He thought he had become used to the meals one could gather in the aisles of gas stations, but the next two months played out on another frequency, each day distinct from the one before, presenting another set of challenges. In the first week they had a borrowed car, a loan from a member of Shelter who was still communicating with her, and Wright watched Fay’s hands, always at ten and two, the speedometer at exactly the legal limit. When they managed to get to one of the houses where Fay once would have been welcomed, it was silent, barbed, the people drifting through the rooms shaking their heads and sighing, kitchen to living to bath, bath to living to kitchen, as though on the track of some children’s railroad set. There were no books open, no maps spread. There was never the smell of food.
Soon they were hitchhiking, Fay lying as much as necessary. They were on their way to a commune, New Mexico, The Last Resort, or they were traveling to an aunt with pancreatic cancer, her remaining days in the double digits, and their Greyhound had broken down. Wright couldn’t see how they presented, he and his mother, but they must have given off some smell of misfortune, because people seemed quick to pity them, to stop asking the questions with the sad answers.
Then it became clear, at a motel where a clerk with no front teeth asked why Wright wasn’t in school and why she looked familiar, that something had changed, closing the world to them. A photo of her, scavenged from an article about Charlie and the bar, had appeared in the papers that morning, alongside a photo of Randy in uniform and the two deceased members of Shelter and the black schoolteacher their bomb had killed, a man who had died because he stayed home with the flu. The network of pay phones went largely unanswered, and the statement, sent to fifty-six newspapers, was of a different tone. Randy’s name appeared beneath it.
We of Shelter are devastated by the loss of an innocent life and of our comrades. We are forced to reconsider our violent ideology, which we developed with the belief that we could enact change. We thought that by mirroring, on a small level, the way this country has treated others, by meeting shock and terror with shock and terror, we might as a nation begin to rethink our identity and become a more compassionate force in the global community. We were wrong, and now we are quiet, and we will remain that way for the foreseeable future.
She read it in sunglasses at a concrete table at a rest stop. They were between rides, having terminated the last early, a man who had asked if she was saved in a way that felt like a threat. She took out a pen and an envelope. He saw her parents’ names printed in capitals, the addressor listed as Bess Rainy, but he refused to ask her why she was writing to them after so many years without a call. Her secrets held no interest anymore, and the thought of his grandparents, how she’d removed them from her life, made him silent. He would run toward the things he knew she’d rejected—a room kept neatly in your honor, photos that described you becoming yourself.
FAY NEVER SPOKE OF RANDY and Wright never asked, though there was a certain face she made that Wright sensed was a thought of him, her lips parted and eyebrows reaching for each other. The conversation she made was benign, remote, never impeached by the events of the last six months. I wonder what type of tree that is, she would say. Do you think the people who designed cars meant to suggest a human face with the headlights, the grill, or was it a function of the subconscious? Do you like the red that house is painted, or does it remind you of a stoplight? He knew they were running out of Charlie’s money, knew that Randy had run off with half of what Fay had saved, because they were camping more and more, sometimes in state parks where Wright surveyed the other families, the Coleman coolers and rigid bedtimes, sometimes on farmland off the highway, places they ended up when they were tired of holding out their thumbs. Where are we going, he would ask her, not because he believed there was an answer but to communicate his total disdain. After a man with a shotgun had unzipped their tent and spit on its fly and given them one minute to go, somewhere in Pennsylvania, Wright offered to turn her in.
“I could do it for you,” he said.
They were following a two-lane country road, barely lifting their feet to make the next steps.
“Here she is, Officer, the white woman who rejected her general luck and wealth to become an amateur bomb builder and inadvertently kill a teacher. She didn’t mean to, she just wanted to impress the creepy radical she was fucking, I’m not sure which one.”
They didn’t speak for the two miles into the next town. The only event was a truck passing, its expulsion of air examining their dime-store T-shirts stiff with sweat. When she pulled her fifth cigarette from the box he asked her for one, feeling with some satisfaction that he could hate her for either response—if she agreed for the heresy of not treating him like a child, if she denied him for the hypocrisy of casting him as an adult. He was only a step or two behind her, close enough that he could press the tip of his sneaker down the back of her heel, which he did. After a minute she lit another one on hers and passed it back. In a café where the water-damaged wallpaper was a faded sixties pattern of interlocking flowers, in a town with three stoplights and a bar called Father’s, she went through the classifieds with a pen and circled the cars for sale nearby. It was an apology, he understood that, an ill-advised risk she would undertake in the name of his peace. If the person on the other end of the ad did not look at her too long, they would have four doors they could lock. She left him in the booth with instructions not to leave and was back in two hours, keys in her fist.
Her seat belt threaded too tight across her chest, the rasping sedan struggling when she steered it onto the highway, she turned off the radio he had turned on.
“None of this was as I expected it,” she said. “You have to forgive me.”
He straightened his spine and sucked his cigarette and looked into the moon.
“There is nothing I have to do,” he said. “You taught me that.”
THERE WAS A BEAUTIFUL LIE of a month in which she found a job, a home aide to a blind woman in West Virginia, and they resumed some version of their life in a rotting carriage house transfigured by kudzu. On a porch that looked at an anemic stream, Fay set full pots of coffee on a milk crate and he pointed out birds from his dog-eared guide. She spoke to him glancingly about quantum mechanics, the difference between serpentine and alluvial soil. Before long a visiting cousin showed up and looked too long at Fay. She told Wright, at ten that night in the bed they shared, they’d be leaving at sunrise.
“You’re one of those atoms,” he said, refusing to get up the next morning, speaking to her from under the sheets. “Exactly. You don’t exist except for when other people look at you, and that’s why we’re in this position.” She spent an hour kneeling there, trying to touch his hands, his face, whispering.
The cousin in question saw her carrying him kicking through the pink light, and the blind woman heard what he yelled, an adult profanity. “Who is that,” she said, groping to turn on a lamp, an old reflex. In the evenings he had rubbed the pads of her feet as she listened to the TV, described to her the faces of the soap opera actors.
Cunt, he had screamed. She could not believe it was the same boy.
SITTING IN THE FRONT SEAT of the car a month later, reading the newspaper she had sent Wright into the gas station to buy, Fay learned about a bomb in the bathroom of the New York State Department of Corrections, an admonishment to a system that had killed three rioting prisoners. As she scanned the article again, as if looking for her own name, she pulled at the yellow foam coming free from the ceiling. The second explosion came not long after, the Capitol.
They had reorganized, the communiqués appearing in the newspaper populated with the phrases she had so often spoken. Far from telling her she had been blamed, they would not tell her anything. From the silent car he watched her dial in the roadside phone booths, boxes of light that appeared like projections onto the dark margins of gravel, standing with one foot flat on the opposite thigh. Her face opened when someone picked up one of the numbers she’d memorized, but it was always another forgotten person, waiting for word from an old life, asking her please to get off the line. Then, one day, an answer, a message—he could tell by the way her hair fell around the phone and her shoulders crawled forward. She pulled a pen from behind her ear and wrote on her hand.