by Adam Klein
I think of Ellen. What did she want going back to that studio? What hadn’t she destroyed already? But Hannah’s impatient. She knows that people just get stuck; they become attached to what’s not working. It’s a puzzle they have to finish. She puts the bottle in the sink, loudly, to tell me that she’s ready for me to be ready.
‘What if we encounter him?’ I ask.
‘I’ll take my car,’ she says, ‘so that it’s clear there’s at least two of us inside. That should discourage him.’
Her confidence is perplexing; it’s as though she were reading safety tips for a walk in the woods. If you encounter a bear, bang pots and pans.
That’s when I remember I haven’t told her about Joel, that I left my car at home when we took King to the hospital. Whether I like her plan or not, I’ll need to get back to my car. I decide not to mention him. Why bring that up again? I need her now, and I know that she requires a kind of exclusive trust between us, not unlike the bond shared by Gina and Rachel.
‘You’ll need to drive me back. Gina took me to the vet and dropped me here.’ Still, it bothers me to lie, actually to fear her reaction. Why am I protecting her when I’m the one in trouble? On the other hand, she seems to know just how deep that trouble goes.
We drive back out to the cottage, and as I make my way along the same roads I’d driven earlier I feel intuitively that this is wrong. I quiet my sense of alarm by telling myself we would have come this way anyway. The cottage is where the town collapses, thins out, and becomes cornfields and – in the winter – barrenness. I think this is the way we’d get to Sioux City if we kept driving.
Hannah turns to look at King stretched out over her backseat, and her gentleness with him reassures me. Now that we’re on our way, her face seems less inscrutable than it looked in her apartment. Her kindness to King is her way of asking me to trust her.
‘Shouldn’t we just drive straight to Sioux City?’ I ask. ‘I don’t think I want to go into the cottage again.’
‘If we can make him believe you’ve left town, we can buy ourselves time. We’ll go in and out. You leave the note, I’ll pull things out of the drawers. Do you still have the envelope your air ticket came in? Something like that lying around will help.’
Somehow, it sounds more reasoned now. It sounds like a plan we’ve actually considered. Buying time. This makes sense to me. It’s why I drew the jewelry out of the safe deposit box before I went to Florida. I didn’t even look at the pieces, still in their soft cloth envelopes. I reach into my carry bag on the backseat and find the airline ticket envelope, itinerary, and receipts still there in the pocket. I dig deeper and feel the cloth envelopes with the jewelry coiled inside them. I run my fingers over them; their stones make me think of the crested back of the baby alligator on my desk. Someday I’ll ask Frances to send that to me. I know she’ll fire me; she needs me now, and I’m leaving her. Though my absences are legitimate – my mother’s ashes, and now Victor – I’m sure it will look like so many excuses. She’ll see through me, noticing the job references I never had, the clients who know more about me than she ever did. She’ll either let me go angrily, or she’ll ask questions. I’ll use the jewelry to buy my way out of explaining, disappear again, start again somewhere else. On and on.
There’s a long flat stretch of land followed by the hill – large for Iowa City – before you get to my cottage. Whenever I drive the flat distance, I always feel uneasy, and now it occurs to me why. It is not how close the stars feel, or how the land stretches out flat and limitless in either direction. It is not about monotonous options, some great yawning vacancy. It is simply that the road is too exposed; it’s too easy to imagine the electric arm of God interposed here, the loud crash of judgment spread out over these fields.
‘It’s really coming down now,’ Hannah says. Snow is falling like something dumped from the back of a truck. She slows down and puts on the headlights.
‘This is really bad, isn’t it?’ I ask. But I can see in the way she looks out the window an excitement about the ludicrousness of this endeavor, with all the elements pitched against us. We drive slowly over the hill. There is not another car in sight. The road is flanked by black ice; the headlights swim through it.
‘I’m thankful I got chains last winter,’ she says.
King recognizes the hill and gets excited. He lifts his head and barks sharply. I wonder if he’ll fear the pond now, and if it matters. He won’t run here again. I look out the window in a state of quiet absence. The cottage is in view, my car in front like a piece of equipment left abandoned in a postwar photograph. For a moment I think we can get away with this, leave the scene untouched, ghosts sweeping through a village. I remember the sense of elation I felt leaving San Francisco, placing the call to the police and driving off. There was a sense of wonder behind it: Can it be this easy?
‘Pull behind the cottage,’ I say. ‘I want to check the window and see if it’s still boarded up. Let’s circle the place entirely and look for tracks. He left tire tracks and footprints earlier.’ The place is transformed now. The lights are on, but it might be years since anyone’s lived here.
The snow is falling too hard to try to find tracks; what was there a few hours ago is now filled in. The window is still sealed. We let the engine settle and listen for a moment to the sounds outside, and I wonder if the owls hide when the wind is this furious.
We walk out toward the cottage; I hear King’s barking until we enter the back door. ‘Where are the knives you were hiding?’ she asks.
I feel oddly ashamed that she actually saw my crouching by the bed and slipping a knife beneath the mattress. It’s the shame of recognizing what I considered preparedness. Go out into the world with nothing but a kitchen knife. It’s just like me. I see a crouching madwoman, hair like a million disconnected thoughts, ready to pounce on a hospital rat.
I go into the kitchen and find myself crying, rummaging loudly through the drawers, opening them all and slamming them shut. Let him know I’m in my house. I want to draw every thrift store plate from the cupboards and crash them on the floor. Not his to destroy. I’m practically strangling the knives as I hand one over to Hannah. Ready if the rat should arrive. She pretends not to notice the tears.
‘Call the airlines and find a flight, an early flight. I’ll pack your bag.’ She looks at me sternly, and I realize she is saying these things for his benefit, as though he were hiding here. Play it for real. Her expression is insistent, almost maniacal.
I stand in the kitchen with the phone to my ear, calling information. He hasn’t cut the lines the way they do in movies. Still, I’m uncomfortable with my back to the living room. I turn around, conscious of not twisting myself in the cord the way I normally do. I call the airline and write down the information for a 6 A.M. flight to Chicago, a big city I mean to avoid. I hear Hannah in the bedroom, opening drawers. I haphazardly drop the envelope with the flight information on the floor. I do it as though he were here, which enables me to feel oddly disengaged and above my own actions. The cottage feels like a set of props I’m familiar with, my lines spoken for an audience I can’t see.
‘I think we should go now,’ I advise. ‘Let’s go to your place until it’s time for my flight.’ I say these lines so convincingly I worry she might remind me where we’re really going.
We leave by the back door. I don’t look around one last time. I lock it. Hannah warms up the engine and we begin to pull out. That’s when I notice headlights on the hill of the main road. I point them out to her; she’s strangely expectant, as though the distant beams were something prophesied. She stops the car, doesn’t turn on the lights. We both recognize that the vehicle on the road is not moving either. It looks stuck.
A rumbling from the cottage roof makes us both jump as a mattress-length sheaf of snow slides off the eaves and breaks over the hood of her car. I clutch her arm, my eye still focused on the unmoving headlights stuck at the top of the hill.
‘That’s him, isn’t it?’ she
asks. Her voice is dark with calculations. We watch as a figure leaves the car and wanders toward the front of it.
‘He’ll need help,’ she says, staring out at him as though she can place these thoughts into his head. ‘It looks like he’s fishtailed coming over the hill.’ She puts the car in reverse as she says this, then maneuvers slowly toward the front of the cottage.
‘Let’s quietly avoid him. Don’t turn on the lights,’ I say. I realize my heart is pounding even as I try to calm her, to suggest that we can slide out of this, characters slowly walking backward out of harm’s way.
We pull up to the road where we can better make him out, looking at his tires, trying to dig the snow away from the front wheels. It’s the car that we’d seen pull up before, a brown car, nondescript, wide. ‘I can’t tell if it’s him,’ I say flatly. ‘I’ll need to see him walking.’ He’s wearing a ski mask, but he may be the right height.
She slowly drives onto the main road, moving in the direction of his accident.
‘This isn’t the way to Sioux City,’ I say, turning in my seat to look behind us. Nothing but the accumulation of consecutive storms, massive snowbanks, and roads glistening with ice as black in the moonlight as coagulated oil. I turn around and see him wiping his gloves on his pants, his woolen mask pulled from his face. ‘That’s him. Jesus, that’s him.’
‘Slide down in your seat,’ Hannah says, biting her lip, her intentions clear, or blank, on her face. I want to tell her not to do this, that we can drive off and avoid this. But we are operating on some vague recognition, more powerful than any thought of retribution, his or ours. It sweeps over us with the obliterating power of the snow and the darkness.
I slide down, seeing his gait again, the way he uses his palms as though he were making his way through water. He’s drawn out to the road, waving us down, though she’s driving recklessly fast now, no headlights. Or perhaps he’s pressed to the side of his car, noticing too late this barreling black weight. I hear the hard thump of his body and the chains as they come down on him. She brakes, and with my mouth open in shock I hear his body dragged beneath a second set of wheels. We almost lose control but manage to drive to the top of the hill, and there’s nothing, no cars, only the vast dispersal of snow and a darkening, like the closing of an enormous eye. I sit there crouched, cowering.
‘You need to check him,’ she says. ‘You need to feel for a pulse.’
I look at her and see nothing in her eyes, only a quiet certitude that is both persuasive and silencing.
‘I can’t do it,’ I say.
‘Do it now. Don’t wait.’ Her hands are still on the wheel. She’s ashen, unable to look back. I open the car door out of a surprising sympathy I feel for her. I don’t know if she’s going to cry, whether she’s even aware of what she’s done.
I step out of the car and walk down toward the body twisted in the snow. I can’t figure out what is anatomically wrong with it, what makes his body look inhuman there. I have the disturbing feeling that he can’t be killed, that this is his real shape. I imagine something supernatural in the inconceivable twist of his torso and neck – and that he is lying there in wait. I remember a painting I’d once seen or just imagined of two devils battling on a snowy road. Two devils vying for dominion on a road like this. I stand beside him for a moment and look quickly into his eyes. I don’t look at them long enough to recognize horror or anger. I don’t search out his motivation for coming. The pupils are still. I take off my glove and reach down to touch his neck, to feel for a pulse, and there is only cold, the rapidity of it as it encloses him. There is some horrible irony in the stillness of his blood. Its coursing and its contents had been his sole preoccupation. He had never strayed far from the current. I put my glove back on and stand up. Hannah is standing beside her car.
‘Come here,’ she says. ‘I want you to look out. If you see anyone coming, get into his car. I’ll pretend I’ve stopped to help you.’
She walks over to Victor’s body and rechecks his pulse. I look past her. The night is jammed with stars. The lights of his car eerily illuminate the mound of what looks like very fine glass off the side of the road. His palms are starting to fill with it.
She turns the car around and we drive toward Sioux City. We discuss what has happened as though we hadn’t any option. Each time we talk about it, it’s like trying to shake off a mantle of snow, to shake the chill out of our bodies, out of our blood. Hannah maintains we did what had to be done. When she uses the word we I don’t resist her, but I think if the police were to find out about us they’d know; it was her car and she was driving. I cannot disentangle her altruism from her opportunism. They presented an intersection, and we entered it fast and blind. I don’t need her to illuminate it.
I let her talk, but my ears feel like they’re full of cotton. I can feel his cold skin under my fingertips. I look at her and want to see the life in her; she seemed elsewhere on that hill. Somebody else.
There’s a gulf between us, each of us attempting to share the experience, but unable to make it real for the other, or to make it unreal. I am uncertain if I should thank her; perhaps it’s best not to suggest she’d acted on her own. But then, perhaps she hadn’t. I touched him and I did not bring him back to life. The more I accept that he’s dead the more the word we settles down in my chest.
We discuss how the elements were in alignment: the storm, the hill, the darkness. We witnessed his car in trouble with the sharp eyes of owls. We acted like owls. And so we discuss the details, our involvement no more premeditated than nature, and so absolved.
9
We stop at a small motel in Greenville, its dim VACANCIES sign like an eternal and exhausted offering. We feel achy after the hours of driving, the events. The motel seems strangely appropriate; it seems almost to sink away from the roadside, a kind of battered shell. We are not put off by the gravity of its drabness. The woman in the office is watching a black and white television, the sound up too loud.
‘You ladies look tired,’ she says, lifting herself from the chair and putting both arms over the counter, her thick bracelets clanking on the glass top. She is clearly commiserating.
‘We’ve been driving through the storm,’ Hannah says.
‘Just to get here?’ The woman laughs, her voice pitched as loud as the television.
‘We’re on our way to Sioux City to visit my parents. I don’t think I can keep my eyes open any longer, though.’ I feel I’m watching Hannah for the first time; her earnestness and ease are qualities I’ve never noticed in her. I wonder if she engages strangers all the time; if three years from now she won’t tell someone in a supermarket that she once killed a man, vehicular homicide. She killed him without particularly wanting to, but she knew her friend needed to be free of him.
I feel emptied out of fear, one way or the other. Who would believe her? Who would care? She’d be another person with too much on her mind, no one to tell it to. Not the right person to tell it to, anyway. And what would I do if I didn’t know her and she told it to me? Exactly what I did. I’d recognize her. I’d give her an opportunity.
Hannah takes the key, and I nod to the woman as we leave the office.
‘Lock your doors,’ she says. The woman’s face looks suddenly like a mask, bleached out by the yellow fluorescent tube above her. Her lips are smiling, but her eyes are severe, warning.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask. My voice sounds ragged, abrupt.
‘I tell all my guests to lock their doors.’ Her face quickly becomes as stern as her eyes. She doesn’t like questions. I feel Hannah’s hand on my arm, trying to draw me out of the door. But for a moment I can’t move.
I find myself staring at her as though something were speaking through her. ‘I think that’s odd,’ I say, and I feel my lips trembling.
She looks at me inquisitively, cocking her head to one side as though allowing my words to drop into her ear. ‘There’s nothing odd about it,’ she says slowly, deliberately. ‘People think they’re
all alone out here. But you’re not. You should always exercise caution.’
‘Thank you,’ I say finally. I drop my eyes from hers and close the lobby door behind me. She’s still watching us quizzically.
We walk down the hallway abutting the parking lot, the lights dim, fixtures filled with the accumulated carcasses of insects. The ice machine buzzes and stamps beneath a stairwell. Our room is beside it.
Hannah doesn’t say anything but looks at me while she opens the door. There’s a light smell of mildew when we enter. Hannah goes directly into the bathroom. I put my bag down and immediately pull the cord on the heavy drapes, shutting them entirely. I grab a handful of its fabric and put it to my nose. That’s where the smell is coming from.
I walk back out to the car and take King inside, careful to close the car door quietly. We didn’t investigate the question of pets here, and I don’t feel like negotiating with the lady in the office. King is still barely able to walk, so I carry him back. I put him down near the heater, and he practically collapses in front of it. Then I go back to the door, lock it. There’s a chain, and I use that too. I put my forehead to the door, and suddenly I’m crying. It’s a deep sobbing I find hard to keep down.
I’m like a little girl dragged off with a suitcase someone else has packed. I find myself running not just from figments but from the law. I close my eyes and I’m touching his throat. He pronounces me guilty, a judge who occupies every cold hotel room along the roadside, the vacant eyes of every waitress and hotel clerk driving home after their shift. We’re not alone out here. I know the woman’s right; there are judges.
When Hannah emerges from the bathroom, I’m sitting on the edge of my bed. She is already in a T-shirt and panties, drying her hair. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asks.
