The Pursuit of Miss Heartbreak Hotel Read online

  And me, I can’t do it. I just can’t deal.

  And I’m gone—to the clattering voices of the aunts bickering, the dark, moody pools of Bitsy’s bugged-out eyes, Oma’s unkempt snow-white curls, her tiny feet like skeleton bones inside Bigfoot’s woolen socks, tubes pumping this and that out of her thin, frail body, blood, skin.

  I’m gone, heeling it outside into the cheery late-morning sun, too cheery. I leap into my banger to find I’m boxed in by all the new arrivals, so I wheel quick around the far side of her house, bumping over flowerbeds to make my hasty, sweaty-mitted escape.

  Marta is climbing from Dad’s truck and she catches my eyes, hers rimmed in sooty black from freshly shed tears.

  Thank you, call again.

  Whirling Dervish

  I finally navigate home from my tree in the graveyard, after many an hour trying—unsuccessfully—to shake the feeling that scrappy-Jacks in coveralls are running a car wash between my ears. Assuming things couldn’t get any worse, I pull into my street to find my sister and her old gang of high school flap-Jacks have hijacked 211 Maple Way, and am reminded that when Mart’s in the mix, there are always new heights of terrible one is able to experience.

  I park behind a line of crooked bangers way up the road and walk and stare out at the multitude of retro-Jacks milling about, scatting, and dragging canna on the lawn, their tripped-out psychedelia tunes blasting and echoing into the still cul-de-sac of our sterile neighborhood. I wasn’t aware a family member’s imminent demise was reason to throw down a massive-blaster toaster and I’m planning to tell my sister this when Mistress Medusa herself saunters up.

  “Word, sis,” she says, voice low and cold. “By the way, thanks for the sunshiney welcome home.” All her Jacks dress like it’s 1969 and my sister is no exception, with tight leather pants, a batik-patterned shirt, knee-high suede moccasins, and twists of purple and gold embroidery floss tied in her long black hair.

  “Totally, man. Far out,” I say, stepping back and crossing my arms, waiting for the crazy to be unleashed.

  “Oh, yeah, and way to cheese out right when Dad and Miles needed you most. Classy move.”

  “Yup.” I nod, and I try to slip by her but she snags my arm hard, spinning me around.

  “Lucy,” she says, her freakishly strong mitt crushing my bones.

  “Back off,” I hiss.

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I said so. Because I can’t deal with you right now.” I rub my eyes. “I’m on overload, Mart.”

  “That’s not an excuse.”

  “Actually, Dr. Phil, I didn’t ask your opinion.”

  “Okay, okay,” she says, stepping back. “All I’m saying is that just because you’re an emotional infant doesn’t mean you can act a flap-Jack and skip out on the hard stuff. This isn’t about you.”

  “Oh, that’s rich. Miss Missing in Action. Thanks for the life advice.”

  She yanks a huge pair of shades over her Ice Queen eyes. “Listen, whatever. I don’t need your flap-scat right now. And I don’t care if you wanna toast with us, Lu, just don’t go dime-dropping Dad.”

  “Seriously, Mart, what is your damage? I’m not, like, seven years old. I’m not Miles. I’m no rat.”

  “Well, nobody needs to know. They’re all gonna conk out at Oma’s, where she’s laid up, prepping herself to die, surrounded by her wonderful and loving family. But you wouldn’t know anything about that.” And that’s the last straw: I slam into her, my shoulder smashing into hers, her body careening back into the railing. She yelps, glaring at me, mouth wide, as I finally push by to snag the handle of the back porch door. Some short, shaggy skuzzer with pale skin and massive long dreads strides up to her side to comfort her, sliding a mitt down her snooty, heart-shaped heinie. She turns from me in a rage.

  “Clash-JACK,” I hiss after her as they heel it away into the woods.

  “EMOTIONAL INFANT!” she yells for the whole goddamn world to hear and I roll my eyes, spit a big, crank loogie on the grass. Oh, sugary sisterly love.

  And then this massive dreamy shaver, Blue, is sauntering up and he’s smiling, cracking up at what a clash cog my sister is being. “What a drag,” he chuckles, slipping a lit tar between my lips. And then he’s lolling away.

  * * *

  I wander alone, after washing away my rage in a searing hot shower, heeling it coma through my house sipping a stolen brew. And then another. Another still. My body becomes light, aloft, and I chain-drag tars. It’s bright and strange and when I’m alone in the bathroom my mug in the mirror is eons away. I park by an open box of pizza in the kitchen and see Marta heeling it up the stairs, some thick-paged book tucked under her leather-fringed arm.

  “The flip?” I drunkenly call out to the sharp line of her shadowed back.

  “I’m going to bed,” she sighs and continues to climb. I pound after her.

  “All your sauced-Jacks are still here, lying out all over the goddamn lawn. You can’t just go to bed.”

  “Whatever. It’s late. I’m hacked. They’ll get the point.”

  “Unreal,” I say, blink my blurry eyes. “You’re really something, Jack. One of a flipping kind. A real role model.”

  “Y’know, Lu,” she hisses, “Oma’s dying. Have you even said two words to her? There isn’t much time.”

  “What, did you pop an Oxy tonight in her name tonight, Gandhi? Snuff some snow just for her?” and she snorts, stomps away. I turn, stride back down the hall. The screen door opens and tunes blare in from outside. I shuffle over to the sink, gulp down glass after glass of water, my temples pounding, my brains sloshing about, half wondering why I don’t cruise my sad sack on upstairs, too.

  Instead, I sit on the lawn and drag too much canna from Marta’s Jacks’ tight, hand-rolled joints. And then I’m pedal-to-the-metal floored when none other than Dream Queen Gazelle Raine Hall, the Crush That Broke the Camel’s Back, is strutting across the grass, kill blond tresses taking flight, and when she walks she floats and her legs are so long you could heel it underneath and she would have no idea. Somehow the fates align and she magically materializes by my side.

  “Wee-Butler? Is that you, all growd up?”

  “Raine Hall!” I grin, my eyes two slitty slits. “You’re at my house! So Ophelia.”

  She tilts back her head and laughs out loud, tells me to come with for a toke in the woods and I’m so deep-fried I actually follow her into the trees and she pulls me, snaking, through the crowded baby pines.

  I open my mouth but Raine’s swinging an arm around my shoulder, a canna pipe finding its way between her lips. “Man-o, Butler. I remember when you were just a wee li’l sprout.” I lean in to give her a light and she inhales. She smells like dirt, earth, patchouli. It’s amazing. “You’re getting massive ace, you know that?” and my head sputters and spits, sparks flying between my ears.

  “Me?”

  She laughs. “Like Marta. Shavers were so hit for that betty. Probably still are. They must go Ophelia for you,” and she’s eyeing me, blowing a long stream of white smoke from the corner of her mouth. She leans in close, studying my face, and I’m near coma I’m so flip. “You know we swapped spit, one time. Me and your sis?”

  “Um.” I gulp, try not to picture it. But of course I do. It bothers me how much I like it.

  She brushes her hair from her face and I squirm, shift on my feet. “I remember you drawing pictures of me in French,” she says. “Telling me all of your worldly woes. Remember that?”

  Let me try again, I think, but nod, instead. “Maybe.”

  She raises the pipe to my mouth and I’m pretty sure it’s a terrible idea.

  “Y’know, I can’t wait to get the flip outta this crank town.” She shakes her pretty head. “It’s such a hole. I wanna take off, jetset, drop outta State School. Maybe sail rich people’s boats from here to the Caribbean. What do you think?”

  “You should for sure do that. You’d be like Blackbeard, or Captain Kidd. Like, Ahoy, me hearties! An
d thar she blows!” and I hate myself for being so crispy as she flashes me a goofy grin and leans down to finish my hit. Our faces are inches apart, and just as I open my mouth to say the most brilliant thing I’ve ever said, a gaggle of flap-Jacks saunter into the clearing.

  “Word, peeps!” Raine whoops, grinning, snagging my light and skipping away. She glances back at me once, cocks an eyebrow, and turns away and it’s as if I no longer exist. POOF, I’m gone. I stand there for a minute, my head a soggy, foggy day, and seeing as I no longer exist, I push my sorry-sack back through the trees and navigate the labyrinth that is my backyard.

  In the living room, I sink deep into the cushions of the big red couch and I feel tiny, invisible, and my digits and feet are almost too miniature to see. I don’t know why but in my haze of gloom, Mr. Blue Sky comes by, crash-padding heavy by my side, and he looks at me, through me, smiling, the spiky stubble on his upper lip rippling like a sea of tiny needles. I approximate a grin, or what I remember one was when I still had lips and teeth, and then his long, bony digits take my mitt and he’s reading my palm. He tells me I have a solid heart line and an even bolder clothesline. And I can’t help myself, I’m cracking up as he takes the laces from my low-tops and we sit and play cat’s cradle for millennia.

  “So,” Blue says, leaning back after our five hundredth game, fixing me in his cerulean gaze. “What’s your deal, Mini-Mart? I mean, what’s the beat? Such an infinite aura. And yet, so melancholy. Why?”

  “Um,” I mumble. “Dunno. Maybe it’s ’cause my tiny little Oma’s gonna up and die and she’s, like, the most perfect human I’ve ever known. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

  “Word,” he says. “I heard about your elder’s voluntary exit, Jack. Marta told. She’s pretty torn up.” I scoff as he sits forward and pushes a stray strand of hair from my face. “But I think it’s something else, Jack. Something deeper. Existential-style.”

  I shrug him off but he’s fixed me in his dreamy-Blue-laser-beam stare and so I think, think, think. The blurry shape of an answer vibrates, blowing like soft snow in my mind. “I suppose, well, it’s my heart, see?”

  Blue nods. “Most assuredly.”

  “Always been broke,” I say. “No, I mean. Yeah. And there’s no end in sight. Just sand, dunes, more sand. Not even a desert mirage. Not a drop to drink.” I stop, frown. Half forget what the question was.

  “Ah.” He smiles, studying my face. “Sounds poetic, Jack.”

  “I assure you it’s not.”

  He stands, stretching up his long arms, fingers grazing the smooth grain of the impossibly lofty ceiling. He looks down from his towering height, slips me back my laces. “Whatever it is, Jack. You gotta own it. Or it’ll own you.”

  “Eh,” I grunt. “Life is pain. Didn’t you get the memo?”

  “We’ll see,” and he leans over to kiss me softly on the cheek before turning and loping out of view.

  “Will we?” I mutter, and for a lifetime I slump coma, on the couch, singing over and over to myself a little ditty: “Se-cret. Re-gret. For-get. You bet. Ciga-rette,” on an endless repeat. It’s a chart topper, for sure. Then I get all slo-mo OCD and spell each word out, fitting spaces and hyphens into random places, feeling the different sizes and rhythms on my tongue. Just me and my obsessive anxiety disorder, having a blast, when the retro hits streaming through the stereo go mute and then this kill tune Zoë and I are massive crazed for comes blaring on. And it’s too good to be true. I’m bopping my head, the beats streaming through my veins like heavy, liquid bliss, and Blue, he’s standing above me, arms out, grin wide with happy mischief in his eyes and he’s grabbing my mitts and pulling me through the tangle of half-coma hippie-Jacks laid out all over the floor.

  “Saw your name on this mix, Jack,” he hollers. “Thought you could use a little auditory healing.” And right there he starts slicing it up. His big feet go quick-stepping, limbs flailing, whole body careening in mad joy to the crunchy beats and I’m laughing so hard at his crazy octopus arms I can barely breathe.

  “You really mean what you said,” I yell, leaning into him. “About, like, poetry, and owning it, or whatever?”

  He grins. “Broken heart, that’s not such a bad rap. Just means y’got something real, something worth the good fight. Most don’t even have that. Most are dead already.”

  And I stop, my laughter fading away. I let his words sink slowly in.

  And I think of Oma.

  Not living, but dying. Actively. Confronting the void.

  Eyes wide open.

  And I think of Eve Brooks, and Ms. Goddamn Hayes, and me. Lucy Butler. Lost out at sea. Shipwrecked, but swimming to shore. Alive and well.

  And I look at Blue, dancing, a whirling dervish.

  And I stare out at the heaps of lost, frozen souls passed out coma on the floor, and see in the hard lines of their faces, their waxing, hot misery reaching out, seeking my own, pulling like ugly green ghouls at the cords of thickening, growing sadness coiled about my going-bitter bones. And I shudder. I shiver. I slap a clammy mitt to my face, shake my head side to side. Hard, and harder still.

  “Wake up!” I yell, startling myself, and Blue tips back his head and howls at the moon in the skylighted ceiling.

  “Wake it up, Jack! Ah-ouuuuuuu!” he screams and I’m gritting my teeth, the music rattling my clenched, ham-bone jaw, my skin prickling with heat as I yank my hood over my head and look down, see my feet already shifting and lifting to the beats, and my body, it’s moving in electro-spectro club-kill waves, locks, and pops. And through my red-rimmed, half-lidded vision, my house, it turns circus-tent-striped, fat with skunky-smoked mirth, fog.

  Possibility.

  I close my eyes, wonder, with a flicker of light blazing bright through my brain, if maybe Blue’s words are true. Maybe he’s right. Own it, Jack, he says. Own it. And I think of Eve, I think of No Longer Miss Ancient History and the Pretty Pennies’ party tomorrow night at Clay Beach, Green Lake.

  And then the song is clanging to its crunchy, perfect end and next thing I know I’m blowing Blue a kiss, ducking under his octopus arms, and heeling it on outta my house, loading headfirst onto my ten-speed spin, making deep tracks over the lawn with the thin strips of my tires. I burn up my hill in record time and the sweet night air is like a calming balm to my saddle-sore soul and I let the rush of Blue’s words and the speed of my bike fill my veins with hope and joy. The night is quiet to its core and I’m louder inside then I can ever remember being.

  And I’m cruising the seven miles across town to Oma’s. I don’t know why, it’s just what I do.

  It’s exactly where I want to be.

  Into the Sea

  Oma, she’s deep asleep, head back, heavy against her pillow, cloud-white hair a fuzzy halo about her thin pink skull. Her heavy breathing moves her lips in and out, in and out. The gadgets hooked into her arm and under her shirt go Beep Beep and her chest rises slowly. But it rises, and that’s something.

  Bitsy’s curled up, eyes closed, pressed into Oma’s thigh, and I see Dad slouched in the corner in Opa’s old recliner, head back, snoring. Miles is passed out coma in his lap.

  “Bits,” I whisper. “C’mon, Bits,” I say, patting at my leg and her lids crack open. “Wanna go for a walk? Wanna be a good girl? Gotta scat?” Her nose twitches and her tail shifts, wags once. But her eyes, they slip closed again.

  And everything is still.

  I take a deep breath of the musky, body-scented air. But my skin, instead of crawling and itching, begging me to flee, it shimmers still with the night. Awake. Alive, with Blue’s gangly arms waving in the dank air of my den, and my body moving like liquid fire to the beats, my heart, broken always, shattered, but thumping and pumping inside. I can still feel the vast night sky shimmering above as I pedaled below, just me, coasting one black tar meter at a time, summer’s breeze enveloping my vibrating skin in its humid embrace.

  Bitsy adjusts her miniature nose under my Oma’s hand and lets out a tiny s
igh.

  “Word,” I say. “I hear that,” and take a long look at my stoically wilting old gram. I take the sight of her in, and the smell, and the sound. I wonder what she’s dreaming, as she inches ever closer. My sweet little Oma. Dad, sleeping still in the corner, shifts and lets out a fart. Ducks, he would say, and I stifle a laugh as I shuffle off onto the musty, empty screened porch around the far side of Oma’s house, to end the longest day ever on the world’s least comfortable wicker sofa.

  I can’t sleep at first, but that’s okay as I listen to the peepers outside in the pond, the Beep Beep of Oma’s heart, and the Slam Slam of my own in my chest and wonder again if Blue’s words could possibly be true.

  We’ll see, I think. We’ll see.

  * * *

  A few hours later, I wake, my mind massive blur and spinning, my body alive and electric. I can’t remember where I am until I hear the faint clatter of the five thousand clocks in Oma’s living room strike four. I get up to pee and then try to find sleep again on my porch perch, but the sauce still pulsing through my blood drums between my legs and I shift and squirm, toss and turn.

  Impressions of Raine Hall cascade in a torrent through my mind, a soaking wet deluge, and my brain aches for sleep but my switch is on, a current passing beneath my skin. I’m lost deep in fantasy as I open my mouth and Raine’s invisible lips meet mine. I rise and fall with the movement of my fingers between my legs, but her face is flickering and fading quick. But the drum between my legs is persistent percussion and Raine’s features morph and fade into a bright, glowing fog and out of this sunny, backlit haze emerges the image of Ms. Ancient History, Eve Brooks, her freckled face squinting into my eyes, a smile curling the edges of her full strawberry lips. She’s laughing and her long cattail fingers are a search-and-rescue mission as they seek and find.