I’m the last person to have seen her before that bastard got her. I didn’t even say good-bye, so the night she left gets played over and over in my mind. It’s the night I met Brad, and it was already quite a night before I got home and learned Kristen was missing. I’ll try to tell it the way it felt as it was happening, starting when she dropped me off at the gas station out by the highway.
I start to get out of the car. Josh and Alex aren’t far behind us. They’ll stop for gas and, if the right attendant is on duty, beer before heading to a party in Bellingham. I talked with them a few minutes ago and said I’d call back if I decide to go. Before my foot hits the ground, I have a near miss with a sticky puddle of chocolate shake. The squashed paper cup warns me in time or I would have messed up my sandals. Kristen has to move the car ahead so I can get out. Then the elevator music hits me. The song blasting through the outside speakers is ancient, about home and love waiting. I’m not ready to go home.
The cashier may be Josh and Alex’s guy, and I hand him a twenty. He gives me cigarettes and change. For the moment I’m not broke. I clean toilets and make beds at the Cormorant Inn and the job sucks, but I’d be screwed without it. I focus on putting the money and cigarettes in my purse. The heavy glass door isn’t the kind that opens automatically and when I reach where I know the handle should be, my hand is surprised by empty space. I look up and there’s this guy in my way. He’s wearing a baseball hat backwards. Corny, but he’s good-looking. His warm eyes make me forgive the hat and the diamond earring that has to be fake. He smiles and says,
“Hi.”
Just “Hi,” but he meets my eyes and there’s something about the way he says it, and the smile, that makes me lock in and look deeper than I should. I smile back. He steps aside and holds the door open. I can feel him checking me out as I pass and it doesn’t make me feel icky. I catch myself smiling at him again.
Outside, I take out my phone. The battery is friggin dead. A few cars are gassing up, but no one I know. No Josh and Alex. So I stand by the rack of exchange propane bottles and light a cigarette, wishing for my own car, but there’s no way cleaning toilets and dumping wastebaskets of empty beer and wine bottles and an occasional used condom will get me a car. Aunt Trish’s old Granada is so ugly I don’t really care that she won’t let me drive it. It’s that copper color, all faded now. The color was gross even when the car was new, back in the eighties before I was born. I hope someone I know will show up before he comes out.
The station and nearby restaurant are surrounded by fields. There’s nowhere to go to avoid him, except maybe to fake a call at the broken phone booth, and I’m not about to do that. They want to make the station look like a circus or some happy place you’d like to go, but instead it feels sleazy, like a used-car lot in the middle of nowhere. Those stupid, bright plastic pennant things flutter and whip, making it sound windier than it really is. They have them strung up between the roof over the gas pumps and the glaring yellow monster sign you can see from the highway. Sticky tire-tread splotches trail across the grimy asphalt from that milkshake I almost stepped in.
Now he’s in front of me grinning, not scary at all, and I’m discovering I’m glad to see him even though I don’t think I’m his type; my hair is dyed maroon and my nose and eyebrow are pierced. I do like sports. They didn’t have a girls’ soccer team my freshman year, so I played on the boys’ varsity team and lettered. That helps me with guys.
“Need a ride?”
I hesitate, then say, “Thanks,” and follow him to a new midnight blue Honda with tinted glass and expensive rims that each probably cost more than the Granada is worth. He unlocks my door as he walks around to get in and says,
“Where are you going?”
“Depends.”
So now I’m in the car with him and he’s on the I-5 southbound ramp heading towards Seattle. He’s playing some hip-hop CD I don’t know. The backbeat from the subwoofer in the trunk pulses through my seat as he accelerates onto the freeway. It’s too early for the road to be deserted and slow drivers occasionally block the fast lane. The way he’s weaving around them, finding open road, makes me think he’s used to driving fast. It’s a nice car, comfortable, low to the ground. I’m liking the way it feels, the sense of openness ahead, and that the Valley will soon be behind me.
As the highway rolls by, he hands me a flat bottle. In the light from an overhead sign, I see the picture and the words “Wild Turkey” on the label. The bottle is new and unopened, so I take off the lid. It smells sour and gross.
“You actually drink this stuff?” I say. “It stinks. Does it taste better than it smells?”
I love parties. I like being around people. They can be funny when they loosen up, but I don’t like the taste of any of it, and I hate the feeling of being out of control. I like hanging out with guys as friends. Most of the time they leave me alone. Guys are guys and they’re going to try stuff, but unless they’re creeps, they back off once they know you mean what you say, and then maybe you can be friends.
“It’s an acquired taste,” he says.
“So you like it?” I say. “You think it tastes good? Or do you drink it for the buzz?”
So far this guy doesn’t seem like a creep, and I think I’m a pretty good judge. I can’t wait to tell Kristen about this. She’ll envy me. I’m still holding the bottle, waiting for an answer.
“Which is it,” I say, “the taste or the buzz?”
“It’s supposed to be good sipping whiskey,” he says, “but it still tastes like paint thinner to me. It’s the buzz.”
“So why am I supposed to like it?” I say. “Are you trying to get me drunk?”
He doesn’t answer and I watch his face, and it’s too dark to tell anything. I still have the cap off. I sniff it again.
He reaches for the bottle and I decide to tease him, moving it away toward my window, out of his reach.
“Give it to me!” he says. His voice is angry and sharp, making me tense up.
“You’re driving,” I say, and continue to hold the bottle away. Now I’m not sure I want to know what he’ll be like with whiskey in him.
“Give it!”
“No.” I can hear the hint of fear in my voice. Not a good thing to reveal.
He grabs my wrist, the empty-handed one, gripping it so that it hurts. He’s very strong and the creep alarms are going off like crazy in my head. The speedometer says 75. Other cars are on the road, but the fast lane ahead is clear.
“Give it, you slut!”
“I’m not a slut,” I scream. “And if you let go of my hand and stop acting like an asshole, I might give it to you.”
I expect a backhand across the face. Instead his grip tightens. His eyes are fixed on the road ahead and our speed stays steady. He seems to have pulled into himself, far away. I’m still holding the bottle in my right hand. I’m pretty strong too. The grip stays tight and I think about smashing the full bottle into his face but I imagine the car going out of control and both of us dying in a fiery crash. Even though we might cause other cars to crash too, I’m wondering if it could be better than some of the other possible ways this might end. I’m also having this strange but very real feeling that he’s hanging on to my wrist in desperation, to keep from slipping over the edge somewhere inside himself.
“I’m not a slut.” I make myself say it evenly. “I want you to know that, in case you’re going to kill me, you’re not killing a slut.”
His grip tightens briefly, then relaxes, and he pulls his hand away and puts it on the steering wheel without looking at me or saying anything. My wrist hurts, but I can’t rub it without doing something with the bottle.
“So do you still want it?” I ask.
“What?”
“The bottle,” I say. “The Wild Turkey?”
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“That’s good to know. I’m not sure I believe you, but it’s nice of you to say it.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not some crazy psycho. It’s been a bad day. I shouldn’t have given you a ride.”
“And I shouldn’t have come, but here I am.”
I put the lid on the pint and hand it back to him.
“A deal’s a deal.”
He opens it and drinks, and now I’m thinking that I should have kept the bottle. He takes another drink, a long one.
“Well, you’re not sipping it. I hope the buzz fixes the day.”
“Nothing will fix this day.” He takes another long drink.
“So are you going to talk about it? Or are you just going to get drunk and be all quiet and scary, because if you’re going to get scary again, I want to go back.”
“I don’t even know you,” he says.
“So pull off at the next exit and take me back, and I’ll be out of your life.”
He switches lanes and takes another drink as he guides the car onto the Arlington off ramp, but instead of heading over the freeway toward the cluster of restaurants and gas stations to let me out or to head back north, he turns west onto a dark road. I can feel without seeing his face that he’s back in that faraway place. We’re going too fast to open the door and jump. I’d probably break my leg and when he got to me, he’d be really pissed off.
I’ve never been on this road before. Outside the beam of the headlights, it’s all blackness out there. I’m seeing what looks like the beginnings of cow pastures and empty cornfields at the edge of the light. Then I’m thrown forward into the shoulder strap of my seat belt. He’s on the brakes hard and we skid, barely holding the road, as we corner onto what turns out to be a bumpy lane between a plowed-up field and a drainage ditch. It’s weird what your mind does, but I find myself wondering if he put the lid back on the bottle, or if whiskey is sloshing out on his pants as we bounce down the lane. He abruptly stops, kills the engine and the lights.
My hands look for the seat belt latch and the door handle. As my eyes adjust, I’m able to make out his silhouette. He’s slumping over the steering wheel as though he’s forgotten I’m here.
My fingers search for the release on the seat belt. I can’t get it to let go. My other hand thinks it’s found the door latch and I’m visualizing the process of wriggling free, deciding if now is the moment, when he sighs and says,
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry! You bastard! You’re apologizing ahead of time so you won’t feel so bad after you’ve left me in that ditch. You better get started, you son of a bitch, ‘cause I’m not helpless and it won’t be easy.” I’m pulling on what I think is the door handle, but nothing is happening.
“I’m not going to hurt you. I want to talk about it.”
“Talk! You brought me here to talk? Jesus fucking Christ! Couldn’t we have talked on the way back north, or in a restaurant, or in the gas station parking lot?”
“You’re right. I’m a son of a bitch, but I’m not crazy. And I won’t hurt you, and I don’t know why, but I couldn’t say it in any of those places, and I have to say it to someone or I’ll explode. It’s true. My mother is a bitch. A real goddamn bitch!”
“Okay. So’s mine. What’s so special about that? She’s a drunk too, if you want to know. She couldn’t get her act together enough to take care of me when I was a kid. She dumped me with my aunt. So your mom’s a bitch. That makes it okay for you to scare the living shit out of me?”
“I walked in on them this morning, her and my wrestling coach on the living room floor, butt naked. All I can see is naked bodies and white carpet, him grunting and her moaning. I’m not psycho and I didn’t mean to scare you, but I feel crazy. I don’t know what I meant or what I wanted, but I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m sorry. I had to tell someone and I can’t tell anyone I know.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“I wish she was dead.”
“You only think so. My dad is dead. You don’t want her dead.”
“I hate her.”
“You can do that. If she was dead, you couldn’t even do that anymore. Sometimes I still hate my mom too, but it doesn’t do any good. It doesn’t help her get her act together.”
“I hate the bitch. I hate her for what she’s doing to my dad and to me.” He takes the bottle from between his legs, opens it, and drinks, then offers it to me. “Want some?”
“I’m all right. It doesn’t smell like it tastes good, and I’ve already got an adrenaline buzz going. Does it disappoint you that I won’t get drunk?”
“No. Look, I’m sorry I scared you.”
“You said that. Maybe I even believe you. You called me a slut. Did you think that because of the way I look, I’d be easy and you could get even with your mother or something?”
“I’m so messed up I don’t know what I thought. I don’t think you’re a slut.”
“It must have crossed your mind or you wouldn’t have said it.”
“Okay, it crossed my mind that you might be easy and. . . Jesus. I’ve never picked up a girl before. I’m a guy, and after what I saw this morning. . . I mean I don’t know. You looked like you needed a ride. Why did you come?”
“I wasn’t going to. I mean I never do that either, take rides from guys I don’t know. Then I changed my mind when you didn’t try to be all cool, but just asked if I wanted a ride. It was a feeling, like I could trust you, like you would have taken me home if that was what I wanted. I can usually tell when guys are weird. You didn’t seem weird. When I saw the car and realized your earring might be real too, I wanted to cut and run, but I didn’t. So here I am.”
“Want me to take you home?”
“Yeah. I think I’m ready to go home now. Look, I’m sorry about your day. You eventually learn to live with the parent stuff, but it isn’t easy.”
He starts the engine. The lane is too narrow to turn around and he has to back the car out. He goes much slower than on the way in. As soon as we’re pointed in the right direction, even before we’re up to speed, headlights appear behind us and come up close on our tail. I turn around to look. He watches the mirror.
“Shit!”
He’s right. As we round a bend, I make out the silhouette of a light rack on top of the car behind us.
He drives the few miles to I-5 cautiously, just below the speed limit, with the cop car following close. At the on-ramp, he signals and makes the turn. When the cop cruises past, he breaks the silence.
“If you want, we’ll find a place to eat in Mount Vernon. Then I’ll take you home.”
I reached over and put my hand on his forearm, just for a second, to let him know I was okay with it.
That night, I imagined Kristen at home in her tidy room, probably asleep, surrounded by her stuffed animals. I looked forward to her reaction when I would tell her about my night. Instead, I keep replaying images of her and Corey in the car instead of Brad and me, and of all the things I was afraid of that night actually happening to her.