Martha watched the fences running along the highway, diamond-link or just barbed wire strung between wooden posts. That’s how it seemed, that the fences were keeping pace with their speeding car. Fields and pastures beyond, cows sometimes, horses, or nothing, just open space that someone thought needed to be contained.

Neither she nor Jess wore a watch. It could be nine thirty, or almost noon. The morning brightened the vast surrounding country. She had never thought of time this way, as light filling a day. Then she corrected herself. She’d had this experience before. That was how time moved through Zero Zone.

Jess said, “I want to know what happened in there, but I don’t know how to ask.”

Martha smiled and said, “I think you just did.”

She was surprised by how much she liked Jess. Until Izzy’s attack, Martha hadn’t thought much about the artist who made the room. She thought she’d feel angry, sitting in a car with the woman who created Zero Zone. Or intimidated. Jess reminded her of Misty’s old Vegas friends, other designers and costumers, the confident, creative women working backstage, away from the lights and applause. Martha had envied and admired that sisterhood, their commitment, their ambivalence toward the city’s playground nonsense. They were there to work; they had a vocation, an art. Martha always felt ashamed when she served them drinks, working the casino floor with a grass skirt and as much cleavage as she could mobilize.

But Jess didn’t act superior or judgmental. Since the moment Martha opened the trailer’s front door, Jess had treated Martha as an equal, with respect, even a little fear. Martha could tell that Jess thought of her as more than a gullible waitress who’d gotten herself into a shitload of trouble. She was the woman who had survived Zero Zone. She was the woman who might get them out of it again.

And now Martha understood that Jess had been with them all along. She had created that place, and some part of her was there during those eight days. Part of her was still there. The room wouldn’t let Jess go, either.

As Martha spoke she looked at the fences, or over to Jess’s profile, the thin white scar running down her cheek. It felt different from when she had told Sam. That was sharing. This was letting go, leaving the story on the road as they sped east. It reminded her of a car she’d once seen on the highway, boxes and suitcases flying from its roof because a strap had come loose. She told Jess of the walk along the trail, meeting Tanner, entering the room. More suitcases, more boxes. She spoke about those final few hours inside, trapped and terrified, yet still hoping for a sign from Misty.

Jess glanced at Martha, then back out at the road ahead.

“Did you ever feel her in there?” she asked. “Your sister?”

Martha wondered what answer Jess wanted to hear. Maybe it would give her some peace of mind to believe Martha had experienced a final moment with Misty’s spirit, a last goodbye. But Martha only wanted the truth now. The fantasies had cost her—cost them all—too much.

“No,” she said. It felt good to hear the word in her own voice, denying the illusion. She imagined shooting that word into Tanner’s chest.

Jess wanted to know about Tanner. It was as if Martha’s thought triggered the question.

“He’s like the room,” Martha said. “Both of them suck you in. Black holes.”

Martha turned the radio knob, sliding between stations, stopping on one static-fuzzed song or another. Neither of them spoke about it, but they both understood she was searching for news. Whenever Martha heard a newscaster’s self-serious baritone, she paused on the dial. They listened in silence, the air in the car pitched high and tight. A shootout, a siege—they waited for the familiar words. But it was just traffic and weather, a weekend carnival in Flagstaff, a gas leak in Albuquerque.

They stopped quickly for gas, cigarettes, to use the restroom. Each time they half expected Vince to streak by in Martha’s hatchback, but there was still no sign of him. They took turns driving. Whoever sat in the passenger seat did most of the talking. It felt easier there, with the driver looking ahead most of time. They could speak without feeling watched.

“Did you know who she was that night,” Martha asked, “when Izzy came into the gallery?”

For the last few miles they’d been stuck behind a long tanker truck, but now the passing lane was clear and Martha gunned the rental alongside.

Jess wasn’t sure how to answer. No one had ever asked, and she didn’t know how to explain. That moment with Isabella didn’t make sense on its own. Maybe that had been her mistake all this time—trying to keep that night quarantined from the rest of her life.

Once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. Martha had unburdened herself of everything, and Jess felt the freeing pull of that honesty. She told Martha about her parents’ accident, Aunt Ruth, Zack, Alex and his photographs, building Zero Zone. Finally she paused, back at the gallery, Isabella coming toward her through the crowd.

“I hadn’t watched the news,” Jess said, “but I still knew who she was.”

“What did you do?”

“I just stood there.”

“Even though she had that thing?” Martha asked. “That canister. You didn’t yell or run?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I thought I deserved whatever she had come to do.”

The tank was half full, but they still pulled into line at a gas station in Tucumcari. They were close now. This would be their last stop and they both wanted a full tank for whatever happened next.

The line wasn’t long, and after she filled up Jess parked by a pair of phone booths at the edge of the lot. She walked to the restroom behind the station, moving slowly, feeling a hesitancy to barrel ahead that fought with the need to get to Zero Zone as quickly as possible, obliterating second thoughts. When Jess came out Martha was crossing the lot toward the restroom, moving in that same measured way. As they passed, Martha placed her hand on Jess’s back. After all the hours in the car it was the first time they had touched. She moved her hand up toward Jess’s shoulder, rubbing briskly, as if trying to rouse them both awake.

The first phone booth Jess tried was dead, but the second booth’s receiver held a distant tone, so she fed enough dimes into the slot for a call to L.A. The air inside the booth was hot and stuffy. She left the folding door open, partly due to the heat but mostly because she wasn’t yet ready to close herself inside a confined space. That might come soon enough.

She dialed Zack’s latest number and waited through the electronic purr of the long-distance ring. But either he wasn’t answering or she had the wrong number again. She was about to hang up when the line clicked and caught, opening up to Zack’s wary, Hello?

Jess said she was just checking in, but she couldn’t mask the uncertainty in her voice. Zack must have heard it, too.

“Where are you?” he asked. The line was bad, coming in and out.

“At a pay phone.”

“Where?”

“Out of town.”

“Jess,” he said. “What are you doing?”

Over at the pump, the line of cars was growing. A long green station wagon with fake wood paneling idled in the middle of the pack. In the back seat, a young girl pressed her check to the window, trying to get a good look at the front of the line. Jess watched her through the phone booth’s smeared glass.

“I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

“Listen to me. You saw what those people did. And what that girl did to you. Let the police handle it.”

“They can’t, Zack. I have to get her out.”

“Out of what? Jess, don’t. You don’t know this girl.”

He was wrong, but Jess didn’t want to fight, and didn’t have time to explain. “I’ll be home soon,” she said. “And then let’s watch a movie. Not on the phone. At your place. Or let’s go to a theater, sit in front of the big screen. When was the last time we went to the movies together? Maybe even tomorrow night. I could be back by then.”

Martha appeared from around the corner of the gas station, heading back to the car.

Jess said, “I have to go.”

“Wait. Just—”

Silence on the line. Jess thought the call had cut out, but then Zack’s voice returned.

“I want you to know something.”

Martha stopped beside the rental’s passenger door, raised her arms over her head, shaking blood flow back into her hands.

“A couple of years ago,” Zack said, “I flew out to Vermont to meet a client, a professor in Burlington.”

The connection worsened, splintering his voice with tiny blank spaces. Jess didn’t know where this was going. Another story about a hunt for a lost movie? Maybe he was stalling for time, trying to keep her from hanging up.

“Zack,” she said, “I really have to—”

“I knew you had a piece there, a place you’d made in the woods. That little house.”

“Waterfall,” Jess said, very confused now. Waterfall had been her first major commission. She and Zack had only spoken of it once, right before she left for Vermont to start building. She had been so excited and proud, and she’d wanted Zack to feel the same, but he was dismissive, wondering aloud who would bother to go looking for an art installation in the middle of nowhere.

“I drove out there,” he said. “To your piece. I spent most of the day inside.”

The line stuttered. Jess felt its struggling pulse in her chest.

She said, “You never told me.”

“I’ve never been able to tell you any of it.” Zack’s voice was halting, stopping and starting, but he pushed forward. He had to get it out. “I was angry, you know? I’ve always been so angry. I wanted to be the one to do those things.”

Jess leaned against the phone, the receiver warm on her ear.

“I can’t describe what I felt in there,” he said. “I still can’t. But I want you to know that I think about it all the time.”

Jess didn’t know what to say. She wanted to tell him that he was the reason she’d first considered making anything. That he had pointed the way. And that they’d been wrong all along, dug into the belief that there was only a single spot for one of them to occupy. There had always been room for them both.

But Martha was in the driver’s seat now, ready to go, so instead Jess said, “I love you.” She couldn’t remember when she had last told him. Not since they were little kids, when it was so much easier to admit.

More silence on the line, then a drop down to a deeper silence, airless and complete, the call gone dead. Jess wondered if he had heard, wondered when she’d get another chance to say it. She hung up the receiver, listening to her dimes falling through the machine.

Martha started the car. The line at the pump inched forward. The girl in the station wagon pressed her lips to her window, blowing a kiss, then leaned back to admire the mark she’d left on the glass.