After that, people sometimes called him California. It was a female name, it seemed, for the guys said it to him sweetly, like they were talking to a beautiful woman in a dark jukebox bar. Someone needed to be the girl, if only for a moment.
Micah’s little trick with his name, Cal thought, was proof that he was a liar.
A little light began to seep under the front door. In no time the whole thing would be framed with sunlight. Bo hadn’t built the best door, and in the winter they had to hang a thick rug over it to keep out the cold and, at the height of the summer, netting to keep out flies. These few weeks were the only time the door worked just as it was, letting in a breeze and those rays of sunlight.
Frida rolled back into him and grumbled more dream-babble into his neck. She slept so deeply, she was probably in L.A. now, ordering a latte. That dream often teased her, and she awoke upset. At least she wasn’t having the nightmares anymore, the ones about Micah. “Him leaving” was how she put it.
At his funeral, someone should have included Micah’s prankster nature in a eulogy, but no one did, no surprise. Not that his lying was a bad thing. Micah never carried a lie for long—what he enjoyed most was revealing his trickery.
Why was Cal thinking about Micah? About Plank? Time moved forward, but the mind was restless and stubborn, and it skipped to wherever it pleased, often to the past: backward, always backward. He wished he had an empty journal to scribble in. If he did, he’d get all this down. But he needed the pages he had left for practical purposes.
He looked at Frida once more. Her face was calm and blank, her mouth open now, the same expression she used to make when putting on mascara. Lines had begun to form around her eyes, and he was happy their only mirror was the rearview, taken from their car at the last moment. If they had a better one, she’d certainly complain about the smallest wrinkle, hold her face back with her hands, as his mother had done. “My face-lift,” she’d say.
If Frida really was pregnant, what would they do? He imagined cutting the umbilical cord with his Swiss army knife. He knew Frida would want to go find others; they weren’t the Millers, she’d say, and that was true. Families couldn’t exist in a vacuum, or not theirs, at least.
Or could they?
He felt her hand on his thigh.
“Hey you,” she whispered. For a second Cal wondered if she’d been faking sleep all this time.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.
“Poor thing.”
“Any lattes last night?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Ugh. Don’t dangle that in front of me. Not this morning.”
Frida yawned and sat up. She was wearing the oversize T-shirt she preferred to sleep in until it got too cold. The shirt had once been white and was delicate as tissue. A small hole had opened at her right shoulder blade, as if her bone had been sharp enough to rip through the fabric. Cal poked his finger through and touched her skin. Cal figured the shirt had once belonged to her father, but he had never asked. To bring it up now would only rattle her. She’d been wearing it since they’d starting sleeping together, and he loved how her nipples showed through the front.
Frida yawned once more and climbed onto his stomach, so that she was straddling him.
“You look good,” Cal said.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
He reached for her breasts, cupped one in each palm. She smiled.
“Good morning to you,” she said. She nodded to his crotch. “And to you.”
He laughed, running his hands to her waist. “You know what I like best about this place?”
She frowned. “What?”
“No one can hear me fucking your brains out.”
Frida blushed. He wanted her so badly. He loved that he could say this to her, that she wanted him to say it, and that nothing had ever felt so natural.
She had her hand on him now. She leaned forward, and he could smell her musky breath. “Sorry,” she said. “Morning breath?”
He grabbed her jaw and kissed her. “Yum,” he said, and pulled for her T-shirt.
Afterward, once they were lying side by side, Cal got to thinking again of that first night at Plank, about Micah. The beauty of violence, all that nonsense, Micah’s grave voice, as if he were imparting something vital to his new roommate.
Stupid Cal, he thought. Get that out of your head.
“Helloooo?” Frida was saying. With two fingers she flicked his dick lightly.
“Sorry,” Cal said.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing…I just can’t get a painting out of my head.”
He couldn’t tell her much more. After he’d graduated and was living in L.A., he’d tried searching for the pictures online. There had been one artist, near the end of the last century, who drew from photographs. Cal couldn’t remember his name; he didn’t want to remember it. The portraits were gray and deliberately blurry, just as Micah had described them. They were haunting, but they weren’t magnetic or beautiful. Not to him.