Mountain Road, Late at Night

by Alan Rossi

  Sitting in the unmoving traffic, now without Jeannie’s voice coming from the speakers in the car, surrounding her, almost blanketing her, she felt the force of her aloneness. She equally felt the force of her not moving, of not having anything to do, of being confronted with just sitting there for who knew how long. Her car moved slowly forward and for a moment she thought the traffic was going to open up, but it didn’t. She pushed hard on the brake pedal before nearly rear-ending the Nissan in front of her. She thought of Jeannie in her house in Florida and wished she was there with her. Jeannie said that what she liked to do when life presented her with a dilemma was to consult her cards. Tammy knew that Jeannie would prepare a joint, light the candles, and then get out the tarot deck. Tammy pictured Jeannie, on her sofa, legs curled up to her, in her little apartment, with this new black boyfriend, Randall, maybe in the kitchen. He was apparently a good cook, and Jeannie’d be there in the darkness of that apartment, the wood slatted shades always drawn, the sound of the ocean waves out the window, the oil paintings on the wall all painted by Jeannie, her dreams, she said, not very good paintings, but strange enough that Tammy was always surprised by them: a cracked moon reflected in a puddle, which itself, you came to realize, was reflected in an eye. She felt a momentary longing for Jeannie’s life even though she knew she judged it. She saw her sister as a faux-mystic, a pretend-gypsy, and underneath all the tarot and palm reading and scarves and dark dresses and long hair, Jeannie was just a pothead. Still, to live on the beach, to feel some easefulness in life, to not have to work every day, to be as carefree as Jeannie presented herself to be. And yet when she and Steve learned about the fact that Jeannie was dating a black guy, they told each other it’d last six months, was a novelty, that they were too different. At that point they’d only seen pictures of the guy through Steve’s FB (I thought you hated this shit, Steve had said when she was looking, to which Tammy remembered replying, Not now I don’t). He was not a big guy, not a small guy, just an average black guy. Average black guy, Tammy had said to Steve. He’s definitely no football player, Steve had replied. She couldn’t get one of those? Help this family out. She sometimes felt a snap in her mind when Steve referred to the family as his, as though he was fully a part of the family in the time they’d been together, as though she hadn’t plucked him from complete anonymity, but then, who was she? Just a person with a sister, parents, and a daughter, and now, potentially anyway, a black brother-in-law. Still, she had people. Steve didn’t have anyone. She knew it must be hard, so she let Steve have this, she granted it to him: it’s your family too, she told him once, and he’d looked at her, not understanding why she said it. She didn’t explain. She wondered if Jeannie had granted this to Randall as well. He was newer though, so maybe not yet. Her parents, who were now great-grandparents, certainly hadn’t. She even suspected news of Randall was a contributing factor in one of her father’s recent strokes, that left his face droopy and his words muttery. You’re kidding? Steve had said. Oh no, Tammy told him. I can just see my dad seeing a picture of this guy, asking Mom, is this Randall, and her nodding and then a part of my dad’s sphincter squeezing so tight and hard that it scrunched shut a pathway in his brain. Knocked him out cold. Jesus, Steve had said. Hey, he survived it, Tammy had told him. She knew her parents wouldn’t even consider the thought that Randall might be part of the family, but Tammy got it, if this black guy did it for Jeannie, if jazz and Tyler Perry and smoked pork butt or whatever did it for Jeannie – all of which she knew were clichés and stereotypes, but whatever – then good, she deserved something decent. Someone in the family did. Plus, maybe he was an understanding, thoughtful person. Maybe Randall was the type of person that would be okay with having a boy unexpectedly have to come live with Jeannie and him, unlike Steve, who was a different type of person.

  Her phone buzzed with a call. It was Steve. She didn’t want to answer it. She wondered if he knew she wasn’t at work, but decided it was just his normal phone call during her nightshift at the hospital’s front desk. Yet, if he somehow had found out, she didn’t want to hear him attempt to convince her that her heart was in the right place, but logically speaking, practically speaking, this was not her place. There were other family members better suited to this than them, which had seemed to be his primary argument, along with the idea that she was reacting in a selfish way, and that what she should really be doing is grieving her dead daughter. Her phone continued its buzzing and instead of answering it, she ignored the call, let it go to voicemail, and put the car in park and got out. A light rain fell. She pulled up the hood of her windbreaker and walked toward the accident, stretching her legs and observing the line of cars, some angled off toward the concrete barrier separating their side of the highway from the other side, the cars on the other side moving freely and easily. The angled cars were people trying to get a look, to see how far ahead. It doesn’t matter how far, a trucker yelled down at her. Every lane is closed. She smiled at him and he told her to climb up, that it’d be awhile. She ignored the comment and kept walking. A gust of wind made her pull her windbreaker around her and tighten her hood over her head. She glanced to her left, where a man in some kind of Nissan was staring at his phone. Behind her, a woman was in a Ford, staring at her phone. She noticed that around her, almost every person in their car was looking at their phone, their faces framed in a strange glow of blue light, making them all appear ghostly and unreal. But they were real, with real lives, different from hers, some better, some worse, there was no way of knowing which. She imagined Jack, and his being with her making her own life better. No, not better, she thought, more real. So often she felt like a ghost in her own life. She went to work, she filled out insurance forms, people treated her as though she herself was a form, she watched television with Steve, she occasionally went for a drive through the cornfields, everything the same, every day repeating itself, just like every row of corn, every block of field. She imagined Jack eating breakfast with Nathaniel and Stefanie. She imagined how lost those two probably were, how when she arrived, it might take Jack a minute, but then he’d remember her, the toys she’d brought him, maybe some subconscious memories of the times she’d fed him a bottle when he was little, and he’d eventually sit next to her on the sofa, like he did the night April had been reading to him and he’d just stood up with the book, walked over to her, and sat on her lap. No words. No asking. He just came over to her and wanted her to read like he’d felt that she was family, not that he’d been told it. And she’d read to him with April watching. She remembered wanting April to see it. To see her. She’d wanted April to see that Jack could feel they were related and that she knew what she was doing, despite the fact that April, and Nicholas, thought she didn’t because she hadn’t been the perfect mother to April. But they didn’t take into consideration how difficult things were for her then. An eighteen-year-old girl, trying to do it all alone, April’s father not there to help. She imagined that Jack would do the same thing now. She would arrive, pull up in her rental, walk up to the cabin, and when Jack saw her, he might hesitate at first – he only saw her once a year, after all – but then he’d remember the times she’d read to him, the times she’d swung him in the swing, the times she’d sung to him, the times she’d made him French toast, and most importantly the feeling of family he’d gotten from her, and he’d come to her, take her hand, and it would all be clear. If only April could see that, that Jack chose her, not the rich kids. It was a disgusting thought to have. Her daughter was gone and she was thinking of how she’d show April, and everyone else, that she was the right one for Jack. Not only that, but that it would be his choice. She shouldn’t be thinking it. Out of respect for the dead. But she couldn’t help the glimmer of a thought that said that maybe April hadn’t done a good job of reminding Jack that she was family too, that she mattered, that she was part of Jack’s life, that April was wrong. It wasn’t only Jack’s choice though that mattered. She would have to come up with an argument, something to convince Nat
haniel and Stefanie, the other side of the family, that Jack belonged with her.

  The cars started moving again, and she jogged back to her rental, shook off the rain, got in, and she was driving. Another phone call from Steve. She again ignored the call and after a few minutes of moving slowly, maneuvering to the far left lane, she passed the SUV, motorcycle, and F-150, which looked destroyed, as though a boulder had been dropped on its hood. She noticed herself register that there were people standing on the side of the road, heads down, soaked by the rain. Two women, a younger and older woman, sisters, or a mother and daughter. Their hair lank and wet. Then another body, a man, on a stretcher being put into the back of the ambulance. She watched, her head turning as she drove by. A movement in her, like a hand inside her chest trying to unclench and pry apart another hand that was in a fist. She closed her eyes and breathed, then remembered she was driving here. The highway began to move by her. She saw these people momentarily in her rearview, growing smaller, their bodies against the enormity of the highway, the rushing cars, the world around them. Then she couldn’t see them anymore and she was driving, watching the rushing freeway. The visual illusion was still something that she enjoyed – that when in a car one could feel like the entire world was moving by, the rush of pavement, the buildings and trees, the concrete abutments, the moon and clouds, a grey nighttime moving outside, while remaining still. While thinking this, driving, her headlights made almost tangible by the mist and rain, solid beams of light into the night, she thought of April, how she’d heard about her daughter’s death, how it was so different from the accident she’d just passed. Everyone had survived the accident she’d just passed. Even the man on the stretcher, or gurney, or whatever it was called, he was moving, he was looking around, she could see him. He’d be okay. The lives around him, he’d join again, like a fish pulled from the stream and then tossed back. That man on the stretcher didn’t have to be envious of the faces that were watching him, didn’t have to feel that they’d go on without him. But April had been alone on a mountain road. No other cars. They weren’t even found till the morning. It’d be worse to die on a highway, Tammy thought, hitting another vehicle, seeing other faces, all these other faces that were going to outlive you, lying on the pavement or stuck in an ambulance and knowing that everything was going to outlive you. That other worlds would remain complete, intact. These other people, the world was going to stay there for them, they were going to stay in it, however good or bad it was, but you were not. Not only were you dying but you also had to try not to feel envy that other people were not dying. But you would, she thought. You definitely would. You’d feel envious that everything was going to keep going without you. That you were the most insignificant part of the world in that moment. Your death was the proof of that. Your own death was so small that the world took no notice, and the pain of it, whatever pain April’d experienced, whatever fear, the fear that you would never be in the world again, that the world was gone for you, was also completely insignificant: there and then gone. Dying on a highway, you’d see passing cars, people looking in at you, the lights of buildings, restaurants maybe, a gas station, and you’d know that you were soon to be nothing, while the something that was everything else went on like the stupidity it was. She thought of how maybe April got to see Nicholas, though he was supposedly unconscious, so that didn’t really count. That was better anyway, being alone. Being alone when you died was the best way to die because it was how everything was: you were alone. Maybe you had friends when you were a kid or a teenager, maybe you had a family, maybe you had everything you wanted, but when you were dying you realized you were utterly alone. That you always had been, Tammy thought. People didn’t know that. People thought you went to some perfect place or that you went back to the universe or that you were reborn, but that wasn’t it. It was just finished. You were done. You would never see, feel, think, be anything again. It was why Tammy was fine with however hard her life was, because it showed her that loneliness was banal, boring even, nothing to be that afraid of. When she died, she hoped it could be like April, completely alone. Being completely alone in that moment was even better than being with maybe one person who wouldn’t make you feel like they were just going to go on without you. There were so few of those people in anyone’s life, Tammy knew. She had once thought that maybe Steve was her person, but he wasn’t. He was just another unmoored soul. The person, she knew, was Jack. When she was older, after she’d sent him to school, or maybe even after she homeschooled him, anything but the Montessori school that April and Nicholas sent him to, after she’d helped him learn a trade, maybe something with cars, after she helped him get into a decent little state school, maybe a partial scholarship, after she’d got him set up in the world, he’d be the one that would come to her when she was going to disappear into nothingness. He’d hold her hand, tell her he loved her, would thank her. Before April’s death, she’d thought that person would be April, but now she knew her witness would be Jack. If you were lucky, you got a witness, you got one person to watch you die and say, This person was here. This person affected something in this world, and that something is me. She felt almost nauseated that April hadn’t had this from her, but as Tammy well knew, you did not get what you wanted. You got lucky or you didn’t, that was all, though it helped to arrange your luck. And with Jack she got a new start: both to be there for someone and for someone to be there for her. Some disconnection had occurred between her and April. Something was missing. Something had been missing for a long time. Or maybe was always missing, she didn’t know. Like those model airplanes and cars April used to get, which had infuriated Tammy some. She had wished April was doing something a little more feminine by ten. Though still, Tammy had helped. They’d build the plane or whatever it was, and inevitably, it seemed, as the thing took shape, it never looked quite as real as on the box, never looked like an actual plane or battleship. That was their relationship: it was only the semblance of the thing itself. Some incomplete mother–daughter model, missing some key piece, from the beginning of April’s life, as though Tammy, in not wanting the child initially, despite doing what she thought most mothers did when their baby finally arrived, which was feel a complete and utter love, had somehow created the lack, as though she was the model maker and had willfully misplaced some key component of the model. This only intensified throughout April’s life, falling into the background in certain moments, when she was a young girl, then becoming more obvious again as a preteen in her hatred of her mother’s boyfriends (who were, admittedly, often idiots, just as Tammy was often an idiot), then turning into April’s identification not with other young teenage girls, but the sports boy crowd, so that she dressed and acted like an afflicted teenage boy, which was infuriating to Tammy and which April seemed to delight in infuriating Tammy with, only for April to change again, in college, into an intellectual, taking philosophy and psychology classes and treating Tammy herself with a sort of openness that felt ironic in its sincerity. And then the final change, Tammy thought, was the most obvious move in explaining the distance between them and what was missing between them: after Nicholas and April met in grad school, after they married a year later, they moved far away from the Midwest, into the mountains, isolated and alone, and lived a life that Tammy knew April felt was a sort of rejection of everything that Tammy had taught April: to fight for oneself, to try to move up in the world, to live with family even if you disliked them, which was what Tammy had tried to do herself when she was a young mother. She wouldn’t let any of this happen with Jack, and that was exactly what Steve didn’t understand.

  A car came up behind her, in the middle lane, and tailed her closely. Tammy signaled to change lanes and then did, the BMW speeding past. She watched it weave between a truck and an SUV, moving into the left-hand lane. She observed, with mild annoyance and the vague thought that the driver was probably on a cell phone, the BMW moving fast and swervingly. The rain was falling harder, she now noticed, and she increased the speed
of the wipers by bumping the wand next to the steering wheel upward. She called Steve back and before she could say anything, he said, I’ve been calling and calling you, Tam. I called your work. Dolores said she’s filling in for you. He was surprisingly calm. She had a hard time understanding if his calm and concern were real or not, if he was using it, as she’d begun to learn he used calm and concern, as a way to manipulate her, in the same way he’d seemingly tried to manipulate her in their earlier conversation when she told him she wanted Jack to live with them, by telling her that she was still in the grieving process and could not possibly make that decision and to give it a few days. On the phone now, she told him she was driving to North Carolina. He said that that was what he was afraid of, and he wanted her to know that more than anything that was disappointing to him because obviously she felt she couldn’t tell him. Oh, that’s disappointing, she said. No, no, that’s not what I meant, he said. It’s disappointing, I mean, I’m disappointed in myself. What he meant was, the fact that she didn’t tell him made him feel bad because he didn’t want to be the type of person who she had to hide things from, he didn’t want to be the type of guy who told her she shouldn’t go get her grandchild or something like that, or that she shouldn’t be the guardian, and he was sorry if he put that in her head, or if what he’d said came off that way. That was not the way he wanted it to come off. He was disappointed in himself because obviously he’d put that in her head and he didn’t want to do that. If she wanted Jack to live with them, he would definitely, fully support that. But Tam, he was just sharing a concern, and that concern was based on his own experience. When he lost Sloane, that was one of the most confusing moments of his life. He didn’t know up from down. He quit his job working construction because it reminded him of her, how she’d bring him lunch at work and they’d eat on a picnic table or under a tree near whatever building he was working on. She’d bring a thermos with coffee and whisky in it and share it, and he’d go back to work with the warm feeling of her inside him. What he should’ve done was take the two weeks his boss wanted to give him, but he’d quit, and gone on a bender instead and nearly killed himself in another car accident. He realized her situation wasn’t the same, but. Stop, Tammy said. Stop talking. For one fucking minute stop. There was quiet on the phone. Then she told him she didn’t want to hear about Sloane. In fact, one month, she didn’t want to hear a Sloane story for one month. Or maybe they should just start with a week. How about that? One week without Sloane coming up. She felt an anger that she’d been suppressing become centrally focused, like a glowing coal in her throat, that allowed her to say what she needed to say to him. In fact, it seems like I know everything about you and Sloane, I know your past, I know your lowest point, I know your recovery, but you know almost nothing about me and my past. And that’s because you never ask. I mean, sure, I shared things, but you don’t really know. You don’t know me and April. You don’t know why I’m doing this. Why I’d want to. Because it’s always Steve and Sloane. As though no one else has had hard times. As though Steve and Sloane were the real Bonnie and Clyde, but in this version, only Bonnie dies, and Clyde goes on to live a guilt-ridden and self-pitying life with a boring woman named Tammy. There was silence on the line and Tammy felt the heat in her throat cooling, as though expressing these words was like cold air settling gently over the burning coal. After a moment, she said she was sorry, and Steve said that no, she was right, she was definitely right, he knew he made things about himself and he knew he had a problem, his past was his problem, and he was the one who was sorry, he should’ve done a better job just listening to her or whatever it was she needed, but see, instead, part of him gave advice, probably because he’d been in AA for so long and he was a sponsor, as she knew, and people were always asking him for advice. So, he had that habit of making things about himself and giving advice, but he really didn’t mean to try to convince her one way or the other. Tammy said that he was doing it again, was he aware he was doing it again? Fuck, Steve said. Yes, I see it, he said. I’m done now. I’m stopping.