The Museum of Intangible Things (15 page)

“They showed me things,” she continues. “They took my hunger away to study it. To figure out what makes humans tick. And little by little I am becoming one of them. I don’t have to eat. I don’t have to use the bathroom. Or sleep. I have nothing to lose by going with them.”

“Noah,” I say, finally pulling out all the stops. “What about Noah?”

Zoe turns away, almost visibly in pain. “He of all people will understand this. And you have to tell him about it. Tell him where I went.”

“But I don’t understand where you are going.”

“It’s an exoplanet. Around an M-dwarf star between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra. There is life. But their lives are different than ours. Less dependent on physical bodies. They can convert themselves to energy. They can travel through lightning. I think they’re trying to find me with all these wacky storms.”

“But Zoe—”

“No ‘buts.’”

“But . . .”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I just want to be a devil’s advocate for a sec. If you do have something like bipolar disorder—”

“Which I don’t—”

“You could have auditory and visual hallucinations. It’s part of it. Your brain could just be misfiring a little. And these storms. They’re part of climate change. They’re what we have to get used to now in this new world we’ve created.”

“You’ve known me my whole life, Hannah. And I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“I don’t think you’re lying.”

“Whatever,” she says, and I can see her start to shut down.

“Zo . . .”

“I am not crazy,” she whispers.

And then she tries not to cry. She catches a sob in her throat, and I feel horrible. She is finally pared down to her true self, and I can’t believe her. I can see her building a new wall, brick by brick, around herself. She takes a deep breath, sits up straight, and swallows the emotion. Her feeling of being entirely alone and misunderstood.

I can’t take it anymore. “I believe you,” I say. “I believe that you had some kind of experience. I truly do,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean that you have to run away. You can still make things work here. On Earth,” I joke. “There are so many fashion-challenged earthlings who need you here. I need you here.”

She laughs a little through her tears, before we try to get some sleep.

When we get to Yellowstone, we pull up to the park ranger booth and pay the entrance fee with some rolls of dimes that the park ranger insists on breaking open and counting. “Are you serious?” Zoe asks. “Each roll is five dollars. You’re just going to have to roll them up again later.”

The park ranger holds up her hand and says, “You made me lose count. I have to start again. Ten, twenty . . .”

Finally, we get some maps of the park and some literature that reminds us seventeen thousand times not to feed the bears or the buffalo. We drive along the curved wooded roads until we find an inclined meadow off the shoulder to our right. The frost has not yet melted off the grass, and there is some hovering loopy mist hanging low to the ground as if the earth is blowing smoke rings with a big earth cigarette.

We look for buffalo, but we don’t see anything but grass.

“Let’s go to Old Faithful,” I say.

I am in way over my head. What I found out last night is that there are limits to my faith in Zoe. They are at the outer limits of the galaxy, but they are limits nonetheless. Because I know too much about her past.

And because I’ve read at least thirteen case studies on bipolar disorder since her latest escapades. And in seven or more of the case studies, the patient experienced hallucinations involving talking to God. Or worse, being God. I think what happens is that when they are depressed, patients feel so worthless that the only way for them to get their self-esteem back is to exaggerate it. It becomes a habit, this grandiosity, until it gets out of control and bipolar people start to believe they are superhuman.

That hypothesis makes a lot more sense to me than Zoe actually having been abducted by aliens. She’s just trying so hard to seem worthy. To herself, mostly. And trying to go somewhere where someone will appreciate her. I understand this, but I do not know what to do. So when she is digging through the rolls of coins in the backseat, trying to gather enough for some geyser souvenirs, I switch on my phone.

The irony of betraying Zoe in the parking lot of Old Faithful does not escape me. But in a way I am being faithful to her. I went about it the wrong way at first, but now I know she needs professional help.

I’m sure with the AMBER Alert, my phone number has been submitted to the police, and as soon as it’s recognized that it’s back on the grid and communicated to local authorities, we will be swarmed with rescue personnel. I imagine choppers and everything. But maybe this is my own grandiose thinking. We are not that important in the scheme of things.

We de-LeMans and I ask Zoe to go buy me some corn chips at the beautiful new visitor center that looks like a Swiss chalet ski lodge with a chevron-shaped window that frames the geyser perfectly if you want to watch it from inside.

I walk into the ladies’ room and think I’m safe, since “alien Zoe” doesn’t have to pee anymore, and I take a look at my phone. It is overwhelmed with voice mails, e-mails, and text messages. Surprising, though, is how many of them are from Danny. And my mom. She’s written me page-long text messages apologizing and promising things will be different when I get home.

Danny has sent photos, though. Of him in his adorable sunglasses next to his ice cream truck. In Pennsylvania. Then in Chicago. And Iowa. The last one is at Indian City! With Rosemarie. Is he following us? He’s got his long arm around her cushy shoulders, and they smile, Rosemarie’s gold tooth glinting a little in the flash. I touch his crooked nose on the screen and trace his lips. I’m about to actually kiss my freaking phone, that’s how in love I am with this boy, when Zoe yells into the bathroom.

“Hannah! Two minutes until she blows!” She stands outside my stall and leans against it waiting for me.

“Okay,” I say. “Coming!”

“What are you doing?”

“Peeing.”

“Well, hurry.”

I am dying to text Danny and tell him where I am. It takes every ounce of energy for me to stand up, hide my phone in a deep inside pocket of my sleeping-bag coat, and step out of the stall.

“Come on,” Zoe says as I wash my hands. I look at myself in the mirror. In the National Park, they discourage vanity. People should be focused externally—on the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and not on the size of their pores—when a miraculous geyser is about to blow, so they installed foggy mirrors that don’t show the details of your face. I look at it anyway and try to see it the way Danny would. I am not as hideous as I often imagine I am. My eyes are intense, like my dad’s, and my nose is not as big and pointy as I sometimes envision it. “Let’s go!” Zoe says.

A huddled mass of travelers in primary-color parkas squeezes around the perimeter of the geyser. “We have to go over here. This place is crawling with webcams,” Zoe says, so we stand in the farthest corner of the viewing area and wait for 10:37, the next eruption time according to a chalkboard beneath Old Faithful’s name plaque.

A digital clock counts down the seconds. A park ranger with a microphone stops educating people about geothermal phenomena and turns our attention to the hole in the ground. The tourists focus their cameras, about to be amazed. Ten, nine, eight.

“I saw you turn on the phone,” Zoe says without looking at me. She is staring at the pool where Old Faithful is supposed to erupt. Three, two, one.

Nothing happens. People stir.
Has this ever happened before? Can this happen? What does this mean?
Moms engage in nervous laughter as kids whine for justice. They traveled ten hours in the car for
this
? I hear them thinking.

Zoe is still staring with abnormal intensity at the pool, and then she reaches her hand toward it as if she’s shooting it with some kind of invisible superhero ray. The ranger gets back on the microphone. “Ah, folks, um, this has never . . .” he says.

Zoe turns to me, winks, drops her hand, and Old Faithful erupts, white and queenly like a liquid statue of the Madonna, but twenty seconds off schedule.

When I turn back to Zoe, she is gone.

I am numb—only energy, without a physical body, like Zoe’s alien friends—as I sprint into the parking lot and try to figure out in which direction she fled. I know if she doesn’t want to be found, though, Zoe will not be found. Already her weather radio, the turtle backpack with Tasery in it, and her corn-pollen sack are missing from the trunk. She also took $157 in coins. I know she is sprinting nimbly through the woods until she can find a kindly trucker to take her south through Colorado and Utah.

I’m out of breath, but I make one phone call before I turn it off again and hope that the authorities missed my temporary blip on the grid. Maybe they had even canceled the AMBER Alert. If they found out what Zoe did to Officer Franz, they may have decided we weren’t worth retrieving.

“Danny!” I say breathlessly. “I lost her!”

“Where are you?”

His voice brings me back into my body. My hands quiver, even now, itching to touch the muscles rippling beneath the soft cotton of his T-shirt. I shake them, trying to punish them for not staying focused on the crisis at hand.

“I lost Zoe,” I say again.

For the first time in our lives, I let her down, and I let her down hard. It feels awful. It feels so awful I can’t even feel. I’m still in shock. I want to cry, but there is a mask-like tightness around my eyes constricting my tears.

“I’m at Yellowstone,” I say. “I think she’s on her way south. She’s chasing the weather.”

“Okay. I’m right behind you. In Gillette. If you drive south to Buffalo, I’ll meet you there, and we can continue on through Utah.”

“What? How did you know where we were?”

“Zoe’s been calling me.”

“She has?”

“Every time you went to the bathroom, from a pay phone. She called first to ream me out. She was so pissed at me for hurting you that she had a few choice words for me. But I explained to her that the Rebecca thing has been petering out for months. I explained I wanted to see you. So a day later she began calling me every day. She just kept telling me that you were going to need me and that I should drive west on I-90. So I did. I really want to see you.”

I was about to say “You do?” as if I didn’t deserve his attention, but instead I say, “Me too. I think about you a lot.”

“How much?”

Like every five seconds. Or more. Or continually. In the background of all my other thoughts is the perpetual thought of you
, I think, but I don’t say it out loud for fear of scaring him away.

He doesn’t let me answer before blurting, “Meet me in Buffalo.”

When I get to the gas station he told me to drive to, he stands there leaning against his ice cream truck in his sunglasses and barn jacket, like that iconic picture of James Dean. Only he’s taller. And less perfect. And much more beautiful, in my opinion.

I park and try not to feel ashamed of my greasy unwashed blond hair as I walk over to him. I hug him and lean my cheek against his broad sculpted chest. He tilts my chin up, and I can feel him pressing against me as we kiss. The chemistry between us is animal. I can tell he can feel it too. Honestly, we haven’t spoken more than 5,000 words to each other in our whole lives, but there’s this whirling vortex inside me that needs to pull him into my body. Into my life.

“We have to go,” I tell him as we break away. “We need to catch up to her.”

“She’s on foot,” Danny says. “And I’m a fast driver.” And then he smiles that smile that makes the corner of his eyes crinkle.

“Just a minute!” I say, putting a halt to it, imagining the sound of a needle scratching off an LP. “What about Rebecca? Is it really over? You were with her one hour after you left me that night. It took you one hour. You can’t be alone for an hour to think about things before you crawl back into her lair?”

“She was waiting for me when I got home. I couldn’t shake her. And how do you know this, anyway?”

“Never mind how I know. I know. She was with you when I called from Michigan too.”

“We were doing homework.”

“For sex ed?”

“Exactly,” he says sarcastically. “We were doing our sex ed homework.” He looks into my eyes. “It’s over, okay? She’s already moved on. I’ve moved on too.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

He takes my coat off and lets it slide slowly down my back. Then he makes a bed with it between the ice cream coolers in the truck. We lie down together on our sides. He stares at me, moving his finger from my forehead, down my nose, over my chin, along my neck until it lands between my breasts.

“Oh look,” I joke, “I’m wearing buttons.”

“I see that,” he tells me, and he uses his nimble fingers to deftly, expertly savor each one before he pops it open slowly.

There, in a parked ice cream truck just outside of Buffalo, Wyoming, I say yes. I resign myself to finding God. And it’s true what they say. You can find God anywhere.

• • •

“Now, we have to go,” I tell him. “Seriously.” We’re lying on top of the grimy nylon coat in the aisle of the truck. He is tracing his finger along the outside whorls of my ear.

He takes out his phone, holds it at arm’s length, and takes a picture of us.

“Do you document all your conquests?”

“Nope.”

It’s then that we hear a knock on the door.

“Hannah Morgan,” demands a sharp male voice.

Shit
, I think. I thought this is what I wanted. Help from the authorities. But now that Danny’s here, I have all the help I need. I don’t want them to question me or send me home. I want to find Zoe.

We shuffle around getting dressed inside the truck.

“We need to ditch them,” I tell Danny. “I thought . . .”

“Shh,” he says, holding his finger to his lips. He stuffs his wallet into his pocket, walks to the back of the truck, and puts his hand on the big lever that opens the escape hatch in the back. The one you practice exiting from in safety drills on the school bus. He holds fingers up and silently counts. One. Two. Three. On three, he pushes the door open. We jump out of the truck and run fast.

“Stop!” the police officers say. “Stop in the name of the law.”

They actually say that?
I think.

“Serpentine!” I yell at Danny. I heard somewhere that you should run in a zigzag formation to avoid bullets. He smiles and yells, “No, just run straight for the highway!” We run through some brush across the access road and to the edge of the highway, where I see another tumbleweed. I don’t have time to appreciate it, though. The overweight officers, dressed in tan, camouflaged in the dry landscape, are in hot pursuit. But we easily dodge the speeding cars on the highway with alacrity, and their cumbersome bodies can’t keep up. We hear a horn whine and blare, and the screeching of brakes behind us. We keep going up an embankment on the other side of the road, and we run up and over another brown spiky bluff to the exit ramp on the other side.

A McDonald’s looms ahead in the distance, but that’s it. For miles. It looks like a McDonald’s on the moon. Nothing is growing. No flora or fauna. And nothing is moving in any direction as far as we look. The landscape is completely mineral. We need a truck. Or a train or some kind of vehicle to jump upon.

Danny makes a dash for the McDonald’s drive-through. And I follow him, though we’ll be too easy to find, hiding in the only place to hide.

“Shouldn’t we find a different McHidingSpot?” I ask him, panting for breath.

“I can maybe hot-wire one of those cars in the parking lot. Come on!”

I’m reluctant to steal a car. And I’m really reluctant to steal a car from a McDonald’s employee whose entire paycheck goes into the upkeep of the car just so he can drive back to work. Like that story of Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill and never getting anywhere.

“Can you make sure it’s the manager’s car?” I say as we run.

Danny just shakes his head and runs faster.

We squat down between a rusted-out old Honda Civic and a small, blue Ford pickup truck.

“Which one does my princess prefer?” Danny asks.

“The truck,” I say. “Definitely the truck.”

He wiggles something, and we’re in.

There is one bench seat across the front, and it is shiny, vinyl, and hot. I slide in first. He looks beneath the steering column, finds the wires he needs, just like in the movies, and the truck sounds like it’s clearing its throat for a second and then grumbles to life. Danny gets in, slams the heavy door, and puts on a baseball cap he finds in the front seat. “Get down,” he says. “They’re expecting two of us.” I crouch down into the seat well, and he pulls slowly out of the parking lot so as not to draw attention to us.

I look up through the window into the side mirror and see the exhausted old cops finally arriving to the parking lot on foot.

“You’re not eighteen, are you?” I ask him.

“Not yet,” he says, and I hope that makes a difference in the penalty for grand theft auto. I hope the jury will understand how we needed the truck to rescue Zoe.

We drive south across the moon.

A little prism hangs from the rearview mirror, and it throws tiny rainbows around the cab as we drive. There is also a pair of pink fuzzy dice. “Do you think she would go to Vegas?” Danny asks, pointing at the dice. “I have a feeling about Vegas.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I need to hear a weather report. She has a thing about the weather.” I lie down across the front seat and rest my head in Danny’s lap as he drives, incognito in the hat and a pair of large sunglasses he also found in the truck.

I finally have time to reflect on the fact that I just lost my virginity and found God in the same moment. I’ve heard that doesn’t usually happen.

He draws figure eights around my waist and then slides his hand beneath the waistband of my jeans and leaves it there. The proximity of my head to his “manhood,” as they call it in romance novels, and the feeling of his whole hand on the soft skin around my hip make me want to pull over and find God again. It’s addicting and more powerful than I ever imagined. No wonder salmon die, swimming upstream, leaping right into the open mouths of hungry bears by mistake.

“I like spawning,” I tell him.

“I hope we didn’t spawn anything,” he laughs.

“We were careful. I want to be careful again,” I say, sliding my finger down the inseam of his jeans.

“Easy there, killer. We need to put a little distance between us and the fuzz,” he jokes.

“Can I sit up yet, then? I can’t be touching you. It’s driving me crazy.”

“Wow, I created a monster.”

“You don’t feel it?”

“Of course I feel it,” he says, looking at me. “I want to pull over and touch every inch of your naked body. Your armpit. The arch of your foot. The flat trail beneath your belly button. But I’ve been feeling it for five years, and I’m used to suppressing it.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything? For five years? It would have made those five years a lot better for me. A
lot
better.”

“I was afraid I’d scare you away. You are so studious and serious all the time.”

“So why Rebecca Forman?”

“Practice girlfriend.”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone to practice with. Develop some relationship skills.”

“Did she know she was your ‘practice’ girlfriend?” I say, making air quotes. I never thought in a million years I could feel sorry for Rebecca Forman or pissed off at Danny Spinelli.

“No. She never needs to know that. We practiced with each other. She’ll move on. She’s tough like that. Besides, I taught her some mad skills.” He laughs. “She can take them with her.”

“But what if she fell in love with you? What if you broke her heart?”

“We never said ‘I love you.’”

“But what if she secretly felt it?”

“I think she secretly felt love for someone else.”

“Who?”

“Ice.”

“Oh, they’d be perfect together.”

“Right? So all’s well that ends well. They’ve already gotten together. Which leaves me with no guilt. I am completely free and available to love you.”

“Did you just say what I thought you said?”

“I said I was available to love you.”

“But do you? Love me? We hardly know each other.”

“I know you.”

“You do?”

“I know that when you eat lunch, you’re the only one in the cafeteria who actually places her paper napkin on her lap.”

“So?”

“I know that you have a freckle right underneath your left eye. I know that when you smile, your eyes close into adorable half-circles and all that’s visible are a little gleam of light and your thick black eyelashes. I know that you are really nice to that kid with Tourette’s and you sit patiently and help him with his math homework even though he’s uncontrollably barking ‘cocksucker’ at the top of his lungs every five minutes. I know that you are trying to improve your life even though the odds are stacked up against you, and that you hide in the attic of the Cunty Day School to try to learn as much as you can. I know that you would give your left arm to help Zoe if she needed it, and that’s why we’re here. I think I know enough.”

“I’ve always known.”

“What?”

“That I loved you.”

“You came out of the womb loving me?” Danny jokes.

“Probably. I remember the day you came to the bus stop for the first time in kindergarten. I think I loved you then.”

“That’s kind of gross that you loved a five-year-old.”

“Well, I was five too.”

“I don’t believe you loved me when you were five.”

“Fine,” I say, giggling.

“You are beautiful,” Danny says.

“I feel lucky.”

“You do? In the middle of Wyoming running from the law?”

“I do.”

“Let’s try your luck in Vegas, then, high roller.”