As we drove on, I watched the views outside and they were beautiful, but I didn’t feel that same sense of bliss and freedom I’d felt at our first stop. My fear was back and deeply rooted. I sat slumped – tucked into my seat as though somehow that would better hide me. I put on my sunglasses and I eyed all the cars around us suspiciously. Then I eyed a pair of scissors that were lying on the dashboard. I had been toying with an idea for quite a while now, and I finally decided to share it with him.
‘Jack, I think I need to change my hair.’
Silence.
‘I mean like cut it or dye it. You know. Just in case,’ I said.
Again, silence.
‘What do you think?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said at last, sounding worried.
‘You don’t think it’d be safer to do that?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
*
After an hour or so I suddenly noticed a dark Ford in my side view mirror. The man behind the wheel was wearing sunglasses and a suit. My heart started beating fast. I told Jack, and he said that the car had been right behind us for the best part of an hour. My god. Jack tried to calm me down, but it didn’t work. I could tell he was glancing in his rearview mirror more frequently. The man in the Ford opened his mouth, said something and then smiled. He did a quick glance to the back seat. A little arm appeared from the back seat and handed him what looked like a soft toy.
‘Oh my god, thank fuck,’ I said.
I breathed a sigh of relief, and if I wasn’t mistaken Jack breathed it with me. The car soon turned off the highway. If I’d have noticed the man and the car from the start, when Jack first had, I don’t know what I would have done.
After a few more hours on the road we drove through Bishop, then took a quick break at a gas station to use the toilets. Jack went off to get a few things while I stayed in the van. I felt safer there. I asked him to get me blonde hair dye. He laughed, but when he returned he handed me a small shopping bag with something inside. I pulled out a box of hair dye. On it was an image of a model that looked like she was having outrageous fun with her blonde hair and her life in general. How ironic.
Jack said he wasn’t sure it was necessary. He said that if anyone was looking for us they’d have better ways of finding us than searching out women with long dark hair. I put the box of hair dye away and decided not to think about it for now.
An hour later and we were at a lake.
‘Mono Lake,’ Jack said, as he trailed off the road and stopped the van.
‘It’s pretty.’
‘I’m going to go for a swim.’
‘You’re what?’
‘I’m going for a swim. You should join me.’
‘Are you serious? Shouldn’t we keep driving?’
‘I need a break.’
He started driving again. ‘I’ll park way out over there. Don’t worry, we’re totally safe,’ he said.
‘Jack. Are you out of your mind? We need to keep driving.’
He didn’t say anything. I closed my eyes and breathed deep. I tried to remember how I’d felt when I first met him, how unusually calm he’d made me feel. How I felt when we made that first stop and I’d breathed in the golden smell off the mountains around us. I told myself that if I’d trusted him up to this point, I had to trust him now. But even so, despite his efforts to coax me out and get me to go for a swim, I stayed put in the van.
‘You’ll have to come out at some point,’ he said.
I watched him as he walked to the water, half naked and holding his camera. And I watched him as he swam and I felt pangs of jealousy.
Later, when he returned, he was grinning like a kid. It was already dusk when he was drying himself off. He looked out towards the lake and told me about how beautiful the pinks and purples in the sky were.
I liked it when people described the colours of things to me. It was rare – of the few people I spent time with, most didn’t know I was colour blind.
Jack hesitated and then he said, ‘Look, let me show you something.’ He fiddled with his camera and then paced closer towards me and extended his arm, showing me what was on the small screen on the back of the camera. It was an underwater photo. Rays of light pierced through the surface of the water, and, beneath, some murky formation could be seen.
‘Did you take that just now?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s pretty. Bet the colours are beautiful.’
‘It’s black and white,’ he said. ‘I guess it’s closer to how you’d see it if you went under?’
I took the camera into my own hands and stared at the photo a little longer. I was fascinated by the fact that there was something that looked the same to me as it did to Jack. It was as though in some way he was melting away a divide between us. I looked up at him, handed the camera back and attempted a smile.
‘It’s getting dark,’ he said, ‘we should find a place to park up and sleep.’
‘Aren’t we gonna carry on driving?’
‘No, we’ll drive more tomorrow, we’ve been on the road for nine hours, and, to be honest, I’m a little drained.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Look, don’t worry,’ he said, ‘we’re safe round these areas. No one’s going to think to look out here.’ And after a pause he added, ‘besides, you won’t regret it. Yosemite is beautiful. You’ll see.’
Again I said nothing. I was annoyed. How could he be so calm?
We drove round to the east shore of the lake via a very basic sandy track.
When he finally found a nook he was satisfied with, Jack stopped the van and started rummaging through his backpack.
‘So is this where we’re going to sleep?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
He showed me how to recline the front seat.
‘I don’t like the idea of sleeping next to this window.’
I had visions of ‘them’ finding us and watching me while I slept.
‘Well maybe you can sleep in the back. You can draw the curtains there.’
And that’s where I slept. He cleared a space and lay out some rugs and, alone in the back, after double-checking that all the doors were locked, I drifted off into a world of terrifying dreams.
*
The next day I woke up surprisingly late, but despite the bad sleep, I felt better, less anxious. Perhaps it was because I was relieved to wake up from my nightmares and realise they were just dreams. Because, although I had so much to fear in the waking hours, the scenery that surrounded us was breathtaking, and all the fears seemed almost unreal that morning. I didn’t mind Jack taking another swim in the lake, I didn’t mind that we stayed there to eat, and I didn’t mind that later on he stopped at Lake Tahoe for another swim.
Again he couldn’t convince me to go for a swim, but I did leave the van to sit in the sunshine. There were only a few families nearby. I liked being around families. No one was going to kill me in front of a family. After muttering something about taking care in the sun, Jack left me and headed towards the lake. I had noticed that he often avoided the sun despite saying he loved it. I really did love it, and always had. It gave me life. Besides, my skin wasn’t pale like his, I rarely got burnt.
Lake Tahoe was stunning, and under different circumstances I would have loved to walk around its shores. I yearned to explore the area and lose myself in it. Yosemite really was beautiful and I couldn’t forgive myself for never having ventured out of the city alone. I was a strange girl. What had I been doing with my life all that time? Whiling away the hours, days, months and years. And what would happen to my life now?
As I sat, I drew. I wasn’t used to drawing natural landscapes. My mind and hand found it hard to adjust to these non-human forms. I wasn’t satisfied with my attempts and I quickly became frustrated. I put my sketchpad down and gave up. Fuck it. I got up and went to get the scissors from the van. I hid behind the van and carefully chopped great long chunks of my hair off. I didn’t give a shit anymore, and it felt liberating. I only cut it to my shoulders, but even so, it felt like a big change. When Jack got back and noticed my hair, all he did was smile and say, ‘Good, I’m glad you didn’t chop it all off.’