Jameson hated stopping for gas. Mini-markets attached to the stations in particular left him with a sickening unease. Oregon drivers weren’t allowed to pump their own gas, and he was grateful to remain behind the wheel and distract himself from the smells of corn dogs and burnt coffee, which he imagined to have been among the last perceptions on earth that his children would have taken in before the terror of what was happening overtook them.
It was worse for Sarah Anne. The first time they pulled into a station after the twins were killed, she got out of the truck and vomited into the garbage can next to the pump. Jameson was still fumbling out of his seat belt when a woman rushed over to help with a handful of paper towels. Jameson got out and held Sarah Anne’s hair as she continued to vomit what little breakfast she had eaten. The woman asked her if she was suffering from morning sickness. It was eight a.m., and Sarah Anne collapsed to her knees.
When June called, Jameson was sitting at a station ninety miles from home, drinking the last dregs of coffee from his thermos while the attendant filled his tank. He was watching a young couple in rumpled clothes hold the hands of two young girls dressed in matching blue sweats of different sizes. They rounded the corner to the bathroom at the side of the store, but not before Jameson saw the younger girl stand in place and cry, as if the parents had woken her hours before she was ready. The mother, he guessed it was, lifted the girl to her shoulder, and Jameson was seized by a gasp, a sob he tried to restrain.
And then a text, and then the ringing, and there was June.
It took some effort to concentrate on what she was saying. He watched a silver-haired couple in a blue Mercedes coupe next to him, reading and typing on their phones, the blue light of the screens reflecting in their glasses, faces devoid of emotion. He turned toward a tall man in leather pants, shoes, and jacket, just off his motorcycle, removing his gloves and helmet. The man rubbed his hand around his face and hair, and the burning knot in Jameson’s leg fired up.
Everyone at the station seemed to have the same weary expression of early-morning fatigue, having strayed away, gone adrift, far from anywhere, certainly far from home. Jameson replaced the lid on his thermos and looked in the direction of the highway. His windshield was filthy.
June’s voice was as magnetic as it had been the first time they spoke. He’d leaned back into the headrest, wanting only for her to keep talking. But the entire conversation couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes.
The attendant had startled Jameson at his window, handing him the receipt. Jameson reached for it while June spoke of the gutters and a storm that had ripped them loose. “Eighty-two-mile-an-hour winds, according to my grandparents. Two years ago, I think.”
Jameson eased his truck to the side of the station and shut the engine. He and Sarah Anne would have left the coast by then, and they had shut the world out, the nightly news especially, for the better part of the following year.
June mentioned all the things important for him to know, but he could not squeeze past the melodic sound of her voice and on to the meaning of her words. Her accent slipped on and off her tongue, and he found himself trying to predict which words carried more brogue than others, and whether or not it was random. It wouldn’t be random.
I can work with you on this. It’s not a problem. I hear how important it is for you to have it the way you want it.
He’d never said anything like that to anyone he worked for in his life. He had a compass of conviction, and the side effect was the confidence it instilled in homeowners. They felt their property was in good hands, and because he believed in what he did and the way he did it, they believed it, too. And yet he’d said what he said several hours ago to June.
And all the rest? What was that? There was something she wasn’t saying, even as she’d openly shared her problem with drinking. Jameson hadn’t found a way to ask her if there was something else she needed him to know. Maybe he was reading her all wrong. Maybe talking at the gas station had spun him off in the wrong direction. But he’d sensed some kind of trouble. Of what nature, he couldn’t say. He’d gone silent on the phone when he’d meant to speak up, and he was sure it had made her uneasy.
When he’d hugged Sarah Anne goodbye this morning his heart had moved nearer to hers, his face buried in her hair, her arms gently rubbing his back in the bright cold dawn. He’d felt her presence when he was on the phone with June at the gas station, her spirit swirling past whatever was happening. And what was happening? Nothing he could put his finger on.
Sarah Anne had woken early to have breakfast with him, heating up the leftover omelets and biscuits from two days before. He’d thanked her, but she didn’t have much to say, just shuffled around the kitchen in her underwear, an old, boxy white shirt of Jameson’s, and white cotton socks. Her silence was only a symptom of not enough sleep. That’s what he told himself. She didn’t bother to run her fingers through the back of her hair; she walked around with a teased clump sticking out in all directions.
Now hours had passed since he’d spoken to June, the high desert giving way to evergreen forests and the summit dotted in clumps of old snow. The Willamette Valley sprouted tulips and stretches of grass and gangly strings of hops. The coastal range was choppy with clear-cuts, brutal scenes of stumps and sky where ancient trees were supposed to be. Those views were hideous, hillsides stripped and taken against their will. A rape, he thought. The ravaged landscape. Ever since his children were killed, his thoughts, without warning, could twist repulsively in dark directions, bracketing innocent phrases with a perverseness he could not control. He looked out onto the land and thought, Slaughtered, gruesome, monstrous, obscene.
He turned the radio higher than was comfortable and passed the time by guessing snippets of songs between the static. He dialed in a Mexican station with a crisp clarity, and the cab of the truck filled with bright and tinny mariachis and a stream of trumpets that mocked his sober mood. The world felt as if it were falling even further out of context, becoming dreamlike, without a hold.
“Viva America!” a man sang, and Jameson rolled down his window as he veered onto Highway 101. The scent of the Pacific Coast reached him before he could see it, so thick he could taste the moisture and salt, and the pine, too, coming for him like an invitation from someone he loved but could not trust, someone waiting on the other side of a door with bad news, even as they called out sweetly for him to come inside, asking with equal kindness what had taken him so long.