Blood Highway

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  My kidnapping was hot news for about three seconds. While I was recovering in Eugene, Oregon, Child Protection Services started yowling about how imperative it had suddenly become to find me the best foster situation ever—despite the fact that by the time I got released, I was three weeks from being eighteen.

  But Blaine knew a lot of lawyers. And I didn’t mind lying to a judge. The sale of Mom’s house banked me more than enough to rent a frumpy studio apartment in Hastings. Emancipation was a formality after that. We put a futon in the living room/bedroom to make it look like someone lived there. Unnecessarily, since CPS rolled its collective eyes and went back to circle-jerking as soon as the courts decreed me an adult. I’d been ready for Blaine to fight me about school, but he hadn’t. He’d met with my principal, who said I had enough credits to graduate. I was enrolled at the U for fall semester.

  Blaine finished his sandwich, crumbled his wax paper. He held up a Wuollet bag.

  “When did you stop?” I bounced, excited.

  “Yesterday. Not as fresh as they could be.”

  I peeled the paper from my angel food with strawberry frosting and bit into it, making a noise that Blaine chuckled at. He wasn’t into cupcakes. He always got a dainty little fruit tart. He picked off the kiwi and ate it in two bites.

  The scar on his throat distended when he swallowed. It didn’t get enormous, not even more noticeable than usual, but I remembered much too vividly the blood pouring out of there. No matter how many times he explained that it’d never really been more than a scratch, the fact he had emergency surgery and didn’t come out of anesthesia for nine hours (at which point he ripped out his IV, left the hospital AMA, called the FBI, said his Corvette was LoJacked and gave them the VIN—cops love acronyms) it made me shudder when the line by his carotid grimaced in my direction.

  I chewed more slowly than usual. We were here for grad day, but he also wanted to talk to me.

  “So—”

  “’M not done,” I said.

  He leaned to get at his pocket then offered the pack with a wry goody-goody pump of his eyebrows.

  I took a stick of Nicorette and developed a deep fascination with the scenery. “It’s not a big deal.”

  A peewee soccer game was getting started a block north. I observed the teams lining up in messy formation, young coaches with whistles around their necks nudging this kid forward or that one backward.

  “I believed you the other morning,” Blaine said. The ref blew the whistle. Two kids scrimmaged, bumping into each other, trying not to fall down. “When you told me you couldn’t sleep. Next night, I started to wonder, finding you down in the den again, reading at five a.m. After that you got smart, sneaking upstairs before I woke up. But I could smell the coffee.” The smaller kid broke away, dribbling with all the coordination of a newborn colt. I could hear the cheers from here. “This doesn’t work if you lie to me.”

  “You telling me to move out?” I said. “I can be out by tonight.”

  “Is it the one where you’re in the trunk?”

  I said nothing.

  “Is it the one where we’re in the desert and I get shot?”

  “New one.” I meant to sound testy but didn’t quite swing it.

  “You need to tell me.” The goalie was hurling the ball back into play. He held on too long and basically punted. “What the shrink said, remember? These are poison. You need to let them out. It’s normal, I had the same thing.”

  “You didn’t have this one. This one’s worse.”

  “Why?” he said.

  I bonked my skull on the water tank, gave him a face full of: Please. Please just this once let it go.

  Blaine shook his head. He raised a calloused finger and pointed between my eyes. “I’m not leaving you alone in there.”

  I hugged my knees, hiding my face in their convenient cave.

  “Rainy, we’ve talked about this. You have to trust somebody. It’s the hardest thing there is, but you’ve gotta try.” He set a hand on my shoulder. It rooted me, so I wouldn’t float away. “You can do it. I know you can do it.”

  I’m in the middle of a street. It’s winter. There’s snowdrifts all down a long row of buildings. I’m confused: Haven’t the plows run? I look closer and notice there’s no glass in any of the windows. The doors hang open even though it’s the middle of the night. The facades are covered in graffiti, mostly boring tags, but there’s this one, a kind of cartoon with a boy, in cutoffs and orange shorts, blowing bubbles. I peer over my shoulder and see the top of the Ferris wheel wedged over the roofs. Its peeling paint is bright canary yellow. I know where I am.

  I go inside and upstairs, find a window with a view. The city rests in permanent stasis. Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom, only doomed for a lot longer. I walk around an endless maze that was either a hospital or an orphanage—the rooms have dozens of dolls posed on naked bed frames. I sit in a desk at a school with indecipherable words scribbled all over the blackboard. I watch an old-fashioned theater stage with no players on it, unless you count the shadows the moon makes, and I discover a room full of gas masks. Tens of thousands of gas masks, the kind with an elephant trunk on the front, as if the designer had said, Let’s make these as spooky as humanly possible.

  It’s getting light out. The snow is melting, and scary-thick icicles drip and break and drop. Once the sun rises, everything’s different. It’s spring. I go outside, walk to the river, and rest on a bench that’s rusted but strong. I let the morning sun strobe my skin, listen to the wrens and swallows. For a long time, their heads were malformed and their throats were rock gardens of tumors. But over the decades, they adapted. Now they fly higher to bathe in the rain before it puddles with radioactivity. Now they pass on grit deep down in their DNA, nucleic resistance to their poison place. And they sing.

  Human voices are singing, too. Hi-fi. Far off.

  Nothing but Rumours.

  It takes a while to get to the plant; the album’s almost done. I follow “Gold Dust Woman” to the cooling pool. Sam’s got a portable grill. He’s turning burgers. He’s scrawny, young, and his head’s covered in hair. My twentysomething mom abandons her record player, hopping up to kiss me hello. Johnny waits ’til she’s done and really kisses me hello. Ellie and Becca are shoving each other on a platform above the water, competing to catch the biggest catfish.

  I say as I sit that this venue is creepy and sad, not to mention plutonium-rich. Johnny asks about plutonium, and I tell him that’s the worst one. In fifteen more years, cesium’s and strontium’s half-lives will be over. But plutonium decays into americium, and that’s over four hundred years. And that’s a half-life.

  “Oh, pffft,” Sam says, handing me a plate. “You like yours medium, right?”

  The cooler’s packed with Mom’s specialties: German potato salad, cheesy green beans, pie. We’re bottomless pits for the food. We grunt compliments, and Mom smiles at them. I’d think it was strange she doesn’t speak, but no one’s talking all that much. I’d consider it the most boring meal of my life if it weren’t for where I’m sitting, who I’m with, and how there’s so much joy tingling in my body that I can barely eat.

  The sun’s beginning to set as we finish. Ellie says, out of nowhere, “We’re gonna go check out the amusement park.”

  “You’re ducking out of cleanup, is what you’re doing,” Sam says. He shoos them. Not mad. Just Dad.

  “Do you think the carousel works?” Becca asks me.

  I tell her, “Sure, probably.”

  She’s so excited. They run off in that direction, skipping. Like adults imitating children much too well.

  The rest of us wrap up what’s left of our supper and gather trash. There’s a trash can right over there but nobody to empty it. Sam says, “Throw it in the trunk.” The Corvette sits parked a stone’s throw away from us. I’m sure it wasn’t there before, but that’s why dreams are annoying.

  I go to help Mom with the record player; it’s heavy. Sam beats me to it, and to my surprise,
Mom wraps me up in a hug. We sway together. I could die there, wearing the heat of her. She slips away, dances to the driver’s side, and claims her seat.

  Sam piles stuff in the trunk. I go to Johnny first, putting his arm around me like a flotation device. We approach Sam together. He’s having trouble fitting everything in the trunk. Some asshole made a real mess in there. They even left a bottle full of piss.

  “Dad,” I say, “how could you?”

  “How could I what?” He doesn’t understand. He’s not that guy yet. There’s a heartbreaking innocence in his expression when it dawns on him: “Was your burger too rare?”

  I wish, in the dream, that dreams were places for warnings. “A little raw,” I say.

  “I’m sorry, honey.” He closes the trunk softly. “Nobody’s perfect.” He winks and goes to the passenger side, does a graceless leap over the door.

  “It’s okay,” I say as the car coughs to life. They drive around the pool, toward the rear of the plant. When they disappear around a corner, I can’t hear the engine anymore. I look in the amusement park’s direction, hoping for lights, calliope music, giggles. Instead, it’s static and silent.

  Johnny takes my hand. The sun’s mostly gone when we get to the forest. Stepping in, the red leaves crackle under our feet. Johnny lights a cigarette, and I tell him it isn’t a good idea—this place is a tinderbox.

  “Watch this,” he says, and flicks his Newport.

  The fire hits the leaves. They come alive. They’re butterflies. They fly all around us, glowing—so many I can barely see him. I feel their little legs, hear their wings rush in my ears.

  “I wish this was real,” I say.

  And Johnny looks at me and says, “It is.”

  “Then I wake up.” I’d related the dream in a flat and lifeless voice. I was about to give it a smart-ass grace note, a no-big-deal coda, but it came out a sob that bent me double with its force. Blaine reached out in what I figured was history’s most enthusiastic hug before I understood it was actually a catch. He’d thought I was trying to pitch myself over the side. He let go when he realized that wasn’t the case, and I ran out of tears after a few minutes.

  “Help me out on something.” Blaine handed me a napkin. “How’s that dream so bad you’re pulling all-nighters to get away from it? How’s it worse than the others?”

  “It’s not,” I said, and blew my nose most alluringly. “It’s better. That’s what makes it worse. I’m using them like puppets, making them say they’re happy.”

  He frowned into space, letting my logic set in. I watched his cheeks get increasingly rage-rouge. He rolled his eyes. “Do you ever give yourself a goddamn break?”

  I had a flannel on—it was May, but it was still Minnesota. From the breast pocket I took a kitchen match and two cigarettes. I smirked up at him.

  Blaine laughed. He didn’t want to. He wanted to keep fighting, say exactly the right thing, convince me, fix me, save me.

  “Cheater,” he said, accepting a Marlboro.

  I scraped the match on the railing and lit us. “How many breaks did Sam give himself? Or my mom? How much slack do you have to cut yourself before you become a monster?”

  “That’s what I’m for. I’ll tell you when you’re cutting too much.”

  “I won’t listen.”

  “You’re listening now.” He tipped his head back and exhaled. “God, that’s good.”

  We settled into the final whistle of the soccer game, the onset of sunset. I saw why he liked it up here. Why he remembered it when most people thinking of their prom night would flash to the color of their date’s dress, or the last song they danced to on a floor covered in balloons. I saw why he picked tonight, when by all rights I should have been sitting in a rigid folding chair listening to a boring speech about my future’s golden possibilities.

  Instead, I was on steel mesh, foot cocked against a chipped railing, watching today’s golden possibilities founder and sink. I felt guilty bringing us back to the dream, but I hadn’t told Blaine my real problem with it yet. “Why would I make Johnny say that? That it’s real?”

  He shrugged. “What if it is?”

  “Then I’m a monster.”

  “Because?”

  “Because they’re stuck.” I tapped my temple. “I trapped them. I’m free, but they’re not.”

  “What if you didn’t?” he said. “What if all you did was give the best parts of them a better place to be?”

  “In a toxic wasteland?”

  Blaine tic’d his neck at the night, smiling. “What if you gave the place a better place to be, too?”

  A rebuttal was right there on the tip of my tongue: Then I’m still a monster, because how much of my gift is a lie?

  But we were smoking our last cigarettes, and the soccer kids were lining up for team high fives. And it occurred to me that accepting defeat isn’t always a loss. The sun did it every day. The sun was doing it now, ceding the kingdom. Burning down the clouds so it could build something brand-new tomorrow—oh, mirror in the sky.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, maybe.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sara

  Chuck

  Sarah

  Emma

  Lisa

  Jackie

  Jen G.

  Michael

  Dani

  Craig

  Chris

  Lauren

  Zach

  Brunson

  Alex

  Elizabeth

  Henry

  Kira

  Marcy

  Alison

  Paul

  Alina

  Joong

  Jen S.

  Keiko

  Maria

  Kerry

  Heather

  Caila

  Billi Jo

  Steffan

  Steph

  Shelby

  Missy

  Greg

  Fleetwood Mac

  Lani

  Courtney Love

  Hallie

  Alice

  Nay

  Veterans Memorial

  Emma G.

  Public Library

  About the Author

  Gina Wohlsdorf’s first novel, Security, was chosen as an Amazon Best Book of 2016. She lives in Colorado.

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2018 by Gina Wohlsdorf.

  All rights reserved.

  “Moon River” from the Paramount Picture Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Words by Johnny Mercer. Music by Henry Mancini. Copyright © 1961 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data IS AVAILABLE.

  eISBN 978-1-61620-881-3