Picture Us In The Light(94)
And Harry here like this, after I’d sort of given up on him, how he dropped everything and is risking getting massively in trouble for me: it is what it is. I feel the way I feel. Whatever it means, wherever it’ll go, I’m in it. And I need to find out if it’s at all like that for him, too.
For a long time when you drive through the bowels of the state it looks like nothing—flat and grassy, rural in a way people from out of state never associate with California, and it feels like you could drive for miles in any direction and find nothing at all.
We’ve been on the road for two and a half hours now and my parents still haven’t called. My mom must be wiped out. Or maybe, because I left my door closed, she just thinks I’m asleep.
That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway. That she’s there, that she’s safe, that when I get back they’ll both be there, immigration agents miles and miles away.
For now, at least, the road is solid and open beneath us, and I’m here with Harry, and I can stow those thoughts away. We’re on I-5 now, passing through small towns with names like Hershey and Harrington, towns that hide themselves off the highway so you feel like you could pull off the road and not find any of them. We hit Arbuckle, and Harry says, “Like Garfield,” and it makes me laugh. “All right, loser,” I say.
My nervousness is expanding with each mile we put behind us. If my parents were wrong and it isn’t her—but I won’t think about it. I know what it’s like to be sketching out rough lines, shading and stippling and crumpling up each attempt; I know what it’s like to watch something take shape in all the chaos. You learn to suspend the questions and give yourself over to the process. I do that now.
I feel hyperconscious of Harry next to me, the smooth outlines of his forearms, the scent of his shampoo. We’re mostly—uncharacteristically—quiet. Once, in Orland, we both reach for the radio dial at the same time and our fingers touch. When my family lived in Austin, every year for the Fourth of July we’d drive out into the country roads with the Parker-McEvoys and buy sparklers from wooden stands and we’d light them when it got dark. That crackling and heady scent of smoke, the way the sparks arced through the night so loud and bright and hot they made your heart race—Harry’s skin against mine feels just like that.
I keep trying to string the words together, what I’ll say to him. But Mr. X won’t leave me alone.
It’s one thing to feel a funny way. It’s another to put it out there in the open for everyone to have to see. You’re asking him to do a disgusting thing with you. If he isn’t funny about you the way you want him to be he won’t be too hot about being around you after this, you sniffing around him with those hungry eyes of yours.
I don’t care what hypothetical old white men think, I tell him. He tips back his head and laughs.
Hypothetical? You think you conjured me from nothing? I’m your neighbor. I’m your dentist. I’m your cop. I’m your congressman. I’m your boss. I’m your teacher. Don’t think for a minute—
My phone rings. I jump.
“Your parents?” Harry says.
It rings again. “Yep.”
“You going to answer it?”
“Yes?” I say. It rings again. “What else should I do, just ignore it?”
Ring. “I mean, what are you going to tell them? I won’t pick up if my parents call.”
The phone feels hot in my hand. It rings again. Then it stops, and I feel—inexplicably—desperate for it to be ringing again, to have the chance to answer still.
I wanted that, though, didn’t I? Otherwise I would’ve just picked up.
On her voicemail, my mom is frantic. “Daniel, where are you? Pick up your phone. Call me right now. I’m going to call you again.” She does. I silence it. There’s a pit in my stomach.
And then the guilt comes flooding into the car, heady and loud, slinking around my shoulders like a cat. What if something happens to them while I’m gone? I could come back and find the apartment empty, and I’ll be stuck forever with the image of her praying I’ll pick up as the phone rings and rings.
I sink back against the seat. “I should’ve picked up.”
“Call her back, then.”
“I can’t.”
“How come?”
“I just—I can’t.” I crack the window. The air outside feels dusty and hot. I open up his glove compartment and stick my phone inside. I’ll keep it off, let the messages I’m sure she’s leaving pile up.
I shouldn’t let them worry more than they need to. I know that. All the same, though—I’m not proud that the thought occurs to me the way it does, blaring neon in my mind, but all the same, there was a lot they let me worry about and mourn and believe. And none of it was ever true.
Traffic slows to a trickle as we lose a lane to construction, and then the road releases us back into open lanes and Harry sets his cruise control. In the distance you can see Mount Shasta starting to come into focus, towering over the valley. We drive toward it, the grasses and flatlands blurring past the windows.
It’s funny about being in a car with someone—all those miles you plow into the road tie you to each other somehow, intertwine your fates at least temporarily, and they blur the borders between your two existences and etch away at whatever was keeping you so separate and distinct. I have a weirdly certain feeling that if I touched him again right now both of us would get shocked. I can feel the charge building up in the air, how it ratchets higher every time the road dips and we get jostled closer together. I know that feeling with him, what it’s like when every time you touch the rest of your body stops existing and all of you funnels itself into that shivery point of contact.