Here We Go Again, page 8
“How could I miss the chance to say goodbye to this?” Joe asks.
Rosemary swallows. It’s almost painfully beautiful. She spent her early childhood in Western Massachusetts, her college years in Connecticut and New York, and a summer touring ten European countries after undergrad, but this is still her favorite view in the world. Other places aren’t this green. Or they aren’t this many shades of green. They don’t have this many hills or mountains or topographical variety. Every time she travels, she’s always surprised to discover how many places in the world are just flat. It always makes her feel ironically claustrophobic.
There is nothing better than seeing the trees and hills out an airplane window as she lands in Portland.
When was the last time she hiked into these hills to see this view? They’re on the other side of the river from home. If she looks northwest, she can see Vista Summit, but it looks like an insignificant speck from here. She turns her head east, the path of their drive, and catches Joe staring up at her with an appraising eyebrow furrow.
“Are you sure that prominent tendon in your neck doesn’t have less to do with detours and more to do with our car companion?”
“You mean the dog?”
“I do not.”
Rosemary scans the circular path, and there’s Logan, climbing up on the retaining wall with a red dog leash in her hand. A volunteer materializes to scold her into getting down. “Why Logan?” Rosemary wonders aloud.
“Because,” Joe answers. “It has to be you and Logan.”
“Cryptic.”
“I could ask you the same thing, you know. Why Logan?”
“Why do I hate her? Joe, it’s fairly obvious.”
“Why did you used to love her?”
That question hits her like a punch to her throat. Why had she loved Logan when they were girls? She hadn’t meant to. God, she’d tried so hard not to.
But Logan was the first kid she’d seen since her dad died and her mother packed their bags and moved them to a tiny town three thousand miles away. And she fell in love with her because Logan said hi first, asked to sit next to her on the bus, brushed their shoulders together as she excitedly talked about a summer camping trip she’d taken to Crater Lake.
Because Logan was everything she wasn’t: tall and loud and goofy; brave and unfiltered, quick to laughter, quicker to tears, every big feeling worn boldly on the outside. The kind of girl who foolishly climbed on retaining walls for the thrill of it. For all of middle school, Rosemary wanted to be Logan. She certainly didn’t want to be herself.
And at some point, those feelings twisted into something she wasn’t ready to deal with at fourteen. She no longer wanted to simply be Logan; she wanted to be with her. The love grew into something beyond the intense bond of female friendship.
Rosemary’s still not ready to deal with it. She doesn’t want to scrutinize why she was able to love someone so deeply at fourteen but hasn’t managed to feel that way since.
But she can’t explain all of this to Joe. She shares most things with him, but eleven-year-old Logan is best left tucked away in the deepest file cabinet in her heart. Instead, she says, “I hate Logan because she treats people like Barbie dolls and tosses them aside as soon as she gets bored with them.”
“Maybe she’s just afraid of being tossed aside first.”
She thinks about the sleepovers where Logan would wake up in the middle of the night in tears, calling out for her mom. “She’s reckless with other people’s feelings, Joe.”
“Reckless with your feelings?” he asks with another deft arch of his eyebrow.
Even she doesn’t touch that file cabinet. “We could’ve hired a nurse, you know. Someone else who could have done this trip with us.”
He shakes his head. “Like I said. It had to be both of you.”
At that moment, Logan bounds over to them. It’s hard to say who has bigger dog energy: Logan or the actual dog. “Can you fucking believe how lucky we are?” Logan shouts. “To live in a place this fucking gorgeous?”
She throws back her head and makes a show of taking a deep breath through her nose. Rosemary watches her chest expand and collapse. “Is there anything better than a sunny day in the Pacific Northwest?”
When Logan looks down at Joe again, she has a huge, goofy grin on her face. “Have you finished saying goodbye to this place, Joe?”
He looks out at the Gorge—at this river, these trees and mountains, that patch of blue sky—one last time.
“Goodbye,” Joe whispers. Rosemary feels the fist slam all the way down into her stomach, but she takes that feeling and files it away too. She glances over at Logan, and for a second, she thinks there are tears in the other woman’s eyes. But Logan is already putting her sunglasses back on.
* * *
They’re at a complete standstill.
I-84 East is down to one lane just outside La Grande, and all Rosemary can see over the steering wheel is brake lights. The minivan three cars ahead of them seems to have turned off its engine entirely, the bearded driver climbing out onto the freeway to do lunges. According to Google, a wildfire jumped its barricade and got too close to the freeway, stopping traffic until they can maintain it again.
“This”—Rosemary pokes a finger at the windshield—“is why we don’t do detours!”
“Come on, Hale,” Logan says through a mouthful of double cheeseburger. “We don’t know that we would’ve avoided this traffic if we didn’t stop.”
Logan has both bare feet dangling out the passenger window and a McDonald’s bag in her lap. Rosemary tries to set that bag on fire with her eyes. McDonald’s added another twelve minutes to their drive, on top of the detour and the precious time lost in this traffic. Still, she is grateful for the planned stop in La Grande. At least it means she’s behind the wheel again. She didn’t enjoy handing control over to Logan for two hours.
Rosemary tries to take another set of deep breaths—four in total, holding each one in for four seconds, like her therapist always insists—but she immediately chokes on a rancid odor.
“Does it smell like skunk in here?”
Logan stops feeding Odysseus french fries and takes a big whiff. “Uh, I don’t think that’s skunk….”
“I don’t smell anything,” Joe says from the back seat, and Rosemary hears him exhale heavily. The rancid scent intensifies.
She turns around. “Joe! Are you smoking weed?”
“No.” Joe exhales again and smoke fills the back seat.
“Joe!” she shrieks. “You cannot smoke weed!”
“Of course I can.” He draws the joint back to his mouth demonstratively. “See?”
“You know that’s not what I meant!”
“It’s legal,” he says with a shrug.
“But it won’t be when we get to Idaho!”
“Honey, we aren’t getting to Idaho anytime soon. Besides, I have a prescription.”
“That won’t assuage the cops if we get pulled over and they find you getting lit in the back seat!”
“No one says lit anymore,” Logan contributes to this ongoing disaster.
Joe pouts. “Rosemary, are you really going to deny a dying man his sole comfort?”
“Yes!” she shouts, perhaps louder than necessary. Odysseus barks in response. Logan gives him another fry. “Is it even safe to smoke in a confined space with Odysseus?”
“Of course,” Joe says. He reaches over and pops open the back window. “Probably.”
“If she’s going to keep squawking, I’m going to need a hit too.”
Logan swivels toward Joe with an outstretched hand, and Rosemary quickly smacks it away. “Absolutely not! You have to be able to drive! We still have another four hours, at least!”
Logan rubs her hand as if Rosemary injured her. “Fine.” Then, to Joe: “I’ll smoke a joint with you when we get to the hotel.”
“No, you won’t! No one is smoking weed on this road trip! This is a drug-free trip!”
“I have an entire duffle bag of controlled substances,” Joe points out.
“That’s different.” Her teeth are starting to hurt again. “Those are for your pain management.”
Joe twirls the joint between his fingers like a baton. “So is this. I hate to disappoint you, Rosie dear, but this isn’t some Tuesdays with Morrie shit. I’m not some noble old man who’s going to share the meaning of life with you as he dies.” Joe lifts the joint to his lips again. “I’m not dying to help you solve some problem in your life. I’m just going to die. And I would like to be high while that happens.”
“But—”
“Why are you going full Nancy Reagan over a tiny amount of legal, medicinal weed?” Logan asks in the most condescending way possible.
“B-because,” Rosemary flusters. She can sense both Joe with his weed and Logan with her fries staring at her.
“Does this have anything to do with the fact that you don’t drink?” Logan asks.
Rosemary’s shoulders tighten. “How do you know I don’t drink?”
“Um, because at every staff party, you make a big deal of ordering only water, and you stand in the corner silently judging the rest of us.”
“I’m not judging.”
“I feel a bit judged at the moment,” Joe puffs.
“Why don’t you drink?” Logan presses, but there’s something surprising in her tone. Logan doesn’t sound mocking; she sounds genuinely curious. Her face has softened again, too. Rosemary finds it infuriating.
“I’m not sure what makes you think you’re entitled to details about my personal life. Does this usually work for you? You just waggle your attractive eyebrows and women do and say whatever you want?”
“Yes,” Logan answers simply. “You think my eyebrows are attractive?”
Heat crawls up the back of her neck. “Oh, don’t pretend to be modest. You know you have sexy eyebrows.”
“Sexy? Wow, that escalated quickly. I didn’t even know eyebrows could be attractive, and now mine have been upgraded to sexy?”
“See?” Rosemary strangles the steering wheel in her hands. “This is why I would never tell you anything real about myself. I’m just a punch line to you.”
“You’re not a punch line, Hale. You’re a puzzle.” She can feel Logan’s golden eyes burning into the side of her face. Rosemary glances at her sideways and finds that same soft, open expression. It reminds her of the Logan she used to know, and for a brief moment, it almost feels possible to get back to those girls they used to be. Maybe under the layers of sarcasm and feigned apathy, her Logan is still in there somewhere.
“You’re squabbling again, and I’m bored with it,” Joe blurts from the back. “Do you girls know what would make this traffic infinitely more tolerable? Van Morrison.”
Logan’s gaze finally shifts away from Rosemary. She clears her throat. “Some Van in the van,” she says blithely. “I’m on it.”
Within seconds, she’s cued up “Caravan” on her phone and plugged into some elaborate tape-deck aux hookup.
“Apt,” Joe says with an approving head nod.
“Very apt,” Logan agrees. She tilts her chair back, and Odysseus takes this as an invitation to climb into her lap. All ninety pounds of him.
“It’s actually not as ugly out here as I thought it would be,” Logan says, staring out at the rolling brown hills of Eastern Oregon over the dog’s head.
Rosemary forces herself to relax her shoulders again. “It reminds me of Steinbeck.”
“They remind me of butts,” Logan says. “Don’t the hills kind of look like butts?”
“Or ball sacks,” Joe chimes in as he exhales puffs of smoke.
“Or boobs. Look.” Logan points at one particularly boob-like hill. “That cluster of bushes is the areola, and that rock is the nipple.”
Rosemary takes four, four-count breaths and thanks the travel gods that traffic is starting to move again.
At least one fire has been contained.
Chapter Nine
LOGAN
“Well, this is definitely a murder hotel.”
Hale swallows and stares at the hotel through the windshield from the passenger seat. “This… this can’t be it.” She scrambles for her phone in the dark, and when it lights up, Logan can see her tense, puckered mouth. “This can’t be our hotel for the night.”
“I’m pretty sure this entire state is just Nazis and ski resorts, and this place sure as shit ain’t a ski resort.” Logan really should’ve thought through the Queer Cuddler thing. Or considered Joe’s safety, like, at all. She’s truly such an asshole.
“ ‘The Stag’s Head Inn,’ ” Hale reads off the screen. She glances up at the neon sign in front of them, and although it’s missing several crucial letters, it’s clearly supposed to read “Stag’s Head Inn.”
“This is not what it looked like in the photos.”
“Did you read the reviews?”
“Logan Katarina Maletis,” Hale says like she’s being choked. “I don’t stop to use a public restroom without reading the reviews! Of course I read the reviews! They said this was a modest, affordable hotel in a safe location with comfortable beds, perfect for travelers passing through Twin Falls.”
Logan points out the driver’s-side window. “That giant banner in front of the pawn shop that says ‘Get Guns Here’ is making me feel super safe.”
“I don’t understand! The website said nothing about the hotel being attached to a liquor store!”
“Shocked they didn’t boast about that amenity.”
“Your jokes aren’t helping!” Hale starts massaging her temples and taking her intense breaths, and Logan swallows her flippant response.
“Joking is my flawed coping mechanism,” she said. “I’m not trying to make things worse.”
“But you are. What are we going to do? We can’t stay here for the night. Can we stay here?”
Logan shifts her gaze between the guns and the booze. Her capacity to deal with this situation died around their twelfth hour in the car. Everything took so much longer than expected, and Hale refused to sing Shania, even though Logan would bet anything she still remembers all the words. And whenever it was her turn to choose the music, she put on the audiobook of Persuasion.
The only highlight of the day was the stop at Vista House. When she’s surrounded by trees, it’s so much easier to breathe. To stand still. To quiet the chaos of her brain. To just… exist.
“What are we going to do?” Hale squawks again.
Joe, who’s been snoring since dinner, suddenly jerks awake. “Where are we?”
“Nowhere worth mentioning. I’m finding us another hotel.” Hale’s sharp nails click clack against her iPhone screen for a few minutes before she screams. “How are there no vacancies anywhere in Twin Falls, Idaho!” Several more violent thumb jabs. “Oh. It looks like there’s a… knife and gun expo in town this weekend.”
Logan barks out a deranged laugh.
“It’s almost eleven o’clock at night, and I’m so tired, and there’s nowhere else to stay!” Hale shouts, her arms flying around like panicked acrobats. “I fucked this up! It was my job to secure our lodging, and I booked us a murder hotel!”
Hale is about to snap. All the telltale signs are there. Teeth? Grinding. Fists? Clenched. Creepy throat tendon? Bulging creepily. Logan knows this version of Hale. She knows the way a minor inconvenience can become a catastrophe in Hale’s mind, and how a small mistake can avalanche into a spiral of panic. Every misstep is a fuckup, and every fuckup is a sign of a great moral failing.
Hale can’t just let herself be a flawed human. She never could.
Logan flashes back to their conversation on the front porch. I thought I had to be perfect to be worthy. The thing is, Hale is perfect at most things. Her brain is like ten supercomputers all going at the same time, solving problems before Logan even knows the problems exist. As kids, Hale could conjure entire stories like spells at the snap of her fingers, write books from nothing but her overactive imagination. It made Logan feel special to be allowed into that magnificent mind.
Hale is brilliant, hardworking, and hyperfocused—everything Logan is not. But sometimes, the supercomputers go a little haywire. Sometimes, Hale’s anxiety gets the best of her.
Logan used to be the only one who could help Hale in those moments. There was a time when Logan would see the twitch in her left eye and the puckering of her mouth, and she would make a silly face to break the tension. Or she’d bust out the choreography to “Bye Bye Bye” until Hale was laughing too hard to remember why she was melting down. Logan would grab her by the hand and drag her into the woods, so nature could smooth the rough edges of her mind, because Hale loved open spaces and trees as much as Logan did.
But that was twenty years ago, before the pool party and all the unforgiveable things that unfolded between them. Now, Logan is the one who makes Hale’s eye twitch. And most of the time, she enjoys it.
Except right now, in this terrifying parking lot, Logan almost reaches for Hale. She almost opens Spotify, almost presses play on “Bye Bye Bye” and does the dance they spent most of sixth grade memorizing. She feels an overwhelming need to bring Hale back from the brink of whatever mental black hole she’s about to fall into. To comfort her.
“What’s wrong with our current hotel?” Joe grumbles from under his blanket. Logan realizes she has started reaching for Hale, her hand hovering between them over the center console.
“Nothing,” she says, shoving her hands under her thighs. “Assuming you’re angling to be hate-crimed on this road trip.”
“We should’ve painted over the logo,” Hale grumbles.
“I know,” Logan admits.
Someone who moves like he’s three platypuses inside a trench coat stumbles closer to the van, but then Odysseus lunges at the window and barks like a maniac, and the trench coat platypuses stagger backward and disappear into the night. She grabs the seat beneath her. “We should just stay here. There’s nowhere else to go, and we’re all too tired to keep driving. We’ll be safe for one night. Odysseus will protect us. He loves unjustified violence.”
