Mountain Road, Late at Night

by Alan Rossi

  She told Steve that he didn’t even understand what this was all about. What this really was about was that Jack needed someone who could devote their life to him, and the other family members, they had full lives. She didn’t. She and Steve didn’t. Their life was barely there, so unreal compared to these other lives, as though it existed in black and white: an apartment, an old car, an unsalaried job, the scarcest of healthcare, no retirement. She told Steve that they talked a little over dinner, a television show, and there wasn’t a lack of communication, there wasn’t miscommunication, there wasn’t wondering what was going on with Steve, there wasn’t the unknowability of this other person. There was just another person there. Just Steve. Just Tammy. She knew what he was, he knew what she was. There was nothing to talk about, there was no communication that needed to occur, their life was barely there. At some point, there was barely even loneliness, she told him. There was the empty space – like a clearly missing book on the shelf of life – where their life should have gone, and with Jack, there’d be a purpose again.

  Ahead, brake lights lit up and dimmed in the night, lit up again. Traffic slowing as the flat elevated highway gave way to another downward slope. Tammy thought that the last time there’d been a clear purpose in her life was at another point in her life, when she had felt the need to save April. Now she felt the need to save Jack, but years ago she’d done something similar. Except then it had been her fault. She remembered that in the apartment with April, when April was finally older, eight or nine, Tammy had begun to feel some unease. She felt like a mother, but she also felt a little starved for adult communication. It’d been years since she’d even thought of dating, but there was another dental assistant at work, a man. She’d thought it was time. She told the male dental assistant (which was what she called him since she’d known him) to take her for drinks, a burger. He did, but he also didn’t last long: when she brought him home the first time to meet April, he’d almost been shocked the kid was real. At work, she’d told him she had April, and he seemed fine with it. Then he was presented with the reality, an actual child. The reality of this child put him off, and she had seen, suddenly, how hard getting what she wanted was going to be. In addition to this, whenever Tammy went out, April moped a little. When Tammy began seeing other men from the restaurant-slash-bar she went to after work, April gave the guys a hard time. She quizzed them on US history, multiplication, their intentions, and, most pryingly, their families: How many girlfriends have you had in the last year? Do you have parents who are still together? How old are your siblings and what do they do now? The guys took it as good fun, but April also thwarted their efforts. She was a force. Tammy knew the men thought she was a handful. So when things seemed to consistently not work out (almost every man claiming that they’d had a lot of fun with Tammy, but hey, they just weren’t in the dad business), Tammy then resented April for it. She found one guy who delivered Fedex to their neighborhood and house, when April was about to be in high school. He had a beard and long, brown hair. He wore flannels. He worked every day, and April’d finally sort of given up on interrogations. She actually seemed to like him. They dated for several months. He spent the night. He watched movies with them, popped popcorn, made meals. But it didn’t work out, as so many things in her life didn’t, and it was no one’s fault, really, if she honestly considered it, no one’s fault at all, just a thing that occurred in the circumstances of her life, which were, as they had always been, not exactly right. Just not right enough. Not wrong, entirely, but not right, either. One night, after Tammy went to bed but he and April stayed up to finish some horror movie, Tammy woke and went to the kitchen for water and she found the Fedex man massaging April. That ended that and when Tammy discussed this with April, asking why she’d let him do that, April told her that it wasn’t the first time, that he did it at least once a week and that he had told April that if she told Tammy that she wouldn’t understand. Tammy had called the guy then, told him that she was filing a report and he would be arrested tomorrow, so be ready, but she never did it. Instead, she moved them away, to a different part of the city, changed phone numbers, gave them a new start, she’d finally had the means to do it, though all April’d said was that she’d moved her away from her school and friends, beginning the divide between them that would eventually carry April away to North Carolina. April hadn’t appreciated Tammy, and neither would Jack, Tammy knew, but in time he might, and anyway, she thought, Jack’s appreciation or gratitude wasn’t necessary. He was too little for it. He just needed a safe space, and that was what Tammy was going to provide.

  Steve was saying that he hadn’t realized Tammy believed their life was so boring, and that he was glad to be at a steady and settled place in his life. He liked eating dinner and watching television together. What was wrong with that? He told Tammy he sometimes wondered if she felt this way because she didn’t get to have a proper youth. He sometimes wondered if she wouldn’t resent so much, or take so much for granted, if she’d been granted some wildness. Then maybe she could appreciate quiet things, simple things, like he did. Her car slowed to a stop, a winding trail of cars down the mountain. She said she didn’t think it was that. She wasn’t resentful. She just wanted something that was hers, and she’d messed that up with April. She told Steve that if Nathaniel and Stefanie took Jack into their lives, she’d never see him, and she’d never get the opportunity to correct some of the mistakes she’d made, along with April’s own mistakes with Jack. I don’t know, Steve said. I understand, but I don’t know.

  Her car was coming out of the mountains, and she could see the city she was approaching, which appeared to be huddled around a river. She told Steve that he didn’t know because he never had a kid. He never had a girl who at seventeen had stolen his car. He’d never had a son say, I can’t wait to get away from you. He’d never had a child, maybe fifteen, try to get out of his grasp after an argument about his boyfriend, a guy some seven years older than her, and how a pair of scissors one of them was holding slipped, and cut him deep through the forearm. He’d never sat with a daughter, both of them sitting on the sofa, not talking, eating Subway, not knowing at all what was going through his kid’s head, but he’d also never watched his kid in the kitchen making grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner for the first time. He’d never played Risk on the dinner table for hours, drinking tea and eating pretzels. He’d never shared colds. He’d never had a son slip into his room after watching a horror movie to sleep with him. He’d never watched his kid begin lessons on the piano, an old one a friend had given them, and then finally, after years, watch that same child actually start getting good, singing and playing songs they’d sung when April was a girl. He’d never seen the little feeling of pride in that kid when they knew they were playing well, and how that feeling radiated outward, like a warm light, over himself. Maybe Steve was right, she told him, though not in the way he thought. It wasn’t that she needed some wildness or missed her youth, but maybe it was that the bad moments in her life were so much larger than the good ones, that she’d taken so much from those moments, that she applied what she felt in those moments, the jealousy and resentment and anger, and applied those same feelings to the normal things, and in doing so, she’d lost what made things good. She wasn’t going to do that with Jack, and knowing this, this made her the right person for the boy, she was certain of it, and there was nothing Steve or anyone else could say to change her mind on that. She’d doubted it, but she knew it again. And tomorrow or maybe the next day, she was going to call Nathaniel and tell him that she was coming to get Jack. She wasn’t going to give him a chance to say no, so she was going to wait until she was closer, until the trip was almost over.

  Ahead on the sloping road, Tammy saw the old city growing larger, with more and more distinct buildings and lights. It was far down the mountain and appeared to be spread across both sides of the highway. She could see a car, flipped on the other side of the highway, two police cars surrounding it, and a long line of head
lights stretching down the mountain road. On her side of the highway, two cars cutting off two lanes, police cars and an ambulance near them. Who were these people? Sitting in traffic, she began crying, thinking of people down there driving somewhere. Thinking of herself driving somewhere. Thinking of April alone on the road at night. She’d be thrown from the car. Her body in the woods. She thought of April and Nicholas and Jack, and she thought of her thinking of them, which equaled her treatment of them, and felt like wanting to admit something to someone, though she didn’t know what. The cars in front of her advanced against the rainy night. The black of the pavement ahead of her was mirror-like and shining in the rain. The headlights of the on-coming cars were reflected right below those same cars, as though there was another world just below and opposite this one.

  She told Steve that she was going to tell Nathaniel that this was what April wanted and he said that if that’s what she wanted to do, okay, and after saying goodbye and telling him she’d call him when she decided to stop for the night, she hung up. She continued through the town. She passed a plant of some kind, lighted and blinking in the night, near a river, probably polluting it, Tammy thought. Then neighborhoods of old houses set on a hill near the river, the houses close together, small yards, working class. On the other side of the river, as she went over a bridge, she could see the old city, town hall. The river was covered in fog, which moved eerily, giving the city a ghostly unreality, as though it could evaporate with the fog. The rain had stopped, she noticed. Her shoulders hurt and she loosened her neck, rolling it around, and in this recognition, she felt the tension in herself, and wanted to loosen it, but couldn’t. The city was behind her and again the car was going into the mountains. She thought she’d find a smaller town, one where the hotels would be cheaper, and stay there the night. Welcome to the Wasatch Range a sign said, flashing green in her headlights off the side of the highway. She didn’t know how many mountains, rivers, towns, cities, long and boring stretches of farmland she’d have to pass through, but she remembered the mountain range near the end of the journey, the Blue Ridge. Even when April and Nicholas had bought her plane tickets and flown her in, they still had to drive through the Blue Ridge. She wondered why the word blue? The mountains weren’t blue at all. They were green or brown or grey, depending, but they weren’t blue. Another lie, she thought. Another way the world was trying to convince you it was one way, it was some dream, some beautiful place, when really it was against you, or at the very least it was just there. And you were just where you were, isolated from it. Driving alone in a car through the night to a place full of people who were going to be against you, going to fight you, who didn’t know you and didn’t want to know you and never would know you, and whose lives were, in all their stupidity and selfishness and privilege, completely separate and unknowable to you, too, and which you didn’t want to know, and yet you kept driving through the night toward these people who didn’t want anything to do with you at all.

  NICHOLAS

  Yunmen said to the assembly, ‘All people are in the midst of illumination. When you look at it, you don’t see it; everything seems dark and dim. How is it being in the midst of illumination?’

  —THE TRUE DHARMA EYE, CASE 81

  There was the ticking of the car’s engine and the sensation of falling awake in the dark. The grey outlines of the interior of the car slowly materialized in the darkness – steering wheel and dash and airbag and frame that once held the windshield. Then he felt himself, felt his head pressed against a flat, almost carpeted surface, which he knew, after something in him made an adjustment, was the roof of the car, and that he was upside down in it, still in his seat, held by the seatbelt. In and through the grainy dark, the splintered windshield lay flat on the ground, grass flattened beneath the cracked glass. The ticking of the car’s engine slowed. A humming of pain from some distant source, like a tuning fork struck gently, grew louder and more intense. He felt himself falling into himself to the sound of the ticking engine. His vision darkened and he closed his eyes, and after a moment, opened them. The darkness undimmed again, and there was the steering wheel, the deployed airbag, a pulsing pain behind his eyes that sent brief flashes of white into his vision, which slowly faded. Beyond the flattened and splintered windshield was the muddy ground, grass, leaves and brush outside the frame of the car, and further out, the forest. It was dark, but he could see, and suddenly he knew that the forest was lighted by moonlight, almost held by it – that silvery light. That humming pain grew louder. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and now saw the deflated airbag hung upside down from the steering wheel and was wet with blood and swayed gently. It felt like there was an optometrist clarifying his understanding of reality with each closing and opening of his eyes. The airbag swayed noiselessly, a drip of blood hanging from a corner. It occurred to him that the bag hung upside down in the same way he hung upside down from the seatbelt, and yet he was still compactly in his seat, almost squished in it, and he realized through a wave of pain – suddenly the hum of pain crescendoed – that moved up his abdomen and back and into his neck that the roof of the car had been collapsed in the accident, and he had almost been smashed. He felt his breathing get faster, shallower, trying to remember the accident, trying to not feel his body, which suddenly seared with heat and ache. The passenger seat, he could see by moving his eyes but not his head, was empty. He observed his body try to move almost without his will and then tried to think it into movement to get out of the car, as though getting out of the car would get him away from the pain, but he couldn’t move his head or his left arm, which the crushed-in driver-side door had trapped somehow. He tried again to move his left arm and a ringing coldness radiated from his shoulder into his neck and back and chest and down, or was it now up, his arm into his fingers. He sensed himself thinking that his arm felt like it was his and not his at once, and behind this thought, he felt himself sensing that he was unsure he was thinking this thought, feeling this thought, or feeling feeling. He felt himself to be at some distance from himself, still falling into himself, as though he hadn’t fully materialized yet, as though he was slowly resolving into physical manifestation – just as the car and physical world had done in his vision – like a slowly resolving and clarifying image on a screen. Cold air swept into the car and felt like thoughts from some other mind, which was watching from stillness: the symmetry of the cold air and the cold pain in his arm produced a strange synesthesia, as though his attempt to move his arm and the coldness he felt there had produced the cold air. He observed his mind think of this strange synesthesia, in order to get away from feeling the pain, feeling as though he hadn’t produced the thought. Then the thought was gone as well as the synesthesia and he was just cold, shivering. He felt momentarily confused considering all this and his head involuntarily tried to tilt, cock, like a dog’s head when considering human words, a habit which was completely mechanical, unthought, and that involuntary movement sent a flash of stabbing pain down through his chest and abdomen, which hit something in him and reverberated back up toward his head along his spine with the force of a physical blow, causing a heat to rush up into his head in a flashing that wiped everything to white.

  Sometime later gathering through wide spaces of dark to his waking self again. Like spilled water collecting itself back into a toppled glass, which righted itself again. His eyes did the same slow readjustment to the dark. He closed his eyes hard and opened them wider in an effort to wake himself up. For a moment, he believed he had woken from the bad dream of the accident, but then realized that it hadn’t been a dream. A lone cricket was now chirping in the forest among a sea of quiet humming sound. He could still feel a strange pulling into his body, as though parts of himself were still gathering back into him from the various places they had been dispersed to. This gathering feeling made him know that whatever was in him could be dispersed again and that he was about to die and this was his being gathering itself into him again in order to divest itself of his body �
�� as though his being was one final inbreath and outbreath. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation, but then the gathering into himself changed somehow, like he could hold what was gathering, and it made him know that he was just here in the car again. He squinted his eyes closed then opened them wide, trying to see and trying to stop from shivering in the cold dark. The shivering of his upper body made something in his neck pulse and hurt. He inwardly told himself to breathe, breathe, just be cold, and to his surprise, it helped some and lessened the shivering and pain in his neck, though then, through breathing cold air and steadying the shivering, he felt other pain more distinctly: a searing and pulsing in his left leg and left shoulder and along his chest, sternum, and neck, the different parts of his body individuated by pain, making it clear that something had happened to his left shoulder, maybe a broken collarbone, that maybe he’d cracked some ribs or his sternum, and the new pain in his left leg, which when he tried to look at he couldn’t and when he tried to move he couldn’t, something holding him there, the lower part of the dash collapsed or maybe the drive-side door pinning him somehow. His body was these individual areas of pain, shoulder and chest and neck and legs, and everything else, the rest of his body, felt like a blank white space, as though it wasn’t there at all. Then with his one free right hand, he felt the stickiness of what he knew to be blood along his abdomen, and it was the blood that made him feel in real danger, and the thought arose again that he was going to die here, that he needed to get out. He searched his chest and stomach and along his ribs with his free right hand but couldn’t find any lacerations or open wounds and knew that the blood that was soaking through his shirt must be coming from his legs, which were above him. Blood from his legs was seeping down his body. He pushed lightly on his upper body and felt that his shoulders and ribs and stomach were sore but okay. He was okay, he thought, though the blood was not good because it was still night and he couldn’t move, so if he was still bleeding, that meant he would keep bleeding, he would bleed out, he would die here. He wanted to move his head to see the blood or its source and assess how serious the bleeding was and maybe put pressure on it with his free hand, but he remembered not to move his neck, that he’d already done that and it had caused him to pass out.