Shimmy Bang Sparkle(85)
Drying my eyes on my hoodie and pushing my all-consuming guilt aside as best I could, I searched for attorneys in Southern California, and then I made a blocked call to an attorney in San Diego who specialized in criminal defense. I told her I was Nick’s sister, that he’d been arrested in Orange County, and that I wanted to hire her to help him. She sounded efficient and serious, and I liked her right away.
She said she’d be glad to go talk with him. “My fee is two hundred fifteen dollars an hour, Ms. Norton.”
Hearing my name like that was a shock that I was too tired, and too worn out, to handle without a gasp. We had been so close to diving into that new life. I had been so close to having all the things I’d never known I’d wanted. And now they were so very far away.
“Ms. Norton?”
“Yes, sorry. I’m here.” I made myself focus on practicalities. No matter what, he would need a good attorney. And that, at least, I could give him. Between Ruth and me, we could find a way to pay her without our names ever being attached. I’d have to scrape all the barrels to do it; moving the North Star would take months, and it would be very tight in the meantime. But even if I had to use every penny I had and plenty of pennies I didn’t, I’d find a way to make it happen. He had given up everything for me, and I would do the same for him. “It doesn’t matter what it costs. I just want him to have the best attorney that money can buy.”
I hung up, tucked my phone into the pocket of my hoodie, and helped Priscilla back into the passenger seat. I clipped her harness to the seat belt to keep her safe, and then I closed her door.
Standing there under the stanchion of the Shell station, I looked across the street at a little dive called the Wagon Wheel, bright yellow and brown, with license plates stuck all over the front entrance. An elderly couple got out of a pickup and walked hand in hand through the front door, the old man holding the door for his wife. I sank down into the reality that we would never be that old couple going for eggs and bacon at the Wagon Wheel. We would, most probably, never be a couple at all.
I took a deep breath, hopped in the driver’s seat, and we got back on I-40, heading east, and I hit play on “Hurt” for the fifteenth time that morning. My map said I had a little less than eight hours left to go. But even if I listened to Johnny singing about all he’d lost a hundred more times, it would never fill the hole in my heart. Because I couldn’t start again, not even a million miles away. Not without him.
The lady at Cruise America could tell I’d been crying, I think, and she was really nice about everything, even the fact that the BE MINE pillow now looked more like an actual human organ than a stuffed decorative accent.
She picked it up with two fingers the way people do with dead mice and looked at me. Her turquoise earrings swung like pendulums.
“Sorry,” I croaked. Even my own voice sounded strange—far away and muted, like I was talking underwater. It was what eleven hours of nonstop driving, singing along with Johnny Cash, and letting tears spill down her cheeks would do to a girl. I zipped up my hoodie a little higher and resisted the urge to put the hood over my head, the way Ruth would have.
“It’s all right, hon. These are just novelty items.” She twirled it back and forth as she inspected it. Priscilla had really gotten into it, and there were small rusty dots of blood from where she’d flossed her back teeth with the fabric. “But what happened to it?”
Sparing me having to string together more words in the hopes it would make a sentence, Priscilla began dancing around the lady’s feet, nipping at the air to try to get to her new best friend, since the demise of the frog.
“Oh, I see,” she said, smiling down at Priscilla. She opened her fingers and dropped the heart onto the pavement, blueish now under the fluorescent floodlights that came on with the dusk. Priscilla planted her face into the still somewhat stuffed half, picked it up, and sat at my feet, making snorting sounds as she tried to breathe into the stuffing.
The lady handed me a clipboard and asked me to initial at the Xs. Each line also featured Nick’s scrawled initials. He’d been careful to make them say MM, instead of NN. But just knowing he’d done what I was doing now, without me as I was without him, was enough to make another roll of sadness overtake me.
I blinked my stinging and exhausted eyes at the fine print and forced myself into autopilot again, placing my pen right next to where he had and trying to keep myself together just a little bit longer. Again and again I initialed and signed as Elizabeth Rutherford, and as I did I wished that I could actually be her. I wished that this wasn’t my life. I wished that I’d never plunged us into this mess.
On the Uber ride to Mr. Bozeman’s house, looking at all the happy houses with their festive Halloween decorations, thinking about all the regular families, thinking about all the things I’d never get to do with Nick—string fake spiderwebs on bushes, spend a night watching TV while the doorbell rang and we ran to the door to hand out candy—I felt perilously close to falling apart and to telling the driver to go to the police station so I could undo this mess I’d gotten him into. But the drive was over before I knew it, and I found Mr. Bozeman sitting on his couch looking at the picture of his wife when I walked in. He still had his hospital intake bracelet on his wrist.
“Stella—” he said, his face all lit up with a smile. But as soon as he saw me, his eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. God only knew what I looked like. I probably looked like an exhausted call girl with mascara halfway down my cheeks, but I really and truly didn’t care. “My heavens, what happened?”