Niagara Motel (10 page)

“All right, well, thanks, I guess,” I said to the bartender.

“Anytime, son.”

I looked at him hard. “I am
not
your son,” I said. Then I turned and walked out of the bar.

Outside, I sat down hard on the curb and held my head in my hands. I pressed my fingers into my eyelids until all I could see were dark red dots. After that, I looked up at the restaurant above the bar. It was all blurry and the red dots were still there, but I could see that it wasn't Melville's, the restaurant that John Allen Hill, Carla's sometimes-boyfriend, owns. It was a stupid looking restaurant called The Hampshire House. They had tricked me. They had made me believe that this was a real place, a place where I could go, and it would be exactly the same inside as it was on the show and Sam would be there and everyone would be there and everyone would know my name. But it wasn't that place. It wasn't it at all. It was just some dumb bar across from some dumb gardens with some dumb restaurant on top and no one was there and Sam especially wasn't there, because he was in Hollywood because he was a star.

“You're not going to cry, are you?” Meredith sat down beside me and lit a cigarette.

“No,” I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve.

“That's good.”

“They make it look so real on TV,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” she nodded, looking back at the bar. “They do.”

“We have to go to Los Angeles,” I said.

She blew a smoke ring that turned into a unicycle and pedaled away. “Do you have any idea how far that is?”

“Yes,” I said. “It's the other ocean.”

Meredith knocked the ash off her cigarette and we watched a horde of pigeons cluster around a woman in the park across the street. She was feeding them chunks of bread that she ripped from a loaf. More and more and more of them gathered around her, beating their wings together until it sounded like distant thunder. Then the woman gave up and just threw the whole loaf of bread at the mob of them. They pecked and clawed at each other, scrambling over one another to get at the bread in a crazy mess of feathers.

“Come on.” Meredith tossed her cigarette into a storm drain. “Let's go get something to eat.” She rubbed her belly. “This baby's hungry.”

I got up and we started to walk. Gasoline rainbows swirled around on the road ahead of us. I didn't even look back at the
Cheers
bar.

14

Meredith and I ate at a diner called Lil Red's. There was a painting of a huge brown chicken on the window with a bright red comb. Not a comb like you brush your hair with, but the red wavy thing on top of chickens' heads is also called a comb. Turkeys have them too. I think it would be kind of neat to have a comb, especially if I could wave with it instead of my hands, but everyone would probably make fun of me and think I had some weird head disease, so maybe not. People always say,
Be careful what you wish for
. You don't always know what you really want when you're wishing for something you don't have. But I've thought about it a lot, and I know for sure that if I could only have one wish it would be to meet my real father. If I could have three wishes they would be:

             
1.
  
Meet my real father

             
2.
  
Have a dog

             
3.
  
Have Gina and my father fall in love and get married and we would all live together and not move ever again

But nobody ever comes along and says, “Hey, kid, I'll grant you three wishes, what do you want?” At least not in real life, they don't. So I guess if you really want something, you have to go get it yourself. And that's why we were going to L.A.

Meredith got waffles with syrup and chocolate chips and a glass of whole milk and a coffee. I just got a chocolate milk because I wasn't hungry. It wasn't the good kind of chocolate milk, though, where it's all mixed together perfectly and there's no detectable powder or syrup. Someone at Lil Red's didn't know how to make chocolate milk properly, and the chocolate syrup dripped down the insides of the
glass like dark blood. I watched Meredith eat, and she looked happy.

“What about
your
parents?” I said.

“What about them?” she said.

“Where are they? What do they do for work? Do you ever see them?”

“No,” she said around a mouthful of waffle.

“How come?”

“They're dead.”

“Oh. What happened?”

“My mom shot my dad and then killed herself when I was twelve.”

“Holy moly.”

She nodded, kept chewing.

“So you've been living at Bright Light since you were twelve?”

“Pretty much,” she said.

“Wow.”

“I was living with my brother and some of his friends for a while, but the social workers took me away because he was too young to be my legal guardian.”

“And no one wanted to adopt you?”

“Are you kidding?” she snorted. “Nobody adopts older kids. They're damaged goods.”

“Oh.”

“
You're
even too old to get adopted now.” She popped a chocolate chip into her mouth.

“That doesn't even matter because I don't need to get adopted. Gina's going to get out of the hospital soon and things will go back to normal. Probably by the time we get back from L.A. she'll be out, she'll probably already have a job by the time we get home.”

“Are we seriously doing this, Tucker? Are we actually going to drive all the way to California?”

“Well, you'll be doing the driving, mostly.”

She shook her head, took a sip of her coffee.

“What? You said you wanted a vacation! We can go to the beach. It'll be hot there. It's always sunny in Los Angeles. That's what they say.”

“That's impossible,” Meredith said. “It has to rain sometime.”

“Does it, though?”

“Yes.”

I saw a payphone in the corner and remembered my promise to Gina about calling every day. I dug a few quarters out of my sock. “I have to make a call,” I said to Meredith and slid out of our booth.

“Hello?” By the way she answered, I could tell she'd been sleeping.

“Hi, Gina.”

“Tucker! How are you, sunshine? Are you having a good time?”

“Yep. Pretty good.”

“Oh that's good, sweetheart. And is Mary's family nice?”

The operator came on and told me I had one minute left for my call. I asked Gina if she was feeling better today and she said yes and told me about the lemon Jell-O she'd had for dessert.

“It had coconut flakes in it,” she said.

“That sounds gross,” I said.

“Oh, no. It was delicious. I'm going to make it for you sometime soon. You'll like it.”

“But I hate coconut.”

“You'll like this,” she said.

“I'd better go, Gina.”

“Oh, okay. You be good, okay, Tucker? Remember to say please and thank you and help out as much as you can with everything.”

“Okay.”

“I miss you,” she said.

Then something clicked and the line went dead.

I walked back to our table.

“Ready to go?” Meredith said.

“Yep.”

“You know this is crazy, right?”

“Yep.”

“Like, a hundred-percent certifiably insane.”

“Yep,” I said, nodding.

“All right. As long as you know that.”

I grinned at her and we walked out onto the street and got into the Caprice and drove out of Boston. The ocean shimmered behind us like a great, grey diamond as we made our way onto the turnpike.

Near Albany, the Caprice's engine started to smoke. At first it was just a little bit of smoke wafting from the hood. Meredith and I both figured it would probably go away, and we'd check it at the next gas station, but it kept smoking and the smoke got darker, until pretty soon we couldn't see anything through the windshield but a big, black smoke cloud. Meredith pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine.

“Shit,” she said.

I stared out at the smoke.

“What should we do?” Meredith said.

“I don't know.”

The car kept smoking.

“Do you think it's going to blow up?” she said.

I shrugged. “I guess it's possible.”

“Fucking Chad. He's such a scum-fuck. He probably doesn't even put oil in this thing.” She got out and slammed her door. Smoke billowed around her head. She tried to open the hood. “Ow! Jesus!” She put her fingers in her mouth. She looked over to the highway beside
us and so did I. The cars were going by so fast they were blurry. The sky was inky-blue, almost black, and no one anywhere, except for Meredith, knew where I was.

Headlights flew by me like golden bullets. After a minute or two, Meredith got back in the car. Most of the smoke had cleared, but it still smelled like it was burning.

“I guess we'll just get to the next gas station and see what's wrong with it,” she said.

“Okay.” I nodded. “Good idea.”

Meredith turned the key, and the engine chortled like it was laughing at us. She tried again, and it sniggered and gurgled. She tried again—same thing. The Caprice would not start. Meredith tried it about ten times and then beat her fist against the steering wheel and yelled mean things about Chad and Jesus and God and the car. Then she leaned her forehead against the steering wheel and closed her eyes. “I guess I deserve this,” she said. The cars passing by outside sounded like they were saying,
shush, shush, shush
.

“Why would you deserve this?”

She turned her head to look at me, then turned forward again and closed her eyes. “I didn't borrow the car from Chad. I stole it.”

“What?”

“I was going to put it back when we were done with it. It's more like borrowing, really.”

“But Chad's your friend. What if he needed it for something important?”

“Chad's not my friend. He used to be my brother's best friend. Until he sold him out. It should be Chad in jail, not Steve.”

“I think Chad's pretty nice.”

“You don't know anything.”

“I know he took me to the hospital when Gina got run over.”

“That doesn't mean anything. The guy's a prick, all right? Trust
me. I used to live with him. He's not a good person.”

“He's trying,” I said quietly.

Meredith shook her head.

“He's going to be mad.”

“Ya
think?
”

“Will he know it was you who took it?”

“Probably,” she said. “But he won't call the cops, at least. I know that for sure.”

“What will he do when he finds out?”

“Kill me, probably,” she said. “You too.”

“But I didn't know—”

“Relax, I'm just fucking with you.”

“Oh.”

She sighed. “Nothing ever goes right for me, you know that? You should stay away from me. I'm bad luck. Here we are, stranded, totally fucked.” Raindrops splattered against the windshield. Cars zinged by.

“It's going to be okay,” I said. “Look at all these people with cars,” I pointed to the highway. “Somebody must have room in their car for us.”

Meredith put her hands over her stomach. Neither of us said anything for a few seconds. Then she said, “Get your stuff. Take everything. We'll never see this car again.”

We took all of our things out, and at the last minute, I grabbed the baby-blue lace garter belt that was wrapped around the passenger sun-visor. I thought that it was probably special to Chad and maybe if I gave it to him when we got back to Niagara Falls, he wouldn't be so upset that Meredith had stolen his car and that we had abandoned it on the side of the road somewhere near Albany, New York.

We stood on the shoulder with our thumbs out for about twenty minutes before Sherry picked us up. Sherry drove a red Pontiac Sunbird. Her hair was brown and fuzzy. She was going to Rochester to visit her aunt. There was a baby in the back of the Sunbird. It was the fattest baby I had ever seen. Its skin was all rolled up on itself. Its chins had chins. It looked like an alien that had swallowed three babies, that's how fat this baby was. I couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. Meredith sat up front, so I had to sit beside the baby. It mostly blew snot bubbles and gurgled and looked at me with googly eyes. There was nothing to be afraid of, because it was only a baby, but I didn't feel entirely comfortable sitting beside it. Meredith looked at it and said how cute it was, and Sherry seemed happy. I wondered if Meredith actually thought the baby was cute or if she was just saying that to be polite.

Sherry smacked her gum around in her mouth. She was a normal-looking lady—not skinny, but not fat, either. I couldn't see any extra chins on her. I looked at the baby. It looked like a miniature Jabba the Hutt. I hoped that when Meredith had her baby it looked nothing like this one.

Sherry told us about her job at the doll factory in Newark, New Jersey. She painted the lips and eyebrows on the dolls with a stencil and an airbrush machine and she stuck the glass eyes in and glued the eyelashes on and made sure all their faces and heads looked just right. She said she got to keep as many dolls as she wanted for her daughter, so I guess the baby was a girl.

Meredith said that it sounded like a cool job, but I knew Meredith would go crazy if she had to work in a doll factory, plus it was kind of creepy, so I knew she was definitely just being polite about that one. Being polite about stuff like that is not the same as lying, although it actually still is lying.

When Sherry asked us where we were headed, Meredith said
“Niagara Falls,” and I said “Los Angeles” at the same time. Sherry laughed.

“We're going to California,” I said.

“Jeez, that's a long way for a couple of kids like youse.” She tilted the rear-view mirror to see me.

“I'm used to travelling,” I said. “It's not that big a deal.”

“You usually hitchhike?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I usually take the bus.”

“Because hitchhiking's a whole different story. Bad things can happen to people who hitchhike. Especially kids. I could've been a psychopath or a murderer picking you up. You just never know.”