Under the Water

by Paul Pen

  “Look, Dad, a hitchhiker.” Simon pointed toward the windshield.

  On the roadside, a young man with dreadlocks, walking boots, and a large backpack was holding a piece of cardboard with a message written in black marker: GOOD GUY.

  “Should we pick him up?” Audrey suggested. “There’s plenty of space. It’ll be interesting to talk to him. I bet he’s traveling the country, he must’ve seen a lot of things.”

  “And he’s a good guy,” Grace read.

  “If he really was a good guy, it wouldn’t occur to him to announce it with a sign.”

  “Let him in!” yelled Simon.

  “Come on, Dad, pick him up.”

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t just go around trusting people and picking up strangers these days. He could have explosives in that backpack, for all we know.”

  “Yeah, right . . . a hippie with a bomb,” said Grace.

  “Why not? You can’t even trust the ones that dress normally, let alone that guy, with that hair and all the rips in his pants.”

  “Dad, that’s so awful and snobbish I don’t know where to start.”

  “Then don’t. And forgive me, everyone, for not wanting a stranger near my family. The next serial killer we see, we’ll let him in.” Then he lowered his voice so that only Grace could hear. “And you: unbelievable. As if we haven’t had enough of strangers already.”

  She rubbed his thigh by way of an apology.

  Concentrating on the discussion inside the motor home, Frank didn’t see the red sedan that moved into their lane. When he looked back at the road, they were already on top of the vehicle—so close that he could only see its nose, the car’s body eclipsed by the RV’s dashboard. Though he was certain they would hit it, his foot pressed on the brake and a hand turned the wheel. Frank braced himself for the impact, locking his elbows, hunching his shoulders. But they didn’t crash.

  By some miracle the motor home changed lanes in time, earning itself nothing more than a horn blast from some car behind them. Frank also honked his horn, hard, the urge he’d contained while maneuvering to optimize his reaction time now concentrated in the palm of his hand.

  “Moron!” he yelled at the windshield, at the little car. “Learn to drive!”

  He hit the horn as rapidly as the pulse in his neck, aimed at the red vehicle that was now moving away as if it had nothing to do with the honking. The letters on its rear license plate read SKY.

  “Yup, the sky’s where you’ll end up driving at that speed. Drive faster, go on, drive!”

  “Stop, Frank, he can’t hear you,” Grace said.

  “God, what a scare! Are you two all right?” he asked the children.

  He saw Audrey sprawled on the floor, wedged in the space between the sofa and the sink.

  “Audrey!”

  Frank steered into the shoulder and stopped the RV. He released his seat belt, as did Grace. They both rotated in their swivel seats to face the vehicle’s interior.

  “Are you OK, honey?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I just fell.” She got herself up with knees and arms.

  “See?” Grace scolded her. “No more lying on the sofa without a seat belt. We’ve been saying it since we left. Go sit with your brother at the table, right now. Are you all right?”

  Simon nodded, still gripping his bag of Doritos. “But this fell.” He picked up the framed photo of Frank and Grace from the floor. The glass had broken, as if the happiness in the image it protected had cracked.

  “What a dope I am, I just left it on top there.” Grace tutted. “I forgot to put it somewhere safe.”

  Audrey gathered her legs in on the sofa to let her mother pass. Grace reached Simon at the table, warning him to be careful with the glass, which she threw in the trash can. She blew on the photograph and showed it to Frank. It wasn’t scratched, and the frame had withstood the impact.

  “No big deal,” she said to him with a smile.

  “This is a big deal,” Audrey cut in.

  She showed them her cell phone. A cobweb of cracks had formed in one corner of the screen. She ran her thumb over it, she typed, she opened the camera app, she played a song.

  “At least it works,” she said with relief. “But see what I’m saying? It doesn’t matter how far away we move, things won’t get better. I bet we’re jinxed.”

  “Don’t say that.” Frank turned back in his seat, facing the front again.

  In the distance, almost at the rest stop, he could see the car that had almost ruined their trip. Luckily, he’d dodged it just in time. Now it was just a red dot in the distance, a long way ahead of them.

  “Everything’s going to be better from now on,” he said to himself, as his wife made sure the children had their seat belts on at the table.

  5.

  The mother guided the little girl by the hand. Seeing her walk with her knees together, containing the urge to pee, made her want to laugh. She didn’t, so she wouldn’t upset her daughter—the girl had reached the point where her need to urinate was no longer a laughing matter. She pushed open the door to the public restroom at the rest stop and allowed the girl to go in first, without letting go of her.

  “Next time, tell me as soon as you need to go. Don’t wait till the last minute, because look what happens, you—”

  She broke off when she discovered a young woman at the first sink. She was looking at herself in the mirror with the water running, gripping the washbowl, her fingers white from the pressure she was exerting. Her face was also pale, her hair stuck to it with water or sweat. The dark patch on the back of her cotton garment made the theory that she’d been sweating seem the most plausible. The mother’s first instinct was to keep her distance from the woman, to get her daughter away from her, but she hid her feelings to avoid offending her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Look at me, coming in here yelling like there was no one. Like the restroom was all ours,” she said. “We have a little emergency.”

  She spoke without stopping, guiding her daughter to one of the cubicles. She cleaned the seat with some toilet paper.

  “Don’t move or touch anything, OK? When you’ve finished, wipe yourself with this and you’re done.” She gave her daughter another length of toilet paper. “I’ll wait for you out here.”

  She left the stall door ajar as she went out. From there she observed the young woman, who was splashing water on the back of her neck. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Seeing her now, it seemed ridiculous that she’d been frightened. She was a harmless young woman having a rough time, not some drug addict going cold turkey or an armed fugitive, two of the options her prejudiced brain had weighed when they’d walked in. The bag the young woman had hung from the hand dryer was a good brand.

  “I try to leave her alone in the toilet,” she explained, gesturing at the half-open door. “So she starts getting used to the idea that peeing is a private thing she’ll have to do by herself sooner or later.”

  The attempt to strike up a conversation was as much an apology for her bad thoughts as a way to distract the young woman from her own.

  “I’m Brittany!” the girl yelled from inside the stall. “And my mom’s called Bree. Brit and Bree. Brit and Bree.”

  Bree laughed, hoping to engage the young woman with the funny way her daughter was repeating their names, but the stranger barely looked away from the sink. The two women’s eyes met just for an instant in the stained, broken, scratched mirror. A graffiti artist’s tag crossed it from corner to corner. Bree could see that the young woman would rather be left in peace. She watched her hold her mouth under the faucet, rinse it, and spit.

  “Mom, somebody’s puked in here,” said Brittany. The young woman stopped what she was doing, aware she’d been caught.

  “It’s in the trash, Mom. Ugh, how gross! Somebody threw up in the trash can.”

  The young woman stooped over, trying to hide behind her own shoulders. She looked guiltily at Bree, as though she were being accused of a crime.

  �
��There’s corn,” the girl added.

  The shoulders hunched even more. Bree felt sorry for her.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, sweetheart,” she said. “Just hold your nose. And don’t touch anything.”

  Bree continued to study the young woman. She saw tears on her face. They could have been the tears that come with intense vomiting or those of the deep sadness that she radiated. This sadness touched Bree, who could recognize a suffering soul.

  “There’s always a way out,” she said. “Try not to make it worse. Whatever it is.”

  The young woman turned off the water, as if she needed silence to reflect on the words Bree had said. Bree felt satisfied that she’d helped her. At her own worst moments, she would have appreciated some words of encouragement like those, even if they came from a stranger.

  The young woman turned her head. “You don’t know anything,” she said over her shoulder.

  “I’m not your mother nagging you, honestly. I’m just trying to make you feel better. I know how powerful it can be to find that someone cares about you. And I care about you. I’ve suffered, too, I’ve done awful things to myself.” She took a step closer to the young woman and lowered her voice. “I’ve found myself lying on the floor in some rest stop bathroom, too, and no one even bothered to check whether I was alive or dead. I don’t want that happening to anyone else.”

  “Do you see me lying on the floor?” the young woman replied.

  In the silence, they heard the girl’s last drops fall into the toilet water.

  “I’m wiping myself, Mommy,” she said in the cubicle. “Geez, this barf stinks.”

  “I just want to help,” Bree whispered.

  “But you don’t know anything about me. You don’t know anything about what’s happening to me.”

  Bree just observed the young woman’s eyes, taking pity on her for the confused state she seemed to be in.

  “Don’t hurt yourself anymore,” she said. Then she raised her hands in the air, bringing her attempt to help the young woman to an end.

  Brittany came out of the stall pinching her nose.

  “Did you wipe really well?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Then let’s wash our hands.”

  On tiptoes, Brittany reached the soap dispenser next to the faucet where Bree had stationed herself, two sinks away from the young woman. Bree wrapped her daughter’s hands in hers and they rubbed them together, forming a lather. While they rinsed, she sensed her daughter’s intention to say something and squeezed her fingers to stop her. They both dried their hands with paper towels. On the way out, the girl stopped next to the young woman and tugged on her pants.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve been sick a few times at school. One time, milk came out of my nose.”

  Bree was moved by her daughter’s gesture.

  “Can I please have a little privacy?” The young woman didn’t even bother to look at the girl, to thank her for her good intentions. Bree pulled her daughter away from the young woman, no longer caring whether she offended her as she had when they’d come in. She didn’t care whether the young woman was rude to her—there wasn’t much that could hurt her at this point in her life—but she wasn’t going to let anyone be rude to her daughter.

  “Next time, be sick in the toilet, not the trash can next to it,” she spat out at the young woman, without a trace of compassion, “and flush it. Just because the world’s crappy for you doesn’t mean you have to make it crappy for everyone else. We all deserve a clean restroom. My daughter deserves one.”

  The stranger didn’t reply, nor did Bree expect an answer. She left the restroom satisfied that she’d defended her daughter, while knowing how much the judgment might have stung the young woman.

  Outside, the girl pointed at an RV the size of a bus.

  “What a huge car, Mom.”

  “It’s called a motor home, honey. It’s like a house on wheels.”

  “I want a house on wheels! Like a snail!”

  “Snails have wheels?”

  “Oh, no!” Brittany burst out laughing.

  As Bree hugged the girl, the young woman in the sweatshirt came out of the restroom and ran to a red car with its windows open. She threw her purse on the passenger seat before climbing in, starting the vehicle up, and driving off.

  “That lady’s mean,” her daughter said.

  “No, sweetheart. She’s just sad.”

  6.

  Grace had given the driver’s seat back to Frank. They’d begun to take turns once they left I-90 and, four tradeoffs later, they had covered more than five hundred miles in around ten hours. The sun had gone down behind them, the ever more oblique rays now filtering through the motor home’s rear window. The evening light turned the bedroom orange and spilled down the corridor to the main compartment, where Audrey and Simon were both entertaining themselves on their cell phones. The number of lanes had decreased each time they turned onto a new road, until the last exit they took led them onto the single lane on which they now traveled. On both sides, a thick conifer forest had replaced the urban landscape from which they had set off. Western white pine, ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, western hemlock . . . Grace could name the conifers of the Northwest by heart after studying them at school and refreshing her memory with Simon in the last school year. She was going to ask him whether he was still able to identify them, because to her they all seemed the same however well she remembered the different names, but Frank spoke before her.

  “Look how beautiful it is here,” he said. He lowered a window and took a deep breath. “It smells of earth, of life. It smells of the future.”

  Grace recognized the same optimistic excitement in her husband’s face that she had seen the day he gathered her up to carry her through the front door of the house they’d left that morning. If the expression had translated into so many years of happiness for the family, perhaps the bright future that Frank saw with such clarity awaited them now. Grace looked him in the eyes, peering into his rosy image of what lay ahead of them and allowing his enthusiasm to infect her.

  At that instant, notes from a guitar sounded on the motor home’s speakers, which were playing a Spotify list from Grace’s smartphone. The music of those chords lifted Frank’s spirits even more, his mouth opening by itself as if there could not be a better moment for that song to play, as if he couldn’t believe they were experiencing one of those rare moments in life when everything’s perfect. Grace turned up the volume to amplify their joy.

  “Your phone’s ringing!” the children yelled at the same time.

  “Very funny,” Frank answered.

  They’d said it because it was the song both spouses had set as their ringtone for when the other called. Jewel’s guitar played several times a day in their house.

  “It’s weird hearing the whole thing,” said Audrey. “You always take the call while the guitar’s playing. The woman doesn’t even start singing.”

  “Oh, it’s an actual song?” asked Simon. “I thought it was just one of the ringtones that comes with the phone. Seriously.”

  “It’s much more than that,” Frank said.

  He smiled sidelong at Grace, another of his gestures that made her melt.

  “It’s the song I recorded for your mother on both sides of a cassette so she knew we were made for each other.” His eyes sparkled the way they did in the photograph in which they were rewinding the very same tape with a pen. Without taking his eyes from Grace, Frank waited for Jewel to reach the end of the chorus before whispering a slight variation of the lyrics to her. “You are meant for me, and I am meant for you.”

  “And you were right.” Grace took his hand on the armrest. With her other one she stroked his jaw, as robust as it had been so many years before. “You’re amazing.”

  “How many songs could you fit on a cassette?” Simon asked. “A hundred?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Audrey said in response to his stupid remark, though she’d never even held a cassette in her hands. �
�A lot less. In the ones in 13 Reasons Why, I don’t think they could take more than an hour of music. And the question you should be asking our parents is how they can be so darn mushy at their age.”

  “Hey!” exclaimed Frank. “Isn’t that one of those discriminatory comments you complain about so much? Isn’t it wrong to demean your parents because of their age, taking advantage of the privilege of youth?”

  Audrey thought about it for a moment.

  “You’re right, Dad,” she said after an inner debate. “And sorry to you, too, Mom.”

  The parents smiled at each other, both proud of how they were bringing up their children. They listened to the rest of the song without interruption, Grace running her fingers over the topography of her husband’s knuckles, Frank looking at her out of the corner of his eye as he had from the bench outside Starbucks where they had coincided every morning before they’d known each other.

  “I’m hungry!” Simon yelled as soon as the song ended.

  “Me too, Gizmo,” Frank said, turning the car radio down, “but let’s eat when we get to our destination—that’s why we’ve got a house with a kitchen in the back. It’s a spectacular spot, you’ll see. We’re going to eat hot dogs under the stars—Idaho’s skies are incredible. And ketchup tastes better outdoors. Seriously, this place is going to blow your mind. And I bet there’ll be no one else there. We’ll have it all for us.”

  “How long will it take?” asked Audrey.

  “About two hours.”

  Simon unbuckled his seat belt. He walked forward gripping the table, the kitchen worktop, the sofa, his sister’s knee, the door. When he reached his father’s seat, Grace smelled the ointment under his eyepatch. The boy asked them to listen carefully. His belly rumbled at such a volume it sounded like it was digesting itself.

  “I can’t wait that long,” he said.