Seventeen

I drove fast through the darkness. The land was barren and flat. We’d been on the road for hours already. I didn’t even know how long. Day slipped back into night. I pushed that little tin can of a car as hard as it would go. The moon hung low in the sky and there were more stars than I had ever seen before. As I sped down the highway, the landscape became a blur around me but the stars never moved.

I looked over at you, lying next to me. You seat was reclined as far back as it could go. You were lying on your side facing me, your hands between your knees for warmth. You had slept nearly nonstop since Charleston. As soon as we stopped moving, we’d get you in to see a doctor to make sure that our son was okay. I didn’t want to take any more chances.

You woke up while we were still on the long, barren road cutting through the desert. You flipped the lever on the car seat to make it sit upright. You looked tired. You stared blankly at the open road. “How long was I out for?” you mumbled.

“A few hours.” You’d been sleeping since we stopped for dinner. I looked over at you again. Your belly looked even bigger when you were sitting up.

“Are we making good time?” you asked.

“This little machine won’t go any faster,” I replied. Then I motioned out the window toward the sky. “Check out the stars.”

You leaned forward so that you could stare up through the front windshield. “Holy shit,” you said, your eyes lighting up as if you were seeing the night sky for the first time. “They don’t make stars like that in Canada.”

“They don’t in New Jersey either,” I replied.

You stared at the stars for a few minutes. Then you leaned back in your seat again. I looked over at your face and could see the tears welling up in your eyes. You had held everything in for so long. You had been strong for so long. “Tell me that everything is going to be all right,” you blurted out to me. You didn’t look at me. You just kept staring at the road ahead of us.

I thought about how I should answer. “I can’t,” I replied.

You looked over at me, fixing your eyes on mine. You hesitated, taking a long breath. “Then lie to me,” you said. The tears fell freely down your face.

I thought about it for a moment. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I assured you.

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

 

 

I don’t know how much longer I drove. You eventually drifted back to sleep. I just kept pushing the car through the night. I wanted to create as much distance between my past and my future as I could. Eventually, I must have gotten too tired to keep driving. When I was barely able to keep my eyes open any longer, I pulled the car over to the side of the desert road and slept. While I was asleep, I dreamt.

In my dream, a car pulled up in front of us as the two of us slept in our car along the side of the road. The car skidded to a stop, kicking up red desert sand, blocking any chance we had to escape. A man and a woman stepped out of the car. Both of them had guns in their hands. I recognized the woman. She was a pretty Asian woman. I couldn’t place her at first because her face had changed, like it had been reconstructed somehow and not everything could be put back like it had been before. The man was a stranger. Every time I looked at him his face changed. Nose, eyes, hair color, lips, everything changed. Every time I looked he was a different person. He was everyone, everyone I didn’t know, everyone I saw on the street and wondered which side they were on.

It was still night when they stepped out of their car. They ordered us out of our car. Then they walked us out into the desert. The sky was littered with stars. The man and the woman kept their guns pointed at us. I told them that you were only seventeen. I told them that you were off limits, that you were an innocent. They didn’t seem to care. The man just kept asking me questions about the people that I’d killed. He kept trying to make me relive moments from my life that I wanted to forget. He was relentless, asking me about people I hadn’t thought about for years, people whose lives ended at my hands.

I looked over at the Asian woman. I thought about Long Beach Island. I thought about Jared and Michael. I remembered that first night when Catherine had flirted with me. In a simpler world, I would have taken her home and we would have fucked until morning and then we would have gone our separate ways. I studied her face, her reconstructed nose and cheekbones. Her eyes looked the same but the rest of her face was different. She looked up at me as we walked. I expected her to be angry. She wasn’t. “You look good,” I said to her, my voice loud enough for her and only her to hear. She started to respond but thought better of it. She smiled slightly, her lips curling up in the corners. Even in my dream, I wondered which of the two of them would pull the trigger when they shot me. I hoped it would be her.

We walked a long way into the desert. The cars disappeared over the horizon. Eventually, I turned to the man. “Did you follow us all the way from Charleston?” I took a deep breath. The air was cool and dry. It smelled of earth and stone. I looked over at Catherine again. She wasn’t looking at me. She was gazing off into the distance, into the seemingly endless darkness.

“We followed you all the way from Montreal,” the man said. I didn’t want to think about the bodies that had been left behind in my wake. No more. I was done.

“How are we going to do this?” I asked, turning to face the man without a face. All I could see was his ever-changing visage and the whites of his knuckles on his gun. He lifted the gun, his finger now tensing around the trigger. I stared up at the sky, not wanting the bullet to be the last thing I saw. Some of the stars had begun to disappear. The sound of the gunshot ripped through the air. I felt nothing. It was like Charleston all over again. The sun had begun to rise.

The sun rose over the flat desert like a fireball being lifted into the sky. There were no mountains to slow down the light from the sun, nothing to create shadows. The day came with the immediacy of a tidal wave. I turned to look at you, standing there in the purple light of early dawn. I turned to see whose gun had fired, to make sure that you were okay. You were fine. Your belly created the largest shadow in the entire desert. Its shadow looked like the shadow of a mountain on its side. There was silence. Suddenly I felt a burning in my left hand. I looked down. There was blood dripping from my hand. The ground was so dry that the blood pooled up on top of it instead of seeping into the earth. I looked at my hand. My ring finger was gone. I looked over at the man with the gun. His face had changed yet again. There was smoke coming from the end of the gun. He’d shot off my finger. The pain came slowly.

“What now?” I asked the man holding the smoking gun. I wondered if he was simply planning on dismantling me one small piece at a time.

“That’s all we want from you,” he said. He slid his gun into the waistband of his pants. “Let’s go,” he said to Catherine. She glanced at me and then at you and then she turned and the two of them walked away. They disappeared over the horizon.

I looked at you, standing in the sunlight. “He’s moving again, Joe,” you said.

I flexed my left hand into a fist. The bleeding had already slowed down. “How does it feel?” you asked.

“It’s okay,” I responded. I concentrated on the pain for a moment. “It’s odd. I can feel the pain in my finger, my whole finger, even though there’s no finger there anymore.”

“Phantom pain,” you said. “I used to volunteer at a hospital. I worked with amputees. They used to tell me that they could still feel their toes even though their legs were gone.”

“When did it go away?” I asked.

“Never,” you replied, shaking your head. “It’s not so easy to let something like that go.” I looked down at my hand. The bleeding had stopped completely now. Now there was just an empty gap.

“Are we going to be all right, Maria?” I asked you. I couldn’t ask you in real life. In real life, I had to pretend that I knew. It was only in a dream that I could ask you.

“Yeah, Joe. We’re going to be all right,” you said.

“Why does it sound like a lie when I say it but the truth when you say it?” I asked.

“Because you’ve never been all right before, so you don’t know what it feels like.”

I woke up as the sun began to rise behind us. I’ve never been one to read too much into dreams. I was just happy to have had a good dream for once. It had been a long time.

I started the car, put it in gear, and stepped on the gas again. I had filled up our gas tank about 150 miles ago. We still had a half a tank of gas. I drove for miles before I saw another sign of civilization.