Even through the spray-can snow on the mall’s glass doors, Sharon can tell it’s darker outside than it should be at 4:30 P.M. Further inspection reveals that it’s pouring rain, the fat drops a little like the nuclear fallout in the film.
At some point she must have lost track of her umbrella. She’s mentally retracing her steps when there’s a tap on her shoulder.
“You go to Walnut, right?” It’s the beam-me-up senior from her school. A few feet behind him, his friend is talking to a trio of girls in Country Day uniforms.
“Yeah, I’m a freshman. I wasn’t feeling well this morning, so I didn’t make it in.” Bites her tongue; sometimes, when she’s nervous, Sharon talks too much.
“Thought I recognized you. You’ve got those pretty eyes.” The boy is tall and lean, has soft-looking ears and a fascinating mix of stubble and red bumps on his chin. She wonders what a girl like Laurel would say in return, what a girl is supposed to say.
“Did you like the movie?” he asks, and Sharon can hardly breathe. She can’t talk to him about Rowen and Cordelia’s tragic love story and the struggle to find the right universe that will allow everyone to save World 1, not here, where things are safe and comfortable, where the Gap is having a sweater sale and a Muzak version of “White Christmas” blends with the fountains.
“It was pretty good,” Sharon mumbles, grabbing the door. “I need to go. My ride is waiting outside for me. It’s my parents here to get me.”
She’s at the edge of the parking lot before registering how much colder it’s gotten since the afternoon and how hard the rain is coming down. But even if she had enough money for another umbrella, she’d run the risk of bumping into the guy again. Pulling the front of her jacket tighter, she hunches over and trudges toward the highway.
As she follows the grassy path along the shoulder of the road, everything feels slower than on the way there. There’s more traffic this time of day, so she moves farther from the highway, the ground mushy and hard to navigate. Water soaks through her sneakers and socks, every step like squishing cold Jell-O. In ten minutes the saturated denim of her jeans goes from annoying to debilitating.
She thinks of Commander Bryce and the Snow sisters in the movie leading groups of survivors through the cold ash and burning sun of nuclear winter, and even through her own discomfort, there’s that stab of longing to be out of this world and in a more unpleasant one.
Another ten minutes and her teeth are chattering, hands stiff and numb.
She flirts with the idea of calling her parents. Obviously they’d never understand about E&E and Captain Rowen, but she could invent a story about a fight with Laurel and Laurel’s friends at the mall after school. Her mom especially seems to like it when she “gets out there” and does “normal” teenage things.
No phone booths anywhere.
Rain stings her eyes, and she realizes she can’t keep going, might not even make it to the exit ramp thirty yards away. So Sharon just stops and feels sorry for herself.
An old station wagon with wood-paneled sides pulls to the shoulder of the road. The driver leans across the passenger seat to roll down the window.
“Where you headed?” asks a man, maybe fiftysomething, with a salt-and-pepper beard.
She tells him Reading Road.
“It’s on my way,” he says. “I can drop you.”
He pops open the door.
For years, after-school specials and PSAs have spouted reasons not to get into cars with strangers, but none of them are as compelling as getting out of the freezing rain. Sharon slides in, instantly creating puddles on the cracked vinyl seats and floor mats.
“Thank you,” she says as welcome heat blows at her face from the vents.
So relieved, Sharon takes a few seconds—until the car is zipping at fifty miles per hour—to notice her surroundings. Smell hits first, something long past ripe and decaying. Then she glances behind her, where the whole hatch of the back is filled: yellowing newspapers and plastic IGA grocery bags, oil-soiled rags, gardening tools with clumps of dirt clinging to sharp edges, what looks like the blade of a chain saw. On the dashboard there’s a saint figurine, and rosary beads dangle from the rearview mirror along with a military-looking medal.
“Don’t worry, little lady,” the man says when he notices her looking. “I’m not a religious zealot or anything.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” she says politely, though his mentioning it makes her shiver again.
This close, she can see how dirty the driver is. Younger than she originally thought, but unkempt, with a brown, indiscriminate substance under ragged fingernails.
“This used to be my wife’s car, and she’d take it to church sometimes.” The man is leaning toward her, familiar scent on his breath—the Scotch her father pours himself each night after work. “Lot of good all that praying did her, right?”
Sharon nods and tries not to let her mind wander to the tools and possible chain saw in the back, not to make any unfounded connection between them, the presumably dead wife, and the smell.
“I’m only saying religion didn’t help her,” says the man.
Through the windshield the world is eclipsed by curtains of rain and a fog of condensation from heat on old glass.
Get out of this car.
Shame strikes before fear. Her grades have always been okay—solid B’s with A’s in history and English, despite her inability to spell—but as far back as she can remember, Sharon has always harbored a secret sense she was smarter than most people in some less tangible way. That all that time reading about other worlds and making up stories had to count for life experience, even if the experienced life might not be her own. Had she been reading a book where the young heroine accepted a ride from a stranger, Sharon would expect the girl to end up raped or murdered or tortured in some horrible, imaginative way. She would have dismissed the character as too dumb to warrant concern.
Get out of this car.
“Sir, it’s okay if you drop me off here,” she says, trying to determine through the steamed windshield where exactly here is.
The man continues talking, as if she’s said nothing.
“You know that old saying, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’?” he asks.
Though she’s never heard it, Sharon nods again.
“Well,” the driver continues, “I was in the war, dodged sniper fire, had a gun held to my temple, and I can tell you, for damn sure, I was the atheist in the foxhole.”
“Thank you for your service,” Sharon says, without knowing which war the man is talking about. Her father, who joined the National Guard to avoid being drafted during Vietnam, says the phrase whenever they walk by uniformed soldiers.
“Sweet girl.” The man looks at her directly for the first time, revealing a red bulb on the end of his nose and cracked lips with dried saliva tamped in the corner of his mouth. “Such exquisite eyes.”
“Thank you.” As stealthily as possible, Sharon inches her butt toward the door, but it’s hard, because her jeans are wet enough to stick to the worn vinyl seats. “Really, it seems like the rain is letting up. You can just drop me off here, that’d be great.”
“Still looks like cats and dogs to me,” says the man. He’s right, of course, thick sheets of water smacking the windshield. “Reading Road is on my way; it’s no trouble.”
Her back finally against the side of the car, Sharon cautiously lets her right hand search for the door handle.
Eyes on her, not on the road, the man smiles, his teeth crooked but whiter than she expected. “It wouldn’t be right of me to leave a pretty little girl like you on the side of the road in this weather, now would it?”
Captain Rowen pulling open the hatch of the crashing plane and jumping without a parachute—the lesser of two deaths, the one with autonomy.
Her fingers finally find the metal latch.
Get out of this car.
Sharon squeezes, releases when she feels it give.
A tickle of icy
air on her back.
And then she hurls herself against the door.
Falling backward isn’t easy. It goes against every human instinct to grope for the seat belt or the console, to cling and cling and cling to the known.
Let go.
A crash of pain in her left thigh like nothing she’s ever felt before when she hits the asphalt and tumbles away from the highway down the grassy shoulder. Hurts like hell, but she can tell her leg isn’t broken, knows it will still work even if it’s unsteady.
Forty minutes later, when she opens the door to her house, soaking wet and bleeding from small cuts on her hands and cheek, she’ll think about how fortunate it was that she landed the way she did, realize it could have gone another way.
When her parents look up from the living room couch in confusion, then rush toward her, she’ll realize that she could have cracked her head open or been crushed by oncoming traffic. Or maybe something minor, a broken wrist or collarbone, an injury that would have slowed her down or dulled her reflexes.
Again and again throughout her life, she’ll recall the luck of her landing. When she gets her acceptance letter to NYU, and when she kisses a boy she’s falling in love with in Washington Square Park. When she burns her novel manuscript or gets her first byline in The New York Eye. Over and over, she’ll contemplate that there but for the grace of Captain Rowen she’d not have the opportunity to screw up this new thing, to move forward, to breathe.
But when she hits the pavement at fifty miles per hour and rolls down the soggy grass, she’s not thinking of possibilities and failures in other universes; she’s thinking only of getting up and running home to the safety of the world she knows.
CHICAGO
Technically, Phoebe Fisher kisses Oliver Ryan first.
They’re in Evanston Township High School’s cafeteria, where they’ve been eating lunch together for two months, theoretically so he can help her with physics. Neither one of them has actually brought up anything about motion laws and vectors for the last few weeks, though. Instead they discuss their teacher’s proclivity for plaid pants, Oliver’s summer at U of I engineering camp, and how Phoebe wants to move to LA and become an actress after graduation. He tells her she’ll blow them away at her audition for the school’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest next week, and Phoebe, almost unconsciously, leans over their plastic lunch trays and brushes her lips against his.
Luckily, Ollie seems amenable to the idea and kisses back. She’d locked lips with plenty of guys at her old school in the western suburbs, but none had worn glasses; she likes the feel of the rims as they slide down Oliver’s nose and bump her cheek. As far as kisses go, it’s fantastic, and the two of them simply grin at each other for a solid thirty seconds after. Finally he asks if she wants to go to the movies that night.
“Braden and I were gonna see Eons & Empires,” he says, “but I’d rather go with you—you’re a lot prettier.”
Even though Eons & Empires is definitely more her fourteen-year-old brother’s kind of film, Phoebe thinks this might be the first really good thing that’s happened since she moved in full-time with her dad and transferred schools.
The feeling evaporates when she notices her brother and a few of his freshman cross-country buddies staring at her across the room. Raising dark eyebrows at Chase twice, Phoebe asks what his deal is, using the language of facial expressions they’ve shared since they were little. Chase rolls blue eyes back and returns to his friends.
Phoebe watches him for a few seconds, but Chase doesn’t look up; things are just so weird now that they’re both in high school. Eventually she relaxes and again thinks that the date with Oliver might be a good idea.
She feels this way all through trigonometry cosines and the Heart of Darkness discussion in twelfth-grade lit. Is still excited about it as school lets out and she gets into the passenger seat of Nicole Green’s BMW, Evie Saperstein sprawled in the back. Then Nicole turns onto the street where all three of them live and suggests they go to her place and hang out for a few hours.
“Can you just drop me at my dad’s?” Phoebe asks.
“What, you got a hot date?” Evie glances up from the CD liner notes of a new band she’s into—Pearl something.
“Kinda.” Phoebe stares out the window at the large stone houses, realizes she’s nervous.
She’s known these girls for years, has seen them on the weekends when she and Chase would stay with their father and stepmother. Their families all went to the same synagogue, and the three of them had sleepovers after all the bar and bat mitzvah parties. But Evie and Nicole have been her everyday friends only since September, when Phoebe’s mother took a job in Hawaii. Though the girls had seemed excited to have her—Nicole convinced the dance corps to give Phoebe an audition, and Evie had gotten her involved in drama club—they’re still strangers in many ways. Phoebe doesn’t know how they’ll react.
“I’m going to see a movie with Oliver Ryan,” she says.
“Who’s that?” Evie asks from the back.
“You know Ollie.” Nicole conveys exasperation while staying focused on the road (perhaps the reason she passed the driver’s test on the first try and Phoebe is scheduled to take it for the third time next week). “Braden Washington’s friend, with the red hair and cute glasses, sorta quiet.”
“That guy?” Evie sighs. “Have you looked in a mirror since the swelling went down, Pheebs? You’re, like, way too hot for that guy.”
Automatically Phoebe’s fingers float to her nose. In a particularly skillful maneuver, she’d convinced her parents that if she had to move across town for senior year, the least they could do was let her get a nose job—a fresh start, a better chance to be noticed by modeling agencies next year. Stunningly, they’d agreed, and a plastic surgeon with an office in the same medical complex as her father had taken out the bump and thinned the tip. It looks amazing—the perfect complement to her heart-shaped lips and high cheekbones—but she hadn’t thought it would make her feel so weird. She wonders if she should tell Oliver about it, if it counts as lying if she doesn’t.
“I mean, these braids are a little Pippi Longstocking.” Evie reaches around to yank the long black pigtails hanging nearly to Phoebe’s waist. “But you’re the prettiest real person I know.”
“I like Ollie.” Phoebe shrugs. “We’ve got the same lunchtime, and he’s been helping me with physics.”
“I could have helped you, Pheebs.” Nicole sounds hurt, a phenomenon Phoebe is discovering occurs with great regularity.
“Ollie is nice,” Nicole continues, “but his dad is a pilot and almost never around, and his mom died in the eighth grade.”
Nicole offers the last bit of info as if it’s a character flaw on Oliver’s part. Phoebe doesn’t mention that her own mother is alive and well and just abandoned her children for Maui. She wonders what Evie and Nicole say about her when she’s not there.
“Yeah, he mentioned that,” Phoebe says, relieved Nicole is pulling into the circular driveway of her father’s house.
“Dave and I were gonna see a movie later. Want us to come with?” Nicole asks. “Might be fun?”
Nicole’s boyfriend is perfectly amicable, but he and Nicole started dating in junior high and spend whole weekends looking at high-rise condos downtown, planning which one they’ll buy when Nicole is done with law school and Dave is a doctor. It seems too intense for her first date with Oliver.
While telling Nicole the offer is sweet, Phoebe suggests, in an undefined way, that they might see each other at the theater.
“Wait, we’re all going as a big couples’ thing?” Evie leans over the bucket seats. “Fine, I’ll ask that drummer from Fresh Delicious.”
Phoebe can see exactly how this will go: Nicole and Dave planning a lifetime of couples’ dates for them; Evie making smart-alecky, hypersexual comments—everyone doing their damnedest to make sure Oliver Ryan never asks her out again.
“Let’s play it by ear, and maybe we’ll see
each other there,” Phoebe says, trying not to offend Nicole but to also get out of the car and into the house before any more bad plans can be fashioned.
“Call me,” Nicole is saying as Phoebe shuts the door.
Through the foyer, with its dramatic stairs and heavy chandelier, the chatter of afternoon talk shows and smell of baked goods draws Phoebe to the sprawling kitchen as if she were a cartoon dog. Wearing an apron over an extremely tight sweater, like a sexed-up Betty Crocker, her stepmother pulls a tray of snowman-shaped sugar cookies from the oven.
“You’re not hanging out with the girls today?” Gennifer pulls off oven mitts to fluff her mane of honey-colored hair.
“No, I’ve got a date,” Phoebe says. “But don’t tell Dad. It’s the first time we’re going out, and I don’t want to answer a zillion questions.”
“I’ll make him take me out to dinner to get him out of the house.” Gennifer smiles, and Phoebe can almost feel the wave of sisterhood she’s projecting. Six years ago Gennifer was a twenty-five-year-old temp entering patient records at Phoebe’s father’s cardiology practice. That her father and Gen fell into the un-ironic love of Lifetime movies would have been an unbearable cliché if Phoebe’s mother hadn’t been the one who had left the year before. “So who is this guy?”
“He’s a senior, too. He’s been helping me with physics.” There’s no point in lying; Gen has proven capable of keeping secrets. “Tall, red hair. Not Jewish.”
Winking a green eye, Gennifer touches the Star of David Phoebe’s father gave her for completing conversion classes, asks where Phoebe and her “mystery man” are going.
“We’re seeing a movie at Old Orchard.” Phoebe helps herself to one of the cookies, which presumably are for the holiday party at her father’s office the next day. “The Eons & Empires thing.”
“Oh, hon.” Gennifer bites her lower lip. “Not the seven thirty-five show?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Your brother and his friends are seeing that.”
Chase, who had morphed from the sweet baby brother she used to play dress-up and board games with into a hormoney teen with acne and mood swings. Chase, with his pals who gawk and whisper at her, who sneak into his room with stolen copies of Playboy and Gentleman’s Prerogative.
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 3
