The Passenger

by Lisa Lutz

  He had that right.

  “I’m no one,” I said.

  Reggie smiled. His teeth were yellow and gray. The last traces of fear left him. I shot out the window to get Reggie’s attention. He didn’t even flinch, while my entire body vibrated from the blowback.

  “Why don’t you get the hell out of here and we’ll call it a day?” he said as he got to his feet.

  I picked up the lighter fluid and doused the couch with it. Then I got the butane lighter by the stove and held it over the couch.

  “Make that call,” I said. “Or I’m going to burn this place down.”

  Reggie charged toward me. I shot him in the arm. He stumbled a few steps back, righted himself, and glanced over at his bloody arm. I didn’t bother giving him a second warning. I clicked the lighter. Within a few seconds the entire couch was engulfed and smoke had filled the room. I could see Reggie weighing his options. I tried to steer him in the right direction.

  “It’s over, Reggie. Why don’t we get out of here?”

  It seemed like some of the fight had left him. He stared at the blaze and then nodded his head. He turned around and slowly walked to the front door. I followed him, maybe a little too closely. He suddenly spun around and backhanded me. I fell to the ground. Reggie landed a solid kick to my ribs.

  I pulled the trigger. The second bullet hit him in the gut. He looked surprised. He took a few steps forward and crumpled to the ground moaning in pain. My eyes were watering from the smoke and fire. I got to my feet and headed for the door. Reggie tried to get up, but he kept falling down.

  “Show me some mercy,” Reggie said.

  “What do you want?” I said as I turned around.

  “I’m already dead. So shoot me right this time. You owe me that.”

  I thought that maybe I did. I raised the gun one last time.

  “God forgive me,” he said.

  I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him in the forehead. His head tipped to the side like he was taking a catnap. I ran out of the house, guzzling air when I stepped outside. I jumped into my Jeep, backed out of the driveway, and floored the gas until I was at the mouth of Reggie’s driveway. I stopped for a second and looked through the rearview mirror. The tiny house had been transformed into a wildfire.

  I hit the gas and pulled onto the main road. I drove maybe a quarter of a mile and then I heard the angry thunder and felt a series of small earthquakes. I pulled onto the shoulder and looked through my rearview mirror again. Reggie’s house was gone; just the fire remained, a fire as bright as day. It was then I realized it was over. I’d used up at least eight of my nine lives. I doubted I had much time left as a free woman. I thought I should see something beautiful.

  I drove to the Albany train station, parked my car with the keys in the ignition, and checked the departure board. There were no more trains that night. I bought a ticket for the ten a.m. Empire Service and checked into a cheap motel.

  I didn’t sleep. For seven hours, I stared at the stucco ceiling and saw Reginald’s face again and again—first that look of defiance and then resignation.

  If you murder someone once, even with a tenuous argument for self-defense, you can blame it on chance, being at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong name. But the next time you kill someone, you have to start asking the hard questions. Is it really self-defense or a lifestyle choice? When you kill another human being in cold blood, you kill part of yourself. Until that moment I had always hung on to a shred of the old me. I knew who I was deep down. It was different now. Ten years on the run, and I was finally the cold-blooded murderer they’d always said I was. My conscience would haunt me like a shadow. I would never be able to close my eyes again without seeing Reginald Lee’s face.

  THE NEXT MORNING I boarded the train to Niagara Falls. I held my gaze on the landscape for the entire six hours, trying to forget who I was and who I had become. When I detrained, I quickly checked into a lodge under the reliable, but expired, Sonia Lubovich name. I dropped my bags in my room and strolled straight to the falls.

  The sound was deafening. The mist felt cleansing. It was impossible to think of anything ugly standing before so much power and beauty. This would have been as good a place as any to throw in the towel. But I wasn’t quite ready for that. I took the gun out of my pocket and threw it into the falls. If that wasn’t the best place to dispose of a weapon, I don’t know what is.

  As it turns out, most people don’t visit Niagara Falls in winter. I had the luxury of walking the cold streets alone. All of the things you see in movies—the Maid of the Mist, the Cave of the Winds (that long wet walk along those red stairs)—were closed for the season. I remembered them from watching Niagara with my mother as a child. Mom idolized Marilyn Monroe. They were nothing alike, aside from unfortunate choices with men. Still, getting to see that giant frozen waterfall made me feel like an average tourist. I stayed outside as long as I could manage the cold. Then I strolled back to town, found a motel with a bar, and ordered an Irish coffee to warm my bones.

  I tried hard to sit quietly and enjoy the comforting burn of hot whiskey in my throat. I tried hard not to think about what the next day would bring, even though I had a clear and concise plan. I tried hard not to steal the wallet of the woman at the bar flirting with a man who paid her no mind. For her, the evening would provide a double insult, but I had to do it. Sonia Lubovich’s expired ID might not get me where I needed to go. The flirting woman, who would wake up alone and without her wallet, looked just enough like me, and I had found that that was all it took. I left the bar and stepped out into the cold air.

  You could hear the falls even back in town. I opened up her wallet and checked her ID. Moira Daniels was her name. She was an inch shorter than me, twenty pounds heavier, with long brown hair and blue eyes. I didn’t bother to say it out loud, or practice introducing myself, or conjure up a complete identity. Moira was just an ID in my pocket until I reached my final destination.

  On my way back to the hotel, I stopped by a drugstore and picked up some hair bleach, contact lens solution, and a new toothbrush. In my room I dyed my short brown hair blond. I’ve found that the more different you make yourself look from the photo, the more it’s chalked up to cosmetics. The smell of bleach lingered in the room and burned my nostrils as I slept. In the morning, I took a long shower since it would be the last one for a while. When I looked in the mirror, I still recognized myself. So I rinsed those terrifying blue contacts in solution and spent a good half hour shoving them back into my eyes. My lids were rimmed with a traumatized red by the time I was done. But I wouldn’t have known me anymore.

  I packed up and checked out of the motel. There was bus service to Buffalo, so I bought a ticket to avoid a ten-hour layover before my journey even began. I found a coffee shop with a view of the falls and made myself invisible for a while, downing one caffeinated beverage after the next. I took out one of my mobile phones and made a call. There was no answer, but I left a voice-mail message.

  “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t care what they do to me. I just want to come home. I want to be me again.”

  The next morning I boarded the Lake Shore Limited. I sat across from an older gentleman with the cloudy eyes of glaucoma. He smiled at what I imagined was the shadow of me. There was something comforting in knowing that I couldn’t really be seen. Although no one had seen me in a long time.

  “Good morning,” the old man said.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Heading home?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s always good to go home,” he said.

  I didn’t bother arguing with him.

  Nora Glass

  Chapter 27

  * * *

  WHEN I began the first leg of my journey home, I decided it was time to shrug off all of my other lives. I was going to be me again. The problem was I had spent so many years trying to tamp down the memory of me that it took some time to resuscitate it.

&
nbsp; Nora Jo Glass was the name on my birth certificate. I was born in Bilman, Washington, on March 15, 1987. I had two parents for a while. Naomi and Edwin Glass. Then I had one parent, after my father committed suicide. There were all kinds of speculation about why that happened. Some people thought he did it because he couldn’t provide for the family. The Glasses had had a grocery store in Bilman for as long as there were Glasses in Bilman. But that went under on my daddy’s watch. Some people think he offed himself because his wife was having an affair. I think he did it just because he was sad.

  At the time my childhood seemed far from ordinary—dead father; drunk, neglectful mother. In retrospect, it was the most ordinary part of my life. In light of the present, it was easy to revisit the distant past through a rosy filter. My early memories began to flood back as I gazed through the train window at the Ohio landscape drifting past me. My countdown began. I would be home in fifty-six hours.

  I HAD FREEDOM as a child and a teenager that I would never know again. My mother was either at work, drinking at the Sundowners, or out cold in bed, recovering from a hangover.

  I found places to go and things to do to fill my time. My best friend was Edie Parsons. She lived on the other side of town, in a four-bedroom, two-story house, the kind of home that families live in on television. It was just a three-mile bike ride from my house, but many nights I didn’t bother making the trip home.

  Freshman year of high school, I joined the swim team on a lark, just to escape. Edie joined at her parents’ insistence, to pad her college application. I discovered I had a talent for it. Freestyle and the backstroke were my races. I was more of a distance swimmer than a sprinter, but I always finished strong. My coach once told me that he thought I had more mental than physical strength. I knew what he meant. I could see the way my competition gave up. I watched Edie give up every day. She wasn’t like that in class, but she hated that desperate need for air. I didn’t mind that feeling you got underwater, when your chest felt like it was about to burst. Edie quit the team at the end of the year and started dating a guy in Everett. I no longer had her home as an escape, so I stayed at the pool as late as I could or rode my bike through town until the occasional police cruiser sent me home.

  I was okay in class, but all I really had was the water. It was the first time in my life I thought I might be better than average. Maybe great. It was the first time I found ambition. And then I fell in love with Ryan Oliver.

  I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Roland Oliver owned most of Bilman. He ran a construction firm, Oliver and Mead, and that was where my mother worked, as a receptionist. Roland was also the man my mother was sleeping with. Roland had two sons, Logan and Ryan Oliver. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know them. Logan was a year older, a few inches taller, and he had a shine on him that’s hard to describe. He made you want to look at him, even when you tried your hardest not to look. It was his smile that killed you. Maybe because he wouldn’t give it up all that often.

  It wasn’t just his good looks and the effortless way he could throw a football that drew me to him. Once, when I was eleven, I saw Logan beat the shit out of Mike Miles after Logan caught Mike bullying a local boy who had Down syndrome. I worshipped Logan after that. He seemed good and thoughtful. It was such a clichéd crush. My knees got weak and my tongue got tied whenever Logan was around.

  I got over it fast one afternoon when I followed Logan into the woods by the Waki Reservoir. I followed Logan often, I’m ashamed to say. I remember that afternoon. It was a warm, muggy day in May. I trailed Logan like a spy down to a place called Wildcat Alley, named for its feline infestation.

  I slipped behind shrubbery every time he looked over his shoulder. He never knew I was there. He never knew I saw him. Afterward he wondered what had changed, why I was the only one who could see beneath his shine. Simple. I was the only one who saw him pick up that stray cat and snap its neck. When I watched him do it, I first thought there had to be a solid explanation. Maybe the cat was sick and needed to be euthanized. It was the look on his face that told me otherwise. Logan enjoyed it. I didn’t mention the incident to anyone. I kept my distance after that.

  But Ryan Oliver was different. He was shy and quiet. He watched people as if he was trying to figure them out. Sometimes I caught him gazing in my direction. He’d always look away. Ryan never said much to me back then. He never spoke to the girls he saw lingering by his older brother. I think he felt embarrassed for them.

  Ryan was softer than Logan. If anyone messed with Ryan, Logan made sure they paid for it. There was no sibling rivalry, because Logan was better at everything—school, sports, girls. Ryan figured out at a young age that there was no point in competing. Besides, Logan never drew attention to his achievements. He was satisfied with winning quietly.

  The first time Ryan and I spent any time together was in the ninth grade. We were partners in a chemistry lab. We made a battery from a lemon and lit up a tiny Christmas-tree light, using zinc and copper nails to conduct the electricity. The class was accustomed to dramatic volcanic experiments; no one cared about the tiny light, except Ryan. I still remember that goofy grin he made when our bulb flickered on.

  Later, during a class kayaking trip to the Tacoma Narrows, we paired up again. As we rowed through Puget Sound, I remember hearing Ryan say my name over and over again with different inflections, testing the sound by emphasizing different syllables.

  “NO-ra, N-ora, No-RA. It just doesn’t sound right.”

  “You feeling all right, Ryan?” I asked.

  “My grandmother’s name is Nora. We call her Grandma Nora. It’s just weird calling you Nora. Do you have a middle name?”

  “Jo,” I said. “It’s short for Joseph, my granddad’s name.”

  “Jo. Jo, how’s it going, Jo? See you around, Jo,” Ryan said, testing it out. “I like it. If it’s all right with you, I’ll call you Jo.”

  Back then I liked the idea of being called something else. It never occurred to me that one day I’d pine for my old name.

  “It’s all right with me,” I said.

  FOR THE TEENAGERS of Bilman, the reservoir was the focus of our social life. On weekends you’d find a knot of inebriated students loitering on the rocky shore of the Waki Reservoir in a clearing called Stonehenge because of a few unusually placed boulders. I began supplementing school practice with my own workouts at the reservoir.

  Ryan showed up one afternoon. I found him on the shore as I climbed out of the water.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Making sure you don’t drown.”

  “I won’t drown.”

  “Probably not, but you shouldn’t swim unsupervised.”

  “That’s what you’re doing? Supervising?”

  “Yes.”

  Ryan supervised the next day and the day after that. Then it was a regular thing. Some days he’d watch me swim and sometimes I wouldn’t swim at all. We’d go for walks along Wildcat Alley or just sit against a giant boulder and smoke weed. People talked, people asked questions. I never had a need for a solid answer. I didn’t know what Ryan was to me. He was just someone I knew would be there. Because he was always there.

  Then one day he wasn’t. I went to the reservoir for my swim, and when I came out of the water, it felt like I was on an abandoned island. Ryan didn’t show up the next day, either. I called his house and his mother told me that he was “unavailable.” The third day, when I arrived at the reservoir, Logan was there instead. He put his arm around me and tried to sound all big-brotherly. He said things, things I’d remember only in fragments.

  You’re getting too attached.

  Boys are different.

  He can’t be with you.

  You’re not the kind of girl . . .

  I asked Logan why Ryan couldn’t tell me any of those things himself. Before I could stanch the flow, a single tear fell down my cheek.

  “Because he doesn’t like to see girls cry,” said Logan.
/>   “Do you?” I said. “Do you like it?”

  It looked like he did.

  AFTER THAT DAY, I kept my distance from Ryan, even when he tried to breach it. One day he had the nerve to ask me what was wrong. He asked to meet me at the reservoir. My answers were always nothing, no. Never more than a single-word response. He gave up after a while. He even gave up saying hello to me as we crossed paths in the hallways. Sometimes, I liked to pretend he was invisible or that I was.

  A swimming scholarship was the only way I was getting out of Bilman, and I wanted out. There were a few decent swimmers on the team, but no real competition, no one to challenge me. Not until Melinda Lyons moved to town.

  The first time I swam the freestyle against the new girl, Melinda beat me by a full body length. The days of taking it easy in practice were over. I doubled my practice time, now that Ryan was out of the picture. The next time I swam against Melinda in a meet, she won by just a hair. We became fast friends.

  In those days, I spent most evenings at the Lyons household. Melinda had an older brother, Jason. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I went out on their back porch and smoked a cigarette. Jason came outside and confiscated it.

  He pointed out a few constellations. I pretended I could see the patterns he insisted were in the sky, and when he caught me shivering, he put his arm around me. As I was trying to decide what I felt at that moment, Jason kissed me. It was nice. It was easy with him. It was my first real kiss. I thought I might feel more, but then I figured that maybe I wasn’t the kind of girl who had those kinds of emotions. I thought it was the universe creating a balance with my mother, who could fall in love with a mannequin.

  For three months I would sneak into Jason’s room at night and pretend I was feeling more than I was. After a few weeks, Jason thought we were together. Everyone at school thought we were something. I thought nothing at all.

  One day, as I finished my supplemental training at the Waki Reservoir, Ryan was waiting for me again. As I climbed onto the rocky shore, he held out my old beach towel. He had something to say. I could always tell when too many ideas were crowding his mind. He would start a sentence a bunch of times, as if he wasn’t sure where to begin.