~ ~ ~
EDWARD AND CLAUDIA took turns at the wheel, slipping in and out of the driver’s seat without much discussion: he could tell by the change in her breathing, low and shallow, when she’d grown tired, and she knew when he became quiet, no longer mocked billboards and bumper stickers. Paulie alternately napped and enthused, woke into excitement and wore it out again. He resembled a maladroitly assembled angel under the staticky corona of hair that encircled him, and he glowed with the dew of sleep in the refracted sun. As he drooled on the bright blue sweatshirt pressed against the window as a pillow, Claudia periodically looked over and gave thanks for the temporary quiet. It was as though every time he regained consciousness, he remembered not only their destination and the much-anticipated dance of the fireflies, but also every moment in his life that had amused or satisfied him, every song and birthday and windless afternoon.
First his unnaturally long eyelashes fluttered, then his eyelids snapped up like blinds. His slack fingers twitched, then all straightened at once, like something being turned on, and clapped his face. “Oh my god!” yelled Paulie, so loud that Edward jammed his index fingers into his hairy eardrums. “We’re getting there, aren’t we!”
In Edward’s few moments alone — pissing in increasingly squalid gas station bathrooms, the rare occasion of focused thought made possible when both Claudia and Paulie had fallen asleep, on stretches of highway shoulder where they stopped occasionally to move their legs and establish some distance from one another — he admitted to feeling a little worried. Claudia looked towards her brother with a fierce adoration, yes, but she also assaulted the gas pedal with the unyielding force of a waterfall, she also seemed unconcerned with the existing flow of cars when merging onto the freeway. He had stopped suggesting she glance over her shoulder, which only made her driving more aggressive.
For the first three or four hours of the trip, her cell phone had rung and shaken at a near-constant rate. She had turned up the stereo and sung louder to Sticky Fingers, she had insisted on an inane car game in which one alphabetically listed the fictitious people they knew. Paulie had strained to remember: “At the party, I saw Aranda… Bernard… Caligula… Dan… Eloise.” Finally, without fanfare, she had turned off the phone and let it slide down her glistening palm, past her chipped blue fingernails, and onto the freeway.
Edward mentioned it later, at a cinder-block marriage of a Subway-KFC-ARCO where eleven-year-olds congregated to suck down cigarettes and a voice bleated over damaged speakers when a rented shower became available.
“What were you thinking? Just get rid of your phone? Think that was whimsical? What if mine was stolen! What if—”
He realized his mother and the anxiety he had inherited were glinting in his grating tone, and he recalibrated his voice. “Claude,” he said, unsure of when he had adopted the shortened version of her name, but certain some milestone of intimacy had been stomped over. “Wanna tell me why you’re acting like the entirety of Thelma and Louise sped up and played on loop? Mid-Life Crisis: The Musical? Should we do some screaming in headscarves, cut off our hair, prank call our exes? Is that it?”
Paulie slumped against the passenger window of the car, exhausted after singing to Jagger’s yowl, and they could see him napping from where they sat. Claudia brushed some crumbs of fried chicken off the table’s oily surface, folded her hands on the plasticked red, and put her head down and started to cry.
“I just want to have this. Can I just have it? Will you just let me have it?” She bolted upright again, and her fingers were straight and quick as knives as she passed them across her wet face.
“Have what? A terrifying sandwich served by a pregnant teenager named Kimmi? You just did.”
“Once I go back,” she continued, “everything is going to be different. I’m going to do what I should have done and make sure he’s always taken care of. I have to get Paulie and me a place together, build a client list and work from home. I have to keep him safe. Drew is losing his shit — who leaves someone not even two years into the marriage, he said, which, who can blame him — and that was him on the phone. He cries in some messages and swears in others. About every third one there’s some kind of threat.” She spit the words out low and hard, gnawing a tiny crescent of skin from her thumb, and he tugged the digit away from her mouth’s nervous bite, held it between two of his fingers.
“Okay. If you need me to support you in your no-holds-barred Spring Break-a-Thon, so be it. I’ll attach a boozy IV to your arm once we get to the Smoky Mountains. We can act out a commercial for herpes medicine, go white-water rafting and high-five on mountain peaks. But I have to ask you here to be a little bit cautious, and not drive so goddamn fast, and not start believing this is your very last shot at living. If you don’t start being a little more careful with yourself, I’m hailing the first Greyhound back to New York City.”
Claudia had never been known as beautiful. She had always dressed in high, flattering waists and dull gold ear studs, kept her brown hair tied and clean, her life small in the service of others. There, however, in the combination Subway-KFC, she loosened. His teasing coaxed her orthodontically corrected teeth into a smile that curved under her still-wet cheeks, and her hair fell tangled around her face, protesting a lifetime of imprisonment. She closed her eyes and began to nod, as though envisioning the cleaning of many rooms, the stacking and sweeping and mopping and finally, the space around her, gleaming.
~ ~ ~
HOW LONG HAD he been cross-legged on the stiff cowhide rug by the darkened fireplace? What was Jenny’s intention, sitting up in the wide sun-bleached bed, looking impossibly old? The tattoo on her arm was the same as that in the newspaper photo — a faded black circle that he recognized now as a snake eating its tail — and the line of the freckled jaw was similar to that of the little girl in Brooklyn, but she looked as though her body had been systematically deserted, memory by memory emptying out in single file. He kept searching for evidence of her taking in or releasing air. The room seemed a near-total void of history or evidence or yesterday or tomorrow: the sheets white, pristine in the way of nothing else on the property; for a nightstand, a slab of unpolished tree trunk; the curtainless window. Just beyond her, a doorframe revealed a small, low-ceilinged room, within it a black woodstove and two simple chairs stacked together. The smells of food, of things warmed by time and by bodies, were absent.
Finally, without opening her eyes, she spoke.
“Edith sent you.”
“Well — not — you see—” he answered, although it had been clear this wasn’t a question. The woman, once a child on the steps of the building Thomas had come to need, stopped him before his unorganized mumbling achieved any pattern.
“I’m afraid I can’t help.”
“But your brother—”
She put a palm up with the patience of someone directing the weak and hospitalized.
“That person is named Owen.”
Thomas sensed Jenny’s language was one half-forgotten, its structure uncharted, the pressure of the tongue against the palate to make a sibilant sound uncomfortable.