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.
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?”
I locked the door behind me, looking at my own reflection in the glass on the storm door. How was I going to have this conversation? Mr. Bozeman thought I was a dog sitter. Mr. Bozeman thought I was a nice, upstanding girl. Mr. Bozeman didn’t need to know the mess I’d gotten Nick into. Turning, I mustered up a smile. It made my skin feel tight and dry. “How do you feel? Are you OK? I’m sorry I wasn’t here to visit you in the hospital.”
“Never fear, my dear! You had Priscilla, and that was all that mattered to me. I feel fine.” He patted his stomach gingerly. “Much better. Miracles of modern medicine. But sit down. Have some circus peanuts,” he said, offering me a half-finished crinkly package.
I did sit, in the easy chair next to the sofa, but I didn’t take any candy. Instead, I undid the sticky plastic ends of his bracelet and put it in my pocket to throw away. Then I looked at Mr. Bozeman and wondered how in the world I was going to come to terms with these feelings and what on earth I was going to do now.
Again, Mr. Bozeman tried to get me to eat a piece of candy. I hadn’t had anything much to eat in twenty-four hours, and the little grumble in my stomach was undeniable. Mr. Bozeman crinkled the package and held it out to me. Reluctantly, I reached out and took one of the foamy, oversize peanuts. I tucked it into my mouth whole, and it began to dissolve instantly. It kicked off a chain reaction somehow, because as soon as I finished one, I reached for another, and then, much to my utter astonishment, I started talking. At first, it was just about Nick. How I’d lost him and how I never knew if I’d see him again. But very slowly I let it all unravel, in vague but still-true terms. That our trip hadn’t gone as planned and that the ideas we’d had for the future weren’t going to work after all. Each word that left my mouth made me feel a little bit better and also worse, lightening the weight inside me but also making the situation so very real. Mr. Bozeman listened to me, nodding and asking only the most crucial questions as he ate his circus peanuts and one episode of his endlessly rerunning Columbo ended and another began.
When I finished, I flopped back onto his easy chair with so much force that the footrest flipped up, and suddenly I was flat on my back and looking at the ceiling.
I was so exhausted, I didn’t even try to fight it. I took a deep breath, hearing Nick say breathe in my ear, and focused on a single gauzy cobweb dangling from the heating vent in the ceiling.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without him,” I said, reaching out for another peanut. “I never ever thought I’d say that.”
Mr. Bozeman chuckled, and I heard what sounded like him smoothing the plastic candy bag on his leg. I lifted my head from the La-Z-Boy and looked at him. I’d eaten the last one, and now he was folding the empty bag into a neat strip, aligning it vertically between his thumbs. He brought it to his lips and tried to blow a note, the way I’d seen people do with bear grass. It didn’t work on the first try. “If there’s one thing I can tell you for sure, my dear,” he said, repositioning his thumbs relative to the plastic, “it’s that you’re going to be OK. One way or another, it’ll all work out fine. You know what Priscilla and I call you?”
I shook my head and swallowed the last of the foamy sweet goodness. Priscilla placed the conversation heart in his lap. “Our girl,” he said and winked. “Our girl can do anything, can’t she?” he said to Priscilla, glancing at me once more. “Our girl is going to be OK,” he said, then he brought the whistle to his lips once more, and an unhappy honking filled the room.
When I got back to my apartment, I found Mr. Bozeman’s faith in me hadn’t been enough to keep me cheerful for very long. I shoved my suitcase through the door and placed Nick’s duffel on top of it. I kicked off my shoes and headed for the kitchen, where I opened the fridge to find a lone carton of sesame noodles.
I took a fork from the drying rack. I shut the door and leaned against the fridge as I jammed a forkful of cold noodles into my mouth. Sinking down, I tucked into a ball on the floor, as all sorts of dirty poetry rained down around me. How strange that only a handful of days ago I’d been here with him and felt so happy. And now I was here without him and felt so utterly adrift. As I plucked the word please from my hair, I heard a key slide into the deadbolt. For one insane, nonsensical, lovesick second I thought, It’s him, he’s come back to me. But before my heart could swell to bursting, the dream fizzled away, and I heard the click-clack of crutches and Roxie saying, “It’s not a race, Ruthie. Slow and steady, OK?”
The click-clacks of Ruth’s crutches got closer. I heard Roxie say, “Why the hell is there a door in the hallway?”
“Stella?” said Ruth, and the click-clacks sped up before coming to an abrupt halt.
Behind her, Roxie’s fresh and perfectly made-up face appeared. “Uh-oh.”
I sniffed hard, and it made a sucking sound in my ears.
“Did you get it?” Ruth asked softly.
I nodded, and a noodle slipped out of my mouth. I sucked it up, and my lips began to tremble again. Using the sleeve of my hoodie, now soaked through with tears and snot, I wiped my nose and looked up at my two best friends. Somehow, I felt like I’d known them as a different woman. In a different time. Before Nick Norton rumbled into my life and into my heart. “But I came back alone.”
Roxie’s mouth fell open. “You mean . . . he took the fall for you?”
Resting my face in my palm, I set my takeout container on the kitchen floor. Everything inside my body ached. Every corner of my heart felt like it had been gnawed on. Another tear tumbled down my cheek, and I lined up the words please don’t go on the linoleum. He’d given up his freedom, his life, his future . . . for me. Just me. Only me. He had gambled on us and lost. And sitting there on the kitchen floor, with 589 carats in my purse, I felt so very, very unworthy. “He told me to go bite the stars for him and never look back.”
For a long moment, neither of them said a word. Until Roxie let out a clear, long, descending whistle, and Ruth said, “Oh my God.”