Nobody but Us

by Kristin Halbrook

  “We need that,” is all he says.

  Then why does he keep going? Why doesn’t he stop, why doesn’t he turn around? We can find the bag, pick up any bills that fell out.

  The tension hisses and sputters between us like an angry snake, but he won’t look at me. Just the road. The road, and the speedometer as the needle climbs well above ninety. He’s thinking, I can tell, and above everything else, I want to know what he’s thinking about. I want to understand what just happened between us, what happened at the restaurant. Why he doesn’t stop to get the money. But he’s acting like I’m not here, so I bury my head in my arms and let go of the frustration. I scream. Then I start to cry.

  His hand is in my hair, covering my head.

  “Zoe.”

  I’m not capable of responding to him. My tears are the Missouri River during heavy snowmelt. They choke my speech and suffocate my lungs. The car slows.

  “Zoe. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Zoe. Please. I didn’t mean to say that. I’m an asshole.” He pulls off the road and yanks the key from the ignition. He reaches for my face. “No one calls you names anymore. No one. Especially me.” His eyes dart back and forth between mine. His voice is husky. “I’m sorry. I’m—Say something.”

  I put my hand over his, over his arm that is creating a bridge between us, and open my mouth to say something, to make some noise that would fix everything, though I don’t know what. A rhythm of shuddering hiccups takes over and I shake my head.

  “Zoe.” He pulls me to him, but it’s awkward, like he’s not sure he’s allowed to bring me close. “I’m sorry.” There’s anguish in his voice, and part of me wants it to be there, wants him to suffer, but a bigger part doesn’t. And he’s not alone in being wrong. I hit him.

  I want to crawl into his lap, soak in the comfort of his apology, radiate my own until it’s all better.

  “Will. I’m sorry, too.”

  He moves his hand around to my shoulder and pulls me in close, just like I wanted. I’m the bad person and yet I still got what I wanted. My father understood that when I was a bad person, I couldn’t have what I wanted. He knew the punishment would atone for whatever I’d done wrong. Will kisses my head, and it’s a bandage on my bruised heart, but the guilt lingers.

  “Ain’t nothing for you to be sorry about. I deserved that.”

  I shake my head again.

  “No. Nobody—” I clamp my mouth shut, because who am I to say the words I want to say? Who am I to say that nobody deserves to get hit? Didn’t my father punish me because he needed to, because it was all my fault? “There will never be hitting between us. Ever.”

  “You do whatever you need to do when I step out of line. Anything. Don’t let me get away with nothing, understand?”

  I kiss him hard, once, twice. Throw my arms around him and nod because he expects me to, but I can’t live that life again. How hard will it be to dig out of that dark place that believes people deserve to be treated like punching bags forever?

  “Nobody calls you names.”

  I nod again. He tucks me in as close as he can. The steering wheel wedges into my side.

  He kisses my tears, my nose. “I love you.”

  His words, his tone soothe me, and I work on slowing my breathing. Steadying my shaking limbs. The strangely free and powerful feeling from letting myself get angry and fight back scares me. I don’t want to love the slap of my hand on someone else’s face. I can’t be that person.

  “I am sorry,” I insist. “No hitting. Let’s make the rule now. Never, to no one we love.”

  “Okay.”

  “Forgive me?”

  He makes a disbelieving sound. “There will never come a day when I got to forgive you for keeping me in line.”

  I want to make him say he forgives me, I want him to understand how I can’t become a monster, but I know in his own way he already has.

  “We have to go back and get the money.”

  “We can’t.”

  “I bet it’s right off the road, Will. We can find it!”

  “No. It was stolen anyway.”

  I don’t understand why that would matter now. Now that his wallet’s gone and we have nothing.

  “What happened back there?”

  “The menu sucked.”

  “No.”

  I sit up, away from him, and he looks at me. There is no humor in his eyes. No devilish grin on his face. But there isn’t anger, either. I saw that when I showed up at school with a new bruise. No, this light in his eye is uncontrolled and wild. I’ve never seen it before, but I know what it is. People like me know it on instinct.

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  WILL

  IF I TELL HER SHE’LL FREAK OUT.

  If I don’t tell her I’ll be a liar.

  I pull onto the road again. Gotta get miles between us and that diner. They’re silent miles. Ugly miles.

  She’s waiting for my answer. Waiting like she got time, and she ain’t letting it go until I tell her something. I think about the right thing to do, about what a real man would do in this situation, and all I can come up with is that a real man wouldn’t be in this situation. Just fucked-up failures with too short of a fuse like me.

  “It was a news story. It just wasn’t a good one.”

  Her look is so intense it’s like she’s touching me. But her hands are in her lap, twisting under the pressure of my mood. She don’t wanna come near me until she knows what the hell’s going on.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Not a good one?”

  I roll down the window and stick my arm out to catch the cold. The air is this mixture of sand and weeds and it used to smell like freedom but now I ain’t sure what it smells like. I ain’t sure of anything but Zoe and how I’ll do anything for her and of this road that stretches out in front of us for miles and miles. I just don’t know if the miles are long enough.

  “We could go to California now. Don’t stop in Vegas. Meet Misty. Or … you wanted to see Mexico, right? We could do that. Just keep driving. All the way to Mexico. Get tans. Blend in. Drink tequila on the beach. Really be free.”

  Zoe’s hands stop fussing.

  “What? Will … I don’t care about Mexico. And I don’t have a passport. What does Mexico have to do with anything? Will, stop the car. Stop it!”

  I do like she says, ’cause for the first time I can remember, I need someone to tell me what to do. The decisions I make on my own are crap. I need Zoe to lead me now.

  We stop in a pit of sandy dirt and she gets out. She’s waiting for me, but if I get out, I gotta tell her the truth. I squeeze the steering wheel and remind myself to stop being a wuss.

  She’s staring out over the desert when I reach her. There’s a scorpion a few feet from where we’re standing, but she don’t notice it. I’m fascinated by the curl of its tail, the armor on its back. I feel worse-equipped for this life than an insect I could smash under my heel. I stamp my foot in its direction and it scurries under a shrub.

  She reaches for me. “What happened?”

  This is better. I just had to get out of the car, out from under the noise of the engine, the noise in my head. The car is silent and so is the desert and I can figure this out. I’m gonna tell Zoe everything, ’cause there ain’t gonna be no secrets and we can handle anything together.

  “He’s dead.”

  She don’t say nothing for a minute. I hear her swallow.

  “Who?”

  “The guy. The one at the store.”

  All I hope for is that she don’t run and hide under a bush like the scorpion.

  “The one you hit with the bottle?”

  I don’t nod or nothing, but she knows ’cause she don’t ask no more questions. We stare at the slope of low bush hills in the distance.

  “Just tell me. Don’t make me ask how it happened—or what happened.”

  So I tell her what I saw on the TV in the diner. About how the guy went home in a bad mood and yelled at his wife and went to bed
but never woke up. About how the brain hemorrhage grew and grew until it finally killed him. About the woman who was in the parking lot with her kid when she heard a commotion in the store and saw two teenagers run out. About how much of our profiles was caught on grainy black-and-white film. And about the make, model, and color of car the police were looking for.

  But I don’t tell her about how, if I don’t think about what it all means as I’m telling her, I can pretend I ain’t afraid.

  I turn around and glare at the car, like it’s all that piece of junk’s fault.

  Zoe ain’t looking at the desert no more. Her eyes are closed tight and her arms hug her body in a knot. She never interrupted me when I was talking. Now it’s like she’s trying to figure out what to say, making sure they’re the right things to say.

  “That’s why we can’t go back for the money.”

  I make a noise.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “You don’t gotta do nothing. You didn’t do nothing. This is all me.”

  She turns toward me, and those arms that were holding her together wrap around me.

  “Oh my God.” Her voice is high-pitched. “We have to—”

  “Do what, Zoe? Turn ourselves in? We can’t do that. It was an accident. Know what’ll happen if we turn ourselves in? You’ll go back to your dad and they’ll put me away for years. I’m legal. There’s no juvie for me now. And they got me on assault, kidnapping, theft, and now … this. I’m done. Is that what you want?” I grip her to me like she can erase it all. My heart races but I take a deep breath of her scent to slow the panic. No one’s ever helped me hold on to that calm place like she can. If we can just get out of this and get … somewhere, I know she could always keep me right. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “But they don’t! And nobody will give a shit that I didn’t mean it.”

  “They know your car. And—and she has your wallet. She recognized your car, she knows who you are, and they’ll know I’m with you, and there’s nothing we can do now.” She steps back from me. Her hands twist. She’s trying hard to hold on to that place that comes just before hysterical. “We have to explain that it was an accident!”

  I grab her shoulders.

  “Vegas is a big city. We can get lost there. We just gotta get there. I’ll get rid of the car. Sell it. That’ll give us some money. Change my name and find a job that pays cash. I know what to look for. I’ll do whatever I can until it all blows over. Or we can go somewhere else. California. I’ll pick oranges. We know that it was an accident, but they don’t and they’ll do everything they can to make me out like a—like a … I don’t know what.” I know what I am, but I can’t say it. The word burns in my throat.

  It ain’t what I am.

  “We just gotta keep going. I’ll take care of you. We’re gonna be okay, promise. I promise.”

  “You can’t promise that, Will. People have seen us. They know we’re going to Vegas. We can’t get lost there. No one gets lost when they’ve killed someone. They’ll find us. They will.”

  Her words cut me. I’ve killed someone. I ended a life. This feeling that I ain’t human anymore, that I’m less than a person because I took someone else’s life—that I owe them part of mine now—it don’t seem to care that I didn’t mean to do it. That it was an accident. And the cops won’t care that I didn’t mean it. They’re gonna be after us now even if they weren’t before.

  “Then we’ll keep going,” I choke out, desperate to soothe her and me, too. I can drive. Just keep going until we get to that place where everyone understands accidents happen and people need to be saved. “All the way to the ocean, okay?”

  “We can’t run forever.”

  “I’ll take care of you. Like you take care of me.”

  I kiss her all over, like it can make everything better. I promise, I say, every time my lips touch her cheek or her neck or her mouth. I promise I’m gonna step up and take care of this and of you and it will be okay.

  ZOE

  I’M NOT PREPARED FOR THE PHONE TO RING. THE sound cuts through the heavy silence in the car like a drill pressed to my earlobe. I jump as Will checks the screen.

  “I don’t know the number,” he says. His voice is raspy as though his throat has seized up on him, refusing to cooperate.

  He extends his hand, his fingers loose around the phone. The ringer sounds again. The area code’s North Dakota. What if it’s the cops? I should let it go to voice mail, make whoever it is leave a message, pretend we don’t exist anymore.

  No.

  Even when everyone pretended I didn’t, when it was easier to look the other way.

  I existed.

  I exist.

  I press the TALK button and hold the phone to my ear but don’t say anything. They have to hear my breathing. It’s so loud.

  “Hello? Is someone there?”

  I know that whispered voice. Lindsay. I swallow.

  What am I supposed to say to her? How much do I tell her? How did she even get this number? My fingers shake as I consider hanging up on her.

  Except, she might have news. Something about my dad, or Will, or the police.

  “Hello?” I gasp out the word, cough, try again. “Hello? Lin?”

  I hear her sounds, mewling sounds and fearful sounds and hiccupping sounds. She sniffs, loud enough to fill my ear completely.

  “Lin? Are you okay? How did you get this number?”

  “Caller ID,” she sniffs. “I erased it, though. Not that it matters. Hardly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you hear me tell my mom you were Gabe when you called, day before yesterday?”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “And then Blaire was there?”

  “I heard her, too.” She needs to hurry up. Say what she needs to say. It’s too hard to focus on anything but a dead man. “Why?”

  Lindsay takes a deep breath before going on. “Blaire picked up another phone. The one in my parents’ room. She listened the whole time we were talking.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m too busy trying to remember if I’d said anything that I shouldn’t have. There was no mention of Vegas, no telling her which direction we were headed. Just that I was okay. Not to worry. Not to say I called.

  “She wanted to get on and tease me, I know, but then she heard your voice and listened. I didn’t even hear her pick up. I can’t believe I didn’t hear her. I was so excited to hear where you’d gone.”

  “But I didn’t tell you anything.”

  “She told my mom and dad that I talked to you. And they called the police. And grounded me forever.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. I’m gonna kill Blaire, though.”

  “I shouldn’t have called. That was stupid.”

  “I’m glad you called. Except the police came over to ask me a million questions and made me feel guilty. And then … that’s not all. The FBI came, too. Afterward. Kept asking if Will was dangerous, if I thought he made you go with him, like with a weapon. I said of course not, and they kept asking where you were, but even Blaire said you didn’t tell us where you were.”

  “The FBI?” I whisper, my thoughts flailing too much to catch hold of. The seriousness—the way Lindsay makes it out to be so grave and terrible—isn’t rooting itself in my brain. The FBI is bigger, worse, than the police. They can follow us anywhere. We can’t get away.

  “It’s my fault, Lin. I shouldn’t have called and gotten you involved. And now you could get in trouble if they find out you’re talking to me again.”

  “It’s okay. I borrowed Gabe’s phone. They won’t know.” Lin’s voice halts; she clears her throat before starting up again.

  “But, Zoe, I think they know where you are. Or at least where you’re headed. There’s footage from this store between here and Nevada. The agents made me watch it. It looked like … it looked like you. Kind of. And Will. They asked if I recognized th
e people in the video. I saw this big guy shake y—the girl. And then the other guy … but the quality was really bad. I told them it was too hard to tell. That wasn’t you, was it? You’ve never been to Nevada, never tried to—” She took another breath and lowered her voice again.

  “That man died, Zoe. And now they think you’re going to Vegas. Now there’s more charges against Will and people in suits are coming over. … Tell me that it’s not true, that it wasn’t you in that video. Are you really okay?”

  I press my nose against the cold window and stare at the silhouetted shrub and rock shapes as we speed by them. There’s got to be someplace out there where people who don’t mean to do anything wrong can go and live and make it all right again. A place that doesn’t tear them apart or hurt their friends. Happiness can’t just be a myth.

  “I’m okay, really. I don’t know what you saw on that video.” I close my eyes now, fighting the hopeless feeling that is creeping over me like clammy fingers. “I haven’t seen it. But I’m okay. And Will’s okay.”

  I know I’m rambling, but I don’t want to say something that’s a lie and I don’t want to tell her too much because it’s not her fault, not at all, and yet things—information—get away from us sometimes.

  “I’m okay, Lin. Believe that. And … happy to be with Will. If anyone asks again, you can tell them I one hundred percent went on my own. I want to be here, I need to be here. Everything will work out just fine. I think—I won’t call for a bit, but you can call here on someone else’s phone, if they won’t tell.”

  “I’ll call again. In a couple of days. Or if anything else happens here, okay?”

  “Okay. Talk to you soon.”

  I press the END CALL button and immediately begin to despise the phone, want to crush it slowly under the heel of my shoe. I don’t know where else to direct my anger, my sadness. Instead, I hand the phone back to Will, gently.

  “They know where we’re going,” I tell him.

  WILL