Chapter 17 Ethan
Ethan
Shane drives the rest of the way, and I let him.
Pennsylvania is a big-ass state, so it takes forever to get through. I notice that the further south we go, there’s less snow on the ground. Once we’re out of PA, the state lines fly by. Maryland. West Virginia. Virginia. I doze off a little through some of it.
It’s probably from the chamomile tea, relaxing me.
And the odd sense of calm I’ve had ever since leaving that old lady’s trailer.
I don’t want to think too much about some of the things she said to me, or the weird feeling I got while I was in her home, but it’s hard not to think about what she whispered in my ear before we left.
Everybody deserves a second chance.
I look down at Ev’s urn on my lap. I’ve never been much of a believer in anything.
I’m still not sure if I am or ever will be.
But we’ve got my brother’s ashes back and we’re getting closer.
I show Shane on the map where he’ll have to cross back into southern West Virginia to a place called Pipestem, where we’ll say our final goodbyes.
My parents asked that I bring back some of Ev’s ashes for them to keep, so that part of him will always be with us.
It’s the part of Everett that will be free that makes me anxious.
But I’m calmer about it now than I was before, so that’s something, I guess.
It’s night when we get to Pipestem, and I’d rather not go looking for the meadow in the dark, so we stop at a place called Bull Falls Motel by the New River.
I’m pretty sure that without Shane here, I’d have panicked so hard I would have crashed into a snowbank. I think about doing this alone again, and it would’ve sucked. Maybe I would have lost Everett’s ashes completely by now. I couldn’t have done this alone, and I don’t know why I thought I could.
And I suppose that kind old woman was right—everyone deserves a second chance.
I wait in the car while Shane goes inside to the front desk.
I look down at Ev’s urn still on my lap.
“Well, we made it, buddy. Just one more night and we’ll take you there.
” I pause for a moment. “I don’t know if Shane’s telling the truth or not.
About what happened. I don’t know if you were lying or not when you said Shane called me a pain in the ass.
It was a long time ago. Maybe you just didn’t know how to react.
And I can forgive you for that, because you’re my brother.
But I don’t know about him.” I look up at the night sky.
It’s clear and the stars are super bright out here and twinkly.
“I just don’t know. I wish time would just rewind like a video and we’d be back at your party.
Start the whole thing all over again.” One star in particular twinkles in the corner of my eye, so I look over at it.
It’s one of the brighter stars of Ursa Major—or the Big Dipper.
The one at the very end, Alkaid, is the hottest star that can be seen without binoculars.
Alkaid is Arabic for leader. It twinkles again, and I squeeze my eyes shut and open them again.
Shane opens the driver’s side door and hands me a key. “Here.”
I stare at him. “What’s that for?”
“Your room.” He’s got another key ring. He puts it in his pocket.
“You got us…separate rooms?”
He gives me a funny look. “Yeah. I mean…” He slips his hands in his pockets and shrugs.
Suddenly the thought of Shane so far away from me, in a whole other room, practically seizes me with panic. “No.” I say it louder than I intended. “Don’t get a different room. Please.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he says, “Be right back.”
When he goes back inside the office, I wrap my arms around the urn and look up at Alkaid again. “You think I should forgive him?”
The star twinkles again, and I feel a warm sensation on the side of my head, like someone is laying a hand there.
I hug the urn close to me as Shane returns, opening the back of the Blazer to take out our stuff. “Guy was really weird about it, but he refunded the other room.”
I slide out of the passenger seat and hold Ev’s urn as Shane carries our stuff.
I gather up the cushions from the backseat and carefully carry everything to the motel room.
Once inside, I turn on the light and look around.
There are two beds. So, it would have been silly then for Shane to have gotten another room.
A waste of money. I put a cushion on one of the chairs and set Ev’s urn on it.
I put my hand on the ugly floral bed spread.
A huge waste of money. I’m sure Shane hasn’t got a lot of it with a kid.
After Shane sets down the last of our stuff, he gets on the phone.
I pretend not to be listening as I get some food out of the tote, but I can tell he’s talking to Gina.
Then I hear the distant, high-pitched voice of a child, and Shane laughs at something she says.
When he hangs up, he asks if I want to use his calling card to call my parents.
I tell him I’d rather call them tomorrow before we leave.
“I saw a diner a couple miles up the road,” Shane says. “You want to grab something to eat there? Or do you just want me to make you a cup of noodles?”
I turn around and he’s standing behind me. “You want to make me dinner?”
“Of course.”
One second, I’m a couple feet from him, looking at the stubble appearing on his upper lip, then in the next I’m feeling that stubble as I kiss him on the lips. Hard.
It’s like in the movies when fireworks go off. It’s like when you touch one of those balls of electricity and you feel your hair raising from your scalp.
I pull away from him, and he’s looking at me as if he felt it too. “Let’s just stay here,” I tell him.
And he agrees.
We put Ev on a nest of pillows on the nightstand between the beds, and I turn on the TV. We try to find a movie or a show to watch, like the old days, when we’d stay up late, watching dumb shit and providing commentary like we were Bevis and Butthead.
We channel surf while we eat, but we don’t really find anything good in this backwoods place, so we sort of settle on a rerun of Matlock that gets fuzzy and flickers any time a car drives by.
“Who in the hell ever watches this?” Shane muses.
I look over at him sitting on the edge of the bed next to me. “Old people, I guess.”
“Yeah.” He takes one last bite from his Cup O Noodles. “And I guess one day we’ll be those old people.”
“Me and you, maybe. But not Everett.”
Shane looks solemn. “That’s true.” He stands up and takes our trash to throw away, pausing to make sure he puts anything plastic in the bag I brought along to toss in a recycling bin. My heart skips a beat.
I get out a cigarette and Shane watches me smoke for a second before he gets it from me and takes a drag.
“I must be a bad influence,” I say to him.
He exhales. “I smoked for a little while. When Mikayla was like, two. Me and Gina would split a pack at night after we put her to bed. We’d sneak outside, even when it was close to minus ten out so Mikayla wouldn’t smell it.”
I take the cigarette back. “I should probably quit.”
“Probably,” Shane agrees. “Why’d you start?”
I shrug. “College. Everybody I went out with was. So, it was just easier for me to do it too.”
“Peer pressure, huh?”
“I guess.”
“Is that why you wear the eyeliner?” He takes my hand and runs his finger over the chipped polish. “And this?”
“I don’t know. It’s just something I liked doing. It was something I could do in New York that I couldn’t do in Port Leyden. You know?”
Shane rubs my hand, slipping his fingers through mine. “I like it.”
I put the cigarette out and kiss him. He kisses me back. He kisses me like he knows what he wants. And he’s going to get it.
I can tell it’s going to lead somewhere; a path we’ve gone down before.
There’s a pause in our kiss as our heads turn and noses bump, and I take the opportunity to slide a hand under Shane’s sweater.
His skin gets prickly and his muscles tighten.
The room changes trajectory and there’s something soft against my back.
Shane’s weight over me is familiar. His short nails dragging over my stomach are too.
I get glimpses of Shane’s chest in the low motel lamplight. Shadows under his jaw as I kiss his shoulder, yellowish light glancing off his hip as I undo the button of his jeans. He’s familiar but different at the same time. He’s what I dreamed about for years.
A thought occurs to me. “Wait.” I shift from underneath him and get up from the bed. I pull the bedspread from the other bed and carefully lay it over the urn.
“What are you doing?” Shane asks, poised awkwardly on his side, his pants unzipped and halfway down his hips.
I look at the lumpy bedspread. “I don’t want Everett to see.”
Shane looks at me, incredulous. Then he grins. Then he laughs. I laugh too. The entire room seems to warm by ten degrees. I climb back into the bed and lie beside him. He stares at me, nestling his cheek against his bent arm.
“You know,” he says, “that I didn’t come along just to fuck you, right?”
I trace a finger across his chest. “But you did.”
“I want to be as close to you as I can possibly get.” He slides his fingers across my face. “Close as you’ll let me. But that’s not the only reason. I want you to know that.”
“I want to be close to you too,” I tell him. “And I know.”
I get so lost in kissing him again it’s sort of a surprise when I look down at our bodies to see we’re both completely naked.
Our hands bump and fingers get tangled as we reach for each other’s dicks.
Shane’s touch is gentle, but it feels so good every muscle in my body tenses and my hand goes slack around him.