He grabbed the room key, went out into the hall. Empty and quiet. To the right was the lobby, to the left was the parking lot. He headed for the lot. Nathan was walking, he decided, planning to hitch a ride.
But the lot was empty. He could hear the distant roar of scattered traffic on Interstate 5. He ran back down the hall into the deserted lobby.
Nathan stood at a pay phone, hanging up as soon as Miles came into sight. His expression was defiant.
‘What are you doing?’ Miles asked.
‘I called my folks… I had to let them know I was okay.’
‘You shouldn’t have.’
‘Listen, my folks don’t have caller ID or nothing, man, they won’t know where I’m at and I didn’t tell them. But I had to let them know I’m okay. I’ve always been tight with them. They’re used to hearing from me every week, man, they’d freak if I didn’t call.’
No contact with him for six months, it’s part of the treatment. Miles let the lie hang in the air between him and Nathan, wondering if another lie would follow.
‘Okay,’ Miles said. ‘How are your folks?’
‘Great. My mom, she understands me. Always has. She’s always been real supportive of me.’
‘You’re lucky to have her.’
‘Okay,’ Nathan said. He stepped away from the phone. ‘I’m sorry I upset you. I can’t sleep no more. Let’s wake up Celeste, get going.’
‘You said we should stay, let Celeste have indoor time.’
‘I was wrong. You were right.’
‘Wow. Me. Right.’ He wanted to say, Stop lying. Tell me who you really were calling. Tell me why you were in such a hurry to hang up you didn’t even say good-bye.
‘The diner down the service road’s open in another hour or so,’ Nathan said. ‘If it doesn’t have mirrors all along the walls – some of ’em do, you know – we could eat there.’
‘Sure. Sure.’ Maybe he had been calling his parents. ‘But we’d better get up and get on the road.’ Or he’s called the police, and in five seconds I’ll hear the sirens.
But there was only the quiet of the night, and they went back to the room, Nathan averting his eyes from the mirror that hung over the sink counter, stretching on the bed. He wouldn’t call the police, not from the lobby, not when I might catch him, Miles decided. He’d just run, get clear away.
He let Celeste sleep another hour. The motel stayed quiet, still, until the sounds of showers rushing through pipes, coughs in the hallway, the distant thrum of a truck pulling out of the lot, announced the new day.
They walked to the diner in the morning chill. Celeste huddled close to him, and as they reached the glass doors he saw her face on the cover of the morning’s USA Today, an old publicity photo from when she’d won the five million, grinning out at the world from a vending machine.
‘Uh-oh,’ Miles said.
‘What?’ Then Celeste saw herself, put her face into Miles’s shoulder.
A couple coming out of the diner, chatting, smiled a good morning at them. Then the woman followed their gazes, riveted on the newspaper dispenser.
Miles steered Nathan and Celeste back toward the hotel. He peeled out of the lot, thinking, Those people didn’t see her face and the picture, they couldn’t have, but as they shot by the diner the couple were still standing there, studying the front page of the paper they’d pulled from the machine.
FORTY
Andy rode with them, talking, murmuring, all the way to Fish Camp.
The town lived up to its simple name. Highway 41 wound high into the mountains, and a few miles before Yosemite the town stood before them: a couple of modest stores, a wide fishing pond, a scattering of rental properties and modest homes, a couple of bed-and-breakfasts and restaurants on the mountain’s side, a scruffy 1950s motel called the Yosemite Gateway on the narrow ribbon of highway. Tall pines covered the landscape; every trash can in the motel lots and along the roadside was metal, with cover mechanisms to keep the bears from foraging in the garbage. To Miles, who had spent his entire life in Florida before that life ended, the mountains and the forests reminded him of drawings from a German storybook he’d had as a child.
Miles checked them into the Gateway, two adjoining rooms with a connecting door between them.
‘Where’s my room?’ Andy asked. ‘Okay, I’ll just stay with you all.’
He’s angry because you’re close, Miles thought. Close to Frost, close to having a way to banish him from your head, once and for all.
Nathan landed on one of the twin beds in his and Miles’s room and stretched out. Miles noticed Nathan kept glancing at the digital clock.
‘I think Nathan has an engagement on his calendar, Miles,’ Andy said.
‘Now what do we do?’ Celeste asked.
‘Find Edward Wallace. But first, we’re dyeing your hair,’ Miles said. ‘We can’t have anyone recognizing you from the newspaper, and if you’re on the front page of USA Today, I bet you’re on television too.’
‘I don’t think I can go out anymore,’ she said. ‘I need walls right now. I need – I need to cut myself.’ She swallowed, braced her shoulder against the door frame.
Miles went down to the motel office and asked for a rubber band. He brought it back, went into her room where Celeste sat at the end of the bed, knelt before her, took her hand, slipped it on her wrist.
‘We are so not engaged,’ she said. ‘But thanks. The urge passed.’
He wished he had a rubber band to drive away Andy. Then he heard the soft, deliberate crack of glass. ‘Oh, goddamn.’ He rushed back to his room. Nathan stood, his fist covered by the room’s chipped and faded ice bucket, the bathroom mirror fractured, two jagged Nathans frowning back at him from the glass.
‘Can’t you control yourself for just one blessed minute?’ Miles said.
Nathan let the ice bucket fall to the floor, walked past Miles, threw himself back on the bed. ‘I’ll remember that when you start talking to air.’
‘We don’t need trouble with the motel, we don’t need attention, we can’t have anyone remembering us. Do you understand?’
‘Sir, yes, sir,’ Nathan said into the pillow. ‘But I can’t calm down. I can’t. I need my meds, man, now.’ Desperation kicked in to his voice.
‘Miles, take it easy,’ Celeste said. ‘He can’t help himself…’
‘I’m sick of it. Sick of being sick.’ Miles stumbled outside. The air, in May, was still chilly, cooler than the high desert of Santa Fe, and fingers of snow hid in the shadows of the heavy pines and furrows of land between the rental cabins. The air was crisp in his lungs, against his face.
He walked away from the car, from the motel, from the intermittent swoosh of passing cars heading the final two miles to Yosemite.
I can’t do this, he thought. I can’t keep them calm and straight and focused. He had no real plan after finding Edward Wallace, and he didn’t want to admit his uncertainty to himself or to the others. How did you expose a conspiracy and have anyone believe you? What if, in bringing Frost to light, he killed the medicine’s chances for acceptance and production because of its illicit creation? What if they got caught just because they went to get food and a television fan recognized Celeste? The whole enterprise was tottering, ready to collapse in rubble and dust, burying him under what he thought had been an impulse, a need to Do the Right Thing.
He stopped at the motel’s corner, leaned his head against the brick. He took a fortifying breath of mountain air. He could do this. He had to, he had no choice. Celeste needed Frost, so did Nathan. They needed help. They needed him.
‘No one really needs anyone,’ Allison said to him from the corner.
He raised his head and she was leaning against the bricks, dressed in the clothes she had worn the last morning of her life.
His breath caught in his throat, he shook his head, closed his eyes. Counted to ten.
He looked again. She was still there, her arms crossed.