I turn the key in the ignition. There’s a slight catch. And then…
Jessie’s talking to me again. And she’s saying, Let’s get the hell out of here.
“I’d love to stay and chat,” I say to Tal, “but we’ve got somewhere to be.”
“Fine,” Tal says, shutting the door more gently than I would’ve expected. “Just don’t say I never warned you. You’re dating the Tin Woman here. Look for a heart, you’ll only come up with dead air.”
“Thanks for the tip!” I say with mock cheer.
He reaches in the window and touches Norah on the cheek, holding there for a moment.
“Baby, it’s you,” he says. Then he turns back to the sidewalk and heads right into the club.
“Seems like a nice guy,” I say. Norah doesn’t respond.
Scot leans in my window now.
“Don’t worry about her friend,” he says. “We’ll get her home. You two kids have fun now, you hear?”
“Sure thing,” I tell him, even though Norah looks like the only use she has for the word fun is to make the word funeral.
Thom shuts the hood and gives me a thumbs-up. Then he and Scot walk hand in hand back to the van, the jumper cables dangling over their shoulders like a boa.
Norah hasn’t moved to put her seatbelt back on. I don’t know what this means. She turns to look at the door to the club.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I honestly have no idea,” she says.
I put Jessie into reverse and give our parking space away to whoever comes next. It gives me some satisfaction to know that my departure will become somebody else’s good luck.
It’s only when I’ve pulled out onto the street that I realize I have no idea where we’re going.
“Do you want me to take you home?” I ask.
I take her silence as a no. Because wanting to go home is the kind of thing you speak up about.
I follow up with, “What do you want to do?”
This seems to me to be a pretty straightforward question. But she looks at me with this total incomprehension, like she’s watching footage of the world being blown up, and I’m the little blurb on the corner of the screen saying what the weather is like outside.
I try again.
“You hungry?”
She just holds her hand to her mouth and looks out the front windshield.
“You thirsty?”
For all I know, she’s counting the streetlamps.
“Know any other bands playing?”
Tumbleweed blowing down the armrest between us.
“Wanna watch some nuns make out?”
Am I even speaking out loud?
“Maybe see if E.T. is up for a threeway?”
This time she looks at me. And if she isn’t exactly smiling, at least I think I see the potential for a smile there.
“No,” she says. “I’d much rather watch some nuns make out.”
“Okay, then,” I say, swerving the car back toward the Lower East Side. “It’s time for a little burlesque.”
I say this with some authority, even though I have only the faintest of faint ideas of where I’m going. Dev once told me about this place where strippers dressed like nuns and did this tease to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” And that was only one of the acts. I figured it was too kitsch to be pervy—and that seemed to be Norah’s range right there. As far as I could tell.
As we’re driving across Houston, Norah reaches over and turns on the radio. A black-lipsticked oldie: The Cure, “Pictures of You”—track four of my Breakup Desolation Mix.
This, and every other song on this disc, is dedicated to Tris….
And if this is the soundtrack, my mind and my broken heart collaborate to provide me with the movie—that night she was so tired she said she needed to lie down, so she climbed over the seat and laid out in the back. I thought I’d lost her, but then five minutes later my cell phone rang and it was her, calling me from my own backseat. In a sleepy voice she told me how safe and comfortable she felt, how she was remembering all those late-night drives back from vacation, and how she’d stretch herself out and feel like her parents were driving her bed, nothing unusual about the movement of the road under the wheels and the tree branches waving across the windshield. She said those moments made her feel like the car was home, and maybe that’s how I made her feel, too.
Eventually she fell asleep, but I kept the phone against my ear, lulled by her breathing, and her breathing again in the background. And yes, it felt like home. Like everything belonged exactly where it was.
“I so don’t need this right now,” Norah says. But she doesn’t change the song.
“Have you ever thought about their name?” I ask, just to make conversation. “I mean, for what?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Cure. What do they think they’re the cure for? Happiness?”
“This coming from the bassist for The Fuck Offs?”
And I can’t help it. I think, Wow, she knows our name.
“Dev’s thinking of changing it to The Fuck Ons,” I tell her.
“How ’bout simply Fuck On?”
“Maybe one word? Fuckon?”
“The Friendly Fuckons?”
“My Fuckon Or Yours?”
“Why is he such a f**king Fuckon?”
I look at her. “Is that a band name or a statement?”
“He had no right to do that. None.”