Just Like a Musical (10 page)

“I had an X-Ray done,” he said, sitting beside me. “The doctor suspects it’s broken. He’ll be here in a minute.”

A broken nose – that’s exactly what we needed the day before we were supposed go to Sarah’s place. That’s exactly what Joshua needed three days before he had to go back to work.

“Does it hurt really badly?”

“It’s a strange pain,” he said. “Sharp at the surface, but dull underneath.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “We should have stayed in the park.”

The X-rays showed that Joshua’s nose was broken indeed. And that wasn’t the end of the drama. He had to spend the night in the hospital. He kissed me goodbye and followed the nurse to the patient room.

As I left the hospital building, the darkness of the city leaned over me like a monster with long, malignant fingers. For the first time since our journey began, I was in the dumps. I didn’t even know where I was or which direction to go. I turned back to the hospital to ask a nurse how to get to our hostel, secretly hoping that I would see Joshua standing at the window. But all the lights, except the dim reception light, were shut down.

“Let me call you a taxi, darling,” the nurse said as I opened the hospital doors again.

I was more in the mood for walking than taking another foolishly expensive taxi ride, but she said that our hostel wasn’t very near and that she wouldn’t recommend me to walk alone, so I had to accept her suggestion.

The taxi driver was one of those guys who have an endless pre-made list of questions for every type of client, even for lost girls in bloody dresses and sadness in their eyes. The more he talked, the more I felt alone. When I finally pulled two twenty-dollar bills out of my devastated wallet and found myself in front of the hostel, I felt homeless.

I don’t want to lie and say that this new obstacle made me even stronger. I’m not that brave. I think I had done my fair share of bravery long before that big guy knocked my boyfriend down.

“We have a thousand and fifty miles to go. In three days. If we don’t manage to do it, he will have a broken nose and no job. He will hate me forever,” I said to myself as I pressed the elevator button.

The hostel door opened with a heavy squeal. Our room, which looked fresh and charming that very afternoon, was now sadly neglected and dusty. A demon of anguish sat on my chest as I lay in bed. I don’t remember what I was thinking when I fell asleep. I remember waking a couple of minutes or hours later, paralyzed. It hadn’t happened for a long time, years probably, and I thought I had gotten rid of it forever – the sleep paralysis. This one was even stronger than those before. It took me an eternity to open my eyes and move my anesthetized limbs. When I finally got up, the sweat was pouring down my face and the back of my neck. I had to get out of that room.

It was 2 a.m. when I left the hostel. Fortunately, I could remember the way to the little park. I sat on the bench and took a deep breath. The night was quiet and the stars were shining low. A couple in their forties was sitting on the bench on the other side of the park, laughing and blowing bubbles with their chewing gum. Were they only passing through Oklahoma City just like me?

I heard someone sneaking up behind me and when I turned, I saw a familiar face… well, a familiar snout at least. It was the same brown street dog that was lying beside our bench that afternoon. Now I had a friend. And soon another one came. It was an old man leaning on his wooden walking stick.

“May I sit here, young lady?” he asked, not waiting for my response.

I have this thing for old people, as you probably know already, especially when I see the trace of sorrow behind their deep wrinkles. And why I am attracted to sadness – that I cannot understand. All I know is that melancholy is beautiful to me. Happiness is beautiful, too, but in a different way, a more obvious one. I guess I love to search for hidden things.

“You look like Rita Hayworth,” he said, looking at me with his milky blue eyes.

“Only in the dark, sir, I assure you,” I said.

“Oh, Rita, she was something, she was something else,” he whispered, tilting his head.

“I love
Gilda
. It’s such a great movie.”

The old man sighed. A police officer approached us from the other side of the park.

“Is he bothering you, miss?” he asked.

“No, not at all,” I answered straight away.

The old man looked behind him as he was going away.

“I worked in Hollywood when I was young,” he said. “It’s the booze, young lady, booze that got me and wouldn’t let me go. That old devil…”

Another movie person. Sometimes I feel that my life itself is a movie. I’m not sure about the genre, though. It could be one of those European movies in which even tragedy looks glorious and people are melodramatic by default. Who would you choose to direct the story of your life – that’s one of the questions I often run across in my mother’s magazines. I would ask Federico Fellini for that favor, but since he’s dead, Woody Allen would do it just fine. I think my life has enough drama and spiced twists, so I wouldn’t settle for anyone else.

“I could have been a great actor if it wasn’t for booze,” the old man said, taking the flask from the inner pocket of his tattered corduroy tuxedo.

I have always wanted to have a flask. I would probably fill it with orange juice, though, but I have always thought it would be stylish to have one. Some style – I know.

“I could have been as great as Steve McQueen,” he said, drawing something in the dirt with his walking stick. “And you, Rita, what do you do?”

“My name is Ruby, actually,” I said.

He looked at me, squinting. His chin was trembling.

“But you can call me Rita if you want.”

“Names mean nothing at all,” he said. “It’s the person who gives a meaning to a name, not vice versa. So I will call you Rita.”

He scratched his gray head. The couple on the other side of the park laughed out loud. They seemed so happy that I almost envied them. I missed Joshua. What was he doing while I was sitting there in our park talking to that old man? Was he worried? Was he thinking about me? Was he even slightly angry at me for dragging him into this mess?

“I’m visiting a friend in Guthrie. Actually, I’m going there tomorrow,” I said.

“But what do you do in life?” he asked, still drawing in the dirt.

“I’m just wandering,” I said, and it sounded great. “I’ll go to college this fall to study English literature.”

Little by little, he opened his soul to me. I guess he finds someone to open his soul to every night. He was born and raised on these streets, although they looked different seventy years ago. He worked in a furniture factory when he saw a movie with Robert Mitchum that changed his life forever. Although he was already known in Oklahoma City bars as a good comedian, he didn’t want to settle for provincial fame; he aimed for the stars. He arrived in California with all his goods and chattels packed into one shopping bag and forty dollars in his father’s leather wallet. He got a job in a mechanic shop, started attending auditions, and even got two small roles in Columbia. A girl named Sue stole his heart, they got married, and she gave him a son soon after. Life was good until the booze came in and ruined everything. He became contentious and violent. The people from the studios didn’t want to do business with him anymore, his beloved wife left him and took away his little son, and his parents wouldn’t let him back in their house. An old friend from the furniture factory opened his door to him and found him a job. It was hard to leave all the big dreams behind and work in a factory again.

“But we are strong, Rita,” he sighed. “One can survive more than he can ever imagine.”

“Does your son ever visit you?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “
I guess he’s embarrassed of his old man.”

“People just disappear, you know,” I said, thinking about my father. “Even those who should be close.”

“People act like life will last forever.”

“Maybe you should try to call him,” I said.

“Maybe,” he whispered, taking another sip from his flask.

“No, I think that you have to call him. Really.”

The happy middle-aged couple on the other side of the park stood from the bench and walked arm in arm down the street. I wondered if their eyes shone with irrefutable sadness sometimes. I guess they did. Sadness and happiness are just like two chemical elements that together form a perfect compound. One means nothing without the other.

The old man raised his body from the bench, his left hand on his hip.

“Here, Rita, it’s a drawing for you,” he said pointing his stick toward the dirt. “It’s a scene from
You’ll Never Get Rich
. This is you, and this is Fred Astaire.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

He put his flask back into his inner pocket.

“It’s water in here, you know,” he said, smiling at me. “I quit a long time ago. But it was still too late anyway.”

The brown dog followed his steps. Solitude bore down on my shoulders again. I pulled out my cell phone from my purse and called Joshua’s number. “The person you have called is unavailable right now. Please try again later.” I rewound the movie of our journey and realized that I hadn’t seen Joshua’s cell phone even once. And I couldn’t remember anyone calling him since we’d hit the road on Wednesday.

I got back into that sad hostel room and tried to get some sleep, but all I managed to do was to chew the cud and relive every single moment of the previous day. I restlessly waited for the sun to come out, and when it finally did, I burst out of the bed, all dressed and ready to go. I was in front of the hospital long before the first shift started.

The hospital bill was enormous. Joshua’s health insurance wasn’t valid in Oklahoma, and he couldn’t be discharged without paying the bill. We were prisoners in Oklahoma City, but most of all, we were prisoners of time. It was Saturday morning; we should have been home in forty-eight hours, and it took us four days to reach this far. Besides that, I knew that Mrs. Wheeler’s time was running out. We had to find Sarah and convince her to come with us as soon as possible, or it might be too late.

We were sitting in the hospital hall, trying to figure out how to deal with this new hurdle.

“Okay, let’s be reasonable,” Joshua said, pulling his left ear. “There must be a solution for this, right?”

“Reasonable?” I shouted. “Look at us! We’re anything but reasonable!”

He sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

“True,” he whispered.

“I’m the one who got you into this,” I said. “But I can’t call my mother, I really can’t. It would be like admitting defeat.”

It would. I would rather have stayed in that hospital with Joshua for the rest of my life than call my mother and tell her how careless we’d been and how desperately we needed her help.

“I can’t call mine either,” Joshua said. “They probably haven’t even noticed that I’m gone.”

“What do you mean? You did tell them where you were going, didn’t you?”

He remained silent.

“Did you tell them?” I yelled, staring at his dark eyes.

“Shhh,” the nurse said, giving me a reproachful look.

“No,” Joshua answered simply. His foot drew an imaginary line on the hospital floor.

Just as I suspected, he didn’t even bring his cell phone.

“That’s brutal,” I said “They must be worried sick.”

“I doubt it,” he said.

I knew there was something utterly wrong with that picture, but I didn’t have much time to think about it. We had to find our way out of that hospital. For a second, I thought I should call Aunt Anna or Grandma Julie, but I didn’t feel comfortable calling either one of them. And it wasn’t only the matter of comfortableness, it was also the matter of pride. I simply didn’t want my mother to find out about this, and I was sure that she would have found out one way or another if I had called my aunt or grandma. Then the light bulb turned on above my head, just like in cartoons.

“James!” I shouted. “Of course! I’ll call James!”

“James?”

“You know
my tutor James. We ran into him the day before we left. Tall, black hair, he asked me something about my SAT scores.”

“Oh, the handsome guy!”

“The handsome guy?”

This wasn’t the time for jealousy or salty observations or whatever he meant by “the handsome guy”. But it wasn’t the time for being surprised either, so I quickly swallowed his remark, digested it, and moved on. I went outside to call James. My mouth was dry when he answered the phone.

“James,” I stuttered, “I need to… I have… I’m in Oklahoma and I need your help.”

As I regained my confidence and began to explain the magnificent chaos I was in, I caught my reflection in the hospital window. The sunlight in my hair looked surreal. I was startled by the contradiction between my calm appearance and the turmoil of my soul.

“I’m proud of you,” James said when I told him the whole story.

“Please don’t tell Mom,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “And call me when you get home, I want to hear everything.”

It’s good to have a guy like James in your life, not only because he will lend you some money when you’re stuck in hospital a million miles from home, but also because he’s an adult, yet he still understands why you do the things you do.

I hurried to tell Joshua the good news, but then I changed my mind and pulled out my cell phone again. I wasn’t sure if I should do it, but I called Joshua’s home. His mother picked up the phone before it even rang on my end.

“Ruby, is that you?” she screamed when she heard my voice. “Is he with you?”

That poor woman was devastated. She began to cry when I told her everything. Well, everything except the broken nose.

“Thank you, darling. Thank you,” she said before she hung up.

The sharp hospital smell inhabited my nostrils one more time.

“Sorry about that thing with James,” Joshua said when I returned. “I feel so stupid. I know he’s your friend.”

I kissed his black eye and hung my arms around his neck.

“No intimacy here,” the nurse said, raising her finger in the air.

“Moron!” Joshua said. “Sorry, ma'am, it’s my tic again.”

The nurse just shook her head with her hands on her hips. Her upper arms quivered like jelly.

“That one was on purpose,” Joshua whispered in my ear.

James had to send money to Joshua since I didn’t have a photo ID. Fortunately, there was a post office just across the hospital building, so we could go there to collect it, accompanied by a woman in a uniform, just like real prisoners. Well, her uniform was white instead of blue and she didn’t carry a gun, but that didn’t make much of a difference. Two minutes later, we were free again.

“I’ll get my salary next week, so I can refund James then,” Joshua said.

“I really hope we will make it till Monday,” I said. “I don’t want you to lose your job because of me.”

“It was my own decision,” he said, touching the bandage on his nose.

“Does it hurt?”

“No, I got tons of analgesics.”

We went to the hostel to get our things and check out. I couldn’t wait to leave Oklahoma City behind, although I was hoping to see the old man in the corduroy tuxedo while we were walking to the bus station. James sent us more money than we needed for the hospital bill, so we decided to take the bus to Guthrie.

***

“I called your mom,” I said when we entered the bus.

He looked at me for a second and then just turned his head to the other side.

“Are you angry at me?”

“No, I’m just a little surprised,” he said.

“She was worried, very worried,” I said. “They even reported you as missing to the police.”

“So now I’m a missing person.”

“She does care about you, you know,” I said.

“Whatever.”

I remembered that James had said me these same words when my mother locked me in the house because of my sore throat. It’s always easier to understand other people’s mothers than your own. I’ll bet even James has some issues with his mother.

“Anyway, didn’t you do the same thing?” Joshua said.

“Well, my mom knows where I am,” I said, imagining my mom imagining me kidnapped, or tortured, or raped by some psycho driver, fully aware of the weakness of my argument.

“I’m so mad at my parents,” Joshua said, taking my hand and still looking through the window.

“I know,” I said. “It must be the hardest thing in the world.”

“I’m so pissed off because they didn’t take her to the doctor earlier. I constantly blame them, and myself, and the doctors, and the whole world. And I miss her so much.”

Movies, death, and undershirts – that’s what my life is made of. And love. But that fourth ingredient got into the mixture only recently.

I leaned my head on his shoulder.

“There was nothing you could
have done. You must know that,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault or your parents’ fault. Life is just cruel.”

His Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed.

“And when you told me you had that heart disease…”

“There’s nothing wrong with my heart,” I said quietly. “Actually, it’s better now than ever before. Just don’t believe whatever my mom tells you about that. Otherwise we’ll end up with you chasing me with a bowl of hot soup.”

We arrived to Guthrie at noon. It looked Romanesque and deserted.

“This is how I imagine France,” Joshua said.

I had Sarah’s address written on a piece of paper and in my cell phone, too. We found her house easily. But when I tried to move my hand and open the gate, I felt something terribly hard tumbling in my stomach.

“I can’t do this,” I said, grabbing Joshua’s elbow.

“Of course you can. I’ll go with you.”

“Why don’t you ring the bell?” I took my chances.

“You know you have to do this yourself,” he said, holding my shoulder.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I had to try, though,” I laughed.

Then I started pulling out foolish excuses from my terrified mind. Maybe Sarah isn’t home. Maybe she isn’t home and she won’t be back until Monday. Maybe she’s sleeping. Maybe she was abducted by aliens. Yeah, I know, freaking out every time you’re supposed to talk to unknown people is such a drag.

I felt the blackout coming.

“I need some more time,” I said. “Let’s go for a short walk, and then I’ll do it, I promise.”

It took me more than two hours of walking around Guthrie to calm down and pluck up my courage.

“Okay, let’s go,” I said, glancing at the street clock.

But when we got to Sara’s house, I decided it was lunch time and that we couldn’t interrupt her until at least 5 p.m. Joshua, on the other hand, was determined.

“We have crossed 1400 miles, we’ve been thrown out of cars, threatened, trapped in the desert, attacked… and now you can’t ring the bell?”

I clenched my fists, opened the gate, and six steps later, we were standing on Sarah’s front porch.