The next morning she had not slept. The siren had quieted but the spinning continued, the unnameable dread had grown with each hour. Daughtry had woken early while she’d pretended to be asleep to delay having to speak. He had gone out and brought back coffee and somehow acquired nail polish remover and a tortoiseshell plastic headband.
He insisted on another shower. Before she got in he wiped the ragged pink polish off nail by nail. “Better to have none than to look chipped. We can get you to one of those nail places later.” Then he found a file in her travel bag (she was surprised to remember she owned such a thing) and cleaned out and filed her nails one by one.
She stood silent as he worked the plastic tortoiseshell into her hair. “To add class,” he said. He stood back to admire her. She was aware beyond the spinning and fatigue that the itching and burning in her crotch had returned. The sex with Daughtry had brought it back, like a chronic affliction.
“I need cranberry juice.”
“Sure, baby,” Daughtry said, but he was adjusting the headband in the mirror and not listening.
At breakfast, he made her eat half a doughnut and a few bites of egg, all of which choked in her throat. The restaurant had no cranberry juice.
She tried to steady herself by focusing on the Formica table. But the gold flecks jittered around like a frantic cosmos. “So this time try for a little more,” Daughtry was saying. “You’re looking good. You’re looking like a living doll, you want to know the truth. They won’t peg you. And the sooner we’re done, the sooner we split.”
Daughtry went on lauding their prospects. She reached into the ostrich-skin purse and absently touched the knife.
Inside the bank, she noted the two security cameras first and looked into each as if to acknowledge them. Then she made a check out to herself for $10,000.
The attractive brunette with hair teased into a bouffant smiled widely at B. “I’ll just have to approve this with my manager,” she said in a cheery voice.
B. nodded robotically. She did feel like a living doll, made up and ready.
A large man in a red tie and a sea-blue suit walked back with the teller. “Have you checked this with anyone, ma’am? I wouldn’t want you to overdraw the account.” He stared at her from his plump face, quivering at the jowls.
“It’s ‘miss.’ No, there’s no one to check it with.”
The man’s doughy eyes did not move from her.
“It’s a large amount,” he said.
“It’s what I want.”
He coughed. The brunette teller stood at his side, smiling, pressing at a bobby pin in her hair, apparently unaware what was holding up the transaction.
“Excuse us for a moment,” the manager said. He walked away. The teller remained a beat, still smiling, then followed him.
B. saw him talk to another man in a tie. She saw a security guard watch the two men talking, then watch her.
Something warm entered her then. It puzzled her at first. She felt it spread. Starting inside the spinning and moving through her entire body. A pleasurable, liquid sensation. A warm analgesia, but emanating from the carsickness. As if the nausea and whirling had beaten so violently inside her they’d mealed the element that still fought them into a warm, pliant pulp. Like alcohol in her veins.
It was wonderful.
She waited to see if this blanketing would continue. It did. In this sensation, she began to discern something. She saw it finally: the carsickness was the truth. A warmth and clarity pouring through her, to guide and protect her. Now making the light more clear, the air purer, the path illuminated.
She saw it all clearly now. Her view of the circumstances sharpened. The banks were done. She no longer needed them. The carsickness was the thing to keep, to stay inside of. She pitied the teller who did not have this understanding. Who would go on fixing her hair and painting her nails and smiling confusedly, without the carsickness to bring her the truth.
The truth that the dissonances were, in fact, irreconcilable.
She felt suddenly as if nothing could touch her. Like lying in Daughtry’s balmy ocean, warm and sedated and enveloped tenderly. Lifted from every shard and cutting pebble below. She reached into the ostrich-skin purse and grabbed hold of the knife.
When the manager and teller returned, her voice was steady and direct.
“I have a friend outside with a gun. If you don’t give me the money, he’ll come inside and shoot you. If he sees you signal the guard or pick up the phone, he’ll kill you.”
The brunette appeared not to comprehend. She was frozen with a half smile on her face, waiting for the punch line. The manager’s wall of jowls shook in fury. The waves of warmth and clearness guided B.: she had read somewhere that a bank must honor the mere threat of a weapon; she calculated that Daughtry was too far away for the manager to see his face through the glass door. She was not certain, however, if there were cameras in the parking lot.
The manager glowered at B. She knew: at her soft hair, her belling dress, her small hands.
“The ten thousand dollars now or he’ll shoot,” she said calmly.
The brunette’s face crumpled then. There was a long pause in which B. still felt no fear, only the warm liquid clarity pouring through her. She locked eyes with the manager.
“Get the money, Cindy,” he finally said.
In the car, she told Daughtry, “It’s for your boat.”
He held the wrapped stack of bills in disbelief. “They let you fucking go with this? Just like that?”
“You can have the boat now,” she repeated.
He looked at the money, not moving.
“We should go, Harold,” she told him gently.
No one followed in the side mirror yet. Daughtry was silent. They passed an orchard covered in blight, half the leaves brown and shrunken. But the sight did not disturb B. It seemed a natural part of the new gift of the carsickness, the relentless truth, the laying bare. When the Mustang was on the highway, she ducked under Daughtry’s legs and rounded up the rest of the money. All of her actions clear and natural in her body without her having to understand them. She smoothed the bills into a single bundle.
“It’s better if you keep everything for us,” she explained, handing it to him.
He slid the bundle inside his lapel pocket mechanically. His forehead was ashen with sweat. “You’re different than I thought you were,” he said. “You’re not the other girl at all.”
It was not clearly admiration or disappointment, and B. felt she could only agree.
“I’m a little shaky,” she said. “Let’s drive for a while and get a bottle somewhere.”
He nodded. He seemed too stunned for the moment to argue with her.
It began to fragment here. Beautifully. Her body on one side, apart, abstract. For the first time since childhood. Whether it was appealing or not, adorned or not. Her body now a vessel for the warm light of the carsickness. She thought of worrying and fretting about bare shins or chipped nails or mussed hair and she wanted to laugh.
Daughtry pulled off at a gas station with a convenience store attached. He paused after he cut the engine, put his hand on her knee.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
It was true. In the fragmenting, she was warm and calm and clear. She was not, anywhere in her tissue and nerves, waiting for things to work out. She watched her body in the seat, holding on.
Daughtry didn’t remove his hand. She observed his worn leather cuff on her dress.
“Really. I feel better now.”
He let out a sigh and moved his hand to stroke her cheek. “I’m glad, baby. I’m glad I know you like this.” She watched him go into the store. The hot sun on the car felt no different than the heat all through her. The cuff of his leather blazer worn to cracks against the green poplin dress lingered in her mind. The carsickness—a boon, she was understanding now—laying the dissonances bare: Daughtry was a good man, and he would not succeed; she and he did not belong anywhere, and they did not belong together. The worn leather cuff and the green poplin dress. No one wanted to hear about her basement apartment; her mother was frightened for her; the girls would be free and bare-shinned. The blighted trees stood next to the healthy. This laying bare did not frighten her. She was not frightened.
She would only need to drive now. She would only need to keep going.
Then came another piece of clarity: he would never let her go. He would want her to stay with him, to take care of her, to put headbands in her hair and catch her fish for their soups. Her body in the fragmenting took this in.
Daughtry came back and got behind the steering wheel with a brown paper bag. “This will smooth things out. Then we’ll get on the road. We can make the border by morning.”
“Let’s stop and drink it somewhere first.”
“Naw, let’s drink while we roll. Faster we get going, better I’ll feel.”
“I want to stop first.”
He looked at her defiantly. She felt it beginning. She put on her bedroom eyes for him.
“Okay, alright. Just for a little while, baby.”
From there, she heard and saw pieces in the fragmenting, from inside the carsickness. “Baby, alright, baby.” Fingers at the nape of her neck. A dirt road, a wind break, leaves skimming the ground. Daughtry laying out the leather blazer once more. “Fishing boats, Mexico . . . Together. Together.” The smooth sharp steel in her hand, the gash in his arm. Against the pale and black hairs the blood bubbling out. Mouth open, no words. The other hand grabbing for her, squirming, then a flick at his cheek, shallow, more blood. A moan. Moans. The eyes. The sad eyes she could not help. Dirt kicked up, sun flaring.
Back in the Mustang, keys in the ignition, wet stains on her dress.
And then: free.