I didn’t sleep at all last night. The Queen, the Fratters, Luka, and his goddamn parties churned in my brain like dirty laundry sloshing in a washing machine. While Mom and Dad are at work, I book a return ticket to L.A.
I want to surprise the Fratters, take a taxi from the airport to the Queen, and unleash my wrath on everyone for having destroyed the house in my absence. It’s not my style and it’s going to make for one hell of an upheaval, but guess what? Life hasn’t exactly been awesome lately, and this might be another cleansing for me to go through.
Maybe I’ll end up moving out afterward. Maybe I’m just done with the Queen. Sure, my throat constricts at the thought, but there’s a time for everything. Maybe the era of the Queen has come to an end.
“Are you okay?” Joy asks me on the phone later.
“No.” I’m in the Reading Room, trying to relax to Mozart on the stereo. I press my forehead against the window. The river does its thing, and I follow it with my eyes. Sure looks nice to be a river. All you do is float and float.
“I’m coming home.”
“You are? When? Are you okay?”
“Oh yeah, and by the way, I don’t feel bad for those asshole roommates of mine either. They’re a bunch of savages, and I mean that in the most archaic sense.” My own words make me seethe. “It was impossible to sleep last night thanks to them.”
“You know, you might wanna simmer down a bit,” she murmurs. “I’m pretty sure they lost it because you left.”
“Whatever.” I press my phone closer to my ear.
“Do you remember what they said, how they were impatient over random run-ins with each other? Do you remember how Luka almost caused a fistfight over nothing at all? That was after you left. With you at the Queen, even right after Julian died, they didn’t do this crap.”
I turn from the window and lean back, letting my head rub against the glass. Closing my eyes, I sigh. “I’m so conflicted, Joy. Maybe I’ll come sleep on your couch.”
“Okay. One step at a time. You’ve got a lot going on. You’re going back to classes though, right?”
“Yeah.”
“E-mailed the professors?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay then. If you come home and you can’t live with the Fratters, that’s fine. You can sleep at my place the rest of the semester. But don’t make any hasty decisions.”
I groan.
“You sound tired.”
“Because I am.” There’s a clicking sound on her end. “What’re you doing?”
“Flossing. Got meat between my teef.”
“Gross.”
“I’ll pick you up at the airport. What day, what time?”
“Tomorrow, seven p.m.”
She laughs. “Whoa. Yay! I’m getting my BFF back.”
I’m not going to lie and say I handle the departure from Portland well. I fall apart at the airport and bawl on my sister’s bony shoulder, then on my mom’s, until my dad wraps me in his bear arms and crushes me so tight I want to never let go. But that’s the thing about adulthood. You’ve gotta suck it up and do your thing. If you don’t, you weren’t just sheltered as a child. You’ve developed into an anxious adult who’ll never even graze your potential and travel to the Amazon.
Dad will do anything for me when he sees me the way I am at the airport, so he bribes me with thirty dollars for internet access. “Stay focused, sweetie. Do what you love.”
On the plane, I busy myself with narrowing down the tribes further. Some groups are too small to be defined as a village. It would make sense to compare two that have never communicated on any level. This way, I can document their different reactions to loss. If they’ve never influenced each other, will there be similarities at all?
With Julian, we’d decided to study their rituals related to death. But since he died, Yarunami keeps flitting through my mind. I haven’t found a single study on female grief in these male-dominated societies. What if I narrowed it down further?
As we hit the tarmac of LAX, a rare pang of excitement hits my sternum; with my PhD, I’m taking my passion to its ultimate limit. Why shouldn’t I cycle right back to exactly what started it, in this moment where I’m so in tune with Yarunami myself that I could describe her reactions like they were my own from a different culture?
I walk off the plane, eyes on the carpet.
Always objective. I can’t let my personal loss influence the responses I find in the jungle. It has to be the women’s responses, their way of dealing, and their society’s support—or lack of it—as they do.
I suck in a lungful of stale airport air. If I get the funding I need, I’ll still have to finish this semester before I go. By then, hopefully I’ll be in a different headspace. It should be easier to distinguish between my own feelings and my informants’.
The Lara’ people live in the western part of the Amazon, on the border between Peru and Brazil. I should counter my findings there with a stay among a tribe in the Eastern Amazon.
Joy throws her arms around me and hugs me tight, mumbling something unintelligible into my hair. Her eyes are glossy when she pulls back, and mine glaze over from looking at her.
“Sap,” I say.
“You too. It’s only been four weeks,” she says.
“See? No big deal.”
In the car to the Valley, I tell her about my plan. She twists her lip between her teeth, thinking. Joy spends most of her time on her own thesis this semester, so it’s great to bounce ideas off her.
“But what’s your thesis statement?” she asks. “Don’t you want it boxed and ready before you determine which tribes to visit?”
“Yeah, I just... really feel like doing this right now.”
On a red light, she taps her fingers against the steering wheel. “Okay. Think. Think.”
“You’re going to figure out the thesis statement for my PhD on the road?” A smile crooks my face. “Would be nice if it were that easy.”
She turns quickly and sets her baby-blues on me. “Why do you want to go to the Lara’ people so badly?”
“Because their story got me into anthropology.”
“The entire people’s story, or just that woman’s story?”
“Yarunami’s. Although they also danced on top of their dead in their town center. It’s a rite anthropologists assume they adapted from neighboring tribes though.”
“So you’re fascinated with Yarunami. What about her?”
“I told you already, how she was cast into the jungle, alone with her grief and was only visited by men who took advantage of her for months. No one stepped in to protect her, and despite it all, she seemed to come out of it completely whole. I want to know why.”
Her old stick-shift rocks backward as she tries to speed past an onramp. “You know you’re stepping really closely to my territory, right?”
“Close to your thesis or psychology in general?”
“Psychology.”
“Yeah. Well, it’s what we do. A little of everything.” I give my purple bang a tug.
“I like your hair by the way.” She waggles her brows. “Luka’s going to love it.”
I narrow my eyes at her while she modifies, “The Fratters are going to love it.”
“I don’t care what they think.” My heart beats faster as we wind through the canyon and into the Valley.
“So back to your thesis statement.” She lowers her voice into the monotonous pitch of an old-timey scholar. “The thesis statement is what states the main idea of your writing assignment.”
“Stop it. I know what a thesis statement is.”
“It helps control the writer’s idea,” she drones on.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“It is not merely a topic but reflects his or her opinion or judgement.”
“Jesus, Joy. Yes, and it also offers a concise point or summary of your paper. Happy?”
“Sure am.” She pops her lower lip out in a playful twist.
“I’m not there yet. The women of the Lara’ people seem to be mentally strong is what I know for now. If they’re all like Yarunami, they overcome unspeakable obstacles and even manage to be happy afterward. I want to find out if it’s a trait of theirs and if we can learn something from them. That’s all I can say at the moment.”
She takes off on Magnolia Avenue. Number twenty-four comes up too soon, and my insides aren’t ready yet. As she parks and locks the handbrake, she says, “So you don’t need a comparative study.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you studied two tribes, it would be to see how they differ, right? You already know that we differ from them. We’re not that strong. In the western culture, we’d probably go crazy or kill ourselves, and if we somehow were Zen enough to act normal after months of being sexually taken advantage of, we sure as hell wouldn’t be happy.”
“Right...”
“So you really only need to study the secrets of the Lara’ women.”
“Oh my God.”
She opens her palms wide. “Ta-dah. Thank me later. Now all you have to do is land that thesis statement.”
An honest-to-god euphoric chuckle shivers out of me. “‘The Secrets of the Lara’ Women;’ I think you just gave me the title of my dissertation.”
It’s a strange thing to stand on your own porch and feel euphoria drain from you while your best friend drags your suitcase up the steps.
I scan the outdoors. The yard seems orderly enough. Then again, the guys wouldn’t have been taking their crazies outside—I assume. I give the windows a onceover from the outside. The blinds are three-quarters open, showing the drapes behind. They're unruffled.
“You want me to come inside?” Joy asks. Then adds, “I’ll come,” before I can answer.
I inhale through my nose, summoning Yarunami’s strength as I cross the threshold. I expect the stench of stale alcohol, dirty dishes, laundry—hell, dirty men—when I enter the parlor. The faint scent of orchids and vanilla reaches me instead.
I feel my eyes dart over walls, floor, and ceiling. I find spotless, shiny surfaces, nothing out of place—
I jerk around to stare at Joy. “Fresh flowers?”
“I guess? Wow.”
I take another step forward. Slowly, I enter the library to the left. I run my fingers over the books. They’re alphabetized like I had them, every spine erect and side by side. The glass table stands there, gleamingly clean, its two deep chairs pulled close, forming a perfect square against the couch on the other side. At the center of the table, my vaporizer steams out the fragrance I smelled in the hallway.
I cross my arms and shoot Joy a glance before I move on to the dining room. No more tipped-over vases or dirty tablecloths. My aqua-colored favorite shrouds the table, and a fresh bouquet of flowers keeps it in place.
I scour all corners for leftover bottles, cigarette butts, even underwear, but I see no sign of anything but a well-kept house. TV room—check. I don’t open the door to James’ room, the only bedroom downstairs, but he’s organized anyway.
“Did you do this? Don’t tell me you had nothing to do with it,” I tell my friend as I walk to the kitchen.
She scoffs. “No way would I clean up their mess. No, all I did was give Luka a heads up you were coming home.”
“I told you I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“And I told you it was unfair.” She raises her shoulders to me. “I gave them a chance to redeem themselves.”
The smell of garlic meets me in the kitchen. Marlon drops the spatula and swallows the distance between us in two strides.
“There she is!” He scoops me into his arms and squeezes me. “Damn, the Queen sucks without you. Fucking shitty is what it is.”
“You’re making dinner?” My mouth waters at the garlic and butter marrying in the pan.
“Yeah, we’re having White Bean Rosemary soup with roasted garlic croutons.”
“What the...?”
“And homemade ciabatta bread.”
“With home-churned butter,” Joy suggests, earning herself a blank glance from Marlon.
He returns his focus to me and slides into one of his sexy smiles. “The rest of the gang should be here any moment. Diego and Nate’re out getting wine. Figured we’d want that. They’re getting you Moscato. It’s still your favorite, right?”
I blink, impressed. “Yeah. Whoa.”
He squeezes me again, and I can’t help it—it’s damn nice to be in the arms of a man again. Of a man friend. “Lenny thought you needed meat. He thinks you sounded thinner on the phone the other day.”
“That’s just ridiculous.”
“Well, you look thinner too. He’s getting a couple of whole roasted chickens as a side dish.”
“To the soup? Chicken as a side to soup.”
Joy lets out a chuckle, sending me a wink. “Am I invited to dinner?”
“Sure you are,” Luka responds behind me, and I turn. “Geneva. Nice to have you back again.” With pale features void of any expression, his nostrils flare as if he’s smelling me. Luka’s eyes travel over my face, up to my hair, and despite myself, I wonder what he thinks of it. Until his eyes darken, pupils swallowing his irises. For a fraction of a moment, it’s there. Desire.
My stomach implodes with heat.
“Good to be back. I’m taking my suitcase up.”
“Babe!” James is here, all grins and grabbing me by the waist. He swings me around. “I’ll take the suitcase for you.”
“Hey, you. Naw, I’m fine. Joy and I need to freshen up anyway.” I smile. “Thank you, though.”
“Be down in fifteen!” Marlon shouts after us, spatula held high.
“Sure thing.”
Stairs. Upstairs hallway. My bedroom. Luka’s door is open, and it’s spotless too. I shake my head to Joy, who laughs quietly. “Guess they wanted to impress you.”
“Ha, they’ve shocked the daylights out of me. This is even tidier than on James’ Mother’s Day luncheon last year.” I bite my smile and sink down on my bed.
Yeah, they did it. And it feels amazing that they care so much.