My head spins. I still can’t believe my father and Emily were lovers, but then how do I explain the reference in the blog?
I jump at the sound of the door opening. Spinning around, I see Jalen walk into the room. I don’t have time to shut down the page, but I block the screen with my body.
“Hey,” he says, “they let us off early.” His eyes pass over me, reading me. “Some problem with vibrations on the third level. Your father said you’d be here. What are you doing?”
He moves closer, but I keep the screen hidden from him. “Reading Emily’s blog.”
He nods. “Did you see anything?”
I shut down the computer as casually as I can. It’s one thing for me to doubt my father, but I don’t want Jalen to know about King Stag. “I don’t know.”
He stands so close the heat of the sun rolls off him, as if he’s managed to bring some of it inside. He stays very still, and as the moment lengthens, I realize after last night’s speech about staying friends that his being here is as awkward for him as it is for me. Yet he’s here anyway.
“I have the rest of the day off,” he says. “Want to take a ride?” He pauses. “There’s this place I want to show you.”
I look up. His arms are crossed and his face is as stoic as ever, but behind the shield of his dark eyes, I glimpse something. My answer means something to him. “Where?”
He shrugs. “You’ll see.”
After what he told me last night, I don’t want any more surprises and yet I’m curious. “Why do you want me to go?”
A hint of a smile comes into his eyes. I don’t know what he finds amusing, and then I realize he’s already figured out what I am just understanding—that I’m going to go with him.
In the battered, summer-scented pickup truck, Jalen takes the highway northwest. With no air-conditioning, we ride with the windows rolled down and the wind, hot and fierce, in our faces. I don’t know where we’re going, but it doesn’t matter. With every mile between us and the park, a feeling of lightness opens up in me. It’s like we’re leaving everything bad that happened there and going somewhere new to start over. I realize this chain of thought isn’t fair to Emily, but I don’t care.
Jalen drives with his right arm slung over the top of the wheel and his eyes steady on the shimmering black highway. We make small talk for a while, and then I kick off my sneakers, tuck my legs under me, and use my backpack as a pillow against the car door. Almost immediately, I doze off.
When I open my eyes, my neck is cramped and I’m starving. There isn’t a single other car in sight, and on either side of the road, thirsty brown earth stretches for miles, dotted with bushes that look like earth’s razor stubble. In the far distance, pale pink-rock mountains rise like gigantic pieces of freeform art.
Sitting up, I push a clump of loose hair behind my ear and wipe my mouth in case I’ve drooled. “Where are we?”
He smiles and points to a sign so far in the distance it looks half-buried in the dirt. “Almost there.” The smile widens. “I was beginning to think you were going to sleep through the whole thing.” The smile is something new—he’s teasing me.
“I guess it’s the company,” I tell him and then pretend to yawn. “How long was I out?”
“A couple of hours.”
A couple of hours? I feel self-conscious for being out that long. But then, I didn’t sleep much last night. Having someone tell you that you’re going to die is a pretty good reason for insomnia. “It felt good.”
“You look better.”
We drive a while farther, and just as I’m beginning to wonder where we’re going, twin, beaker-shaped concrete pillars flanking a sign come closer. The sign reads, “Welcome to the Navajo Nation.”
We flash past it, and I feel a rush of excitement. Even with all the restorations my father has done, we’ve rarely been inside land under Native American jurisdiction. Why is Jalen bringing me here? Clearly it’s not a date. Probably he’s trying to make up for yesterday, the whole “friends” thing. He catches me studying him.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m not kidnapping you.”
“Oh, darn,” I say, as if disappointed, and then because the loose ends are driving me crazy, I pull my hair out of its elastic. I feel him watching me, although he turns his head the minute I look at him.
We pass a large, modern-looking concrete structure with a sign identifying it as a visitor’s center. A colorful flag with a red, yellow, and blue rainbow hangs from a flagpole in the parking lot.
We stop for gas and sandwiches at a convenience store. A Native American woman in a black dress cinched at the waist with a silver Concho belt takes Jalen’s cash. Her black eyes peer out of a weathered, round face the color of nutmeg.
Back in the car, we continue down the highway, and it’s like the little convenience store never existed and we’re climbing a series of mountains, giving us dazzling views of the canyons below us. Beneath us, the old truck’s engine downshifts. We barely go ten miles an hour as we maneuver the turns.
We pass clusters of civilization—villages, farmlands dotted with herds of sheep or cows, and numerous mobile homes, small as metal shoeboxes tucked into the landscape.
After another twenty minutes, Jalen turns down an unpaved road. Almost immediately the underbrush and sand cover up the path. We hear them scrape the underbelly of the truck.
I almost think we’ve lost the road completely when I see a structure in the distance. It sits alone on a patch of sparse grassland almost invisible in the enormity of the land.
As we get closer, it takes shape, the octagonal sides and mud covering defining it as a traditional hogan. Jalen pulls the truck to a bumpy stop. He turns off the ignition and stares at the house.
“We’re here,” he says.
The place looks long abandoned. What probably once was a garden is now a patch of dry earth dotted with spindly, yellow weeds.
“Come on,” Jalen urges, already at my side of the truck, pulling the creaky truck door open.
He holds my hand, but I’m not sure he’s even aware of it as we step through the front door. The one-room interior smells musty and old and feels as if it’s been empty for a long time. There are no windows. A stone fireplace sits in the middle of the room.
Whatever this place is, it means something to Jalen. I can see it in the way his gaze travels almost tenderly around the empty space, as if he’s seeing the room not as it is, but how he remembers it.
“There was sheepskin on the floor, and they kept Pendleton blankets over there,” he says, pointing. “A lantern hung on that hook and all the kitchen utensils were on that wall.” His face is rapt. “And here,” he points to a spot near the fireplace, “is where my grandmother made kneeldown bread.” He closes his eyes, smiles. “Sometimes she made it with bacon. It was so good.”
“You grew up here?”
He shakes his head. “No. My father and uncle.”
It’s so small it’s almost impossible to imagine a family living in what is essentially smaller than my mother’s garage. There’s no electricity, much less a bathroom or running water.
“I came here about twice a month on the weekends,” he says. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but back then…” He shakes his head, as if wondering how to put it into words. “My grandmother made the best blue corn pancakes, and Grandfather… We went on long walks. The places here—the canyons and the monuments…”
I wonder if he realizes he’s different here. The strong planes of his face seem to soften, and there’s a look in his eyes—a sureness, maybe contentedness?
“What do you think of it?” He comes to stand next to me.
“Just that this is so different than our house in New Jersey. I can’t imagine living here.”
Almost instantly his mouth tightens and his eyes harden into onyx. “You don’t like it.”
It isn’t what I mean at all. I put my hand on his forearm. “My mom’s house is bigger, that’s true. We have four bedrooms, three-and-a-half baths, a finished basement, and a two-car garage.” I pause because it’s important he gets this. “And you know what? We were all miserable there. There’s no smell of blue corn pancakes, and we stopped taking long family walks when I was ten. Even before my dad left, there was this…quiet. We all pretended it wasn’t there. It took me a long time to figure out it was the sound of everything falling apart. You think I wouldn’t trade that for a house with the kind of memories you have?”
He looks at me a long moment, sighs, and then brushes back my overgrown bangs. “Let’s eat,” he says.
He spreads an orange-and-blue-striped blanket on the floor near the hearth and unpacks the sandwiches from the convenience store. He hands me a ham-and-cheese and asks about what it’s like to live in New Jersey.
I tell him about life in the ‘burbs—a world where everyone spends way too much money and time trying to seem totally perfect.
“There’s a lot of pressure,” I tell him, “to have the right look, the right clothes, the right friends.” I shake my head. “People judge you all the time. Sometimes I would get so sick of that—but most of the time you try to be like everyone else so you don’t get talked about.”
Jalen nods. “It was important to my father that my brother and I fit in at school. He encouraged us to try out for just about every sport.”
I pass him a slice of orange. “What’d you play?”
“Everything—football, baseball, basketball.” He shakes his head. “It always seemed like a big waste of time.”
“What did you want to do?”
He takes a long swallow of water, recaps the bottle, and gives me a guilty grin. “Study.”
My brows shoot up. “Study? You’re a secret nerd?”
He shrugs the way people do when they’re really good at something but don’t want to admit it. “I want to go to college and double major—Native American Studies and political science. After that, law school.”
Law school. For a moment it’s hard to picture him in a suit and a tie, but then I look into his eyes and know this is exactly right for him. He’s quiet, but he misses nothing and he thinks things through. His mind works differently than mine, which takes all sorts of weird leaps and turns.
“You’ll be an amazing lawyer,” I tell him. “I can see you doing great things for people.”
His gaze drops. “Thanks. I hope so. We’ll see. How about you?”
I sigh and tell him about my childhood spent following my father around the desert, how I once dreamed of becoming an archeologist, but then saw what my dad’s crazy hours and obsession with the past did to our family.
“I didn’t want to be like him, but nothing else ever felt right, either.” I tell him then about Stuart and my mother, and that I deliberately failed health class and tanked my SATs.
He says that what’s happened isn’t as important as what I do next, how I handle things now. I know he’s exactly right, only it’s complicated. There are so many things I don’t know—how to talk to my mother about Stuart, how to go back to New Jersey and put everything behind me. And there’s Jalen. How exactly does he fit into my future?
I’ve been quiet a long time. That’s another great thing about Jalen. He never rushes you to say anything.
“I think I want to go to college and study archeology, but what if I’m not as good as my father? Everyone’s going to compare us.”
Jalen shakes his head. “Who cares what people think? You should go for it if that’s what you want.”
Like it’s that simple. Like failure is a word that doesn’t exist.
Lunch is over, and we gather our trash and put everything back in the paper bag. “What scares you most?” I ask as we rise to our feet.
He takes his time folding up the blanket. Finally he lifts his gaze to mine. “Wanting the wrong thing,” he says.
Looking into his eyes, I know I am the wrong thing.