Erma lay naked on the motel bed. Beside her, a red transistor radio made in some other country in some other decade bared its scratched surface. She reached out and turned the knob. Static, and then, there, like a gift, a song that was the right one. Maybe the only one that would have let them do what they were about to do. And for a wonder, she’d caught it at its very beginning, the jangling of bells like an alarm, and then the slow, insistent build to music.
“Wilco,” John said, naming the band as he stepped from the bathroom. He stood before her undressed, and she saw that his skin was much too pale to be called “healthy.”
“Yes.” Erma pulled the covers back and knew, even as he slipped in, that they were lost in the same memory, of the two of them with their flesh sticky against the vinyl of John’s car, the windows down, air heavy with humidity, and this very song on the radio. She was still dating someone else then, and John was still pretending at a cool that was untouchable, and all of that, all of it would shatter against the weight of their two bodies that night as they came together for the first time and then pulled apart, each leaving a piece in the other like a shard, or a splinter.
“Here,” John said, and he took her hand and guided it between the sheets down to his thigh, to the bare of his leg, and then she was holding him, her eyes closed, about to guide him home.
“The condom,” she said, hating herself for saying it.
He stopped. The song played its chorus, I am trying to break your heart….
“Are you sure?” he said, and he was asking a different question, but Erma answered it, opening the package, sliding the plastic between them, a barrier against so many things, and it might have ended there, might have been better to end there, but it didn’t, and they went on, and above them, the glow-in-the-dark stars that someone had pasted slowly lost their light.
And now the other memory—the black one—found them and caught hold. They bucked together against it, two bodies like twigs on an ocean much too large not to swallow anything that came in its way. Erma cried out, felt the absence bloom there, then disappear. Beside the bed, their dog lifted its head and howled, caught up in the swan song of the two of them.
And then it was over. They closed their eyes and found an ugly sleep.
The tiles of the motel bathroom were cold, and she tried not to look down at them, at the brown stains on the grout between the squares. She pulled the cheap ringed shower curtain closed around her, and turned the rusted knobs to release the spray, lifting her face up to catch the hard drops.
Montana. This, then, was where she’d remember it happening.
Gently, Erma moved her hand to rinse between her legs. A stream of red rushed out, mixing with the water.
The doctor had told her the first time might be painful. He’d also told her that she was perfectly capable of allowing this first time to happen weeks ago, though she’d lied to John and said differently. She watched the blood stream down the drain, mixing with the rust around the silver rim. Carefully, she pulled the tender flesh apart, moving a soapy hand between the folds to ensure that what was left rinsed away.
There was still time.
The doctor had told them both that.
Still plenty of time.
A rumble issued from the room next door, unmistakable through the paper-thin motel walls, and then was followed by the sound of a toilet flushing. The water above Erma’s head turned to scalding, jerking her from her unpleasant memories. She jumped out of the water’s stream, nearly falling on the slick tub bottom.
“Shit!”
“Everything okay in there?”
John was up, then. He’d be in a hurry, too.
“It’s just the water,” she shouted back. It was tepid now, as if the burst of heat had depleted it. Another toilet flush, this time from the room above them, and the water changed temperature again, from tepid to ice. Erma jumped fully out of the tub, deciding to give up the endeavor altogether.
“John?” she called over the noise of the bathroom fan.
She stood dripping, awaiting a response, but there was none. He must have taken Maxie out to pee.
As she toweled off she glanced briefly at the bathtub, at the faint ruddy swirl about the drain that one could mistake for rust, and then quickly she left the bathroom, got dressed, and packed, filling her suitcase in a rush.
John came back in with Maxie, moved past her with only a nod and then, thrown back over his shoulder, a command. “I’ll be ready in five minutes.”
Erma waited for him outside, sitting on the curb of the motel’s parking lot. To her left, a maid shoved a motel cart, its ship-like girth near to tilting with the stacks of thin motel toilet paper, mini shampoo bottles. She was not surprised to see the woman filling these mini bottles from a large V05 bottle, the bright dollar store sticker still on its front. Erma’s hair, wet from the shower, began to dry quickly in the morning sun, the wind sending up its soapy scent to her.
John came out, Maxie close behind him.
“You ready?”
“Yes.”
The motel door to their left opened, and a woman emerged. She held a screaming toddler slung across her hip and a phone pressed to one ear, using her shoulder to keep it there.
“…and I just told him,” Erma heard the woman say, “to fuck off.”
The toddler began to scream, reaching for its mother’s face. The woman slapped its hand away in annoyance.
Erma couldn’t tell if the child was a boy or a girl. Stringy blond hair lay matted against the baby’s head, and a thick, wet-looking diaper drooped down from its bare backside. Behind them, a boy of ten or twelve followed his mother from the bowels of the motel room, his hand buried deep in a bag of Cheetos. The boy looked at John and Erma, smiled, then carried on, wiping orange streaks on his white T-shirt.
Could have been mine, her mind raced.
“And Jesus wept,” John muttered, under his breath.
Erma inhaled sharply, hoping the kid hadn’t heard. He hadn’t, apparently; he trundled onward, following his mother across the parking lot and toward the fast food building at its end. The toddler began a high, chuffing kind of whine.
John whistled for Maxie, then opened the door of the moving van to let her jump in.
Erma wanted to say something to him, to chide him for his judgment of the kid. “You didn’t have to—” But he cut her off before she could finish.
“See you on the other side,” he said, pulling himself into the moving van after Maxie. Then, without fanfare or even a wave, started the engine, and drove out of the motel parking lot. Erma hurried to her own car, stamping on the gas to catch him.
Above them, a single crow flew from left to right. If John had seen it, he would have reminded Erma that early Romans thought seeing a bird fly in that direction was bad luck.
She felt the tampon swelling slowly inside her, and briefly she shuddered at the memory of what had come out of her, but there in the morning sun, the open road ahead of her, it was easier, somehow, to cast these thoughts aside.
They were on to a new life, after all, and she supposed it was best to leave some things behind.