17 Xavier
17
XAVIER
M Y BODY WAS two hours ahead of hers, so I woke up before she did. The hotel appeared to be criminal free at the moment, as there were two cops eating breakfast burritos in the parking lot, so I left Samantha sleeping in bed to get her coffee in the Dart.
I did not like her driving this car. At all .
No airbags, no roll bar, no shoulder strap. No automatic locks or alarm. I checked that the hazards worked—they did—but that’s about all this vehicle had going for it in terms of safety.
She said it was temporary. I hoped it was.
I got her coffee and some roses a man was selling out of a white bucket on the side of the road.
When I got back to the room, she was still sleeping so I left her latte and flowers next to the bed, brushed my teeth, and jumped in the shower. When I got out, she was at the sink.
“Good morning,” she said around her toothbrush.
“Good morning.”
She spit. “Thanks for the gifts. What do you want to do today?”
I was wrapped in a towel and she dropped her eyes to my waist and grinned.
Someone started screaming in the parking lot. A second later we heard the whoop of a police siren.
We both looked at the door and then back at each other, amused.
“Maybe breakfast and then a mattress store?” I said.
She scoffed. “Okay. Then what?”
“What is there?”
She ticked off on her fingers. “Disneyland, La Brea Tar Pits, the LA Zoo—”
“The zoo.”
She smiled. “How did I know you’d say that?”
I loved zoos. Aquariums too. Both were places I didn’t get to go as a kid unless I was going with one of my friends and their family.
I don’t know why I didn’t do these things as an adult. Why I had to wait to be taken. When I thought of activities to fill my time, I thought of volunteering, working longer, going to the gym. Grown-up things. My mind never went naturally to things that I might enjoy. It was like that switch was not available in my brain. Like the loss of it in my childhood was a permanent one and only someone else could get me there.
“Is that fine?” I asked. “We can do something else.”
“I love the zoo. I haven’t been since I was twelve or something. Can we maybe take the boys? They’d like it and my sister doesn’t get much of a break.”
“Of course.”
She rinsed her toothbrush. “Can I make a special request?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t want to tell you what to do with your face, but when you meet the boys, can you smile? Because you are very tall and you frown a lot.”
I scoffed. “Yes. I will make an effort not to scare the children.”
“Thank you.”
Then we just stood there, peering at each other.
She looked beautiful. Rumpled and sleepy. She’d gone to sleep wearing the hoodie I gave her but she’d taken it off and she was in nothing but a maroon tank top now. No bra. Her nipples were pressing against the fabric. I felt a twitch under my towel. Then someone started shouting outside followed by the sounds of shuffling and an electrical zapping noise.
She looked at me with her eyes wide. “Did we just hear someone get tasered?”
“I think we did…”
A male voice went into the Miranda rights directly on the other side of our door.
With the mood officially deflated, she grabbed a towel.
“I’m going to go take a shower,” she said. “How was the water pressure?”
“Terrible.”
“Perfect.”
I was dressed by the time she came out. She got ready and I took her to eat breakfast at a diner. We’d just ordered. Her cell phone pinged and she checked it. She looked perturbed.
“What?”
“Jeneva,” she said, putting her phone away. “She said Dad came in a little after we left.”
“Where was he?”
She shrugged. “She said she saw his car in the driveway, he snuck back in, she didn’t talk to him.”
She poured creamer into her coffee. She liked the blue vanilla ones. I made a mental note.
“How long have your parents been together?” I asked.
“Thirty-three years. She is the love of his life.”
She looked away from me when she said this, like she needed a moment to recover from it. She peered out the window, watching the traffic on Colorado Street.
“I thought dementia was something that happened to old people,” she said. “There was a laundry list of things that I worried about for my mom. Breast cancer. Arthritis. Really shitty menopause. At no point was dementia on my radar.”
“What’s the prognosis?”
She gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “She can live with it for years. Decades even. It’s not the dementia that kills you—it’s the falls, the infections, the malnutrition. She’s young and her body is strong, so that’s good. She doesn’t have any other health conditions. She wanted to stay at home. That was really important to her.” She paused. “You know what I realized through all this?”
“What?”
She gazed at me. “That there is nothing more beautiful than being a witness to someone’s life. To know them inside and out and be with them through everything, share the same memories. Memories are everything. I want that.”
“A witness to your life?”
“Yeah. I want someone who knows everything there is to know about me, and I want to know everything about them. I want to be able to say one out-of-context comment to someone and they get what it means and they laugh and it’s just some stupid joke from like eleven years ago that means nothing to anyone else.”
The corner of my lip twitched up. “Like, ‘Come On Eileen’?”
“Yes!” She jabbed a finger at me. “‘Come On Eileen’ is exactly it. I want a lifetime of that. I want to be able to talk about my family and they know what I mean without me having to go into the backstory. To just say ‘Tristan’ and they nod and roll their eyes. I want someone who knows all my petty vendettas and they honor them no matter how out of pocket they are.”
“So, mustard stuff.”
She laughed. Then her smile fell a little.
“You can’t fake that kind of thing,” she said, softly. “It’s the result of a parallel life. A shared collection of experiences, like a snowball rolling downhill, getting bigger as it goes. And then you get to a point where you’re so far in, you can never replace that person. Not really. No one else can ever be the same kind of witness because you’ve lived through so much. It really is a once in a lifetime thing.” Her eyes went a little sad. “Can you imagine losing that? One memory at a time?”
I peered at her quietly. “No. I can’t.”
But also, I could. Because I’d lost both my parents, even though they were still here.
There was no one who would witness my life from my start to the finish of theirs. And no one to witness my parents’ lives either—except each other, which felt more like a punishment than something poetic.
And the sad thing was, it didn’t have to be this way. They were already feeling my absence. They needed me now, like Samantha’s mom needed her, and I would never answer that call.
Somehow, not having me witness their life felt like a fitting consequence for their actions. Because Samantha was right. There was nothing more precious.
When we got out of breakfast, it was almost eleven. We were driving back to the house to pick up the boys for the zoo. Her car was sweltering.
We had the top up because it was too hot to be in direct sunlight. The V-8 engine was like a space heater, radiating hot air on our legs under the dash. The vinyl seats were scorching and the whole thing smelled like oil.
“How do you deal without AC?” I asked.
She pulled her hair into a ponytail at the red light. “It’s bad, huh? Grandma said there’s a vent under the dash. It lets air in while you drive?”
I found the vent on the passenger side and opened it up. It was a rudimentary four-inch-by-four-inch square metal box with a metal latch.
“Got it,” I said.
“Ugh, hopefully that helps.” She fanned herself with her hand.
People were staring at the vehicle on both sides of us as we sat at the light, baking in the car’s fumes. The Dart drew a lot of attention. It was a great-looking car, just… impractical.
The light turned green and she pulled forward.
I could feel the air from the vent immediately. It was warm air, but at least it was circulation.
“I’m still figuring this thing out,” she said. “Getting the hang of it though. Last week I learned that when it starts to stall at red lights, you just need to keep giving it gas. When you stop, you gotta keep one foot on the brake and one on the gas and keep feeding it while you idle.”
“It stalls?”
“Only when it’s cold. Once it warms up, it’s good.”
“Does it get cold here?” I asked.
“It got into the sixties last week.”
“A car that stalls from the cold and the cold is only sixty degrees,” I deadpanned.
“She’s old.” She shrugged.
I looked at her gas gauge. “You’re out of gas.”
“No, the gauge is broken.”
I looked between it and her. “How do you know if you’re running low?”
“Hold on, I’ll show you when we get to a red light. Okay, here we go.” She turned the radio down and braked a little harder than necessary as we stopped. “You hear that?” she said.
There was a glug glug glug noise as the gas sloshed back and forth in the tank.
I stared at her. “Are you kidding me? This is how you know the car has gas?”
“Yeah, I’m really good at it. I’ve got the glug glugs down to a science.”
“How long are you driving this again?” I asked.
“Until the wheels fall off probably.”
“Why am I worried that’s actually going to happen?”
The light turned green and she pulled forward.
A dried leaf blew up from under the dash.
“At first I hated it,” she said, “but it’s kind of growing on me. It’s so cheap. The gas mileage sucks, but my car insurance is only like fifty bucks a month. And I really don’t go anywhere, so I don’t need anything nicer. There are entire days where I don’t even leave the house. Why spend money on a car that’s just sitting in the driveway?”
“Reliability, safety, comfort…”
She waved me off.
She got onto the freeway and turned the radio up. We wouldn’t be able to talk while we drove, it was too loud with all the windows down. Actually, it was loud even with the windows up. The car rattled. The weather seal wasn’t great either—there was a crack between the canvas top and the windows so it whistled—and the engine was noisy. There was no way this car was watertight. Good thing California didn’t get much rain…
Another leaf blew up from under the dash. Then another one. It twirled around the car in a flurry and got stuck to the front of my shirt.
I was plucking this off me when the warm breeze coming from under the dash suddenly stopped. It was still for two seconds, then like a shift in the air pressure a deluge of dried leaves dislodged and blew into the car. It hit the cab like a tornado.
“Oh my God!” she screamed.
The leaves whipped and circled around violently. It was blinding. I covered my face and looked around through gaps in my fingers. “Slow down and pull over,” I said calmly, putting on the hazards. “You’re in the right lane, signal and pull off to the side.”
“Okay, okay—Ah! There’s so many!”
The sound of a horn peeled past us.
“Just slow down, the hazards are on.”
When she slowed down the tornado did too. She pulled over and I leaned out the window to guide her onto the shoulder.
“Don’t get out and don’t get unbuckled,” I said. “Okay, stop.”
She threw the car into park and slumped against the wheel. “What the fuck was that?” she said, looking at me with wide eyes. “This thing must have been parked under a tree or something.”
“Have you ever opened that vent before?”
“No.”
I looked around the car. Leaves everywhere. Leaves in her hair, leaves in my hair.
The car glug glugged.
And then, like some strange cosmic joke, “Come On Eileen” came on the radio. The fiddle intro eked out of the lone speaker and we both looked at each other.
I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t funny, but it was.
She laughed a little. “Please don’t make fun of me for this,” she said.
“I don’t think I have a choice, unfortunately.”
She dragged leaves from her ponytail and I dug them out from inside my shirt.
“They’re avocado tree leaves,” she said. “It must have been parked in the driveway at some point. Gross.” She looked down at a large leaf on her thigh and froze. “Oh my God! NO! Xavier, take it take it! Ahhhhhh!” She flapped her hands.
I looked at her lap. It was a dead mouse. Flat and petrified, frozen in a toothy death mask. “It’s okay—”
“NOOOOOO! Get it! Oh my God!”
She started dry heaving.
“Samantha—”
“I need antibacterial wipes—” she said. Retch. “Hand sanitizer—” Retch. “We’re covered in dead mouse dust, I CANNOT—”
I lost it. Completely lost it.
I was laughing so hard when I picked up the stiff rodent by the tail to toss it out the window I could barely do it.
She started rummaging frantically in the center console for wipes, dry heaving and laugh-crying all at the same time.
“It was like a little mouse mummy,” she said, hiccuping.
“The leaves were probably his little mouse bed.”
“STOP!”
She fumbled the wipes. I took the package and pulled out two and handed them to her, still cracking up. “Just breathe,” I said. “It’s all right.”
“Come On Eileen” hit the chorus.
She was wiping her leg down when a man came out of nowhere and popped into the passenger side window. “Hey, you guys okay? Need a jump?”
Samantha and I blinked at him.
He put a thumb over his shoulder. “I got my cables.”
She made a sound like she was holding in a giggle fit.
“No, thank you,” I said, trying to keep it together. “Just some technical difficulties.”
“Thank you,” she managed. “We’re fine.”
He looked us over. We had leaves in our hair. She had mascara running down her cheeks, we were both sweating. The man took one glance at us and decided he didn’t want to push it and walked back to his truck.
“Where did he even come from?” she whispered.
“I have no idea,” I said, shaking my head.
A leaf fell out of my hair and landed in my lap. She broke into laughter again and so did I.
We sat there on the side of the road, hot. We smelled like oil, covered in leaves and mouse dust and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would never forget this moment. That this was a memory sticking to a very new and very small snowball.
And I liked where it was going.