The Truth of Letting Go Page 14

  Once we’re inside the store, he doesn’t slow until we get to the meat section at the far end of the building. He stops, turns on his heel and runs his hands down his face. “Fuck.”

  “What is going on?” I say as I catch my breath. “Are you stashing a bunch of drugs under the seats or something?” I hate that the thought is even crossing my mind; that there’s a possibility the guy I’m crushing hard on is some kind of drug dealer. I never pictured Ezra as the criminal type, but why else would he be in such a panic?

  “My dad,” he says, cursing under his breath. He glances around, but unlike the gym, this grocery store is vacant. “He must have reported the RV as stolen.”

  “Why would he do that?” Cece says. She picks up a package of frozen salmon filets and reads the nutrition information.

  “Why are you looking at fish?” I say.

  She shrugs. “So we don’t look suspicious standing here.”

  Ezra gnaws on his bottom lip. “I didn’t exactly tell him I was taking the Winnebago.”

  “What?”

  His eyes crinkle as his voice turns desperate. “I knew he wouldn’t let me take it. But we park it at the back of our land near the barn and you don’t even see it on a daily basis unless you go outside.” Ezra exhales. “My dad never goes outside. He’s too busy being hungover to bother with anything outdoors. I thought I was safe.”

  Even though he looks like he’s on the verge of having a heart attack, I breathe easier knowing Ezra hasn’t done anything truly illegal.

  “But why would he report it stolen without asking you first?” Cece says.

  He sighs. “Because last time I talked to my dad about giving me the RV, he said he’d report it stolen if I ever tried driving it anywhere. He was drunk off his ass so I figured he wouldn’t remember that.”

  “Can we go back and explain to the police what happened?” Now that I know Ezra isn’t stashing bags of cocaine in the RV, my mind is racing, and all thoughts come back to the fact that we need a vehicle to get home. “Can you tell them you’re the owner’s son and it was just a misunderstanding?”

  Ezra shakes his head. “I can’t do that. I’d rather them think someone actually stole it. My dad would kill me. And not in that mysterious Thomas way where I might still be alive.” Ezra shuffles on his feet. “He’d kill me dead, Lilah. He can’t know I took it.”

  “Oh, this is not good,” Cece says, her voice sounding far away. Her eyes widen. They’re still ringed in dark circles, but she’s never looked more awake. “I have my laptop, notebook and clothes in my backpack,” she says, patting her shoulder. “But my pill box is on the counter in the RV. I haven’t taken my pills this morning. I was waiting for when we got breakfast.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Ezra says. “We’ll find a way to get home. You have more at home, right?”

  “Yeah, but, I’m supposed to take it at the same time every day.” Cece’s brows pull together and she sets the frozen seafood box back on the shelf. “If I skip a pill…I start feeling like someone else. This isn’t good.”

  “It’s fine,” I say. If we hadn’t brought our backpacks into the gym we’d be screwed, but my planning ahead has saved us. Kneeling down, I unzip my backpack and pull out the bottle of Cece’s pills. “I brought these just in case.”

  Her face screws up, her nostrils flaring. “How dare you,” she says, her voice a whisper. “I can’t believe you!”

  “Why are you pissed?” I stand and hold out the bottle. “I have this under control.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m pissed,” she says, her eyes crinkling. She’s watching me like I’m Scrooge and she’s Tiny Tim. “You just have to be in control all the time. You don’t trust me to take care of myself. You had to have a backup plan because you knew I’d screw it up, huh?”

  “Cece…” I begin, but the rest of the words die on my tongue. That is exactly why I brought the pills. And now here we are, stuck in some weird town hours away from home and Cece doesn’t have her pills. It’s a good thing I brought them, but I didn’t bring them for when we got in trouble with the law. I brought them because I didn’t trust her.

  “I’m sorry,” I say as a shiver slides up my spine. I’m not sure if I’m cold from being in the freezer section or if the guilt I feel is slowly strangling me under a noose of regret.

  “All that talk about wanting to be friends was just talk,” she says, still staring at me like I’m unwanted gum on the bottom of her shoe. “You were doing what Aunt Carol does, and trying to seem like you get me and like you care, but all you’re really doing is being my babysitter, waiting for me to screw up.” She holds up the bottle of pills. “Congratulations, Lilah. I screwed up. So glad you are here to take care of me. God forbid I fall off the rails and go on some manic adventure. Like, I don’t know,” she says, tossing her hands in the air. “Driving all over Texas to look for a dead guy.”

  “Excuse me for caring about you,” I snap. An older woman with a shopping cart full of groceries rounds the corner, takes one look at us and turns back into the aisle she came from.

  Cece glares at me, her arms folded in front of her chest. I turn to Ezra. “Are you sure we’re not going back to the RV?”

  “I’m very sure.”

  “Okay then, we need to get home.” I’m tired of fumbling around chasing after Cece’s crazy leads. I’m done spending the night outside. It’s time to go home and I’m going to make sure that happens. Now. “We’ll get a Greyhound bus. I know they travel all around here from that summer Kit and her boyfriend went on tour to follow some garage band around Texas. There’s bound to be a stop around here. How much money do we have?”

  “I’ve got nothing,” Ezra says, running his thumb over his eyebrow. “My wallet is locked in the RV. I figured it’d be safer there than in the locker rooms since I didn’t have a lock.”

  “I have about a hundred dollars left,” Cece says, still staring at me.

  “I think there’s maybe a hundred dollars in my bank account. My debit card is in my backpack.” I nod, as the plan comes together in my mind. We’ll hop on a bus and be home by dinner time. For real this time.

  “There’s a Starbucks next door,” I say, not allowing any doubt to show through my voice. Cece’s right; I’m in charge and I’m going to get us home. “Let’s go there and use your computer to buy tickets home.” She rolls her eyes but doesn’t object. “Come on,” I say, leading the way. “You can hate me later, but now we have to get home.”

  The nearest Greyhound bus stop is two miles away. We make the walk on foot, and I’m amazed at the sweat wicking capability in our free gym pants. Texas weather in June is not forgiving.

  I’d had visions of a fancy bus stop complete with maybe a Starbucks and some leather waiting chairs. Reality is a plastic sign on the wall of a laundromat that says BUS STOP HERE. The only place to sit are in the uncomfortable orange plastic chairs that line the laundry mat and look like they’ve been here since the seventies. The only employee is a middle-aged man who sits in an office behind bulletproof glass reading a porno magazine.

  I’m not even joking.

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” I say with a sigh as I make my way around a woman’s pile of laundry in grocery bags. Her toddler is on his stomach on the floor wearing only a diaper while he plays with a piece of dried mud. I want to scoop him up and bathe him in antibacterial gel.

  “Hello,” I say to the man behind the glass. “Um, we bought tickets online and it said we could print them here?”

  He doesn’t even look up at first. Ezra appears next to me. “Oh my god,” he mutters with disgust. He’s probably just seen the man’s reading material. “Lilah, you two go over there,” he says, pointing across the room. “I’ll get our tickets from this perv.”

  That makes the man look up, but he doesn’t seem to care one bit that we’ve all seen him doing a very private activity in public.

  “Lilah, we’ve never been in Kansas,” Cece says as we sit in the hard chairs. I’m t
rying not to think of how many germs are on them. How many butts have waited here over the years.

  “It was an expression,” I say, although I’m not sure why I’m bothering to explain it to her. “It’s from the Wizard of Oz.”

  “I never liked that movie.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Ezra returns with three slips of paper that look like receipts, but are our tickets. The next bus headed north arrives at 11:00 so we have an hour to wait. Even though we’re only three hours from home now, it’ll take four to get there with all the additional bus stops. Ezra slides into the chair next to me, bumping me with his arm.

  “I should report him to the police or something,” he mutters, glaring toward the bulletproof window. “That’s freaking disgusting.”

  “I don’t think you should be anywhere near the police right now,” I say, leaning my head on his shoulder.

  “You’re right. The bastard probably reported me as missing even though I texted him earlier.”

  “You did?” I ask, lifting up to look at him. His jaw has a bit of stubble I hadn’t noticed earlier.

  He nods. “I told him I’m going out with the guys after work and probably won’t be home until later tonight. Just tried to be all casual about it so he wouldn’t think I took the RV even though he never cares when I’m home or not.”

  “Did he reply?”

  Ezra presses his cheek to the top of my head. “No.”

  “You see any outlets around here?” Cece asks. She’s dug her laptop out of her bag and is looking around. “There’s one. I’ll be over there,” she says to no one in particular. Ezra and I watch her walk to the end of a line of dryers and plug in her laptop cord. She sits on the floor underneath a dryer with a big out of service sign on the door.

  Ezra’s lips press to my hair and stay there for a moment. Minutes slowly tick by. My phone is still dead, and when I realize my mother might be frantically trying to reach me, I find an outlet under our chair and plug it in. The moment it powers up I get a string of messages. One is a voicemail from my mother.

  “Hi Lilah. It’s Mom. Just checking up on you and making sure things are okay. Going to class soon so call me back! Love you!”

  Then I check the two text messages she left.

  I called, call me back.

  Going into class now, you better not be sleeping!

  It’s better than a freak out, I guess. I text back: Sorry, didn’t realize my phone was dead. I’m not sleeping. Love you.

  A TV hanging from the wall is on a news channel. The captions are on and they fill up half the screen, but I watch it anyway because there’s nothing else to do. There’s magazines in a rack on the wall but I’m not about to take the chance of contracting the bird flu from touching their worn out, sticky-looking pages.

  Ezra sits silently beside me, his head resting on top of mine. I love the feel of his shoulder under my cheek, even if this hour is taking forever to pass and it’s boring as hell sitting here.

  “What do you think she’s doing?” Ezra asks, nodding toward Cece.

  I watch her, her gaze intently on the screen in front of her. It’s that same look she had when we were at home and she found the red Jeep on an old car sales website. I inhale through my nose and let it out slowly. “She’s looking for her ghost of her brother.”

  “She won’t stay mad at you forever,” Ezra says.

  I hadn’t been thinking about that, but now I am. “I keep screwing up. I’m not trying to. I’m trying to repair our relationship and I just keep ruining it.”

  “You mean well, Lilah. She’ll figure that out.”

  I relax into Ezra’s side, my head on his shoulder, and my hands tangled up in his. “I don’t know how we’ll go back home after this. We have monthly therapy sessions with my parents. How are we going to keep all of this a secret? If Cece and I can be friends again, it’ll be obvious that we’re acting different in the sessions. If we act normal, then we’ll never be friends again. There’s no middle here.”

  “Tell me about these therapy sessions,” Ezra says. I think he’s being sarcastic at first, but then he slides his thumb across my palm while he waits for my answer.

  “They’re awful. Our therapist, Dr. Tess, has this insufferable voice, and the thing is, she thinks it’s calming. She talks like a yoga instructor during the cool down session. I’m like, just talk normal.”

  He chuckles. I sigh. “We have to talk about our feelings, things that bother us. How we’ve adjusted since having such a huge family loss. It was fine at first, but after five years, you go on with your life and stop thinking about it.

  Then we always go into talking about Cece being bipolar. I feel bad about that part, because it’s like the whole family has to talk about how well she’s been doing.” I look over at her, knowing she can’t hear us. Still, talking about her makes my skin crawl just like it does in therapy. “It’s like my parents and Dr. Tess treat her like a child. Someone who will just up and choke on a Barbie doll shoe if you’re not watching her like a hawk. I know she hates it and I quit participating a long time ago. But the worst part is that there’s a little truth to it. She can blow up at any moment. That’s how bipolar disorder works.”

  “I’m still not sure treating her like a child will help the inevitable blow up,” he says, his lips pressed into a thin line. “But I’m not a therapist.”

  “Therapy was good at first,” I say, unable to take my eyes off Cece. “It helped us cope with the loss of Cece’s parents. But then it just got too much. When I tell my mom we should stop going she just freaks out. “The world doesn’t revolve around you, Lilah,” I say, imitating her voice.

  “Maybe you and Cece could come together as a united front and put a stop to the therapy sessions.”

  I actually snort out loud at that comment. “You don’t know my mom.”

  “I do. I just haven’t seen her in a while.”

  Talking about the past only brings up memories of things I’d rather not think about. “Let’s change the subject,” I say as I inhale the slightly stale detergent but still good scent of him.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  Since we’re almost home, I guess I’m feeling more ballsy than usual. I sit up and turn toward him, a swivel movement in these ugly bucket seats. My knees knock into his. “We can talk about what this is,” I say, gesturing to our entwined hands.

  “Too fast too soon?” He starts to pull his hand away but I squeeze my fingers to keep him where he is.

  “No, just… what is it?”

  His eyebrow quirks. “Is that a trick question?”

  “I’ve just never had this happen.”

  “You’ve never held hands with a guy?” he says, this teasing smile on his lips.

  “You know what I mean. I’ve never liked a guy only to have him like me back without, like, fifty tons of drama heaped on top. I didn’t have to jump through any hoops with you.”

  His lips pull into a smirk. “That’s a good thing, right?”

  I shrug. “Is it because we’re here? When we get home, will it all go back to normal?”

  “Only if you want it to,” he says, leaning into me.

  I meet his gaze, see the sparkle behind his eyes. I’ve never been so sure of anything before. I don’t have to second guess anything with Ezra. I don’t have to change my clothing style or pretend to be super into some band I don’t like. It’s easy with him. I’m about to tell him all of this when a shadow rolls across the windows. The hiss-pop of a bus jolting to a stop makes us both look back.

  Our bus is here. Relief consumes me because in four hours we’ll finally be home. I can work through my problems with Cece and figure out this new thing with Ezra, all from the security of my own bedroom in my own house in my own hometown. I’m so nervous it hurts, but there’s still a small possibility that Cece won’t tell my parents what we’ve been up to this week.

  People unload from the bus, looking disheveled and mostly bored. Our schedule says the bus
leaves at 11:15 so we have plenty of time to get on it.

  “Cece,” I call out to get her attention. She doesn’t look up, her brows furrowed as she stares at her computer screen. I roll my eyes at Ezra and stand, feeling the weight of his absence the moment our hands slip apart.

  “Hey,” I say, stopping in front of her feet. “The bus is here. We need to go.”

  A few seconds pass and I’m about to repeat myself. Then Cece drags her gaze from the computer up to me. Her green eyes widen, and it makes my stomach twist into a knot. I’ve seen that look before.

  “We need to go,” I say. “Pack up.”

  She shakes her head slowly, like she’s in a daze. “We can’t go right now. We can’t leave this town.”

  My heart sinks into my stomach. We are so close to being home. I’m not above wrapping her feet together with her computer’s charge cord and dragging her onto the bus. And something tells me no one in this shit hole of a laundromat will care. “Why the hell not, Cece?”

  She points to her screen and smiles like it’s Christmas morning and we’re still five years old, unaware of the pain of life.

  “I found him. He’s just an hour away.”

  It was a regular Friday night in eighth grade. Cece had ridden the bus home with me because she planned on staying over all weekend since Thomas had Ezra at their house. Now that they were in high school, they were more annoying than ever, mostly because they thought they were cooler than we were. Some stupid Xbox game had just been released, and the boys had stock piled Doritos, frozen burritos, and Dr. Pepper with the plans of commandeering the living room TV for the forty eight hours before school started again on Monday.

  It was 7:05 in the evening and Cece and I were checking movie times, debating on seeing Pitch Perfect for the third time, or trying a new movie like Anna Karenina. We were finally old enough to have Mom drop us off at the theater entrance and then pick us up after the movie, so it didn’t really matter what we saw, just that we got to go see it alone, like adults. Adults who still bummed money from their parents, but adults nonetheless.