Page 23 of Anywhere with You

We chatted for a minute about the Grand Canyon and Mom’s garden.

She had never seen the Grand Canyon, but she had read about it extensively since she heard I was going there and had almost as many facts to give me as Cara.

She also couldn’t wait until I was back home so she could give me a whole bagful of weird kinds of cucumbers from her garden, and I pretended to want them.

Maybe Cara liked cucumbers and could take them off my hands.

Mom held Badger up to the phone so I could hear his snuffling breaths. Then we said good-bye.

I wasn’t used to feeling homesick. It took me a minute to identify the feeling.

Cara climbed back into the car, windswept and slightly sweaty. She grinned at me, and I very nearly reached over to smooth her hair. We’d become comfortable together, sharing the same space, but not that comfortable. Not that intimate.

She was lovely, though, with her curls a mess, like she’d just climbed out of bed after a very well-spent afternoon. Just like she’d been in my dream.

“What?” she asked.

“What?” I mimicked.

“You’re staring at me.”

“You’re staring at me,” I mimicked again, unable to come up with anything not stupid to say.

She had this lacy pocket on the front of her shirt, and I realized that she had a lot of clothes like that, with a hint of lace or embroidery here or there, sort of like an old lady, but in an utterly charming way.

I turned away quickly before she could accuse me of staring at her chest.

Some Puritan ancestor whispered in my head that she shouldn’t be so pretty. It was a temptation to sin.

Then I spent a lot of time thinking about what that would be like, sinning with Cara Espinoza.

Thick gray clouds filled the sky as we headed out of town, making the day so dark that we had to depend on the headlights to see the road ahead. Fat raindrops spattered with an unreasonably loud sound, as though they had been hurled down from the sky instead of just falling.

“We’ll probably drive right out of it,” Cara said.

“I’m sure it’s just a little rainstorm,” I said, but I might not have been convincing.

“Does the weather stress you out?” Cara asked.

“A little. I don’t know why. I probably watched Twister too many times. I also watched Titanic too many times. I spent years terrified of boats. And Kate Winslet.”

“Do you want me to drive?” she asked.

“No, but thank you. Just distract me. Give me one of your road trip conversation topics.”

“How about…” She scrolled through her phone. “Where’s the weirdest place you’ve had sex?”

“Where are you getting these questions?” I asked, my voice squeaking. I wasn’t sure I could handle talking about sex with her right now, not with us so close and yet not nearly close enough. The center console between us was a thin but impermeable force field.

“Do you think that’s a weird question?” Cara asked thoughtfully.

“I thought it was fun. I’ll go first. Mine is probably the foreign languages section of my college library.

Do you know what countries speak Tagalog?

Or maybe it was that time at the Natural History Museum.

I don’t know what qualifies as weird, exactly.

But we were behind a mammoth fossil, so that seems pretty weird.

” She paused. “It had really, really big tusks.”

After a moment, she turned in my direction and saw me gaping at her, before I refocused on the road.

“What?” she asked.

“Cara Espinoza. I never would have imagined you were a bad girl.”

“Shut up,” Cara said.

“No, I’m serious. I am so surprised that if you literally told me right now that you were three raccoons disguised as a human, that would be less surprising than what I just heard come out of your mouth.”

Cara smiled, then wrinkled her nose. I needed to stop looking at her and watch the road, but it had never been more difficult.

“I do seem to give off a goody-goody vibe, don’t I?

” she asked. “I just figured you were able to see through that.” She almost sounded disappointed in me, which amused me even more for some reason.

“I’m starting to,” I said. “You do have that sweet innocent teacher thing going on for you. But I guess you can’t judge a slut by her cover.”

She slapped my arm, laughing. “No way. You are not going to shame me for having a good time in my twenties. Especially not when I know you were having just as much fun.”

“Oh yes, I definitely give off the opposite of a good girl vibe,” I admitted. “But I’ve never knocked boots anywhere more adventurous than the beach.”

“Seriously? I always imagined…Never mind.” She looked down and started fiddling with her phone.

“No,” I told her. “You can’t stop there. You imagined what? That I was doing it next to the dinosaur fossils, too?”

“Honey,” she said gently, “mammoths aren’t dinosaurs. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“So what beach was it where you got…adventurous?” Cara asked.

“Bolivar Flats. Have you been out there? It’s usually deserted except for the bird-watchers. It’s just miles of sand and waves. It’s beautiful.”

“So that’s who you hooked up with on the beach? Some bird-watcher?”

I shook my head vehemently. “Never. I have zero tolerance for standing there while someone talks about migration and beak shapes. I would literally rather be shot in a nonvital organ. I would rather subsist on your granola bar bricks. I would rather—”

“Yeah, I got it. So, not a bird-watcher. Then who?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Bridget. It was a few years ago, when we were going through a rough time, just arguing constantly. So I thought I should do something romantic, something new. I had planned a picnic.”

“So, what happened?” Cara asked, catching my word choice. Not We had a picnic. Nope. It was, again, a good idea that hadn’t panned out. Our marriage, in a nutshell.

I squinted into the rain. “I packed a basket of her favorite foods. We got frisky on the beach. She said it was sandy. We walked a little farther. She complained about the wind, the temperature of the water on her bare feet, and the lack of pretty seashells. Then she stepped on a jellyfish. According to her, everything was ruined. The whole thing was a disaster. She would tell the story later like I’d deliberately planned the worst date of our lives. ”

“I’m sorry,” Cara said gently.

“She said that she would never go anywhere again that wasn’t the seawall in Galveston.”

“Where it’s crowded all the time and smells like petroleum?”

“Yep,” I said, though I usually loved Galveston. It was a fascinating and fun place with a kick-ass homemade candy store, but not a good destination for getting lucky on a sand dune. “And where you can get a cocktail quickly when you get attacked out of nowhere by a malicious jellyfish.”

Cara was silent for a minute, which stretched into two. I suddenly realized why.

“You want to give me an interesting fact about jellyfish, don’t you?” I asked, resigned.

“The smallest jellyfish species can’t be seen without a magnifying glass, and the largest can be more than six feet across and one hundred feet long,” she said quickly, as though afraid I might change my mind. Then she whispered, “And box jellyfish have twenty-four eyes.”

I laughed. “That is very interesting, Cara. Thank you.”

Soon, we stopped seeing small towns and traffic lights and, eventually, any other signs of civilization.

We drove for hours in the drizzling rain through a flat desert with scrubby, dead-looking bushes.

There were mountains in the distance and the occasional abandoned motel, but nowhere to even consider pulling over except the bare roadside when the storm worsened.

The rain grew so loud on the roof of the car that we could hardly hear the thunder. I watched the lightning, looking in those brief flashes for funnel clouds, though I had no idea if they had tornadoes in Arizona or California or wherever we were.

We’d been on the road at least an hour without seeing another car or building when there was a pop of electricity, and everything in the car turned off. The display screen was dark. There were no lights on the dash. The fan was silent.

Cara and I looked at each other.

She pushed the gas. Nothing happened.

Slowly, the car coasted. Cara steered it onto the shoulder, over the rumble strips, and stopped, shifting into park.

We sat for a moment in the quiet, listening to our own too-fast breaths and the snare drum roll of the rain.

“This is unfortunate,” I said.

Cara glared at me, opening her mouth, no doubt to tell me I was useless, then changed her mind and settled on reaching for her phone. After a minute of tapping, she said, “No signal.”

I stupidly checked my phone, with the same result.

Cara tried to start the car again, but nothing happened, not the slightest sound or flicker.

There was so little light that we could’ve been stuck in the damned elevator again if it wasn’t for the overwhelming noise of the rain.

Neither of us seemed eager to try to talk over the sound, but at last, I leaned closer to her ear, trying to tell myself that I wasn’t going to take the opportunity to smell her hair.

“Stay with the car. I’ll walk and see if I can pick up some cell reception in a mile or two.”

“No,” Cara said, shaking her head vehemently.

“What?”

“No, I’m not sitting here alone while you go off like we’re characters in a horror movie. I’m coming with you.”

“Fine,” I huffed. “Come on, then.”

With all the packing we’d done, it turned out that neither of us had thought to bring an umbrella. Cara had a jacket that at least looked waterproof. I settled for holding a plastic bag over my head.

We got out quickly, locked the doors, and hurried in the direction of California.

Within minutes, we were both shivering.

“How is it this cold?” Cara asked.

“Maybe we’re at a higher elevation. Maybe a cold front brought the rain. Maybe—”

“Shut up. I know how weather works. I was just complaining.”