She paused for a moment. The living room seemed to have sunk a few inches deeper into the ground, weighed down with the story.
As she’d started to speak, her voice weirdly relentless, trudging its way through the words, instantly my head switched off the lights and film-reeled: I saw Jade in grainy twilight (tight jeans, umbrella-thin) marching determinedly through the weedy junk along a highway — one in Texas or New Mexico — her gold hair ignited by the headlights, her face red from the unblinking eyes of the cars. But then, when I barreled past her in my mental eighteen-wheeler, I looked back and saw with surprise, it wasn’t Jade: only a girl that looked like her. Because “hitchhiked with truckers” didn’t sound like her and neither did the “beautiful, fragile” friend. Dad said it took a certain, rare revolutionary spirit to abandon “one’s home and family, however bleak the conditions, and hurtle oneself into the unknown.” Sure, every now and then, Jade slipped into handicapped stalls with hombres taking their fashion Must Haves off of Wanted posters, got so drunk her head hung from her shoulders like a squirt of glue, but for the girl to take such a chance, a running leap into the air and not be sure where she’d land, if she’d even make it to the other side — it seemed unbelievable. Of course, no detailed history of a human being could be laughed at or dismissed out of hand: “Never presume to know what a person is, was, or will be capable of,” Dad said.
“Leulah was in a similar situation,” Hannah continued. “Ran away with her math teacher when she was thirteen, too. She said he was handsome and passionate. In his late twenties. Mediterranean. I want to say Turkish. She thought she was in love. They made it all the way to — where was it…Florida, I think, before he was arrested.” She took a long drag on her cigarette, letting the smoke drool out of her mouth as she talked on. “This was at her school before St. Gallway, somewhere in South Carolina. Anyway, Charles was a ward of a state for most of his life. His mom was a prostitute, junkie — the usual fare. No dad. Finally, he was adopted. Nigel, too. Both of his parents are in a Texas prison for killing a police officer. I can’t remember the exact circumstances. But they shot him dead.”
She raised her chin, staring at the cigarette smoke cowering above the lamp. It seemed deathly afraid of Hannah — as I was, in that moment. I was afraid of her tone of voice, which threw out these secrets impatiently as if she’d been forced to play a dull game of horseshoes.
“It’s kind of funny,” she continued (and she must have sensed my alarm because her voice was now pasteled, the harsher edges shaded with fingertips), “the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life — your success — depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary.” Her lips curled into a laugh before there was sound. (She’d been poorly dubbed.) “But it doesn’t, you know. You wouldn’t believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on. Some people pull the trigger and it all explodes in front of them. Other people run away. And you have no idea what you’ll do until you’re there. When your moment comes, Blue, don’t be afraid. Do what you need to do.”
She pulled herself upright, swung her bare feet onto the carpet, stared at her hands. They sat on each leg crumpled and useless like Dad’s discarded lecture beginnings. A piece of her hair had fallen over her left eye, turning her into a pirate, and she didn’t bother tucking it behind her ear.
Meanwhile, my heart was trying to crawl into my mouth. I didn’t know if it was right to passively sit there, listening to these awful skin-and-bones confessions, or to try to run for it, scramble to the door, fling it open with the force of Scipio Africanus when he ruthlessly sacked Carthage, sprinting to the truck, taking off into the pillaged night, gravel flying, tires wailing like captives. But where would I go? Back to Dad, like some president’s middle initial no one remembered, like some day in History on which nothing groundbreaking occurred apart from a few Catholic missionaries arriving in the Amazon and a minor native uprising in the East.
“And then Milton,” Hannah said, her voice sort of caressing his name. “He was involved in that street gang — I can’t remember what it was, something ‘night’—”
“Milton?” I repeated. I saw him immediately: junkyard, leaning against a chain-link fence (he was always swaybacked against something), combat boots, one of those scary nylon scarves in red or black knotted over his head, his eyes tough, his skin faintly rifle colored.
“Yes. Milton.” She repeated, mimicking me. “He’s older than everyone thinks. Twenty-one. God — don’t let on you know. He had a few lost years, blackouts, when he doesn’t even remember what he did. He lived on the streets…raised hell. But of course, I understand. When you don’t know what to believe, you feel like you’re sinking, so you grab on to as many different ideas as possible. Even the crazy ones. Eventually one will keep you afloat.”
“So this was when he was in Alabama?” I asked.
She nodded.
“So that must be why he got his tattoo,” I said.
I’d seen it by now — the tattoo — and the breathtaking occasion in which he’d shown it to me had become a timeless film clip I replayed incessantly in my head. We’d been alone in the Purple Room — Jade and the others had gone to the kitchen to make pot brownies — and Milton was fixing himself a drink at the bar, plopping ice cubes into his glass, leisurely, as if counting out ducats. He’d pushed up the long shirtsleeves of his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, so on his right bicep I could just make out the black toes of something. “You wanta see it?” he’d asked suddenly, and then strolled over to me, whiskey in hand, sitting down, hard, so his back collided with my left knee, the couch wincing. His brown eyes stapled to mine, he pulled up the sleeve, sloooowly — obviously enjoying my rapt attention — to reveal, not the crude black splotch everyone at St. Gallway whispered about, but a cheeky cartoon angel the size of a beer can. She was winking like a lascivious grandpa, one chubby knee in the air, the other leg straight down as if she’d frozen solid doing a jackknife off a diving board. “There she is,” Milton said in his drooping voice, “Miss America.” Before I could speak, hunt and gather a few words, he’d stood, pushed the sleeve down and wandered from the room.
“Yes,” Hannah said abruptly. “So anyway,” she was tapping out another cigarette, “they all had things happen to them, earthquakes, you know, when they were twelve, thirteen, things most people don’t have the guts to recover from.” She lit it swiftly, tossed the matches onto the coffee table. “Know anything about The Gone?”
Hannah, I noticed, had been about to run out of gas when she talked about Milton. If she’d started out in a slick and self-assured Monte Carlo roadster with Jade’s story, by the time Milton’s yarn rolled around, she was in one of those rusty jalopies panting along the side of the highway, hazards on. I sensed she was experiencing pangs of remorse about what she was doing, weighing me down with this confession; her face looked like a pause between sentences as her mind ran back over to the words she’d just said, poking them, listening to their little heartbeats, hoping they weren’t fatal.