Surviving Valencia

“More like rice sacks than bags of flour, I guess.”

“I guess.”

“Like something a person might see in… Where do you think, Adrian? Thailand, perhaps? Miniature Thailand. Or Miniature India. Or… Gosh, I don’t know.”

“They just look like sugar packets to me.”

“Well, as I was saying, I think there’s more to what happened to the twins than everyone thinks.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

He continued chewing, now and again punctuating his meal with swallows of orange juice or coffee. He did not appear upset in any way. Well, maybe a little upset with me. But he was not acting like someone who had anything to hide. I sighed.

“Do you know that when we were in Madison the boy at the coffee shop gave me my coffee for free?” I asked.

He looked impressed. Guys are so suggestible. If one guy liked me, five would like me. If one guy called me a bitch, they would all think I was a bitch. “Really?” he asked.

I looked down at the napkin in my lap, suddenly unsure as to whether it had happened to me or someone else.

“Are you ready?” Adrian asked, setting some money on the table.

“I guess.”

“You didn’t touch your pancakes.”

“Well, I hate pancakes. You know that.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

So I was no detective. Great at starting fights but really terrible at solving crimes. I wished I could put those photographs in a part of my brain that could be boarded up and forgotten. I had spent my whole adult life trying to overcome my childhood, and now a bend in reality had rewritten it as even worse. Horrific and tangled. Needing to be acknowledged and solved.

I was afraid I simply could not do it. I didn’t want to. I just did not have it in me. Not smart enough, not strong enough. Valencia and Van could have stepped up to this kind of pressure. Either of them would have known what to do and they would have had no trouble making the right decisions. But I wasn’t that motivated or clever. I wanted to go to sleep and awaken to find that someone else had taken over while I was dozing. The right person would be arrested (not Adrian), my sister would be found happily living in some cottage in Maine (amnesia having wiped out a few years of her life, but otherwise unharmed), and all other loose ends would have been neatly tied up.

“What’s going to set today right again?” Adrian asked me.

“Hmm?”

“I don’t want to be in a fight.”

“We’re not fighting.”

We were back in the car, on our way home. Our windows were down and the smell of flowers from the gardens we were passing filled the car. Adrian likes to take detours and today he was driving us past some old mansions. I closed my eyes and inhaled, the hot car and the warm breeze feeling good after being in the icy restaurant.

“Do you want to stop for some ice cream?” he asked me. “You must be hungry still.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

We drove down to the river and parked the car.

“Wait, I’ll get it,” said Adrian. He got out and met me on my side of the car, opening my door like he used to when we went out somewhere fancy for dinner. He reached in and took my hand. Together we strolled along the cobblestones by the river. He steered us into the shop with the elderly ladies instead of the cute young girls as a silent peace offering. I ordered a waffle cone with two scoops of mint chocolate chip and we sat down on a bench by the river. He put his arm around me. I wanted to melt into him; instead I sat there rigidly, eating my ice cream. It reminded me of being little. Really little. Four or five years old, riding in the car with Van and Valencia. Our mother warning us not to get ice cream on the upholstery.

“Adrian, this reminds me of this one summer,” I began, but was cut off.

“Excuse me, are you Adrian Corbis?”

We looked up to see a middle aged man with a thick, old-fashioned camera case strap cutting across his middle like a seatbelt. He wore an over-flowing fanny pack drooping below his big belly.

“That’s me,” said Adrian.