Blood Highway

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  Also by Gina Wohlsdorf

  Security

  Blood

  Highway

  A Novel

  Gina Wohlsdorf

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  For S. N. S.

  To the bitter end.

  To be ignorant of what occurred before

  you were born is to remain always a child.

  —Cicero

  Contents

  I Rainy

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  II Kat

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  III Roam

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  My Reflection

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Somebody’d punched the mirror. The web of cracks reached high and wide, spiraling to a center indented from the impact and brown-maroon with old blood. The splinters created a hundred fractals. Funky parallelogram shapes gave back the room each in its own dimensional miniature. It would have been beautiful, except all they had to reflect was five toilet stalls, three outdated hand dryers, dingy green tile, and me.

  I dumped the Rite Aid bag on the counter. The girl on the box was blond. She was on a swing for no reason, her teeth these little white pearls, like she was trying to sell toothpaste instead of hair color. I tore her in half, poured the small glass bottle into the big plastic bottle, shook it up. The gloves were huge plastic hand muumuus. The directions said to test it first, but I didn’t waste the time. I squirted rows down my roots and smeared it in, noticing belatedly there was no clock in here.

  I pictured it. I couldn’t not. The woman who threw the punch must have broken her hand. A hophead or a schizophrenic or a chick with a temper. She brought her fist way back, used her hips and legs like you’re supposed to, and blam-o! The shiver it must have sent up her arm. How her screaming must have reverberated in here, drowning out the tinny Muzak I was humming along to. “Manic Monday,” the Bangles.

  But the Bangles were old enough that they’d begun the transition from ironic to nostalgic likability—an odd process, as I’d never stopped liking them. “Eternal Flame,” c’mon. That dumb Bubble Yum was the perfect accompaniment to raining acid on my head, monkeying with what the hair gods gave me.

  I chunked my empties and boosted onto the counter, turning my back. Another mirror was on the opposite wall. I duplicated, shrinking with iterations, into homunculi. It was the primping mirror. No sinks. There was a shelf underneath to hold makeup. Did the men’s room get one of these, or was this was our trade-off for urinals?

  Why did traveling for three days exhaust me so much? It was like I’d run the miles instead of sitting in a seat, watching the country pass. Plains turning into mountains, turning into desert, into other mountains. Turning into Sacramento, whatever it looked like. It looked like a Rite Aid, looked like a bathroom. My route got me here at four fifteen in the morning. It was a refueling stop and a change of drivers, so I had an hour ’til the last leg. I hadn’t wanted to fall asleep in the lobby, since bus people creep me out, and I’d asked myself: What would a teenage runaway do with this hour?

  Answer: Dye her hair.

  When the time came to do it for real, I’d go red or jet-black. I’d be unrecognizable on my fire escape at sunset, strumming a guitar I bought at a pawnshop. If Audrey Hepburn could cold-learn those few simple chords, so could I. And people would be walking down the boulevard, rushing, late for a meeting—and they’d hear a whispery rendition of a ballad that hadn’t been cool in decades. Only they’d be alone, in their head, and that’s the last private place, the last place you don’t have to be cool, the place you can be you in all your nightmare glory. The place you can hear a happy song and think for just a second—

  “Five thirty to Los Angeles will board in ten minutes. Ten minutes ’til boarding, five thirty to Los Angeles. Thank you.”

  I startled awake and fell off the counter. The wall where I’d been leaning: its stained green had gone markedly paler in patches and streaks. The burning in my scalp was as hot as napalm. I dove for the taps, cranked them full blast, got my head under, and constructed incredible cussword hyphenates, bodacious compound swears. ’S fine, ’s nothing, this is how bleach works. Rinse it out, erase.

  The bathroom door blammed open, a stall slammed shut, a woman peed like a frightened racehorse. She flushed, and heavy clogs appeared by my sneaks. “It’s leaving soon,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “I told the pecker taking tickets to wait for me, and he was his pecker self about it.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “I’m trying to help you, dear.”

  “I said thanks.”

  My friend Ally wanted to be a hairstylist. She’d cautioned us about bleach. She said if you botched it, all your hair could fall out in clumps, and though that didn’t seem to be happening, the texture was definitely different. I poured on the conditioner, and it helped. The strands went from straw to straw soaked in conditioner.

  “Five thirty to Los Angeles now boarding. Now boarding, five thirty to Los Angeles. Thank you.”

  I shut off the water and wrung out handfuls. The rim of the sink was cool on my forehead. It was the fumes making my eyes water, the bright tang of fried hair. The bright white on my head in the mirror was incandescent. I thought of the magnesium we’d lit on fire two weeks ago in AP Chem.

  “Five thirty to Los Angeles, final call. Final call, five thirty to Los Angeles. Thank you.”

  The lobby was empty. A diminutive man at the ticket pulpit was putting stubs to right angles with fussy hands. He didn’t look up until I gave him my license. The contrast between my photo and my brand-new do meant he had to double-check. That was the last thing you wanted when using a fake ID.

  He pushed his round glasses higher on his nose, ripped my ticket, and added the stub to his pile. “Have a pleasant journey, Holly.”

  The Greyhound idled under harsh lights. It gave off heat, a relief when the cold morning was biting my wet scalp. I climbed steep steps. Most of the seats were vacant, but I sat right behind the driver. It was people’s least favorite spot, which made it my favorite spot. Out the window, bugs were frantic under streetlamps. Then we moved and there was nothing else to watch but black night cut by cruel electric, a median dry-dyed yellow, and across it the occasional northbound car driven by someone with a reason to be on the highway before dawn.

  “LA, huh?” the driver said. His jowls rippled in the dark of the windshield. He tipped his Broncos cap at me. “Actress or model?”

  “Yeah, you got my number.”

  “I see a lot of you girls on this route. Makes me worry.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Lots of sharks, and I don’t mean in the water. They take advantage. You think you’re different, but there’s too many of you girls and too few gigs. It’s lonely.”

  I didn’t mean to smile.

  “Sure, old fart like me, what’s he know? You take care, sweetheart. Take care and know when to call it a wash. Will you do that for me?”

  Other girls probably giggled, asked his name. I considered playing the part to find out how much of his concern was concern and how much was that brand of perviness unique to horrid old men. So self-awarely unfuckable that they crank their charm dials to eleven to see if this naïf will chortle and coo.

  “You smoke?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Thought I saw you smoking. Back at the station. Those things’re poison, sweetheart.”

  I pi
cked at my cuticle and found a stray flap of skin. I tore it. A gutter of blood ran down my nail.

  “Okay,” he said. “I got it. I’ll leave you alone. Pardon me for caring.”

  The sky faded through successive washes of blue. The ocean crept up, foaming over black boulders whose sharp points caught more and more sun. People boarded, disembarked. Civilization never seemed to end here—it thinned and thickened, but there were always buildings and bridges and streets. Nobody wanted to waste an inch, even as the colors changed, becoming jaundiced, and the plants turned anhydrous, except for the palm trees flashing coconuts when wind caught their wide fronds. I got off the bus as little as possible, afraid the driver would speed off without me if he got the chance. Meaning the Marlboro Reds in my back pocket staled, and I ripped every miniscule excess of flesh that could be termed a hangnail, and my own blood made up my whole diet for the day, so that by ten to six that evening, when we pulled into LA’s downtown station and the bus doors sneezed open, it surprised even me how spry I was jumping out of my seat and flying to the sidewalk.

  “Hey! Don’t forget your luggage!”

  The sun angled low, elongating every shadow. I put mine behind me, running west. Ahead was Any Street. It blatted with traffic. A trio of girls wearing tight neon nothing Rollerbladed through the blocked crosswalk, catching their hands on hoods. A bistro was crowded with outdoor diners—expensive shades, capped teeth, the newest flip phones, the best blouses they could afford. I hit the button for a walk sign. Under Yugos and Rollses and Beamers and Bugs honking for the right-of-way, I heard an effortful picking apart of “Hotel California.”

  At the bus station’s squat entrance sat the Caucasian version of Jesus. His guitar case lay in front of him, its blue lining pimpled in spare change.

  He grinned at me. “You the next big thing?” he said.

  I walked, though the sign still said don’t. I caught another bus; this one was local.

  I could tell I was getting closer by what the shops sold—Korean food and dry cleaning to bikinis and surf accessories. Traffic got worse, amazingly. People became populace. I heard it and smelled it before I saw it. I hopped to the street, and the shriek and reek of humanity faded. I remembered being thirteen, turning this corner for the first time. The way everything changed. It was, no metaphor, where the sidewalk ended. Stepping from cement to tan sugar, how crazed I was to get my shoes off. I did it leisurely now, and I walked into the soft scratch, the funny ground-shift. It had made me laugh back then. I’d been laughing and laughing, and nobody cared or even looked for long, and I knew this was the place.

  Today was Any Day, and I could be Anybody. The Pacific Ocean at sunset was a sight I could come marvel at anytime I wanted.

  A few volleyball courts had games going. Numerous couples walked hand in hand, far enough inland to stay dry. A girl, who couldn’t have been two yet, didn’t want to leave her sandcastle; she batted her mother’s hand with a plastic shovel. I perpendiculared all of this, went right up to where the tide licked, and sat down. I balled up my coat and put it behind my back, with my shoes, and set my toes in the salty fizz, my chin to the divot of my knees. The sun was still above the water. Sparse clouds chose a palette of magenta and slopped it everywhere. Waves overshot my feet. My butt got soaking wet. A parasailer way out there cut a wedge from the juicy orange sinking to the horizon line.

  The thing that still haunts me, and probably always will, is this: I could have stayed. It was my fourth dress rehearsal, and I’d aced it. Except for the hair, and from a certain perspective, that was a win. missing posters with my school photo would feature me dirty blond.

  The sun skinnied down to a red rind as it slipped behind the edge of the world. The sea turned to blood. The stratosphere bulged with veins, draining its contents into the sea. I listened for silence, yet the sandcastle kid was still crying, a woman was telling her walking partner that she felt like he was using her for sex, a frenzied male was shouting, “Over! Over!”

  I took out my cigarettes, found a dry one, and corked it in my mouth. The seagulls wailed while I lit up. It was over.

  Four days later, I got in a cab. It was four thirty in the afternoon. The streetlamps were on. A cold spring shower washed dirty slush into drains and brought night early, turning the last of rush hour into a bunch of gray dead ends. I’d considered taking the crosstown, but I was sick of buses. Plus, the Saint Paul station wasn’t in the best neighborhood.

  I regretted it when my driver tried a sucker route. I was just as sick of being a bitch to strangers. “Thirty-Five E, please,” I said.

  “Dis vay ees—”

  “Thirty-Five to Five to Sixty-Two or let me out.”

  Most of the snow had melted. Parking lots had white borders, the last of the mountains that plows scooped to a side after blizzards. I thought it was nice our spring break actually looked like a spring break, albeit the Midwest’s version. I was ready to go back, to hear about road trips to relatives in tired Wisconsin towns. I’d put together my own account of a week in Grand Forks, North Dakota, visiting my awesome Aunt Vi, who taught English lit at UND and lived for live concerts. We went and saw James Taylor. I’d say I was the youngest person there by about thirty years. If there’d been a fire, I’d have so survived, because everybody else would’ve been using walkers and canes to get to the emergency exits.

  I smelled great. My freshly albino’d head was even sexier after ninety-six hours without a wash. I was curious where I ranked on the driver’s scale of foul passengers he’d ferried through the Twin Cities, but he didn’t seem curious at all. He was turning up Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” and whistling.

  Had he been curious, he might have asked what was making me so uneasy. After exiting at Cedar, the streets ran a standard grid. They were stocked with houses that could have been drawn as a dictionary diagram definition of “normal.” The Krenelka boys were hotdogging at their b-ball hoop, exploiting the last, most fleeting gasp of daylight. Ms. Suther juggled groceries out of her trunk while Max screamed in his car seat, scared his mother wouldn’t come back for him. Good cars were socked away in garages for the night. Hail-pocked beaters sulked on the curb. Soggy leaves turned the yards into mulch piles, and lights in windows glowed warm caution, intimating meals inside: lavish, home-cooked, served with a side of convivial chatter.

  My house was no different, except the blinds were closed. She did that so neighbors couldn’t see in. During the day, the blinds were wide-open so she could see out. Preferably into neighbors’ windows.

  “This one.”

  He pulled in. I tried to see what he was seeing. Snow on the mountain under the front bays, lovingly tended. Potted purple mums hanging from either side of the door, garish old-lady earrings. Paint and siding in good condition. Clean gutters.

  I gave him all the cash I had left—“Keep it”—and got out before his gasps could form cohesive thanks. The rain felt incredible. Clean, light, new. Our front door was purple, to match the mums. She loved color. She used to color-code my outfits: Stirrup pants and matching sweaters. Socks and underwear coordinated, too.

  “Perfection is a secret,” she’d said.

  The heavy knocker thwacked, announcing me. The evening news was cranked in front of an empty purple couch. Blue TV light darkened it navy. End tables held vases full of artificial irises. The gray carpet was thick and plush, lined from recent vacuuming. Easter decorations were gone, replaced with more general spring flourishes—pink and lavender ribbons on the lampshades, green plastic grass in a basket on the mantel. Around the living room’s corner, sink spray shushed from the kitchen, and angular light, and the smell of baked ham. In between, the dining room strobed its darkness, the mirror on the antique hutch reflecting a news segment about flooding in Duluth.

  I took off my shoes as the sink shut off. A cupboard opened, a drawer. Her bowl met her spoon. She opened the freezer. It required that extra step, an audible fit-and-twist. It was the kind of noise you’d dismiss, if you even hear
d it, and you’d never put it together, with how she didn’t allow you past the front door.

  The kitchen went dark. Her heels clopped a few steps. She appeared wearing her blue housedress, the nude pumps. She was eating as she walked. She got to the couch and turned on the lamp, sitting in its disc of light. She watched the news, and I watched her like a TV. She was brown-bobbed, rail-thin from mall walking, her nose a tad beaky. Its severity leaked to the rest of her face, sharpening it. She had perfect posture, but her bites of ice cream were greedy. White dribble progressed down the sides of her mouth. She didn’t wipe it away.

  Why would she? She was alone.

  The anchors said good night, and their jingle played. Mom cut it off by aiming the remote. I heard the Friends theme’s twangy opening. I got up, went toward her, sat beside her—all she did was set her bowl on a coaster, finally wiping her chin.

  I recognized this one. It was where Ross and Rachel first kissed. I didn’t get the appeal of these two; I saw no cliff-hang about them. Mom laughed at a weak punch line from Monica. Monica was her favorite. She’d told me a long time ago, and she’d asked who my favorite was. I’d said, “But they’re not real, Mommy.”

  I thought: One more time.

  I’d thought “One more time” so many times.

  “Mom?”

  Her eyes were silver, stuck to the screen.

  “Mom, look at me. ’Kay?”

  The knocker thwacked. It made me jump. Mom stood and smoothed her skirt, shoes leaving crags behind her as she went to the door. Her face changed. Vibrancy infested it. She was so happy to see whoever it was.

  “Hi there!” she said. Her thick Minnesota patois took every vowel and turned it babyish. “You come on in out of the rain now. My goodness. What the heck’re you doing with shorts on, you silly goose?”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Cain. It was warm when the sun was out.” Kyle Krenelka had his official Star Tribune billing pad. He tore off a slip and handed it to her. “Same as last week.”