A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  “Thanks,” I said. “I guess we took the long way. It’s impossible to get a signal out here. We got lucky and headed the right way.”

  “Don’t need a signal,” he said, flashing a strange smile that seemed to be testing something in the air. “You just need to know where you’re going. Everyone around here does. Where are you girls from?”

  Penny skittered her eyes over mine. He was watching us closely now, following her gaze. She took the crate from me and balanced it on her hip. “Tehacama,” she said, and I was glad the woman wasn’t around for the lie.

  “Service isn’t much better there. I weld for Mentco. We do all the cell towers. Our parents did fine without them. You ask me, we’ll keep doing fine. I’m out in Tehacama sometimes. Where do you girls work?”

  “We actually have to start heading back,” I said. Penny inched closer to the door.

  “I’ll follow you out.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. We’ll be fine,” I said.

  The man came out of the kitchen. He was wearing an expression on his face I wasn’t sure how to read; his lower jaw tightening, as if there was something there he was missing—a wad of chew, some gum. “You girls aren’t really from Tehacama,” he said.

  “Does it matter?” Penny asked. It came out a degree too sharp, her patience spent. The distance we had already traveled, how far we had yet to go.

  “It does when I ask you.”

  “And who are you?” she asked.

  “You don’t know. You don’t have any idea.”

  Penny shrugged. “I know this place feels like the Twilight Zone.”

  “I was going to do you girls the favor.”

  “We don’t need your favors.” Penny said, her hand already on the door. “Do we?”

  * * *

  —

  Outside the night was packed like tight black wool, the wind picking up. The gravel crunched under our boots on the way to the truck. Penny cooed to the puppy in a nonsensical language I had not previously thought her capable of. She climbed in and set the box between her feet on the floor of the cab. There was no choice now but to use the brights. When I turned them on the ground in front of us sprang to life in all its minutiae, the rabbitbrush leaves reflecting like small, strange dinosaur parts in the light. Only when we had locked the doors and had our seat belts on did I look down at the small animal peeking out of the milk carton, his black eyes glinting in the dark.

  We were turning left out of the lot when I heard the sound behind us, the squeaking hinges of a door. In the rearview mirror the man was running out down the front steps of the trailer toward a hulking 4x4 parked in the corner of the lot. There was nothing in his hands.

  I tried to form Penny’s name in my mouth, my tongue lifting and falling, over several seconds, to form a consonant, a vowel. Penny twisted around in her seat to get a better look. When he started the engine it was the same monstrous sound, loud and guttural, that had engulfed the park earlier. It wasn’t until he switched on the lights that we could finally see it: one of those modified zombie off-roaders on lifts, custom headlights, a full light cage strapped to the hood. He flipped on the cage and our rearview was flooded with light so bright that our skin became translucent. One of us let out a cry, and even I couldn’t tell the difference between us. He switched off the cage again, and we were made blind, spots floating in our field of vision.

  “Maybe he forgot something at the store.” My voice was lost somewhere in the cab.

  “Drive,” Penny said. Her voice more clear than I’d ever heard it. “Go now.”

  29

  “Cale?” The baby-faced doctor stood up behind his massive desk, squinting across the room. Lamb was somewhere down the hall with his fat, redheaded nurse. Every time this place managed to feel like the captain’s quarters in a luxury cruise ship: the gold-thread carpet and desktop hourglass, his diplomas framed on the wall. The fentanyl I stole from Lamb’s bathroom slithered through my system, making everything cotton candy soft. I laid my head against the doorjamb, trying my best not to puddle into the carpet.

  I had snuck into the house sometime after midnight, feeling my way up the stairs in the dark. For hours I lay curled in bed, twitching at every creak of the house settling, the wind whistling outside, the dogs’ nails clicking on the hardwood floors. Finally, after dawn, I heard the front door slam, Lamb leaving for his doctor’s appointment alone. I crawled out of bed to the hall and picked up the phone to dial Penny’s number, listening to it ring. But when the time came to leave a message, I couldn’t decide what to say. Maybe we both needed a day alone to repair. Maybe I ought to preserve my words, my limbs, my parts, my wits.

  “Come here,” the doctor said. “What happened to you?”

  I walked to him on unsteady legs, conscious of his attention. He came around his desk and stopped me, closing his cool, spongy hands around my arms. He palpated my neck and shoulders, probing the sides of my chest. He pressed a tender spot under my breast and I cried out, gulping air. This close, I could make out a small spattering of sunspots along his forehead and the top of one cheek. He was not as young as I imagined, though it was his displeasure aging him now. His censure, like Lamb’s, nearly too much to bear.

  “Stand up straight.”

  “I am.”

  “What did you take?”

  “Nothing. One of Lamb’s suckers.”

  “You can’t do this right now. You understand? Talk to someone, I don’t know. But this—”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?” He lifted my chin with a finger, manifesting a penlight from the deep pocket of his coat. I had already seen my reflection in Lamb’s bathroom mirror. My right eye was swollen to a discolored slit, a deep gash bisected the brow, a nasty purple stain mottling the top right quadrant of my face. The doctor probed the fragile orbital bone.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last night.” My voice like something left out in the sun to dry.

  He clicked off the penlight. “There’s nothing to do for those ribs but to take it easy. You’re lucky nothing’s broken. If you waited any longer I might not have been able to sew you up.”

  “Can’t I see him first?”

  The look on his face, enough to shame me. “He hasn’t seen you?”

  “I got home late.”

  He shook his head, moving away from me to his desk. He pulled out a drawer and slammed it shut, then another. I waited while he found what he was looking for, hauling out a tiered white box. He pulled out a pair of gloves, gauze, swabs, sterile packages of tweezers, clamps, suture thread. He ripped open an alcohol swab. “Don’t move.”

  “Aren’t you going to numb the—”

  He tapped a cotton swab against the tight corner of my eyelid to relax. I felt the first prick and realized I was gripping a fistful of his coat. In ten minutes it was done. I forced myself to let go. He snapped off his gloves, discarded the trash.

  “Ice gently. Don’t touch. Come back in five days, I’ll take the stitches out. The bruising will take a couple weeks.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Down the hall, room seven. And Cale—”

  “I know.” I missed his hands, clinical but tender. I was in the market for healing, the long-term kind. I wanted to crawl under his desk and hide. “How long, do you think?”

  “We just took his blood. You can go back now.”

  “I mean, how long do you think he has?”

  The doctor had moved away to the other end of his desk. He opened a drawer, uncapped a pen. He was scribbling something on a notepad. I was grateful for his distraction, that he wasn’t a witness to the coveting all over my face, oozing from every pore.

  “Never as long as we would like,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of the long hall, I pressed my ear against the door of room seven
. No noise came from the other side, though a phone rang distantly from the doctor’s waiting room, a receptionist’s murmured tones. I felt for the doorknob and let myself in. Lamb sat on the edge of the exam table wearing only a cotton gown. His legs were a startling paper white, leanly muscled still, his knees two angular fists of bone. I had never seen these legs, I could swear it. We had lived years together in intimate proximity, yet here was a brand-new part of him I had forgotten to love. Lamb’s head was bent, his palms turned to the sky, as if waiting to receive a benediction. But Lamb didn’t pray, at least not that I was aware. When he looked up I watched it all bloom and wither on his face, taking in my cuts and bruises, my violation of his trust. His cheek twitched. I tried to hold myself apart; Maria from the panadería behind her mesh screen.

  “What did you do?”

  I grabbed one of his warm, supplicant hands in my own. He squeezed it hard enough to crush my bones to dust. I’m here, he meant, or fuck you.

  Since finding Lamb’s blood in the sink, I had been afraid—not that his illness was a contagion meant to seep into my life, but that it wouldn’t; that this obscure malignance was Lamb’s own, meant to alter him in some way I could never know, leaving me distinctly alone. He was still examining me closely, as if beyond the bruises, he was only beginning to notice an erosion of my character, a slipperiness, a willingness to distract from my own failures and turn them back into his own. I had been an honest child, I could only hope it would come full circle again. But how could Lamb be anything but impressed by my ingenuity, my ability to devolve so seamlessly in concert with life’s disappointments?

  He was still holding my hand; I pulled on it to straighten his arm, revealing a pinprick in the crook where the nurse had taken his blood. He hadn’t let her bandage it. A few times when I was a child, they had tried to draw mine. Terrified of the needle, I screamed until Lamb rolled up his own sleeve to offer his veins instead, as if we might be so close as to be interchangeable, as if even a spinning centrifuge couldn’t tell the difference between us.

  He squeezed my hand again, gentler now. This, the first time we had touched in months. Since childhood there had been the natural widening of physical boundaries between us, the long-dispensed habit of crawling into his lap, the comfort of being rocked to sleep. But I had always kept his gnarled hands for myself. I tucked my knuckles inside his palm, still a sheltering nest.

  Maybe the bruises reminded him I was fallible; maybe he was beginning to doubt my ability to survive without him. Maybe I was, too. Either way, one of us was softening, leaning toward the other in apology. And although I always thought it was Lamb who needed to bend, I suspect now that it was me. This entire time, I’ve been the one who needed to change.

  25

  When my vision finally cleared, the sand-colored man’s zombie was still in the rearview mirror, the sound of the throaty engine revving up. I turned left out of the trailer lot, following a barely perceptible curve in the dirt. It was impossible to make out where the path ended and the rest of the desert began. I drove down what I hoped was the center, my heart hammering in my chest. Penny kept one hand steady on the side of the milk carton, watching her side mirror. A moment later the zombie fell into the lane behind us, engine thrumming. His cage lights were so high they flooded our mirrors but offered little transparency to our measure of road.

  “You’ve never met him before, have you?”

  “Cale! Can’t you drive any faster?”

  I gassed the truck, speeding up, creating a wide cushion of space between our cars. We drove tense in our seats for a mile, maybe two. I imagined the raspy-voiced woman in the trailer addressing her only son. Maybe you’d better help those girls find the highway after all. Because the zombie was only tailing us to the on-ramp to make sure we didn’t get lost. I repeated it to myself, willing it to be true. Then the truck revved again, the man throttling the engine to close the gap between us in an instant, the 4x4 zooming so close its grille disappeared in the rearview. Penny screamed. I white-knuckled the wheel, bracing for impact.

  “What’s he doing?” I glanced at the mileage on the truck, then back to the road, trying to remember how long we’d driven from the exit to the trailer in the first place. Five miles? Seven? Was this the way we came? If there was a sign for the highway, I was afraid we would miss it now.

  The man tapped his horn, once, twice, making us jump in our seats. Penny grabbed my arm, her fingers pressing into the crescent-shaped wounds she’d left earlier on the mountain, still healing. She must have remembered it or decided I needed both hands on the wheel, because she let go. I pressed my foot on the gas and took us up to sixty. It felt like the gravel was flying by.

  “Go faster.” Penny twisted again in her seat to peer out the back window.

  “I can’t see anything! If we go any faster, we could crash into someone coming.” But if we didn’t speed up, if the zombie clipped our bumper, we would fly off-road into the gravel and whatever waited for us there: a ditch, a cluster of rocks, a tree. I stepped on the gas again, thinking of Lamb’s wife, her sharp turn on the mountain’s curve all those years ago. I didn’t need any help conjuring the image of a fatal car crash, our necks snapping in our seats. The zombie dropped back again, bouncing on his suspension. At any second he could close the distance between us. He was toying with us, enjoying the 4x4’s monstrous advantage over our truck, all of it a game to him. The snare drum of his engine echoed behind us as we drove, the modified exhaust mounting and falling. The brights helped a little, pushing back a few more feet of darkness, revealing more of the same pebbled earth and brush, clusters of rock, the occasional gleam from beer cans and broken glass bottles near the road. Beyond the jerky, roving cushion of our headlights, the night swallowed all.

  A small boulder the size of a basketball appeared in the headlights, coming too fast to avoid. It clipped our bumper and rolled underneath the truck, followed by a series of loud thumps and metallic screeches. Penny was saying something I couldn’t hear. I prayed the rock wasn’t sharp enough to rip out a brake cord. The puppy began a low and steady growl from the floorboard of the truck, a surprisingly full snarl for such a tiny body.

  “Shhh,” Penny said, her voice tight. She lowered a hand to stroke the animal behind the ears. “It’s okay.”

  In the rearview the zombie loomed up again, sweeping right to left and back again, zigzagging like a crab. If we fell back, he would clip us for sure.

  “Where’s your phone?”

  She rustled for it, tossing lipstick and compact into the console. The light brightened the cab. “Still no service.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She threw it at me. I jerked the wheel, the phone clattering against the console.

  “Are you crazy!”

  “Go faster!”

  “Fuck you!”

  Another cluster of rocks appeared ahead and I jerked the wheel, sending Penny slamming into the passenger door. The zombie followed our erratic path with distressing ease. But if we were patient, he would tire of his stupid game; he would drop back and change direction, he would turn around, leaving us shaken but alive. The off-roader zagged abruptly from behind, roaring up alongside. The sound was deafening.

  “Don’t look!” I screamed it, but we both did. He had his window down and was yelling, gesturing wildly. Pull over. Fat chance.

  “Drive faster!”

  “I can’t drive any faster! We’re going to fly out of the fucking windshield!”

  The zombie veered left and there was the long, high-pitched whine of metal kissing metal. Penny screamed, the puppy snarls interspersed with short, baby barks. The man was hollering, too, not making any sense. Fucking bitch. Cunt. Pull over. Pull over.

  My heart was threatening to burst out of my chest. Where were those red and blue police sirens when you needed them or, at the very least, another car? If I slammed the brakes, would we spin out? Crash? Would th
e truck flip? I could already imagine the windshield shattering into sharp, sparkling sand. Any minute now, and we would fly.

  He swerved the zombie close again. I took a deep breath and jerked the wheel sharply to the left, slamming on the brakes. The zombie shot past but the Ford shuddered, the sound of gears screeching against each other in all the wrong ways as we began to spin, the truck picking up momentum, whipping around so fast my hands flew off the wheel. Penny was still screaming; I was screaming, too. The entire truck tilting, tilting, tilting, a centimeter more and we would flip, a shower of rocks pinging at the undercarriage. I felt a wave of nausea and swallowed hard. Something thumped—God, not the dog, please—time stretched taffy-like and snapped back, the tires slamming on the dirt so hard our bodies bounced, the seat belt cutting into my neck, the puppy yelping. We came to a hard stop amid a smell of burning metal and rubber. A cloud of sand was settling around us, a delicate crystal rain.

  In the low light Penny’s cheeks looked wet. She stared straight ahead as if in shock. The puppy had stopped growling. It no longer made any sound at all. I would not look down. If we turn around and start first, he will let us go. I tried the gear. It was stuck. I wiggled the shift. Penny reached for my hand, her palm hot and clammy on my own. I shook her hand away.

  “Cale?”

  “Shut up!”

  I wiggled the gear until I was able to push it into park, fumbling with the keys, killing the engine. I felt as if I had run a mile, five miles, ten. I waited a beat. Turned the keys again.

  “Cale. What are you doing?”