1978
The smell of burned rubber and new sap followed Bobbie as she walked from the crash, out of the woods, and onto the road. She stubbed a toe early on and kept re-stubbing it for miles afterward, wincing each time she did so. She peeled dried blood from her lips, picked a clot of blood from one nostril, squinted into the night with gritty eyes. She’d already been tired when she started and now she was more tired still, following a road she didn’t know to another road she didn’t know.
She would do anything to see her mother’s car, to be bundled into its comfort and whisked home. In truth, however, had she seen her mother’s car, she’d have hidden. How could she explain what had happened? To imagine everything about her life being suddenly laid open, suddenly exposed, was an injury greater than the cuts, the bruises, the pounding head, the hurt feet.
At last she saw lampposts, appearing like candles of light ahead, and what appeared to be a shopping mall, set between vacant slopes of abandoned farmland. It was a new build, still white with fresh plaster, planted with saplings clothed in wire to protect them from deer. Outside the mall, a spotlight illuminated flowering shrubs in a circle of lawn at the entrance, and when finally she reached it, she arranged her body in a comma around the base of the spotlight, careful to avoid the black insulated cables. The shrubs bordering the circle were high enough so that they had shielded her from sight, the grass shorn so she did not become sodden with dew.
She slept only for a few hours, no more, and when she woke, she had no idea where she was. The image of Craig’s face came to mind, the awful stillness, and the metal rod that balanced in his eye socket. She wrapped her arms around her head and rocked herself, imagining what would come next: police and jail and terrible shame.
The hard ground had made her stiff. A muscle spasm meant she could not turn her chin toward her right shoulder. She did not dare look at the feet but stared at her scabby arms, her hands latticed with dried blood, allowing herself to peer down the length of her ruined jeans to her feet only after she’d picked out the worst of the imbedded dirt and hard crusts of blood there. Deep scratches and a ball of dark blood swelled beneath the skin by her knee, and something else, too. Tree sap, she suspected, stuck between her fingers and under her nails.
She wiped her feet and arms and hands on the wet grass, straightened, then tested herself on her ragged soles. She stepped delicately to the edge of the parking lot where there was some taller, wetter grass with which she tried to wash her face. When that didn’t work, she got on her knees, pressing her cheek to the lawn and rubbing back and forth, feeling the dew on her skin. She picked her way across the mall parking lot and knelt between two parked cars, then angled a side mirror her direction.
Overnight her face had gone from white and pink to a dull sienna. There was a bluish-red cast across her nose, a swelling there, ripening beneath the skin. The dirt and bits of bark in her hair made it look as though someone had poured coffee grounds over her head, and she tried to rub off the dirt and blood using spit and the bottom of her shirt. When she ran her fingers through her hair she was stopped by tangles and something sticky—tree sap, mixing with her blood where a scab was forming.
She had the urge to cut all her hair off. Cut it at the base with scissors. She thought how much she’d like a sink of warm water right now, how much she’d like a bath. First to drink the water, then to soak. For long minutes she sat on the ground with her head on her bent knees, her temples throbbing. She felt the sun pressing on her. She felt her spine, one painful piece all the way up to her neck, and her stomach, begging for food. Her clothes revealed a story she did not want to tell. She had to find new ones.
The mall was new. Not all the vacancies were yet rented, but she saw a uniformed man with a bored expression and a fist of keys unlock a set of glass doors at the far end of a Kmart. She watched from a distance until he’d gone, then set out across the parking lot, up on her toes on the rough asphalt, running like a bird trying to take flight. As she neared the entrance, she slowed down, dropping back onto her heels. She forced herself to breathe slower, to walk casually, to appear as though she was in no hurry. At the very least she needed to appear unreportable. Stepping through the doors into the air-conditioned store, her feet connected at last with the linoleum. The smooth surface against the painful skin on her feet was a cool balm, almost medicinal; she wanted to skate on it.
In the front of the store a row of windows, silver with light, were being scrubbed by a man in coveralls. Register five was the only one with its light on and there sat a large woman with a big bosom, staring into a compact, applying lipstick. None of them even noticed Bobbie, not the guy polishing the windows, not the cashier, not the man with keys who had disappeared from view. She began to feel hopeful. She would get new clothes; she would go home. And here was the best part: She had money. She pressed her pocket, feeling for the carefully rolled cylinders of cash, and she found them against her thigh, the relief nearly sending her to her knees.
And then she remembered, as though she could ever forget, Craig and the accident and the hideous metal rod. His face was right there, hanging in the air in front of her as though on a black cord from the sky.
She walked deeper into the Kmart, a giant, narrow rectangle, with low-slung tiles on the ceiling, and the feel of a warehouse about it. As long as she stayed focused, and nobody tapped her shoulder and asked why she was so dirty and scraped up and not in school, she’d be all right. Her lips were chapping, the corners caked with salt. In her nervous state, her hunger had vanished but she was thirstier than ever. What she really wanted, even more than clean clothes, was a water fountain, a faucet, a bucket, anything. She craned her neck, peering over the clothing displays and lit cases of cheap jewelry and big dump bins full of socks and headbands, searching for a vending machine to buy a drink. Then she remembered she had no change, only bills.
She headed down the rows of clothes. At the end of each aisle were mirrors but she did not look at the mirrors. Hiding behind racks of dresses and blouses, she peered through the garments to see if anyone was noticing. She reached out to take a hanger from the rack. Then, trying to affect an air of casual concentration as though this was an ordinary shopping trip, she studied a shirt for a few seconds before putting it back quickly, in a panic, realizing she was in the maternity section.
She needed jeans and a shirt, long sleeves to cover up. She needed socks. Socks were easy. They came in packs of three. She got lucky with shoes, finding some knock-off desert boots with gummy soles and yellow webs for laces.
She bought a hairbrush, a pink handbag-size one. And then she remembered: her handbag! It was still in the car. What would happen when the police searched the car? But she had no ID in the handbag, she now realized. No wallet, not even a set of house keys. Nothing in the bag could identify her. Even so, she worried. She’d left him there. He was dead, but she’d left him.
By the registers was a revolving tree of sunglasses from which she plucked some mirrored shades. Last thing was gum, taken from a rack behind the conveyer belt where she placed all her purchases. Gum instead of a toothbrush. Hairbrush instead of shampoo. Somewhere around here would be a bathroom and that was where she was going next, to clean herself and put on her new purchases. She only had to get past the cashier.
There was no one else waiting, so she went to the checkout area. The cashier took notice of her, darting her eyes at her, then away, then straight back again as though noticing for the first time the wild-looking girl in dirty clothes. Bobbie placed her purchases on the counter. She watched the cashier reach for the tags, then punch some numbers on the register.
She didn’t dare look at the woman, didn’t want to give any excuse for conversation. She felt the clotted dry interior of her throat. She wasn’t even sure she could speak, had not practiced since waking and now worried she would be unable to utter a sound if she were called upon to talk. She felt a rush of panic, brought to bay by a sudden stinging of salt from the road in a cut on her toe. She shifted her focus down to the gratings of skin that surrounded her toenail and winced uneasily at the sight of blood on the polished floor. When she looked up again, she saw the cashier staring directly at her, studying the shirt Bobbie wore, splattered with blood and dirt and stinking as though she’d been living in it for days. Her thin jeans had a big tear in the back, and a back pocket torn at one end, wagging by her hip. The jeans were a disaster, looking like something that had been dragged through a field, and meanwhile another bubble of fresh blood spilled over the edge of her broken toenail onto the floor, so that Bobbie moved the pad of her foot to cover the splotch of red.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked. She gave Bobbie a pitying look, then punched more buttons on the machine and let the numbers tally.
“Yes,” Bobbie managed. But her voice was wrong; her words croaked out as though it was unnatural for her to speak. She thought about water again. “Of course.”
But she wasn’t all right. She heard a buzzing in her head. The Kmart felt completely foreign to her, as though it was from another world and not the kind of place where she and her mother shopped all the time. She curled her fingers into her palms. She felt like she no longer belonged among those who shopped at stores and bought what they needed and raised their children and fed themselves at a table each evening.
The cashier took a moment to look closely at Bobbie before saying, “Cash or charge?”
Bobbie touched the money in her jeans. She was amazed that even through all the drama of the night, the money had somehow remained with her. She was going to have to get some out now to pay for the clothes and the thought terrified her. Her vision seemed to separate from her body and float up among the ceiling tiles, so that she was now peering down onto herself, on a filthy girl being looked at suspiciously by a round, kindly checkout woman with a mint-colored V-neck. She thought, Craig is dead now, and felt a fire of panic inside her chest.
The cashier leaned forward from her chair. “You able to pay?” she whispered.
She remembered how she’d left him. She had not brushed the dirt from his face, nor the little splinters of glass that sparkled like salt against his lips, nor allowed her gaze to rest on the spear of metal through his eye. There had been no moment of regret, no goodbye, spoken or unspoken. In her mind she saw his corpse all over again, and it was several moments before she realized that she was still staring at the cashier, who was waiting for an answer.
“What?” Bobbie said.
“Can you pay?” the cashier asked again.
Bobbie nodded. But she was genuinely afraid to show her one of the fifties. It was as though the money had on it the written testimony of the night’s awful events: the image of Craig’s destroyed eye and the skewered face embedded in the bills just as indelibly as the Capitol. She felt a knot of pressure between her eyes, but then she remembered all over again how Craig had refused to pay the boy at McDonald’s, and how unkind he was, not just last night but often. He would tell her he loved her, sure. He would listen when she voiced her fears over pop quizzes and science labs. But there were things he did not understand about her body. He hurt her. He yelled at her for no reason. She remembered the day at the swimming pool when she stood on the scorched grass, her wet hair flat on her head, the August sun beating down, and how he’d threatened to tell her mother all about her, about the things she did with him, if she ever humiliated him like that again, flirting with another guy.
“Hang on a moment,” she said to the cashier, then hunched her shoulders and leaned into her pocket, separating one of the fifties from its roll, bringing it up slowly, so that none of the others would come with it, and handed it to the cashier.
The cashier looked at the bill carefully, angling it above her head and tilting it from side to side under the ceiling lights. Then she looked at Bobbie. “I’m supposed to get the manager for anything over a twenty,” she said.
Bobbie waited. She wondered if the bills were counterfeit. She wondered if Craig had beaten a man half to death last night over fake money.
“You on your own?” the cashier said. Her voice was light, even kind, like she wasn’t meaning any harm.
“My mother’s working.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She sent me to get some clothes; she didn’t want me going around like this,” Bobbie said, hardly breathing now, allowing the woman to take her into her vision and draw her conclusions.
The cashier nodded slowly. “Okay, then.”
She thought she saw in the woman’s dark eyes a mixture of disapproval and pity, and a scrutinizing intelligence, too. She almost expected to hear the woman say, Where did you get this?, and then to watch helplessly as she signaled security, turning Bobbie over to the guard with the keys who had opened the doors. He had worn a uniform. He might even have a gun.
Instead, the cashier sniffed, then looked at Bobbie directly. Then she ran her finger over the security thread on the bill, a little vertical strip embedded into the paper, opened the drawer on the register, and placed the fifty beneath the tray. Bobbie swallowed. She tried to act naturally, breathe easily, as though paying for the clothes had been nothing unusual, and there was no particular reason for the tremble in her hands as she accepted her change.