NICK
Halloween came and went, and I didn’t hear from her. I’d told her to run, to forget about us, and she’d listened. But fuck me if I wished she hadn’t. Because I missed her. I missed everything about her. Her smile, her smell, the way her hand had felt in mine. Her laugh, her love. That Stella blend of sinner and sweetheart. I missed just being near her sparkle. I missed being so full of love and hope. I missed being with Stella even more than I missed being free.
The one sign I had that she was still thinking about me was my attorney, who contacted me the day I was booked in, saying my sister had hired her. I’d almost said, “What sister?” But then I put it together and kept my trap shut about that too. The attorney was good at what she did; no bullshit, no small talk. The story was this. If I was willing to give up the diamond or the name of my accomplice, the sheikh would drop the charges. But in the handful of meetings we’d had it was clear to both of us that unless I was willing to throw Stella under the bus, I was class-A-felony fucked.
As the cops built a case against me, they put the screws to me to give up my accomplice. Witnesses had seen her. The sheikh’s bodyguard gave a description to a sketch artist. The sheikh had said he’d seen her, that he remembered her dress. The sketches weren’t of Stella, but of a little blonde bombshell who didn’t exist. No matter how hard they pushed, I didn’t give in. I didn’t say I knew her, or that I didn’t know her. They asked me where the North Star was. I told them the truth—I didn’t know. They were rough on me, but pressure makes diamonds, and every question those fuckers asked me about her just made me love her—and need to protect her—more and more.
November ticked by, and the guys on my cellblock got hand-shaped turkeys made of construction paper from their kids. Thanksgiving dinner was slices of dry turkey breast, potatoes out of a box, and a can-shaped slice of jellied cranberries, still with the ridges on the sides. The days slid by, one merging into the next, and the turkey decorations were replaced with Christmas trees studded with glue-soaked cotton balls.
Every time I made the walk down the cellblock, I felt sick with nostalgia for something I never had and never would have. Every wall reminded me of holidays and traditions I’d never get to experience with Stella, dreams so powerful because they were so new. Then, in January, the goddamned Valentine’s cards started to arrive. Every paper heart made my own bleed and made me ache to be on the road with her in that RV in a way I’d never ached for anything before.
The attorney had worked to make sure that while I was in the endless holding pattern between arrest and trial, I stayed where I was, with all the white-collar guys serving sentences on evasion and laundering. My cellmate was a decent enough guy. Some hacker who’d gotten himself in a shitload of trouble doing something that I didn’t totally understand. We got along fine, because he didn’t say much and neither did I. But sometimes, at night, he’d hum Tom Petty, and my eyes would get fucking blurry all over again.
I had the bottom bunk, and that afternoon—like every afternoon—I was looking up at the steel crossbars above me, at a scratched-in line of graffiti that said LIFE SUCKS AND THEN YOU END UP IN THIS SHITHOLE.
My thoughts drifted back to that magical night with her, on the roof of the RV, looking up at the stars. I relived the way she’d run her fingertips over my tattoos and the way I’d shown her this constellation and that one, not really caring if she saw them in the sky at all, but just enjoying the way it felt to be there with her. To experience her surprise and her happiness. With each day that passed since I’d seen her last, I’d added a few more stars to the underside of the bunk, so now it was dotted all over with the night sky, dots of ballpoint pen on plywood.
“Norton!” boomed the guard, yanking me out of the stars and slamming me back into the grim realities of the Orange County Jail.
I rolled over in my bunk and turned to face the door. He was a skinny guy who looked a lot like Willie Nelson, except for the uniform. “Got a visitor,” he said, and swiped his key card over the wall, making the lock on the cell shudder open with a clatter.
On the wall of the cell across from me was taped a doily heart that had MISS YOU! written across it in crayon.
“Who is it?”
“The fuck kinda question is that?” the guard said. “Think I know? I just work here, Norton.”
True enough. I rolled off my bunk and followed him down the hall. On either side, guys read or played cards or did push-ups on the bare concrete floor. We passed through one guarded doorway, then another, until we got to the visiting room. Because it was medium security, the visitors’ room wasn’t some Hollywood-style set of booths with bulletproof glass, but a big, open cafeteria space with picnic tables bolted to the floor, metal ones dipped in blue rubberized plastic. It even had big, triple-thick windows along one wall, one of the few places in the whole building that had a view of the horizon. Seeing the great wide open soothed the ache inside, but not very much.
As he opened the door for me, I let myself imagine for one second what it would feel like to get to see Stella. The joy. The relief. The happiness.
None of which I’d ever feel again.
Of course, it wasn’t Stella sitting there at the far corner table with her back to me. Instead it was a woman in all black, with short dark hair, and with her right foot in a walking boot.
Ruth.
She was intense. Sitting across from her made me feel like I was getting interrogated in the middle of a round of high-stakes poker while I held the world’s shittiest hand.
“How’d you even get here?” I asked as I slid onto the bench across from her.
She placed her phone upside down on the tabletop. It was covered in rhinestones, just like Stella’s. But these were black, with a contrasting red R in the middle. “I took the bus. I always take the bus.”
Christ. Eight hundred miles on a Greyhound with her foot in a boot. Seriously hard-core. I leaned back on the picnic bench and ground my quads into the edge of the table. “How are you healing up?”
She looked at her boot, which was slightly to the side of the table. She wiggled her toes in her athletic sock and said, “I’m here because I went to talk to your lawyer today. As your sister,” she said, adding a little extra weight to that word to make sure I hadn’t missed it, “I thought it was time for me to actually look her in the eye.”
I gripped the edge of the table, digging my thumbnails into the rubber coating. “And?”
She stared at me, a poker face to beat all the poker faces. “She told me that the sheikh is willing to drop all the charges if you give up the location of the diamond.”
There was no universe in which I was going to swap my freedom for Stella’s. Or her dreams. “No fucking way.”
Ruth sniffed, took a tube of yellow lip stuff with a bee on the label from her pocket, and rubbed it over her lips. Her expression was inscrutable, utterly neutral. “We could set up a dead drop. You’d be riding that bike of yours, slinging drinks, and kissing her before sundown tomorrow, I bet. Tempting, right?”
Tempting wasn’t even the start of it. The thought of kissing her again was mind-bending. But there was no way in hell I’d ask her give up her dreams—or the money she’d get for that godforsaken gem—for me. I wasn’t worth it. But she was. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
Ruth ran her fingertip over the diamond-shaped gaps in the table. “She’s a mess.”
The words clobbered me. What I wanted to hear was that she was happy, making plans to live her Big Wide Open American Dream, with her puzzle box full of rough diamonds.
“You need to let her go,” Ruth said, looking me right in the eye. “I want to go back to her and tell her you’ve forgotten about her. I want to go back to her and tell her she’s free.”
A wave of anger came up from deep inside me. It was the first thing I’d felt other than heartbreak in months, and it didn’t feel very fucking good either. There was a time when anger was my driving force, but since I’d met Stella, all that had changed. I had changed. She had changed me. The effect she’d had on me wasn’t lessening over time; it was only getting more profound. Ruth was still watching me, but I turned away. On the far wall was a flyer that announced movie night that week. The Pink Panther. Christ almighty, everything would always hurt forever. There was no way around it.
Forgetting about me was exactly what I’d asked her to do, because that would be the best thing for her. But the idea of me forgetting about her was brutal, impossible. To lose her was to lose hope. To lose her was to let go of the only life preserver I had. To let her go was to make the whole night sky go dark forever.
I shook my head. “You can tell her what you want. But she knows I’ll never forget her.”
Ruth scratched the corner of her eye with her fingertip. “You can’t stop me telling her you will.”
“She’ll never believe you.”
“You’ll never hear her voice. Her laugh. Any of it. Ever again.”
There were a lot of things I regretted in my life, but being in jail for her would never be one of them; even if I never heard that laugh again, having heard it at all made it worth it. Because of me, she would be happy—it would be the only good thing I’d ever done. The very best of things. “Tell her to keep laying low.”
“She might forget about you.”
She owed me nothing, but I owed her everything. Because through her, I’d seen a glimpse of a different life, one that I think I knew I’d never deserve to live, but one that for just an instant, I could see myself inside. And that, just that, was enough. “I’ll never forget her. And I’ll never let her go. Not here.” I tapped on my chest. “And not here either.” I pressed two fingers to my temple. “She’ll always be a part of me. And there’s nothing that you, or her, or anybody else can do about it.”
Ruth’s face was expressionless and stern. She picked up her phone and put it into her pocket, then used the table to brace herself as she stood. She watched me, carefully and closely. I held her stare and didn’t move a muscle. If she was expecting me to fold, she was gonna have a long-ass wait.
But then, very slowly, the hardness in her eyes softened, and I could have sworn I saw the smallest hint of a smile. As fast as it had appeared, it was gone. Disappearing ink.
I began to doubt I’d seen anything at all, until she said, very softly, “Good answer,” and hobbled off toward the exit.
I knew as she turned her back on me that I’d never see her again. And I’d never see Stella again either. “Wait,” I said.
She turned back over her shoulder and stared at me.
“Did she split it?”
If the answer was yes, I’d accept my fate. If the answer was no, I could go on living in the hope that maybe, just fucking maybe, I’d get to hear that laugh of Stella’s someday again.
But Ruth was a stone wall. And without another word, she turned around and hobbled out of the room.