54
IN BUCOLIC KLAMATH Falls, early fall is bright and dry. The leaves are already turning brown, letting themselves be blown from their branches into sad little piles on unmown lawns.
My dad is down in the courtyard, searching for the watch he dropped on his way home from the bar last night. He’s been looking for half an hour already. (If you ask me, I think Critter found it and took it straight to Jack’s Pawn.) Dad keeps looking up at me, sitting here on the apartment’s tiny balcony, like he thinks that any minute I might vanish into thin air.
I’m not going anywhere. My first community service session isn’t until tomorrow afternoon. See, when I got back home, the first thing I did was walk to the police station and turn myself in.
Yup. Once a GG, always a GG.
I think I knew from the moment we stole the Harley that I was going to have to make amends for our journey. It was the right thing to do. And even though Robinson’s eyes are likely rolling out of his head right now, I think he might have been smiling down on me, too, when the judge handed me my sentence. Grand theft auto is a felony and usually lands people in jail, but miraculously I was only charged with a misdemeanor and was banned from getting a driver’s license until I turn twenty-one, and I’m basically going to do community service until my arms fall off.
It’s completely worth it to me. After all, the people who “lent” us their cars gave Robinson and me an incredible gift, and I’ll gladly pick up trash for the rest of my life if I have to. In fact, I’m thinking about volunteering for the police department, too.
“Axi,” my dad calls up, “shouldn’t you be heading to school soon?”
“I’ll be down in a minute,” I reply. Ugh. I’d forgotten about my mandatory physics tutoring session, which starts in an hour. Turns out you can’t pass a class when you ditch the last three weeks of it and stop being able to understand the supposedly important laws of physics.
Those laws don’t explain why Robinson had to die. They don’t explain how I’ll keep going without him. So I’m pretty sure I don’t care that much about understanding how “the entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases.”
But then, like a contrarian voice from the heavens, something from class pops right into my mind: a body in motion tends to stay in motion; a body at rest tends to stay at rest. That’s the definition of inertia, a word that would have made Robinson roll his eyes.
I am in motion. I will stay in motion. Maybe one of those magical forces of the physical universe will kick in and keep me going, no matter how much pain I feel.
Or not.
I wrap my arms around myself, inhaling the scent of Robinson that lingers on his flannel shirt, which I’m wearing. And my tears well up and start to spill out all over again. I’m just really, really tired.
“Hey, Axi, check this out!” my dad calls. I lean over the balcony and he points to a part of the withering rosebush in the yard—one solitary flower still miraculously in bloom. I smile weakly. I was hoping he’d finally found his watch.
“You okay?” he asks.
I shrug. I mean, how am I supposed to answer that question? I saw Dr. Suzuki last week, and my cancer is still in remission. My five-year survival rate? Almost 93 percent.
So technically, yes, I’m okay. Technically.
But as I sit here letting the sun warm my face, I know that there’s a part of me that’s missing. It’s as if the doctors had sliced something essential out. A vital part that I was sure I needed to keep me breathing. Not just existing. Even now, sometimes I think I hear Robinson’s laughter, and for a moment my heart lifts. But when I turn my head to look, it’s never him. It’s the wind, or the call of a bird, or a hallucination of my own mad dream.
I think it was love at first sight for both of us; it just took us a little while to figure it out. That was understandable, considering we were being stuck with needles, shot through with radioactive particles, possibly poisoned by the horrific substances the hospital tried to pass off as food, and then, when we got discharged, running away and stealing cars together.
So we had other things on our minds.
Of course, sometimes I think maybe we did know our feelings right away, but we couldn’t admit them to ourselves. Like we secretly thought, Okay, cancer is scary, but love is terrifying.
And it is. But it’s also exhilarating and bewildering and miraculous.
Right before Robinson and I left on our trip, I’d written a paper on the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. (“Ooooh, faaaahncy,” Robinson had teased.) “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself,” Montaigne wrote. And while Montaigne was a very smart man, I’m sure, in this particular instance he’s full of shit.
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to someone else. The way Robinson and I belonged to each other. We held on as tight as we could, as long as we could. It wasn’t enough.
And yet it has to be.
At night when the stars come out, I look up and remember Robinson at the window of the hospital in La Junta, me standing so close to him that it took my breath away. I think about what I didn’t say then, which is this: the stars we see aren’t even real stars. We see the light that they gave off millions of years ago but that is only now reaching our eyes. We don’t see a star as much as a memory.
“Remember the me before this,” a pale, sick Robinson said to me. “Remember the me with the guitar.”
And since memory is all I have now—unless you count a glass orb, a key chain, a shirt, and a penny that once was lucky—I tried to do what he asked.
“Write about us,” Robinson urged. “Tell our story.”
And I did it; I told our story. You hold it in your hands.
I just wish I could have done it better. How can you, through my plain and simple words, possibly experience the joy I felt when Robinson jumped into that Los Angeles pool, sledded on the golden sand of the Great Dunes, or kissed me in an ancient temple? How can you understand what Robinson meant to me? His laugh was like a peal of bells. He really did consider Slim Jims to be their own food group. When he played the guitar and sang, whether it was in the cancer ward or in Tompkins Square Park, everyone stopped to listen. He was magic.
“Axi!” my dad shouts from below. “I found it!” He’s holding up his Timex and grinning like it’s a winning lottery ticket.
“Good for you!” I call down. As if he’s the kid and I’m the mom.
I feel like I owe my dad, running off the way I did. He almost drank himself to death, worrying and missing me. I’m trying to make up for the fact that I barely got back in time to save him.
I only wish I could have saved Robinson, too.
But I know Robinson didn’t want me to be broken after his death. He wanted me whole, well, and writing. About us.
“Make sure to throw in a lot of words I wouldn’t understand,” he’d said—using the last bits of his energy to tease me. “And a lot of fancy metaphors and stuff.”
I just nodded. I’d do anything he wanted.
Loving Robinson made everything seem brighter and more beautiful. And if life has faded a little since he’s been gone, it’s still a lot more vivid than it used to be. Now the sun dazzles. That vermilion rose flings its perfume into the air. And the breeze soothes me, if I let it.
Most days I think of him and smile, even if I have to cry my eyes out first. He never stopped believing he was lucky. Maybe not lucky enough to survive, but lucky simply to have lived.
He was my light, my heart, my beautiful scalawag. And I was—I am—his GG.