10
WE DROVE ACROSS the Golden Gate Bridge that night, gliding over a dark San Francisco Bay into the narrow streets of the Presidio. Since the car offered a solid roof over our heads—and since cops apparently frown on urban camping—we decided to spend the night in the Pontiac.
I curled up in the backseat, and Robinson folded himself, with difficulty, into the front. There was no question of us touching (or, as the case may be, not touching) with all that upholstery in the way. A tiny part of me felt relieved, but a larger part of me longed for the so-cozy-it’s-claustrophobic tent.
That was my realization for the night: I was capable of missing Robinson when he was less than two feet away from me.
I was starting to develop a theory about missing things in general. It had started when we left Charley the Harley behind, and I hadn’t stopped thinking about it the rest of the drive. If I practiced missing small things—like the rumbling ride of a motorcycle, or the faint murmur of my dad talking in his sleep, or now sleeping right next to Robinson—maybe I could get used to missing things. Then, when it came time to miss something really important, maybe I could survive it.
We listened to the radio for a while, Robinson humming along and me keeping my tuneless mouth shut until we drifted off. In the morning, fog rolling in from the bay blurred the streetlights into soft orange halos. I peered over the seat at Robinson’s tangled limbs.
“Rise and shine,” I sang. He opened one eye and gave me the finger.
Not everyone is a morning person.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” I told him.
“Now?” Robinson asked. But I simply handed him his shoes.
There was one book I’d gotten Robinson to read in the last six months. The Winding Road was a memoir about growing up as the daughter of an alcoholic father (I could seriously relate) and a beauty-queen mother (ditto) in a small town in southern Oregon. The author, Matthea North, could have been me, which is maybe why I found her story so fascinating. A couple of years ago, I wrote her a fan letter. She wrote me back, and an epistolary friendship—I guess you could call it that—was born.
(Epistolary: a word I’m not going to use in front of Robinson.)
You must stop by for a visit sometime, Matthea had written. We’ll drink tea and ponder the vagaries of love, the secrets of life, the mysteries of the universe …
If ever there was a time for that conversation, it was now.
Matthea’s house was on Nob Hill, at the top of an impossibly steep street. I rang the bell and we waited nervously on the stoop. Robinson didn’t even know what we were doing here, and I refused to tell him. If you ask me, a person doesn’t get enough good surprises in life. Birthday, Christmas … that’s only two times a year to count on.
But when the front door opened, I was even more surprised than Robinson. Since Matthea North and I had so much in common childhood-wise, I guess I thought she’d look like an older version of me: slender, medium-sized, with the full lips and wide-set eyes of a beauty-queen mother somehow diluted into a slightly less remarkable prettiness.
Matthea looked like Bilbo Baggins. In a Gypsy costume. Under five feet tall, bedecked in scarves and necklaces, she reached up to take my hand. “You must be Axi,” she said. Her green eyes, set deep in rosy cheeks, positively twinkled at me.
I swallowed. “Yes!” I said brightly. “Robinson, this is … the one and only Matthea North.”
He turned toward her, smiling his wide, gorgeous grin. “Hey, you wrote that book—the one about the town even worse than ours.” If he was fazed by her clothes, he didn’t look it.
Matthea laughed. Older ladies love Robinson.
We followed her into the darkness of her home, and already she was chattering about how Mark Twain never said the famous line about how the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, but he should have, because it was absolutely Arctic today; how birdsong had evolved over decades to compete with the sound of traffic, and weren’t those sparrows outside just deafeningly loud; how she’d gotten a bad fortune in her cookie from Lucky Feng’s, but did we know that it was the Japanese who’d actually invented the fortune cookie?
She motioned for us to sit on a dusty-looking Victorian couch. “I loved your short story about that old deli, Axi,” she said, “the one about that girl and boy who are best friends but maybe something more—”
“Oh, yeah, thanks,” I said hurriedly, not wanting to cut her off but needing to.
Robinson cleared his throat. I could practically hear him thinking: You wrote a story about Ernie’s? And us?
I ignored him. Of course I’d written about him. He was my best friend, wasn’t he? The one who knew me like no other. The one I thought about approximately 75 percent of my waking hours, if not more.
“Thanks for letting us come over,” I said. “I really wanted Robinson to meet you. I can’t get him to finish any book, ever, but he read yours in a night.”
“It gave me … insights,” Robinson said, looking pointedly at me.
Matthea laughed. “Axi and I share certain background details, don’t we? But Axi’s much smarter than I was at her age.”
“She’s ornerier,” Robinson said. “That’s for sure.”
I kicked him in the shins—lightly.
Matthea produced a pitcher of iced tea and a plate of lemon cake, and Robinson helped himself to two slices.
“So, how’s the writing going, Axi?” Matthea asked.
“Um, not much at all lately,” I admitted, reaching for my own slice of cake. “Please tell me there’s some secret to keeping at it. Not giving up. Believing in yourself. That kind of stuff.” I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice.
Matthea sighed and began to braid the fringe on her scarf. “My dear, there is no universal secret. There’s only the secret each writer discovers for herself. The path forward.”
I could feel my shoulders slump. Of course. There’s no such thing as a magic bullet. Who doesn’t know that?
“Are you aware that European kings used to have their hearts buried separately from their bodies?” Matthea asked.
“Um … no,” I said, and I saw Robinson raise his eyebrows with that slight grin I loved. Clearly, he was amused by my weirdo writing mentor.
“It was a way of offering their hearts, literally and figuratively, to their country. Forever.” Matthea sighed. “Macabre practice, if you ask me. But I like it as a metaphor. You give your country—which, in this case, is your story—your heart.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.” No wonder I hadn’t written the Great American Novel yet. My heart was still firmly planted in my chest. Wasn’t it?
“Be patient,” Matthea said gently. “Keep writing, but keep dreaming, too. Remember that inspiration struck the brilliant mathematician Archimedes when he was in the bathtub.”
And inspiration struck the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman when he was in a strip club, I thought. (I may be failing AP physics, but I did learn a thing or two.)
That’s pretty much how the rest of the conversation went. We didn’t ponder the unpredictability of love or the mysteries of the universe, but since we touched on everything from the mummified hearts of European kings to Einstein’s theory that creativity was more important than knowledge, I felt like it was time well spent.
After a fourth piece of lemon cake, though, Robinson excused himself, saying he needed to get a bit of fresh air. I watched his retreating back, feeling a vague sense of unease. My body gave an involuntary shiver, and Matthea looked at me piercingly. We continued our chat, but later, as we were leaving, she put her hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?” she asked.
For one tiny millisecond, I wanted to tell her everything. The real reason behind what Robinson and I were doing, which I hadn’t even wanted to admit to myself this whole time. It didn’t actually have anything to do with me escaping my boring life in Klamath Falls. But I couldn’t tell her.
“I’m great,” I said.
“And your friend?” She squinted toward Robinson, who was leaning against the car, staring down the hill toward the bay. He brought his arms up and almost seemed to hug himself, as if he were cold. Or as if, for a moment, he felt the need to reassure himself about something.
“He’s great, too,” I insisted. Why are you lying, Axi?
Matthea picked a yellow flower from one of the vines around her door and tucked it behind my ear. “Give your story your heart,” she repeated.
It sounded reasonable enough. But when I looked at Robinson, I knew I’d already given my heart to something—to someone—else.