Chapter 9 - Shane #2
“I don’t want to leave him out here.”
“You can’t take that in there.”
“Why not?” He genuinely looks offended.
“Because…it’s like, an urn. Holding a person’s ashes.”
He unzips his coat and tucks the urn inside, zipping it back up. “It’s not just a person’s ashes, it’s my brother’s. I’m not leaving him in the car. If they give us any shit, we’ll just go somewhere else.”
I decide not to argue with him, because I don’t know which one of us is actually being sensible right now.
Once inside, we get a booth in the smoking section.
I look around us nervously as Ethan carefully sets the urn beside him and turns it toward the window.
A waitress comes by and we both order coffee.
I tell her we’ll need a minute for anything else.
She seems too distracted to notice there’s an urn joining us.
Ethan lights a cigarette, looks out of the window. I do too. Then at the menu. Then the window again. The absolute silence between us is slowly killing me.
“You feeling better?” I ask him.
He nods, still staring out the window. He exhales.
“It’s weird to see you smoking,” I say. “Didn’t you do a science project one time that showed the amount of toxins in a cigarette butt?”
He takes a drag, side-eyes me, and exhales against the pane of glass.
I fidget with the corner of the menu. “I can drive the rest of the way if you want. I seriously don’t mind.”
He takes a drag. He keeps staring disinterestedly out of the window.
The waitress brings our coffee. I end up ordering pancakes. Ethan just asks for a side of french fries.
“You should probably eat a little more than that,” I suggest to him once the waitress has walked off with our menus.
He pours some cream into his coffee. “Thanks for helping me earlier. But you need to stop talking to me like my mom.”
The insult stings. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to say to you.” I sigh. It seems he’s back to being hostile to me again.
It’s starting to snow. A fresh layer sticks to the dirty layers piled up in the parking lot.
The faint daylight coming in through the window lights up Ethan’s face in a flattering way.
I decide that I like his blond hair. It actually suits him.
It suits his whole melancholy look. Including that eyeliner.
I pull the disposable camera out of my pocket. “Can I take a picture of you?”
He stubs out his cigarette. “I don’t care.”
I snap a photo of Ethan gazing out of the window. Then I get another one from a different angle. “The light’s really good here. It’s hitting your face just right.”
He shifts his gaze over to me again. He looks tired. “Please don’t do this shit.”
“Do what?” I wind the film.
He shakes his head. “Just stop it, Shane.”
I put the camera down. I look down at the table. It isn’t very clean. There’s something sticky on one corner. I wipe at it with a napkin. “I still have all those pictures, you know. From before.”
Before Ethan can respond, the waitress shows up with our food. We thank her. Ethan takes off his coat and tucks it in between himself and the urn. He adjusts it, moving it closer to the window, and then he digs into his fries. I pour syrup on my pancakes.
I watch Ethan with his plate of fries, worried he should eat more. I watch as he lays them in a pattern, like he’s building a fence around his plate, then he dips them in ketchup and eats them.
A memory pokes through the surface of my mind. A long-forgotten memory. One of Everett. And Ethan too. It makes me smile.
Ethan notices. He glares at me. “What? You want another stupid picture?”
“You remember that one time we went up to that diner in Lowville?” I ask. “Pete’s, I think? It might not be there anymore.”
He keeps glaring.
“I was just thinking about that one night,” I continue, gazing out of the window again at the snow falling on the highway. “It was really late, we’d been at that movie place, and Everett wanted to go to the diner because Monica Simpson was working, and he had a thing for her.”
Ethan’s brows pinch with thought.
“Monica didn’t wait on us. It was this older lady, and she didn’t like us for some reason, so we all ordered a bunch of french fries and built like this tower of french fries and tried to play it like Jenga.”
I remember we’d pulled fries from the tower, eating them, until it eventually collapsed. Everett had been distracted, trying to get Monica’s attention, and caused it to fall. We made a mess, but before we got up to leave, Everett cleaned up some of it and left the waitress a nice tip.
“It was Ev’s idea,” Ethan says softly. “The tower thing. He was trying to get Monica to look over at us.”
“Oh, yeah.” I laugh softly, remembering.
The corners of Ethan’s lips turn up a little. “And it fell because he was doing that thing from Saturday Night Live.”
“Yeah, yeah! The Chris Farley thing, the—” We both say the line at the same time. “You’ll be living in a van down by the river!”
We laugh together. I’m glad to see that Ethan has the same laugh and the same smile.
At least that hasn’t changed. Seeing it for the first time since we started this trip makes the blood in my veins feel warmer, makes my heart do a little hiccup.
Seeing him laugh and smile was beautiful back then. It’s just as beautiful now.
I’d missed him so much. I almost say so, but after the laughter fades, we fall quiet again.
I mess with the corner of a napkin. He takes a sip of his coffee.
Then I reach into my coat pocket for the photograph, the one I took of us on the rocks at Black River. I push it across the table toward him.
He sees it, slowly setting down his mug. He glances up at me, then picks it up and stares at it.
“I’ve got more in the car,” I say. “Some of Everett I thought that you and your parents would like to have.” I pause for a second. “But most of them are of you. Like a lot of them are of you, actually.”
He looks up from the photo at me.
“I guess I thought maybe you’d want to see them.”
He sets the photo down and turns toward the window again. I wait for him to say something, but he doesn’t.
“It’s weird how it feels like forever ago,” I say eventually. “But it also doesn’t.”
Ethan glances at me again. “Does five years seem like a long time to you?”
I take a sip of coffee. “In one way, yes. In another way, no.”
“What’s the yes way?” He watches me carefully.
“The yes way is because I had a kid to raise. While everybody we went to school with was leaving town, going to better and bigger places, it was like I was getting left behind. Then my grandpa went into a hospice…” I pause there for a moment or two.
“It’s like a lot happened. In that little space of time. That’s what makes it seem so long.”
“And you ignored people,” Ethan mumbles. “So, there’s that.”
I shift uncomfortably in the booth. I push my plate away from me. “You said you don’t want to hear any apologies or my side of it, so…”
“Because it’s bullshit.”
“It’s not.”
“It is.”
“It’s not, Ethan.”
He crosses his arms, looks away.
“I don’t know how to be any sorrier,” I say. “And there’s a lot you don’t know. I wish you’d let me tell you.”
I see his jaw working. He puts his coat on, dumps a wad of cash on the table, and snatches up the photo. He slides out of the booth. “We need to get going.”
I slide out of the booth and follow him. “Do you not want to hear it because you’re afraid you might be wrong about me?”
When we get outside, there are fat snowflakes falling on the sidewalk. Ethan spins around in them, getting in my face. “What do you fucking mean being wrong about you? You seriously think there’s an excuse for what you did?”
“I didn’t say an excuse, but you don’t know the whole story. You don’t know my side of things. You just think you know.”
“I don’t care.” His eyes look like two gray stones. “I don’t fucking care, Shane. It doesn’t matter at all, because it happened. Telling me, five years later, what you were feeling won’t fucking change what happened.”
The way he’s looking at me hurts. It hurts so much that my eyes sting with tears. He’s so angry. So hurt. So filled with hatred—toward me.
“I know it won’t change anything,” I say. “But you told me if I ever needed to talk about anything, you’d listen. Remember?”
Those cold hard stones flinch, his face softening for the briefest of moments, then his expression hardens again. “So did you. And I’m pretty fucking sure anything we said to each other before is all null and void now.”
He spins around and marches off to the car.
I wait a second and follow along behind him. When we get to the Blazer, we find about two inches of snow and ice on the windshield. Ethan turns the engine on and gets the defroster and wiper blades going.
I find a scraper in the trunk and start scraping ice from the windows. “You really think everything we said is null and void now?” I look over at Ethan as he helps clear snow off the Blazer with his gloved hands.
He rolls his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does.” I stop scraping for a minute. “Answer the question. Do you really think everything we said is null and void now?”
He doesn’t answer me. He gets into the driver’s seat and shuts the door. I finish scraping, toss the scraper back in the trunk, and I get into the passenger seat. Ethan puts the Blazer in reverse and begins backing out of the parking spot.
I put on my seatbelt. “You’re not answering me because you know it’s not true.”
“Shut up.”
“Come on, Ethan. Just listen to me. For five minutes. Please.”
Ethan shakes his head, agitated. He gets out a cigarette, and I see his hand is shaking.
I start to feel bad. I soften my tone. “You sure you don’t want me to drive? Are you feeling okay?”
He lights the cigarette as he drives us out of the rest stop and onto the highway. “I’m fine,” he says through an exhale.
“Maybe we should wait till the snow stops,” I say. “Or check the weather forecast?” I turn on the radio and spin the dial.
“We grew up in fucking upstate New York,” Ethan retorts. “What the fuck would we wait for?”
I grab the map and see we’re supposed to get on Interstate 81 next. But the snow is getting heavier, slowing traffic all around us. Ethan curses at the car in front of us, and switches into the left lane to pass them.
“Don’t drive so fast,” I mutter to him, remembering the promise I made to his dad.
He glares over at me, but he slows down. A little.
After driving a couple of miles, slowly through the traffic, I glance over at him. He’s laser-focused on the road, then his eyes dart over to me for a second then back to the road. “What?”
“Does it still make you sad that stars die?” I say it softly, intimately, remembering the first time he said that to me. It made me think. It made me think about something that was real. Something that was beyond me. Something completely out of my control—or anyone’s for that matter.
There’s a moment where I see Ethan’s expression softening. He must be remembering that night too. Then it hardens again. “It’s not really true. Mr. Carver was wrong.”
“I still think about that. Wrong or not, it really made me think when you said it.”
The corner of his mouth twitches, but his eyes stay glued to the road.
After merging onto I-81, the snow is still thick and heavy, and traffic has moved to a crawl.
Pellets of ice click against the windows.
Even though neither of us are strangers to heavy snowfall and blizzards, growing up in the land of Lake Effect Snow, and rarely getting school canceled because of it, I’m worried about it now.
I didn’t think to check the forecast for our route, and I’m not sure if he did either.
“Maybe we should find another rest stop,” I suggest. “Or a motel or something?”
He glares at me again.
“I’m just saying. Traffic is slowing down, and I’d rather we stop somewhere than get stuck out here.”
He shuts his eyes for a second, opens them. “Fine.” He nods to the map. “Can you find the next exit?”
He can’t get us over into the right lane until a tractor trailer moves, so he flips the turn signal, and we wait. I grab the map to look for our options.
Just as we’re beginning to speed up a little, and I see the Pennsylvania Welcome Center is just a half a mile ahead, Ethan suddenly slams on the brakes, causing the Blazer to swerve a little, and I grab onto the dash.
I look over at Ethan, who’s face is as pale as the snow outside, and his eyes wide. “What happened?”
“Fuck,” he chokes out. “Fuck.” He turns around to look behind us, then turns the Blazer to the left onto the center median between the highway lanes.
“What are you doing?” I grab the steering wheel, trying to turn us back on the road. Cars honk behind us.
“I forgot him,” Ethan shouts at me. “We have to go back! I left Ev’s ashes at Denny’s!”