The Last True Love Story Page 4

  My whole life felt small. There was the wind, even the occasional lonely car horn calling out from a road in the hills behind us, but around that, in the vast invisible beyond the city, in the immense space between two stars, there was silence. I could shout as loud as I could from that hill and it would rise briefly but inevitably sink into the deep, unfathomable silence. Maybe that was beautiful too, though, not making a lot of noise in a small room, instead belting out one long, give-it-your-all yawp—music that matters because it knows the silence that surrounds it.

  I wanted to ask Corrina what she thought, but her head was down between her knees, a curled, shadowed ball against a squat tree trunk, and she rocked gently forward and backward. I was close enough that I could hear her breathing through her nostrils.

  “Corrina,” I said. “Do you still want the silence?”

  “Well, now you know I’m a disaster,” she said down at the dirt. “I’m surprised you’re still here.”

  “Of course I’m still here.”

  “Don’t say it like that. Please. People leave when they can. Let’s face it. People just get up and get the hell out as soon as they think they can.”

  She couldn’t have known, but she sounded like a long-ago echo of my own mother. Something Mom had said about Dead Dad, the nondad he was before he died, or at least, the nonhusband. Most often she didn’t say much about him, or if she did, it was in that distant I don’t want to talk about it way, but sometimes anger broke from her like water bursting through rock. “That deadbeat,” she’d once snapped. “He left and then he died while he was gone. He could have at least said good-bye, since leaving was what he wanted to do.”

  “We promised each other,” Corrina continued. “We weren’t going to tell anybody.” She swallowed hard. “It was Toby’s idea, but I agreed. A secret. That’s what I wanted too. Fine. We slept together, but it was supposed to stay a secret. That was the whole point. And then . . .” She trailed off. “You know what it feels like?” she continued. “Him telling everyone? Like everybody was standing around the car—watching. Asshole. It wasn’t for them. It was supposed to be just for us.”

  “That’s messed up.”

  “Yeah, and . . . it’s so fucking typical. I should have known this would happen.” She took a deep breath, and when she spoke again the words burned their way up and out of her. “Every time I trust someone they just get up and walk away. Every. Time. Why?”

  Corrina lifted her head again, and I could see tear streaks stuck to her cheeks. She looked at me as if she’d opened a window in her chest and shown me the beating heart there, as if to say, Please, please take good care of this, I don’t want to do it alone. But that look in her eye, the tremble in her lip, the wrinkle in her forehead all faded. She sniffled and wiped her face. She was hard again. It had only taken a moment. She’d turned right back into stone.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “Uh, no, obviously. My life is a clusterfuck.”

  “So is mine.”

  “No, Hendrix,” she said. “Not like mine. I feel like I’m in a prison, but not like I’m locked in a dungeon, something worse, like I’m free to go wherever I want, but there are still bars down between me and everyone else around me.”

  “But you’re the freest person I’ve ever seen. It’s like the rules don’t apply to you. Like you just totally killed Toby.”

  “Yeah, but now I can never go back to O’Keefe’s again. And that was my big connection, Hendrix. I can’t go anywhere in this town. Believe me. People say LA is so huge, it’s so cool, but it’s just like every other town. It’s small. Who you know is who you know, and who hates you hates you. That’s everything.”

  “Come on. You’re bigger than all that. You just graduated. You can do anything you want.”

  “Actually, no. I’m seventeen. My parents have me until I’m eighteen. They thought I was a genius when I was in kindergarten and they just bumped me up to second grade. But I wasn’t. I just had parents who’d gotten me to read early. Turns out, I’m far from genius. Far.”

  “But, I don’t know, you are able to get up and do things like no one else I know.”

  “Don’t do that. I’m not magic. I roll around in the shit like everyone else.” She got up and crossed in front of me to the far end of our dirt patch on the bluff. “You have to get out more,” she continued, pointing to the city. “See the world and all that. Get out in it, you know? This town is wrecked. Everything’s wrecked. School. The whole scene. It’s wrecked. I need to get the hell out of here.”

  I got up. She stepped closer to me. I could tell she was trying to decide if she wanted to tell me more or not.

  “They’re sending me to Rosewood for a year of postgrad,” she finally said. “School for the Emotionally Damaged? Yeah, that one.”

  “Can’t you just go to college?”

  “My dad, Mr. I Read Minds Like Professor X? He knows better. He knows what’s best, he says. He’s a psychologist, so there’s that.” She shook her head. “I saw my file. We got in this huge fight this morning, nothing new, but when he went out, I snuck into his office and I fricking took it. That’s it—supposedly the entire me tucked into one thin, plain manila folder. It’s still sitting in my guitar bag. My whole life stashed in my stupid guitar case. And yes,” she said emphatically. “Yes, my goddamn father has a goddamn file for his own goddamn daughter.” She walked away from me and looked back out over the valley. She balled her fists and yelled.

  “I’m fucking out of here,” she said when she’d finished. “I’m nobody here. I’m nobody to Toby, nobody to O’Keefe. I’m going. I can’t stay here. I have to go.” She nodded and repeated, “I’m going. I’m just going.” Her growing anger sent goose bumps spraying across my skin. “And to my dad, I’m just another diagnosis in a file. I’m not a file, Hendrix. I don’t want to be someone’s file.”

  As she stood there, catching her breath, staring out over the ripple of light in the city below, I couldn’t help but think of Gpa staring out over the Pacific, fearing his disease was wiping him out too, making him and Gma nobodies, but they weren’t, because every nobody is a somebody—a person with a story that proves he is alive.

  “You’re not nobody, Corrina,” I said.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter what you say. I’ve made up my mind. I’m leaving.”

  “Where are you going?” I asked, but the gears were already turning, cogs catching, ideas rising.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How are you going to get to this nowhere?”

  She paced as she spoke, swinging her arms out over the emptiness below us. There was a fierceness in her step, a magnetic and pulsing determination beneath her frustration. “I don’t know. Train. Bus. I’m broke. I don’t know. I’ll hitchhike.”

  “That’s a terrible idea.”

  “Don’t try to stop me, Hendrix. I’m going.”

  “I won’t. I mean the opposite. I mean, take me with you.”

  Corrina stopped and looked back me. She laughed. “What? No.”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Take me with you.”

  “You’d suck at hitchhiking.”

  “True. But guess what? So would you.” I stepped closer to her and took a breath. “Take my mother’s car.”

  “What?”

  “She’s gone. We’ve already taken it tonight. Take it again. She won’t know until she’s back.”

  Corrina raised her eyebrows.

  “Take her car. Get the hell out of here. But I need you to take me with you.”

  She smiled, as if the many wheels of her mind were already spinning past that.

  “I have an idea.” I wasn’t exactly sure I knew what I was doing—I just knew that I felt like I’d washed up onshore and Corrina and Gpa were there too, and we all had to get up and get somewhere together.

  “Look, Hendrix. Don’t go thinking you can save me. I don’t need that.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “It’s the other way
around. I need your help.”

  Maybe because I’m the world’s biggest idiot, or because instead of being a mama’s boy, I’m a Gpa’s boy; or maybe because while most of the kids I knew wanted to get the hell away from family, I felt like I just wanted to hold on to what little was left of mine before it was gone—I couldn’t help but think how this might be my only chance to help Gpa.

  “I need to get to Ithaca, New York,” I said.

  “What?”

  “We take my mother’s car, and it’s a two birds kinda thing, right? You get us to Ithaca, and I get you out of LA. You’ll be on the other side of the country and you can go anywhere you want from there.”

  “Hendrix,” Corrina said slowly. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes,” I said. “As serious as the Great Empty Blue.”

  Corrina nodded. Her own kind of mania rising in her smile.

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We have to take my grandfather.”

  She laughed and spun away from me. “We take your grandfather? That’s hilarious.” She looked back at me. “Oh my God. You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  Corrina walked toward me, and I could feel heat radiating off her. Maybe I had some too. She stopped right in front of me. “So you’ll help me, if I’ll help you? And that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Fuck yeah.” Corrina tapped me on the chest and then spun around and gazed out over LA. “Pack your bags tonight, Hendrix, because tomorrow we hit the road.”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE GREAT EMPTY BLUE

  I fell asleep that night repeating Corrina’s words, “Tomorrow we hit the road,” telling myself again and again that I was excited, but that was a lie because in the middle of the night, I woke from a nightmare that was more truth than any mantra I could ever repeat.

  It’s always the same: I’m floating on a small wooden raft, surrounded by water and darkness above, no moon, no stars, only the rise and fall of waves and the creaking of the wood in the water below me. A mucky stench follows me as I drift. Something lurks and waits for me. Rise and fall, rise and fall, the waves stretch and drop, and I can feel something swelling, a storm that gathers from the depths, not from above, until, like a whale breaching, the enormous shaggy head and shoulders of my father rise up and out of the water, as if he’s climbing. Water and seaweed drip from his long hair and beard, his eyes like lightning in the night, he is ten times the size of any man, and I know he’s there to smash my raft to splinters and pull me down into the deep gloom below. And just as the raft breaks and I sink with his gargantuan fingers locked around my ribs, squeezing the air from my chest—I awake.

  I had fallen asleep in the living room, my bag as my pillow, and, as he so often was when I woke from this nightmare, Old Humper was there at my side, nuzzling me, licking the side of my face, reminding me I was still alive.

  My house, the Great Empty Blue, with its dark-water-hued walls, was filled with the weight of Dead Dad’s absence, which ruled and plagued our home like an angry god or a ghost. This was why I thought ghosts were real. Not the stupid cue-ball-covered sheet. Not the impossible-to-believe shimmering translucent image of a person. I mean the real thing: A ghost is an absence still present, the enormous weight still left when a person is gone. This ghost of Dead Dad hung about me everywhere, even in the spaces between words when Mom spoke, and he scared me most in those unanswered questions drifting in the silence of the Great Empty Blue.

  I knew so little about my Dead Dad. All I really knew was how he died, far away from us, all the way back in Ithaca, where he was from. The drunk driver fishtailed it home in his own fog, while Dead Dad, alone, careened off a bridge into the black river, the car the coffin carrying his body, his heart carrying everything I wanted to know, down into the depths below.

  I had questions for this Dead Dad—Why’d you go? Why were you out there? Were you ever coming back?—but they were just whispers of smoke loose in the fog of his silence, because nobody would tell me anything. Not Mom. Not Gpa. “There’s nothing to know,” Mom would say. “He decided to leave and he left. He died when he did—that bastard.” And Gpa said even less, even though, because he raised me, he was a father to me, which made me, in this depressing way, like another son to him. Or at least I felt that weight—the son who remained, the son who was alive. What was I supposed to do with that?

  So after my heart eventually calmed and Old Humper curled up next to me, I fell back asleep, using my travel bag as my pillow, until I woke in the morning—and everything was different.

  The sun swept through the front window, hitting the edges of the cut-glass panels in the cabinet like a constellation of stars lighting up the living room. The house hadn’t felt this warm and yellow since Gpa had moved out. Even Old Humper could feel it. He lay on the floor with his eyes closed and stretched his legs and back. I scratched his head and then down under his chin and on the bridge of his nose, and then lay down next to him, and we remained like that, curled in the warmth of the sun, until I heard someone across the room say, “Good. You’re up. Let’s get moving.”

  I nearly had a heart attack because I knew it was Corrina right away, and I was worried I’d fallen asleep wearing only boxers, and that a morning missile was standing at attention, ready for takeoff, before the rest of me was, but luckily I had clothes on, and I’d been drowning in too much anxiety all night, so my body was in self-protection mode.

  Corrina had dropped me off late, left the car in the driveway, and walked home while I packed, but I didn’t realize she still had the keys until I noticed her swinging them around her finger. She sat in the pale white armchair by the window, and she looked ready for another concert, same boots and jeans, a new, clean, faded white T-shirt, and she wore a twilight-colored bandana to hold back her hair. She glared at me. “You ready?”

  “I need a shower.”

  “Move it!”

  Old Humper snapped to attention first and barked at her, happy for whatever was coming next, and I got into motion and made my way to the bathroom down the hall.

  When I was done, I met Corrina in the living room again, where she stood by the mantel, holding a framed photo of Gpa in her hand. It was my favorite one of him, taken back in his Vietnam days. He’s standing on a beach with other soldiers crowded around him. None of them are wearing shirts; they’re all only in pants with the cuffs rolled up and their bare feet in the sand. They all hold plastic cups, probably filled with beer, and it’s easy to see that the other men are all listening to Gpa. He’s probably midstory when the shot is taken, most of the men aren’t looking at the camera, but Gpa is, he’s looking directly into the lens. There’s no fear on his face. He stares right out from the photograph with a strong, crystal-eyed confidence, as if he’s saying, I’m going to do whatever it takes to bring these boys home. And yet, it was a war, and when you go to war, not everybody comes home.

  But now it was my turn, and I had to bring him home.

  “This him?” Corrina asked, holding the photo out to me.

  “Yup. The War Hero.”

  “He looks pretty good here. Like, seriously good.” She hooked a crooked grin. “How come you don’t look like that? He must have been only a few years older than you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “He’s twenty-seven in that photo, by the way.”

  “Still,” she said. “You are related.” She looked at me and cocked her head to the side. “No, actually I kind of see it.”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged.

  “Wow,” she said. “But a silver fox, huh? He has those same Bombay Gin blue eyes as you do? Damn.”

  I shook my head. Silver fox? “I wonder if that’s how he wants to be remembered,” I said by way of distraction. “A man with a Solo cup on the beach.”

  “He looks calm.” She stared at the photo as she spoke. “Imagine what’s going on in the background. Maybe only a few miles away, in the hills, or upriver? It’s terrifying. And yet he looks so calm,�
�� she repeated, pointing at Gpa.

  “Remember that,” I said. “Remember that image when we’re driving with him. Please. Remember something sweet about him. It won’t always be like that. You have to know that. He can be difficult.”

  “So can you.”

  “Thanks. But I’m serious. It’s weird.”

  “I’m okay with weird,” Corrina said, putting the photo back where she’d found it. “You’re weird.” She grinned. She glanced at the photo and back at me. “Sometimes you have the same smirk he has here, you know, like the right side of your face is a little happier than the left.” She walked over and poked me in the chest. “Looks like you’ve got a little of your Gpa in you.” She marched to the door and picked up her guitar case and bag. “Come on, Hendrix, let’s go spring this war hero from his prison.”

  She left the front door open as she stepped outside, slinging the bag up on her shoulder, grinning wickedly up into the bright blue LA morning. I grabbed my bag and joined her.

  “We’re bringing him, too?” she said, pointing at Old Humper as I walked him to the car.

  “I can’t just leave him here alone for a week.”

  “No, I guess not.” She tilted her head and stared at me silently for a moment. I couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark circles of her sunglasses. “So let me get this straight,” she finally said. “My great escape is becoming a little crowded.”

  “I come with baggage.”

  “Yeah, I see that. Basically the whole family, huh?”

  “Basically,” I said.

  Of course, I felt a little bad for Mom, because she wouldn’t understand why I needed to do this, and sometimes I felt that, after Dad died, a part of her had died too, and what was left of her attention she gave to her boardroom meetings and hotel conferences. Brenner, Stoddard & Pell Associates might as well have been her family.

  “Does this car have a name?” Corrina asked.

  “What?”

  “A name, caveman, a name. Every car needs a name.”

  “Like a 2016 Beetle?”

  “Oh my God, no! Like Emmy Lou, or Peggy Sue, or Proud Mary.”