Now she felt the urge to weep building up inside her too, followed by a sense of shame that her own tears weren’t for her father either. She’d nearly gotten Liver killed once before; she should be the one insisting that he stay far away from her. But seeing him again after she thought he was dead might have been the one thing that happened in her life where the reality of things turned out to be better than she expected. The time she’d spent with him had felt like she was making new memories. Everything besides Liver seemed like nothing more than dealing with her past mistakes.
Liver was squinting toward the sunset. His wrinkled eyelids looked like glossy walnut shells. “Hey now. Let’s pack up the tears. You’re better off with me not coming. I stick out in certain situations. I’ll handle burying your dad.” He didn’t seem able to take his eyes off the sky. Was he also tearing up a little? It looked like he was reading words off a giant teleprompter in the clouds. “I’m going to nestle some explosives in the cooler with him. If anyone tries to disturb his peace, boom. And I’ll sit with the grave for a while. It’s what I do. If your brain turns out to be fixed, maybe we’ll see each other again sometime.”
He kissed her and Hazel felt more tears come. She was sad she’d given up a normal life for a chance at a special one with Byron and it hadn’t turned out to be special at all. Before him, back when she’d planned on having a somewhat regular existence, it was probably love that she’d wanted most out of life. She’d really thought love would develop. It didn’t.
Love hadn’t developed with Liver either, but she had a fondness for him and it felt horrible to let it go.
“Are you going to bury the three of them together?” Hazel asked. “A mass grave?” Watching Roxy’s hair flutter in the wind, it seemed strange to put the dolls underground. Even motionless they looked full of vitality and spirit, far more than she or Jasper or Liver did, ready to go let loose on a dance floor or grab front-row seats on a roller coaster. “On second thought, maybe Dad wouldn’t want that. He’d probably tell me to make sure they went on and had the time of their lives. Maybe they could stay with you?”
Liver winked. “I’ll try to show them a good time then. Hope to see you again,” he said. “I don’t say that much.” He turned and began wheeling the cooler off the path. Hazel started walking in the other direction, straight toward the sun. It felt like it was burning her tears out. When she got to the end of the trail and had to turn to the car, she looked back for one final glimpse. Liver was hoisting one of the dolls up into his arms, carrying her tenderly, as though she had broken her foot. Then he disappeared into the brush.
20
HAZEL WAS FLIPPING THROUGH RADIO STATIONS WHEN JASPER SUDDENLY hit the brakes and twisted the dial to shut the music off. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t take that ‘Saving You Saved Me’ song. It’s a long story but that music gives me thoughts that bring on strange feelings.”
Now Jasper looked even more motionless than Di and Roxy had been capable of—he seemed to have been taxidermied in the blink of an eye. There was something off about his posture—he was trying to cover up his lap. Oh, Hazel realized. It could be a stress response, maybe. A fear erection? She wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. For some reason it seemed more hopeful than creepy, like a divining rod pointing to a better tomorrow for both of them.
It was actually difficult not to stare at his lap. He was an attractive man; there was no doubting that. But she didn’t know anything about him and felt overcome by a desire to keep it that way. He was really starting to make her wonder.
And they hadn’t discussed what she was going to do or what he was going to do if her noon download happened tomorrow. Did he have a backup strategy? Hers was round two of the pill bottles. She’d brought several with her, an arrangement Jasper might want to get in on.
Hazel put her hand on his arm as it gripped the steering wheel, then took it away. With his obvious arousal, no matter where she put her hands on his body she felt like she was touching his penis.
If the chip hadn’t deactivated, this could be her last chance ever to sleep with someone. Though it was probably best not to make Byron want Jasper dead even more than he already would. Bad enough that she’d just considered it.
“Do you think we should split up soon?” she asked. “If the chip’s still working, it’s better for you if I don’t know where you are.” She checked her watch—7 PM. Jasper had nearly seventeen hours to get as far away as possible. “If you go now, you could be on the other side of the world by download time.”
“Let’s get you a little farther away first.” He shifted in his seat; he seemed to be trying to get his condition under control. “Where should I drive you?”
Hazel had no idea. “Just away, I guess. If you asked me where I don’t want to go I could tell you. I only seem able to wish for things through a process of elimination. It can only be ‘I guess I want this because I don’t really really not want it.’ Like I hate pain, for example.”
“Well, for money I used to pretend to love people,” Jasper said. “So I can’t really offer you wisdom about yearning and its ideal state.”
Hazel looked out her car window, and considered. “I sort of pretended to love someone for money too. I mean, it wasn’t my idea. To date or marry him. But when it fell into my lap, it was hard for me to conceive of a scenario where I turned down a multimillionaire’s marriage proposal.” Byron really hadn’t seemed horrible at first, just strange. And who wasn’t? Though she hadn’t tried very hard to look for something horrible. It would’ve needed to be pretty glaring, though. “Marry me and then don’t worry about anything ever; be relatively immune to the vast majority of life’s material consequences” was an easy sell. “I really planned on it being a marriage, though. You know how when you learn to ride a bike? How you’re being pushed or supported or whatever but then it’s all you? I thought I’d train myself to love him. I’d never been in love but it seemed easier than a lot of things people train themselves to do. I don’t know, like bodybuilding. Though I’ve never done that either. But romantic love seemed very ‘how hard could it be?’-ish. At the very least I thought I could reach a point of stasis. You know, ‘this is good enough; this is void of acute suffering.’” Jasper guided the car onto the freeway, which made Hazel think of cameras, tollbooths, roadblocks. But they could just as easily be trapped and ambushed on a rural dirt road. “You never accidentally fell in love?” she asked. “The pretending never led to something more?”
“No,” he said. “I never felt like I was in the risk group for that.”
Hazel studied Jasper’s face. “What’s it like to be so good-looking?”
“I’m just driving, by the way. I have no idea where I’m going.”