toll it takes on the body, heavy and leaden. All of her energy draining into whatever part of her processes grief. A well-worn place. When she closes her eyes she sees those emails, those photos of Freya the Bewitcher, black magic in her eyes. She stole Mia’s sleep and all her dreams along with it. Everything smarts like a slap.

  Mia writes in her journal:

  Where is the jester I met on the island? The one with the smile and the life in his eyes? Did I imagine the man who laughed in the sunshine? Was he really just a trick of the light?

  She slumps on Ruth’s couch, flicks on the TV and switches it off again. Tragic news on every channel, people suffering, destruction, war. Either that or impossibly perfect people making love. It’s too much, she can’t stand it. She sees TV for the brainwash box it is. The radio’s no more a comfort: if it’s not some stupid soppy sentimental love song, riling her with its phoney nostalgia, then it’s an angry one about a broken dream, about being left out in the cold, full of spite and revenge – great to rock-out to, but how can she sympathise now knowing what a joke it all is?

  She takes a pen to her journal again:

  Haven’t people realised? Fairytales are fibs we’re told as kids…

  She calls her romance with Zak an email fairytale.

  Why are full-grown adults still pining for heroes on white horses?

  Ghost horses, and heroes who only ever lived in books…

  Pretty words, promises, playful fantasies. There’d been no substance with him, all of it hot-air. Mia flicks back through the pages to where, on the island, he conjured her that imaginary air-balloon – that day he’d whisked her away. How, for her, it had triggered all those projections of a future together, like days in a journal yet to be written. The day she has food-poisoning in Cambodia and Zak places wet towels on her forehead and finds her bottled water. The day her bag is pinched in Brazil and he runs after the thief, retrieving her things. The day they miss their train in Thailand and huddle together in the depot to stay warm. Those pages are blank. Those days never happen. Mia had already lived them without him. She’d taken pictures from her past and, in the empty space I left behind, filled each one with the prospect of him. But Zak was never there. I was there, in the form of a void that is me.

  Switching off the radio, she flicks through her CDs – what will make her feel better? Better still, what’ll make her not feel? Her Woodstock album – surely that’s not too confronting – but, when she puts it on, loads of other stuff starts seeping through the speakers. She used to embrace these lyrics with their peaceful poetic ideals, but now it’s all hedonism, promiscuity, drugs and self-indulgence – free love, baby, yeah!! Part of her always wished she was a youth of the Sixties, but now all she craves is stability, single-hearted monogamy. Where does freedom stop and anarchy begin? She wants what was safe. Most of the time she can’t even bear to let herself miss me.

  At least music lets her know she’s not the only one disillusioned: her culture obsessed with love and the unfulfillment of it – romantic movies, books and songs. It reminds her of the story she read where the anthropologist asks a member of the Hopi tribe why his people sing so much about rain. The Hopi explains that it’s because water’s so hard to find, then asks, ‘Is that why your people sing so much about love?’

  * * *

  For days now a watery sun’s been trying to break through the clouds, but the weather in the valley stays cold and grey. For days, she’s moved through River Valley like an apparition. She finds herself gazing down never ending train-tracks, down long roads that disappear into the horizon. She passes Hollow Wood Lane, sees that April’s van’s gone, only a dark patch of lush grass marks where her home used to be. Dandelion seeds and swallows dart through eerie orange-brown sky, dust swells up on the dirt-track where they danced, a ball of tumble-weed bounces across it and takes off in the wind. With April and her van gone and no one around to explain it, it becomes just another thing she doesn’t understand.

  In the daytimes, she walks calm residential streets, passing tidy lawns with their white picket-fences. What secrets hide in these picture-perfect homes? What lies lie swept under rugs? It’s over then – she and Zak – but still she can’t believe it. Not even with those photos of Freya around his bed, not even with that in-box, his hundred lovers around the globe. Hopes and promises gone, the dream she’s lived by for almost a year, the thing she held onto tighter than anything she knew – thought she knew…

  But if the dream has smashed apart, how could its shadow still be so strong?

  Shadows: she observes them in the changing light of day. As I walk with her through the valley, we watch the shadows growing bigger than the objects casting them. ‘Is that what happened with Zak?’ she asks aloud, though not to me. ‘Did the dream outgrow the reality?’ Having stood in the shadow of last summer for so long, she’d let it stretch out of all proportion and now she can’t even find the sun. I want to comfort her, but I can’t. All I can do is be by her side.

  Zak
’s house is full of secrets and shadows, but almost anywhere else she goes she’s out of place. She’s a weathervane turning any which way the wind blows, with no direction of her own, no place to be, nowhere to go. Maybe her aunt, her Zia, was right, she thinks, maybe she will stay married to the wind.

  On the bright side, Mia still has Ruth and the Dale crowd, although, with graduation over, holiday jobs fill most of their days. They fraternise and gallivant around work and every few days, Wil calls Mia at Ruth’s house, inviting her on an adventure, to some party or event. The Dale Drive household are an easy bunch to hang out with, like favou- rite cousins, she reflects. It’d surprised Mia – in the nicest of ways – how such a close-knit group were so inclusive of her, an outsider, until Wil pointed out that all of them were outsiders to begin with. That’d put her at ease, along with the knowledge that Brent’s schedule – currently being the most full-on, teaching chemistry at summer school – meant she didn’t have to deal with him in the meantime.

  So Mia goes on those escapades and ventures to those parties, smiling and chatting and feeling so damn detached from herself that she floats between here and gone. She drinks to prolong the numbness. With her head a fog, she’s becoming as cool as the breeze blowing down from the snowy peaks. And yet, aside from Ruth convincing her to stay, Mia’s intuition agrees it’s the right thing to do. Something tells her that sticking it out here will be worth it. She just can’t see why that is yet.

  She tries her best to stay active; when she’s not working at the shelter she catches local buses, destination unknown. She walks downtown, noticing saloons and steeples she’s never seen before, or sits by windows in cafés, watching people, trying to find inspiration to write. She rests under trees, discovering, with quiet pleasure, what smooth and marvellous a thing it is to take a ballpoint pen to a banana peel. She does what she always does when she doesn’t know what else to do: she paints. Clinging to what she knows, when surrounded by so many things she doesn’t, she channels her pain into paintings, something she can do to fill whole days. She draws upon the images from the book Wil gave her, ideas of strength, self-nurture and self-possession dominating her canvas until the artwork she creates makes more sense to her than she does to herself. She’s terribly homesick – not for home in the literal sense – she wants to return to a place within herself where she feels okay. Mia stands by what she told Ruth: giving up and going back to London is not an option, especially when that’d mean facing the friends who warned her that this was a bad idea from the start. Namely my sister. No, her dreamboat may have sailed away into a cold consuming mist, but it’s a dream she’s cherished for far too long to abandon ship now. It’s not the Happy Ever After she’d been hoping for, but she’s already left one town – her home-town – on an off-note, and she wants to make that the last. Beneath it all, her determined optimism is still hanging on for dear life.