Don’t smile, Cat. Just get along with it.
“Let’s start over. You don’t have any social media accounts, according to the internet.”
“I do not.”
“Why not?”
Luke looks over at me. “I just don’t like people knowing my business.”
I jot down his answer even though I’ll probably be able to remember every answer he gives me because this is starting to become an unforgettable trip.
“What was it like, growing up in Bardstown?”
“Simple. Slower. Sunday dinners. Town chili cookouts. Playing in the woods. Church Sundays. Coming home from a day of play at dark when the neighborhood streetlights came on. Collecting cans for money and trading it in for baseball cards. Sitting on the front porch and reading the newspaper. Listening to the radio, waiting for your one favorite Taylor song to come on. Helping others. Putting cards in our tire spokes to make them sound like motorcycles. Building tree forts. Knowing you’d better not break any rules in town because everybody’s known you since birth and they’d report it back to Mom and Dad before the deed was done.” He pauses. Pulls his lip through his teeth. “That Laura Knettles would be at church, school, and Sunday dinner, and if I had just enough courage, I might kiss her. Where Mr. Reeves was not only the town barber, but also the mayor.” He exhales, maybe asking himself why he moved from something so sweet. So comfortable. So simple. “Nothing like LA.”
I’m strangely attracted to this lifestyle. A lifestyle I’m so unfamiliar with but might have experienced just a touch of it with our summer trips to Myers Flat.
“Tell me more,” I say as I ease back in my seat and watch his mouth move.
“My buddy Benny and I would sneak into the movie house on Friday nights to see R-rated movies like Sudden Impact, Scarface, Blue Thunder.” Luke stops, almost trying to find the right words. “Benny always wanted to be a helicopter pilot for the Army,” he says the words tentatively as if testing the idea. He bites his lower lip.
Luke pulls out his phone and does a quick search on his Maps app while I try to figure out how to ask more about Benny.
“I need to make a stop in Las Cruces,” Luke says, pushing his phone back in his pocket.
“Okay.”
We drive for a few more hours, and I realize New Mexico isn’t a place I’d ever want to live. I’m sure it’s beautiful to some, but I can’t get the hang of it. The barren land. The occasional rock formation. The flatness of it all. It’s a place I never want to come back to.
But my heart isn’t in Los Angeles either and certainly not in Beverly Hills where I grew up.
I’ve always felt like I lived on the outskirts of the city, never quite fitting the mold like Ingrid. The city life grew around her and inside of her, like she was a piece of it. It wasn’t until our first tip up to Myers Flat that I knew my heart was meant to be there. That the gigantic redwood trees beckoned me, called me by name, spoke to me as I walked among them. And under the canopy of trees existed banana slugs bigger than snakes, trillium, and the biggest ferns in the world blanketed along the forest floor. Myers Flat, in a lot of ways, reminded me of The Goonies, maybe because Astoria, Oregon, seemed a lot like Myers Flat with its rain, small-town feel, and giant trees.
In prison in Dublin though, I felt like I belonged, oddly enough. I had a cell, a number that told you who I was. The manila folder that told you what I had done to earn my spot there. I lived thirteen years in one place. I’d lived only twenty-one on the outside.
Before I’m aware of it, Luke has already turned off the highway, and we’re in a neighborhood. He double-checks his phone, slides it back into his pocket, looks past me to his right, and pulls in front of a house.
“I’ll leave the car running. I just need to run inside real quick.” Luke almost leans across my lap to see the house.
With the proximity of his body to mine, I remind myself that he’s an attractive man with a nose not fit for LA. “I still can’t believe they wanted you to get a nose job,” I whisper as he eases back from my lap.
Did I say that out loud?
I swallow. “What I meant to say was, your nose is perfectly symmetrical. Your nostrils are of normal size. Clearly, it’s textbook size.” Christ. That’s also not what I meant to say. “I’ll wait in the car,” I say, clearly unfit to speak words that don’t embarrass myself.
But something in his manner soothes me, something about the look he’s giving me from the driver’s seat, a sense of urgency and tenderness. “I’ll be right back,” falls from his lips.
Luke keeps the car running and gets out. Walks to the front door and hesitates before he knocks.
A woman with dark hair wearing an apron opens the front door. She nods as Luke speaks, though I can’t hear what he’s saying. The woman retreats from the door, only for a man in a motorized wheelchair to come to the door. A grin spreads across the man’s face as his arms reach out to Luke for a hug. The man smiles broadly and looks at me in the car.
Luke looks back at me and runs back toward the car. He opens the door. “Please, come with me.”
Luke puts out his hand to help me out of the car. Before I take it, I shut off the car and grab the keys from the ignition.
I take his hand.
And I cannot remember a time when my body has ever responded to a man’s touch in this way.
It feels like …
A warm breeze.
A clear conscience.
After love has been made.
Relief.
A hard day’s work.
Home.
As if all of the things gone wrong up to this point suddenly make sense.
Our hands linger in each other’s just for a moment.
“Come with me, Catherine,” he says.
Ten years ago, I’ve just learned, Benny was hit by a drunk driver and paralyzed from the middle of his chest down. He’d become the helicopter pilot he always wanted to be and was stationed in Las Cruces. Since then, he’s been medically discharged.
Alberta, the woman with the dark hair and the apron, is Benny’s caretaker. Ben, he goes by now.
“Catherine, would you like something to drink?” Ben asks.
“No, I’m okay for now. Thank you.” I sit across from Ben as Luke sits next to me.
“McCay, you know where the drinks are. Get it yourself.” Ben laughs. “Have you heard this guy play the guitar, Catherine?” Ben asks. “It’s like silk.”
“Shut up, man. How are you?” Luke asks.
“Good. You know, just keeping in shape.” Ben looks at me. “It’s a joke. Ten years in a chair, you have to find humor somewhere, right?” Ben looks at me. “So, Luke says you’re a magazine writer?”
Among other things, I think to myself.
Ex-con.
Parolee.
“I am.”
Alberta brings us water anyway. Luke and I thank her.
“Man, do I have some stories for you.”
Ben tells a story about the time he and Luke were finally caught sneaking into the movie house. “McCay knew how bad I wanted to see Blue Thunder. See, McCay had finally grown a pair and asked Laura Knettles on a date. But, shit, we were, like, sixteen at the time. But she could only go on a date the exact day Blue Thunder released. Man, he knew how much that movie meant to me. So, he ended up telling her that he was sick and couldn’t make it. I told him he was crazy and that he should take Laura out because he’d waited so long to ask her out. He refused. So, we did our usual back-door sneak-in. Took our normal spot in the back. Right when the movie started, two kids sat a few rows in front of us. Thought nothing of it. But when the projector broke and the lights came on, two things happened. One, Laura found out that Luke wasn’t sick, and two, we were never able to sneak into an R-rated movie again. The two kids who had come in late were Laura and her older brother, Nick. At that time, you could go to an R-rated movie as long as you were eighteen.”
Ben laughs.
Luke smiles, rubbing his lips with
his fingers. It’s the second time I see the smile that’s genuine, pure. He looks at me. The earth-brown eyes have traded themselves for a deep hazel.
“Don’t include that in the story, okay?” Luke starts to cough, grabs his water, and takes a few swallows.
We visit for an hour or so when Luke explains to Ben that we have to get back on the road.
I stick out my hand to Ben. “It was so nice to meet you, Ben.”
Ben looks at my hand. Laughs. “Nah, friends don’t shake hands.” And he reaches up from his chair and wraps his arms around my neck in the softest way possible. “It was my pleasure, Catherine. Watch out for him, would you?”
I don’t answer Ben because I don’t know how to. I don’t know what he’s asking me to do, so instead, I turn on my heel and toy with the words in my head as I walk to the car to give Luke and Ben a moment for their good-byes.
“Watch out for him, would you?” As in don’t let him make a bad choice?
“Watch out for him, would you?” As in he’s fragile, and he needs you?
“Watch out for him, would you?” As in watch his back?
I lean against the Mustang, out of earshot.
Luke is hesitant. His hands in his pockets of his cargo shorts, he kicks the lip of a brick and then looks at Ben.
I can’t hear what they’re saying, but Ben listens to what Luke is saying. Ben is quiet, and one thing I’ve noticed about him is he doesn’t like silence. He likes to keep the conversation moving. Perhaps it’s his own insecurity; maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just the way he was made.
They both wait for the other to speak.
Luke reaches into his back pocket and hands Ben a white envelope. I try not to stare, but I can’t help it. I feel as though I’m eavesdropping, watching a conversation that isn’t my business.
But I can’t look away. I remember watching LA Hills and thinking about Dylan Klein. I wondered back then if his voice really sounded that smooth. I wondered if he drove his sports car that fast on Highway 1. I wondered if he really smoked cigarettes and made up for lost time with women he didn’t know. I wondered if he was really that handsome in real life or if the cameras somehow managed to catch the good angles all the time. I wondered if he kissed women with want and need and passion—because the man who’s coming toward me is older, somehow softer, and still just as beautiful.
“You ready?” he asks.
Without answering, I open the car door and get in.
Luke goes around to the driver’s door, and I look back at Ben, who’s still on the porch, waiting for us to pull away.
Luke starts the Mustang, and the motor comes alive with a roar.
Is Ben really all right with being in the chair for the rest of his life?
Is Ben really all right with the person who did this?
My grandfather, Elias, used to say, “Acceptance is the key, Catherine,” in his thick German accent. “No matter what happens in life, if we cannot accept it, it will ruin us.”
We pull away from the curb of Ben’s house, and I wave at him.
But I have a hunch that Ben is far beyond acceptance.
We take a left and then a right that leads us back to the freeway. I don’t ask what Luke handed Ben, nor do I ask what they talked about, I just stare at his right hand on the gearshift, his knuckles big and white.
“Your hands are dry,” I say. “Do you work a lot with your hands?”
“Fixing up my place,” he says from somewhere a million miles away.
I grab a lotion bottle from my purse. “May I?” I hold up the lotion bottle. When I was in prison, I’d receive a bottle of this lotion every month without fail. I still haven’t figured out who sent it to me, but it works. When I got out, I found it at some voodoo shop in LA. I squeeze a dime size on my fingers. With my other hand, I take a dab and gently put my fingertip to each of his knuckles and carefully massage it in.
He watches me as I do this.
His hands are not the hands of an actor, but a carpenter. Working man hands. Not soft. Not gentle.
“Do me a favor,” I whisper.
“Yeah?” he says.
“If the acting gig doesn’t work out, don’t be a hand model. I don’t think things would work out in your favor.” I smile, look up at him.
“Dream crusher.” He gently pulls his lips to a half-smirk and then pulls his hand away, placing it on the steering wheel in a way that says, I can’t go any further. You touching my hand isn’t something that should be happening.
I put the lotion in the glove compartment, so he has it. I want to explain that I didn’t mean anything by the lotion on his hands. That it’s just something in my nature. To help. If he hadn’t been driving, I’d most likely have just handed him the bottle instead. But I don’t say any of this.
“Remember when Michael Jordan came out of retirement for the second time?” I take a different approach.
“Of course.”
“Do you remember watching Jordan play the game of basketball? It … it was like watching all the pieces of life fall into place. Like eating the world’s best burger—with bacon.” I smile. “Like touching silk. Like smelling a bouquet of red roses. Like listening to ‘Pas de Deux’ from The Nutcracker. Like watching the defining moment in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape—when they burn the house to the ground.” I continue, “So, anyway, when Jordan came back to play for the Washington Wizards and failed miserably, it was heartbreaking to watch.” I look out the window to a three-toned rock formation. “We had one television at Dublin, and when the game was on, Lucinda, one of the correctional officers, let me watch it in the dining hall.”
“What’s your point?” Luke asks.
“If you become a hand model, you’ll fail miserably.”
Luke gives a feeble attempt at forcing himself not to smile. “Noted.”
I grab my notebook from the floorboard and look at my list of questions. “Why’d you stop acting?”
Luke’s sunglasses protect him, keeping me from seeing what his eyes say that his mouth can’t. “I didn’t.” He shrugs. “People just couldn’t look past Dylan. They couldn’t see me as someone else. Couldn’t see me as their leading man in a thriller. Couldn’t see me as their leading man in a comedy. Producers, directors couldn’t see past the one defining role in my career.”
“So, you just stopped?”
Luke looks at me, his eyebrows rising above his sunglasses. “It wasn’t my first love anyway, Cat.”
My heart stumbles over itself, tries to find its rightful pace again. The way he says my nickname is like it’s casual, like we’re old friends, like we’ve somehow reached an agreement of trust.
It’s music. Music is his first love.
“Besides,” he continues, “I have enough.” He takes his left hand and rubs the back of his neck.
“Do you want me to drive?”
“No, I got it. Slept wrong last night, I guess.”
I nod, looking out the window again. “Do you ever feel cheated? Like maybe if you hadn’t gotten that role, things would have been different?”
Silence sits in the air for several seconds before Luke breaks it with hoarseness. “My dad used to say, ‘Luke, we’re all put on this earth to do several things, not just one. So, take the good shit, the bad shit, and everything in between.” He coughs, clearing his throat.
“Do you think everything is forgivable?” I stop. Hold my tongue. Surprised at myself for allowing this to slip out.
He coughs once more, recovers quicker than last time. “No.”
I let the small grooves of the dashboard take away my ability to allow fear drive my imagination.
“Do you?” he asks.
“No.” My own word rests shallowly on my lips, as if waiting for me to take it back. “But sometimes, we just have to take the bad, right?”
“Something like that,” he says.
The road is flat and surrounded by desert. Cacti follow us for miles.
Since that awful night and all thes
e years later, I question every single thing I did that night and question if I had been put in the wrong place at the wrong time. Did I put myself there? Did I make the wrong decision at the right time or the right decision at the wrong time?
I’ve played the scenario, the series of events that led up to it, in my head a million times, and no matter what, I keep coming up with, it had to happen.
“Promise me something,” Luke says.
I don’t answer at first. “I can’t promise you something if I don’t know if I’m capable of keeping it.”
He ignores me. “When you look back on this life, when you’re old and gray, you’ll give yourself the gift of forgiveness.”
His words are like a direct hit on my chest, leaving a smattering of red, like Luke has exposed a piece of who I am, the demons that I keep.
“I thought you said not everything is forgivable?”
Luke’s manly hands sit on the steering wheel. “Not everything is forgivable, but the truth of forgiveness lies in the eyes of the keeper.”
Both sadness and truth come over me. In other words, what I think isn’t forgivable, someone else might.
“Promise me,” he says, showing no signs of relenting.
I let the sun find my arm, and I move it in its rays, feeling the warmth. I don’t make promises I can’t keep, I want to say. I want to tell him what happened on the morning of January 2, 2001, so he’ll know what I’m up against.
“I promise.”
An unkept promise full of good intentions is no better than one lie among truths. The only difference is the person behind them.
Luke turns on the radio. Jimmy Buffett plays.
“Tell me two truths, Luke,” I say, allowing myself to get lost in Buffett’s tone of good days.
Luke taps his fingers on the steering wheel to an unheard beat. “One, Nutella on bread with milk at one in the morning is a guilty pleasure. And two, I still haven’t found the perfect wave.”
“You couldn’t surf in Kentucky, so you learned to surf when you came out to California?”
“Best money paid was to a guy named Kane who lived in a shack just off of Venice Beach. This was back in the eighties, of course. Took two days with me. I’ve been hooked since.” He looks over at me. “And you?”
The Light We See Page 6
