Anywhere but Here (20 page)

By the time the dishes are done, the phone has rung three or four more times and I have steadfastly ignored it. I set about rinsing and recycling Dad's collection of beer bottles. There are seventy-three.

Afterward, I lean on the door frame and watch as his snores literally shake the recliner.

There are six more beers in the fridge.

I consider pouring them down the drain while he's passed out. Then I have a better idea. I retrieve my backpack from downstairs and load them all inside.

They clink against my back as I stride down the hill toward Greg's house. I've gone about three steps when Hannah's Saturn idles up beside me and she rolls down the window. Damn. The girl must have been on surveillance duty. There should be stalking laws against that sort of thing.

“Hey, handsome,” she says, her breath steaming into the cold air. “Thought you might want a ride.” Her eyes are red, a contradiction to her wavering smile. Even with puffy skin, though, she's gorgeous.

A ride is the last thing I want. In fact, if the route to Greg's house was lined with hot coals and I was barefoot, I would still rather walk. I can't get into a car with a gorgeous girl who is not the mother of my future child.

“I need the exercise,” I say.

The smile disappears. “Look, Cole. You don't have to talk to me after today if you don't want to. But you owe me this. Get in the damned car.”

This is not the voice of Home Base Hannah.

I climb in the car.

“Do you have any idea how hard this is for me?” she asks.

I'm not exactly having the time of my life either.

“I wasn't born here like the rest of you. I know that you and Lauren have a lot to work out right now, but I don't have a thousand friends to turn to once you dump me.”

The word “dump” is a little harsh.

“It's not like I planned this,” I snap.

“You and I are so good together. It's just not fair.” Blinking fast, holding her lips tight, Hannah is trying not to cry. I appreciate the effort. There's nothing worse than being trapped in a moving car with a crying girl.

“This town sucks,” she says.

“Agreed.”

Then Hannah's breath catches. When a tiny hiccup of a sob escapes, I feel something crumble in my chest. Life has seriously screwed with me this week, and I'm taking it out on her. “I'm sorry,” I tell her. “I really, really am. But there's stuff I have to figure out.”

“You don't have to do it by yourself.”

I sigh. It's not that help wouldn't be nice. But I'm at the bottom of a ditch here. The stinking, slimy, toxic-waste-coated bottom of a ditch. I'm so far in that I can't see the tops of the banks anymore. It doesn't feel fair to pull someone down here with me.

She puts a hand on my leg. “I could help you. We could figure it out together.”

As romantic as that prospect sounds, it's not going to work. She knows it too. I can see it in her face.

“Can you just drop me off?” I ask.

Hannah snatches her hand back. She wraps her fingers around the steering wheel, and I watch as her knuckles turn white.

“So that's it,” she says.

“Sorry.”

I really am, not that Hannah believes me. I'm sorry for hurting her, sorry for running out on her parents. Most of all, I'm sorry for my damned self right now.

She leaves me on the side of the road by the hospital, close to Greg's house.

“Check yourself into the psych ward while you're here,” she shouts out the window before pulling away with all the power her Saturn can muster.

For a few minutes, I stand on the corner letting the wind cool my head and waiting for the tight feeling in my throat to pass. Across the street from the hospital, there's an old Lutheran church with a looming brown cross in front and one of those marquees that declare the scripture for the next week's service.

I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS
, it says,
EVEN UNTO THE END OF THE WORLD
.

“That's half the problem!” I yell. I should go over there and kick that sign. Do churches put them up specifically to torment people? “Why can't everyone leave me alone?”

Now I'm yelling at a sign while standing by myself in the dark.

To make things worse, when I finish yelling, I discover that I'm not actually alone. Tracy is having a smoke outside the door to the emergency room.

She waves me over, and since my better judgment has already deserted me, I join her, motioning for a drag of her cigarette. As I cough, she examines me with a pursed lip. A pierced, pursed lip. Seeing a thick silver stud on the lip of a forty-year-old Webster nurse is like seeing a UFO.

“You wanna talk about it?” she says.

Yeesh. Is there some sort of estrogen-based conspiracy around here? No, I don't want to talk about it! And if I did, she probably
would
check me into the psych ward.

I bet they have good drugs in the psych ward. It's tempting, but not quite as tempting as my next idea.

“Maybe later,” I tell Tracy, passing back her smoke. “I gotta go.”

I turn toward town and text Greg as I walk. I still have the beer. He can pick me up.

Greg is pissed. Somewhere between fleeing Hannah's house, amputating my girlfriend from my life, and acting like a lunatic in front of the church, I forgot about the part where I impregnated Greg's future wife. He, apparently, has not forgotten.

“C'mon, bud.” Since he refused to answer the phone or the door (a trend among my friends these days), I've taken to standing outside his bedroom window and yelling. “I know you're in there. I saw you close the curtains.”

No response.

“Can we talk about this? Over a drink? Or two?”

I'm having déjà vu. Only a few months ago, I knocked on
Greg's window to tell him that Lauren and I had broken up. He was more helpful then.

“I didn't do any of this on purpose. I could really use some help figuring it out. . . .”

The curtains whip back and I jump. With a creak, the window slides open and Greg sticks out his head.

“You want us to figure out something? What kind of something?”

“I don't know. Do we have to talk about it here?”

He tilts his head, considering. “Yes.”

“What do
you
think I should do? Ask her to marry me? Get a job in Vancouver and mail child-support checks? I don't know, man. This doesn't even seem real yet, and I can't get past the prison guard to talk to Lauren.”

“You haven't talked to her?” He makes it sound like a felony.

“Not since she told me.”

“Nice. Why don't you start with that, Cole? It's good to have goals.”

He slams the window shut.

“She won't let me in!”

Inside the house, music starts to blare. The panes vibrate.

I swear, these people are trying to drive me insane. They're like octopuses when I want to get rid of them. Octopi? Creatures
with big frickin' tentacles that won't let go. And now, when I could actually use some help, they disappear into the dark depths of their own worlds. Bottom-feeders, all of them.

•  •  •

Unwilling to go home, I head down the hill toward 7-Eleven. That's where I find Dallas.

He slaps me on the back as if I'm the prodigal friend. “How's it going? Where's the rest of the gang?” For some reason, his accent makes me feel better. I can't talk to Dallas without expecting cowboys to ride by and oil rigs to gush in the background.

“Hannah and I broke up. And Greg's sulking in his bedroom like a chick.”

Dallas doesn't ask more questions, which I appreciate.

“Y'all got time for a drink?”

He doesn't ask questions
and
he wants to have a beer with me on a Monday night. “Dallas,” I say, returning his shoulder slug, “it's possible you're my soul mate. I have half a dozen beers in my pack.”

The drinks slide down surprisingly quickly in the alley behind the store. When they're gone, we go in search of a new supply.

•  •  •

An evening in the Prospector bar is risky because even if the bartender isn't some guy who graduated two years ago and knows
I'm still not of age, there are always a dozen customers who can identify me.

Tonight, I really don't care.

“We're grown men,” I tell Dallas as we push open the heavy double doors.

“Captains of our own ships,” he agrees.

Fortunately, there's a middle-aged woman tending bar. She has long, red hair pulled into a thick braid and looks like a Wild West pioneer. No matter. She doesn't know us, and she doesn't blink when we order two beers. Then two shots of tequila. Then two more beers. When Dallas slaps down a twenty to pay for the next round, she only raises her eyebrows in a way that suggests she'll be laughing later, when we're puking our guts out.

“She underestimates us,” I tell Dallas.

“Because we're men of purpose,” he says.

“Men of independent means.”

“Makers of our own destinies!” he says grandly, spilling some of his beer as he hoists it.

That's when Dad sits down beside us.

We freeze. Usually you can predict what a parent is going to do in a certain situation. If Greg's mom had just spotted us, for example, we would be marching home to the beat of a lecture on the mind-bending effects of alcohol and the cancerous toxins released in our bloodstreams.

With Dallas's dad, there would have been a slow wink, a head tilt toward the door, and a deep, “Git your asses on outta here.”

My dad? I have no idea what he's going to say. And I don't think he knows either. For what seems like a long time, the three of us sit silently staring at one another. Finally, he takes a deep breath and blows it between pursed lips. Then he raises a hand to the bartender and holds up three fingers.

“Guess you're gonna grow up sometime, eh, boys?” he says.

When the beer arrives, we clink the tops of the bottles like we're old buddies and slurp in unison.

Since we arrived, the bar has filled with a strange, Monday night mix of after-shift loggers and committed drinkers. Despite the new beer, I'm uncomfortable.

I find myself wishing Dad had kicked us out.

Dallas, a grin on his face the size of the Rio Grande, has crossed the room to play pool with a group of loggers. The way he's lipping them off, he's going to get thrown out on his ass soon.

I stay on my stool, struggling to think clearly. After repeated attempts to focus, I hit on the problem. I would like to be the type of guy who handles things better than this and without the help of alcohol. Didn't I recently tell my dad that things had to change? My negotiating power is draining like a spilled beer. Sheri's pregnant. Lauren's pregnant. Drinking with Dad, it's like I've signed on to the “if you can't beat 'em, join 'em” team. And
in a few hours, we'll both stagger up to the house, where we'll lean against the wall and scrape our keys against the door frame, searching for the lock.

There's something not right about that.

I stand abruptly, which sends the bar spinning around me. “Be right back,” I mumble, heading in the general direction of the bathroom. Halfway there, I'm distracted by a blast of cold air from the front door. It's like a slap in the face, in a good way.

I don't realize how noisy the bar was until I emerge. Out here, it's perfectly silent and still. The cloudless sky is spread with stars. It's cold for November—deep-winter cold—but I linger, unwilling to go back inside and talk to my dad. As long as I hover here or lean against the frigid brick wall, I'm in limbo, absolved from all decision making.

The crunch of footsteps on snow echoes through the empty street. I hear women's voices, punctuated by a peal of laughter.

When I turn my head, there's a three-second delay in my vision. There must be a traffic jam inside my brain between the optical nerves and whatever lobe is responsible for interpreting vision.

“Cole?” Ms. Gladwell spots me against the bricks. She's holding hands with a woman. I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining things.

“Watch,” I tell her. Then I turn my head toward her friend.
“See? First my head moves. Then, a while later, my eyesh see you.” I hear the slur, and I'm about to repeat myself—to ensure I'm making this completely clear—when I'm distracted by Ms. Gladwell's friend. It's Tracy. Tracy's holding hands with Ms. Gladwell.

If seeing a goth nurse in Webster is like seeing a UFO, this is like seeing a UFO actually abduct someone.

“Hey! You two are leshbians,” I tell them. “That's cool.”

I don't want them to be uncomfortable.

I point a finger toward Ms. Gladwell. “This explains a lot. You've kinda changed.”

They're both looking at me with the same bemused expression that Tracy wore outside the hospital a couple hours ago.

“I mean that in a good way,” I clarify. I'm finding it difficult to look at them out of both eyes at once. My right eye is spontaneously closing.

I experiment. “Camera one. Camera two.”

“Cole, how 'bout we take you home?” Tracy says. “My truck's just down the block.”

“Nah, I'll walk,” I tell her. “Last time I got in the car with a woman, it washn't good. Not good at all.”

“We could call your dad to come get you,” Ms. Gladwell suggests.

“He's inside,” I say.

Their eyebrows go up in unison.

“What if I get him?” Tracy says. “Then you can both head home together?”

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

A sand truck approaches from the far end of the street, its yellow lights swirling. The way those lights reflect on the snow . . . hypnotizing. I should work that into a science doc somehow.

“You should really go home,” Tracy says.