For some reason, Rebecca is really, really happy to see my 2012 Chevy Impala parked outside. I’m guessing it’s better than Neel’s sweltering truck.
Then, as I watch her transfer into the passenger seat, I realize how much easier this must be than in Neel’s higher truck. Despite how much we’ve been hanging out lately, I haven’t gotten to see her do this yet. Not that I stare and gawk or anything, not that I have time to stare or gawk. She lines her wheelchair up, lifts her left foot off the footplate, and, bending forward, shifts right over. She hooks an arm under her legs to swing them in and she’s done.
I know it’s not easy, but that’s how she makes it look.
Neel springs into action after that, taking her chair and popping off the wheels and even folding the back down to stow it in the backseat before hopping in beside it. He’s obviously done this a lot. I make a mental note to learn how to do it myself as quickly as possible.
“This is nice,” Rebecca says, running her hand over the dash then along the fabric of the bench seat.
“Did you notice the A/C?” I turn the knob so the chilled air is blowing fully at her. I think I hear Neel mutter dick from the back seat and I crack a smile. Before I can say anything else to Rebecca, Neel is there, leaning forward over the seats and blocking my view of her. He stays there the whole way back to Good & Green, making her laugh with inside jokes and “hey remember that time” stories. I barely get a word in before he’s grabbing her attention back; it shouldn’t bother me but kind of does.
When I finally pull up beside Neel’s truck, I’m more than ready to be done with him, except even then he doesn’t leave. He gets out but goes only as far as Rebecca’s window and gestures for her to roll it down.
“So tonight in the park, you, me, and Gene Kelly?”
My hands tighten on the wheel and I stare straight ahead out the windshield. Why is he doing this in front of me? My finger moves to the passenger window button and I genuinely contemplate pushing it.
Rebeca runs her palms back and forth over her shorts. She did that sometimes when we were kids, not often, but I always knew it was a sign of discomfort. She’s really trying to hide it with Neel though. After glancing quickly at me she says, “Can I get back to you? I’m kind of helping a friend with a project and I don’t know how much time it might take.”
Neel makes the briefest of eye contact with me before offering her his fist to bump. “Sure. I’ll text you later.”
The second we pull away from the curb her hands are back on her shorts. Is that because she’s upset that my “project” is keeping her from going out with Neel?
“Thanks again for the ride,” she says.
“Sure.”
“Everything okay?”
How the hell am I supposed to know? According to Neel, she doesn’t tell me anything anymore. “Yep.”
Her eyes flash angrily in my direction. “What’s with you today? You barely looked at me when you came in the shop, said next to nothing on the drive here, and now you’re Mr. One-Word Answers?”
Before, when she’d get worked up like this, she’d pull her knee up against her chest and wrap her arms around it. She can’t do that now and I can feel her frustration grow.
“You don’t have to bail on Neel this weekend for my sake.”
“I thought you needed my help?”
“I do, but it doesn’t always have to be about me and my stuff.”
For some reason that comment makes her look very tired all of a sudden. “Your stuff is kind of everything right now.”
How am I supposed to know if that’s true when I don’t know what is going on with her?
“I’m just saying that if something else was going on, you could talk to me about it. Maybe we try your next thing when we’re not on the phone tracking down my mom. Give me a chance to help you for once.” I don’t mean for that last line to come out heated but it does and her response is just as biting.
“Can’t help me when you’re gone, can you?”
I turn my head to fully stare at her. “Are we gonna go there again? ’Cause I’m gonna need to pull over if we are.”
Her cheek puffs as she exhales. “No, I don’t want to go there. I just want...”
“What?” I say, trading quick glances between her and the road. Now that Neel’s opened my eyes to how much she may be holding back, I’m desperate to hear her answer.
“...to talk about something else.” And there’s the deflection Neel mentioned.
I’m already making her do something hard by helping me find my mom, so it’s not exactly fair to make her do anything else right now.
“Okay,” I say, no longer fighting to keep anger from my voice. “What do you want to talk about?”
She’s white-knuckling the seatbelt. “Anything else? Something about you?”
Something about me. My words come out before I can yank them back. “I used to have this dream about coming back here one day. It’d be years from now and you’d be all grown up, in college or something, but somehow I stayed a kid. And you’d be nice to me and everything, but you’d have this whole other life that I didn’t fit into no matter how hard I tried.”
She twists sideways to face me, the seatbelt going slack in her hands. “What a horrible dream.”
I shake my head, my gaze on Rebecca but seeing the slightly older, dream version of her. “It wasn’t so bad.”
She studies me. “So you never grew up? Never got to start your own life, just watched everyone around you do what you couldn’t?”
“Not everyone.” I slow down at a light. “My mom didn’t change either.”
She bites her lips. “That’s not a good dream, Ethan. I hope you had other ones, that you have other ones.”
Her words make the small car feel crowded and stuffy. It’s growing dark outside, and hot air made sickly sweet from the citrus trees baking in the sun all day rolls inside when I lower the windows.
“Oh, sure, tons.” Not like she means though and we both know it. My dreams are finding my mom and trying every day to make sure she has another. It’s not a bad dream.
Her gaze drifts away from me and settles on a book I left on the floor. Before I can stop her, she reaches for it.
“What’s this?”
A rhetorical question since the title is right there on the cover. “Some book I found on that bookcase in my grandparents’ living room. I ran out of ones to read in my room.”
She starts flipping through it. “Gardening and botany? You read this?” There’s a little gasp when she turns another page and flips it to show me. “Did you do this?”
This is a sketch of a prairie smoke bloom, a reddish-pink wispy flower that I now know is in the rose family, is native to North American prairies, and grows best in full sun. “It’s just a sketch.”
She laughs. “Can’t see your grandfather loving you doodling all over his book. Please tell me there’s a flip book animation with Old Man in here somewhere.” But her quick flipping soon slows as she realizes I wasn’t just absently sketching. She finds more flowers with little notes about their growth patterns and what zones they thrive in, other pages where I squeezed in full landscapes. “Ethan,” she breathes my name. “These are beautiful. And so detailed. You were good before, but this...” She brushes her finger over one. “It almost looks real. You have to show these to your grandfather.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” I ease the book from her hand.
“But he could help you, you’re obviously interested in this.”
“I don’t want his help. I can only think about finding my mom right now. I’ll think about what comes after that...after that.”
She sighs, just slightly, but nods. “I just want you to know it doesn’t make you a bad guy to want something for yourself beyond protecting your mom.”
Her words bounce off me.
“And when is after?” Her voice is quiet like she’s not sure she wants me to hear her. “After you find her? After you go back to LA so you can watch her every day? After she gets clean?” She reaches for me when I grip the steering wheel hard, her words as soft as her touch. “After she stays clean for a year? Five years?”
I shrug off her hand. “Why are you asking me this? You think I know? That I have any clue?” I jam a hand into my pocket and pull out the crumpled piece of paper that’s somehow supposed to help me find my mom. “That’s how close I am to after.” I throw the paper down between us, turning away again as she picks it up. I don’t want to see the look on her face when she reads the fat lot of nothing I have to go on. I spent hours trying to remember my mom’s friends from La Jolla and then match names to the memories. The problem was that I was just a kid and sometimes I only knew first names or even just nicknames. I don’t know if any of them still live there—most of my mom’s friends were pretty transient—or are even still alive.
I hear the paper opening and I tense more with each crinkling sound until it’s all I can do not to snatch it back and just take off. That was my go-to as a kid, and as slowly as she’s opening it, Rebecca’s at least half expecting me to bolt too as she smooths the paper out on her thigh and skims the paltry list I came up with. “Okay, so we begin with the names you know, track them down, and if they haven’t heard from your mom then maybe they’ll be able to fill in some of these gaps.” Her brow pinches as she points to the name at the top. “Bauer? That’s where you want to start?”
I nod. “I don’t know his actual name, but they were together for a while when I was like ten, used to bring me old paperbacks every time he came over, and then he’d send me down to this cafe where he worked to read while they got high.”
I swallow as those last few words slip out before I can stop them, but Rebecca doesn’t turn a pitying gaze in my direction, she doesn’t turn anything in my direction, just nods and makes a note on the paper.
Start with locating the cafe.
I smile at the road. “Remember how when we were kids and my mom would leave me with my grandparents and I just knew that whatever you were doing, wherever you were, you’d come? It’s not fair to still expect you to do that. Or to get mad that you have other people in your life. You should. I want that for you and I need to remember that better.” I reach to take the paper back, setting it facedown on the dash. “I can work on finding the cafe this weekend. You should go hang out with Neel, go watch a movie or whatever.” I mean to sound easy, encouraging her to go out with Neel, but there’s a strain in my voice that she must hear. “He still likes you, you know.”
One palm rubs over her leg. “We’re just friends now.”
“What happened with you guys anyway?”
“Nothing happened, we just—I don’t know.” More running her palms over her shorts. Her shoulders start shifting until she’s practically squirming beside me. Wow, she does not want to talk about this with me. I consider tormenting her a little longer but decide to be merciful.
“Bad kisser, huh? Yeah, I could see that.”
The squirming stops instantly. “What?”
“Too much tongue, am I right?” I shake my head. “Some guys can’t take a hint.”
Her lips tighten and I know she’s trying not to smile. “Actually, he’s a really good kisser.”
“You know he’s not here, right? No need to spare his reputation on my account.”
She gives up fighting that smile, but it stays soft with barely a flash of dimple as she runs a finger over her lips. “Maybe it’s all those old movies he watches, but there’s a reason women were always swooning in them.”
“You swooned?”
She nods. “This one time—”
“Ah, ah, ah.” I wave her off with a hand. “I heard enough earlier from Neel about you two.”
She shrugs. “You asked.”
“And now I’m un-asking.” I coast to a stop at another light, sending the paper sliding toward the windshield. Rebecca reaches for it but I stop her with a hand on her arm. “Just leave it.”
She frowns. “Why?”
“Not much to go on, is it?” I know I encouraged her to ditch me this weekend, but the truth is I don’t know what I’m doing without her.
“We found Theo, didn’t we?” She grabs the paper, refolding it more neatly than I had. “Now we find Bauer, and then whoever after him and whoever after that.”
I stare unblinking at the red light, not moving even when it turns to green. There aren’t any cars to honk behind me, but I don’t know if I would care in that moment if there were. “I’m scared, Bec,” I say in a quiet voice. “If we can’t find her or we do but she’s...”
Rebecca slips her hand into mine. “We’ll find her. And it’ll be okay.”
I cling to her hand and her words as we drive home. We won’t stop. She said it so many times in so many different ways, and each time I believe her a little more. It’s gonna hurt when I leave her. It’s already there, that feeling like I can’t take a deep enough breath, but what else can I do?
I help her put her wheels back on her chair when we get home and close the door after her once she transfers over.
“So I’ll come over in a couple hours and we’ll start cafe hunting, okay?”
“No Neel?”
Her shoulders drop a little and I can’t tell if she’s bummed to be missing a date with him or what. “I’ve seen every Gene Kelly movie with him at least a dozen times.”
“Well then maybe we can also figure out our next tattoo or whatever?”
It’s probably just the streetlight flicking on but it’s like her whole body lights up at my question. “Yeah?”
“I mean I’ve got to do something with that ski mask, don’t I?”
“Oh, we are gonna have so much fun until summer ends.”
It’s not until after I watch Rebecca go inside her house that I realize I never asked her what happens after the summer.