Chapter 13 Bastien — Day 33 #2
The sunset was the ridiculous kind, the kind he'd been afraid of the first week out here because he hadn't believed a sky could do that without a filter.
Long red bands over the low country. Purple mesa.
A moon that came up in the rearview like an argument.
The Davis Mountains had been behind them for hours and now the flat country was behind them too and there was nothing on either side of the truck but pumpjacks nodding to something no one had said aloud.
They didn't talk much for the last hour.
He was tired in a good way. She was tired in a way he wanted to fix and couldn't. She fell asleep against the window sometime after the second interchange and slept for maybe forty minutes and woke when he tapped the brake, orderly and immediate, like a woman who'd fallen asleep in a lot of moving trucks.
“Where are we?” she said.
“Coming up on it.”
She sat up, ran a hand over her braid, checked the road signs the way pilots check gauges.
“Motel on the frontage,” she said. “One I've used before. Clean sheets and thin walls.”
“I like clean sheets.”
“You'd better.”
The lot was half full. A neon sign, one letter dead, buzzed over the office. Later than they'd planned. He killed the engine and the sudden quiet made him aware of his own body — the shoulders, the low back, the fact that his hands were still braced on ten and two.
“I'll go in,” she said.
“I'll come.”
They went in together.
The clerk was maybe sixty, gray and wiry, wearing a faded feed-store sweatshirt despite the warm lobby. He looked up from a paperback and gave them the once-over motel clerks give couples who look like couples and aren't sure yet if they are.
“Evening, folks.”
“Evening.” Mara set her wallet on the counter. “Two rooms, please.”
The clerk's eyes flicked to Bastien. Bastien didn't move his face. His face had done a whole day of not moving already, and would keep doing it a little longer.
“Two rooms,” the clerk said. “Of course.”
He turned to the little board of keys behind him.
Bastien didn't look at Mara and Mara didn't look at Bastien.
He heard the card reader beep. He heard a page turn in the paperback the clerk had set face-down.
He signed a name on a form that was mostly his and not quite his and felt the ink bleed a little into the paper.
“Ice machine's around back,” said the clerk. “Coffee at six. Don't get your hopes up about the coffee.”
“That's a theme today,” Bastien said.
The clerk snorted. Mara laughed. Just one small sound, once. He'd think about that laugh later.
They walked out into the lot. The night was warm and dry and full of the small clatter of an air conditioner in a window somewhere.
“Room eight,” she said, holding up her key.
“Room ten.”
“You need anything?”
“I've got everything.”
“I'll knock at seven.”
“Seven.”
She stood there another second. He stood there another second. Neither of them stepped closer. Neither of them stepped away. If he'd been a braver man he'd have said her name. If he'd been a better man he wouldn't have wanted to.
“Sleep, Beau,” she said.
“Sleep, Mara.”
She walked to eight. He walked to ten. He watched, out of the corner of his eye, until the door of eight opened and closed behind her, and then he opened ten and stepped inside and shut the door with the flat of his palm.
The room was what a roadside motel outside Wichita Falls was. A bedspread the color of nothing. A lamp with a crooked shade. A framed print of horses running through a river neither of them would ever see.
He sat down on the edge of the bed.
He put his hands on his knees and looked at them. The nail on his left thumb still carried the small crescent scar from the sailboat, when he was eight and Julien let the boom swing him into a cleat. He covered the pale ridge with his right hand and pressed until it disappeared.
He wanted her.
It came up in him like weather. Not a thing he could argue with.
He wanted her mouth and her hands and her braid on his pillow and the sound of her breathing in the dark.
He wanted to walk five doors down the concrete walkway and knock and stand there in the yellow parking-lot light and say her name until she opened it.
He wanted to sit at her kitchen table for the rest of his life and hand her the salt without asking.
He wanted, God help him, to be the man she thought he was.
He wasn't that man.
He was a man who'd signed a name on a form tonight that was mostly his and not quite his.
He was a man who owned a company he'd run from, whose lawyer emailed him twice a week and got nothing back.
He was a man who'd told her, in the truck, that his brother had died — and hadn't told her his brother's name.
He was a man who'd listened to her talk about her father's last breath in the barn and hadn't, in return, said the true simple sentence: my name is Bastien Lorne and my family is on the cover of magazines you don't read.
He'd say it. He would.
Just not tonight.
He sat on the edge of the bed and shook, quietly, the way a horse shakes off a fly.
Once. Then again. He pressed his hands together and told himself it was the coffee.
He told himself it was the eight hours. He told himself it was the long lift of the sun over her cheek at mile forty and the way she'd said “Alright” to a sentence he hadn't meant to speak.
He lay down without turning the sheet back.
He stared at the ceiling. He listened to the room on the wrong side of him — someone's television, laugh track and canned applause — and then, more carefully, to eight.
He couldn't hear her. He wouldn't have been able to hear her through concrete block if he'd tried, and he knew it, and he listened anyway.
He counted the pulse of the ceiling air conditioner. He lost count at sixty-four. He started again. He lost count again.
He thought about the notebook in her door pocket. He thought about the way she'd said “alright” with no color in her voice. He thought about the salt he hadn't passed her yet across a kitchen table.
At two in the morning he got up, drank a glass of water at the sink, looked at his own face in the smoked mirror over the vanity, and didn't like what he saw. He got back in bed. He lay on his side. He lay on his other side.
Somewhere near four, he stopped pretending he was going to sleep, and simply waited for the sun.