“I get it,” I say. I cough, just to get another sound out, to not stop. “I was famous. But I been paying attention to you, too.”
She purses her lips. “If you say so.”
“Like,” I start, but I don’t really know what’s gonna come out, since I don’t actually know much about her, but it’s too late to stop now, “I know you—I know you like girls.”
Her face. Just for a second it’s like I threw a bucket of ice-cold water on her. But she fixes it fast, back to something that’s supposed to be tough or whatever. “Dean, what the hell?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say.
“I know it doesn’t matter,” she says. “I don’t need you to tell me that.”
“No, not like that,” I say. “I’m saying I bet there’s plenty people it does matter to, yeah?”
She’s sitting on the floor with her legs straight out, but now she slides both her legs up so her knees is bent to her chest and she can hold on to ’um. “Of course,” she says.
“Make a list, all those people,” I say. “I’ll kill ’um. Even their dogs. Matter fact, I’ll do the dogs twice.”
She busts out laughing. “You’ll slay them with your incredibly bad math skills?” she says. I know she’s joking, but it doesn’t feel like that.
“Bad joke,” she says, I guess when she sees my face. But when I don’t say nothing, she lifts back up some of the pictures and starts going through them again.
I kick the box she’s taking pictures from. “Don’t act like that,” I say. “I was the one that had for stay down in the valley, looking for him for weeks, mosquitoes and cold nights camping in the rain, while you was studying at school. I was the one that had for see where it happened, then go tell Mom and Dad after.”
She puts down the pictures. “Sorry,” she says.
Sorry sorry sorry, I think. Everyone’s always sorry. You’re not the one that fucked up again and again and again.
“What was it like?” she asks, her voice quiet.
“What was what like?”
“Him,” she says. “Dying.”
I lean my head back against the wall, next to the window. There’s still weak light coming in. “You mean—”
“—I mean the place. Where you found him.”
There’s the valley. It was going from hot to cold to hot again, since the clouds was moving fast overhead, but I was all sweating from the trail, and the ground was ripped up and smeared, like someone had started for sweep the whole world off the edge of the cliff but stopped before they was finished, and I go to the edge and look over, there’s crampy ropes coming in my stomach because I see fabric and reach for ’um, the blood all squeezing my skull when I hang upside down for extra length. There’s the backpack in my hand, there’s the boot, there’s the blood.
“Dean,” Kaui says again. She scoots herself over and touches my shoulder. Everything goes out of me.
I say one sound, more like a breath: Ah. It gets something going. When I got there—to where he fell—it was like for just a minute all of me and all the valley was touching each other. Had a feeling like I got before on the basketball court. A chanting sound somewhere. Like when I first got to Spokane, or like that one Hawaiian Night game during the regular season, when I got that green feeling, like I could feel all the old kings right inside me, coming across the water.
“You ever think you felt things the way Noa felt ’um?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” Kaui says.
“Sometimes I get this feeling,” I say. “Or I used to, anyway. Where it was like I was me and then I was something bigger than me, all at once.”
I check her face and the yes is right there, I can see ’um. Like maybe she didn’t get just what I got, but she got something. Hell, no, Noa wasn’t the only one. Makes me smile, even.
“It’s funny,” I say. “Noa told me this one time he thought the sharks wasn’t just for him. I never really believed him…” I wait just a minute, try hard to feel it. To listen. But there’s nothing.
“I think maybe I missed it,” I say. “Like it was looking for me, same as him, and I never figured out how to answer ’um.”
Kaui starts talking, but a shadow moves over the window next to us. It’s big, like we can feel the person in the room already. Kaui’s on her feet and checking the peephole. “Oh, no,” she says.
I’m all, “Who is it?” but she’s already backing away from the door. I hear keys jingle, then grinding in the lock.
I stand up. Kaui shoves me with her hand, says, Go go go, and there’s no more talking, we just start for run.
27
KAUI, 2009
Portland
Go is what I say. Or think I say. We’re up and frenzied. We grab whatever we can—our wallets and my backpack, two of the smaller photo albums—and bolt. The front door opens. There’s a voice but we don’t stop to listen. We reach the bedroom I broke in through, window still open. I heave myself out. Fall into the slurping lawn that runs behind the duplex. My backpack’s open, so painkillers and wadded tissues and sticks of gum and tampons spill out. I gather what I can, jam that and the photo albums in the backpack.
“Around the corner,” I say to Dean, and we go around the corner. Except when we do we practically run into the Sheriff’s chest. He trips backward and a hand goes to his gun, he’s calling, Stop stop stop. We explode the other way, through the yard toward the gap between a garage and another house. The rain is spitting into my eyelashes. I can’t blink it away, things go blurry. The Sheriff’s hollering behind us. We hear the jingle of those keys. We keep running, but I’m clenched for the shooting to begin. They always shoot at people like us.
But we make it to the gap and out the other side. Noa’s sweatshirt is swimming and sucking on me, too big and getting wet. When we don’t hear the Sheriff, I stop and look back the way we came. He’s far away, running to his car. My hair is starting to drip all over me. My breath smokes in the cold.
“Go,” Dean says, and we do, again. Only I don’t realize he means different ways: when I break across the next street, Dean goes for something kitty-corner, through a yard, and by the time I realize it, he’s already on a fence, scrabbling halfway up and over.
The Sheriff’s car comes hot down the street, lights boiling bright. No sirens, which makes it feel nothing like a movie. It’s real, we’re real. I turn and run my way. There’s a break between two houses and I go for it. Dog growls crack out and roll over me, bounce around the walls on either side, but whatever’s there I can’t see and nothing lunges. I don’t stop. There’s a tire squeal. A metal crunch. It’s all behind me. What I see is in front of me, the wide-open land past the houses.
I’m out. It’s just an empty lot. So much space and air it’s like the world’s taking a breath. Stacks of lumber under blue tarpaulins and little wooden stakes stabbed into the cold dirt, orange ribbons twirling from their ends. I leave the lot and turn onto a new street and run another block and cut through to another yard. There’s no sound at all. I heave in oxygen. My left backpack strap is loose and I yank it down tight on my shoulder.