Kiss the Morning Star (4 page)

Wait, that’s not true, what I said about faith, about how I never had any. Or it is, but it’s not the whole truth. I couldn’t catch and hold my father’s faith—the competing columns of virtues and sins, rewards, and punishments. The Holy Bible According to Pastor Jake. But that doesn’t mean I believed in nothing.

I used to believe in so many things—elves and leprechauns, virgins riding unicorns. I trusted that the world was made up of people who were generally good, though they may have lost their way temporarily. The faith my mother gave me—the words she whispered when she said good night, the idea that gave me hope for the two of us even when we fought bitterly over trivial things, as mothers and daughters do, I guess—was her belief in love, a love so unconditional we could barely scratch at the edges of comprehending it.

“A clod of dirt,” says Kat, scooping a forkful of pie into her mouth. “Slight possibility of a prairie dog.”

I want to believe her, I do. But that image…those guys with their slack-jawed faces and terror in their stupid eyes. The thud. Seriously, the
thud
.

“What if we killed them all? What if I killed the first guy and then you killed those other two?” I fold my legs underneath me on the bench and wrap my shaking arms around them, tugging on my sleeves. If I can hold myself tightly enough, maybe I won’t fall apart. We are in so much trouble. The gun, the guys…the shaking escalates. My teeth chatter. Kat’s hand reaches out and touches my cheek. Her touch is light, but her voice is firm.

“Anna. We did not kill anyone. We didn’t hit either one of those men. I’m telling you, there was a huge mound of dirt; I saw it before I turned off the headlights.”

“Why in the hell did you turn off the headlights, anyway?” I close my eyes tightly, but the images play again on the backs of my eyelids.

“They were frozen,” Kat says. “Like deer, I guess. Mesmerized by the lights. I turned them off so they could get their asses out of the way.” She licks her fork. “And they did, Anna, I promise. We didn’t kill anyone.” Her tone drifts toward curt. “Can you just try to trust me for once?”

I try, but I’m not convinced. “Well, what about the guy I brained with the fuel can?” I clench my right hand; it’s like I can still feel the impact. My right hand of death.

“You didn’t kill him. But I bet he’s going to have some headache when he wakes up. Also, nice job with the knee to the balls. With any luck you did permanent damage.”

“But…”

“
Anna
.” Kat grabs my phone. “Should I call the cops? We’re not that far away. I’m sure the police can be here to arrest us within a half hour. Forty minutes, tops.” She dials a 9, then a 1. “If that’s what you need me to do, I’ll dial this last number. I’ll tell them everything, but seriously, show me a little faith.”

I take the phone and end the call, looking around the diner to make sure nobody witnessed the spectacle. “Don’t be stupid. Of course I don’t want…” I trail off, not sure exactly what I want. I know I don’t want to end our trip, not yet. Still, the headlines rise up in my brain—
Drugged-Up Teens Kill Three in Hit and Run: Police Say Illegal Firearms Involved
.

“So let’s make a plan.” I take out a map from my backpack and spread it out on the table. I don’t handle uncertainty very well. Kat slides into the booth next to me—to see the map better, I suppose—but instead she puts her head on my shoulder and sort of burrows her face into my neck. My cheeks grow warm, and I pull away, embarrassed.

“So here we are.” I point at South Dakota, trying to make this fact expand enough to push all the other thoughts out of my brain. “We can go down to Nebraska or keep on west into Wyoming, I guess.” I trace my fingers along the corresponding routes.

“Do you want to do any of these touristy things? Mount Rushmore? Devil’s Tower?” says Kat, pointing at the map.

“Well, we could pretend to be in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
.” It makes me smile to think of that movie, one of my mom’s favorites. She loved alien flicks.

“I suppose it would be sort of cool to see it. Even though it seems hopelessly cliché,” says Kat, “but who knows? Maybe God is in the clichés.”

I roll my eyes, but this whole thing…it’s just a road trip. God is not a real variable in this equation. Or if he is, where would we even look? My brain reels. “I need to make a list. WHERE TO FIND GOD’S LOVE.” I take out my journal and open to a clean page, writing the title neatly across the top. “So where do we start?”

Kat doesn’t even hesitate. It’s like she was waiting for me to ask. How far behind am I, anyway? I fiddle with the rubber grippy thing on the end of my purple pen and write down what she says.

“Art. Creative stuff. You know, he’s the Great Creator or whatever. We should try to catch a few concerts and visit galleries and make a point of talking to people. Put that down, too. People.” She sips her coffee.

“And Nature,” I say, adding to the list. Katy’s not all that crazy about my backpacking idea, despite her fondness for Kerouac’s “rucksack revolution.” I love the idea of getting way out in the wilderness, nobody around for miles and miles. I don’t even really know where this longing comes from; it’s just that ever since the fire and everything, I’ve had this urge. You know when you step in the mud with boots on, and there’s that satisfying sound? A
squilsh
, my mom used to call it—the way it tugs at your boot when you try to lift your foot, but not in a scary way like you might lose your boot forever—that nice little tug that reminds you you’re solid. That’s how I imagine it would feel to sit in the middle of the woods and close my eyes and do nothing but breathe and listen and let myself
squilsh
right into the world. Solid but not scary. Alone but not lonely. Missing but not lost.

I doodle in the margin. “What else?” I pretend like I’m thinking about the question, but really I’m just sitting there, taking up space. It’s how I spent all of my senior year of high school.

“Drugs.”

“For serious?” I write it down, but I have to fight this ridiculous urge to cover what I’m writing with my other hand, like when you’re taking a quiz next to someone with wandering eyes.

Kat nods. “Acid, peyote, mushrooms. Stuff like that. It would be an adventure.”

Adventure indeed. Is it the kind of adventure I’m ready for? I’m not sure. “Okay, I wrote that. And?”

“Church?”

“As if I haven’t had enough of that to last me all my life,” I say, but I write it down on the page. “Oh, and meditation. Prayer, I guess.”

“Sex.”

I wish the sound of the word wouldn’t make me blush. “You think so?”

“It’s at least as possible as finding God in a tree. I don’t even really
like
trees, you know. Unless they have Christmas lights on them.”

Our waitress comes to clear away the dishes and top off our coffee. She smiles at the map spread out on the table in front of us. “Are you on a trip?” she says.

Kat nods. “Excuse me,” she says, “but if I asked you where a person could look to find God, what would be the first thing that comes to mind, for you?”

The waitress shakes her head a little, her brown ponytail flipping back and forth merrily. She bites her lip. “Well, gosh, I guess I’d have to say old people.”

“Old people?”

She smiles. “Yeah, like, you know. I volunteer at a nursing home in the summers. I go in and read and talk to them, play cards, learn how to crochet, you know. Just be a friend. And every time I go there, I learn so much about life. Old people are all full of God, I think.” She laughs. “More coffee? I can get your check, but I’m not trying to rush you out of here or anything. Take all the time you want.”

Kat nods. “Thanks. Old people. Cool.” She turns to me. “Write that down.”

I write it down, but I really don’t see the point of any of this. I mean, so we go looking for God in all these places, but really, it’s not like we’re going to prove anything. It’s not like people haven’t spent entire lifetimes looking for divinity. And sure, some of them claim to have found it, but they can’t prove they’re right. I go back to studying the map.

Kat snaps her fingers. “Hey! Let’s let Jack tell us where we should go next,” she says. “What if we just, like, flip through the book and stick our finger in it to see where we should go next?”

I nod. “Bibliomancy.”

“What?”

“It’s when you use a book to divine the future. Usually you use a sacred book, I think, like the Bible maybe.”

Kat laughs. “And Anna sucks the whimsical right out of my idea.”

“I’m gifted like that.” She’s teasing, but she’s right. I haven’t been very much fun this year. But I’m trying. I mean, I’m here, aren’t I? I pull
The Dharma Bums
out of my backpack and study the faded cover. I can’t quite imagine Kat’s dad reading a book like this, even in college. He’s so practical, so solid and secular—the complete opposite of this mystical, Buddhist poet guy.

“Okay, just point to something,” says Kat, grabbing the book out of my hands. The pages fan back and forth between her fingers.

I stick my finger into the book and squint at the words I’m touching. “What if it’s not a place?” I’m pointing to one of those long exuberant passages about enlightenment or something. The kind that makes Kat squeal and me roll my eyes. This book is full of them.

“Read it anyway. Maybe it will tell us what to do.”

“Well, okay.” I’m still doubtful. “It says, ‘What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I’m a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I’m empty and awake, that I
know
I’m empty, awake, and that there’s no difference between me and anything else.’”

I sip my coffee, tasting the silence that follows. In my reluctant head, thoughts hum like mosquitoes.

“Well, I guess the meaning of that is obvious,” says Kat.

“It is?”

“Well, I mean, what it’s telling us to do is obvious.”

“Oh?” I hold Katy’s gaze, the sparkle of her deep blue eyes. “Would you care to enlighten me?”

“It’s zen. I can’t
give
you the answer.”

“Yeah, because once again, you’re full of shit.” I slap at the mosquito-thoughts with an impatient movement of my hand, which I try to disguise by smoothing out the map. “I am empty and awake.” For an instant the words fall into place—for a moment I
am
empty and awake. A laugh bubbles up.

I’m about to speak, to tell Katy everything I now understand with perfect clarity, but of course it all vanishes; once again, the ideas are nothing but a vaguely annoying hum in the cavern of my vacant skull. But sitting here—sipping coffee with Kat—our future is any one of a thousand crazy lines snaking off in all directions. Maybe that’s enough.

I pull out my phone and text my father. I think of how I felt on the road, like I was solid and real for once.
Maybe it’s enough just to move.
I send it. I can be all zen and stuff, too. Maybe my dad could journey along with me, if he’d only get out of that damn bed.

“You looked like your old self for a minute there.” Kat frowns, looking up from the map and into my face. “Your eyes,” she whispers. There is a long silence.

“What?” I shift uncomfortably in the booth, my bare legs sticking to the vinyl seat. “What is it?”

Kat shakes her head. “I don’t know. Your eyes were happy. You…do you ever forget about it, like I did just now?”

“Forget about it?”

Kat takes my hand, squeezes it a little. “You look like her, you know. Especially lately, the way you’ve been wearing those little scarves to pull your hair back.”

The scarves. I tug at the back of my kerchief with my free hand as a memory surfaces—from maybe my sophomore year—our faces side by side in a mirror. My mother’s eyes, with that strange reproachful look she sometimes wore.

“Your hair could be so stunning if you’d take care of it,” she had said, as she smoothed her hands over my frizzy mop, trying to twist it up into something sophisticated. “Here, what if we wrap one of my scarves”—she plucked a green silk from the basket where she kept them—“and you know your hair will get darker, more auburn like mine. It will be less…” She wrinkled up her nose and put her face beside mine in the mirror, leaving the distasteful adjective to my imagination. “See? You could be so pretty, Anna Banana.”

“
Whatever
.” I jerk my hand away from Kat. My memories of my mother are all kneaded through with that twisted chest feeling, the one that makes it hard to breathe.

Kat stares down at her empty fingers. “I guess I can see why you’d be angry at God.” Her voice is quiet, thoughtful.

“I’m
not
angry, Kat.” My tone is about twice as bitter as I would like it to be. I fiddle with the empty creamer container for a moment, waiting out the silence that follows. A silence that is unrelenting.

I mean, okay, maybe she’s a little bit right. I’m pretty pissed, to be honest. But not…not at God. I’m pissed at those kids for messing around with fire underneath our stairs. I’m pissed at myself for acting like I did that night, for not waking up in time to change what happened. And one more thing. My face burns. “I’m pissed at my dad for sleeping in his study that night. For not getting her out.” I grab for my coffee cup, and the lukewarm coffee sloshes out on my hand. Kat hands me a napkin in silence.

I laugh, but this time there’s no joy in it. “I didn’t really realize that.” I mean, I knew I was mad at myself, but not him. “He’s so crushed by all this. What kind of a monster am I to be angry with him?” Tears slide out of my eyes, and I stab at them furiously with the coffee-sodden napkin. I can’t believe I’m crying, right in the middle of this stupid greasy spoon.

“Anna babe, you’re no monster.” Kat reaches out and brushes her fingers across my cheek. I can’t help it; I push her hand out of the way and try to cover my eyes with both hands, but she won’t leave me alone. “Anna, stop hiding from me.” Her fingers close around my wrist, and she pulls my hand to her mouth. She kisses two of my fingertips, softly, her eyes closed. Then she places my hand on her cheek, holding it there with both of her own hands, looking intently at me from behind the dark curtain of her hair.