Homecoming Two

Brad's jeans barely fit him anymore, creaking soft as he folds himself stiff into the car.  He bends low to slide across the leather in his sports car, orgasm red and aged with the wear of 80's hair metal and cracks in the makeup of a showgirl.

"Ready Freddy?" Brad asks me, and squeals onto the highway before I can get my seat belt on.

He shouts over glittery disco.

"So Adam moved your stuff back but rearranged it to fit the new floor plan."

"Okay," I yell back.

"The twins are in Joshua's van."

"Okay."

And we settle into silence beneath the music, the sky blackening as we drive south.

Brad's hair is getting longer, and his eyes squint into the distance even through the soft twilight.  He smells like cologne Bonnie likes and sweat from packing up our home we're now abandoning.  He looks in control of himself, and adult in a way I think I never will.  He tugs at the buttons at the throat of his blue polo, always unbuttoned but providing distraction.  The heater blasts at us hard enough to move the ends of our hair, and I adjust a travel mug of coffee in a cup-holder by his knee.

The reality of the drive is 20 hours with traffic, scenery, and tolls, but Brad drives me through the back roads of the universe to our home again, passing scenery and landscape that exists only between us.  The speedometer of the car hovers, waving gently at 90 miles per hour.  The number beneath the stark white and smoothly-applied 90 is a smaller orange and digital 140 to mark kilometers.  The dial rolls slowly as we race around coastal turns; 204566], 204567], 204568]... 

Brad's exuberance, and his speed, and his twitching legs, make the inside of the car a place to party.  He rolls down the window in the freezing rain and goosebumps raise on his bare arms.  I used to write moments, and now I write stories, convinced of the value of a shared understanding.  Brad drives fast enough to rob me of it, his laughter somehow malicious as it steals from me all the ability I'll later have to describe it.  Like I can't catch him.  Like we're driving someplace pure.

The bridge unrolls from around a slow corner, the salt of the Atlantic peppering the cold night with a smell like metal and mistake.  It's distant point makes the car feel slower, and the music shifts to something smooth and dark, the beat throbbing the windows in time with the red lights at the top of the bridge's cables, to tell low-flying planes to beware.  

The skyline teases out from behind the fog; a skirt lifted, a curtain parted.  We get trapped in the drowsy hurtle, the dragging commute, the relativity of time and space.  Bruce Springsteen elbows his way through the chaos to pull focus on the road ahead, as we cross over the land and into the artificial space of the bridge.  We pass the suspension cables with a blur, and Brad nudges the music down.

"Nice bridge," he teases, and I blush.  

"I don't know what your thing is about them," I wonder, but only because I want him to say.  I cover up with the warmth of his leather jacket, slung careless into the space passing for a backseat but really is the final resting place for cans of Coke and rapidly aging and empty cigarette packs.  

"It's how I want to go," he explains.  "A swan-dive into the bay."

"Why?"

"Because..." he grins, flipping his blonde lank out of his eyes, the roundness of his nose apparent in profile and somehow juvenile against the age of his stare.  "You'd never be able to get over it again."

I look out into the fog around us, imagining his long body arcing painfully against the sky, falling quickly with a tiny splash into the black below.  

"What do you mean?" I ask, my voice softer.

"You'd never cross that bridge again," he smiles.  "You'd never go there.  No one would.  They'd stop there and that's where the world would end."

"Not Clyde," I dare him, and his eyes turn to steel, and his mouth softens to an expression of a love I don't understand.

"Clyde," he disagrees, and presses the brakes to slow us to 45.

The city leaps up with an ache in my chest for it's nearness.  The clean rain coming up the coastline batters the faces of it's skyscrapers, lights dappling the neon glow of the clouds.

"This is what I was talking about, to Bonnie," I tell him, and he smiles with conspiracy, and makes a left turn, his blinker flashing red onto the bricks of an investment bureau.  


"Do you want me to show you around?" he asks, his tone creeping into a lower register.  I'm convinced suddenly that if I turn, his hair will be dark, maybe even red, and his eyes will be vicious.  

"What do you know about it?" I ask him, avoiding turning my head, and I hear him chuckle deep and threatening.

"Oh, I get around," he assures me, and his car cruises through the financial district, the shadowed glass in every doorway gleaming from the headlight's glare and the sweep of a Maglite of a night watchman.  

I become her in small dissolutions of fear.  Something more innocent, maybe even naive, than I could ever be before.  There's a difference between acting innocent and being it, I think, but what that difference is, I'll never know.  Maybe just the belief in one over the other, and if so, I have no idea where that places me.  

I get smooth under him, and absolute.  He lets me curl under his jacket and rolls up the window with a primordial mechanized whine.  His hands still from their nervous revolutions on the wheel.  Every song becomes the kind of lullaby we know.  

"I used to dance there," I tell him, pointing to a neon sign crossing the landscape of financiers and into the places they buy their cocaine.  Green sign, reading one word which trails into the sky forever.

"I remember," he says, but I know he doesn't.  

He points to a coffee shop on the corner of Martinique and Palomino.  It has a turquoise sign proclaiming it to be a beacon in the darkness of this place, the street wet and reflecting it to the sky again.  It reads in bright white lettering, "DINO'S DINER."  

The insides are lit soft and clean, nearly every booth empty in the late hour.

"That's where we met," he reminds me, and I get shy, although we didn't.  

"In the rain, like this," he urges, and make-believe becomes memory so fast, I fail to remark on it's passing.  

"I had a flat," I admit, my voice a soft chime against the rush of air on the windshield.

"What?" he asks, and I repeat myself, no louder than before.

"Right," he smiles, and I realize I'm a movie star, and so is he.

The kind of exposition required to make a scene for an audience is the same we create for one another.  People seldom have a conversation the way we do, remarking on the unfolding of events in a way to create the memory itself.  I realize one of us must be Exposition, and if it were anyone, it might be Nick.

"I'm Marilyn Monroe," I tell him, too shy to meet his eyes.  It's an embarrassing thing, or a ludicrous thing.  Something that makes me leprous and inauthentic.  I start to cry in the dark of the car as the diner disappears behind us, the girl with the flat tire in the rain passing by with it.

Brad's hand finds mine between the seats, over the travel mug of coffee, and he squeezes hard.

"I'm James Dean," he argues, and I glance at him.

"Well," I say, noticing the pure regret on his face, "are you sure you don't want me to drive?"

"Evie," he sighs, his breath catching in half of a laugh.

We stop in a parking lot at the edge of town, near the water.  It might be the parking lot of the school, but the building beyond is dark, and the sound of the rain on the asphalt isn't enough to cover the slipping sound of the waves beyond.

"What would you say if this was a movie?" he asks, switching the radio off into silence, and I think about my answer until it's been quiet so long, the car forgets the sound of the music.

"Sometimes I think about these other girls I was supposed to be and I get sad they never got to live."

"Like who?" he asks, turning slightly in his seat.  The leather creaks, close and soft.

"The girl who never became Evelyn.  The girl who stayed in a bad place.  I think maybe she's still there, waiting."

He shakes his head in disbelief.

"Nah, it's not like that, Evie, you're not like a big cloud of dust or rain.  You don't leave a trail of your shit behind.  The truth is a lot worse.  All the girls you are stay stuffed inside you, ever increasing daily.  And they make this pressure, right?  The pressure just builds until who you are isn't something you really get to choose."

"Maybe that's why people run," I wonder, and he wonders with me, to Hollywood, to the west, where anyone in America seems to run, hoping to find their real selves, or escape for a moment the pressure of who they are by being someone else.

"Are we in a movie?" I ask him, and he nods.

"Yeah."

The silence stretches long beyond any scene worth watching, and he confesses to a crime.

"The photos of us together aren't real," he betrays.  "I looked it up.  It's the first thing I did when you told me.  And that's good."

Suddenly, his voice is hoarse with the rage of suppressed tears.

"That's fucking great, and I'll tell you why.  It means that I knew you were my sister and you knew I was your brother and we couldn't tell a fucking soul and some things, Evie?  Some things never.  Change."

"That painting is called Flute Song," I tell him, and he nods, his jaw tense, his eyes staring straight ahead.

"Yeah, and it's of you and me and Rosie.  And it probably means she called us somewhere, then."

"That's the name of a song I listened to once, here," I tell him.  "And I guess it must be about us."

I slide my finger over the face of my phone to bring it to life, and he listens to the dark beginnings of the song with a haunted expression.

"Do you wanna dance?" he asks, and our venture from the car results quickly in his hips pressing me to the hood of the cold red car, the metal buckling under the weight of the two of us.

"You're like when they say 'Action,'" I whisper in his ear before he cums, and he moans loud, but it's carried off by the wind.

Goosebumps on our skin, he holds still with my arms around him until our shivering forces us back into the car.