CRASH

1978

Coming out of the motel and getting into Craig’s car with the money plunged deep in her pocket felt like climbing into a bull’s pen. Bobbie sensed that as with a bull she must keep watch but not look at him directly. The car smelled like old bong water and burger wrappers and pot resin. His clothes, the ones he had on and every stitch he owned, carried that same green-weed smell. They drove out of the motel parking lot and she thought what she needed now, other than the newly found money folded against her thigh, was a little luck.

He said, “What were you really doing in there anyway? Smoking cigarettes, I bet.”

She didn’t answer and he gave her a look.

“I don’t have any,” she said. “I told you.”

“They make you taste like an ashtray.”

“I was fixing my hair.”

“That was a hell of a long time for hair.”

She smiled and hoped that smiling would end the discussion. He reached over and put his hand on her knee. She looked down at the cotton pocket of her blue jeans and hoped he wouldn’t feel around in that area. Keeping the money from him felt like a greater betrayal than hiding from him on the school bus had been. She wondered what he would do to her if he found out about the money, other than take it off her, that is.

“What’s the matter?” he said. “Are you sick?”

Not sick, she thought, but not exactly right, either. The night was inky, with a moist heat that liquefied the air. Her hair was wet at the nape, her blouse damp under her arms. No matter how many times she ran her tongue over her lips, they were dry, while the rest of her was sweating, not just from the heat. If he found the money, she would need an explanation for why she hadn’t mentioned it. But she couldn’t think of anything. Her brain raced like the images on a slot machine, but when she summoned it to slow down and give some answers, nothing came up. Nothing she could win with.

“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s that test tomorrow making me worry.”

Even now, while he was driving, he moved his wide hand on her thigh, reaching higher, almost to where the money was. She held her breath and waited, waited for him to wrap his fingers around the wad of bills and then ask what in the hell was that in her pocket. Her head began to wag back and forth, as though saying no, no, no to a conversation that ran inside her mind. She better tell him, tell him now before he discovered for himself. She opened her mouth to speak but suddenly did not know what to say.

She took a long breath. She willed her heart to slow, but it would not. Meanwhile, his hand moved down to her knee and then up again, climbing her leg one finger at a time as she stiffened under his touch. She waited, and hoped, and tried not to seem as though she was hiding something. She prepared an explanation, then gave up, deciding there was no explanation. He would tell her she was selfish. He would say she was a thief. She was about to confess the whole thing when he rolled his palm away, this time toward the inside seam of her jeans, just beneath her crotch. He could not feel the money there, or where he went next, so she said nothing.

They drove a rural route, passing a farm on their right, an abandoned gas station attached to a miniature golf course, now closed down. She wondered if there were anywhere left in the world that didn’t look like this, haggard and worn, in need of repair. For years, the recession had caused her mother to worry she would lose her job. When the cupboard door broke, her mother had tacked it back up with the wrong hardware. When the dishwasher leaked, they began using the sink to wash dishes. Now, she had five hundred dollars, money out of the blue. If only she could get home without Craig finding out.

He kept touching her, then looked over.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Nothing.”

She felt like a bug next to him, even more so in her thin shirt and wooden Dr. Scholl’s sandals, blocky slabs without any heel, castoffs from her mother who said they made her toes ache. She tucked up, trying to hide the outline of the bills through the fraying cloth of her jeans, and rested her head on her knee, her face turned toward him. She hoped her expression portrayed fondness, not fear.

“You know they’re still hassling me at work,” he said. “That asshole girl.” He was referring to a girl who had come into the station asking after Craig and telling everyone that she knew him. The girl was a high-school student with acne and frizzy hair. The program director had told her to stay away from the station, but she’d kept insisting that Craig was expecting her. “I know Craig. We’re friends,” Craig said now, imitating the girl’s light, high voice. “Friends, bullshit. But that big shit-eating pig of a program director makes a huge deal of it!”

He had one hand spanning the wide circle of the steering wheel, and with the other he found her knee. He articulated his story with little prods from his fingers. Big-poke-shit-poke-eating-poke-pig. He pointed the Buick down the smaller road that led to her neighborhood, rolling the steering wheel with his thumb, all the while playing his other hand up and down her leg.

“And I don’t know this girl!” he said, all innocence. “Anyway, she’s already sixteen!”

Sixteen was legal, Bobbie knew. Just as she knew she was illegal.

“And anyway, I wouldn’t cheat on you,” he said, then suddenly drew his attention to the radio. A song ended and he lurched forward and flicked the dial, turning it up so the sound boomed through the car. “Hang on, here comes a break!”

He was obsessed with breaks, with all performance from disc jockeys. He listened only to the station he worked for, never changing it even if he hated the song. And when he liked a song, he’d crank up the volume so high she could feel the base thumping her chest. He’d make a fist and tap the air like he was playing the drums, his expression concentrated inward, his drumming hand fastened to the rhythm, eyes half closed in concentration. She’d watch him, feeling the music pressing into her, and she’d think, This is embarrassing.

But the songs didn’t mean much to him. They were filler; what he cared about, cared greatly as though every deep-voiced radio jock on the East Coast was in a contest with him, were the times in between songs when the DJ came in with that all-important break. That is when he’d really turn up the volume. Right now, a guy he hated who had the spot before his, a guy whose hire he’d opposed, who he’d heard had drinking problems and sleep problems, was talking over the guitar intro of a current hit, and this fact pissed him off. He listened, his face darkening as the voice ran into the song, interfering with the lyrics. Shaking his head, Craig gave Bobbie a look like Can you believe this shit? before moving the volume back to a normal range and returning to his conversation.

“I told that pig, I already have a girlfriend. And he says, ‘How come I never met her?’ And then, guess what? He starts asking how old you are.”

He’d half convinced himself she was of age now, so often had he lied.

“What did you say?”

“Eighteen.”

She felt her head buzz. Eighteen. That was ridiculous.

“Actually, I told him you’d be nineteen soon. But it’s none of his business. What’s he, your goddamned father?”

Her father was dead. Heart attack in his twenties. This made no sense to Bobbie, how someone could have a heart attack at such an age, but she’d seen the death certificate in a box in the closet alongside old wedding photos of her parents. Her mother, pregnant in a big white dress; her father, a young man in a dark suit, a gold ring on his finger.

They turned off the road and suddenly they were nearing her neighborhood, gliding beneath traffic lights suspended on wires, passing a parade of shops, what used to be a restaurant, then a dance club, now a nursing home. In a few more miles he would pull the Buick into a space at the top of her drive. She’d hear the crunch of his tires over the pebbles, see the reassuring light that shone by the front door. He’d stop some way from the house, pull up the parking brake, and turn toward her. Then he’d do something to remind her about the sex. He’d put her hand on his crotch so she could feel the outline of his dick, warm, already swelling, waiting for their next time. Then he would tell her he loved her. “I love you, babe,” he’d say, just like Sonny to Cher. If she didn’t say it back, he’d look at her with big eyes and keep holding on to her until she did.

Once, she had almost believed that she did love him, because he’d paid her such a lot of attention, and told her how pretty she was, and how mature. You’re different from the other girls, he’d said. You’re wise for your years. Those were the early days, back when he was being nice. He would take her to restaurants, pull her chair out for her, tell her to leave room for dessert. He’d sneak her into the station and let her choose records. She’d wear his headphones, talk into the microphone, hear her voice in a recording he’d play back to her. He made her feel special, clever, somehow above the pettiness of junior high in which friendship and popularity hung on such small matters as whether your hair was “good” or you had the right jeans. Then one day, he told her he wanted to marry her. Marry me? she’d said, stunned, terrified. He’d nodded confidently, as though that had always been the plan. He’d worked it out that they were like Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed and forbidden because of her age, but for no other reason. No legitimate reason. Plenty of guys were older than their girlfriends, he’d told her. In other countries, men older than himself married girls her age.

Who do you belong to? he would ask her, pinning her on the mattress. She’d tell him what he wanted to hear. You, she’d say. The thought scared her because she worried—she really did—that if it came to it, he’d get what he wanted and she would be his. His now and forever. And then all her life would have led up to marrying him. But how do you get out of such a thing? After you’ve had sex with a guy and told him that you loved him? And she had told him, too, more than once. It was too late to take it all back.

But it wasn’t too late, she told herself now. It wasn’t. They sailed down the dark street, too far out in the country for streetlamps. He sang along to the radio as they passed the elementary school. His favorite song, “Three Times a Lady,” by the Commodores. She hated the Commodores. Syrupy, worse than her mother’s Tom Jones. That he could even like this song bothered her. Surely she didn’t have to carry on meeting him, driving with him, having sex with him. There was an out—it happened all the time. She just had to try.

She said, “I don’t like that song.”

He sang another line, as though she just needed to listen a little harder and she’d see how fanfuckingtastic was this band and its number-one hit. “Number one,” he reminded her, holding up a finger. “You can’t argue with that!” Then he said, “So I told that prick boss of mine, that I already got a woman and not to take seriously this stupid girl and her ridiculous accusations.”

Back to the program director, whatever he’d said about the girl Craig knew, or didn’t know.

“I said to him, the idiot, I said, ‘Are you listening to crazies off the street? Fans, oh man. They are the true head cases and a good reason to get and stay stoned!’ And then you want to know what happened next? You want to hear?”

She breathed in, and he took that as a yes. He said, “I held up some weed and we went into the parking lot and got high.”

He laughed out loud. Spit foamed a little at the corners of his lips. He was always complaining about dry mouth, a side effect from all the pot. It was the weed’s fault but who could blame weed? He’d drink Dr Pepper or beer, or Nestlé Quik, or rum. Then he’d scream, I’m drying up! My tongue is numb! Like he’d never heard of water.

He said, “Reach behind my seat and see if you can find my pipe, wouldja?” His face glowed from a Mobil sign they passed, then from a restaurant’s neon lights in the shape of a cactus, then from the red of the traffic light at the end of the long road.

She brought out the pipe, but it didn’t feel familiar in her hands. It was a little stainless steel “L” with purple ceramic on the stem, lightweight, compact, but it wasn’t his pipe. His was a red and blue one with a longer stem and a Confederate flag. This one, specked in rust, its stem clogged with oil, was so tiny you’d likely singe your lashes smoking it.

“You mean this?” she said, holding it out for him.

He nodded. “I left my good flag pipe in the head at the station and it was taken by that skinny boy-wonder piece of shit they brought in who talks over the fucking lyrics!” He yelled this last part straight into the radio. “I hate that little fuck. He always plays my favorite records so I can’t repeat them, and now he’s taken my goddamned Confederate flag pipe, the cock!”

He threw the matches at her. “Light up the bowl,” he said.

She didn’t want to. If they smoked in the car, she’d reek of it. “We can pull over, can’t we?” she said, then remembered the money and hoped he wouldn’t stop.

“No, we can’t pull over. Jesus, you should get high. That’s what is actually wrong with you, if ever you were wondering. The government makes shit up. Think about it. If everyone switched to weed, who would pay their fucking tax for alcohol?” He laughed, then tossed over his Bic but she dug in her purse for matches because she wouldn’t burn her fingers so easily with them. That was when he saw it, saw the money making a bulge in her pocket.

“What is that?” he said, his voice suddenly slow and deliberate. He had his fingers around the roll of bills and he wasn’t letting go.

“What’s what?”

He jiggled his fingers, pinching the roll of bills tighter, his voice even. “In your pocket,” he said.

She said, “Nothing.”

“You better show me.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Nothing is nothing. That,” he said, pointing, “looks like a dime bag.”

“Is that what you think it is? Drugs?”

“Pot, not drugs! All this anti-marijuana from you, Miss Mouth, and meanwhile you’ve got a dime bag in your jeans!”

“It’s not a dime bag!”

“Then what is it?”

“Nothing!”

Sudden commotion, her whole head in a spin. She saw the glass in front of her, then away; her vision bouncing. He stopped the car fast, swerving right as he did so, and she flew forward, her head banging the windshield, then thwacking the seat back. The car came to rest on the side of the road—dust rising, the tires cooling, the engine making its ticking noise—the whole thing settling like a big fish hauled onto shore after a long ocean chase.

He said, “You should have been wearing your seat belt.”

There had been no need to stop like that. No other car or giant pothole or blown-out tire. They were off the road now, parked squarely in a bus turnout. The only reason for him jamming to a sudden halt was his temper, that old grizzly that caused him to do this kind of thing, break a bottle, hit a wall, pick a fight with some stranger in a car.

“Why did you do that?” she said.

“Do what? I only stopped the car.”

She touched her legs, her face, her arms, smoothing down the goose bumps, the knots of muscles, the galloping pulse. Her nose was running but there was no blood. No blood she could see. She was about to turn on the inside light and look in the visor mirror to make sure, but he scratched up a flame on a matchbook and the fire lit his face so she could see his eyes, and that stopped her dead.

“Give me the pipe,” he said. His words, their tone, and the way his eyes focused on her, made it sound like he was accusing her of stealing it.

She didn’t know where the pipe was. She started to panic a little, or maybe she was already panicking. Her head felt light; she was floating. This same feeling had visited her some months back when Craig had found her talking to a boy at a public swimming pool, a boy her age. The boy and she stood waist deep in the water, leaning against the wall of the pool. They’d been laughing. She looked up and there was Craig, standing like a lion behind a little chain-link fence. He’d called her over, and just by the sound of her name in his mouth, she’d known she was in trouble. She’d been scared. She climbed out of the pool, not even taking the time to find a towel, and went to where Craig waited. She stood with her bare feet on the hot sharp grass, her face squinting into the sun, her arms together at the elbows, hands cupped on one shoulder, dripping water. He looked down on her as though he had never seen anyone so disgusting. Insects swarmed, mosquitoes, gnats, while he whispered every imaginable threat in a low voice so that others could not hear. She’d felt helpless and stupid; she’d felt she’d done something very wrong. It was the same feeling she had now, like she was in trouble, like all hell was breaking loose and somehow it was her fault. All her fault. Her head hurt. She felt a bubble of tears, but she swallowed them back and held on.

He sighed, cleared his throat, lit another match, holding it in the air. “The pipe,” he said.

She willed herself to remain calm. Calm and smart—when was she going to learn that? He was about to say something more. He was about to make his point and she needed to say nothing—nothing at all—even though she wanted to run and kick out and scream. Outside, a willow leaned its tangled branches over the hood of the car and tapped in the breeze. She could climb out and shimmy up its leafy fronds. She could throw the door open and tear down the road. But she couldn’t, and she knew it. She felt her blouse wet down the length of her back, and a headache blooming between her eyes, and the pain in her face, right in the middle of her face, was like a target. She thought of all the times she’d found herself saying, I want to kill myself, found herself recently saying exactly these words, and she hadn’t known why. But this had been why.

“Barbara,” he said, drawing out her name. “I want that pipe.”

She knelt on the mat of carpet in front of the seat, keeping her eyes on him as she did so. The floor mats were full of grit and twigs and dust. There was no air that wasn’t tainted with a bitter dampness, with spilled bong water, stale beer, soured milk, puke. She didn’t care. She scrambled on the floor in the dark. It was time to find the pipe, find it now. She groped around on the floor, her hands moving across the carpet like little windup toys, jerky and erratic. She squeezed her hands into fists and then released them again, trying to steady herself.

She worried maybe there was a time limit for finding the pipe, like he had her on a timer and she’d taken too long already. She was in trouble. She felt it deeply, as though she’d already heard a ding! But then—thank holy Jesus—her palm moved over a bump in the carpet. It was the bowl, like a little marble of gold, and for the first time in what felt like a long while she let out her breath.

“Don’t get angry,” she said, bringing the pipe up to him.

“I ask you a question! A simple question, like ‘What is in your pocket?,’ and you give me all this shit, then tell me not to get angry!” He was exploding; he was orbital. But there was her friend, the clock on his dashboard, moving toward midnight when he had to be at the radio station, sitting in the big swivel chair in the center of the studio. Midnight to five a.m., he was on the air. He didn’t have much time to go crazy. His crazy time was confined as she was confined.

“What do I have to do to get a straight answer out of you, Barbara?”

She rubbed the pipe clean, tried to get him to take it from her, but he acted like he didn’t want it now. She pressed it toward him and he pushed it away. Finally she gave up, placing the pipe on the seat between them.

“If I ask you a question, answer the question.”

“Okay,” she said, patting the air. “No reason to get us killed.”

She regretted saying this. Right away, she regretted it. His anger ignited freshly, and she felt his grip as he grabbed the top of her belt, hauling her up like a bucket, then tunneling his hand deep into her pocket for the money before shoving her back onto the seat again. She felt a scrape on her hip from his wristwatch. She felt her pocket empty of its treasure.

Now he turned on the light. She stayed as he had dropped her, curled like a shrimp, her limbs pulled toward her center. She watched his face unfasten its anger, then bloom with surprise, even wonder. For a moment it was like seeing a boy with a magnifying glass examining the complicated wings of a flying insect, enthralled and amazed, as though he could not believe his luck to live on this earth with such a thing as he held in his hand.

“What the hell?” He leafed through the fifties. Taking one, he flipped it over and back again, holding it up to the yellow bulb in the car’s roof. “Jesus,” he said, inhaling carefully, counting the bills in time with his breath. He turned them over, counted them again. For a long minute, he stared at the money, as though searching for a message in the stout face of Ulysses S. Grant. In a low, serious voice, he said, “Where did you get this?”

She couldn’t speak.

“It is a simple question.”

She heard her words—silly, girlish—as she tried to explain that she hadn’t been looking for anything, certainly not for money, and how the bills were dusty and had clearly been there for a long while. “So I took it. That was the wrong thing to do, but I took it.”

“From the motel room? Money was just sitting there in the room?”

“Yes, and I should have told you, okay? But I was worried. I mean, who leaves a thousand dollars in a motel except maybe a drug dealer? I should have told you. I’m sorry. But I didn’t know what you’d think—”

He didn’t register her apology. He was looking at the money, counting all over again. He pinched the wad in his hand, squinted at it as though measuring its thickness. Then he said, “You say a thousand.” He spoke very slowly, and far more seriously than she had ever before heard. “So where’s the other five hundred?”

—

HE WAS ON the air in just over an hour, but they were heading away from the station. He had to get back to the motel, find the rest of the money, then get out again. The car burned through seventy, eighty, ninety on the straightaways, him screaming at her, asking why in hell’s name had she left five hundred dollars behind? He could not be late to his midnight spot. Could not! She had fucked everything up, fucked it clean up, and why was he always making up for her incompetence?

She tried to read him, to figure out where the flying ball of his rant would land. She had to appear not too casual but not too wary, either. Whatever else, not scared, because that always made him worse. Slanted on the bench seat of the Buick, shoulder against the window, she stayed as far from him as she could without being accused of sulking, holding on to the seat with one hand, the door with the other. She didn’t want him to know she was worried by how fast he was driving so she held on lightly, as though her hands just happened to rest there. Meanwhile she watched the short distance between the car bumper and everything else in front of them. She tried to look up at the moon, a tonic of white stillness in the slate sky, to set all her thoughts there and ignore the speed of the trees and bushes and telephone poles flying past.

Out on the highway, he skirted the traffic. “You better hope we don’t meet a cop!” he said. Always her fault, always. He glared hard at her, as though she were the reason for all his ills and every trouble in his otherwise tidy life.

They skimmed the bed of a big semi, so close to its wheels she felt the suck of a vacuum pulling the side of the Buick. The shadow of the truck bed fell over them, the darkness covering her lap. A weight of gravity pushed against her shoulder, and she thought for one clear moment that her life was done now, that she would be taken by the truck as a field mouse is taken by an eagle.

Craig jerked the Buick into the next lane. She breathed out hard as he pressed down the accelerator. She felt her stomach burn as he swerved into a third lane, then skirted up two cars and over once more.

Now the highway dipped downward, with a long tongue of road ahead. The car rolled faster and faster. It was exactly as though they had no brakes because he did not use brakes. His response to everything—bends and bumps in the road, other cars—was forward, forward.

“What made you think I didn’t need the whole grand?” he said. As though the money—all of it—was already his.

After a moment she said, “I didn’t want to draw suspicion.”

“What?”

Louder this time, so that her voice carried over the road noise, “I said I didn’t want to draw suspicion!”

He slapped the steering wheel in exasperation, then punched the accelerator at the belly of the highway’s slope, and she swore they went airborne. He said, “Who was watching you? How can it be ‘suspicious’ when there is nobody to see?”

With the word suspicious he took both hands off the wheel to draw little quotation marks in the air. Air quotes while topping a hundred. He said, “That’s just retarded! You find money, it’s yours! That’s how it is with money. And other stuff, besides. Not car keys, okay. You can’t take someone’s fucking keys!” He spoke angrily, as though she’d done just that, taken a whole ring of keys off an innocent bystander. “Only a pussy takes someone’s keys!” he shouted.

She tried to think of a way of distracting herself. She started counting in threes: three, six, nine, twelve…

“And not clothes, either—that’s personal! And not even money once it’s in someone’s pocket—that would be stealing. But loose money is like air. It’s for whoever happens along. Do I ask if it is okay to breathe the air near you? Do I say, ‘Barbara, mind if I have a little whiff of your air?’ Well, do I?”

Thirty-six, thirty-nine. She opened her eyes to see the cars beside them becoming dangerously close as he teetered toward the next lane. She heard the sound of a car horn over the music and Craig’s bellowing voice.

“Come on! Answer me when I ask you a question, Barbara! Do I or do I not ask if it is okay to breathe the air near you?”

She hadn’t realized he expected an answer. “No,” she muttered. Forty-two, forty-five…

“No, I fucking well don’t and why should I? Same with loose money.” He glanced at her from across the car, a low, sorrowful look as though he was concerned about her intellect. “You need to understand some things,” he said. He checked the road briefly, then whipped his head back to her once again. “Would you agree that you need to understand some things?”

“Yes,” she offered. Fifty-one, fifty-four…

“Quite a few things?”

She nodded.

“Because you don’t know anything yet. Tell me one goddamn thing that you think you know.”

She had no idea what he was talking about, or why she had to answer, or how. “Fifty-one isn’t a prime number,” she said. “You’d think it would be. It sounds prime.”

He shook his head. “You’re completely insane. A total nutbucket,” he said.

“It’s true. If you had five and one together it’s six and therefore divisible by three,” she said.

He glared at her. “That’s the kind of stupid shit nobody cares about.”

“Three times seventeen.” She knew he didn’t care. That nobody cared. She was talking nonsense. She was scared to death.

“What is wrong with your brain that you are doing math in my car? You need to get your shit together, Barbara. You need to pay attention to the University of Life.”

She told herself if she got out of this car alive she would never get back in. This was the last night of the last day, the very last time she would ever see him. She didn’t care what it took to rid herself of him. Let him scream and shout. Let him tell her mother. It made no difference. She was done.

But she nodded in agreement that she needed to get her shit together—oh yes, oh yes, get her shit…

“Okay,” she said. “I agree.” Her admission satisfied Craig, who liked to seem sage and intelligent. He liked to teach her. He’d once explained why blood did not belong to one person but to everyone, and how if he were in charge of stuff, he’d stop blood-supply shortages by requiring hospitals to drain the blood of patients who died, but only a few minutes after they died so that it was still good, the blood. It wasn’t rotten or anything. Then there was the guy he worked with who was born without thumbs. Craig had explained that the worst thing about missing thumbs was how it made it so the guy couldn’t work a bong. And this was a shame because bongs gave you a better, cleaner, and more complete high. He was sure of this. He believed that one day science would find ways of measuring such things.

He veered onto an exit ramp, the motel sign a great beacon of light, then put the car in neutral as a way of saving fuel, a habit she never liked because traveling the slope of the road at high speed always made the car feel light and out of control. They rounded the curve of the exit, the car swerving and swooping along the contours of the road like an osprey tracking the air above the ocean’s swells and surf. They were fast; they were flying. He was smiling now, singing along to a tune on the radio. He didn’t care how fast they went; he was hunting. He was about to get his money. It was waiting for him there by the big bright sign.

—

SHE’D LEFT THE key in the room, so they had to get the manager’s keys to get inside. She followed Craig through a glass door with a strap of bells attached, then into a little square room lit from above by strips of humming, cold light. He rang a bell on the desk and called out “Hey, anyone here?” loud enough so if you were there you’d come running. That, or hide.

The countertop had neat piles of leaflets, a rubber plant, and a desk calendar with curled corners and a photograph of the motel on it. The night manager, or whoever he was, must have still been around because he’d left half a cup of coffee in a blue enamel mug, and a coffee pot roasting dry on an electric ring above the filing cabinet.

“You ever seen so deserted a place as this?” Craig said, thwacking the bell with his palm. “Hey, anyone here?!”

There were fishing rods in one corner, a trash can, an old sign. Craig called again and still no reply.

“What the fuck is the matter with this place,” he said. He stamped his foot, banged the bell with his fist, called out again. The hum from the fluorescent ceiling lights annoyed him. “Someone shut that damned tube off,” he said, as though to the staff. He took a broom from its place by the door, tossed it up and grabbed the brush end. He whacked it on the light fixture so that it blinked and swayed before resuming its noise. Now he grew red with impatience, paced the length of the counter, slapped the top of it, sounded the bell over and over again before finally throwing it against a wall. Then he went over to the bells tacked on the door and shook them like he was trying to get a coconut out of a tree.

“Hey!” he shouted. He was wearing the bicentennial ball cap. His untucked T-shirt billowed over his front, where a loose swatch of leather from his belt wagged with his steps. “Hey! I need some attention here!”

His voice boomed toward the back of the room where there were some closets and an exit door. Nothing happened. He flipped up a section of the counter that allowed him through to the manager’s area, then opened cupboards until, at last, he found where the keys were stored on pegs. The one he wanted wasn’t there and he searched the rack then looked on the desk, yanked open a drawer and swept his hand through, scattering paper clips, an ink pad, a calculator. A log of staples fell to the floor and broke into sections he then stepped on, turning abruptly when the phone began to ring. “You gonna answer that?” he said to Bobbie, sarcastically. The white light flashed on one of the extensions and the phone rang and rang. They both looked at it. “This is all your fault,” he told her. “Making us come back.”

Then he told her to get out, go back to the car and wait there.

She left him in the motel office and stepped into the night, wishing she were home already. Her house had a screened porch and she’d used paper clips to fix some extra mesh over the holes in the screen so bugs could not get through. She would sleep out there on nights like this, lying on a little camp bed beside a long section of screen, watching the moon through the trees. It was what she’d done the night before, quietly drifting into sleep in the silky warmth of the night. She had woken at dawn, feeling part of the trees and woods around her, part of the songbirds and squirrels and night animals.

She could still hear Craig calling for the manager. She had eight hours until she had to be at the bus stop for school and she’d better have washed her hair. It was sticky and stiff, hanging in her eyes. Sleep would be good, too. There had been times recently when she nodded off in class and the teachers behaved as though this was deliberate rudeness on her part. Her geography teacher once woke her, saying, Do you have a problem I can help you with? She’d shaken her head, stifled a yawn, endured the laughter in the classroom. No, he couldn’t help her. She had a lot of problems he couldn’t help her with. Her problem right now is she has to wait for Craig to get the money and get her home. Who could help her with that?

The motel sign was reflected in long bars of light on the Buick’s gold hood and in colorful splashes on the window. When she approached she saw her own shadow, angular and dark. Then she stopped. Somebody was behind her. She could see plainly enough in the window’s reflection. He was moving along the little cement path that led to the front of the motel. The night manager. He disappeared from view as she got into the car. She rolled the window down and listened. Crickets, the whirring of the ice machine, traffic in the distance. She smelled freshly cut grass and the fecund, growing greenery, and she breathed this in and tried to relax. Don’t worry, she told herself. Craig would get the key and get the money and then drive to the station. In a matter of hours the whole awful night would be over. She pulled her knees up and hugged them. “Don’t worry,” she said out loud. But when she heard the door of the reception area bang shut, upsetting the bells, she felt like a fuse had been lit somewhere in the distance and soon everything would blow.

She saw Craig walking quickly down the path, the wooden fob in his hand, his head bent in the direction of the room. He turned in to the path that led to the motel’s interior, then down the step to the little path that led to the room. A motion sensor clicked into action and produced a sudden, gauzy light that draped over him like a cape. He disappeared into the light and she could see no farther.

She opened the glove compartment, searching for cigarettes just in case Craig had missed them. Crushed in the corner was a single stale Marlboro with a tear in it, which she fished out carefully and tried to straighten. The filter had specks of loose tobacco and she was busy picking those off when she heard her name and looked up. Craig was standing on the bank of grass, blue in the neon light, his ball cap in his hands, his hands on his hips.

“Barbara, get in here and help me!” he said.

She poked her head through the open car window. “Help you how?”

“Don’t ask me how! Move!”

How could he not find the money? It was in a drawer on top of a Bible with a note. She’d already told him that. It was impossible to miss. She wondered if she’d made a mistake and the money wasn’t there. Maybe she was remembering incorrectly. Maybe she put it somewhere else. Finding the roll of cash, fishing it out from behind the night table—all that felt as though it had happened long ago. She could no longer think straight; she was tired, her thoughts agitated. She wanted to lie down, but she pushed open the door instead.

Her Dr. Scholl’s clip-clopped along the cement path and she was aware of the noise and the likelihood of disturbing people. But she couldn’t figure out how to tiptoe in such inflexible shoes and he pulled her along so quickly she had no choice but to clomp down the path. They reached the room and he pushed the door open, then stood in the yellow light taking up a good deal of the small space where they’d been all those hours ago and said, “Find the fucking money.”

The room looked burgled. The bed still had the brown coverlet but he’d been through the drawers and they stood open, some now with broken handles, some pulled off their runners so they lay at angles across the floor. The dresser drawers were only made of flimsy plywood and the back of one had come off and now sat inside the three remaining sides. In another she could see the print of Craig’s shoe across the lining paper. The curtain was drawn back so the light from outdoors shined onto the bed, which was still tidy, still as she’d left it, except two of the curtain hooks had flown onto it and gleamed there like pieces of jewelry left behind by a guest.

She went to the bedside table. He’d already pulled the drawer out, leaving it open at an angle. The Bible was there, the pages open beneath the book’s spine.

“We could have had it already!” he said. He was stripping the bed, pulling up the mattress, digging inside the pillows. “We were here! In this same fucking room! And you had the money in your hand.”

She felt his anger radiating toward her. “I’m looking!” she said, but when she pulled out the Bible, which was facing down on its open pages, there was no money inside it. She shook the pages so they waved beneath the hard cover like a swatch of hair, but nothing came out. No money, no note. She kneeled down and looked under the night table’s squat legs, but found only cobwebs and a stray pack of matches. In the space against the wall was an electrical cord and a socket. She could not see the money no matter how much she willed it to be there, and she could not leave until it was found.

“Stupid!” Craig said, about her or about the situation or maybe both.

For a moment she thought she saw it and gave a sudden shout.

Craig looked up. “You got the money?”

But it was only the note she’d written, which she threw back to the floor now. She dropped lower, scouting close to the carpet, her nose to the ply, looking crossways over the room. The contents of the drawers were all over the place: a pen with a crack in it, a phone book, some brochures.

Craig looked at her. “Fucking stupid,” he said.

There were footsteps outside. She heard them and froze. Both of them did, Craig standing with a corner of the mattress leaning on the wall by his ear, her on all fours with her head cocked to one side like a dog. The footsteps grew louder and Craig said, “Get to the bathroom!”

She ran, stubbing her toe on the edge of the bed, then stepping out of her sandals and hopping barefoot, so that she all but fell onto the bathroom floor. She switched on the light and heard Craig yell, “Off!,” so she switched it off again and sat on the toilet, perched on the edge of the rim, arms folded on the tops of her thighs, forehead against her knees. She felt a slushy sourness in the pit of her belly and listened as whoever it was came into the motel room. She thought it must have been the manager. She heard the shock in his voice from seeing the place so torn up and Craig there with a bedsheet in his hands.

The guy said, “What the hell?,” and then Craig started shouting at him that he was looking for his money.

“What money?” she heard the other man say.

“What I left here!” Craig’s voice. “What you took!”

“I never took any money! I’m calling the police!” The guy’s voice went falsetto at the word police and then she heard something snap and a kind of slapping sound and a heavy object fall. She heard the manager saying, “That’s it, I’m definitely calling the police, man!,” and then Craig’s voice booming as though from a megaphone. He had a deep, thundering voice with a lot of reverb, and when he shouted it was as though there were ten men inside of him.

“Call the police and tell them you stole my money, you fucking coward!” Craig bellowed. She heard a dull wet thud, and something scraping the window, and finally a boom so the whole room shuddered. Now the guy was screaming. She heard a whooshing sound and the guy yelping in pain. Craig was still shouting about his money and being robbed. The motel manager was crying out “Please stop!,” and she didn’t want to open the door, but she had to look.

There was Craig with the antennae from the TV in his hand, slender long metal twins, jagged at the broken ends. He was using them like rapiers, or not like rapiers exactly because he did not thrust the ends of the antennae into the guy but sat astride his chest, beating the metal whips across his face as he was down on the floor, his head pinned in place by Craig’s knee on his neck.

“Tell me where my fucking money is!” Craig was shouting.

They were angled into the corner, the motel manager making the most awful crying and begging noises. She’d never seen two men actually fighting but she realized now that it was nothing like what you saw on television. There was no sport to it. They did not size each other up and take honest swings. The man on the floor being whipped in the face cried out in a high-pitched voice while Craig kneeled on him, lashing his cheeks and forehead and nose until the man gave up and howled, animal-like, lying on the ground, and still Craig did not stop.

There was the open door leading out to the dark inviting night, and all she could think was to run, but her legs were shaky. She’d left behind the stupid wooden sandals and her naked feet did not feel sturdy or even under her command. She didn’t dare run, but instead crawled on her hands and knees, down on the floor where she hoped she would not be seen. She kept hearing the manager’s cries; imagined the sting of the antennae against his neck and shoulders, heard his garbled answers that he did not know where the money was, that he didn’t know about any money.

She watched as the mattress suddenly fell onto the night table, which itself tipped over, sending the drawer flying out toward her head. She rolled into a ball, squeezing her eyes shut as it missed her by inches and hit the floor. She forced herself to stay still, to think clearly. She needed to get out the door and run. The men were still in battle; nobody would see her. She needed to keep moving. She opened her eyes, crawled forward once more. She only had to make another twelve feet or so, but the men were there, legs flailing, the long sweep of the metal rods stinging the air. She crouched forward and suddenly in front of her—she felt dizzy seeing it—there was the money.

The bills were in a roll just as she’d left them. They had been stuck or pinned or behind something—she could not imagine how the money ended up beside her, but there it was. She could hear the beating continue. She thought maybe she should call out, The money is here, goddamn it, leave the guy alone! But Craig would kill her if she let anybody know she was in the room. Being underage was another of her many faults. Her job was to stay hidden. People weren’t allowed to see her. And certainly not in a motel room.

She heard the man yell out, then form a sentence. This comforted her, that he wasn’t so hurt that he couldn’t talk. He said he did not know about money but if it meant so much, why not go to the office and rob the cash register?

“There’s tons of money in there!” the guy told Craig. “If you want money, go take it!”

“I’m not a fucking thief!” shouted Craig. “I’m not some lowly criminal who robs a fucking cash register, you cunt!” He kept hitting the manager as he spoke, punctuating his words with swipes from the antennae. “I’m only after what’s mine!”

She closed her fingers over the wad of bills. She measured the distance between herself and the open door that led into the night. And then, in a moment she thought she might regret, she held tight to the five hundred in her closed fist, and she ran.

It was not that easy to get away. She didn’t have any shoes. She didn’t have any idea where to run now that she was out of the room. The security light flicked on as she passed, but she did not stop. The men in the room did notice, of course. The light meant someone was coming and this paused them.

She ran down the path, skirted the turn, crossing the parking lot with its rough surface and sharp pebbles. She moved in high leaping steps as her feet stung, climbed a bank of grass, cool and lumpy on her naked soles. Now she was beside a road that paralleled the bank of highway that rumbled above. She stopped, bending forward and resting her hands on her knees, looking out at the motel as she tried to regulate her breathing. She wanted water. Water and a bicycle, or at least a pair of shoes.

She was ready to give up. If there had been a phone booth, she would have called her mother and explained what happened. Or not explained but said, Please help me. Please, I need you. And her mother would get that serious tone in her voice and say, Bobbie, where are you? Can you see a road sign? Can you see the name of a store or a restaurant or anything near you? Her mother would tell her to stay put and that she’d come. But her mother was not at home. She wasn’t sure where she was. Bobbie didn’t even have a number to call because by now her mother would be driving home, arriving sometime in the middle of the night, exhausted from the road.

So there was no one. She would walk, she decided. How far could it be? Ten miles, twelve? She’d won a National Fitness Award last year in school. She was a good walker. But it was the shoes. That was her problem. And she wasn’t too sure about directions.

Even so, the night was pleasant and dry, the temperature comfortable. She thought about finding a place to lie down here on the bank between roads, here in the grass. How bad could that be? Hadn’t people slept outside hundreds of years ago? Or if not hundreds, then thousands of years ago? In the summer, no less? With darkness to cloak them and the serenity of the stars? Hadn’t she read a poem like that in school? And who could see her out here? She dropped to her knees, then curled her legs under her. Her mind was cluttered with images of Craig and the manager and those awful metal antennae. She pushed them from her thoughts. She was so tired. Surely it was all right to lie down now? She lowered herself into the tall grass; if she stayed on her back nobody would see her. She closed her eyes and let her mind swim toward sleep. She told herself she was surely hidden. Not even the moon could find her shadow.

—

CAR HEADLIGHTS SPRAYED light on her face, and she was tossed from sleep into the night she now detested and wished away. She was blind and chilly and footsore, and she was scared. Even so, her first thought was that somehow her mother had figured out where she was and had come for her. The stopped car meant she was safe now. Rescued. She realized that this was what she’d longed for all night, to be rescued. Though it was impossible, and part of her knew it was impossible, in her dreamlike state and the suddenness of her awakening she believed that the greatness of her need had defied all physics and made itself known across miles and time to her mother.

The night air was pricked with dampness, as though the rain that gathered did so from beneath the ground. She sat up, hugging herself, wet from the grass. The sudden waking had jarred a place inside her stomach where she now felt a sour pinching. She shielded her eyes with one hand as someone threw open the car door. She could not see properly—the headlights were too bright—but she could see it was not her mother; it was a man. She could tell it was a man by the force of the door and how he left it open, and his outline in the beam of headlights, large and wide and tall. She thought perhaps it was the police, but then she saw exactly who it was, still wearing his ball cap, and engulfed even now—oh, she could hardly believe this—in the same fierce anger that had possessed him back at the motel.

On the car radio, turned up loud, A Taste of Honey was singing “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” a harmless teen song that seemed directly at odds with the glaring lights. The force of headlights had temporarily jarred her vision. Everything in front of her was halos and drifting clouds of color and great gobs of blackness through which she could see nothing, even after she pushed her palms into her eyes and blinked. She got to her knees. She felt weak and heavy, held down by the light, as though it was a weight that pinned her.

“Barbara!” His voice was booming and deep and full. “Where do you think you are going!”

She would have loved to have an answer. Instead, she sat down on the grass once more.

“Get up,” he snapped.

She stood. She thought about running and would have done so, but for the no shoes.

“Well, come on! What do I have to do? Pull you up off the ground and carry you to the car? I have a job to get to, you know.”

Her sleep, which had lasted less than twenty minutes, seemed to have been much longer. And now her mind filled with images of the snapped-off antennae and that man on the floor with his hands in front of him, trying to ward off Craig. She wondered how Craig had found her but then she saw the obvious trail she’d made through the wet grass. She might as well have put out signs.

Suddenly the headlights were off. She could hear the DJ on the car radio talking over the long exit of a record, and when she turned around she saw Craig peeing on a spot of ground just in front of the car.

“Let’s move!” he said, doing up his fly.

She got back into the car and Steely Dan started playing, and Craig said “Finally!,” though she didn’t know if he meant finally she was in the car or finally there was a decent song on the playlist.

He put his pipe between his teeth and wheeled the car around getaway-style, his head bent over one shoulder.

He said, “I’m going to be late and it’s your fault. That money—how the fuck did you leave it behind? I mean that is just stupid. Don’t tell me you’re sorry because—”

“I’m not sorry,” she interrupted.

“Good God, do you do nothing but argue?” he said. He drew his hand up as though to hit her but didn’t. “One day, Barbara, someone is going to kick the shit out of you, acting like you do.”

And now, into her vision came the antennae from the motel TV. He’d taken them with him. There they were, lying across the top of the dash like the stems of headless flowers. She thought, If he touches me with them I’ll…But she had no idea what she’d do. She couldn’t think clearly with the wind blowing through the windows and the cloud of traffic noise. It felt like being out on an airport runway or fixed into the engine of a helicopter. Her brain couldn’t work with all the noise.

“If I had my pipe instead of this Mickey Mouse toy shit of a pipe, I’d be a lot happier,” he said, then tossed the pipe in her direction. “Fix me up a bowl.”

The sandwich bag of pot was lodged in the ashtray. She took a pinch of grass, rolling her fingers to feel for the seeds and separate them out, letting them drop. She bent down, avoiding the ceaseless wind driving through the car’s open windows, and tamped the leaves so they would catch when she brought a match to them, which she did now. Lighting the bowl was the next thing he was going to ask of her so she might as well.

“Thank Christ for reefer,” he said, and turned up the volume button on the radio. He took the pipe from her and drew in a long toke. “I wouldn’t need to smoke so much if things were less fucked up in this world, but you can see how it is, can’t you?”

“Are you taking me home?” she said, her voice raised in order to be heard over the wind.

“No time. You can sleep in the car at the station,” Craig said.

“I don’t want to sleep in the car. I want to go home and take a shower.”

“You should have thought about that before you made us so damned late!”

This was the end. She wasn’t going to get home tonight. Her mother would arrive to an empty house and go crazy. And even if her mother didn’t check the bedroom to see that she was there, the fact was that Bobbie would miss her morning shower. There would be no time to wash her hair. She’d have to go to school in these clothes and without her books. She’d arrive for a chemistry test without her calculator, fail the test, get detention. Worse yet, she didn’t have any shoes.

“I have to go home before school starts,” she said. “I don’t have any shoes.”

“You left your goddamned shoes? How could you have done that!”

“I couldn’t walk in them—”

“People walk in shoes, Barbara. All the fucking time.”

“I couldn’t run, I mean.”

“You think you’re so smart—who leaves their shoes behind?”

“I don’t think I’m so smart—”

“Yes you do! You think because you get good grades that makes you smart. Well, it doesn’t mean anything, Barbara. You got that? It doesn’t mean dick.”

All at once she felt a fury course through her. She wanted to kick out, or break up the car. Instead, she did the one thing that she knew would get to him. She reached forward and punched a button on the radio, changing the station. That did it.

“Hey! Jesus CHRIST!” It was as though she’d done something awful to him, actual physical damage, changing the radio like that. His music suddenly gone, his station gone. That station was his, the songs on it were the soundtrack to his life. But coming through the car’s immensely overpowered speakers now was Doris Day. Doris Day singing “It’s Magic,” her voice clear and slow and melodic. It sent Craig into a fit of pain. He started thwacking at the radio, trying to stop the ballad, but Doris played on: “How else can I explain those rainbows when there is no rain? It’s magic!”

He looked pissed, like someone was trying to harm him—out of nothing, for no good reason—injecting this “music” into his ears. The pipe fell from his lips, dropping onto the floor as he lurched as though in pain, thumping the radio dial again. It went off this time and now there was silence, except for the rushing wind, and she could no longer hear Doris Day’s voice moving skyward, nor the violins creating that celestial air. “Sonovabitch! Why in HELL did you do that!”

She said nothing at first. She didn’t really know. Every once in a while she got brave. Every so often, a well of defiance rose up inside her. It had been building for months now and if she tapped into it, she was capable of anything.

“It’s her birthday,” Bobbie said quietly.

“Whose birthday?”

“Doris Day’s.”

“No it isn’t!”

“Yes it is. It’s her birthday and that was her greatest song. Put it back on.”

“It isn’t her fucking birthday. Jesus, how did you get to be such a…” His voice trailed off as though it was hardly worth finishing the thought.

There was a beat of silence and then Bobbie said, “It is her birthday! I’m a member of Doris Day’s fan club and I got a card in the mail—”

“You didn’t get any card,” he said.

“You don’t know that!” She was following a stream of anger that led to a river that led to an ocean. She was sailing now.

“I know it isn’t Doris fucking Day’s birthday.”

She was up on her knees, balancing on the bench seat, leaning toward him. With her voice as loud as she could make it, her face close to his ear, she shouted, “You don’t know shit about Doris Day!”

A silence. For a moment nothing, then Craig said, “Who cares? Who the hell cares?”

Bobbie dropped back into the seat and said, “She just happens to be my mother’s favorite, okay?”

He looked like he halfway heard this and that in some other universe somebody could understand why this fact mattered, but what he said was, “Find that pipe that fell on the floor before we light the car on fire.”

“It is her birthday.”

“Okay, fine. Happy birthday, Doris. Now get the pipe. I can smell it burning a hole.”

But she didn’t get the pipe. She thought how she was going to listen to the rest of that song now—why not? She’d half convinced herself that it was Doris Day’s birthday and that this was enough reason to insist she get her way. She put her bare foot on the dashboard, trying to look confident, then reached to switch the radio back on.

“Don’t fucking touch that!” he bellowed.

“Don’t whack my hand!”

“I’m warning you.”

“Back off! That’s my favorite song!”

“It is not.”

“Yes it is! And you wouldn’t know. My favorite song is what then? If you are so sure it isn’t that one?”

He rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said, “do what you want.”

She got the radio on and back to the right channel, but it was too late for “It’s Magic.” There was only the last lingering sad note, and the rising and falling of the dying violins and the DJ’s voice coming on to say, “That was the incredible Doris Day!” before Craig slapped the dial once more.

“There!” he said, sending it back to his own station where the Village People sang “Macho Man”: “Macho, macho man…!”

“Oh, yes, this is much better,” said Bobbie. As loudly as she could, she sang along: “Macho, macho man…I want to be a macho man—!”

“Shut up!” he shouted. He made a grunting sound like someone was standing on his foot, then said, “What is that little turdball playing?” He punched the dash so hard the tuner button spun off like a saucer. He swore and writhed in his seat and shouted at her. “Why on earth are you singing!”

He was truly insane now, shifting in his seat, hitting his car, screaming at the radio, the seat bouncing with his weight, the car drifting into another lane, so she stopped singing. She was sorry that she’d argued with him, sorry about wanting to go home, about the radio station, about everything. They were going to crash. He twisted in his seat, the cords of his neck showing like ribs; he was facing her now and howling, “Fix this fucking thing!”

She realized the problem. The tuner button, having flown off, was now missing. He couldn’t escape the Village People. She scrambled to find the button on the floor, then brought it up and aligned it with the little stick of metal on the radio to get it working again. She let him find a station he wanted and didn’t flinch when he yelled, directly into her ear, “Get! The! God! Damned! Pipe!” His voice was huge, even with the tearing sound of the wind through the car and the tires rumbling over the road and all the other cars’ engines, and the pumped-up speakers that shot the music in four directions all at once. Nothing was bigger than his voice. It was massive, like a weather cloud. She did what she was told.

“Light the fucking thing!” he barked at her, and she tried. If he smoked enough, he’d get mellow. He might even get sleepy. God, she wished he’d smoke himself into a stupor.

They turned off the highway and moved down a long, near-deserted stretch of road, heading toward the station at a speed that would land them in prison. She no longer dared look at the speedometer but focused on keeping the pot flowing. The pot would calm him down. She took the bowl and dumped the charred contents out the window, her hair flying in sheets around her head. She lit a new match to start the bowl, kneeling in the passenger’s seat and leaning low toward the floor, trying to keep the wind out of the bowl, trying not to light her hair on fire.

“Oh for fucksake!” he said, pissed off by how incompetent she was, not being able to light a bowl, and how he was going to have to roll up his window, what a pain in the ass.

She thought she should roll up the window on her side, too. Normally, she didn’t dare touch the windows, the seat position, the radio. These things belonged to him. But she cranked the lever from her bent position, angled on the floor, her elbow taking the strain. With the windows up, she could get a bit of a spark and then slowly, after a few short sucks, some embers kindled. She passed the bowl carefully across to him and he drew in the smoke and held it.

“Finally,” he croaked, holding his breath. He exhaled and said, “There’s countries where it’s legal to hit a wife who won’t obey.”

“I’m not your wife,” she said. But she shouldn’t have said anything and knew it.

He said, “You’re spoiled because you’re pretty and people do things for pretty girls.”

She didn’t know what he meant. First, about being pretty. Her legs were pink and white like a plucked chicken. Her eyes were invisible behind blond lashes. The only good feature she could identify was her hair, which right now felt like dried-out cotton and was so snarled and ruined that she thought she’d have to cut the tangles out.

“But one day you won’t be so pretty,” he continued, “and then you’ll be very truly fucked, just so you know.” He took a toke from the bowl, but it went dark. He sucked the pipe and got nothing. “Jesus Christ, it’s out again! What a rip-off fucking no-smoke goddamned pipe! This is not my reefer’s fault.”

She wasn’t so sure. The draw on the pipe was weak, but the grass was young and it made a lot of smoke and wouldn’t keep a light anyway. She took the bowl once again, added some fresh leaves, and relit it, handing it to him like medicine. But it was out in ten seconds and he groaned in frustration and shoved it back in her direction, saying, “Fix this fucking thing.”

“How?”

He leaned forward and took one of the antennae off the dash and said, “Break this up and poke it down there and get out all the shit.”

Remarkably, she knew what he meant. The pipe was bunged up with resin that needed clearing. But she didn’t want to touch the antennae, which seemed to her as lethal as a gun. Anyway, she could not easily break them in two. He suddenly swerved the car to the left, passing a driver who wasn’t traveling at a hundred the way they were, and she felt a sloshing inside her guts as they moved sideways all at once like that. The antennae dropped to the floor and landed, sharp side up, bent in her direction as though pointing.

“God, Craig,” she said.

“Give it to me,” he said.

“What?”

“The TV thing, that, what’s next to you, on the floor. Jesus, Barbara.”

She thought of the motel manager all over again. She wished Craig hadn’t brought the antennae. “What happened with that guy in the room. Is he all right?” she said.

“He’s five hundred of my dollars richer, is what he is.”

And then she remembered: the money.

It was rolled into a log in her back pocket. She almost reached into her pocket to make sure it was still there but stopped herself. Instead, she put some weight onto her right buttock, trying to feel if there was a lump there. Slowly, secretly, she moved just enough to tell if there was some tiny resistance from the roll of bills. If he found out she had the money, he’d go wild. She could not risk that he’d find it. Could not risk it.

“But you have the money,” she said weakly.

“I have this!” he said, and pulled out a flattened stack of bills, wadding it into the ashtray next to the grass like it was an oil rag. “But my other five hundred is fucking disappeared.”

“But the guy—”

“What about him?”

“He’s not—” She didn’t know how to say it, how to ask if the guy was dead.

“He’s a fucking fairy!”

“But…alive, right?”

Now he laughed. He laughed and told her he was hungry and to watch out for the golden arches because he needed a drive-through. Then he picked up the antennae in his non-driving hand and broke them against his knee, which made the car jerk to the shoulder. She held the dash and watched him as he poked around the pipe and pointed the car toward a turnoff that led to a stretch of road where the radio station would eventually be found. It was already midnight and she did not understand why he wasn’t tearing his hair out, then heard the DJ on the radio say he was playing an album, which meant Craig had another half hour or so before he’d have to be sitting in the studio.

“He’s playing an album, Craig, did you hear that?”

“So what?”

“So you can relax,” she said, meaning he could go a little slower.

“That only gives me so much time.” He pinched the air to show her how little time. “And I’m hungry.”

—

HE PULLED INTO a McDonald’s, circled into the drive-through, and leaned toward the microphoned clown. He said he’d need two Big Macs, large fries, and a Coke, plus a milk shake. That was for her, the milk shake.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Yes, you are.”

They drove around to the window and a young guy in eyeglasses and a brown nylon uniform stood waiting for the money, the paper bags beside him and the cardboard drink-holder, too, plus all the napkins and straws and plastic pouches of ketchup and slim packets of salt, assembled in a messy pile like a salad.

The guy told Craig it would be three dollars and something and he said, “Fuck that’s a lot for a couple of burgers,” and then looked at Bobbie for the money.

“What?” she said.

He held out a hand. “We need four bucks.”

“Three seventy-five,” the McDonald’s guy said. He had a tag on his lapel that read Dan and curly hair that spiraled around the cap on his head.

“I don’t have enough money,” she told Craig. These words seemed dangerous to her. She wondered if this was a trick, that he knew she had the other five hundred and this was his way of showing her he knew she had it. One of his little tests.

“You left the house with nothing?” He didn’t move. He didn’t look in his own pockets or in the glove compartment, only at her. His eyes were slits of pink and his mouth hung open like he was caught mid-chew.

She said, “Not four dollars.”

He shook his head slowly, like he was at the end. At the very end. He had no time for this. “Give me some money, Barbara, so we can eat! People need to eat, you know.”

Again, she wondered if this was a trick, like she was supposed to hand over the five hundred now. Why else would he have stopped at a McDonald’s when he was already supposed to be on the air? Why else would he demand that she pay for his food? She didn’t even understand how he’d lucked into having the DJ before him play a whole album as his last record. Craig must have called him from the motel and told him he was going to be late. It was the only explanation, and suddenly the whole thing felt like it had been staged. He must know she had the five hundred. On the other hand, she’d had a few tokes while lighting his pipe and maybe she was paranoid. She always got paranoid when she smoked pot. It was one of the reasons she didn’t like getting high.

“I don’t have any—”

“Bullshit!” He was furious now. It was over. She would give the money to him, give him all the money. She didn’t want it anymore. She couldn’t remember why she had taken it in the first place. It had rolled its way up to her, right up to her face, that was why.

A story came to mind, one Craig had once told her about the Hope Diamond. He’d said everyone who had the large and beautiful gem came to a terrible end. It was cursed. She concluded now that the money she’d found in the motel was cursed, like the diamond. He could have the cursed money, every last dollar. She reached into her pocket to get it. She couldn’t wait to hand it over and have this done with. She wished that after she gave him the money she could get out of the car. All at once, this seemed a fair exchange. He got the money, and she walked free. Free from him not just now but always. It was a bargain. She felt the roll, a sense of immense relief filling her heart. But just as she took it in her hand, everything changed. Craig pulled up the emergency brake, gave a great groan of impatience, and now she watched in confusion as he pushed his body toward her, then over the back of her seat. She pressed the money toward him but he knocked into her again, reaching his arm to the seat behind where her handbag rested. He grabbed the handbag and threw it at her, threw it at her face, so the buckle slapped her teeth, the strap stung her eye.

“Get some money!” he shouted.

“Sir, we can take a check if that helps,” the McDonald’s guy said. But nobody was listening to him.

Craig’s eyes were fully on her now. “You think I’m so stupid I don’t know your mother will not let you out of the house without cash?”

“My mother wasn’t home—”

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up.”

She still had the fist of bills, but he didn’t notice. He grabbed the steering wheel with both hands as though steadying himself on the ropes of a boxing ring, then he said, “You’re a trial, Barbara. Do you know that? It makes no difference what I do with you! You have to make everything difficult.”

She closed her fingers over the five hundred, hid it deep into her palm, then dug into her purse and found some change, mostly dimes. In her lipstick case she kept an emergency dollar. But she couldn’t make it four dollars without handing over one of the fifties.

“Sir, if you don’t mind me saying,” the MacDonald’s guy began. He was stuck in his little brick-and-glass box; he was a head in a square of glass. His hair curled against the dull uniform and you could see the reflection of sweat on his chin. His name tag, Dan, seemed like something a small child would wear.

Craig whipped his head around to the McDonald’s guy. “WHAT?” he said.

“If you don’t mind me saying—” The guy suddenly stopped. He was nervous, was young himself, only sixteen, seventeen at a stretch. His beard looked like stray hair that needed plucking. His hair had a hedge shape of tight curls. “In the car there I can see quite a bit of cash. More than three dollars seventy-five. Just there, sir. In your ashtray.”

Craig glanced down at the roll of bills in the ashtray, then at Bobbie, then at the McDonald’s guy again.

“What is this all about!” he yelled, as though the two of them—Bobbie and Dan the McDonald’s guy—were working together to swindle him. “Everyone, his dog, and his uncle, wants to separate me from my goddamned money!” He pointed into the ashtray with a single strong shake of his arm as though trying to hurl his index finger into the pot of cash. “That’s mine, son! You got that? Nobody is touching this money! Now here, take this!”

It was Bobbie’s money, almost three dollars. She watched as Craig handed it up to the boy, who nodded and thanked him. She waited as he counted.

“You going to give us our burgers, man?” Craig said to Dan. “Or are you going to stand there with our money and our food, working out how to wipe me clean of every red cent?”

The boy finished counting, then looked unsteadily at Craig. Bobbie could see the reflection of the car in the windowed booth and Craig’s face snarled in the yellow-and-red lights that pricked the glass.

“Sir—” The boy looked distressed now, truly distressed. He stood on one foot, then another. He opened his mouth to speak and stuttered out the words, “This is…this is only three twenty-five.”

“Oh. Fuck. You,” said Craig, like he was tired now, wiped out with all the bullshit this kid was giving him. “Come on, sunshine, give us our burgers!”

The boy licked his lips. His shoulders were thin and sharp. He had a hollow chest, long arms, bony wrists, slender fingers, and you could see every pore on his face in the fierce laboratory-bright light. He leaned on his arms and sunk his head into his neck, then looked over his shoulder and back at Craig, and spoke again, this time in a voice that sounded even younger, “I’ll ask my manager. Maybe he could do something—”

She felt Craig flinch and the colossal spear of his approaching anger. She saw how he fixed his eyes on the boy and knew what this meant. It was impossible to keep silent. The idea that Craig would hurt the boy filled her mind completely. It didn’t matter that there was a window and, in fact, an entire wall between the car and the boy. Her mind was stuck on the memory of the motel manager, the sight of him down on the carpet, his face bent ninety degrees from center so the side of his nose pressed against the floor, mouth contorted, eyes squeezed shut, hands raised, swatting at the antennae as Craig pinned and beat him. It was all she could think about. From where she sat stiffly in her seat, she now leaned forward and caught the boy’s gaze and motioned with her head in small, fractional side-to-side movements. No, she told him silently, wagging her head almost imperceptibly, so that Craig would not see. Do not get the manager.

She saw the subtle change in the boy’s expression and heard him say, “Never mind,” and she nearly collapsed with relief. “This is fine,” the boy said. He tried to smile, but it didn’t look like a smile. He handed the bag of burgers, the cardboard tray of drinks, all the straws and slim packets of extra salt, and the napkins through the McDonald’s window. Reaching toward Craig’s open window with the bag, moving as carefully as he could with shaky hands, he delivered the whole thing down to Craig, who passed it all to Bobbie in a swift movement and then told the boy he was a peckerhead.

“You’re a peckerhead,” he said to the boy. “Do you know that?”

The boy said nothing. He stared at Craig, swallowing hard.

“Say it!” demanded Craig. “Say, I’m a peckerhead!”

He waited until the boy did as he was told. “I’m a…” The boy was trembling. “I’m a peckerhead?” he said, his eyes fixed and staring.

“Yes, you are!” Craig laughed, then put the car into gear and they got the hell out of there.

—

THEY LEFT MCDONALD’S and sailed forward, the car now filled with the smell of burgers. It was midnight and she was caught in the cloud of noise from the radio and the road and him saying, “Take the wheel while I unclog this thing,” meaning the pipe. She scooted over and sat close to him, her head pulled back away from the spear of the antenna as he held the pipe in his mouth and poked the sharp end inside, then took it out and examined the bowl in the passing glare of streetlamps. Her fingers were locked around the steering wheel and she tried to watch the road out ahead the way he had instructed her many times before, not allowing herself to focus on the bleached cement that fed itself under the car just in front of the hood, which was where she naturally looked.

The road was straight, banked occasionally by leafy birch trees with bark that peeled in silvery paper upon their trunks. Above them was heat lightning and a faraway storm, but also the silent, sure flight of a jetliner aiming for the airport. If she weren’t having to concentrate so hard on keeping the car on the road, if she didn’t have to drive, she might have leaned against the door and stretched her vision up to the pretty halo around the moon, then tracked the plane’s red-and-white lights across the map of sky.

“Keep her steady,” he said.

“Next year I can get my license.” She squinted ahead, shifting her legs so they unstuck from the sweaty seat.

“Don’t remind me. You can already see it happening. Girls change. You’re already argumentative and pissy. You’ll be finished by sixteen.”

“I’m not pissy,” she said. She wondered what he meant by finished. “Am I driving okay?”

“Fourteen is optimal. I liked you better then. And I thought you’d turn out better than you did, too. Stay a bit straighter. Here,” he said, and pushed the wheel with his thumb.

“How far ahead should I be looking? Like a hundred feet or fifty feet or ten?”

“I’m not saying I don’t love you. But you were nicer then. Much. You had promise. I’ve seen this happen before. A nice girl one minute, then they hit fifteen, sixteen, and suddenly they turn into little bitches.”

“I’m not a bitch.”

She felt the weight of his disappointment in her, but she had to concentrate on the road. She had to be careful. She could get hypnotized by the road immediately in front of the car. It looked like what the arcade games looked like when you put in quarters and got to pretend you were a race-car driver. The car was tricky. Its headlights weren’t aligned and the beams turned in on each other so she was driving into a cone of light. Meanwhile Craig was cleaning out the pipe bowl with the broken antenna. He took a few tokes, leaning back and sucking the pipe, poking it with the antenna every now and again to get a better draw. “That’s good,” he said.

He seemed like he might fall asleep, resting on the nylon seat, so she said, “You’re not sleepy, are you? Don’t forget you’re the one with the brakes.”

He said, “Can’t you tell we’re going a steady sixty?”

“I’m just saying.”

“How could we be doing sixty like this if I weren’t doing my part with the gas pedal?”

“Okay, sorry.”

“See what I mean? Now you’re telling me how to drive. You don’t even have a damned license yet but you’re the expert.” He pinched some grass and held it above the bowl, talking all the while. But he looked like it was too much trouble to get mad at her. “Remember last year when we’d go down to the quarry and swim and have a good time?” He sighed. “You were sweet then.” He stirred around the leaves with the end of the antenna, then told her again to keep the damned car in a line so he didn’t get seasick. “Steer,” he said, exasperated.

She hooked her fingers tighter around the wheel and said, “I’m doing my best.”

“Make your best a little better, then.”

She said, “Please hurry. This is hard, keeping it straight when I’m sitting at an angle.”

“It’s not hard. I’ll show you hard.”

He took one of her hands from the wheel and she nearly screamed. He laughed, and put her fingers between his legs. She was already too short for the seat and had to lean over, and now she was one-handed, and he expected her to keep the car steady.

“Please,” she said.

“I got no time for you anyway,” he said. “I’m already late as hell.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “Is there any chance of me getting home?” She didn’t want to bring it up again, but she didn’t want to sleep in the car while he did his show, either. She’d done that back in March and it hadn’t gone well. He’d found it funny when he got back to the car and discovered her huddled under a blanket, a thin glazing of ice on the windows. She’d been unable to sleep for the cold and she begged him for the hot coffee that steamed in a paper cup held in his hand. Her mother had been in New Jersey that night, too, working one of the trade shows and sleeping in a Marriott. She’d phoned Bobbie to say she was bringing her some chocolate coins they sold in the gift shop and something else, too, that was going to be a surprise, and Bobbie had been so groggy she could barely say thank you.

But now, as she steered the car with Craig beside her with his matches and his pipe, she noticed the branches to the left of the road became unsettled and suddenly, as though out of a fairy tale, there sprang an enormous deer in a graceful arc before them, its legs folding and unfolding, its back stretching and unstretching. From the veil of forest, it landed for an instant upon the road much like a bird lands momentarily upon the bare ground, awkward in stillness, its eyes toward the approaching car. In the blaze of headlights, she saw the stag’s bright golden pelt, the overlong legs, the elegant neck. She saw the antlers, angled and strong and fixed on its broad head, and she was mesmerized by the dark eyes, and the deer’s steady gaze. The car was still coming fast, the brakes untouched, the tires rolling dumbly toward the deer. She called out to Craig as the animal took in the car with its bold, soft eyes. It did not turn away but waited on the road, framed in the headlights, the colors of its coat filling her vision, planted before them as though it had been searching for death all evening.

Craig did not brake, or at least he did not brake early enough. He’d said he was doing his part with the gas pedal, but it hadn’t been true. She turned from the deer and the car became a missile, aiming for the trees. White sparks flashed against battered trunks as the whole of the woods charged toward them. She felt the tires blow out, the rims banging, and a terrible dropping as though her body were suddenly reduced to nothing but her head. Her head rolling like a ball in the dark of the car.

The accident seemed to go on forever, the car dying slowly as it looked for a landing among the forest, the trees falling, breaking, and bending, with tremendous cracks and jolts that came from all sides, all at once, even under them. They had passed the area of hardwoods and come off the road’s shoulder into a section of farmed Christmas pines with their bushy fans of needled branches and scaly bark, all precisely planted. They’d been driving so fast the car had hit the weak line of wire fencing and somehow gone up, climbing the wire, snapping the posts at their bases, and flattening the fence so that it lay on the ground like a tarpaulin. The pines were immature, the sound of their breaking trunks like that of guns firing. She heard great explosions of wood, then a blast of glass as the rear window crumbled. A cape of branches flowed over the car and then she saw nothing at all. She smelled burning rubber. She smelled an oily cedar scent and gas fumes and blood. Her nose was bleeding. She hadn’t been wearing a seat belt and had flown downward into the well of the floor in front of the passenger’s seat where she had stayed until at last the car stopped moving and the explosion of wood ceased to echo in her ears.

She felt herself roll out of consciousness, and then her mind sprang forward as a current of sensations and images flooded her. It was like dreaming with a broken brain, all these sharp little thoughts firing inside her skull. She threw up hard, her chest heaving to bring in air that was suddenly in short supply. She was a rag doll, weightless on the floor. She thought she was dying, then threw up again.

It was as though they’d entered a cave with a blackness so complete she could not tell if her eyes were open or shut. The space of the car seemed to have transformed around her. She banged her head as she lifted herself from under the dash, feeling for the seat behind her, filled now with broken branches and bark scrapings. The whole car consumed by the forest, stuffed with wood and branches and great shavings of bark so that she was poked by their jagged ends coming through from the open window beside her.

She tried the door but it was stuck, the car wedged at an angle. It was possible the door was so damaged it might not work in any case, even if she managed to clear the pressing branches. The headlights were punched out, the engine silent. She touched the window and it suddenly disintegrated into broken glass. It was difficult to believe the car had been perfectly functioning along the open road only moments before. She pushed all her weight against the door but it sprang back just as hard. She felt for the inside light and switched it on and looked at Craig next to her, understanding at once that he was dead.

She thought about climbing out the window on his side, which meant climbing over him, but she saw his face and immediately felt the bile erupting into her throat and mouth, until she tipped her chin and retched. The antenna he’d used to beat the manager, and later to root through the bunged-up pipe so he could smoke cleanly, was now lodged inside his right eye. She could not see the whole of his face but only his profile, unnaturally bent, the blood washing over his cheek below the speared eye, and the sight of him sent her into a shivery panic. She bounced in her seat, screaming and sobbing, the muscles in every part of her clenched so hard she felt she’d pass out from the strain of breathing.

She called his name and he did not answer. She could not bring herself to touch him. She thought, I must get help. She thought, It’s too late. Everything is too late. In a feverish confusion she used her shoulder like a weapon on the door, banging against it again and again. She could not stay trapped in the car, caged in by the battered metal and the broken wood around her. It felt like she had been lowered into the ground with a dead man. Even the sounds outside were muted, as though they were underground. But no matter how hard she pushed, the door bounced back at her, never giving more than few inches, until at last she gave up and sat quietly, and hoped that nothing started to burn.

There was a red box from a Big Mac crushed next to the windshield, which was shattered but intact, with thousands of pieces of glass fitted together like a puzzle, so that the glass was opaque. The burger wrapper put her in mind of the boy at McDonald’s and then, with a start, she remembered the money. Craig’s half, the wad he’d stuffed into the ashtray.

There it was, exactly as he’d left it, pinned by the little door of the tray on the dash. She took out the bills and held them to her face. She breathed in the scent of ink and dust, inhaling because they smelled like the world outside the car and the forest. She put them in her pocket along with the other rolled-up bills and she did not know what to do next.

The backseat was the only way out. There was a hole in the rear window and it could serve as an escape hatch. She told herself that the leaning, uneven half wall of shattered window could be easily pushed aside, the little cubes of broken glass no threat at all. You will not get cut from that window, she told herself sternly. Or not seriously.

She used to read books about adventures and terrible physical tests but none of them were the least bit like the real thing, which was slow and uncertain and tormenting. The pain—even little flecks of pain that she felt now—was enough to send you into a fear so solid that the only positive outcome was a full-scale rescue of the sort in which you lie belly-up and pray.

But Craig was there with a metal stick in his eye and she wasn’t waiting however many hours it would take for help to arrive.

She knelt on the front seat, then pulled herself toward the back of the car, gliding carefully over broken branches and shards of bark, one hand shielding her eyes, the other reaching like a probe. She felt for jagged ends and sharp points. The yellow light was enough to guide her but not enough to see fully the contents of the backseat, an assortment of loose branches and pebbles of glass glistening on the upholstery and all over the floor, like thousands of eyes. She could not risk stepping onto the glass with bare feet. She could not stay in the car. She perched on the rolled ledge of the front seat like a big cat hugging a high rock, and then slowly slid to the left, guiding herself out of the rear window, and sliding roughly along a mesh of branches before dropping slowly to the ground below.

She landed on her side and looked up. Still, she could not see the sky. A broken tree was canopied above her. Crawling through the branches she at last reached an open section of forest perhaps ten feet away and she looked up at the stars and cried out for help. Her voice was weak and she became aware of a thirst unlike any she’d had before. She felt her tongue thickly in her mouth, her eyes dry beneath their lids. Her skin stung everywhere as though she’d been burned, and for a moment she thrashed upon the ground in a kind of contained hysteria, before getting to her feet and squinting through the night to find a path.

Her feet were alive with pain, her steps mincing and tentative, and sometimes after another agonizing spike from a pebble or thorn pressed itself on her soles she dropped to her knees, feeling the ground for sharpness. At times, she let herself cry out freely. At other moments, she held her breath and raced through and over whatever was in her path.

The trees were set in tidy rows as though sewn in place by a giant machine. Once she got far enough from the crash, her path to the road was clear, spelled out in moonlight and the shadowed brush of pine beside her. As she walked, the Christmas trees became smaller and weaker, so that she could see through and above them and it was like walking as a giant through the land. She stopped when she reached a wire fence that banked the road and walled her from it.

Her head was heavy. A buzzing worked itself furiously toward its center and she stooped on the dry ground and clutched her forehead, pressing against both temples to contain the ache. She did not know how long she walked the line of fence—up on her tiptoes or with her weight on her heels or, just as cautiously, on the full flat surface of her stinging feet. She wanted to lie down and sleep. She would have slept, but the only way she could contain the events of the night, to keep them separate from the part of her life she still wished to preserve, was to escape from the crash and these woods.

She wanted to go home, to enter the porch through the swinging screen door and find the key beneath the stone tortoise, a garden ornament that had been on the porch’s brick floor as long as she could remember. She wanted to sit behind a locked door in the kitchen and reassemble herself, to decide what to do next, for there would be things she had to do. Go to the police, for example. But she did not want to go to the police. They would ask her questions. What happened? Who was driving? How did you know this man? Why did you leave him there?

She thought of herself at the police station, sitting in a hard chair at a steel desk in a room with no windows and no way of leaving.

The policeman might ask her, Don’t you know to call for help when you need it?

But who could she call? And with what phone? She walked the fence, feeling pain everywhere, especially in her right hip and her bare, bleeding feet. The thought of a police station made her feel sick with terror. She was old enough to be left on her own but would they say her mother had neglected her? Her mother had never neglected her, but that is what they would think. The police are trained to think like that, that every bad thing that happens is someone’s fault.

And the drugs. Good God, what would the police say about the pot? If she owned up to having been in a car with marijuana and all that paraphernalia, it would be the end of her education. She would never get into college. She would never become anyone.

She came across a clearing and there she saw a reflection of eyes gleaming in the moonlight like stones in a stream. It was a herd of deer, trapped in the same way she was behind the mesh of fence and the empty road that divided the woods. She did not want to startle them, to frighten them into scaling the treacherous wire where they could so easily get their legs or antlers caught.

She thought of the stag they had nearly hit. In her mind’s eye she could see again the unquiet bushes, the moment the stag entered the road, and how her vision was transformed with its sudden presence. She’d controlled the wheel, Craig the brakes. Had he been in control of their direction they might not have crashed through the woods but, instead, held their course and hoped the stag leaped forward and that its appearance in their journey became just another in the long string of near misses that followed Craig’s life.

But she had turned the wheel. The stag, so wonderfully perfect in the headlight’s bright observance, had disappeared in a fraction of a second as she veered toward the side of the road. They had not hit it, that was one thing she was sure of, and for that small blessing she was grateful. Now she squatted by the clearing and watched the rest of the herd beneath the gauzy moon, their ears flickering. She thought it best to back away from them, but could not bring herself to take even a single retreating step, as getting this far on the stubbly ground had been so hard-won. So she waited until at last one of the larger deer drew its weight back upon its haunches and turned, dissolving through a dark patch of pine, followed then by another, and another.

The clearing was empty now and she entered it without worry, eyeing the fence with its lattice of unforgiving wire. It had been such a struggle to walk, and now she had to climb. With her bare feet and bad light and an unsteady head. Something flashed in her mind: the inevitability that her mother would find out. No matter what she did now, one day, her mother would know. She could not afford to think about such a thing; it dragged her down to imagine that soon, perhaps in a matter of hours even, her mother would find out about the crash, about Craig, about the sex. She couldn’t live with that, with her mother knowing. So she thought instead about the fence in front of her. She reached for the top of a post with both hands, and with the light of the moon as her guide, she pushed against the post and stood up on the wire.