One night we drove down a long forestry lane off the main highway to find somewhere to sleep.
We were about two days’ drive from Eidon Mountain.
There was a little pebbled rest area in the woods for the logging trucks and it was edged with long wild grasses which gave way to the dark of the pine trees. We were ringed by them. Up above us was an oval of night sky full of stars and dark quick-moving clouds and wind moving the black treetops at its edge.
I got out of the car and walked to the edge of the trees and there was the smell of pine, sharp, and the wet smells of soil and moss on the breeze.
I had left my shoes in the footwell of the car and my feet were bare. Between tufts of grass there were pieces of gravel and they dug into the soles of my feet and the pain seemed to heighten the night and to sharpen it and it felt good.
Behind me I heard the driver door open and shut and then Cal’s footsteps round the side of the car and the sounds of the side door opening; he was getting ready to sleep.
I breathed in the wet nighttime flavors of the air.
“Anne Marie?”
I turned. He had walked up behind me and was standing a little way away and he was looking at me. He seemed hesitant suddenly which was odd for him and I realized that he was unsure about whether he should come over to me and whether I would want him to come over to me. When I turned and walked toward him the moment was gone and the unsure look on his face was broken and something about that struck me deeply and I had the strangest feeling of walking toward him and studying him as I went, objectively for the first time in a long time, the first time since he had come back, the print of his face in the light from behind him through the open door of the car, how flat he suddenly seemed.
And I remembered another moment from a long time ago. The moment when I had seen that, for all of his wild carelessness, Cal too had a front like all the rest and it was just a different front and a different way to hide a frightened little brain full of lonely thoughts. I remembered the feeling that came with that because if Cal wasn’t thinking what I was thinking then nobody was.
My mind was somewhere in the dark over the trees, disparate, around it an aching void of space.
Carefully he put his arms around me.
He said, “You’re so different now, Anne Marie. You’re different.”
I laughed and I thought it sounded hollow maybe and I wondered if he could tell. I said, “What am I supposed to say to that?”
He stared at me for a moment and then shrugged. “Whatever you want. I don’t know. You don’t have to say anything.”
“Cal, do you know—”
I stopped for a moment and looked at his face and felt for the right words and like always at times like this they weren’t there.
I said, “Do you have any idea what I felt for you?”
“Jesus, Anne Marie. We’re not going back there again—”
“No. No, you see? You’re already backing straight back out.”
“What? I’m not—”
“Cal. When we get to Eidon I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know where I’m going to go.”
“What are you saying you want?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”
He stared at me for a long moment and then he laughed and it was a little harsh.
He said, “This wasn’t what I wanted to end up talking about at all.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I know. Me neither, not now. I’m so tired, I need to get some sleep.”
I watched him walk back to the car and I followed a little way behind and let him make up the blankets in the back into a sort of nest, and he crawled in before me through the side door and I went after him and lay in the sticky heat, in the closeness of the little car, the night cicadas loud outside, somewhere not so far away the sound of the highway which moved moved moved all night rushing on, and I wondered who was on that highway and what they were doing and what they were thinking and where they were going. And I thought that probably I would go my whole life without meeting a single one of those people moving in those cars and yet they had made this tiny little interaction, this tiny little piece that they had put into this night of my life, this piece that was each individual rushing sound of a moving car on a highway far away through a forest night.
And outside in the dark trees the cicadas droned on and on and got in my head and in my brain and lay over the moving of the blood in my ears until I couldn’t tell the two sounds apart.
Cal fell asleep quickly.
He twitched slightly and ground his teeth together in his sleep.
I lay awake, and thought where am I going, and lay awake, and lay awake.