The Edge of Always

28

We’re on the road again, somewhere on a highway between Gulfport, Mississippi, and New Orleans. The day is perfect, with clear blue skies and just the right amount of heat so that we can still ride with the windows down and not feel the need to turn on the AC in the car. Camryn is driving and I’m kicked back on the passenger’s side, a lot like she usually is, with one foot hanging out the window.

We stayed in Mobile for a week and paid for our hotel room, all of our food, and the gas in the car with just a fraction of the cash we scored performing and Camryn’s tips from waitressing. My busboy tips were just a drop in the bucket compared to hers.

My cell phone buzzes around in the pocket of my black cargo shorts, and I answer it. “Hey, Mom, what’s up?”

She tells me how much she misses me and goes right into questions about my check-ups.

“No, I’ve been getting checked out,” I say. “Yeah, I got a scan not long ago at a hospital in—No, they just called in to Dr. Marsters for my info and—Yes, Mom. I know. I’m being careful.” I glance over at Camryn, who is smiling back at me. “Camryn won’t let me get away with not going. Yeah. Well, right now we’re on our way to New Orleans. I don’t know how long we’re staying there, but after we leave we’ll swing by home for a visit, all right?”

After I hang up with her, Camryn asks, “Texas?”

Instantly, I get the feeling she’s having the same thoughts she did during our first road trip, but she proves me wrong when she says, “Not that I have any problem with it. Just curious about the destination.” She smiles, and I can tell right away that she’s not hiding anything.

“Texas doesn’t worry you?” I ask.

She looks back at the road as we go around a curve, then she glances over at me again. “Not at all. Not like it used to.”

“What changed your mind?” I pull my foot from the window and turn to better face her, intrigued by her change of heart.

“Because things are different now,” she says. “But in a good way. Andrew, last July was tough. For both of us. I don’t know how I know, but I think I knew all along that something bad was going to happen when we got to Texas. For a while I thought it was all just me worried about it being the last stop on our road trip. But I’m not so sure about that anymore. I feel like I knew…”

I smile slimly. “I think I understand,” I say. “So then that leads me to one question.”

She looks at me, waiting.

“Will we ever settle down?”

Her reaction isn’t what I expected it to be. I expected her smile to fade and the moment to be lost, but instead her eyes brighten, and I feel a sense of calm emanating from her.

“Eventually,” she says. “But not yet.” She looks back at the road and continues, “Y’know, Andrew, I want to see Italy one day. Rome. Sorrento. Maybe not right now or even in the next five years, but I hope to see it. France, too. London. I would even love to go to Jamaica and Mexico and Brazil.”

“Really? It would take a long time to see those places,” I say, but not in a way to deter her from wanting to do it. I would love to do it, too.

The wind from the open window brushes through her hair, pulling more loose strands from her braid as they dance around her bright face.

“I feel free with you,” she says. “I feel like I can do anything. Go anywhere. Be anything that I want.” Her eyes fall on me once more and she says, “We’ll settle down soon, but I never want to settle down forever. Does that make sense?”

“Definitely,” I answer. “I couldn’t have said it better.”

We make it over the Louisiana state line just after dark, and Camryn pulls over to the side of the highway.

“I don’t think I can drive anymore,” she says, stretching her arms behind her and yawning.

“I told you an hour ago you needed to let me drive.”

“Yeah, well I’m letting you now.” She gets cranky when she’s tired.

We both get out of the car to switch sides but stop when we meet each other at the hood.

“Do you see where we are?” I ask.

Camryn looks around on both sides of the desolate highway. She shrugs. “Ummm, the middle of nowhere?”

I laugh lightly under my breath and then point to the field. Then I point up at the stars. “Last time didn’t count, remember?”

Her eyes light up, but then I sense she’s conflicted. It doesn’t take me long to figure out why.

“It’s a flat, clear field. And there are no cows as far as I can tell,” I say.

I know that absolutely nothing I just said makes her feel any better about the possibility of snakes, but I was going for subtle and stupid, hoping she’d overlook it.

“What about snakes?” she asks, not overlooking it.

“Don’t let your fear of snakes ruin a perfectly good opportunity to finally get to sleep underneath the stars.”

She narrows her eyes at me.

I break out the big guns and just beg. “Please? Preeeety please?” I wonder if my attempt at puppy-dog eyes is as effective on her as hers always are on me. My first instinct was to throw her ass over my shoulder and carry her out there, but I’m curious about the effectiveness of my begging technique, just the same.

She mulls it over for a minute and finally caves to my charm. “All right,” she says a little exasperatedly.

I grab the blanket from the trunk, and we walk together through the ditch and over the low fence and then through the enormous field until we find a good spot several yards out. It feels like déjà vu. I lay the blanket on the dried grass and do a quick snake-check of the surrounding area just to make her feel better. We lay down next to each other on our backs, legs straight out and flat against the blanket, our ankles crossed below. And we look up at the dark and endless expanse of sky filled with stars. Camryn points out various constellations and planets, explaining each one to me in detail, and I’m impressed by how much she knows and how she can tell them apart from one another.

“I never imagined you’d be so…” I struggle to find the way to word it.

“So knowledgeable?” I can sense her smiling briefly next to me.

“Well, I… I didn’t mean that I think you’re—”

“A brainless, superficial girl who doesn’t know that the Milky Way is something bigger than a candy bar or that the big bang theory isn’t just a television show?”

“Yeah, something like that,” I say, just to play her at her own game. “No, but really, where’d all this come from? I guess I just never took you for the scientific type.”

“I wanted to be an astrophysicist. Decided that when I was twelve, I think.”

I’m completely shocked by her admission, but I continue to stare up at the stars with her, my smile growing.

“Well, really I wanted to be that plus a theoretical physicist and an astronaut and I wanted to work for NASA, but I was a little delusional back then. Obviously.”

“Camryn,” I say, still so surprised that I barely know what to say. “Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “It just never came up. Didn’t you ever dream of being something other than what you are?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I say. “But baby, why didn’t you pursue it?” I lift away from the blanket and sit upright. This calls for my full attention.

She looks at me like I’m overreacting. “Probably for the same reason you didn’t pursue whatever it was that you wanted to be.” She draws her knees upward and rests her hands over her stomach, her fingers interlocked. “What did you want to be?”

I don’t want to talk about me right now, but I guess I better answer her, since she’s brought it up twice.

I bring my knees up, too, and prop my forearms on top them. “Well, aside from the clichéd rock-star dream everybody has, I wanted to be an architect.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” I say with a nod.

“Is that what you were studying in college before you dropped out?”

I shake my head. “No,” I say and laugh lightly at the absurdity of my answer. “I was in college for accounting and business.”

Camryn’s eyebrows draw inward. “Accounting? Are you serious?” She’s almost laughing.

“I know, right?” I say, laughing it off myself. “Aiden offered me part ownership of his bar. Back then I just had dollar signs in my eyes, and I thought that owning a bar would be an awesome opportunity. I could play my music there and… I don’t know what I was thinking, but I jumped at my brother’s offer. Then he started talking about how I’d need to understand the business aspects of it and all that shit. I enrolled in college, and that was pretty much where the idea ended. I didn’t give a shit about accounting, or running a bar or having to deal with all of the negative that comes with owning a business.” I pause for a moment and then say, “I guess, like you said, I was delusional, wanted all the positives but none of the negatives. When I realized it didn’t work that way, I said fuck it.”

She lifts to sit upright with me. “So, then why didn’t you pursue the architect thing?”

I smirk. “Probably for the same reason you didn’t pursue the astrophysicist thing.”

She just smiles, having no real rebuttal to that one.

I gaze beyond Camryn’s blonde hair and out at the field. “I guess we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl,” I say.

Her eyes narrow. “I’ve heard that somewhere before.”

I smile and point at her briefly. “Pink Floyd. But it’s the truth.”

“You think we’re lost?”

I tilt my head back a little and look up at the stars behind her and say, “In society, maybe. But together, no. I think we’re right where we need to be.”

Neither of us say anything more for quite some time.

We lie back down next to each other and do what we came out here to do. As I gaze up at the infinite blackness of that sky, I’m in complete awe of the moment. I think I find some of myself up in those stars. For a long time I forget about music, being on the road, about the tumor that almost killed me last year, and the moment of weakness that almost killed Camryn’s spirit. I forget about losing Lily, and about the fact that I know Camryn stopped taking her birth control pills and didn’t tell me. And I forget about the fact that I stopped pulling out for a reason and didn’t tell her.

I really do forget about everything. Because that’s what a moment like this does to you. It makes you feel like something so small inside of something so massive that it’s beyond comprehension. It strips away all of your problems, all of your hardships, all of your worldly needs and wants and desires, forcing you to realize just how insignificant all of it really is. It’s like the Earth becomes completely silent and still, and all that your mind can understand or feel is the vastness of the Universe and you gasp thinking about your place within it.

Who needs psychiatrists? Who needs grief counselors and life coaches and motivational speakers? Fuck all that. Just stare at the night sky and let yourself get lost in it every now and then.

Something unpleasant wakes me the next morning. I sniff the air with my eyes still closed, my mind not fully awake but my body and sense of smell working ahead of me. There’s a mild chill in the air and my skin feels moist, as if covered by early morning dew. Rolling over onto my other side, I sniff the air again and it’s even fouler than before. I hear something rustling nearby, and finally my eyes open a slit. Camryn’s passed out next to me. I can just barely see her blonde braid lying on the blanket in between us. She seems to be curled in the fetal position.

What is that smell?!

I cover my mouth with my hand and start to raise myself from the blanket. Camryn begins to move at the same time, rolling over onto her back and rubbing her face and eyes with both hands. She yawns. As I sit upright and open my eyes the rest of the way, Camryn asks, “What the hell is that smell?” and her face contorts.

I’m just about to say that it’s probably her breath when her blue eyes grow scary-wide as she looks behind me.

Instinctively, I turn around fast.

A herd of cows stand just feet from us, and when they sense us moving around, they spook.

“Oh my God!” Camryn jumps up faster than she did that night the snake slithered over our blanket, causing me to do the same.

Two cows moo and moan and grunt, backing into the other cows behind them, stirring the herd that much more.

“I think we better get outta here,” I say, grabbing her hand and running with her.

We don’t wait long enough to stop and grab the blanket at first, but I stop and double back seconds later to snatch it up. Camryn shrieks and I start laughing as we dash away from the cows and toward the car.

“Awww, shiiiit!” I yell when I step in a huge pile of it.

Camryn cackles with laughter, and we both practically stumble the rest of the way through the field, me trying to scrape the shit off the bottom of my shoe while running at the same time, and Camryn’s flip-flops getting caught on the ground as they try to keep up with her feet.

“I can’t believe that just happened!” Camryn laughs, as we finally make it back to the car. She arches her body forward and props her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath.

I’m out of breath, too, but I still relentlessly scrape the bottom of my shoe on the asphalt. “Dammit!” I say, rubbing my foot back and forth.

Camryn jumps up on the hood of the car, letting her legs hang over the front. “Now can we say that we did it?” she asks with laughter in her voice.

I stand still and catch my breath. I look at her, at how beautiful and bright that smile of hers is, and say, “Yeah, I think we can safely mark it off our list.”

“Good!” she says. Then she points behind me. “Do it on the grass,” she says with one side of her mouth pinched into a hard line. “You’re just spreading it around doing it like that.”

I hop over into the grass and start rubbing my foot back and forth again. “Since when did you become an expert on shit?”

“Better watch your mouth,” she warns, getting into the driver’s seat.

“What are you going to do?” I taunt her.

She starts the Chevelle and revs the engine a few times. There’s a cruel gleam in her eyes. She props her left arm across the top of the open window and next thing I know she’s driving slowly past me.

I give her the warning eye, but her grin just gets bigger.

“I know you won’t leave me here!” I shout as she goes past me.

Surely she wouldn’t…

She gets farther away and at first I call her bluff and just stand here, watching her get smaller and smaller…

Finally, I take off running after the car.