We swapped seats.
Cal told me to sleep. It was getting late, almost eleven. He wanted to wind a path back to the coast to find somewhere to park for the night. I closed my eyes with my head half on the plastic of the doorframe and half on the cold glass of the window above it and vibrations against my cheek and the seat belt cutting into my neck.
I was exhausted but I didn’t want to sleep. My brain was wired and my thoughts were hectic and a little delirious and anxious and buzzing round and round in my head.
So I pretended to be asleep and through my half-closed eyes I watched the vague rhythmic flicker of headlights going past and I listened to the faint crumple of static laughter on the radio.
Then I must really have fallen asleep because I was walking alone in a deserted airport which meant I was dreaming. I was in a long white terminal building and there were rows and rows of airport chairs stretching out a long way ahead of me and there were big signs hanging down from the ceiling. When I tried to read them I found that the names were not real at all but instead were random letters scrambled up with no order.
All the other people at the airport must already have left to get on their flights because there was only me still there alone and staring up at these signs, trying to decode them, and it seemed like the more I looked the more the letters danced and moved and slipped away.
And suddenly I found myself not alone anymore but arguing with a shop attendant who had appeared out of nowhere in the little airport news kiosk.
I was trying to buy a newspaper and the woman had hold of one end of it and I had hold of the other and she was pulling it out of my hands.
“It’s not in the right language, it’s all backward,” she was saying. “You can’t read it anyway.”
“But I need it.”
“You can’t. You’re not supposed to. We’re closed.”
“But I have to see—”
I tugged it hard and it came out of her hands and on the front page was the photo that I had known would be there, the spread-eagled body, the running blood pixelated into the gutter of the road and all of it splashed out in blurred ink and strangely distorted, Sandro Martin flooding the inside of his head onto the tarmac.
I woke to the feeling of the plastic door handle digging into my back; Cal was shaking my shoulder.
It was pitch dark.
He said, “Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“Are you sure? You were talking in your sleep.”
“I’m fine.” There was heaviness in my eyes and it was thick and dark. “Where are we?” My voice was dry.
“At the coast. Near a place I used to come on vacation with my family when I was a kid.”
Outside there was the sound of water, soft wavelets.
I opened the door.
Low old trees grew together overhead and their branches were bleached white and twined and smooth and hung with thick pads of draping moss and their flat glossy leaves were murmuring in the night breeze.
We were parked in a sandy clearing and there were trees surrounding us and the road was winding back behind. In front of us there was an opening in the trees and through it was the flat darkness of the ocean.
Tiny waves broke on the sand, white on black.
I climbed out of the passenger seat and walked across the clear space and into the water barefoot and there were stars above me and the smell of salt in my throat and I looked up at the sky and raised my hands above my head and turned around and around in the water under the huge clarity of the dark sky and the stars which stabbed out long points of light.
Cal walked out and stood beside me and his face was turned upward.
After a moment he made a half movement in the water and put his arms around my shoulders and for a moment we leaned, slumped against each other, exhausted, and I felt myself swaying and I thought I would fall but didn’t. I closed my eyes and there was stillness and the ragged sound of my own breath and the warmth of his body pressed against my back. I said, “I have to sit down.”
I pulled away from him and walked out and sat down on the sand of the beach and looked out at the water and Cal came and sat beside me.
I said, “I’ve been thinking about where we should go. I thought maybe we should go to Eidon.”
“Eidon? That’s farther south. What would we do there?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Whatever we’d do anywhere else, I suppose. I want to see the mountain, Eidon Mountain. Have you seen it?”
“Yeah. There’s snow on the peak in the middle of summer. The city is built out across the valley.”
“I want to see it.”
He shrugged in the dark. “We can go there. If it’s what you want.”
Then he said, “And what about when we get there?”
“What do you mean?”
He paused. He was staring at the water and his face was fixed and he seemed to be looking through it and not really seeing it.
Then he said abruptly, “What was the other night to you? At Maro’s.”
“Where did that come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not like you. To talk.”
He shrugged. “I just wondered.”
I paused for a moment and foundered but he didn’t seem to need an answer. I thought maybe he hadn’t expected one.
After a while he said, “You know, you were always above the rest for me, Anne Marie. You were always above the others.”
“Cal—”
“Just let me say it. I know I wasn’t right to you and I know I broke things. But I did want to make it work.”
I looked at his face in the moonlight and it cut me to my gut. I said, “You could’ve told me you were leaving. I’d have let you go because I would’ve done anything for you, Cal. Anything to see you happy, even if it meant giving you up.”
“I know, shit, I know—”
“That’s what broke me. That you didn’t tell me, and that I never really knew what was in your head.”
He was silent for a moment and then when he spoke his voice was hoarse. He said, “I have this feeling, this smothering feeling, and it’s pressing on me all the time and it’s like I’m burning up against the whole world and the only way to escape it is to move, to keep moving so it doesn’t catch up with me. Sometimes it goes away when I drink, when I come close to some kind of an edge. But it always comes back. I remember being in that apartment we had and thinking it’s got me again, it’s got me here too, the feeling’s back. I tried to ignore it. I tried not to give in.”
“But you did. And this is where we are.” For a moment I felt so tired and far away from him.
Silence fell and we sat side by side, looking out over the dark.
Eventually he said, “Yeah. This is where we are.”
Somewhere out across the water a bird keened in the night, and its sound went on and on through the stillness.