Shimmy Bang Sparkle(84)

It was another post from the sheikh. On the screen was a photograph of the inside of the Zero Halliburton’s textured egg-carton foam interior, completely bare and empty. In the very corner of the frame was Nick’s tattooed forearm and a handcuff on his wrist. Underneath he had written, #SoPissedRightNow North Star is gone, but they got the guy. Watch this space.

I dropped my phone in my purse and slid my fingers into the side pocket, where I’d put the diamond in my hurry. It was cold and hard and meaningless. I pressed it into my palm, trying to focus on the way it felt against my skin. I gripped it so tight, I tried to make it hurt. But it didn’t hurt at all, not compared to how my heart ached and throbbed, breaking more and more each time I heard his voice saying, “Bite those stars. Do it for me.”



I found another campsite fifty miles north. Before I pulled in, I took off my wig and makeup and changed my clothes. I gave the owner a different fake ID, with my face but a different name. I paid cash for the night and parked the Love Boat underneath a parched pine tree with thin clusters of dry brown needles. I drew the shades, locked the doors, and sat on the floor of the living area. There, I stared at his zipped duffel for a long, long time. I kept replaying what had happened, trying to will a different ending to the scene, to the nightmare, to the disaster. Priscilla crawled into my lap as the sun was setting and flopped her face onto my thigh, looking just as heartbroken as I felt.

“I know,” I said, my voice shaking. “I miss him too.”

I had never wanted a hero. But I’d gotten one. And now he was gone.

Very slowly, I unzipped his duffel. His T-shirts and pants were neatly folded, and sitting on top were his phone, his keys, and his wallet. As if he’d known, all along, that things might go so very wrong. Or maybe he was just better at this than I was, courageous enough to plan for the very worst. I ran my fingers over the leather billfold, tracing the stitching, before finally mustering up the courage to look inside. Half of his face peeked back at me from the fake ID I’d made him. I reached across the floor and got my purse, from which I took my puzzle box. Inside, I’d hidden both of our real IDs. He was smiling wide in the one I’d made, so wide that there were smile wrinkles around his eyes. In his real ID, he looked angry and tough—the sort of guy that the phrase Don’t mess with me was made for. But that was not the Nick I’d come to know.

Or the one I’d come to love.

Then I noticed that peeking out from behind the fake ID was a strip of paper. It was our fortune, folded in half. He’d saved it, without a word, and neatly hidden it away. Swallowing a sob, I opened it, and my vision got blurry again. One big tear ran off my cheek and landed with a splat on Priscilla’s fur. She scrunched her back side to side and curled into an even tighter ball between my legs.

I woke up his phone and saw my own face looking back at me from the home screen. It was me in profile, when I’d been driving the RV. I had my hands at nine and three, granny-style, and I was giggling. I had my head thrown back and my face all contorted with a somewhat unflattering laugh. But then I remembered him saying how he loved my laugh. And my heart split right open one more time.

Eventually, I unfurled myself from the floor of the RV. My legs were prickly and asleep, but I hardly noticed the pins and needles at all. On autopilot, I made Priscilla dinner, just going through the motions. Scooping out the dry food, opening up a small can of wet. I put the bowl down on the floor, and she gave it a sniff, but then she looked at me with flattened ears and lay down again. Forlorn.

I scooped her up in my arms and carried his duffel into the bedroom. From the neatly folded stack of T-shirts, I pulled out the one on top. Priscilla sat on the bed and watched me take off my clothes. I stood naked in the dark, pressing Nick’s shirt to my nose. I could smell him on the fabric, and my lips quivered against the cotton. I slipped it over my head and crawled into the pink satin sheets, on the side where he’d slept. For a long time, I lay there, listening to the crickets outside, listening to campers laugh and sing. Through the back window on the RV, I looked up at the stars, blurry through tears. And in Andromeda and Perseus the hero I saw not possibility. But only what might have been.





42

STELLA

Priscilla and I got on the road before dawn, and the miles passed in a numbing monotony as I listened to Johnny Cash singing “Hurt” over and over again. I couldn’t bear to take exactly the same route that I had with Nick, so instead we went north through Anaheim and slowed to a crawl in the early-morning traffic outside LA. Each time we stopped to pee or gas up, I steeled myself and opened my phone. I wasn’t expecting a call from him; it would’ve been too risky to contact me now, if he ever would. So I searched for “Nicholas Adam Norton arrest” to see if there was any news. At first, there was nothing. But about four hours into the trip, just past the Dead Mountains and before Havasu, in a town called Needles, I saw that there was.

His new mug shot made him look older than he’d looked just last night, and his eyes didn’t have the same twinkle that I’d come to know. In the picture he looked worn out, spent, and . . . I pursed my lips together, but the tears were coming again, hot and painful against already-swollen lids . . .

He looked sad. So very, very sad.

On the abbreviated charge sheet below, I grasped the gravity of what was about to happen to Nick. It was the worst news of all.

Grand larceny. Felony class A. No bond.