Goodbye from Nowhere Read online

  She sent back six eye-roll emojis.

  What?

  Oh god. Those movies you and Em love. They’re so STERILE, they’re so . . . ugh. I mean, if you like old movies, watch some Bergman, watch some Kurosawa, get out of your weird prim little bubble and grow up!

  On second thought, maybe he was glad Megan wasn’t there. He couldn’t pause long enough to let her know she’d gotten under his skin.

  ooookay just thought I’d ask

  After that, he immediately texted Emily. She was a turn-the-phone-all-the-way-off-before-bed person, so he knew he wouldn’t be bugging her if she’d gone to sleep.

  Are you still up?

  Ha was just about to text you, she wrote. We need to finalize. West Side Story and A Star Is Born (Garland/Mason)?

  Do we really want two tragedies? he asked. Also they’re both super long.

  It’s a theme? And we literally have all day unless you want Catan to go on for twelve hours.

  Um not really.

  Half the aunts and uncles and also Alex had been on a Settlers of Catan thing for the last few Thanksgivings. Kyle and Emily agreed that it took too long to set up, and also they both needed to constantly be reminded of how to keep track of their crops and their lumber and whatever else, which was annoying for everyone.

  Okay so West Side plus what else?

  How about no tragedies? Kyle said. He’d never told Emily this, but honestly he couldn’t handle West Side Story. It was all fine and everything up until the last act, when he had to turn it off before the really sad parts.

  Maybe the theme should be absolute happiness? Like Singin’ in the Rain and Sound of Music?

  Sound of Music has Nazis.

  But it ends happy, he said.

  Yeah, for the Von Trapps maybe!

  They talked until they’d settled on A Star Is Born, since a new version was out and it would be fun to compare, and then The Wizard of Oz, the theme being Judy Garland. They knew from previous viewings that the Wizard of Oz tape had a glitch around when the flying monkeys showed up, but that was too intense for Alex anyway.

  It seems like Nadia’s not scared by what she witnessed at dinner, Emily said. Did she say anything?

  Not really. We were laughing about it. Nadia thought his dad’s line to Brenda about how being a rebel looked like being an asshole was pretty good.

  I’m mad at my mom, though, Emily said. She can be such a jerk sometimes.

  True.

  She just thinks she’s being funny and interesting and doesn’t realize she isn’t until it’s too late. If ever haha.

  I love her anyway, Kyle said. Everyone does. I mean, my mom is like the most polite person in the family and no one likes her!

  I like your mom!

  I don’t mean literally no one likes her. She’s just like the least favorite.

  Debatable, Emily said. Grandpa Baker and Great-Aunt Gina are in the running.

  I don’t count the old people.

  Ohhhhh. Well then, yeah, your mom.

  He sent her back a laugh-cry face and said good night.

  He opened his window about an inch to let in some air. From his bed, he heard leaves rustle outside, skitter across the concrete patio. Maybe next Thanksgiving he and Nadia would be back. Maybe his grandparents would let them share a room. Maybe they’d have babies and then Taylor would have babies and Martie would have babies, and then those cousins would come here and be complaining to each other about Aunt Megan being a jerk and Emily would defend her and she and Kyle would still be best friends.

  Everything exactly like this, always.

  5

  BY THE time they drove home on Sunday, Kyle and Nadia were talked out and just held hands and stayed mostly quiet. They barely even listened to music. Kyle went over and over the weekend in his head, scanning for anything bad, anything that had gone wrong with him and Nadia. He came up blank. It was all good.

  She liked Emily, Emily liked her. She liked the mini film fest and cried at the end of A Star Is Born. She liked walking the land with Grandpa Navarro and hearing about the various seasonal things he and the crew did to keep the farm running. She really liked Martie, and they ended up going over to Aunt Jenny and Uncle Mike’s for dinner on Saturday so they could hang out mostly with Martie. Nadia wasn’t scared off by Aunt Brenda, and when Uncle Mike tried to teach everyone a super-wrong version of the Shiggy, Nadia fixed it and let him post a video with her in it.

  Every aunt and every uncle had at some point during the weekend found Kyle to tell him how much they liked Nadia, how they hoped she’d come back.

  “So,” he said to Nadia now, “it was good, right?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  He glanced at her. “Are you happy?”

  “Yeah, I’m happy. Also so tired. I was really, like, concentrating on being likable. It’s a lot.” She squeezed his hand. “But yes, happy.”

  “Me too.” He adjusted the visor to keep the sun out of his eyes. “I kind of don’t want to go back to real life.” He had to get back in the gym with the team for baseball conditioning, and his grades had taken a dive lately—partly because classes were hard and partly because all he wanted to do was be with Nadia. But he needed to catch up.

  “We can detour to Vegas if you want,” she said. She let his hand go and wiggled her fingers. “Put a ring on it.”

  His heart pounded, but he played along with her light tone. “I’m sure everyone in our families would be very very cool with that.”

  “Definitely.”

  On one stretch of highway, the wind blew big tumbleweeds across the lanes. Kyle took Nadia’s hand back into his. “I used to be scared of tumbleweeds,” he said. “We’d be on a road trip and there’d be a giant one coming toward the car and me and Megan and Taylor would be screaming, ‘You’re gonna hit it, Dad!’”

  Nadia laughed, rubbed her thumb against his palm.

  His dad would always say, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing.”

  They’d get closer and closer to the tumbleweed and they couldn’t swerve and they couldn’t brake, not with the other cars around them on the road. And Megan and Taylor would be laughing about it and pretending to be scared, but Kyle really was. Then his dad would drive right through it and it would vanish into a cloud of fibers, no weight, no substance. It would just explode all around them like a special effect in a movie.

  It got to where Megan and Taylor would get excited when they saw one coming, the bigger the better. But Kyle never did. Every time they were about to hit one, he thought, This time it’s going to hurt.

  Except right now, with Nadia by his side, he didn’t feel that. Right now he felt bigger and more powerful than anything coming at him. And when a huge tumbleweed bounced on a collision course with his car, he stole a glance at Nadia, drove straight through it, and laughed.

  Part II

  Spring

  1

  IT WAS mid-March, and like Martie had promised, Nadia had been invited to her quinceañera. But it overlapped with the start of spring break, which turned out to be a bad time for everyone. Nadia’s family had a trip to Chicago planned, and anyway, her parents had other ideas about how much time she should be spending on overnights with Kyle. Taylor was too stressed out by school to go, and Megan was still boycotting the family. Kyle’s mom had planned to come, but then she felt like she was getting the flu and didn’t want to spread it around. So she said.

  She’d been out of it lately—hardly home, working a lot and forgetting about Kyle’s games and other stuff. Not the predictable and reliable Mom she usually was. Pretty much as soon as he got back from the party, Kyle would be taking off for a spring break varsity baseball tournament in Arizona, and he hoped his mom would have his stuff ready.

  Anyway, if Nadia was going to be gone, there was no reason to stay home for the weekend when he could be hanging out with Emily and everyone else at the farm. So it was Kyle and his dad alone for the long drive up the coast, his dad listening to a cooking thing on NPR and Kyle te
xting Nadia.

  He took a picture of his dad.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  His dad patted the hair around his bald spot and glanced at Kyle. “Are you posting that?”

  “Just to Nadia.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m bored. And I want her and me to be bored together.” He sent off the text.

  #dadvibes

  She replied with a smile.

  “You could ask people’s permission before taking pictures of them and sharing it around,” his dad said.

  “It’s just Nadia.”

  now he’s mad. I think he thinks I’m making fun of him

  “Maybe I don’t want you to send Nadia a picture of me.”

  well now you are!! Nadia wrote. btw the hotel we’re gonna stay at in Chicago is supposedly haunted.

  “She knows what you look like, Dad.”

  “Not the point.”

  he feels violated I guess? u believe in ghosts?

  “What is the point?”

  “Maybe put the phone away for a minute, Kyle. I want to talk to you.”

  in trouble now haha.

  Nadia sent him a string of emojis that Kyle didn’t have time to interpret before his dad grabbed his phone and dropped it into the driver’s-door cup holder. Kyle stared at his dad and laughed, playful. “I’m sorry, Dad, I’m sorry!”

  Kyle wanted his dad to laugh too. He wanted them to crack each other up and find the humor in their own dumb reactions to stuff that wasn’t that serious. A quick look at his dad was enough to see that wasn’t happening. “I wasn’t dunking on you, I swear. I was sending her pictures of the road, other cars, freeway signs, whatever. It wasn’t anything.”

  The muscles in his dad’s jaw flexed, like he was clenching his teeth. It didn’t look like he’d be giving Kyle’s phone back anytime soon. Kyle thought they’d been in a good mood. He blew air from between his lips and shook his head. Whatever. He’d just stare out his own window, then. Kyle’s mom always said he and his dad were alike that way. Too sensitive, too fast to “go dark,” as she put it. “As fast as switching off a light.”

  “You don’t need copper pans, it’s the aluminum that actually holds in the heat,” the woman on the radio was saying.

  “You don’t even cook, Dad,” Kyle muttered.

  They listened to the rest of the tips on buying a sauté pan. The handle should be comfortable. It should be ovenproof. It should have a little hole so you could hang it from a rack. Then his dad turned off the radio and said, “I want to tell you something. That’s going on.”

  Kyle’s first thought was: money. A couple times every year, there was some big speech about money, the business being unpredictable, them all needing to tighten the belt and be more conscious of the inflows and outflows. His dad would be super serious like this for about ten minutes, and then literally nothing changed and they went on spending exactly as much as always.

  “Go ahead,” Kyle said, impatient.

  “Don’t sigh like that. Don’t give me attitude.”

  “I’m not!”

  Silence. They went a few more miles. A tumbleweed skipped across the road, but his dad didn’t drive through it. Instead, he slowed down and let it blow past.

  Was Kyle supposed to apologize now or something? His dad was being all sensitive and cranky. Maybe they should talk about baseball. Kyle had been moved from outfield to second base and had been playing pretty well there this season. Coach Ito had told him the other day he showed good leadership, but the idea of saying that to his dad right now, like some kind of brag, felt awkward.

  He reached for the radio to turn it on again; his dad stopped him, and their hands touched for a second before they both pulled back.

  “Mom is seeing someone,” his dad said.

  “Huh?” Kyle wanted his phone back.

  “Mom is seeing someone.”

  Kyle had no idea what he was talking about. “You mean like a shrink or something?” It wasn’t that big a deal. Half the people they knew were in therapy. Mom probably should be in therapy, and work out this shit with Megan or whatever else she was going through so she could be more like she used to be. But then his dad’s silence worried him. “Or some other kind of doctor?” Kyle asked. “Is she sick? Dad?”

  “No,” he said quietly.

  Then Kyle got it.

  Seeing someone. His brain processed the phrase, one you normally didn’t hear about married people. A parent. Your parent.

  Then his body caught up with his mind, and he felt it in his gut.

  “I haven’t told your sisters yet. I . . . we . . . haven’t told anyone, actually, and I don’t even know why I’m telling you now. I didn’t plan this.”

  We haven’t told anyone.

  “Wait, so . . . Mom knows you know?”

  “Yes. But she doesn’t know you know.” He lifted his hands off the wheel and let them fall again. “She’s been seeing someone for a couple months. She says.”

  The world outside the windshield flew by and Kyle wanted to stop it, rewind, make his dad unsay the words.

  His brain sorted the pieces of information and tried to make sense of them.

  His mother was having an affair. And his father knew and they were still married and living in the same house like everything was fine? And they weren’t planning to say anything to anybody. Was he missing something? In what world did any of this make sense?

  Not in Kyle’s world. Not the one he thought he was living in.

  Every muscle in his body wanted to reach over and grab his phone from the driver’s-side door and tell Nadia, tell Emily, tell Taylor, tell Megan. WTF??? he would ask on a group text.

  “I don’t know what to do, Kyle,” his dad went on. “I really don’t. We were waiting it out, you know?”

  Um, no, I don’t know, I have no idea whatsoever.

  “We’re still waiting it out, I guess, and I guess we should separate, but to be honest we can’t afford it. I mean, a place for her and a place for me? Rent prices in California, with business how it is? It’s such a goddamn expensive industry, Kyle. I always imagined you and the girls taking it over, but I don’t want you to. There’s so much overhead, and if people don’t pay on time or a project goes wrong, you’re screwed. Not to mention all the competition now and all the people who watch an hour of HGTV and think they can do everything themselves for five grand.”

  He’d gone from dropping the bomb of his mom’s affair to lecturing Kyle on the cost of running a contracting business?

  “We were waiting it out,” his dad repeated, sounding bewildered. “And frankly, neither of us thought this would still be going on at this point.”

  Kyle made his right hand into a fist and gnawed on his knuckle. A thing he used to do when he was stressed out as a kid. But he didn’t want to look like a baby right now, so he shoved his hand under his leg and asked, “You’re ‘waiting out’ Mom sleeping with someone else? Like, you discussed it and decided to ‘wait it out’? You’re just gonna, like, wait? For it to not be happening?”

  They passed three freeway exits.

  “I shouldn’t have told you,” his dad said at last.

  Yeah, no shit. “You did, though.”

  “I know, I know. Kyle, I’m sorry.” His dad reached over and touched Kyle’s arm in a way that seemed to try to express some kind of father-son-ness, as if it would make this any better. Kyle recoiled toward the passenger door and brought his hand back to his mouth.

  His dad kept talking.

  “I don’t have answers that are going to make any sense to you. All I can say is life isn’t as all-or-nothing as you think. Not after twenty-six years of marriage and fifteen years of our business, and three kids, and two house remodels and one medical scare and”—he gestured to the road they were on, taking them to the big family event—“your aunts and uncles and cousins. A history. A life. You don’t just . . .”

  His dad was losing it. Kyle had seen his dad angry, seen him de
pressed, seen him goofy, seen him sad, seen him quiet, seen his eyes go damp, seen him go somewhere deep into himself. But he had never seen him actually truly cry. He didn’t even know if he could tell Taylor or Megan this part. Kyle listened to his dad’s choppy breathing, pulled at the hair of his knuckles with his teeth.

  “Okay.” His dad said, exhaling sharply. “Okay. Sorry. Okay.”

  “It’s fine,” Kyle said.

  Totally fine.

  Fine that it turned out his whole world was a tumbleweed, just a mass of dried-up bits that used to be rooted in something but now was fragile, not attached to anything, on the verge of being annihilated if the wind blew it one inch the wrong way.

  “Look, we’re going to figure this out. Forget I said anything.”

  “Sure, Dad.” Like he could forget. Delete. Backspace.

  They drove past more strip malls, gas stations, billboards.

  “Seriously, though. This weekend, Martie’s birthday. You know, don’t say anything. Don’t let on.”

  Kyle nodded. Got it. His dad had pushed past the emotion to some worse place that was all about being practical. Be around the whole family and act like everything is fine. Hang out with his cousins without letting on what was falling apart. Look his grandmother in the eye and be cool.

  “The thing is . . . ,” his dad continued, “the thing is that the, um, the guy. The other guy? His wife doesn’t know. His kid. There’s another family on the other side of this, and every town is a small town when it comes to this stuff. Especially considering the business and all, our names out there on the trucks and everything. Anyway, I feel like it’s not my place or our place to make that choice for him. The other guy.” He glanced at Kyle. “About whether or not to tell.”

  What was even happening? Was his dad’s truck some kind of portal to a parallel universe, where everyone’s parents—who previously had been annoying, at most—were actually the worst people on the planet?

  “But you’re okay making that choice for me.”

  “Well. You’re not directly involved.”

  Kyle wiped the back of his hand on his jeans. “Oh, okay.”