Tobias listened, leaning against the side door and staring at the empty passenger seat. It was soothing to listen to Myrra read, but something about the words made Tobias feel incredibly vulnerable. They were such delicate beings, trapped in such a harsh place. The wind raged again. All around them there were small little pinging noises as the sand hit the windows and the sides of the car. A chorus of sand.
“‘It made her feel a little lonesome, until then she had been busy climbing but now she was beginning beginning hearing everything and it was a little lonesome.’”
Myrra slowed down on the last words, let her voice diminish in volume, looked over the top of the book to watch Charlotte. The baby let out a small snore. Closing the book and bunching up the corner of her sleeve, Myrra delicately wiped away the snot that was dripping out of Charlotte’s nose.
Myrra leaned her head back against the leather headrest and regarded Tobias. He looked back at her, but both kept quiet. Quiet was a relative term—Charlotte was still snoring, and sand was still pelting the plexiglass. But it still felt quiet.
“That’s an odd story, isn’t it? I don’t remember reading anything like that when I was a kid.” He kept his voice soft, glancing over at Charlotte asleep.
“I like it,” Myrra said. “It has simple words. I used to borrow books from Marcus’s collection, but they were always harder to get through.”
He looked down at the book in her hand. Such a rare thing; he’d handled only one or two books in his entire life. He held out a hand.
“May I?”
Myrra handed it over to him gently. There were pages torn out; he shuddered as though he were looking at an amputated limb. Tobias leafed through its browning pages, turning each over gingerly between two fingers.
“Jake gave you this, right?” he asked while examining an illustration of a boy and a lion.
“Yes.” Myrra sounded surprised, and Tobias realized his faux pas. It was an awkward reminder that he’d studied her and that only a few days prior he’d been hunting her.
“How much do you know about me, exactly?” she asked.
Tobias was too tired for quick thinking, though he desperately wished he could soften the situation with a few white lies.
“I know a lot about you. More than I should,” he said finally. “Part of the job. I’m sorry.”
Through a crack in the blankets, the orange light of a sunset filtered through. Or maybe it was a sunrise. He’d lost track. Tobias reclined his seat, enough to lean back but not enough to squish Charlotte, asleep on the seat behind him. He stretched out on his side and watched Myrra. She looked regretful but not suspicious.
“Did you guys talk to Jake?” Myrra asked.
“Yeah, we talked to him,” Tobias said.
Myrra winced at the thought.
“I treated him badly,” she admitted. “I led him on. I didn’t love him.”
Tobias thought back to the interview, how much he’d judged Jake at the time. He’d felt so much older, so much smarter, but in the end he wasn’t above anyone. Cosmically, he was just as clueless as the next person.
“I’m sorry about that,” Myrra continued. Her eyelids were drooping. “It’s strange, I didn’t think I would be, but I am. He offered me friendship, and I used him.”
“He’ll be fine,” he said, trying to sound reassuring. There was nothing else to say. They would never see Jake again. “As fine as any of us can be.”
Myrra couldn’t get it out of her head, how much Tobias knew about her. She knew he felt bad about it, and that on some level it was part of his job; that’s what agents did, investigated people. He was trying his best to play it down; on the long drive, he listened to her tell stories of her life, acted interested in them, even if she had a sneaking suspicion that he knew some of the details already.
“I need a distraction,” she said. This was partially true—Tobias had been quiet for the past few hours, and she was tired of talking. “Tell me something about yourself, something I don’t know.”
“Um. OK,” he replied, grinning uncomfortably. It was fun to throw him off balance. He thought for a minute, then slowed the car down and pulled out his tablet, clicked on a photo album, and handed it to her. Then he resumed driving. Safety first, Myrra thought.
The album was a series of paintings; Myrra could tell by the variations in style that they had been painted by a number of different artists. They were stranger, moodier, less classical than the pieces that Marcus had collected and shown on his walls. She sifted through the photos, holding for a few seconds on each one.
“My family once had a great art collection, back on the old world. They sold half of it off to buy passage to Telos. David never shut up about it, and it was the only story of his that I actually liked hearing.” Tobias mostly kept his eyes on the road, but she noticed he couldn’t help stealing glances down at the tablet in her hands to see which one she was looking at. He peered down as her hand hovered over a nude portrait. “That’s Lucian Freud—he’s great—”
They were beautiful pieces—some of them looked familiar, as if maybe Myrra had seen them in a book or on the walls of an art collector’s penthouse. She’d gone along to enough meetings and dinner parties at the Carlyles’ behest; she’d seen plenty.
“So now,” Tobias continued, “anytime I visit a museum, or end up at a fancy party, I look around at the art on the walls, to see if any of it once belonged to my family. I’ve never found one, though.” She shifted to another painting, and when Tobias caught the one she was looking at, he touched her hand to stop her from shifting to the next image. “This one’s my favorite. The painter was trying to count to infinity—”
It was a simple gray painting with lines of white-painted numbers scrolling across the canvas. Of course, Myrra thought. Of course this was his favorite painting. It was the most orderly thing she’d ever seen. Then a jolt of familiarity hit, and she realized; she sat up and turned to him. “I’ve seen this!”
“You’re joking.” Tobias’s eyes widened. “Where?”
She felt giddy, as if they were two strangers meeting at a bar, shocked to have the same friend in common, or to find out that they had both grown up in the same small town.
“It was at Senator Davis’s house, in his entryway. Imogene used to loan me out to their kitchen staff whenever she visited for a dinner party.” Myrra leaned closer, her eyes wide, her body alive with a sudden surge of energy. “It confused me; I didn’t really understand what all the numbers meant. I thought maybe it was a painting of a receipt, or computer code.”
“Nope,” Tobias said. “It was infinity all along.”
“Do you know how high he got, before he died?”
Tobias furrowed his brow. “Actually, I don’t.”
Charlotte was in the back seat, playing with a set of keys that Tobias had found in the bottom of his knapsack. “They’re to my apartment. So they’re pretty useless, at this point,” he’d said upon handing them over, not without amusement.
Charlotte had come up with a game where she’d drop the keys on the floor, shout, “Uh-oh” (her new favorite sound), and wait for Myrra to retrieve them. The repetition was starting to get to Myrra. She was up front with Tobias, looking warily at the charge display on the car’s dashboard. The battery was getting low. To keep her eyes off the battery light on the dash, Myrra tried looking out the window instead. The sun continued to rise and set at a maddening pace, but what was more concerning was the clouds clustering in lumps above them. Up until this point the sky had been clear, with only the occasional wisp of white passing by.
“It’s not usual for there to be this many clouds out here, is it?” she asked. It seemed like the type of thing Tobias would know.
Tobias followed her eyes and looked up at the mass above them. “No. It’s probably due to messed-up daylight patterns.”
The next time the sun rose, Myrra marked the color of them—they were no longer white. Now they were swollen and gray, big bellied with rain. Within ten m
inutes, fat water droplets were splatting against the windshield. Here and there at first, and then more and more until sheets of water cascaded against the glass. Through the sound of water pounding against metal, Myrra heard a telltale jangling noise from the back seat. Charlotte had dropped the keys again.
“Uh-oh!” she shouted.
“Shit,” Tobias mumbled. Myrra watched as he toggled the windshield wipers to their fastest setting. The dunes outside swam together through a watery filter, watercolor sweeps of blue and brown and green and white. Now Myrra truly felt as though they were at sea.
Tobias sat forward in the driver’s seat, pushing his face closer to the windshield. Charlotte started to fuss, and Myrra reached around on the floor behind the seats, searching for the keys she’d dropped. “OK, sweetie, OK…”
“Deserts aren’t meant to have this much rain,” she heard Tobias say. He sounded apprehensive. “It’s going to flood.”
Myrra felt the jagged edge of cold metal deep under Tobias’s seat. How the keys had wandered that far in such a short time was a mystery. She deposited them back in Charlotte’s hands.
“Uh-oh,” Charlotte said again.
“Uh-oh,” Myrra parroted back. “You dropped the keys! Hang on to them this time, OK?”
“Oh,” Charlotte replied. She wove her fingers in between the bits of metal, entranced.
“Will we be OK?” Myrra asked Tobias, settling back into her seat.
“I don’t know,” Tobias mumbled, squinting to try to see.
And then, ten minutes into another nightfall, there was another earthquake. Myrra heard the rumble of the ground and what sounded like the rumble of sand being displaced in the dunes. It was impossible to see anything outside. The car stopped with a sudden jolt. As slowly as they were going, Myrra was still flung forward, ending up half in her seat and half on the floor. She craned her neck back from her jostled position to check the back seat. Charlotte was safely strapped in.
“Battery dead?” Myrra asked, pulling herself back up. No—the wipers were still going full tilt. Tobias pushed on the accelerator; Myrra heard the whir of tires spinning underneath them, but felt no motion.
“I think we’re stuck in mud,” Tobias said. He unbuckled his seat belt. “I’m going to go see how bad it is.”
He shook his shoulders a little, steeling himself, then opened the door and rushed out, slamming it shut before too much rain could get in. It was as though he’d disappeared completely; the water flowed so thickly down the windows, it was impossible to make out his shape outside. Myrra waited a few minutes. She cupped her hands against the window, pushed her face close to the glass; nothing. Myrra looked back at Charlotte—she was swinging the keys around and around the metal circle of the ring, mesmerized. She would be fine for a few minutes. Myrra counted to ten, then jumped out of the car to find Tobias.
Her feet were immediately submerged up to the ankles in loose wet sand. She hadn’t even had a chance to look around the car for Tobias before her clothes were soaked through. She found him on his hands and knees at the front driver’s-side tire, digging away the sand that had piled in front of it.
“Here—” she shouted, getting down on all fours next to him to assist. Tobias looked at her through the water beading on his glasses. She could tell he was on the verge of protesting and telling her to get back in the car, but then he seemed to think better of it and continued digging.
She sank her arms in up to her elbows and flung mud behind her, but it was no use; more mud just poured down to replace it.
“Let’s get back in,” Tobias eventually shouted to her over the din of the rain. “We won’t be able to do anything until the rain lets up.”
She nodded at him, and they raced back to their respective car doors. The moment the doors clicked shut, Myrra noticed the difference in sound; it wasn’t quiet per se, but everything was suddenly muffled. Charlotte still twirled her keys, enviously dry. They were trapped in a bubble under the sea, their own miniature Palmer. She sat and stared ahead at the windshield in shock, completely drenched. Water dripped off her hair onto the car seat. Pat. Pat. Pat.
She turned to Tobias. Myrra couldn’t see his eyes through all the condensation that had formed on his glasses. His dark-brown hair had gone black with wet and was plastered in curls to his forehead. Clothing was merely a film clinging to their bodies at this point. Tobias pulled off his glasses and, in a futile attempt, tried to wipe them down on the sopping corner of his shirt.
“Do you have towels packed somewhere around here?” Myrra asked. She looked over the top of the back seat—clothes and bags were piled in small mountains in the hatchback trunk.
“No,” Tobias said, his shoulders slumping. “Towels would have been useful.”
They dried themselves off with diapers instead. Myrra counted out how many they had left. There should still be enough for Charlotte to last until they died. Her spine tingled underneath her wet clothing. It was unsettling to consider death in such practical terms.
Tobias hung his head upside down beside the dash and rubbed the inside of a diaper back and forth against his hair.
“This works surprisingly well,” he said, rubbing the edge of the diaper around his ears.
“The best brand for absorbing moisture,” she said, holding up the package. She’d wrapped two diapers around her own hair, but her clothes were soaked through. Tobias’s clothes were dripping as well.
Tobias caught her eye. “I snagged some of the clothes you dumped, if you want to change.”
Myrra glanced around the confines of the car.
“I won’t look if you won’t,” he added.
She climbed back and rifled through Tobias’s supplies, tossing him a gray button-down shirt followed by jeans, boxers, and a pair of thick socks. Searching through the odds and ends, she found a serviceable blue dress for herself. Leggings. Bra. Underwear. All wonderfully dry. She changed, keeping her body facing the rear of the car, patting down the last bits of sopping skin. Her feet were still bare.
“Can I steal a pair of your socks?” she called up, and out of instinct she turned to look at Tobias. He was only halfway into his shirt, contorted, trying to pull his jeans up over his boxers. It was an endearing pose; he looked like a teenager hurrying back into his clothes after a midnight tryst, just about to sneak out his girlfriend’s window. Tobias blushed, and she hurriedly turned back around.
“Sorry—” she shouted over her shoulder.
“Oh, no—it’s fine,” he said. “And sure, take the socks.”
She slipped on a thick gray pair and wiggled her toes happily in the enveloping dry warmth. The gray matched Tobias’s shirt. He was fastidious enough; no doubt that was on purpose.
“OK, dressed,” he shouted from the front.
Myrra took one of the half-damp diapers and wiped off the front seat before climbing over and sitting back down next to him. She heard the keys clang to the floor behind her.
“Uh-oh!” Charlotte cried out, clearly thrilled with herself.
Myrra retrieved them, then Tobias took a turn, then Myrra again, while they listened to the rain subside and waited for the sand to dry out. The earth shook again, a tiny quake. The sun set and rose.
33
MYRRA & TOBIAS
Tobias had hoped that being around Myrra and Charlotte would keep him calm, but that wasn’t strictly true. Myrra did not fix his mental state—in fact she complicated it. Just his having to regularly interact with a person meant that Tobias’s emotions were more present on the surface—anxieties that he’d usually try to ignore were now mirrored in Myrra. In many ways he felt closer to a breakdown now than he had in Kittimer. But it didn’t matter. It was good to have her around. No, good was too simple—nothing about life was good right now. Myrra was neither good nor bad, Charlotte was neither good nor bad. But they were necessary. It was necessary to have someone there to fret over, to consider when making choices, to react to, to argue with, to talk to, to remind him that he was alive. In
all his ball of pain, it was necessary to remember that he was still alive.
The car didn’t last very long past the rainstorm. Steadily, incrementally, it slowed and puttered until it stopped moving altogether. Myrra, who’d had her eyes glued to the charge display on the dash for the past hour, let out a sigh.
“That’s that,” she said, sounding frustrated but also resigned.
Tobias slumped forward and let his forehead come to rest on the steering wheel. He closed his eyes and tried not to feel hopeless. They’d been driving for two days and they were still surrounded by sand. It was hard to hold on to the feeling that not too long ago, he’d looked around and considered this sand beautiful and majestic, all the blues and greens. Things could change from majestic to monotonous in no time at all.
He heard the sound of the car door wrenching and squelching open—the machinery was still a little waterlogged. He raised his head back up. Myrra was walking down the road, peering ahead with her hand shading her face, examining the way forward. Myrra was always pushing forward. It was awe inspiring.
“Tobias,” she called out. He liked that she hadn’t yet tried to call him Toby, but that he wasn’t Bendel to her either, as his coworkers always called him.
“Yeah?” he answered back.
“Come out here a minute—does the sky look strange to you?”
He braced himself for another rainstorm, or lightning, or a tornado—who knew what the universe would throw at them next? He climbed out of the car and stretched his arms and legs, trying to wrench the frustration from his body. From her spot in the back seat, Charlotte watched Tobias and started crying the second he closed the car door.
“Charlotte’s crying,” Tobias said. Myrra cocked an ear toward the sound, as though trying to suss out a foreign language.
“She wants you to pick her up,” Myrra said.
“Me?” Tobias asked. He pointed a finger at his own chest and then felt like an idiot. As if to confirm this, Myrra laughed at him.
The World Gives Way: A Novel Page 31