Lily

A short story.

Cars? by Julian Opie (1998-99) via MoMA

Story No. 10: Lily

Lily and I drove all over the place. The day we loaded everything into the camper van and said sayonara to our dickish landlord was easily one of the happiest of our lives. There was a sense of anything could happen, which felt good as opposed to the going sense of being fucked financially, mentally, and possibly romantically. 

The dealio was, I lost my job, Lily’s sucked, and paying fifteen-hundred a month for a shoebox in the house of depressed bartender, his girlfriend, and their Chihuahua mix had become unsustainable. We sold our stuff, pooled our resources, and bought a Volkswagen camper van, and for the first three hundred miles or so, all was well in the land of Lily and me. 

Then, somewhere between Lake Tahoe and Reno, I noticed Lily fading. That is to say, balking, backing down, second guessing, losing the faith. At first I thought it was the whole van life concept that she was coming to reject, not me. But then I realized the two were inextricably linked, and this spelled potential catastrophe. We were crossing the white salt flats in Utah when it started. She had her shades on. I forgot mine. My eyes were burning from excessive squinting, but that was fine. What wasn’t fine was that even through my narrow field of vision I could tell Lily’s earlier happy-go-luckiness had vanished along with the always-pleasant sight of her bare feet on the dash or her arm out the window, where she liked to let it noodle in the wind. 

I asked what was wrong. 

I’m fine, is all she said. 

I kept asking. 

She got more pissed, is all the happened. 

Being a rational person, I attempted to salvage what was shaping up to be the terminal stage of a once-thriving relationship. That is, I tried to find fun things for us to do, things that would take our minds off ourselves and turn our attention to the outside world sliding by like a infinite panoramic picture. For a while it was all ice cream cones, expensive campsites, and reaffirmations of love that felt only partially genuine. Then I caught wind of this cool little town called Galena, in Illinois, that was nearby and the town where President Ulysses S. Grant used to live. You could tour his house. I followed the suggested highways and got us there. But when we arrived, Lily didn’t want to get out of the car, a sure sign of the damaged state of our relations.

I’m tired, is what she said about staying in the car despite the efforts, and fuel costs, I had undertaken to get us to Galena.

Are you kidding? is what I thought. 

But what I said was, Come on, Lily. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Please.

Which was maybe a bit childish. I was at a loss at how to play this so as not to fall through the extremely thin ice that was life on the road with a girl that was fading on life on the road, and on me, while also inspiring that same girl to get out of the car, explore a dead president’s house with me, love me.

Can you just not right now? she said. I’m just tired. OK?

Was Ulysses S. Grant tired in the midst of the Siege of Vicksburg? Probably. Did he press on regardless in order to preserve the integrity of the country he loved? He did. But I got the message. It wasn’t I need to rest tired. It was I’m vexed by my current circumstances, which include you tired. I left the van with her in it and did the seven-dollar tour of Grant’s house alone. I learned he smoked an ungodly amount of cigars, and when it came time to bathe, the family had only one bathtub and only so much water. Grant went first, then his wife, then the kids from oldest to youngest, meaning the youngest bathed in brown, tepid water.

I knew it would be unwise to go back to the van so soon. Maybe this was exactly what we needed, some time apart. So I figured I’d just wander and dwell on Galena as a once thriving industrial community, and come back to Lily better, more patient, more ready to be like we used to.

But Lily wasn’t in the van when I got back from my wandering. She was laying on this grassy hill near where we’d parked with some long-haired dude chatting her up. I didn’t approach, but cut a nonchalant left and crouched between some parked cars. I watched them through about five windshields. She was laughing. He was pointing at something, bringing his head and arm close to hers so she could more easily follow the direction of his finger. There was the smile I’d been praying to God about for no less than a week. And he got it out of her, just like that.

He pushed her red hair behind her ear, and I felt sick.

He leaned in, going for a kiss, and I felt sicker.

Then I remembered I was still hiding behind a Toyota Corolla.

Hey, man! I said, emerging from the parking lot. The dude quickly stood up. Lily said she was wondering where I’d been. I said President Grant’s house, and asked them what was going on. I tried to be cool but my face was probably weirdly contorted. I didn’t know how to fight, but I assumed the stance I imagined a seasoned fighter would—chest puffed, fists balled, feet shoulder-width apart. 

Relax, bro, he said. She told me she was—

But I didn’t let him finish. I walked over and punched him in the noggin. After that, he kind of just ran off holding his eye. I hunched down and held my fist, which hurt, but I quickly realized how cowardly this was, and pretended I was fine.

I sat down with Lily. The blanket was warm from the dude’s ass. Lily said thanks and that he was a local creep that was bothering her. Even thought that seemed a bit incredible given all that I’d witnessed through the five panes of autoglass, I went with it because this is what I wanted. I laid on the grass with her, taking the long-haired dude’s spot. We made out. Then we migrated to the van and kept things going. If it’s wrong to admit the what we did in the van could hardly be characterized as making love, it felt no worse for its wrongness. It was rough and greedy fucking, and it was great. I felt like a Roman centurion after a victory in the field, or rather, for locational correctness, a Union soldier come home from battle with Lee’s army. Whatever it was, it felt like love again. Maybe that’s because I wanted it to be so. Or because of adrenaline. But I liked it. I liked it even more every time I glanced at my bruised hand.

That faded though pretty much as soon as we hit the road again. Things went back to how they were in terms of no feet on the dash, no arm out the window noodling in the wind, no talking, no friendship, no love. And all of this was made worse by the fact I was feeling pretty shit about what I’d done to the long-haired dude. Like, he didn’t really deserve that. I didn’t even give him a chance. It was a sucker punch. I wasn’t a sucker. Was I? I wasn’t one who punched unsuspecting persons in the noggin. But I guess for Lily, I was. We slept at a rest stop that night and didn’t really talk besides the few words we shared over our Starkist instant chicken dinners. It was chicken, but in a packet. It sucked. I sucked. Things sucked. 

And in the morning the van wouldn’t start.

Thank God, though, my dad taught me how to fix a sticky starter. In case you’re wondering, you just kind of get something heavy and give it a knock. On the road again, I resumed by efforts to fix Lily. I pointed out cows, rock formations, dilapidated farm houses, which were usually of great interest to both Lily and I, but none of these tactics worked. The van’s engine seemed to be developing an overheating problem. I said nothing, only pulled off the highway into the parking lot of an ice cream shop connected to a gas station to let the engine cool. We got cones. It was nice. In fact, it was perfect. And that was funny, the way things were sometimes best when you were trying the least. Then Lily reached into the back of the van for her water bottle, which was in her backpack, which was gone, along with all the rest of our stuff. While I was were inside, someone had broken into the van and stolen all of our stuff. 

Lily started to cry. 

We’ll be alright, I told her. I held her it but it was like I wasn’t holding her, or like I couldn’t—like she was shrinking in my arms.

Don’t worry, Lily, I said. Don’t cry. It’ll be okay.

But now I could really feel her fading. Even pressed up against me she felt far away, like a hollow, shell-version of the whole Lily. But I just kept holding her. And then I cried, too. And if anyone saw us, it would have been a sad scene. Two people crying, holding one another, with melting ice cream cones running down their shaky hands.

The way I made up for this setback was telling Lily I had a surprise, that I was going to drive us to Horton Bay, Michigan, where I planned to take her to dinner and get us a hotel and mend the things that had frayed between us.

Horton Bay, I read, was a paradise. It sits up against Lake Charlevoix and is the place where Ernest Hemingway hung out in the summertime. This was exactly what Lily and I needed. I could see us sitting on the beach holding hands and taking a canoe out into the lake, going fishing, frying up our catch. We would have campfires and sex and meet the locals and drink lots of beer and be happy.

So we hit the road, only there wasn’t a lot of talking now, like none at all. Lily asked where we were going but I told her it was a surprise and she had to wait and see, which was met with resentment. When it got dark and Lily fell asleep with her head against the window and I thought a lot about her, especially about how much I loved her and didn’t want to lose her even though it was seeming like I was going to. I thought back to our little room in California and how we had no money but were happy still. I thought about how hard she was working back then doing doubles at the credit union so she could help with the rent. I thought of how badly I wanted to earn more, to move up the ranks in the corporate world if that’s what it took for us to stop living in a van and get a little place we could afford where she wouldn’t have to work so much because I would be bringing in the dough. I thought about how she wanted a dog, and about what it would be like to give her one. Most of all I thought that even though it didn’t work out back in California, that maybe now it could. We were free. We could do whatever we pleased, even get married if we wanted, so long as she didn’t totally fade before then, before we could recharge our love in that way. I thought all this was possible, that once we were in Horton Bay, I could propose to her in that most romantic of places, the shore of the lake, water lapping the sand, at sunset. 

Then I heard a loud pop from the engine. Lily woke up in a panic. Everything was shaking violently, and there was a terrible oscillating noise coming from under the floorboards. I pulled over to the side of the highway, but even when we stopped the sound kept going. We got out of the car as the cabin was filling with white smoke. Then the van, our home, burst into flames. 

We both just kind of stood there in shock as the flames got bigger, like the biggest bonfire you’ve ever seen. In case of explosion, I took Lily by the hand and walked her down the road a bit, where we sat on the edge of the highway together, our faces illuminated by the glow of the fireball of our possessions. We didn’t talk. We only watched the blaze. In a way, it was peaceful. I knew then it was over. The fading process was complete. I’d lost Lily. There was nothing left to be salvaged. She was gone, despite her being next to me.

She called her dad, who said he would make arrangements for her to come home immediately. That night, she left in a black Uber.

As for me, I’m living in a Motel 6 in Holland, Michigan. Ben-Hur is playing on the TV, the silent film version from the early 1900s. I’m running through everything that happened, thinking about it over and over. I tried, I guess. No one can say I didn’t, despite things ending in a literal explosion. There’s something that feels good about that actually, failing but trying, trying but failing. Ben-Hur is moving his mouth but only beautiful music comes out of the TV, and somehow I know exactly what he’s saying. I’ve got a chocolate milk from the gas station cooling in the mini-fridge.

I tried. What else is there to say? Lily is gone. I’m okay. ◆