Those fields make me want to start running and never stop. Past the wreathed, white crosses dashing along the highway, they’re just fields of gold that remind me of the summertime and the exuberance of youthful legs chasing after fireflies. My knees ache a little at the memory, but that might just be from the five hours and thirty-six minutes or so (I’m not counting) they’ve spent cramped up against the backpack on the floor in front of me.
Sophia hasn’t moved her hands away
from two-and-ten o’clock on the steering wheel, and two hours or so ago, I told
her she looked ridiculous with her knuckles white and the whites of her eyes
bugging out at the empty road like this was the first time she’s ever driven
above thirty-five. Two hours minus a couple of seconds or so ago, she told me
to shut up, so I did.
That was the rule, and why I was
allowed to come: “You shut up about Marcus, you don’t say a goddamn thing,” she
said, because like she told me before, she knows I can keep secrets. I’d say
she only knows about three-fourths of them. The rest I keep in a shoebox inside
my head, and they are only for me.
We don’t listen to the radio. I
don’t mind the quiet, but I think if nothing happens soon, my brain will join
the highway litter, and my head will be a bust-open echo box of secrets public
and private.
My stomach speaks for me, and I know
she had to hear it, too, but she doesn’t even look at me. I should be used to
that. “Sophie,” I say, “we’ve been driving awhile. How about a bite to eat?”
Her eyes tighten, and I can tell she
doesn’t want to hear another one of my brilliant ideas, but her grip on the
steering wheel loosens a little, because she knows I’m right. Every single
time, except just that once, I’m right. (I’m not counting.)
“First truck stop, then,” she says.
After another thirteen minutes and one nearly-missed exit, Sophia takes us to a gas station that calls itself a travel center. She pulls into the parking space too close on my side, but I manage to squeeze out and follow her into the restaurant. I don’t even remember the name of it—it’s one of those generic places you only find far away from real cities, where you only go if you’re desperate and sick to death of golden arches.
Neither
of us announces it, but we both head for the bathrooms first. The list outside
mine says it was last cleaned by “H.C.” at 10:35, but I don’t believe it.
When
we meet back in the food court and look at the menu, I decide I’m safest with a
hamburger. Sophia whispers she’s not hungry, but I order her one anyway and say
it’s for me when she gives me a half-hearted glare.
We
pay in cash and sit down, and her foot taps restlessly against the base of the
table, causing it to vibrate, but I don’t think she notices. Her eyes are a
little red, and they won’t stop moving.
“You look crazy,” I tell her, “like
you haven’t made a good decision in twenty years.”
“I haven’t,” she says with her
hollow voice.
I want to tell her it’s not her
fault—I was the one who chose that moment to distract her, to take her eyes off
of the road (what was he doing there, anyway?)—but we both know it ultimately
is, and she looks like she’s about to start crying anyway, so I say nothing. I
wait about four minutes, then push the still-wrapped hamburger toward her. She
doesn’t even look at it, but her hand accepts and unwraps it, and she chews
with her eyes far away.
The meat is too pink, and as I eat,
I can see the fleshy strands and imagine them shifting with the movements of
the living cow and the splatter of unusable bits on the slaughterhouse floor,
and the shifting of those same muscles in the human or machine who sweeps up
after. I can taste something vile in my mouth that’s come creeping up my
esophagus, but I decide it’s only a reaction to the grease. I manage a few more
bites and hide the rest in the foil wrapper.
I dump our trash in the bin outside
the door. We move back toward the car, but when we reach the parking spot,
Sophia stops and stares at the hood of the car as if trying and failing to
steel herself. I wait patiently, examining
the fractal pattern of insect parts and butterfly wings, and she
confides, “I don’t want to keep going.”
“We can’t keep driving forever,” I
agree.
She doesn’t need to say “I know.”
Her facial expression suffices.
“But we’ll keep going until you’re
ready, and I’ll be there.”
She manages a flicker of a watery
smile, and I am overcome with self-hatred for only thinking of these words now,
when they can only come to nothing and I no longer deserve to say them. For
once in my life neither awkward nor sincere.
“Let me drive,” I say quickly, to
expel the taste of sentiment from my mouth. “You can rest a bit.”
She thanks me quietly and pulls the
keys from her pocket, passing them to me. I unlock the car, and she moves to
sit on the passenger’s side, but my backpack is still stuffed on the floor
between her seat and the dashboard. I tell her to wait so I can move it out of
the way. She shakes her head to tell me not to bother, but I insist.
We return to the highway and the
rhythm-less silence of before, as if we had never paused in our flight. My gaze
is focused on the white and yellow lines, and Sophia’s eyes look open, but are
in fact closed behind a curtain of memory. I know what she is thinking, because
if I stopped thinking for a moment, the same confused images would be repeated
endlessly in my mind, though perhaps with a different conclusion.
Sophia’s red rosary swings a little
as it hangs from the rear-view mirror. I never realized how distracting it is.
How can she drive—how can she do anything—with it always dangling there in
front of everything?
I used to be a Catholic—had my
baptism and first communion and everything. But reconciliation I could not do.
They led me there when I was eight to confront the faceless screen and told me
to confess my sins. But kneeling there, feeling only a presence on the other
side, I could not be sure if it was the priest or God Himself, even though the
voice sounded just like Father Bill. I was so nervous, I made up sins,
confessing things I had never done because the empty silence was too powerful.
I can laugh at my child-self now,
caught in the impressionable haze of innocent suggestibility and imperfect
memory. I am older; I do not sin anymore—I do what needs to be done. No
judgment, only justification.
The car trembles as a grinding sound
shoots through us like a lightning flash of panic. I curse at myself for
drifting as I shift the steering wheel to take us off the punctured ruts lining
the shoulder and back into our lane.
As if suddenly awoken, Sophia lets
out a pitiable moan that sends another, softer shock through my heart. “I
killed him,” she finally whispers. “I killed him, they’ll think I did it on
purpose, I killed…” Her voice fades as she withdraws somewhere deeper inside
herself, watching and not seeing the yellow fields rippling by.
Silently, I listen to her echo my
own accusation I deflected toward her in that confusing and wild moment just
after it happened. Like I’ve been doing for the past six hours and forty-eight
minutes or so (why am I counting?), I look to the rear-view mirror for the
flash of red and blue that we both know is coming. It will take them awhile,
but they will find Marcus, and then they’ll find us. There’s no such thing as a
coincidence.
(My timing was perfectly calculated,
but they’ll never need to know, and I will feel no guilt.)
The sun is bright overhead, and my eyes are watering. We
pass another cross; I can’t read its name. My hands are on the wheel.
Two-and-ten. Oh god. Stop shaking.
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