The Crashers

by Cubed, Magen

  “For arresting me?” he asked.

  “For getting ahead of myself.”

  “And arresting me.”

  “I brought you beer. What more do you want from me?”

  “Fair enough.”

  He walked past her to hold the door open before leading them to the elevator. Up three floors and down a stretch of dark hallway to a room with a chipped wooden door that led inside his makeshift apartment. She took off her boots and placed the beer on the table. He took off his jacket.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” she said. “That was shitty. I should’ve talked to you before going in guns blazing.”

  He shrugged and flipped on the ancient police scanner on his dresser. “You’re doing your job.”

  “Aren’t you mad?”

  “About the handcuffs, yes.”

  “Okay, fine.”

  “But I’ve had a few hours to calm down. And a few beers, I guess.”

  “It doesn’t make it okay, Kyle.”

  “It makes it what it is, Amanda. That’s it.”

  She smirked as voices fluttered in between the static. “Can’t help yourself, can you?”

  He wiped his hands on his jeans and felt a little guilty. “Yeah. Old habits, you know?”

  Leaning against the table, she opened her beer and tossed the cap. She took one long swallow. He sat in the armchair by the window and sagged into the worn leather. She wiped her mouth with her thumb and crossed the bare floor between them to pass him a bottle, which he took with a nod of thanks. He sat it on the floor.

  “So, do you ever miss it?” she asked. Her voice was quiet and without sentiment.

  “Miss what?”

  “This?”

  “The job?”

  “No, stupid. Do you ever miss us? What we could have had?”

  Kyle stared at her fingers around the neck of her bottle. The rounded edges of her unpainted nails rubbed against the glass. “Three years is a long time. It’s better not to dwell.”

  “Yeah, right. You dwell pathologically.”

  “Maybe. What about you?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, of course I’ve thought about it. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t come up from time to time.”

  “Before or after I got out of jail?”

  “Both.”

  “What does Glen think of that?”

  “You mean Tim?”

  “Whatever.”

  She didn’t have an answer for that. After a moment, he got to his feet.

  “You should probably go,” he said, albeit half-heartedly. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She didn’t move and neither did he. Instead, he took her hand and she let him. He stepped in close so he could feel her breath on his mouth. His eyes flicked to hers and down to her mouth. She pressed her lips together to wet them.

  “This is a bad idea,” he said, if only to make his case for the record.

  “Yeah.”

  She still kissed him. It was tender at first, so he wouldn’t pull away, then fuller and sweeter, so he wouldn’t want to. He grabbed her by the hips to aim them for the bed, and it was as if the years between them melted away. Kisses turned into wet sighs and soft bites as she pushed him against the mattress. She pressed a hand on his neck to tell him to stay. She tugged her sweater over her head and unbuckled her belt. From the bed, he watched hungrily.

  She sat in his lap, and her knees bracketed his hips. Her hands ran in his hair, over his neck and down his shoulders. The only foreplay they afforded themselves was the sinking of his teeth in her throat and her hands roaming under his clothes. Once she got his jeans open and his shirt off, he didn’t stand a chance anymore—against her or the comfort of her touch. Leaning back, he held a breath and watched her bear down on him until their bodies met, connecting in the kind of wet heat that made her eyes close and mouth open. He couldn’t say no to that, either. Not to her bare skin on his (hers dark and smooth where his was pale and rough), her long hair tumbling down her shoulders to touch her breasts, or her back. The sex was a fleeting and ragged thing because it had to be. She rode him until orgasm caught her in its sharp and sudden grip, and for just a few moments, his life made sense again.

  VI.

  The smell of cooking food woke Bridger from his crooked spread across Adam’s couch, pulling him from a black and dreamless sleep. Above, the beige ceiling was patched with cheap plaster. Beneath, the wooden floors creaked with every step Adam took on the other side of the wall. Bridger blinked twice and sat up to pop his neck. Light came in from the blue-curtained windows. It was morning. Two doorways cropped up in his peripheral: one to the cramped kitchen and dining room table, the other to the bedroom and bathroom. When Bridger realized he didn’t remember how he got there, he closed his hands over his eyes. He tried to think, remember, and disregard the smell of old pennies making his mouth taste like metal.

  There had been the diner, the ride to the station, and the white light of the interrogation room. He remembered the tape on the television screens and the bus ride and the dreams of snow falling upwards from the ground to catch in the underside of his eyelashes. There’d been a white room, white lights, and that snow coming from everywhere as the girl in the white party dress twirled in a circle around a grubby, angry man. He had taken seven steps down the street when he collapsed to his knees in a powdery bank of unreal snowfall. The man stared down at him from his station in the center of the chaos. Stooping to sit beside him, the girl simply whispered, “White.”

  Ten minutes later, Bridger scrubbed his face with the heel of one hand and found his footing to walk to the shelves on the opposite wall. While bacon cooked and Adam shuffled harmlessly around his refrigerator, Bridger eyed the books, photos, and trinkets that cluttered the living room. Vinyls of classic Motown albums adorned the walls amid pictures of school functions, Christmas mornings, family vacations and church picnics. The pictures showed a brother, three sisters, and boys and girls under the age of ten. There was an old house with green shutters and flower boxes on a sunlit block in Southside, flanked by photos of Adam with his parents. The voyeurism of looking at a stranger’s intimate moments settled over Bridger uneasily, so he kept his hands to himself.

  “Hey.” Adam appeared at the doorway behind him. “Did you sleep okay? I know the couch has seen better days, but I don’t have a futon anymore.”

  “I’m okay,” Bridger said reflexively. “I mean, you know, relatively speaking.”

  “Yeah. Are you hungry? I cooked breakfast, if you like eggs.”

  “Yes. Well. If you don’t mind me asking, how exactly did I get here?”

  Adam crossed his arms. He looked suddenly bashful. “I carried you here. You had a seizure and took a nosedive at the bus stop. You couldn’t stay on your feet, so I figured it made more sense to let you sleep here.”

  “Right.” Bridger snapped his fingers. “That. Sorry.”

  “It’s no trouble. C’mon, grab a plate while it’s still hot.”

  Bridger followed along into the kitchen, taking a seat at the table with a glass of orange juice and a place setting awaiting him. He sat with his hands in his lap while Adam made plates for the both of them, unsure of what else to do as Adam served him before taking the opposite chair. It was eerily like being home again, reading the news at the kitchen table while Caitlin made his plate and took her seat across from him. Her smile was nothing like Adam’s, which was sweet and well-intentioned, but Bridger decided it was best not to think of his wife and took up his fork instead.

  “So, hey, thanks for not leaving me to die in the street and all,” he eventually said, “but I think I’ll be leaving soon.”

  “What, so you can go back to dying in a hovel?” asked Adam with a smirk.

  “This qualifies as a hovel.”

  “It happens to be a very comfortable hovel.”

  “The quality of your hovel notwithstanding, I think I’d better make my exit anyway. There’s only so long
a man can sit and have breakfast with the guy who carried him home.”

  “Yes. Like a bride, actually,” Adam said. “In case you wanted to feel a little more butthurt about the situation.”

  Bridger cleared his throat. “Thanks. But, you know, charity’s not really my speed, so...”

  “It’s not charity. And I don’t pity you, if that’s what you think.”

  “Which doesn’t actually make me feel any less pitiful.”

  “Relax, nobody actually saw me carry you.”

  “Yeah, still doesn’t work.”

  The room suddenly lurched in Bridger’s peripheral, swimming from one side to the other. He dropped his fork and pressed his palms to his eyes to wish it away. Images flashed behind his eyelids like déjà vu at breakneck speed. They popped and crackled in fireworks of names, dates, faces and smells. An imagined fire climbed the walls to eat up the ceiling of Adam’s tiny apartment, consuming everything around them in hungry tongues. Adam immediately appeared on Bridger’s side of the table. He was no longer smiling.

  “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  Bridger’s nod came out as a shake instead. “It’s okay. Just—I dunno, confetti. Images of shit. Whatever. It’ll pass.”

  Adam’s hand on his back was oddly soothing. He rubbed slow circles between his shoulder blades. “Just stay here for a while, all right? Eat, get some rest, and get back on your feet.”

  “Yeah.” Bridger nodded. “All right.”

  “I have to go to work in a little bit, but I’ll be back by 6:30. If you’re feeling better and still want to go home, I can drive you. Just don’t take off while I’m gone, okay?”

  “Okay. Okay, I won’t.”

  Part of him regretted saying it. Regretted the feeling of weakness that came from being comforted by someone else. The parts of him that were on fire made a better argument. Instead of leaving, Bridger stayed behind. Adam closed the front door and locked it behind him, and Bridger counted the rough patches on the ceiling until sleep took him again.

  Chapter Ten

  I.

  Amanda wasn’t there when Kyle got up the next morning, slipping out before he woke. She didn’t come back the next night, either. Kyle didn’t expect her to as he filled his cup with coffee that morning and whiskey that night, but the thought still crossed his mind. It came over him in warm waves like the alcohol in his belly and her fingers in his hair. If he thought about it long enough, he could almost feel the weight of her lips on his and the softness of her neck beneath his teeth. But he didn’t think about that. He drank coffee or whiskey, went for a walk, and tried to run down what he knew about the case.

  She didn’t even call and that was fine, too. It made it easier not to call her. Made it easier not to miss her body in his sheets as much as he knew he did. They both had work to do, details to see to, and cases to solve. It was the same case, same stakes, and same blood in the gutters. She may have had a better shot at solving it, give or take a few bad hunches, but he wasn’t trying to keep score. Instead, he watched the tape cycle through news broadcasts morning to night and hated the man responsible. He studied the case so much that when she appeared on his doorstep again two nights later with a bottle of Crown, he was as desperate for the distraction as he was for her.

  But in the morning, they wouldn’t talk about it. It was just easier that way. He needed easy like he needed sex, but they wouldn’t talk about that, either. Later on, they would text each other like they weren’t just exes falling back into familiar routines. It wasn’t ideal, even in the kind of city they now found themselves in, where every morning could bring new violence, new tapes, and new death tolls. It was, however, good enough for now.

  II.

  Despite Bridger’s insistence, he stayed put in Adam’s ramshackle apartment days after his seizure passed. Adam was grateful for Bridger’s weight on the sofa, his place setting at the table, and the presence of another person in the room. They could talk over meals or television, and feel like friends. It was a significant comfort to Adam to have Bridger stay, well aware that he could have escaped at any moment. Anxiety was an isolating condition, and Bridger’s friendship felt like real progress. It felt like a breakthrough after a session with Dr. Bell, or a moment of medicated calm. But Adam didn’t say a word of that. It wasn’t his place to say whether they were really friends.

  He gave Bridger the spare key he kept in his wallet and told him about the secondhand shop down the street, the cafe around the block, and the weird little used bookstore that specialized in old travel books and encyclopedias. He told him places to go, to walk around, and to browse in case he decided to stay a few days more. Bridger took the key and thanked him but said he couldn’t make any promises. Adam was okay with that, and then he got dressed to go to work for the day.

  At 1:00, he retired to the employee break room for his bagged lunch and bottled juice. He pulled out his phone to check the time and read articles from his news feeds, local personal interest stories and random pop culture factoids. Scrolling through the endless surge of information, his phone vibrated and a new text appeared in his inbox.

  “Do you believe in heaven?” Clara asked from somewhere across the city.

  “I don’t know.” Adam shrugged at the thought. “Why?”

  “Because I already texted Norah but she hasn’t texted me back and Bridger is rude.”

  Laughing, he thought about his response before typing, “I did once. But even if there is a heaven, I don’t believe there’s a god.”

  “Good, me neither.” A few moments later, his phone vibrated again. “What about souls? Do you think we have souls?”

  “No,” he replied. “I think that when we die, we die. That’s why we have to make something out of our lives while we’re still here.”

  It sounded so relentlessly optimistic he wasn’t sure if the words were his or Dr. Bell’s. Either way, he pressed send. His phone vibrated.

  “So, do you think that this is our afterlife? Our second chance?”

  He took a deep breath. “I’d like it to be.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Left alone again, Adam tucked his phone into his pocket and returned to his lunch.

  III.

  Hannah stayed up two nights in a row to finish the comic book in time for Ms. Bradshaw’s show and tell. Drawn on her grandmother’s stolen printer paper, each panel was cautiously measured out with a ruler in four-by-four grids and colored in with soft pencil. She shaded buildings and ground with the cheap charcoal sticks her mother got for her last birthday and smeared the shadows until her elbows were grubby and black. Later, she inked over the outlines with a fine point Sharpie, careful to mind her edges and expressions so they didn’t look blobby. This would be her best work yet, she decided. She folded her pages and stapled them together in the middle. It was good enough to frame.

  In front of Ms. Bradshaw’s cluttered, little classroom, Hannah swayed back and forth. She waited for her turn to speak. Anthony flaunted his pet lizard, Ralphie, and Sarah talked about the Indian arrowhead she dug up on vacation the previous summer. Finally, it was Hannah’s turn. She cautiously unfolded her ten-page comic. She cleared her throat and took a deep breath to steady herself. All eyes fell to her leg braces, then her comic, and finally to her.

  “This is my mom, Norah,” she explained. “And these are her adventures. She has superpowers and she’s an outlaw and she can do anything she wants because she’s powerful.”

  When Norah came to pick up Hannah, Ms. Bradshaw met her at the classroom door. Hannah flitted around the room with the class hamster and talked gibberish in high-pitched voices. Norah prepared herself for the worst-case scenario.

  “I hope she wasn’t too much trouble today,” she said, helping Hannah pack her bag with books and crayons. “It’s been a rough few days for both of us.” She made no mention of FBI investigations or the eight hours she spent in police custody. She didn’t have to. Hannah already did it for her.

  “No, no, she was
no trouble at all,” Ms. Bradshaw said. “Hannah actually had quite the day. Her comic book was really inventive. The other kids enjoyed it.”

  “Her comic book?”

  “I made a comic about your powers,” Hannah chirped. “Everybody loved it!”

  Norah winced. “My what?”

  “I didn’t know your daughter was so talented. She must admire you a lot to do that.”

  “Yes, well, she has a hell of an imagination,” Norah lied. “She’s a great kid. I’m lucky to have her.”

  Hannah wasn’t allowed to draw comics for show and tell again. The comic did make it to a frame, placed proudly on the coffee table, so long as she promised never to tell a room full of people that Norah was picked up by the FBI. After a moment’s deliberation, Hannah shook on her mother’s deal.

  IV.

  Doreen Reyes kept two leather-bound journals: one for Clara’s newspaper clippings and blue ribbons and another for her husband, Lawrence. Clara kept the latter journal for herself. Her mother gave it to her when she left for school so she would always know where she came from. She kept it in a box under her bed for safekeeping with a shoebox of childhood photos and postcards. They were the tiny reminders she had of her life before Santa Monica, college, and the crash.

  Her father lived just twenty-seven years. He was a big man with strong arms who worked in a glass factory. He lived just long enough to see Clara’s fifth birthday before a car struck him one sunny afternoon. Clara had to think really hard to remember her father now, and that was disappointing. The contours of his face were rendered down to a soft blur whenever she closed her eyes, conjuring up thoughts of Christmas mornings or Sunday dinners at her Abuelita’s house. Most of her memories of her father were faithful reconstructions from her mother’s stories of how they first met, the jokes he would tell, and how he would give you the shirt off his back if you let him. They built Lawrence Reyes from the groundwork of wallet photos and secondhand fairytales.

  It seemed unfair to think of it all now with the shoebox turned over and the journal disassembled and scattered across the floor: the warm Sunday evenings, the glass factory, the shimmer of tinsel on Christmas morning. It seemed unfair that she had lived through her crash when her father died in his, leaving her mother to raise their daughter alone. Looking through her father’s life in pictures, concert tickets, love letters and chicken scratch, she knew he would have wanted it this way. Her father would have wanted her to leave home and go on to play among the stars. This, she decided, was her chance to do it.