Kenia and I both love creating female characters who don’t behave quite like the world wants them to. This excerpt is based on my dark fascination with why and how women do the “wrong” thing.
The potential was always there. The first time I noticed it, age six, I was in the passenger’s seat of my mom’s rust-red Volvo sedan, watching the scrubby trees fly by as we drove the salt-scented road to my grandma’s on Cape Cod. That was Sunday night—Mom was having me skip school like she did sometimes when her worries got heavy, and so the lane going the other way was packed full of cars leaving the Cape after the weekend.
I was peering out toward those fast cars, across the double yellow line, when suddenly I was overwhelmed by the thinness of that line. In fact it wasn’t just thin, it was nothing, it was flat paint on asphalt, it had no power at all to stop a car—any one of those hundreds of cars!—from veering into our lane and smashing into us, full speed. It could happen at any moment. There was no reason it couldn’t. I looked at the face of each passing driver and wondered who it would be. Then I looked at my mom’s calm face, her soft hands on the wheel. I looked at my own hands. I started to cry.
It’s happened thousands of times since then, almost every day it feels like sometimes. I look at my hand holding my expensive phone and wonder if I’ll suddenly decide to smash it on the sidewalk. The paperback book over the cozy fireplace. The small girl at the edge of the observation deck, hands on the low rail, toes on point. It’s not that I want to do these things. It’s only that the lines are so thin.
So, I guess I wasn’t surprised when I looked at the man through the steam of my coffee, at far end of the dining car, and said: “Okay.”
I told myself it was because Mom was dead, buried under those heavy worries at last. And on top of that, Beatrice was gone—no warm bulk next to me in bed, no wet nose pressed into my hand when I came in the door, no quiet barks as she slept, dreaming, on the hearth. Without the two of them, I was unmoored. So in some way, maybe it was because they were gone. But in another way, it certainly was not. I did it because I could. So that I could know, at last, what the swerve felt like.