Everything Beautiful (17 page)

45
Conversation Without Words

All morning Dylan and I talked like we were in a contest. We talked like a tug-of-war. We talked like a toboggan. I told him about Chloe, the bunker book, and the bus ticket. He told me about how he ended up in Trevor’s ute.

“Fleur wanted a blue rose. I know she just wrote it as a joke. A blue rose is like a black orchid, but I got it in my head that if I could get her one . . .” He stopped and smiled ruefully. “She’d chuck Craig and come sit on my lap. There’s no florist in Nhill, but there was a weird little gift shop. I bought that notebook. Your notebook. And well . . . you saw the pictures. I tried to draw a blue rose. Then I realized the whole thing was stupid. I had some money left over, so I bought a bottle of brandy and holed up in an empty shop and the rest is history.”

“I don’t think she’s as much of a bitch as I thought she was.”

“She’s okay,” Dylan said. “But she’s not worthy of a blue rose.”

“Well, it’s mine now.”

Dylan went on. “I was shitty about Craig, too. You know, after February second he was the only one who didn’t come on with the bright fake bullshit. He came and saw me in rehab, we played cards. I thought we’d be okay. But it’s context, isn’t it? I look at him here and all I see is... triumph. It’s Fleur. And it’s his fuckinglegs.” Dylan ran his hands up and down his jeans, fast, and I imagined them sparking. “Drugs,” he deadpanned. “Sometimes I invent things. Craig’s a good guy, the best. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be a prick as well.”

“I’ve seen a few pricks in my time,” I joked.

Dylan didn’t laugh. I was sitting in Fraser’s old rocking chair. Now I rocked back and forth, mulling. “Um. That was one of Chloe’s.”

“That’s not you.”

I really, really wanted to believe him, but the graffiti was on the wall. Not only
Fatgirlsaregrateful
but also
Are you rampant
? As if he’d read my mind, Dylan said, “Sorry I called you rampant. I was confused about the Craig thing.”

“There’s no Craig thing.” I took a breath. Dylan was saying he didn’t want to go there—and that made sense. Take a fat girl like me and a broken boy like him—how could we be anything
but
friends? And now because he’d shared something, I wanted to share something back.

“I have Mom’s memory trunk at home. I used to look at it all the time, but I haven’t looked at it for ages. Not since we moved. It’s like if I open it I’ll just want to climb in and close the lid and breathe her air, until I’m full of her. But I can never be full of her—you know what I mean? It’s like every scrap of information I get is just a tease about all the stuff I’ll never know.” I stopped. My throat was dry. I wanted a cigarette, not to smoke, just to hold.

“Oh, no.” Dylan said. “Don’t cry.”

He was the opposite of “let it all out, love.” It was liberating.

“I won’t,” I assured him. “I don’t. In the trunk there was this program for Mom’s high school musical. She wasn’t starring or anything, she was just in the chorus. I can see her in the back, singing, fooling around. Anyway, there were messages all through the program. From guys, and they were all, like, filthy.

“Conclusion.” I sat forward and waved my finger around like a magistrate. “I think
she
might have been rampant. But I don’t know what I am.”

I wasn’t expecting it when Dylan leaned in and kissed me. We kissed for ages. It felt like we were continuing our conversation, only without words. We kept our hands half out like toddlers when they run, because the laying of hands on body parts would bring about a reality that I don’t think either of us was ready for yet.

46
Dressed!

At eight past eleven Bird stuck his head in. He had a jerrican with him, full of gas siphoned from Anton’s car.

“You’re a legend,” I gushed.

“I wish I could come on her maiden voyage,” Bird replied. “There’s treasure out there. You might see a Crimson Chat. I’d give my eyes to see a Crimson Chat.” He passed me a paper bag. “From Olive.” I passed the bag to Dylan and he held up items and mimicked Neville.

“Bottled water. One pack of Monte Carlos. Two Fuji apples. Toilet paper. One pack of Band-Aids. Matches. Candle. One bottle of champagne.”

“What?” I squeaked.

“True.” Dylan nodded. “2007. A very good year.”

“Olive is a legend, too,” I told Bird. He looked proud.

“What do you think of Delilah for a name?” Dylan asked him. It was the first time he’d spoken directly to Bird since their face-off in the garage. I wondered how Bird would take it.

He took it straight. He meditated on the name, and mouthed it a couple of times, testing it out. Finally he nodded. “Okay.” Then he said something strange. “In a way, I don’t mind if she doesn’t come back.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“Well, Fraser went into the desert to die, so in a way it would be good if Delilah died there, too.”

I patted his arm. “No one’s going to die, Bird. She’ll be fine.”

“Changes occur in the desert,” Bird said, by way of departure.

After Bird left, Dylan was silent for a long time. I wondered if he was thinking about Bird, and the past, and how when one thing shifts, everything else shifts with it. I was thinking about Fraser’s notebooks, the sum of his life, and how good it was that they had somewhere to go. After Mom died, Dad said I should take what I wanted; the rest was going to go. I never asked where, and he never said. I didn’t know what to take. Nothing could replace her. In the end I took some of her jewelry and books and three of her most fabulous caftans, and I put them in her memory trunk.

I opened Fraser’s closet door and touched the clothes.

“I wonder when Fraser’s wife died.”

“Maybe she didn’t; maybe she left him,” Dylan suggested.

“She wouldn’t have left him,” I said softly.

Dylan gave me a look.

“Mothballs always make me sentimental,” I joked.

Something at the back of the closet made my eyes pop.

“Oh. Wow,” I breathed.

“Skeleton?”

“Sort of.” I reached in. Wrapped in plastic, looking almost like a museum exhibit, were Fraser’s and Rose’s wedding clothes. I took the dress out of its sheath and I posed in front of the mirror, holding it out in front of me.

“This might even fit.”

“Should we be going soon?” Dylan’s voice was edgy. “If we’re going to go, we should go.”

“Just wait a sec.” I wriggled out of my blouse and kicked my jeans off. I didn’t even think about the fact that Dylan was going to see me in my boulder bra and Wonderpants.

“Hey, Riley?”

“Wait.” I put the ancient dress on over my head. It was silk-lined and it floated over my skin. I stood in front of the mirror. “This is so cool.” I showed Dylan my back. “Can you zip me up?”

“Come closer.”

The zip wouldn’t go past my waist. No corset.

“Backless,” I affirmed. “How do I look?”

Dylan looked from the photograph to me. “Stop smiling,” he said. But I couldn’t and he couldn’t and then he was tearing the plastic off Fraser’s suit and it took a bit longer for him, because he had to wobble around on his crutches, plus we were laughing, so that got in the way, and I couldn’t help noticing that his legs were white as white could be with hardly any hair, and he had lots of old scars from cigarettes, from pens, from compasses—but it didn’t matter, because Dylan and I were going to the salt lake and we were totally dressed for the occasion.

47
Accidents 1 and 2

All cars have their quirks, and Delilah was no exception. There was her lack of a floorboard, her pedals sticking up like broken pipes, and she was temperamental. Bird had explained that she’d only start in second gear, and even then would require external assistance. We determined that Dylan would take the wheel and use his crutch to keep the accelerator down. I’d push until Delilah was outside, where we could—to use the parlance of rev-heads—“really open her up.”

Dylan fixed himself behind the driver’s seat. He turned the key and gave the accelerator a few stiff pokes, but he couldn’t seem to bring his hands down on the wheel. I looked up from my position. The back of his neck had gone scarlet. I called out to him, “You okay?”

“Yeah. It’s just . . . It’s the first time I’ve been behind the wheel since . . . you know.” Dylan raked his hand through his hair. “Give me a minute.”

. . .

The first accident happened at—or rather to—the camp boundary. We’d been driving for about twenty minutes down the dusty, corrugated road. Fraser’s map hadn’t said anything about a wire fence, and yet there it was. And I had pedal dyslexia.

“Slow down,” Dylan yelled.

“I’m trying to!” I yelled back.

“F-ucccccck!” We plowed through the fence.

Then we were on the Nhill road. We thundered on. Dylan was staring straight ahead and fondling his silver cross. I thought I heard him say, “We are going to die.” But there was the wind, and the engine sounded like Armageddon. On top of that I was laughing. Too much oxygen. Too much freedom. We were a devastation on four fat sand tires. We almost missed the desert turnoff. Then the road went feral, the edges were soft and dangerous, but that only made me want to drive faster. We tore off down the fire road, grazing flora, scaring fauna, laughing like crazy.

The second accident was a lot more serious.

48
Parallel Lines

When I opened my eyes all I could see was blue sky. For a while those were the only two words I knew. Blue sky—sky blue. There were more pretentious adjectives: surreal blue, Klee blue, Mom would have said Paul Newman blue, but what I was looking at was more and less than that—it was pure. I didn’t know how long I’d been passed out for, but I had a sense that it was more than minutes. The sun seemed evening-close. I felt like I could reach up and volley it over the net of wispy clouds. I looked down and around to an army of trees. And rosellas! A flock burst from the branches like a paintball explosion and stunned me back to the situation at hand.

We were in the Little Desert. I’d been driving—too fast down the fire road. I’d spaced for a second, hit a pothole, and Delilah had lost a wheel. Then we’d hit the tree. The red mallee bastard had a trunk as wide as a minivan. I nearly hurled when I saw the dent in Delilah’s hood. The wheel was back several meters in the sand, but everything else was in its place. Everything except Dylan and his wheelchair.

Panic hit me like a bag of oranges—all over and everywhere at once. I had a moment of blindness, of tilt and trauma. I grabbed the supply bag, gathered the skirt of Rose’s wedding dress, and climbed out on Dylan’s side. On terra firma I rotated my arm like it was a compass that would point me in the right direction. Then I saw the tracks, parallel lines cut straight in the sand, going up and over a small hill. I walked between them, heart pounding.

Over the crest the land became crowded. Trevor said that the term “desert” confused people, made them think there was nothing, when there was actually an active ecosystem at work. Here, scrub rough as steel wool mixed with the most delicate of flowers. Here, I took a step and a lizard as big as my foot shot under a piece of bark. There were grass trees—stunted, burned black, with hair worse than Roslyn’s—and there were ghost trees, tall and twisted and haphazard. They reminded me of old people. Some of them even looked like old people with deep pockets in their skin, wise airs, and flakage.

The sun dipped. The sky became the near-night blue of shadows and stolen moments. Now the ground was firmer. The land had flattened out and Dylan’s tracks were no longer visible. Here and there, I found little reflecting pools, and then at last I saw one great big one. The lake was a giant mirror reflecting a crazy paving of tree and sky. Up ahead I saw a monster gum tree with wandering roots that looked like they’d waded right into the water and thought, fuck it, let’s stop here. Dylan must have thought the same thing. He was in his chair, facing the water, a little way back from the edge.

49
Wanting

I tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, mutard.”

He turned and then wheeled all the way around. I saw a dozen looks cross his face, but the one that stayed was relief. “Thank God, you’re all right!” He was rubbing the heels of his hands on his wheels. He leaned toward me and said in a raw voice, “I tried to get help. I started off going back the way we came, but it was too sandy, so I thought I’d try another way. And then I just went whichever way I could. And ended up here.” Dylan stopped. I was smiling past him. “What?” he asked.

“Nice aspect.” I pointed to the lake. The sky behind the sun had gone orangey pink and the lake reflected the colors.

“There’s something else,” Dylan said quickly. “The lake. It’s salty.”

“This must be it, then.” I took Fraser’s notebook out and tried to place the little red bean. It made sense—we were only a short way off the fire road and the little hill was marked. I squealed and kicked off my shoes and turned to Dylan. “Let’s do it.” I lifted my dress above my head and started in. “Wow . . . It’s
warm
.” The floor of the lake was soft, almost silky. I performed a slow twist, a sarky bump ’n’ grind, waving him in. “Come on, the water’s fine!” The water
was
fine. It was better than fine. I took moon steps until it was up to my neck, and then I plunged. When I came back up, Dylan was still on the shore. I paddled toward him.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s not going to work,” he said. But his voice was tentative. Hopeful.

“Come in anyway.” As soon as I said it, he knew—like I knew. Like I’d always known. There was no miracle. There was just wanting.

I floated on my back and closed my eyes. I let the water cover my ears so that all I could hear was hum. Then I opened my eyes to the huge gelato sky, swirling lemon and raspberry and pomegranate. Birds littered the sky like bonfire ash. I counted to twenty, then I looked back. Dylan was on his crutches coming toward me. He’d stripped off and was wearing only Fraser’s bow tie (slightly skewed), white boxers (rumpled), and a look of grim determination (cute). His face changed when he felt the water. He looked the same way he had in that photograph in Neville’s office. And a thought rose up—
that
Dylan wouldn’t have gone near me, but this one was waist-deep in a salt lake in the middle of the Little Desert. For me.