Synesthesia: Chapter Fifty

serial fiction (finale)

Image: Brandon Griggs, Unsplash

Amber ran a french fry through a puddle of ketchup, leaving behind a ghostly trail across the paper of her hamburger wrapper. Under the table, my hand clenched nervously around the heart-shaped chunk of fossilized tree sap bearing her name, and my heart beat wildly as I fought to find the courage to say what I needed to say to her.

“I bet Jacob’s having fun, don’t you think?” she said, her gaze somewhere between me and nowhere. She smelled faintly of watermelon.

“Yeah, I’m sure he is,” I said. What kid wouldn’t love a trampoline park?

“Roberta’s really good with him,” she continued, as if trying to convince herself that her son was fine being apart from her for the first time since she’d found him, alone and terrified, in an abandoned Taco Bell.

“She is,” I agreed, hoping to reassure her. The paper-wrapped amber in my palm, now damp with sweat, felt like a bomb waiting to explode.

Amber turned her eyes toward the window, as if she might see Jacob leaping and grinning on the trampolines if she just looked hard enough.

“I got you this,” I blurted, placing my hand on the table, palm up toward the fluorescent light fixture flickering tirelessly above our heads. I felt my heart twist as I realized how ripped and damaged the once-pristine paper now was.

She turned and looked at me, then down at the object in my palm. Nervous sweat continued oozing out of me, and there was nothing I could do about it.

“What is it?” she asked, reaching for it with two fingers, as if it might be dirty.

After spending the last two months living in my pocket, waiting to be given to its intended recipient, I guess it probably was.

“It’s just—it’s for you. Just open it,” I urged. And please don’t hate it, I thought. Or me.

She wiped her fingers on a paper napkin and tore open the paper. It fell off easily, almost disintegrating in her hands.

The gold-orange heart with a moth frozen within it rested on Amber’s slender fingers. I waited, hoping the object would do the talking for me. But I knew I would have to say the words myself.

I cleared my throat, or tried to.

“I love you, Amber,” I said, my voice strange from nerves and dryness. “I’m in love with you.”

Two jungle-green eyes rose from the amber heart and locked onto mine. My pulse was unsustainably high. I felt like I might pass out.

Amber threw her head back and laughed. It was that awful, beautiful, irritating, unnerving cackle of hers, that loud, scratchy noise I’d grown so accustomed to since she’d come into my life. The whole restaurant looked over at us, gawking, as Amber cackled and I choked on the gasoline fumes of her finding my words hilarious.

An unfamiliar heat stung at my eyelids. I wanted to disappear, to take back what I had said. Anything but being laughed at like this.

I stood up, hot liquid pooling in my eyes, intending to make for the door.

“You idiot,” Amber said, placing her hand on mine. “Sit down.”

I sat down.

She swallowed another cackle, then wiped tears of mirth away from her eyes.

“You’re not in love with me,” she stated matter-of-factly.

I stared at her as the gas fumes cleared. Not in love with her?

I opened my mouth, ready to protest.

“You’re not,” she repeated, cutting me off.

We sat and looked at each other for a long time, the pile of fries slowly cooling between us.

Finally, she broke the silence.

“Have you ever had a friend?” she asked.

I narrowed my eyes at her, offended. “Of course,” I said. “Richard is my friend.”

She considered this for a while. After the incident at the Grand Canyon, Richard had stayed in contact with me. With his help and encouragement, I had applied for and been offered a position in a volunteer search and rescue organization. Sometimes he and I went out on missions together.

Then she shook her head. “Richard is a guy who helped you get a job,” she argued. “Sort of. But I’m talking about a real friend. Someone who really cares about you, and you really care about them.”

“I care about you,” I said. “And Jacob.”

Amber nodded slowly, holding my gaze. “And I care about you too. Because we’re friends.”

The word landed like something from a foreign country.

“But I have these.. these feelings about you,” I protested. “Like—”

“Like you want me to be happy?” she asked, and I nodded in agreement. “Like you like spending time with me?” I nodded harder. “Like you feel safe and happy when you’re with me?”

I felt like a fool nodding so hard. “Yeah,” I said. “Exactly.”

The gas fumes were back, but Amber quickly suppressed them.

“We’re friends, Zode,” she said.

Her words had a finality in them that I didn’t feel equipped to argue with. I looked at her, wondering if it was true. I did want her to be happy. I did like spending time with her. And probably most of all, I did feel safe and happy when I was with her.

Amber smiled at me, then broke eye contact and picked up a cold french fry.

“Are we… best friends?” I asked, realizing after the words were out how stupid I probably sounded.

She looked up from the ketchup and grinned. She smelled like shit and pine all wrapped up in vanilla.

“Yeah,” she said, dropping the fry and wiping her fingers again. “We’re best friends.”

---

I never knew how much I would enjoy search and rescue. It’s a little like kidnapping, only that finding and carrying off the victims is a bit more challenging. But at the end of it, instead of a potential felon, you’re a hero.

No one on the search and rescue team can figure out how I do it—how I can close my eyes, sniff the air, and move confidently in one direction or another, every time ending up right where an injured or lost hiker is waiting, terrified, to be rescued.

I’ve never told anyone about the orange blossoms, and I don’t think I ever will.

The vanilla, though, is something I never got with kidnapping. That’s something new.

As soon as the person sees me, the orange blossoms go all creamy vanilla. They’re so grateful to see me, in my highlighter-yellow vest, that they don’t even have time to feel happy.

Me, on the other hand—I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

I thought I’d never recover from Amber laughing at me when I’d finally worked up the courage to tell her how I felt. But seeing how happy she is now, and knowing that she’ll always be there for me, makes the world feel like a place worth living in.

Roberta offered Amber a job at the motel we stayed at on our way to the Grand Canyon. The two of them, plus Jacob, moved into a three-bedroom house in Flagstaff, a boring suburban thing with white brick in the front and pale green wood on the other three sides. There’s a fenced yard in the back, another yard in the front, and a driveway where Roberta and Amber wash the Honda Civic on weekends. Amber mows the lawn, a fact she never shuts up about when we get together. She says they’re just roommates, but I’m not so sure.

Jacob started first grade last month at Sagebrush Elementary School. Amber and I took him to buy school supplies. He was so excited, bouncing down the aisles, examining all the folders and crayons and pencil sharpeners. He chose Spider-Man everything.

Hoka guy—Daniel—turned out not to be dead after all. He’d been hospitalized after the break-in at his home, but he recovered—physically, anyway—and recently participated in a local ultramarathon. Amber said he showed up at their house and offered his finisher’s medal to Roberta, begging her to take him back. Roberta did not take him back.

Gas Stove was found dead in an abandoned bus in Phoenix of an apparent overdose. I told Amber about it after hearing the news on the radio, but she just giggled eucalyptus and said she already knew.

I didn’t ask her for any details.

---

I can’t say I’m not sometimes tempted to go back to how things were before. Once in a while, a really good fear-scent, like the one the girl with the broken leg let off, will drive me back into fantasies of wire dog crates and scratchy white motel sheets, just me and a terrified woman alone in the darkness, just off some random highway.

But then the wave of vanilla hits me, I shake off the daydreams, and I get to work, carrying the scared but thankful victim not to a motel room but out of the wilderness, back into the safety of civilization and the waiting arms of their loved ones.

It’s strange work, but it smells incredible.

---

I came to the desert for clean, emotionless air, for privacy, for solitude, for wide-open hunting grounds and the lush, erotic scent of orange blossoms. In a way, I got those things, but not at all in the way I’d envisioned. Still, I don’t think I’d trade what I have now for the life I wanted when I first came to Arizona.

Because this place has given me so much more than orange blossoms.

It gave me, for the first time in my life, a friend.