فصل بیست و دوم

sadie

I dream of small, broken bodies.

Prone and hurt, catalogued and kept sacred in a small, dark spaces. The look in their eyes is one of utter incomprehension giving way to pain, to emptiness. Sometimes they stare right at me. Other times, the middle distance. There’s nothing I can do. It’s too late.

I dream of Mattie’s face.

I jerk awake, the side of my head knocking against the windshield. The throbbing in my nose is near unbearable—but survivable.

It’s survivable, I tell myself.

I turn the car on and glance at the clock only to discover I wasn’t out for more than an hour. I feel more tired than I did before I gave in to sleep and my bones are aching in a way that makes me miss my bed, makes me miss the idea of a home. The trailer’s not even that, anymore, though. It wasn’t when I left it. It’s not home if I’m the only person in it.

I yawn. It was the shuffling and shifting beside me that woke me up. Cat rummaging around, I think, but by the time my eyes were open, she was sitting very still beside me, staring out at the road. I follow her gaze. The rain has stopped. Must have just stopped. The midafternoon sun is out, making the pavement gleam.

Cat doesn’t look right. Everything she laid out on the dashboard is gone, back in her bag, I guess. An hour doesn’t seem like it would be enough time for them to dry.

“What’s w-wrong w-with you?” I ask.

“What? Nothing. I was just waiting for you to wake up.” “I-I’m awake.” I clear my throat. “You wanna g-get outta here?” “Sounds like a plan.”

I pull back onto the road while Cat sits rigid beside me. We drive the next hour in silence. She’s different now. I can’t put my finger on why—all I did was sleep. I roll the window down and take a deep breath. I can see the air, thick with post-rain haze.

“Hey, hey.” Cat taps me on the arm with one hand and points left with the other. The road reveals a small gas station and we must be between nowhere and somewhere, because it’s surprisingly busy. It’s got two pumps out front and probably the world’s grimiest bathrooms out back. I pull in. The sign next to the pumps says SELF SERVE (CASH ONLY, PAY INSIDE).

It’s the best of the worst available options, just slightly less talking involved than if an attendant shows, expecting you to tell them what you need. But I’m not feeling up to it. If Mattie were here, I’d let her do the talking. She liked doing her best impression of a person in charge to save me from The Look, or worse. Because there are worse people than Becki with an i—Becki, imagine her, the tip of an iceberg—and I swear I’ve met them all. There’s a lot of folks out there willing to pay for their comfort with someone else’s voice.

Cat unbuckles her seat belt and shoves some crumpled money into my hands.

“Should be enough,” she says quickly. A yellow truck pulls up behind us. “Uh, I’m just gonna stretch my legs … go to the bathroom.” “Okay.”

She gets out of the car.

I watch her round the station and sit there for another minute, or maybe much more than a minute, because the next thing I know an older man raps his knuckles against my window, startling me so bad I near hit the roof. I roll the window down and stare. He’s all silver hair and bushy eyebrows, the skin of his deeply tanned face sun-leathered enough to make it hard to guess how long he’s actually been on this earth. Forty. Sixty. I don’t know.

“Whoa! Didn’t mean ta scare ya.” His voice has a faint withering of age about it. “But it’s self-serve and you’ve been sittin’ out here so long, I thought you didn’t see the sign. We got a line happening behind you, so…” “—” I block, of course. I can feel the word in my mouth, trying desperately to free itself. When it finally does, it comes out, “Sssssssorry.” I sound drunk.

“You been drinking?” the man asks.

I’m never sure if being asked if I’m drunk is a step up from the suggestion I’m stupid, but it all points to the same thing, I guess—that there’s something fundamentally not right about me and once you feel that on you, you want to get away from it.

“If you been drinking, you know I can’t just let you drive outta here.” “C-couldn’t st-stop me. I got a”—I flash a smile—“got a g-good head st-start.” I keep that smile plastered on even as I feel heat creep past my neck, to my ears, and bloom across my cheeks until my whole face is tomato red. The hard lines around the man’s brown eyes soften. He either feels sorry for me or he’s embarrassed for himself. I won’t know which until he opens his mouth.

He clears his throat and makes it a peace offering: “How about I fill it up for ya.” “I’ll pay i-i-i—”

I give up and nod toward the building.

I’ll pay inside.

The air-conditioning gives the station a bite, raises the hairs on my arms and legs. I need to restock a little—food and water—but doing it at a place like this, where anything remotely healthy is too expensive to look at and the shit food is at a premium too, isn’t very smart of me. I grab a bottle of water from the fridge and a dusty jar of peanut butter from a shelf near the back. I pick up a plastic spoon at the coffee counter where I contemplate a seventy-five-cent coffee from an old metal percolator and decide that money’s better spent on food. So no coffee, but my metal-warped reflection is how I want people to picture me: the skin of my face stretched upward and downward at impossible lengths, my eyes dozing somewhere near the middle, my nose a long sliver with two pinprick nostrils, all of me blurring oddly together like watercolors poured down a canvas that can’t keep hold of its art.

The bells over the door spastically announce the old man’s entrance and I expect Cat to be behind him, maybe, but she’s not. I follow him to the counter with my peanut butter and water and that, combined with the gas—even with Cat’s contribution—lightens my wallet too much.

Money burns fast. Knowing that doesn’t get easier with age and it’s worse when you learn it young. The beauty of childhood is not entirely grasping the cost of living; food just appears in the fridge, you have a roof over your head because everyone does and electricity must be some kind of sorcery, like right out of Harry Potter or something, because who could ever put a price on light? Maybe it’s not even that you believe in magic. It’s that you never really had to think about any of it before. Then one day you find out you’ve been walking the razor’s edge all along.

“Th-thanks,” I tell him.

When I get back outside, Cat is nowhere to be found but the line that’s formed behind my car is looking more than a little pissed off. I get inside it and pull forward into a parking spot and that’s when I notice all her stuff is gone from the front seat.

“What the fuck,” I murmur. I get back out of the car. The place seems busier than it did a second go, people moving in and out of the store.

I cup my hands around my mouth. “C-Cat?”

A few heads turn my way, but none of them are her. I jog around the building to the bathrooms and a sign on the door says to ask for the key inside—but Cat didn’t do that. She got out of the car, walked behind the building and now she’s … she’s gone.

The back of the station faces a steep incline toward a field of wildflowers. It stretches about a mile before it meets highway. There’s no one I can see. My chest gets tight. Did something happen? Did someone … Did someone take her?

I look back, my heart thrumming, skin buzzing. I picture Cat, this girl I don’t even know, finding herself here, trying to open the door. She sees she needs the key. She needs the key, and she’d go get it, but there’s someone behind her, someone comes around from behind her— No.

Stop.

I remember my fumbling search through the loneliest, emptiest places in Cold Creek, shouting out her name perfectly, solidly, holding out for that moment my voice would fracture because the fracture would mean I wasn’t alone, that Mattie had come back.

It was the only time in my life I wanted to stutter.

I kept calling for her, kept searching. I couldn’t let myself stop looking, couldn’t let myself cry either, because never in my life would I risk crying where Mattie could see because for Mattie, I was supposed to be strong.

I remember the moment when I finally gave in, when I no longer had the strength to push against reality. I let the tears come and as soon as I did, I got a text from May Beth.

The police are here. You need to get back.

A woman brushes past, startling me.

“’Scuse me,” she mumbles as she opens the bathroom door. She has a key in her hand.

Where the fuck is Cat? I run to the front of the station and push through the doors harder than I can keep myself from doing. The bells go crazy. The old man’s head jerks up in alarm.

“D-did you see a g-girl?” I ask. “She was w-with me. I c-can’t f-find her.” He frowns. “She was b-blond, c-curly hair…?” He snaps his fingers. “Didn’t know she was with you. I saw her. She hitched a ride with some fella in a yellow truck. They pulled out while you were in here.” I take a step back.

“O-okay. Thanks.”

“You bet.”

I walk back to the car and the panic inside me fades into confused embarrassment.

I bring my fingers to my lips.

Cat ditched me.

I mean, I don’t care.

It wasn’t like we were—

It’s not like …

When I get back to the car, I realize the backseat is a different kind of messy than it was before I picked her up … She was going through my things, looking for—what?

I pull the door open and see blood. My stained shirt unearthed from where I stuffed it under the seat, now crumpled in a heap on the floor mat, the switchblade beside it. I slam the door shut and get back in the driver’s side.

I hope whoever she ended up with wasn’t a worse person than me.