12
jasper
Jasper: Any news?
Harvey: Nothing. If I find out anything, you’ll be my first call.
Jasper: Okay.
“I think we should stop for today.”
We haven’t been traveling for long, but I feel the pull of sleep in the center of my forehead like a weight that wants to close my eyes. Things have only gotten worse since the world’s most uncomfortable I spy game vanished and left us sitting in silence.
The only thing I hear is the hum of the tires against the road. It’s a white noise machine at this point.
Robin’s egg blue. What was I thinking? It’s so easy, so calming, to fall back into those memories. Sometimes I wish I could go back. It was simple then. They didn’t recognize me wherever I went. Beau wasn’t missing. She wasn’t running away from her life.
But I? I’ve always been running away from mine, trying to escape the attention.
-OK. Sloane looks at me a little too closely, and I raise a hand to fold the brim of my cap, as if that might keep him from seeing me. Because I’ve always had the feeling that he looks at me in a way that I can’t hide from, like he sees too much. Are you OK? Do you want me to find a good place to stop?
-Yeah. I just… honestly, Sloane, I’m so fucking tired. I was all excited to leave and now that I have, I’m exhausted.
“Can I drive for a while?” “He says it lightly, but we both know he knows the answer. She’s the only one who knows the whole story, every dirty detail. Everyone else has bits and pieces, but with Sloane, I told it all. She was too young to really understand, which I think meant she was too young to judge me.
Sometimes I wonder if he judges me now.
I keep an eye on the rocky elevations of the surrounding mountains, so high and ominous that they can be seen from the city. We are already in the middle of them, crossing the undulating yellowish foothills and entering the jutting peaks crowned with immaculate snow.
-No. Not with the load we carry. You have no experience with that.
His eyes narrow, and I feel it more than I see it.
-And you do?
One of my shoulders rises.
“Not recently.” But yes, I have hauled many loads of hay in the summer when I was younger. You don’t live at Wishing Well Ranch and become a country boy.
He doesn’t answer, but instead pulls out his phone, thumbs flying over it. I see a call come in and the screen flashes. Sterling. He quickly rejects her and continues searching.
“Are you ever going to talk to him?”
There is a town called Rose Hill that has a hotel next to a lake. It looks pretty.
I nod.
-I know it.
-Yeah?
-Yeah. We had a dry land training camp there once. Beautiful place. How far away do you say?
-Thirty minutes. Turn off at junction 91.
-OK. I just need you to keep talking to me.
He straightens in his seat.
-OK. What do you want to talk about? Should we badmouth your coach for forcing you to be out?
I growl a laugh.
-No. I have already asked you a question.
Her head turns away from me to look out the window and she taps the tip of her nose with a finger thoughtfully.
“I forgot what it was.”
My lips squish and I squeeze the steering wheel with my palms. He’s lying, but it doesn’t matter. We both have secrets to keep.
“I asked you if you were ever going to talk to him.
-Who? Big turquoise eyes turn in my direction, and I give him an amused look.
“Are you tapping your nose so it doesn’t grow, Pinocchio?”
“I don’t want to talk about that with you.”
I ignore the pain in my chest, realizing how we’ve drifted apart this past year with Sterling in the picture. Who walked away first? When did it happen? Did you notice that he was looking at you differently?
“Well, there’s no one else here, and I know how your head works. You talk things out. And I’m good at listening. So spill.
His laugh is soft and silent. I know you must be thinking about the way you would talk to me as a child while I sat brooding.
It’s hilarious that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“I don’t know if he really deserves my words,” that’s how he begins, and I swear he sucks all the air out of the cabin. The more I think about it, the more angry I am, with myself more than with anyone. I played along and let him talk to me like he did, belittle me like he did. And I never cared. I was going through the motions, I think. Focusing on the ballet company. Focusing on my parents. Focusing on everyone else, and now I look at myself and… I don’t like what I see. I don’t like the decisions I’ve made. And I think ignoring it, as petty as it may be, is a choice I like right now. I don’t even know what I have to say to him, you know? I’m clinging to what little sanity I have and I don’t want to share it with him. You can’t have it.
I nod and wring my hands on the steering wheel, resisting the urge to reach out and touch her, to tell her how proud I am of her. To tell her that she could be mine. Because I told her I would listen to her, and she doesn’t need me complicating her already complicated feelings. And she definitely doesn’t need my seal of approval on them.
Feelings don’t work like that: they are what they are, regardless of what other people think.
I have been told repeatedly that I am not responsible for what happened on that highway, but that doesn’t change how I feel.
I feel responsible.
I feel bad for my father. “Icy tendrils slide down my spine. As far as I’m concerned, his father is a colossal piece of shit, but I’m not going to be the one to tell him that. I don’t know if he would forgive me. But I’m also very angry with him. The messages he left me…” He clenches his upper teeth tightly on his lower lip, as if hurting himself would ease the pain of his father’s betrayal.