Blood Highway

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  Blaine skirted the empty parking lot, searching for an ideal space in the twenty dozen available. “It’s one night, Rainy. You’ve got my word. One night.”

  We went by a long line of windows up front. It was a smoking room. The chairs were cheery colors, but a lot of the cushions were ripped. A woman in scrubs with a brown mullet was walking around. She had a tray laden with paper pill cups. People were packed together, sucking tobacco. Each one of them was a “too.” Too thin, too fat, too inked, too pale, too young to look that old, too old to look that young. This guy with several rings in his lower lip watched us pass. He puckered up and kissed at me.

  “I wonder how many times I can get raped in one night,” I said. “I’ll let you know. I’ll keep a count.”

  Blaine braked.

  “I’m kidding.” I was not kidding.

  Blaine was an athlete, but so was I. He knew this part of town, but so did I, and I knew it on foot. I undid my seat belt and reached for the door handle, ready to run. I opened it to a shock of cold.

  Cat-quick, Blaine lunged. He caught the door and yanked it shut. He put the transmission in drive, turning at the halfway house’s entrance.

  “Belt up,” he said, and kept going.

  “What?”

  “Put on your seat belt.”

  He gassed it into a turn, the foul edifice shrinking behind us. The tinkly intro to “Songbird” was playing, but I skipped it. Blaine’s profile was a Mount Rushmore of tension, ideally suited to the thump and wail of “The Chain.” He made a left, and another left, into a McDonald’s drive-thru. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He got me two cheeseburgers, fries, an apple pie, and a shake. We parked and snarfed. I had no idea what was going on, but as long as I wasn’t at this present moment being checked into that hellhole, I didn’t care. So much the better that he was wolfing a supersize #1. I’d outrun him easy when we went back.

  I nudged the volume a tad higher on “You Make Loving Fun.”

  “Favorite band?” he said.

  “The last great band.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I crumpled my Mickey D’s into a ball.

  Blaine said, “Done?” He got out of the car, went to a trash tub by the pickup window. A vehicle abruptly separated us. A tall van, its black side panels resolving into messy, snowblown zebra print. It moved slowly, even for this weather, flashing a mountain sunrise on its bumper. free tibet, the sticker said.

  “What I’m about to suggest . . .” Blaine’s voice broke my concentration. A thought had quarter formed in my head, something important. It was dissolving. “You can say no, okay?”

  I quirked around in my seat. The van slo-mo’d left and was gone.

  “Rainy?”

  “What if I say no?”

  “Do you ever just cooperate?”

  “Fine. Suggest.”

  “You can stay at my house tonight if you want.”

  My eyebrows went up like a flag.

  “I’m not leaving you there,” he said, squirming a little. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Won’t that get you in, like . . . massive trouble?”

  “Let me worry about it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Your house.” I sounded light. My misgivings were diffuse, and my answers to them were wildly unfamiliar: So what if he does? What if I want him to?

  We glided past the golden arches, and soon, we were getting on Cedar again, then turning off at Thirty-Ninth.

  “Are we going to my house?” I said.

  “I live six blocks from you. It’s okay, we won’t pass your place.”

  “I’d be fine if we did.”

  “Shocker.” Blaine hit a button on his visor, and an average two-story on the average street cracked its garage. Pulling in was a tight fit. The space was meant for two cars, but two narrow cars—not a wide police cruiser and the tarped thing on our left. A low line of red peeked from under the canvas. The tires had that crossed-flags insignia on their hubs.

  The engine cut. My bravado sank. Fresh, clear, energetic fear took its place. It was as if I’d taken a power nap, or my instincts had, and they were waking up, sniffing the air. All they smelled was December and the tang of gasoline.

  Inside the house, the kitchen led to a dining area, to a living room. A few stairs went down, and a longer set went up. Upstairs was a hall of doors, down was a den. I could see books in the den, hundreds, in shelves lining the walls. In the living room, dead ahead, there were shelves of movies on VHS, dozens, and I went to those. I digested the titles. They were mostly old. Betty Grable and Fred Astaire and Clark Gable and Lana Turner. I spotted Breakfast at Tiffany’s and stroked the spine.

  “Find one you like?” Blaine was in the kitchen, scooping grounds into a coffeemaker.

  I needed him to make sense to me, right now. The layout was very open, but his house did not square. I’d predicted a full-size man cave—chairs with beers in the armrests, a gaming system and the latest joystick controllers. I wondered if he’d had an immediately clear understanding of me when he’d walked through my house. If he got me, just like that, and what I had to do or give or learn to have that skill.

  “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” I said it much too loudly. I listened in disbelief as my mouth ran away. “The movie’s based on a novella by Capote, but they massacred it. She’s supposed to get on the plane to Brazil and Fred never sees her again. He sees her in a photo—she’s riding a horse or something in South America. He recognizes her, but he doesn’t, because she’s not the same person. That’s the ending.”

  Blaine shuffled through a newspaper. “That’s a downer.”

  “That’s the real ending.”

  He picked two mugs off a mug tree, and offered one by raising it. “It’s decaf.”

  I shook my head.

  “Those are my mom’s,” he said, tilting his cup at the movies. “I never watch ’em.”

  I folded my arms, gave my diaphragm a squeeze. It wasn’t a big house. No one had come to meet us, greet us, so I’m all: You live with your mom? She’s where exactly?

  Blaine held my eyes while pouring. “I need you to be straight with me. Do you want out of here?”

  I tried to call up some more savvy teen-snark, but I had none left. I dug in my pocket and held up his cigarettes.

  “Down in the den,” he said. “Open the storm door first.”

  I went. The stairs felt perfunctory, shallow. The books were history, history, and military history. I grabbed the storm door and pulled. The glass slid on its track, detonating a blast of single-digit Fahrenheit. I sat, weak. Three Parliaments left in the pack.

  Leave me alone, leave me alone: a litany I sent to him as I found an ashtray at the bottom of the nearest shelf. Blaine appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “I’m not having sex with you,” I said, searching for that light tone again and achieving the polar opposite. “Kinda saving that for a special occasion. Leap year, maybe.”

  “That’s not why I brought you here.” He sat on the top stair, his legs bent extreme for how short the risers were.

  “But you’re that guy,” I said. “You’re the guy at the bar, the guy at the party, the guy at the wedding. You never bring a date, but you always leave with one. You’re Joey on Friends, except a cop and not dumb.”

  He laughed quietly.

  I didn’t like that. It was a dismissal. “You’re a riddle, a sphinx,” I said. “You’re a blank. You’re whatever they want. Guys love that in other guys. Girls love it in guys. Guys and girls both hate it in girls. It’s the double slut standard.”

  Blaine’s cheeks went bright pink. “Little tip, Rainy? If I was a statutory-raping piece of shit, pissing me off wouldn’t be your best bet here.”

  “But you’re always pissed off. I’d rather you try it now, if you’re going to, than attack while I’m sleeping—”

  “Okay.” He sat up, gesturing “safe” with his hands. “Okay, stop. Stop. Time-out.
” He made an arm T. “How about you? What girl are you?”

  “I’m the girl who gets on the plane to Brazil and Fred never sees her again.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “I knew it,” I said. “I knew you didn’t believe me.”

  “Not that. Not the diner. I’m talking about right now. You pretending you get my whole deal.”

  “Then tell me your deal.”

  He picked up his coffee cup and sipped. “My old man would’ve called you a spitfire.”

  “That’s a term guys use when they think a girl’s a cunt but they want to fuck her anyway.”

  He surprised me again, nodding. “I just wanted to ask about how you handled yourself. How you kept it together tonight.”

  “Yeah, real funny. I fainted and threw up on my driveway.”

  The heat kicked on. Blaine said, “I punched out an EMT and had to be sedated.”

  I thought he meant tonight, that he’d punched out an EMT while he was yelling at them on my lawn. But “sedated” made no sense. “When?”

  Blaine spun his cup by the rim, watching whatever liquid was left swirl in circles. “I was fourteen. She did it in the garage.”

  Five

  It reminded me of choir. The Christmas concert we’d been rehearsing. Sopranos got this astonishing key change at the end. I swear we grew wings. I floated out of myself. It was scary, exhilarating, transcendent.

  “She had music going, too,” Blaine said. “The radio was on.”

  “What song?”

  “‘Hey Jude.’” He smiled. “I fucking hate that song.”

  It’s a miracle I didn’t wet my jeans. If he was saying what I thought he was saying—

  “I got out early from practice.” Blaine scratched his jaw. “Football. It was November. Come in the front door and I hear it right away. It was at the na-na-na part. I figured my dad was home.” Blaine broke off. His head lolled forward. “Sorry. I don’t talk about this.”

  I thought that meant he was done. Disappointment crushed me. “It’s okay.”

  “I went to the kitchen, poured some milk. I don’t know. I don’t know why I went out to the garage. He worked on the car all the time with the radio going, so it wasn’t weird the engine was on. I just went, I guess to say hi. See if he wanted a hand.” Blaine’s brow puckered. “No, that’s not it, either. He wouldn’t let me near that fucking thing. Said I’d scratch it.

  “There’s these holes.” His hands moved, to cover the holes. “You see it in witnesses all the time, these disparities. I remember going to the door. I remember that almost too well—like I’m trying to make up for the rest. Because here’s the thing: I don’t know what happened to my glass of milk.”

  Blaine held out his coffee cup. “I’m holding it, and I open the door, and there she is in the ’Vette with the top down, and her skin’s blue, and that fucking song is going na-na-na. I must’ve dropped it.”

  He dropped the cup. It fell to the stair beneath his feet but didn’t break.

  “So it must’ve broke. Unless I set it down somewhere after I hit the button for the garage door and ran to her. I don’t remember doing that. Or dragging her out to the driveway, starting CPR. My dad asked me later why I didn’t call an ambulance, and I go, ‘Didn’t I?’ My neighbors called. One of the EMTs tried to pull me off her, and I swung around and hit him.”

  Blaine made a fist. He pointed at the middle knuckle on his right hand. “See that scar?”

  I nodded, though I was too far away.

  “That’s the next thing I remember, breaking my hand. Never break your hand, there’s no pain like it.” He set his fist in his lap and examined it. “I talked to them later. Dad made me. I said I was sorry, and they said it was all right, no problem. They’re looking at me with this pity, thinking I lost my mind. But I didn’t. Not then. There was a logic. I thought if they went away, it wouldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t be lying there in the snow.”

  He looked up. I had a hard time recognizing him, because the blandsomeness was all gone. Blaine had animated. I didn’t like it.

  “When I got the call for your house, they gave me the specifics—a girl found her mom suicided. I didn’t want to go. Then I think, ‘No, go. Go and do it right.’ I wouldn’t let anyone stare at you. No drugs, no sedatives, even if you were hysterical. I wasn’t going to take you out of there ’til you wanted to leave, and after we left, I’d tell you: ‘It doesn’t get better. People are gonna say that, but don’t listen to them. It doesn’t get better. It just gets less.’”

  He scooted closer, forgetting he was on stairs. He teetered, and inched back, bent practically to ninety degrees. “I was going to tell you, at first she’s all you see. You come to, you see her every few seconds, these flashes—but that’s only a couple hours. Then it’s every few minutes. That part’s hard, that’s the worst. It lasts about a week, week and a half. Then you’re over the hill. You can go twenty minutes. Thirty, forty. Took me months to make it an hour. I know a trick, though.”

  He smiled a terrible smile. “You make it an appointment. You set up a time, every day, and you think about it. Think about it any way you want, whatever works. And you don’t skip, not one day, or it’s worse when you remember again. That’s what you do.”

  Blaine left me an opening. I didn’t take it.

  “Except you’re not doing any of that. You’re not going to need any of that, are you?”

  I folded into the corner. Crumpled the Parliament pack.

  He got up, jumped the stairs, went to the desk at the end of the bookshelves, and pulled a drawer. He tore cellophane, threw underhand. Fresh cigarettes landed by my heel, followed by his gold lighter. He sat on the floor so I could look at him levelly.

  And I did. Blaine wasn’t enjoying this at all. His skin was stretched too tight, like he wanted to jump out of it and run. Yet he’d sit here until the end of the world—letting me watch a parade of old nightmares that was flattening him—to hear why I wasn’t doped in a hospital room. He wanted to know what my secret was.

  I wished it were something that would help. “I do that already,” I said. “The day I kicked her, that’s my appointment. Every day when I walk home.” I lit up and corrected myself: “The day I broke her.”

  Blaine didn’t argue.

  “You played baseball,” I said.

  “Second baseman. I was better at football.”

  “You liked baseball better.”

  He grinned, catching the pack when I threw it. “Now why’s that?” I pointed at a signed baseball two shelves over, a glove right above me, a framed trio of player cards on the desk behind him.

  “My dad’s,” Blaine said. “His house. His shit.”

  “Where’s . . . ?”

  “He stopped a speeder and got clipped by a semi.” Blaine took an envelope off the desk, tapping ash into it. “He stepped out on my mom every chance he got. That’s why we moved. She kept bumping into his girlfriends in New York. She thought we’d come here and he’d shape up. We come here, and all it does is give him more space. She got depressed—I’m no shrink, but I’ll go out on a limb and say sleeping twenty hours a day qualifies as depression. My dad thinks it’s not. He thinks it’s her wanting attention. And he gives it to her, yelling at her, telling her the house is going to hell, where’s his dinner. Here’s the real kicker, is he was maybe right, because she yells back and that’s about the only time I saw her anything but miserable.” Blaine shrugged. “I took over the cooking and cleaning. I couldn’t handle those fights. Her last shot at getting what she needed, and I fucked it up for her.”

  Here’s where I was supposed to disagree. “Not your fault,” “she was sick,” bleh-bleh-bleh. I wouldn’t insult him like that, because he hadn’t insulted me like that.

  Blaine nodded at my silence. Our atmosphere changed. Which came first—his respect increasing or my nerves decreasing? His uniform seemed irrelevant now. And none of the ages on my fake driver’s licenses felt old enough.

 
“Does it help?” I said. “Going out, bringing a girl home?”

  “I never bring ’em here.”

  I thought: Well, what the hell. And aped a Vickie’s Secret model. Slight sulk to my heavy lips, begging, but not for a kiss. I couldn’t tell how serious I actually was. It wound up not mattering.

  “I’m not having sex with you,” Blaine said.

  I laughed so hard my throat hurt.

  “Save it for leap year,” he said, and I was useless for about five minutes.

  “I’m serious,” I said, when I almost was. My head felt heavy. My night had been . . taxing. “Does it help?”

  “For a little while. Then it’s worse, but that’s not for long, either. I hate sleeping alone. I wake up early without trying, so it’s easy to get out of there.” He flicked his badge. “Say I gotta get to work, and it’s almost never a lie.”

  I stood up and turned to peruse books, to stay awake, but I did it too fast. My vision blurred over names of eminent dead men. Seneca, Cicero, two kinds of Pliny. I prattled, forgetting to frame my references. “My teacher’s awesome. He said he might be hurting our AP scores, but we were going to spend two months on the period. The parallels are incredible. When the seat of power’s too far removed from industry and resources, it always breeds discontent.”

  “Hey—”

  “Marcus Aurelius was full of it, though. Stoicism’s a total rich boy’s religion.”

  “Hey, you’re swaying on your feet. I’ll show you your room.”

  I didn’t walk; I floated. Up the stairs, and more stairs. And I saw a bed and I went to it and fell on it, and there was Blaine in the hall.

  “This locks from your side. I’ll lock it behind me, okay? You’re safe here.”

  My eyes were buttoning. Sinking into a never-seen abyss of sleep, I barely heard him say: “If I’d have known she was dead in there, I’d have shot you before I let you go inside.”