by Kali Wallace
“Nice to meet you, Melanie,” he said. “I’m Tate. Let’s hope that storm up ahead isn’t as bad as it looks.”
THREE
THE STORM WAS just as bad as it looked. The rain broke over us with shattering noise. Thunder crashed and I jumped, laughed uneasily. The man who called himself Tate switched on the wipers and the headlights. He sat forward in the driver’s seat, both hands on the wheel, and followed too close behind a minivan slicing wet channels across the asphalt. The traffic marched in lines of white from the west, red straight ahead, blurred and indistinct in the downpour. It was too loud to talk. We crept along for forty-five minutes, maybe an hour, barely making any progress before the rain slackened.
The man eased back into his seat and turned the wipers down a notch. “At least it’s not a tornado.”
“You had to go and say that, didn’t you?” The air conditioner was blowing cool air across my skin, raising goose bumps on my arms. I leaned forward to peer through the windshield. “The sky doesn’t look green. I hope you didn’t jinx us.”
“I have better luck than that,” he said.
I had always been afraid of thunderstorms before, ever since I was little. My dad had tried to explain to me what they were and how they worked: air pressure and temperature changes, electrical discharges and cloud formations. He thought laying it all out in scientific terms would help. But knowing how lightning happened didn’t make it any less frightening, not when I was ten.
That was before. There wasn’t much point in being frightened anymore. I stared out the window at the rain-battered fields and wondered what it would be like to be caught in a tornado. Lifted up and tossed around, scoured and stripped and dropped miles away, a bloody piece of debris in a pile of rubble. I could add it to the list.
The traffic grew heavier when we passed through Lincoln, dissipated on the other side. It was evening on a Tuesday or Wednesday; I had lost track of the date. The man asked if I minded a short stop to grab some food. He chose a roadside diner with a neon sign and a dirt parking lot. I didn’t want anything but he insisted, so I asked for a milk shake. It was chocolate but tasted like ash. He ordered the special, pork chop and mashed potatoes and soggy green beans, and he smothered the entire plate in ketchup.
He talked about himself while he ate. None of it was true. He told me he was an economics professor from Michigan. I made the appropriate impressed noises to keep him talking, but I couldn’t look at him. The smell of his dinner reminded me of a faraway house splattered with blood and small bodies collapsed over their plates. Outside a rainbow curved over the landscape. The clouds broke briefly to let shafts of evening sun shine through.
I blinked, the clouds closed, and the sunlight faded again. I excused myself to the bathroom to throw up the milk shake. My body doesn’t digest food anymore.
When we were on the road again, the man who called himself Tate laughed self-consciously and said, “We’ve got a lot more hours of this great scenery ahead of us, and it only gets more boring from here. Tell me about yourself, Melanie. What are you studying in school?”
I invented a story for him. I wove together pieces of Maria Garcia’s cousin, Sandra Ulster’s stepsister who lived in her parents’ basement and played the banjo, Marcus Reyes’s brother who had won a swimming scholarship and might be training for the Olympics, bits and pieces of secondhand acquaintances and friends of friends. I told him I was a freshman at the University of Chicago, studying biology or maybe chemistry, and I was going to work as a lifeguard for the summer. I was an only child and my parents were lawyers.
“Not, like, criminal lawyers,” I said. “Car accident lawyers. You know. Like the kind you see on TV.”
I offered a silent apology to my parents for forcing them into such an embarrassing profession.
I didn’t tell him one true thing about myself. It was easier that way. I was a patchwork person, stolen scraps stitched together with the frailest threads. If he cared at all, he would have seen the lies for what they were.
But he didn’t care that I was lying to him. Every few moments he tapped nervously on the steering wheel and glanced my way. I didn’t need to read his thoughts to know what he was thinking. He was planning. Wondering how long he had to drive before he could find an isolated place to pull over. Thinking about what he would say, how he would deflect my worries, what excuse he would give. How it would feel.
I leaned into the door and hitched one leg up, hugged my knee to my chest. I hadn’t bothered with the seat belt. If we crashed, that could be another item on my list.
I knew I ought to be scared. But all I felt was a faint flutter beneath my ribs that was a little like excitement, a little like hunger. He thought I was helpless, but I knew something he didn’t know: he couldn’t hurt me.
I had never before had that kind of power over someone.
I tucked the feeling down in my gut in a tight little ball, small and black like a frightened roly-poly bug, and kept it in the same place where I kept my real name, my real story.
When we were back in the car and on the road, I leaned my head back against the seat and faked a yawn.
“Tired?” said Tate.
“A little.”
“You can go ahead and sleep,” he said. “I was just kidding about making you keep me company.”
I yawned again. “Thanks.”
The night grew darker as we drove west. I pretended to drift off, but I don’t sleep anymore. Rain came and went in quick taps on the windshield. The air smelled like ozone and exhaust and manure. The man murmured to himself from time to time. I couldn’t make out the words.
A couple of hours outside Lincoln, he turned the signal on, slowed the car, and eased to an exit. I kept my eyes closed. I felt us stop for a moment, then we turned right. The road was rough and loud beneath the tires. He drove for another twenty, thirty minutes before stopping.
He turned off the engine. His seat belt clicked and rasped as it retracted.
“Nobody will know,” he said, a whisper under his breath. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Nobody will know.”
There was a soft thump as he hit the steering wheel with both palms. I waited for the fear. He had made his choice. I should be scared now. But all I felt was tired. Tired, and disappointed that I had been right. He could have kept driving through the night and into the morning. He didn’t have to stop.
“Nobody will know,” he said again.
I opened my eyes. He was looking right at me.
“Don’t move,” he said. His voice shook. He gripped the steering wheel. His lower lip was trembling, his shoulders tense, the line of his neck taut as a steel cable. “Don’t move. You—you stupid, you freaky bitch, what are you doing?”
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t moving. I wasn’t doing anything except waiting.
“How stupid are you?” He hit the steering wheel again. “What the hell did you expect, getting into a car with a stranger? Didn’t your mother tell you that’s asking for trouble?”
I clenched my hands together in my lap. I could barely remember how it had happened before, when I’d woken in the grave with the stranger kneeling over me.
“You should have known better,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
He launched himself across the car and slammed my head into the window. The angle was bad, he was shaking and grasping, but I felt his fingers dig into my neck, pressing against my windpipe. He wasn’t strong enough to hold me. He didn’t know what he was doing. But I didn’t try to push him away. All I did was close one hand over each wrist, and I pulled. The shadowed vines wrapped around us, an impenetrable tangle.
His eyes went wide with surprise and anger—anger that I would fight back, anger that it wasn’t going to be easy. His face turned red and beads of sweat formed on his brow. His pupils were dilated, his mouth open slightly, pink tongue pressed between crooked front teeth. He was trying to say something. His lips moved, fishlike, but the only sound he could make was a weak kittenish me
wl.
Something dark and oily inside him snapped.
I felt his heart beat once, twice, stuttering—and no more.
I was standing in a kitchen. I was raising a baseball bat. I was swinging it down. A small body crumpled before me.
The man’s hands dropped from my neck. I shoved him away and he slumped against the steering wheel. His eyes were open, his mouth gaping. He was dead.
I pushed the door open and tripped out. My heart was racing, my breath coming in quick, painful gasps. I dropped to my knees, gagged and spat on the ground. I felt like I was buzzing on caffeine, on adrenaline, trembling so bad it was all I could to do crawl away from the car. I curled onto my side and lay there for a long time in the glow from the headlights, and I remembered.
A little kid. A boy. He had killed a little boy who liked baseball and video games and had come home early to get a snack of peanut butter and crackers. The brat wasn’t supposed to be there, not while his mom was at work. There was an open jar of peanut butter on the counter, a glass of milk beside it. The kid was always sticking his fingers in the jar. His blood spread across the yellow linoleum floor. He wasn’t supposed to be there. His baseball bat was supposed to be in his room, or in the garage, not right there in the living room. He was always sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. He would still be alive if he had put his bat away. If he knew how to keep his mouth shut. If he for once in his life had used a knife to spread the peanut butter instead of sticking his fingers in the jar.
A long time passed before I was able to sit up.
A mosquito whined in my ear; I waved it away. We were parked on a rutted dirt driveway by a narrow road. Lights of isolated farmhouses shone in the distance. The car clicked as the engine cooled. The night was quiet, the prairie grass damp with rain. My hands shook as I rubbed them through the wet blades, wiped them over my mouth. I spat again.
When I was certain I could move without my heart bursting in my chest, I walked back to the car and took my backpack and skateboard out of the backseat. I found the man’s wallet in his pocket. I didn’t steal anything; I only wanted to know his real name. I tucked my sleeve over my hand and wiped my fingerprints from the inside of the car. Anything else they found, if they looked, would be too degraded to identify me.
Natural causes. That’s what they would decide. His heart had stopped. Suspicious, out there on that empty road, so far from home, but there was no sign of foul play. I looked at him closely. He didn’t look any different. He wasn’t gray or shriveled or pale. The clinging black tangle that had hung around him was gone. What I felt in its place was an electric hum beneath my skin, the steady thump of my heart, a deep dull ache in the bruises around my neck.
I slammed the car door; the light went out.
I wanted him to look on the outside as he did on the inside. I wanted to feel guilty or sick or scared about what I had done. I wanted to regret it.
I didn’t. He had been a murderer. Now he was a dead murderer.
I walked to the road and dropped my skateboard to the asphalt. I was only 50 percent sure I was heading toward the highway. I didn’t care. I pushed myself faster and faster, much faster than I would normally go on a rough road in the dark, racing and reckless. The night air was cold and damp on my face, in my hair, on my tongue. It felt wonderful, the cleanest exhilaration you can imagine. I never wanted to stop.
FOUR
HIS REAL NAME was Duncan Palmer. He was forty-seven years old. He had been a bank teller in Minneapolis, but he had recently been fired from his job for losing his temper and making threatening comments to customers. He told his friends he was going to take a vacation to get his head together before he found another job.
He had been arrested two years ago as a suspect in the death of his ex-girlfriend’s son. No charges were filed and he was released.
The boy had caught him with the sixteen-year-old babysitter while his mother was at work. The girl had run away, humiliated, and Duncan Palmer had panicked. He hit the kid repeatedly over the head with a baseball bat. The bat had been a birthday present from Palmer a few months earlier; he had spent too much money on a good one, never mind that the boy was the worst player on his Little League team and the mother wasn’t impressed.
The boy had died on the kitchen floor. Duncan Palmer wrapped the body in plastic and drove out of the city to dump it. A woman walking her dog found the boy the next day.
The cops suspected the man from the start, but the babysitter lied and Palmer lied. The mother lied and swore he would never hurt her son. Maybe she even believed it. The case went unsolved. They blamed it on a home invasion gone bad.
Not all of that was in the news, but there was enough in the memories for me to put the story together.
By the time I met him, Duncan Palmer was thinking about doing it again. The possibility was there in the back of his mind, wrapped up on those vines and thorns that tasted of ash, deep and thrumming like a distant drumbeat. He had gotten away with it before. It had been the most exciting day of his life.
He was the second man I killed.
Some days I feel bad about it. Most days I don’t.
The kid was short, chubby, with dirt brown hair and brown eyes. He only wanted a snack. I can still smell the peanut butter.
FIVE
DUNCAN PALMER HAD driven us several miles along a county road north of I-80, through gently rolling fields surrounded by wire fences. It was a dark night, most of the sky covered with clouds. The pavement was uneven and rough, difficult to skate on, but I barely noticed. I kicked and kicked and my legs never grew tired. I was energized, my nerves sparking, my blood flowing, my heart beating so strong I could feel it in my ears and my fingertips.
I wound my way along the grid of country roads for miles. Trees loomed beside the road, dropped away as I passed them, and insects buzzed in the darkness. A few cars passed, headlights bright and white. Some slowed when they saw me, but none stopped. The rich night air rushed over me, soft on my skin, cool through my hair. My mind was empty.
I crashed once, not entirely on purpose. I knew I was going too fast when I crested the hill, but I didn’t slow down. I hit a pothole in the asphalt near the bottom, on the outside edge of a sharp turn. My skateboard went left and I went right. The momentum carried me straight into the trunk of a tree.
I lay on the ground for a few minutes, dazed and hurting.
I moved my head, neck, arms, hands. I probed at the abrasions on my face. If there were hairline fractures in my ribs or cracks in my skull, they would heal themselves. If there was blood collecting in my brain, it would drain away. The scratches on my chin and cheek bled sluggishly for a minute or two, then stopped. I would have fading yellow bruises and new scars by morning.
The worst of the pain passed. I sat up, took my notebook out of my backpack. It was too dark for me to read what was already written on the page, but I didn’t need to. I knew the list by heart. I had started writing it shortly after I woke up. A record of experimental trial and error: all the ways I could not die.
I added one more line:
8. Skated face-first into tree.
As failed deaths went, that one was pretty embarrassing, but in the spirit of scientific inquiry I couldn’t leave it out. I sat cross-legged beside the road until the sting in my skin faded, then I found my skateboard and I kept going.
The clouds gathered and parted through the night. It rained a few times and my hair and clothes grew damp, but it always passed. I stopped once at an empty intersection, not because I needed a breath and not because I cared that I was lost. I only wanted to taste the cool damp air and listen to the quiet. There was enough of a clear patch overhead for me to recognize the broad W of Cassiopeia, but I couldn’t see much else. As I watched, the clouds drifted over her.
It figured that now that I was here, in the dark in the middle of nowhere, no cities to speak of for hundreds of miles, it was too cloudy to see anything.
But I didn’t have to leave.
&
nbsp; The thought drifted into my mind, curious and bright, like a fish behind the curved glass of an aquarium.
I didn’t have to keep moving. If I wanted, I could lie down in one of these fields. It wouldn’t matter if it rained because I couldn’t get sick. I didn’t have to worry about the cold. I didn’t have to eat. I didn’t have to sleep, or find a safe place, or do anything at all. I could lie beneath a shade tree and use my backpack as a pillow and wait through the day, watch the clouds clear, watch the sunset, watch the stars come out again. I could do that for as many nights as I cared to count. I could never see anybody again.
No murderers. No memories.
Eventually the hollow cold that wasn’t hunger would fill me again, but I could wait it out. Maybe my heart would slow, my blood would grow sluggish in my veins, my lungs would spasm and shudder when I tried to breathe, and maybe I wouldn’t mind so much, out here with nothing around but grass and stars, with no people dragging their guilt and grief and anger behind them like oily dark banners.
I had left home after I woke up because it was impossible for me to stay. There was a Breezy-shaped hole in the life I had once occupied. The girl I had been was gone. I didn’t know what I was anymore.
I went west because it was as good a direction as any, and because I thought I might like to reach the Pacific Ocean before I made another decision. But I didn’t have a plan. For the first time in my life I didn’t have any idea what I could or should do next. I didn’t have anywhere to be. Nobody was waiting for me. Nobody was expecting to see me ever again.
Grass rustled nearby and I started, spun so quickly I nearly lost my balance. It was only the wind pushing leaves against each other. I let out a loud breath, shook my head, and turned again.
There was something in the intersection.
It was pale and translucent and drifting a foot above the asphalt. It had the basic shape of a human body: limbs, torso, smudge of a head. The legs ended in shredded rags, the arms in spidery threads.
