I pushed myself up from the concrete and crawled to the door. There was a stillness to the air I didn’t understand.
I checked to make sure the door was locked. It was, but from the outside, as if someone had left and barricaded it behind them to keep us from leaving.
My tongue felt thick with dust, like I’d been dreaming with my mouth open. The air was chilly and stale, yet humid from our sweat. Maibe shivered on the floor, moaning, tossing around. In the haze of gray cloudiness in my brain I went over and shifted the blanket to cover her.
I tried not to think about how much time I’d lost, how I was going to find Dylan. Thinking about him sent a new hurt through me.
I steadied my hand against the door.
Where was Christopher? Where was Jane?
Before I could search for them, I lost myself again.
The Pathfinder started with only a slight cough and rumble. I tied my hair into a ponytail and rolled down the window since I couldn’t afford the gas to run the air conditioner, even if it had worked. The radio spouted a song from the 50s and I cranked up the volume to compete with the rushing air.
I’d upped my time at the community garden to three days a week. The garden had helped put my life back together. I loved working in the dirt, planning out a new section of plants, discussing which species to cultivate next.
I made good time to Ms. Roche’s little blue cottage. She’d painted her stone porch a bright yellow the neighbors hated. I loved her courage.
“Hello, dear,” Ms. Roche said as she opened her front door. She wore a large dream-catcher pendant with plastic, pink beads that clinked together in the canyon between her breasts. “Come around back and let’s quickly get the starters in your car. Did Leiko tell you the water’s been off on my block for two days?”
“I thought it was only for overnight?”
“Yes, well,” she hummed a couple of notes to herself and then looked sideways at me once we stepped into her backyard. “There was a water problem in Golden Estates and they dropped everything to go deal with that. And so here we are.” She fluttered her hands at the sky.
We loved to gossip about Golden Estates, but Leiko was waiting for the starters. “So what’s the deal?” I saw about a dozen starts of wilted kale, wilted lettuce, and a single pathetic blueberry plant covered in yellow leaves.
“I haven’t watered in two days. I managed to put by enough for me to drink, but that’s it.” She laughed. “I’m staying back all these feet so you can’t smell me.”
I smiled and said, “Ms. Roche, you always smell like a butterfly and you know it.”
She giggled and then fingered the blueberry, sending a leaf twirling to the ground. “The blueberry is bad off. Most should bounce back once you get them to the garden. Not sure the blueberry’s going to make it, but, well…” She shrugged her shoulders.
I rummaged in my purse. I shook an almost empty bottle over the blueberry plant to release the last few drops. The heat seemed to laugh at my misting attempt.
“Let’s get ‘em in my car.” We loaded up the plants and a wheelbarrow, and I waved as I drove off with my precious cargo.
The community garden was two miles away, but the first half-mile crawled, and then brought me to a standstill. Lights flashed far in the distance. I turned left onto an empty side street—the alternate route would triple the distance, but who knew how long the accident might hold things up. I sent out a hopeful thought that no one was seriously injured.
I turned the radio up and hummed along. Several miles later, I stopped at a light to turn left. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel and glanced back at the plants. This intersection always took forever. Whenever I stopped I swore the car’s temperature increased by ten degrees.
My detour had taken me past city limits and into a section of vacant lots turning back into country. Two out of the four corners were cracked cement and starthistle. The other two corners were graveled dirt.
Plenty of cars broke the speed limit racing through the intersection. Lunch hour. A bicyclist in bright blue clothes and matching helmet crossed before the light turned. “He’s got the right idea,” I said to the plants. Soon it would be too hot to bike, but he seemed better off than me right now.
The light changed and I pressed the gas. My car rumbled to life, and then coughed, and then died. I sent out a frantic wish for enough momentum to reach the curb, but my car halted in what seemed like the exact middle of the intersection. I tried to restart. Nothing. The car didn’t whimper, but I did.
The light changed, cars inched past, and then picked up speed. A black BMW made a lane change that almost forced a red truck into my front fender.
I opened the driver’s side door and tried to ignore the irritation rolling toward me like heat waves. I took a deep breath, held the air in my lungs, and pushed the car with all my strength.
The car moved like a ton of rock. It didn’t budge.
I tried again, moved the car an inch, but then the grade of the street moved it back two inches. Sweat streaked down my face, arms, inside my clothes. I wiped my hands on my jeans and repositioned. “C’mon. You can do this.”
I lunged into the push. I grunted. The car moved an inch and then another inch and then a few more. I was doing it! I was also headed into oncoming traffic, but I dared not lose momentum by trying to steer.
“Grab the wheel!”
I startled and lost my grip, but the car continued moving without my touch. The blue bicyclist was pushing at the back of my car. His bike lay in the street behind us.
“Just get in and steer it,” the biker shouted. “Make sure this coffin doesn’t jump the curb!”
I hopped into the driver’s seat, steered, and the car rolled onto the shoulder. I hit the brake, regretful that I was ending all that had gone into moving this stupid hunk of metal.
“Thank you so much,” I said, jumping out of the car, ready to heap him with compliments. “It just stopped—”
“Hold up,” he said. “Let me get my bike.”
He jogged back to the intersection, ignored the lights, the Don’t Walk sign, and stopped traffic like he had a god-given right to it. He reached his bike. I heard him swear. He gave the finger to a honking car, and came back through the intersection. The bicycle’s wheel wobbled like badly tossed pizza dough. “Goddamn,” he said every few seconds and kicked out once at the passenger side door of a car that refused to let him pass. The car paused, and I thought I might witness some sort of road rage incident, but the biker’s fury must have given the driver second thoughts. The car sped off.
When he reached the shoulder, he flipped the bike onto the seat and handlebars, and began fiddling with the wheel.
I didn’t know anything about bikes, except that a wobbly wheel wasn’t good.
“They tacoed the damn thing,” he said without looking up. “I just retuned the spokes. What a mess.”
“Umm,” I cleared my throat. “Thank you for helping me, and I’m sorry about your bike. I—maybe I could help buy you a new one, as a thank you?” I could probably scrounge together fifty dollars. Maybe pay my rent a little late, forgo the seed donation money this month.
He kept his head bent over the wheel. “The hub has lost some teeth. The wheels alone cost me $350 to build and the hub is ruined, that’s another hundred bucks.”
My head began to swim. “I…”
He looked up. Dark eyebrows and a shaving shadow framed sunburned skin and piercing blue eyes. “Not your fault,” he said.
“But…”
He returned his gaze to the wheel hub and then back to me. I drowned in multiple waves of embarrassment.
“You didn’t happen to notice the license plate of the car that did this?” He asked.
“I…” God, why couldn’t I finish a sentence or even put two words together? Maybe it was situational stress, the adrenaline lessening, the embarrassment rising again, the monumental mechanic’s bill waiting for me in the near future.
“Never mind,” he said.
“I’ll help out,” I said. “I have maybe fifty bucks at home. I could at least help you get a new hubber thing.”
He laughed. His facial features relaxed. “Hub,” he said. “Wheel hub. And really, it’s not your fault. I should have left it on the corner sidewalk, not in the intersection, but you looked so alone out there with all those cars honking at you.” He shook his head and spun his back wheel, but the wobble caught on the frame and stopped the movement halfway through a rotation.
I remembered the plants. “Oh!” I said and ran to open the back of the Pathfinder. The plants looked much worse. The blueberry had all but given up. “Do you have any water?” I removed the wheelbarrow and pulled over the plant containers for closer inspection.
“Uh, yeah.” He handed me the sports bottle from his bike.
I unscrewed the cap and portioned water out for the blueberry. I drained half the bottle and then finished it off on four other starts. The rest were goners. “I was on my way to the community garden on 7th street and…” I trailed off as I saw the look on his face.
He stared at his empty water bottle. “Did you know,” he said in a strangled voice, “that there isn’t any potable water around here for at least another two miles?”
I dropped the offending bottle to my side. “I didn’t know that.”
“Did you know today’s going to break a hundred degrees?”
I laughed, the sound choking a bit in my throat. “I did know that.”
After a long pause, he said, “It must be important to get these plants back to the garden alive.”
“Oh, it is,” I said, and then rushed into a long explanation of each plant’s history, genetic value, the mission of the garden, the blueberry’s varietal uniqueness.
He laughed and held up a hand for me to stop. “Save your energy,” he said. “I believe you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, breathless at the warmth of his laugh. I wiped the sweat from my forehead.
“You’ve got some dirt.” He moved closer and brushed his hand along my face. He pushed back a strand of my hair. Our eyes caught and held.
He stepped back. “Sorry.”
“No,” I said. “That was…I should be saying sorry.” I brushed my face again with my hand and froze. “I totally didn’t mean to do that.” I could have slapped myself. I turned my back to him, took the edge of my shirt, and furiously cleaned my face with it. When I turned back, he had set the wheelbarrow upright on the street and was filling it with the plants.
“Since the plants can’t stay here, but the car looks like it won’t be going anywhere for awhile, I’ll walk the wheelbarrow if you walk my bike. There’s a bus stop about a mile away. No water, but the driver on this route should be cool about the wheelbarrow and he’ll get us to water.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” I said. “Nobody stopped to help but you. And now your bike is ruined because of me.”
“True,” he said seriously. “All true.” And then he smiled. “The bus will let us off in front of a grocery store. Treat me to a bottle of ice cold water…and a date.”
“I…yes, yeah. Okay.” I unsuccessfully hid a smile. “I’d love to.”
He handed his bike over, and then closed the back of the Pathfinder. I didn’t bother locking the piece of junk. It’d make things easier if someone stole it.
The wheel made it difficult to steer the bike, but I was determined to get the hang of it. Soon the shoulder gave way to hard-packed dirt wide enough for us to walk side by side.
“I’m Corrina,” I said.
“Dylan,” he said. He hummed a song melody, and then sang the words.
“Yeah, my dad was a Bob Dylan fan.” I searched for something else to say. “I’m glad I met you.”
He shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
“Do you mean that, considering the circumstances?”
A little put off, I lost control of the bike and the front tire bumped into the side of the wheelbarrow. I steadied it and said, “Obviously I didn’t want my car to die like that, and using your water for the plants was—”
He busted up laughing.
After a moment I joined in. “Thanks,” I said between breaths. “I really appreciate a person who can laugh at me when I’m in trouble.”
“With you. Technically, you’re laughing, so I’m laughing, with you, at all your troubles.” He pointed to one of the plants. “So what kind of blueberry is this one again?”
“Well.” I touched the bare skin of his arm, feeling warmth, sweat, electricity. I pushed his arm so that his pointing finger moved a foot to the right. “First, this one’s the blueberry.”
I babbled and I woke to my own noises. Christopher pressed against me, and I rushed back into a coma full of memories. I was next to my dying mother’s bedside. I was tied up in the army surplus store. I was listening to Maibe sob in the darkness. I was sitting next to Dylan. He was telling me how much he loved all my ideas: how beautiful I could make drying on a clothesline sound, how romantically I described a weed garden in every front yard, how inspiring I was when I talked about people trading in their gym memberships for bicycle-powered washing machines. But he knew me well enough to understand it was partly about fear, about not relying on others because maybe they couldn’t be relied on. People always died, people always left.
Suddenly I was drinking water from a cup. I woke enough to eat the MRE that Christopher pressed into my hand. My body felt weak from sickness and dehydration. I realized he’d tied me up again.
“Sometimes the memory-rush is too strong,” he said. “It can make you do things. Hurt people. You were walking around. This is safer.”
“Where’s Jane. What did you do to her?”
“She’s gone.”