Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

Somewhere, Raquel was shaking her head in disgust. “Why would I break up with you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Listen, Melanie, are you or aren’t you breaking up with me?”

  “I’m not breaking up with you.”

  His body visibly relaxed. “Good. I’m really glad.”

  To launder time without arousing suspicion, you had to choose small increments. But this was going nowhere, and soon her aunt would come home from work, find her missing, and freak out. So okay, forget Raquel and her comforting chatter.

  “When I was two and a half,” Melanie blurted out, “my father killed my mother and would’ve killed me, too, but I got away but so did he.”

  For several seconds, the only sound was the pulsing of the ceiling fan. Phillip watched her face, as if gauging how to react.

  “Is this a joke?” he finally said, but with gentleness in his voice. He knew it wasn’t. She’d been secretive with him from the start, evasive to the point of bizarre. Why he’d put up with her this long, she had no idea.

  “I’ve never told anyone before,” she said, looking down at her lap.

  He took her hand. “Oh, Melanie,” he said. “Oh, dear God.”

  This wasn’t the secret she’d come here to tell. But Phillip needed to know that the woman carrying his baby was putting them all at risk. And when he led her toward the bedroom, saying, “Let’s cool down,” she said yes. She had already laundered enough time this afternoon, and, especially after the morning’s disagreement with her aunt and uncle, she knew she ought to be getting home. But looking at Phillip looking at her, she realized that she was sick and tired of laundering time, and that she was desperate, instead, to spend it.

  When they went into his bedroom and he said, “Do you think you can tell me more? Can you tell me everything?” she said yes again. And when he said, “You know you can trust me, don’t you?” she willed herself to say yes one more time—the brief hesitation not a matter of distrust but rather disbelief.

  This is real, she told herself. This is happening. I am doing this. I am not alone.

  3

  September 19, 1991

  Ramsey Miller had been awake for thirty-two hours when he stopped his truck for the hitchhiker.

  Usually he preferred solitude. Maybe some local FM station (music, never talk radio—the beauty was in getting away from talk); maybe just the engine’s hum and his own thoughts, while the forests and fields and mountains slid past. Not that he objected in principle to helping a stranger move from Point A to Point B. But strangers always felt the need to talk—about nothing or, worse, about something. Life lessons, road wisdom... whatever foolishness they were urgent for you to hear. As if they were doing you the favor. And when they weren’t trying to impress you, they were stinking up the upholstery with cigarette ash or worse. After the first year of driving his big rig, Ramsey swore off hitchhikers entirely.

  In the six years since, he’d made only two exceptions. First one hardly counted: no older than thirteen or fourteen, walking along the narrow shoulder of the eastbound side of I-80 at sunrise, middle of nowhere, PA, thumb in the air while sheets of rain pummeled her. From fifty yards off, she could’ve been a kid. Wasn’t till she was in the cab and shivering that Ramsey decided she was slightly older than that.

  “I’m going to New York,” she said through chattering teeth, arms wrapped around herself.

  No luggage, no umbrella. Soaked hair and clothes. After she was settled in with the heater blasting, Ramsey radioed ahead and deposited her at the nearest exit, where a couple of cops were waiting to get to the bottom of that particular tragedy.

  The second hitchhiker was female, too, but older—probably older than Ramsey. Her hair was graying and chopped real short, but she wasn’t bad looking—she was someone you might take up space with in a bar near closing time and think, Sure, okay. This was back a few years, when Allie was early in her pregnancy and the two of them got to arguing sometimes about nothing. The argument had occurred just as he was leaving for eleven days on the road.

  About ninety minutes later—too soon for the road’s gentle rhythms to ease his temper—he saw the woman thumbing a ride on the Jersey Turnpike, a handful of miles north of the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

  He slowed to a stop, waited for her to come over, and said hop in. A couple of hours later, past the DC beltway, she was hopping out again. It was Saturday, and all they’d done was listen to part of a Top-40 countdown. She’d been an ideal passenger: quiet, nonsmoking. He took an exit to refuel and let her off, stopping at the edge of a flat of asphalt away from the fuel pumps and the other trucks. She got her backpack from the floor by her feet and said, “I sincerely appreciate the lift.”

  “You do, huh?” Ramsey said. “Then how about a kiss?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said, hand on the door. It was locked.

  Ramsey didn’t especially want to kiss her, but the embers of his argument with Allie still burned, and he had the vague sense that he was owed something by somebody. “What are you, a dyke or something?”

  “I’d like to get out now.” The woman was glancing back and forth between Ramsey and her side window, her hand still on the door.

  He waited long enough—six, seven seconds—before pressing the power unlock. “Yeah, okay.”

  He watched her leave the truck and walk quickly toward the safety of others, his self-loathing already cresting like a wave.

  That ain’t you anymore, he repeated to himself later that afternoon, seated at the end of a neon-lit bar just off the interstate that stank of piss and sawdust. He pounded shots of well whiskey and thought about how in the past he’d been responsible for all kinds of meanness. His heart had, at times, been black, and he knew he was a lucky SOB to have escaped his teenage years—and, let’s be honest, his twenties—without crossing that invisible line you can’t ever uncross. But all that was in the past. He’d worked so fucking hard to become a changed man. A family man, and soon to be a father.

  That ain’t you anymore.

  Afternoon bled to evening. He drank hard and woke up puking his guts out in his truck in the Walmart lot, no memory of the half-mile walk from his seat at the bar. He wasted half the next day washing his bedding in some laundromat and scrubbing the fabric in his cab until the stench was gone and the stains faded, reaffirming with each wipe of the rag his vow never again to stop for hitchhikers.

  Now, this third and last time, he was doing it for his own safety. Company policy and federal laws were already being violated—he was fudging the log book and was way over the eighty-two-hour limit—but these were no longer concerns. All that mattered was getting home by Friday afternoon.

  He had been seriously revved all week, content only with his foot on the gas, and had logged as many miles in seven days as another trucker might in ten or eleven. Jersey to Memphis to Kansas City to Phoenix. He was due home, 2,500 miles away, in three days, but all his life he’d wanted to see how the real Grand Canyon matched up against the pictures he’d seen. So he took the extra day and drove north, trusting his juices to keep flowing at the same rate they had been, until he was home again safe and sound.

  A miscalculation.

  Now it was Thursday night. An hour earlier, the sun had dipped below the tree line behind him, and with 1,100 miles still to go, every part of him was sagging and slowing. It dawned on him that his body, being a body, needed sleep.

  A few years back, he’d have gone pharmaceutical. Now he cycled through the lawful tricks—air conditioner full blast, heavy metal station roaring, face slaps, extra large Diet Coke, fast food fries—and they all helped push him through Missouri to the Illinois border. But that left fourteen hours, more or less. And while the truck’s fuel tank might’ve been full, Ramsey himself was out of gas—besides which, his time spent at the Grand Canyon had left him feeling magnanimous. So when the truck’s headlights fell on the man thumbing a ride on the shoulder of I-70, Ramsey put on the brakes.

  “You’re a kind soul,
” the man said over the engine’s idle. He looked as if hitchhiking were his chosen profession: all-weather jacket, thick shock of gray hippie hair tied into a ponytail, huge backpack.

  Ramsey waited while the man climbed aboard, stuffed his backpack by his feet, and strapped on the safety belt.

  “This ain’t your first ride in a rig,” Ramsey said.

  “Brother, you got that right.” The man shuffled in the seat, trying to find a suitable position. “All I ask is that you deposit me a little further along this road than I was when you met me.”

  “Can do,” Ramsey said. “But I got a favor to ask.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I’ll be honest with you—I don’t ever pick nobody up these days. But I’m dog tired, and I need help staying awake so I can get home.”

  “Sorry, friend—but I been clean for over a decade.”

  Ramsey shook his head. “I mean talking. Conversation—so I don’t nod off.”

  “Well, that I can do.” He adjusted the seatbelt. “Where’s home at?”

  “Jersey shore. North of Asbury Park.”

  “Bruce Springsteen.”

  “Yup.”

  The man nodded. “You regular tired, or coming down off speed?”

  “I ain’t coming down off nothing,” Ramsey said. “But I wouldn’t call it regular tired, neither.”

  They were far enough now from St. Louis that the sky was no longer tinted orange from all the lights. Traffic had thinned somewhat, and the outlines of woods lining the highway faded in the encroaching dark. Soon Ramsey could stop worrying about the deer. He knew to plow on through—a deer won’t damage your cab too bad—but the road was dominated by fools who jerked their cars from lane to lane and slammed on their brakes to avoid twigs and jackrabbits and imaginary things, never noticing the semi in the next lane. So he was always glad when the deer hour ended and dusk darkened to actual night.

  “How long you been on the road?” the man asked.

  “Six days, 4,200 miles,” Ramsey said.

  The man let out a low whistle, either impressed or skeptical. “But no speed?”

  “Sober as a judge.”

  “No wonder you’re tired.”

  Ramsey sighed. “No wonder I am.”

  “You overdue for a break?”

  “Like I said, gotta get home.”

  They watched the windshield a moment, and then the man said, “Looks like I just may be your fairy godmother.”

  “Now how’s that?” Ramsey asked.

  The man shimmied a little in his seat and pulled his wallet from the back of his blue jeans. “You aren’t in the habit of giving lifts,” the man said, “and I’m not in the habit of offering this particular piece of assistance.” He removed something from his wallet and held it up for Ramsey to glance at. A driver’s license.

  “I can’t read it in the dark.”

  “Well, it says Class A.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Ramsey said.

  “Quit driving in eighty-six—flatbed for five years, dry van for ten. Name’s Ed Hewitt.”

  “Glad to know you, Ed,” Ramsey said.

  They went another half mile before Ed asked, “Am I being too subtle?”

  “Come again?”

  “You’re fading, man—I’m offering to drive for a spell so you can recharge.”

  Ramsey looked over at Ed. “You aren’t serious.”

  “I most certainly am.”

  “I never heard of a hitcher driving the truck,” Ramsey said. “That’d be a first.”

  “I imagine it would—but I been in lots of trucks, and you look more beat than fellows coming down hard. You sure you aren’t...”

  “I told you, I don’t do that,” Ramsey said. “Not since the kid was born.”

  Ed nodded. “Well, the way I see it, if we help each other out these next few hours, it’ll raise the odds that we’re both alive when the sun comes up.”

  The idea was absurd. Yet over these last few months, Ramsey had learned to trust the universe rather than his own limited understanding of it. And when fate drops a hippie with a Class A commercial driver’s license into your cab, the best course of action might well be to switch seats and catch a few hours of overdue dreams—especially with so much to do these next couple of days.

  So he slowed the truck again and stopped it in the shoulder, and once the two men had exchanged seats, Ramsey gave Ed a brief tutorial. But the guy didn’t need one. He wasn’t bullshitting. He worked the clutch like he’d never retired.

  Maybe you are my fairy godmother, Ramsey thought as Ed accelerated to the speed of traffic. “She’s gonna shimmy some—I’m carrying balloon freight.”

  “Got it.”

  “And it’s windy out there.”

  “I know,” said Ed. “I was walking in it.”

  “And remember, you get stopped for anything, it’s bigger trouble than either of us needs.”

  “But no bigger than dying,” Ed said, “which is what I see happening if we let you stay behind the wheel much longer.”

  “Fair enough,” Ramsey said, reclining way, way back.

  He dreamed again of flying. This time, a gentle summer breeze carried him high over the ocean like a lone gull dipping in and out of the clouds. Not since he was a kid had his dreams been so vivid and wondrous. He swooped down over walls of baitfish moving in unison and shimmering in the sunlight. Bluefish and bonita glided through the water alongside flashier, supersaturated fish that his dream transplanted from the Caribbean. He could smell the brine. Closer to the shoreline, jagged hills of orange and red coral jutted up from the ocean floor. If he were to dive under the surface, he knew he’d be able to breathe underwater. But he stayed in the air, where the sun warmed his skin.

  When he opened his eyes again, he didn’t know where he was. His truck, the highway. A millisecond of panic—asleep behind the wheel!—until he noticed that he wasn’t behind the wheel. He looked over to his left, and the rest fell into place.

  In front of him, the truck’s headlights cut into dark empty lanes. The canopy of stars overhead revealed no sign of morning. The dashboard clock showed 5:12.

  “You could’ve woke me any time,” Ramsey said, rubbing his eyes.

  “No need to interrupt a peaceful ride.”

  “Whereabouts are we?”

  “We went through Columbus about forty minutes back.”

  “What’d you do at the weigh stations?”

  “Pretended they didn’t exist.”

  Ramsey massaged his neck, unstiffening it. “We’re making good time.”

  “Not bad. Though I sure could use a pit stop about now.”

  “Next rest area, I’ll buy you breakfast. You earned it.”

  “Can do.”

  Ramsey yawned and shut his eyes again, feeling the engine’s hum, the road beneath him, the soft push of air past the windows. When they exited the highway a while later, the blackness around them had become infused with hints of blue and gray. The border between tree and sky was starting to become visible.

  Today. Ramsey’s heart rate quickened at the thought. Today, it begins.

  After sleeping all those hours, the remainder of the drive was nothing. Ramsey reached the Toys“R”Us distribution center in Wayne, New Jersey, by 9:30. It was a frequent stop, and he trusted the dock supervisor to have him in and out. Sure enough the unload moved, easy paperwork, and by noon he was pulling into the Monmouth Truck Lot.

  The office was a narrow trailer up on cinder blocks. Inside, the walls were wood paneled, the floor linoleum. Same as when he’d bought his truck five years earlier. Probably the same as twenty years before that. On the grassy lot itself, trailers and cabs sat like vast tombstones surrounded by swaths of reedy weeds. Nothing about the place hinted at a successful business, but Bob Parkins, the owner, knew more about trucks than anyone Ramsey had ever met. Ramsey had bought his sleeper cab and trailer here on a tip from his fleet manager after two years of driving a company truck. Hard to say whether the move
from employee to dedi-cated owner-operator was worth it, but the tip on where to purchase had been sound. Ramsey came away with a dependable truck at a fair price. Since then, he returned whenever his rig needed servicing beyond what he himself could do.

  A counter split the trailer down the middle. Behind it were a couple of desks with papers piled everywhere, Bob’s filing system. In a corner of the trailer, on the customer side, was an upended milk crate, and on it sat a coffeemaker, a stack of Styrofoam cups, and a container of powdered creamer.

  “Help you?”

  The guy behind the counter was some kid with a faded blue collared shirt and stupid-looking spiky hair.

  “Where’s Bob at?” Ramsey asked.

  “Took the afternoon off,” the kid said.

  “You gotta be... ” He felt the heat climb and took a breath. “Bob said he’d be in till three today. I talked to him from the road, coupla days ago. I made sure.”

  The kid shrugged. “Weather got good, and he hasn’t had a day off in forever. He went fishing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘weather got good’?”

  The kid nodded toward the window. “You know—sunny. Warm.”

  There was a time before Ramsey started driving when he considered buying a fishing boat and chartering it out. The risks ended up being too great—bad weather, red tides, polluted water, expensive insurance—but you didn’t need to be sea smart to know that today was no fishing day. “Wind’s blowing hard out of the northeast. There’s gotta be four- to six-foot seas out there.”

  The kid shrugged again. “I wouldn’t know about it.”

  “You don’t fish?”

  “Nah, never did.”

  “Your old man never took you?”

  “My old man’s a piece of shit.”

  Ramsey sized the kid up some more. Shirt too large in the shoulders and neck. Probably a hand-me-down from the piece-of-shit himself.

  “So Bob ain’t coming back today?” Ramsey said it more to himself than to the kid. He was counting on Bob being here, making everything nice and easy.

  “That’s what taking the afternoon off means.”

  “You being smart with me?” When the kid’s eyes narrowed, Ramsey backed off. The kid’s name was Frank, according to the tag on his chest. He couldn’t be older than twenty or twenty-one, and he had a lousy old man and a crappy haircut and God only knew what else. “Forget it. Listen, Frank. Bob sold me my truck five years ago. I need to sell it.”