Truth
“You really never told her about Heidi?” Kahlil shook his head in a way that made Kestrin feel like he'd made an idiot of himself.
“Things like this just get worse if you talk about them,” Kestrin defended.
Kahlil's eyes pressed the conversation anyway. His Middle Eastern heritage had given him persuasiveness that Kestrin affectionately termed terrorist leader blood.
Kestrin was used to surrendering. He said, “We can't talk here with half the train listening.”
Kahlil was a step ahead of him. “I've got somewhere in mind.”
“You first,” Yuki offered graciously.
Lorona giggled, already feeling the wine. “You know what my first emotion was when I knew Kestrin liked me?”
“Intoxication?” Yuki suggested.
Lorona shook her head and rubbed her eyes. Yuki looked like she was shimmying, but her wine wasn't sloshing in the glass. “It was pride. I liked that I could affect someone like him in such a powerful way.”
Yuki was nodding mutely when Lorona stumbled to her feet. “I think I need to switch to orange juice. This stuff is potent.”
Kestrin crossed his arms. “Please tell me you're joking. The bathroom? They'll think—”
“Do you really care?”
Inside the metal can, the cleaning chemicals battled the slight odor of sewage and the train wheels whirred three times as loudly, drowning out voices and thoughts. Kestrin faced Kahlil, his shoulders squished uncomfortably between both walls. “Any cunning last words before I drown you in the sink?”
“I think it's time you told me everything about Heidi. And by everything, I mean more than ‘she's the crazy bitch who screwed me over.’”
“Okay. When I met her she was crying at a corner table in the bar. I knew that the girl for me was one who at least could cry. The dream had been with me for years and by that point, I was going crazy.”
Yuki had filled her glass and Lorona's when Lorona came back with the orange juice carton and a second glass. Lorona was taking alternating sips to slow herself down as Yuki said, “So you were tickled that you affected him. You took the whole party by surprise. It was exciting.”
“But I feel like our marriage started out on the wrong foot.”
“Bad luck?”
“Way more than that. Maybe I married him because I was just so excited that he adored me.”
Yuki shook her head. “You're smarter than that.”
“Am I? Do you know how it feels to be adored like that?”
Yuki stiffened.
The walls felt like they were squeezing Kestrin. “I think she started crying only when she saw me getting near her table. Her eyes were probably as dry as hell before she saw me for the sucker I was.”
Kahlil cleared his throat, “You'll break that faucet if you keep twisting it like that.”
Yuki was a pale sheet of paper in the middle of a swirling room as Lorona said, “Do you know what it's like to have someone behave like Romeo and sneak over to tell you in an unbuttoned black shirt that he wants you to marry him, and that all he can taste in his mouth is orange juice?”
“Orange juice?” Yuki blinked. She wasn't following the train of thought.
Lorona raised her glass of juice. “It's the screwdriver from the party.”
“Wow. You remember the drink.” Yuki's face slumped for a moment as she eyed the carton on the table, then she recovered. “You meant something to him, so I guess I can't argue with that.” She straightened, gathering strength. “But did you have to marry him?” She smiled, but it seemed forced—and there was something else on her face.
A slow dawning horror broke across Lorona like a nervous sweat. Yuki's face turned crystal clear in its precision, and Lorona watched Yuki clutching her wine glass, misery leaking out of her eyes.
Lorona faltered to form the words, “In college, you went to lots of parties.” Why were the synapses all crashing together at once? “You weren't always on a couch in your girl friend's dorm were you?”
Yuki smiled wryly, and put on a fake English accent. “Dahling, don't be so naïve. Do you think I'm made of stone?”
“And was—”
“I wasn't a slut and I'm still not. But let's say a few times I got smitten and carried away.”
“And I think I know the rest.”
Yuki kept her eyes on the table.
“Oh my God… Yuki, being my maid of honor is one of the sweetest things you ever did for me.”
Kestrin opened the faucet and watched the water froth and gurgle down the drain. The swarm of unused water felt strangely satisfying. Waste was a natural part of life. Like Heidi.
“I knew that Heidi had to have her wings clipped or she'd leave,” he told Kahlil.
“And your dream?”
“I knew by then that she wasn't the girl, but I didn't care anymore.”
Kahlil sighed. “Wasn't she happy with you?”
“At first. Then she noticed other people. She'd tell me that she was like a bee, ‘flitting from flower to flower.’ A King and I reference, I think. Anyway, when I panicked and brought up the “m” word, she got really scared and started crying. I didn't bring up the subject after that.”
“She did an awful number on your brain, man.”
Kestrin looked up, surprised. “How can you tell?”
“Your voice. It's the way you talk about her. I thought Lorona might have been the evil sorceress, but this one trumps her.”
Kestrin laughed coldly. “Heidi even forced my hand for the breakup.”
Lorona expected the shock, rage, and jealousy to kick in, but, adding to her confusion, all she felt was a deep concern. “Did he hurt you?”
Yuki ran a finger around her glass rim. “No complaints. Not till he said it was over and that I'd need to do whatever it took to convince myself of that.”
“When did it happen?”
“Sophomore year.”
“Before or after we starting rooming together?”
“After.” Yuki squinted, bracing herself for the memory. “Beginning of November. A bunch of friends were having a cheap candy party, you know, day after Halloween sales, and he was there, dancing salsa all by himself, and—”
“I get it.” Lorona had unconsciously gripped the table ledge. She released it and the blood rushed back to her fingers.
“Kestrin was….there, I said his name,” Yuki sighed. “He was everything in the world but committal. It was like he was trying to find an answer to a question that he'd never asked me.”
“Yuki, I…”
“And then I set the two of you up and I'm excited when he falls for you. Half of me wants you to set him on the straight path and the other half hopes that he falls for you and gets burned so he can feel a little tiny taste of the all bitterness he's been spreading around. And—” Yuki gasped for breath and abandoned her sentence. She cautiously met Lorona's eyes. “You want to move out of here and never speak to me again, don't you?”
“No, I don't.” Lorona shook her head. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry he made you feel like you failed something. I don't even know what he's looking for.”
“It wasn't me. Kestrin made that super clear.”
“Please don't break the faucet.”
“It's that or your face, Kahlil.”
“I don't care about the faucet.”
“Heidi found my replacement, and brought him back to my apartment to introduce me as her friend. We went to an awkward dinner and I insisted on driving her home.”
“She got in the car, but she was really mad. Still, I was feeling good because I was the one who got the girl at the end of the night. We were just coming across the Aurora Bridge, heading north from Queen Anne Hill. It was raining and the roads were slick. She grabbed the wheel as soon as we were across and yanked it so we skidded over two lanes and started sliding down the exit. I swerved in time to miss a tree. She hit the windshield with her forehead.
“I don't think it hurt her much. She was angry that she hadn't wrecked my car. A couple folks pulled over and stopped. I waved my hands and told them I was okay, and then Heidi started crying like she was terrified and victimized. And then she told them a pack of lies.”
“Good grief.”
“I don't know what it is, either,” Lorona said, wishing she had something more profound to offer.
They were both silent for a full minute. Then Yuki said, “Well, do you still love him, even though you don't have it all figured out?”
Lorona wasn't expecting the conversation to shift this way. She had to rein in her thoughts as they careened through her head. Finally, she nodded.
Yuki said, “If this was a good story, like something you'd watch on TV, you'd be out in the rain, banging on the doors of every motel, pleading through smeared mascara and a wet T-shirt that accentuated your—”
“Yuki.” Lorona cut her off, but smiled anyway.
“Listen, if you were the heroine of a play, you would be asking everyone you saw if they'd seen your love, because you wouldn't sleep until you found him.” Her eyes blazed hopefully.
Lorona pulled the bottle of wine out of Yuki's reach. “No more for you. I don't believe in fairy tales and you make me sad just talking about it.”
“She's screaming at me to get away from her, and calling me a sick bastard and shrieking. I didn't even know what to say. Someone stepped forward from the crowd of witnesses and she threw herself into his arms. She can smell those suckers a mile away.
“She told this crackpot story about how I was jealous and trying to kill her because she'd wanted to break up with me. I didn't bother to listen to the rest. I let them have her. I drove to my apartment and looked up my lease to find my earliest moving date.”
“You moved closer to the city.”
“And my grades dropped.” Kestrin nodded.
“But you graduated.”
Kestrin leaned his shoulder into the wall. “Barely.”
“And you began to hit the party scene.”
“Hard. I hit the scene hard.”
Kahlil let his voice soften, “And was this when the girls became a major part of the picture for you?”
“Yep. I moved from dating to twisting my dream to justify hurting others.” Kestrin shook his head. “That previous sentence sounded way too intelligent.”
“Were you still looking for the girl in your dream that whole time?”
“Doesn't matter what I thought.”
Kahlil inched closer, trying to make eye contact. “But you were, weren't you? It was deluded and wrong, but you were looking, right?”
Kahlil clearly didn't want to believe that his friend could be guilty of heartless romance.
Kestrin sighed. “I had that dream in some dark corner of my mind, but even if I had been trying to find her, that really doesn't make it a noble quest.” He blew out his breath. “You think way too highly of me.”
Yuki and Lorona agreed that further conversation had grown impossible.
“I hope you don't remember any of this in the morning,” Yuki laughed nervously. She curled up on the other edge of Lorona's bed and gave all appearances of passing out two seconds later.
Lorona left the blinds open with the moon streaming through them and reached for her notebook, something her musician father had taught her to always keep beside her bed in case an idea struck. Kestrin had tucked a note inside it while they were living at his apartment, sometime before she'd read his journal.
I hope whatever you're about to write is good, because it came from a beautiful mind. Oh, and I don't mean that like the guy in the movie. I don't think you're crazy. Unless it's crazy about me. Then that's fine. xoxox-Kestrin
Lorona dug the pen into the paper, not bothering to keep inside the lines.
Kestrin got to Yuki. The most horrible part is it doesn't change how I feel about him.
She stopped writing for a moment, about to roll over and let sleep win, but then,
I married him because I was and I am selfish. I hope he never asks for me to come back. He'd just discover the truth.
Lorona felt the world crumpling as if its edges were paper that had been lit on fire and rushing toward her. It was a lie. She did want him to ask for her back. She let her hand fall across a patch of moonlight on her bedspread and stared at her knuckles and her silver wedding band until she fell asleep.
“Can we get out of this tin can now?” Kestrin throttled the faucet.
Kahlil barred the way. “I want to know if you're still looking for the girl.”
The sink handle snapped and pinged sharply on the wall as Kestrin hurtled it behind him. It rolled noisily into the corner. “Yes, damn it to hell. I am.” He'd pay for the damage to train property. It had been worth it.
“Do you still think Lorona might be that girl?”
Kestrin's eyes darkened, like he was about to take a vow he would regret. He said, “I wish I knew.”
