Random (Going the Distance) (12 page)

“Right.”

Together we get breakfast on the table. He has napkins in a holder, another shocker. He’s an adult, I guess. Will Rick and the band members have clean kitchens when they’re 25? It’s hard to imagine.

“Do you snowboard a lot?” I ask, just to be conversational.

“Not like I did.” With an expression somewhere between rueful and sad, he adds, “I was supposed to go to the 2006 Olympics in Turin.”

“What?” The eggs are delicious, not too dry or too runny, and the bread is something nutty and hearty, and I’m having trouble paying attention to anything else. “That’s amazing.”

He nods, watching me. A slow smile spreads over his face. “You eat with more focus than I’ve ever seen.”

I put my fork down and fold my hands. “Sorry. It’s really good, that’s all.”

“Don’t stop. I like it.”

“You eat yours, too.” I point and pick up my fork again. “You’re a good cook.”

“Are you a foodie or something?” he asks, obliging me by starting to eat.

“No. I don’t even know what that is.” I’m half-embarrassed again, but it’s getting tired. The only person I can be is myself. If he doesn’t like that, I guess he’ll find somebody else. “I eat because I’m hungry.” I say it with a laugh, but it still sounds pathetic. “I live alone, support myself. There’s not a lot left over for gourmet meals.”

“I get it.”

“Do you, Rich Boy?”

He lifts his chin, and his eyes are hard. “I don’t, actually. But can we stop with that shit, please? I really like you, but you have a chip on your shoulder. I don’t care how much money you have.”

I bow my head.

He takes my hand. “Do you like me, Jess?”

I raise my head and look directly at him, so he knows I’m telling the truth. “Yes.”

“Why?”

I asked
him
this question a couple of days ago, and he answered. I feel like it’s only fair to do the same. “Because you have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. Because you know things I’ve never even thought about. Because—” I shrug. “Because I want to know you.”

“Good answer.” He tugs my hand to his mouth and plants a kiss to my palm. “I like you because you look like something out of an illustrated book of fairy tales, and because I can’t stop thinking about you in my bed, and because I want to paint you, and—” he looks at me soberly “—because you are an old, old soul and I think I’ve known you in a lot of lives.”

My heart squeezes hard.

“I hope,” he says quietly, “that I get it right this time.”

Something ripples through me then, that weird sense of things being rearranged. Magic glitters back into my world, shining all around him. Around me.

He smiles and lets my hand go. “Finish your toast and let’s get on the trail before it gets too hot.”

* * *

I’m worried that Tyler is the kind of guy who will take me on some crazy hard trail, but I’ve already promised myself I won’t say a word if he does. I’m relieved when it turns out to be easy going through the forest, up and down, but nothing super steep. We’re out early, but there are lots of others out before us, running with sweat pouring down their faces, walking in groups, or with the happiest dogs in the world.

As we get higher, we’re alone in our own little pocket, talking a bit, but sometimes just walking. He takes a lot of pictures with his phone, too, getting close to things I’d never think about taking pictures of, like the top of a pine cone and an ordinary black and red beetle crawling on a pink granite boulder. He’s wearing a backpack with a water bladder inside and shares with me, both of us drinking from the same tube.

We walk for a long time on the dusty path, pale pink from the local granite, and after a while just the smell of everything, all pine and sunshine and needles cooked on the ground for ages, makes me happy. It’s easy to be with him this way, with something to do. All the awkwardness is gone. He leads, and I follow easily, sweating a little.

“You’re pretty fit,” he says.

“Waiting tables will do that.”

He asks about Virginia and my job search, not like he’s being polite, but like he really is interested. We talk a little about the band he saw last night, but he still doesn’t say anything about the people he was with.

I realize that I dismissed the Olympic thing at breakfast, which was pretty rude. “So, you were really going to the Olympics?”

“Yep. I was on the team.”

“What happened?”

He stops. “I was helping my cousin paint his house and a window fell out of an upper story. The whole window, the frame and everything.” He pulls up his t-shirt.

His back is crossed with a perfect gruesome X that goes around his side and over his hipbone. I reach out my fingers instinctively and trace one tail. It’s not a faint, faraway mark, but a deep reddish cord snaking around his side. “It’s a miracle you didn’t die.”

“No one could believe I was alive when they got me to the hospital. It sliced up a bunch of stuff in there, broke my ribs and gashed my liver and all kinds of things.” He holds up his hand, and I can see thin scars crossing the back of his wrist. “Took six months to even get out of the hospital.”

“Wow.”

There is that darkness on his face again, the expression I glimpsed in my kitchen. “All that would have probably healed, but the frame was what came loose, and it landed on my right hip and shattered it completely. I have about a thousand pins and bits in there.” He grinned unexpectedly, teeth flashing. “You should see what happens when I go through airport security.”

For a long minute I look up at him. He pulls his shirt down, looks off toward the horizon. In profile his nose is powerful and straight, his mouth more stern than it looks from the front. “The window just
fell out
?”

He nods.

“Random,” I say, shaking my head.

“Right?”

“My mom and I were going to lunch downtown when the icicle came down,” I say. “There were a bunch of other people on the street, but none of them even got nicked. Only her. She died right there. Instantly. Which I guess makes me feel better sometimes.”

“Random,” he says, touching my arm lightly.

I hold his gaze this time. “I’m sorry about the Olympics.”

“Me, too.” We start walking again. “So why aren’t you in school, Jess? Seriously.”

“No money.”

“Scholarships? Loans?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t have the greatest grades. My mom died when I was fifteen, and I started working and—” I shrug. “My grades weren’t terrible, but they weren’t great, either. And I don’t have any idea how you get loans. My step-dad lives on disability.”

He absorbs all this for a minute, still setting one foot after the other on the trail. “Did you want to go?”

“No,” I say sarcastically. “I think it sounds awesome to be a server for the rest of my life. Maybe I should start smoking and then I could be
really
broke.”

He grins. “So what would you study if you could study anything?”

“I honestly don’t know. Which is part of the problem, right? I’m not one of those people who burn to do one thing, like go to the Olympics or write a book or cure cancer, you know?”

He’s listening carefully, nodding. Our feet carry us over the gravel. A bird sails through the trees beside us, wings flashing blue. “What do you like to do?”

“Well, you know I love to read.” I laugh up at him. “Can you go to college for reading?”

“Of course. It’s called an English degree.”

I stop. It’s embarrassing how little I know about college, but I can’t help saying, “Really?”

For a minute he just looks at me, and something strange and lost and heart-wrenching plays across his face. He takes my hand. “Really.”

I grin. “That’s what I want, then. Read all day and all night, all the rest of my life.”

He slips the phone out of his pocket and, still holding my hand, takes a picture of my face. He looks at it, then shows it to me. He’s only captured the right side of my face, my eye and the curve of my smile, and the instant I look at it, I know something about him. I’ve never had anyone look so closely at me.

Ever.

Chapter ELEVEN

W
e hike for a couple of hours, then end by walking up the street to his house. “This is steeper than the hike!” I laugh.

“It is.”

“How do you drive on this when there’s snow?”

“I don’t. I park at the bottom of the hill and walk up.”

That would do a lot to give a person a great ass, that’s for sure.

At his house, it’s still easy between us. “Do you want to check your email? I’ll get us some lunch.” He slides the backpack off. “If you can stay?”

“I can stay.”

He grabs a sleek laptop from a table, opens it on his arm and types in a password. “There you go.”

He’s opened a guest account for me. There are five responses from applications I’ve sent out, but they’re all just acknowledgments. Or so I think until I get to the last one, which is from McDonald’s. A real person named Betty.

We’d love to talk to you for an opening at our Weber store . The phone number you put on the application is not right. We have 555-321-4385

The number
is
wrong—I transposed the last two numbers. It should be 58. Crap. I hit reply and apologize profusely and give her the correct number. Not that I am dying to work at McDonalds, but it’s two more days ’til payday and I have no idea if I’ll actually get that check. If I worked at McDonald’s, I could work at the greenhouse, too, maybe. Why haven’t I thought of that before?

Tyler is still doing something in another part of the house, so I fold my legs under me and go to Facebook. My inbox has the number 17 in red and I sigh—no one ever sends me email there, so I’m guessing the messages will all be from Rick.

There is also a new friend request. I go to that first.

It’s Tyler. I find myself smiling gigantically, and I’m glad I changed my relationship status before he went looking for me. A rustle of pleasure goes down my spine as I imagine him typing my name into the search box. I click yes in response, but I’m not about to go to his page in his house. Instead I type in my own status box:
Hiked this morning! Could eat a horse.

Then, if only to clean them out, I open the inbox. There’s a long list of messages from Rick, all saying the same thing in different ways:
I love u. I dont want to brake up. Ill do whatever you want.
He’s not the greatest speller and I always mostly forgave him, but looking at the messages today, some mean part of me is embarrassed that he’s such a bad writer. Third-grade bad, even though he tries to disguise it with all kinds of texting abbreviations.

Lucy has also written an email.
  Seriously, Jess, Rick is totally losing it. Can you at least talk to him? He really really is falling apart. Call me!  

I have no desire to do either one. Number 1 not see him and have him cry and beg to come back, or number 2, listen to her tell me all the reasons I should do number 1. The sad thing I didn’t realize is that she was one of my only friends. The other is in a coma in the hospital. It makes me feel lonely.

Which makes me think of my dream when my mother told me to find my dad. I didn’t look on Facebook the last time, and I type his name into the search box now. Again a long list of people pops up, most of them in England, a couple in Australia.

And then there he is. Keiran Pears in Marlborough, South Island, New Zealand. Again, his picture, so intimately familiar, gives me a strong emotional reaction. He has a big sunny smile on his face, and I have a sudden flash of his hands around my waist as he swung me into the air. I can see that face, below me, laughing.

It makes my chest ache in this weird, unexpected way, and I click on the page to see how much I can access. He only shares some things with his friends, but I can see a lot about the vineyard, photos of him working with the vines, tasting the wine. His wife’s name is Helen, and she’s not as pretty as my mom by any stretch, but I reluctantly like her round cheeks, her curly hair. She looks like a mom, like she should have a bunch of kids trailing behind her at the park.

For long minutes I stare at my dad’s face and then impulsively click the “Request as friend” button. In the box that asks for a note I type quickly:

Hi. I think I am your daughter. My mom was Gloria Donovan and we lived in New Zealand until I was six. I’d love to talk to you. Jess Donovan.

And I hit send.

It doesn’t freak me out until it’s done, and then my whole body starts shaking a little bit, right under the skin. “Oh, my God.”

“What is it?” Tyler says from the doorway.

I widen my eyes. “I just sent my dad a friend request on Facebook.”

He inclines his head. “And?”

“Not Henry. My dad in New Zealand. I haven’t talked to him since I was a little kid.”

This time his expression registers the magnitude of the action. “Wow.”

I look down at my newsfeed as if expecting him to reply in seconds. Instead I see a photo of myself. Tyler posted the pic from the hike, but he’s cropped it so that only my eye and a part of my forehead show. He’s tagged it “freshness.”

I grin up at him. “This is a good picture!”

“Thanks. Come on, let’s eat, and then I want to show you my studio.”

I blink. “Is this where I have to pay for my lunch by disrobing for the artist?”

“Disrobe? You have quite the vocabulary for a girl who hasn’t gone to college.”

That stings a bit. “Reading, remember?”

“To answer your question, no. You don’t have to do anything. I just want to show it to you.”

He’s made turkey sandwiches on the same grainy bread we had for breakfast, piled with tomatoes and lettuce. We settle at the table, just sandwiches and napkins. My legs are pleasantly tired, and I can feel a light sheen of sweat from the hike. The sun has moved so it’s throwing a dappling of shadows through tree branches. I take a bite of my sandwich and trace the line of a shadow branch with one thumb, not looking at him. It’s quiet, and I think he should have played music. My shyness, curse of my life, starts to creep up the sides of my neck, freezing my words in my throat.