Noelle August - Boomerang

“Find what? What are you looking for?”

“That girl took all of them,” she mutters. “Every last one. She left me nothing.”

The girl again. I forgot to ask my parents, but now I’m really concerned. Could she have done that to my grandma’s room?

“What did she take, Nana?”

“All the prettiest ones,” she replies, and of course that doesn’t help.

Again, I think of the steep drop through tree branches and sharp rocks. I think of coyotes, out hungry and roaming in packs. Guilt and shame consume me, not because I leave most of the worrying to my parents but because a deep part of me, the selfish little girl inside me, wants to run away from this as fast as I can. But I don’t.

I touch my grandma’s shoulder gently but with enough pressure to bring her eyes around to me. They look small and fevered, birdlike and sunken into the wan skin surrounding them.

“It’s so dark out here, Nana,” I tell her. “Whatever you’re trying to find, we’ll have better luck in the morning.”

“But what if they’re gone by then? What if the girl takes them all and goes back on that train?”

Takes what? What train? I want to scream a million things at her, but I know she’s confused, that she’s overlaying events in her mind. She’s in a waking dream so much of the time now that it’s so hard to know what’s real.

I guide her back into the house where I help her get washed up and changed into a nightgown that doesn’t have dirt clinging to the hem. Then I bundle her into bed. In the dim light cast by her bedside table, we talk about her life as a young woman, meeting my grandfather, giving birth to my mother. I can’t save her, but I can offer her some touchstones on nights like these.

“I’ll find out where the girl put your things,” I tell her. “And we’ll get them back.” All the pretty things—whatever they may be.

I spend a little time reorganizing her room so she’s not frightened by its condition when she wakes in the morning. After straightening the house and switching off most of the lights, I bring her a cup of lavender tea and honey, but she falls asleep as soon as I set it on her ebony nightstand.

Her red hair coils in the hollow between her chin and shoulder, and there’s something coquettish about the way her face softens in sleep—but strong too. Like the face of Joan of Arc, if Joan fought her battles in Selma, Alabama, and 1960s Manhattan instead of Orleans, France.

I put a few more things away and then sneak from the room, leaving the door cracked open just an inch, the way I liked it when I was a kid. I turn out all the other lights on that side of the house but keep a dim hall light glowing in case she gets up and needs to find her way.

Finally, I sink into a kitchen chair and light the cluster of candles resting in a copper votive holder on the table. Their flames sputter and give off a plastic, chemical scent, but their three golden points warm me and help my bones unknot.

I put my head in my hands and tears come. Just a few. That boat feels farther away than ever, my nana the smallest speck on a gray horizon.

After a minute, I brush at my eyes. She’s still here, I remind myself. And with my camera, I have the power to hold her, to keep her with me in some form and share her with others.

That makes me think of Ethan. Before I know it, I’ve taken out my phone. It’s ridiculous, but I miss him. I want the connection. And I want to know what the hell happened at Pink Taco tonight. Who is that girl?

Mia: Hey, everything okay?

The candle flames shrink and stretch. Approximately sixty thousand minutes pass before his response appears.

Ethan: Define okay

No joke. No, “Hey, Curls.”

Mia: Umm. You’re safe, sound, and in one piece?

Ethan: Two out of three. No way I’m sound.

Mia: What’s going on?

Ethan: That girl tonight?

Mia: Yeah?

Ethan: That was Alison. My ex.

Suddenly, it’s like I’ve gone farsighted. I have to hold the phone out, concentrate really hard on the blue bubbles and the white type.

How is that even possible? How could I have scanned through dozens and dozens of profiles and found his freakin’ ex-girlfriend? What are the odds? It feels like it would be easier to go outside and be hit by a meteor.

Hysterical laughter bubbles up in me, but I pass my fingers through the candle flame a few times, looking for a little sting to settle me down, help me make sense of what absolutely defies sense.

My phone chimes.

Ethan: Still there, Curls?

Mia: Yeah. Wow. That’s crazy.

Ethan: Not as crazy as I feel right now.

Mia: Sorry. Should I call?

Ethan: Nah. I’m beat. Want to pretend it was all a bad dream. Or a bad joke. Which reminds me.

I wait, and when nothing more comes, I say:

Mia: ???

Ethan: I’m going to kill Cookie for pulling this shit on me.

Oh, crap.

I start typing an answer to Ethan, telling him that I switched his dates, that it wasn’t Cookie but me. But each time I try, it sounds crazy—like something a psycho jealous girlfriend would do. It doesn’t seem like me, and it sure doesn’t seem like something he’ll understand. At least not right now.

I’m on my fifteenth effort when another message comes through.

Ethan: I’m out. Doing breakfast with the ex, but get there early for the show. Cookie’s going down.

Mia: Don’t do anything crazy.

Which could mean either seeing his ex again—why would he do that?—or antagonizing Cookie, who didn’t have a thing to do with this. Both paths seem like bad, bad choices. And both paths seem like ones I’ve laid for him myself.

Ethan

Q: Do you live more in the past, the present, or the future?

I manage maybe two hours of sleep, then I meet Alison for breakfast at John O’ Groats, where I push some food around while we both act like we can do this. Remake ourselves. Or whatever the fuck it is we’re doing.

Alison asks me about my parents and my brother. She asks about the Dynamos and Jason and Isis. She chips away, getting me to talk about the people and things I care about until I start to relax in spite of myself.

Then she asks about Boomerang.

“What’s Adam Blackwood like?”

“Mixing in a little work, Alison?”

She smiles, a little guiltily. “I was just curious. Dad’s trying to get a read on him.” She takes a sip of her latte—dusted with cinnamon—and picks at her egg-white omelet. “Do you like working there?”

“Yeah, I do. I’ve met some really good people.”

My mind does a stop and pivot, suddenly one hundred percent focused on Mia. On her green eyes and sweet smile. The way she felt the night I kissed her in her mother’s studio. She was so responsive, so turned on. I want that again. I need that.

Alison must sense that I’m distracted because her eyes narrow on me, then take on a resigned sadness. She looks down at her latte. “It means a lot to me that you’re here, Ethan.”

“I almost blew it off.”

“I probably would have if our situation was reversed.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “Give yourself a little credit.”

She continues to stare at her coffee, but her eyes begin to fill with tears, which shocks me. Prior to this Remaking Us campaign, I’ve only seen her cry once, when her horse, Zenith, broke a leg and had to be put down. I pull a napkin out of the holder and hand it to her, flashing back on Raylene. This is starting to become a habit for me.

“Thanks.” Alison takes it, but she tucks it beneath her plate. She’s already gotten herself under control again. No hour-long cry for her.

“How’s your mom?” I ask, because it feels like I should.

She looks up and pastes on a smile. “Oh, you know. Raising millions of dollars for charity. Doing lunch. Getting Botox. The usual.”

Her mom is a piece of work. She’s the most self-absorbed human being I’ve ever known. I don’t know what to say next, but I’m saved when her phone buzzes.

“It’s my dad,” Alison says, fishing it out of her purse and declining the call. “I told him I was seeing you this morning.”

Okay. This is awkward. “Tell him I said hi.”

“You know him. That’s not going to cut it. He’ll ask me a hundred questions about you, then decide to call you himself. He wanted to call you weeks ago when we—ended. I swear, he almost disowned me. He misses you.”

I smile, because the idea of her dad missing anything except making money is hard to imagine. He’s a shrewd entrepreneur like Adam, but where Adam seems to have fun in business, Alison’s father is ruthless. Graham Quick and I have nothing in common, which makes me both nonthreatening and interesting to him. Plenty of times on trips it felt like he wanted to spend more time with me than with Alison.

That is one screwed-up family, but I got along with them okay.

“Well, tell him he can call anytime,” I say.

“He’ll probably ask you to golf with him.”

“That’d be great. I’d love to school him again.”

“He’ll keep inviting you until he wins.”

“Then we’re going to be playing a lot of rounds.”

Alison’s smile fades and her long fingers flatten on the table. “You bring out the best in people, Ethan.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. And I can’t take this non-Alison character any longer. I have to call her out. “You’re pretty different, you know that?”