Lone Star

Hannah

I miss him. I’m a million miles away and yet all I can think about is him. Last time we saw each other he kept begging me to let him come visit me for a few days in Spain. I said, how could you possibly, I’m going with Blake. He didn’t care. He said maybe I could get away for a few hours. Where would I tell Blake I’m going, I asked him. To a Barcelona bed with me, he said.

I want to be a good girlfriend for Blake here in Europe, give him these few weeks as happy memories. He’s been good to me. And I’ve been good to him, of course.

Mason has never seen anything or been anywhere, so he’s acting like Riga is da bomb. It’s annoying. I didn’t even know Riga was a capital city until Moody told me. I had barely heard of Latvia. This isn’t where my future lies. I’m going to study to be a trilingual interpreter. I will wear beautiful clothes and go to state dinners in the capitals of the world. Not Riga. Other capitals. I will meet important diplomats, shake their hands and flirt with them. I will get fluent in Spanish and French. Where is my French book? I want to study my subjunctive conjugations while we pass Riga by.

Tomorrow Chloe is going to the orphanage and the boys to the Old City. I’m tempted to send them all off without me, so that I can get over the jetlag, write, practice my Spanish and French, and my English elocution. I’ll say I’m not feeling well. I’ll allude to some womanly problems. That always works. I’ve actually been feeling off lately, that’s not a lie.

Blake

Everything is amazing. Traveling was great. I want to travel all the time. I love planes, I’d never been on one, but how amazing! Packing was fun, carrying stuff, helping the girls, the ride to Boston; I wish we had time to spend a few days in Boston, looking around, walking around. When I grow up and have my own business and can take off work whenever I want, I’ll go to Boston once a month for a long weekend, just to walk around and see the sights. Maybe Chloe can go to Harvard Law School and Mason and I can go visit her. The airport was awesome. I had four burgers because I knew I might not eat for a few hours. The check-in lady weighed my bags to see if they were over, but she should’ve weighed me, because I was over. Ha! Four burgers, two large fries, a large shake, and a Hershey chocolate pie. And a Coke. I was full up, man. She forgot to weigh me. Poor Chloe hardly ate at all, on account of being such a nervous flyer. Her bag was too heavy. She said it was because of my journal, but I told her it was because of her three pairs of shoes.

Hannah is the most seasoned traveler out of all of us, which isn’t saying much, because we’ve never been anywhere, but she’s been to Quebec once, and to Niagara Falls. Before her ’rents imploded, they took her and Jason to Chicago, and once to see Elvis’s house in Memphis, because her crazy cheating dad is an Elvis freak. She took five years of Spanish and three years of French, as she keeps reminding us. So she’s an expert, she says, and doesn’t need to be awake. I love how calm she is.

Poor Chloe! Mason wasn’t sitting next to her and he was snoring to boot, and Hannah was meditating or whatever, but Chloe really needed to talk to somebody to calm down, and she had no one. She would’ve been less steamed if she’d talked to somebody. She just needed a few jokes and some banter about bullshit.

I’m so psyched about Riga. Who else but me is going to write about Riga in the competition? I’m going to season my story with the spice of Europe, baby, and I’m going to choose my words extra carefully, and they’ll be dazzled. I’ll have Chloe read it before I send it, so she’ll be dazzled too, and she’ll say, I didn’t know you could write, Blake, and be all impressed. Look at how awesome your story is, she’ll say.

17 (#ulink_d7e2c89d-7bab-5a54-bad3-90430f166714)

Carmen in Carnikava (#ulink_d7e2c89d-7bab-5a54-bad3-90430f166714)

Chloe

She loved the city in the distance. She loved the traffic on the roads (though she loved it less on the bridge they were failing to cross), and the vivid colors of the buildings. She even liked the unfamiliar sounds of Latvian: half-Slavic, half-guttural.

She was ashamed she was such a bad and unprepared traveler. Having no one to turn to, since neither Hannah nor Mason knew anything about Riga, Chloe turned to Blake, who walked arm in arm with his back journal, and it so happened that his journal on this particular Saturday was filled with tidbits about Latvia! He was infuriating. Why was he always the one looking things up, knowing things? What did Riga have to do with his story? “Everything,” he said. “The story keeps morphing, my dear Haiku. The chrysalis is becoming a butterfly. Did you know for example that Riga is a hotbed of spy activity? I’ll use that detail in my book.”

“What do Latvian double agents have to do with the suitcase found in a dead woman’s yard?”

“We don’t know where the suitcase was found,” he declared. “Don’t assume anything.”

“Your hero goes to Riga to find his answers?”

“Also, don’t assume he’s the hero. He may be the anti-hero. But yes, he goes to Riga. Just look at this place!”

She did. She was startled by the black church spires rising up outside the taxi windows, and she was startled by Blake. His cheerful immersion in the details of their travel and his commitment to his unformed opus were completely at odds with the Blake Chloe had grown up with. He was confounding. Hannah was no help. She accepted the new Blake the way she had accepted the old Blake, with neutral amusement.

Now, stuck in traffic on the bridge over the Daugava River, Chloe was forced to listen to Mr. Eager plan their itinerary like he was some kind of expert on all things Latvian.

“We’ll go to the Central Market. We can’t leave Riga without seeing it. And the Riga Museum. Also the Opera House. And, Chloe, I can’t wait to try the Black Balsam—how about you? No, I’m not going to tell you what it is. You’ll find out soon enough.” Leaning forward between the seats, he poked her in the arm. “There’s also a bakery that’s to die for, you know how much you like pastries, wait, I’m looking for the name of it …”

Hannah, of course, in her dry way, rained on all things, especially the bakery. “Well, it can’t be any better than the bakery in Bangor, near UMaine,” she said. “They have the most divine cream puffs. I drool when I think about them, and I don’t usually like sweets. And can the Riga Museum really compare to the Field Museum in Chicago? Same with the Opera House. It might be okay by Latvian standards, but compared to Carnegie Hall? And you know what I think? Beer is beer. Heineken, Bud, Black Balsam. It’s just beer, Blake. Plus Chloe doesn’t even like beer. Let’s not talk about it like it’s Dom Pérignon.”

Mason, looking and sounding annoyed, asked Hannah if she’d ever actually had Dom Pérignon.

“I’m just saying,” said Hannah.

“Didn’t think so,” said Mason.

Blake didn’t care. Sitting between Hannah and Mason in the back, he leafed through his notebook, his bedhead banging the roof of the cab. “Chloe,” he asked absent-mindedly, “when did you take Hannah to a Bangor bakery? You had cream puffs and didn’t tell me? Were they really that good?”

Chloe was at a loss. On the radio, the Latvian music, full of balalaikas and cymbals, syncopated through the cab.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember.” She stared at the outlines of the city through the window. “Moody’s aunt lives so far outside Riga. When would we even get to a bakery?”

“Don’t worry,” Blake said. “We’ll find a way. This bakery is a must-see.”

Chloe was hungry, sleepy, slightly irritated by the long ride, the slow-moving traffic. “Well, it definitely can’t be tomorrow,” she said. “We have to go to Liepaja.” The air whistled out of her balloon. Across the wide river, the Old City tempted her, its blue and pink walls, its green and yellow roofs, the colored stone, the purple domes, the pale light of the late afternoon northern sun. Riga seemed to be holding its breath before the raucous Saturday night ahead. Like Chloe was holding her breath before the next twenty days, before the rest of her life.

“We don’t all have to go to Liepaja,” said Blake.

Hannah heartily agreed.

“Chloe, I’ll go with you if you want,” Mason said from the back seat.

“I thought we would all go,” said Chloe. “Wasn’t that the plan? To live through everything together, like always?”

“We don’t have enough time.” That was Blake. “Hannah will go with you, Haiku. Mase has to come with me. We’re going to the war museum, bro, the Powder Tower. Manly things that dainty girls aren’t interested in. We’re writing a story. This is the work part of our trip. While Chloe is in Liepaja looking for a boy, you and I have to find nefarious goings-on in Riga.”

“No!” said Hannah. “Why do I have to go to Liepaja? I’d rather go to Riga with you. But not to a bakery. What’s the point of going to a bakery if Chloe’s not coming with us? I’m not going to eat any of that cream-filled starch. I’ll be five hundred pounds before the trip is over.” Spoken like a true size 2.

Chloe couldn’t help herself. “If you don’t like the pastries, Hannah,” she said, “then why were you wolfing down so many of them at the Bangor bakery?”

“She makes a good point, turtle, why?” said Blake.

“I was much thinner then.”

As if that answered anything.

“And what do you mean you’re not coming with me?” Chloe knew she sounded petulant. “Somebody has to come with me.”

“Yeah, Hannah,” Blake said. “Chloe can’t find a boy on her own.” He pulled Chloe’s hair. “She needs help.”

“Leave me alone,” Chloe said.

“I’ll come with you, Chloe,” said Mason.

“You can’t, bro. What did I just say?”

They were finally out of the city, over the bright, freshly minted bridge. The countryside went from urban to rural in the space of two city blocks and a farm. Inside the cramped cab, their tired chatter faded.

“What’s the name of the town we’re going to again?”

“Carnikava,” Blake said. “Chloe, why do I have to tell you where you’re going?”

“Not Carnikava,” the cabbie said. “Tsarnikava.”