by Paul Pen
“Similar ones.” He inspected the flatware. “But these are better.”
“Everything’s better in Idaho.”
The waitress winked at the boy, gathered up the plates, and went away to fetch the sundaes.
“See? Even the waitress says it—everything’s better in Idaho. The world’s on our side, giving us a new opportunity,” argued Frank.
“Yeah, sure, what else is she going to say if she lives here?” Audrey grouched. “But I love her look, with the nose ring and tattoos. It reminds me of a character from Orange Is the New Black.”
“I was a little unsure, to be honest, but we’ve only crossed one state line and I already feel like we’re leaving all the bad stuff behind us. I even think my hair’s started growing at the normal rate again.”
Grace ran her fingers through her hair, giving it a volume that she hadn’t felt for months. She’d missed it so much she had even cried. There was no trace of the two worst bald patches.
Frank found his wife’s hands on the table, among glasses in which the last ice cubes were melting. “Honey, everything’s going to be just great,” he said to her. “We’re indestructible.” He held her palms to his mouth and kissed them loudly.
The clatter that rang out in the restaurant hunched their shoulders. There was a series of crashes. Glass smashed. A woman’s scream preceded a noisy metallic drumroll. Frank’s mind pictured a tray spinning on the floor. The bells over the door shook, as did the windows at the entrance after the door slammed.
“What happened?” Penned into the booth, Frank couldn’t see beyond their table.
“Not much.” Audrey gestured at the floor with her chin. “As was only to be expected, our sundaes have fallen on the floor. I told you all we’re jinxed.”
Grace got up to take a look. Her mouth opened. She pushed past Audrey as the two of them came out of the booth. Frank did the same with Simon, who also made way. The waitress was on the floor, on her side. Her elbow was resting in a pinkish milky pool, her hip in a chocolate-colored puddle. Scattered all around her were the four thick glasses, wafers, cherries, straws, and a little paper umbrella. Simon let out a guffaw. Frank held his hand over his own mouth to contain his laughter. Grace and Audrey started to help the waitress up.
“She must’ve been in a real hurry,” said the waitress. Then she gestured at her own backside. “Lucky I’ve got cushioning.”
She got up onto one knee, then the other. Once on her feet, she discovered the scratches on her elbows, the ice cream on her uniform. She swore without considering that there were children right in front of her.
“What happened?” Grace asked, interrupting her expletives.
“The girl that was here”—she indicated the nearby table—“she dashed off and pushed past me. I couldn’t keep my balance with the tray and I ended up on the floor. And I bet she left without paying.”
Frank checked the table. A folded twenty-dollar bill was poking out from under a maple syrup bottle.
“Actually, she hasn’t,” he informed the waitress. “She paid. And I thought we had the restaurant to ourselves. Have we been very loud?”
A crabby voice reached them from the other side of the room.
“A little, yes.”
It was an elderly gentleman sitting with a woman about his age. They were sharing a piece of pie or cake from a plate in the middle of the table.
The waitress shook her head. “Ignore him. You haven’t bothered anyone,” she whispered through the teeth of her extremely broad smile. “What bothers me is being thrown to the ground at the end of my shift. You can’t trust anyone.” She brushed the blobs of ice cream from her uniform. “Well, except you ladies,” she said to Grace and Audrey, “coming straight to help me. Women helping women, as always, while the men stand there watching without doing anything.”
She aimed a reproachful look at Frank and also gestured at Simon. The severity in the waitress’s eyes, framed by a cropped head of hair that gave her an intimidating look, suggested that she was being deadly serious. But then she widened her eyes and burst into laughter, admitting it was a joke. She told them not to worry, that some fresh sundaes would be ready in a moment.
9.
“No, put on your seat belt,” said Grace.
She spoke facing into the motor home from her passenger seat. Frank settled into his, left the bag of cell phones on the dashboard, fastened his own seat belt, positioned his feet on the pedals, and started the vehicle. The restaurant’s luminous sign was reflected on the parking lot’s surface. The night’s darkness made it even brighter. After her fall, the waitress had returned with four more sundaes as if nothing had happened. Frank felt so bad for not helping her himself that he left a much higher tip than the usual 20 percent. As they went out through the door, he heard her singsongy thank you, as well as an invitation to return whenever they wanted. Simon had run to the RV.
“We all ready?” Frank asked with his hands on the wheel. The children, sitting at the table, yelled that they were. Grace nodded and stroked his forearm.
“Please, let’s get to this fabulous spot you keep telling us about.” She smiled at the theatricality of her own tone. “I’m burning with the desire to see it.”
His wife’s mood had gradually improved the farther they traveled from Seattle. He sensed her doubts and fears dissipating like the fumes from the exhaust pipe. She’d started the day with half-closed eyes, but now they were so wide and bright that it was easy to imagine her with a glass of wine in front of the fireplace.
“I love seeing you like this,” he said to her before stepping on the gas.
Before long they passed the Super 8 motel Frank had expected, with its giant luminous yellow-and-red sign. He slowed down and put the high beams on. He asked Grace to keep her eyes on the right side, where they were looking for the two thick tree stumps Carl had said marked the entrance to the road they had to take.
“Here it is.” Frank hit the brakes and turned on the hazard lights. “It’s wider than I thought.”
Grace stretched her neck. “Is it paved, or not?”
“Doesn’t look like it. But it’s a firm road, it’s been graded very recently. And look at how wide it is. Almost like this highway. It’s perfectly safe.”
She lowered her window and stuck out her head to inspect the area the headlights were illuminating, also tinged orange at intervals from the turn-signal light.
“Nothing’s safe for us, remember,” Audrey said from behind.
“Stop saying that.” Frank’s words sounded more severe than he intended.
“What if we stay at the Super 8 and finish the drive in the morning?” suggested Grace.
“Oh, sure,” said Simon. “So what did we bring a motor home for?”
Frank gestured at the boy, at his unbeatable argument. “Exactly. Anyway, the guy in Reservations used this road with a Class A just like ours, even a little bigger. Look, we’ll try it, and if the road gets more difficult than it seems, we’ll stop right there.”
“All right, all right.” Grace raised both hands and sat back in her seat. “You’re the one who knows about these things. And, actually, I’m dying to see this place now.”
“Let’s go!” Simon threw his arms up in the air.
As Frank had predicted, the road was as stable as if it had been paved. What’s more, another vehicle could come in the opposite direction and there would easily be enough space for them both. The most frightening thing, as soon as they left the streetlights and reflectors of the highway, was the darkness that enveloped them. Outside the bright halo of the RV’s headlights, the blackness was total—the edge where the light ended was not a gradually fading band but a sharp line. Such dense darkness was not a consequence just of the night: the tall conifers that lined the road also eclipsed the moon and starlight with their trunks, branches, and crowns. To Frank, the bright light of the yellow-and-red motel sign they had just passed seemed to belong to another world. The fake world humans had created, ignoring t
he majesty of nature. Without warning, or without realizing what she was doing, Grace lowered the volume of the music, bending to the surrounding silence.
They climbed successive slopes that then descended only a little, so that they reached ever-higher altitudes each time. Frank forced a yawn to unblock his ears. There were bends, though not many and not very sharp. Around one of them, the road ran along a ravine or precipice and the trees suddenly disappeared on one side, revealing a starry sky that prompted expressions of amazement from the whole family.
“Wow, how lovely is this?” Grace sat up in her seat and held a hand over her mouth. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many stars.”
“Look at the moon, it’s so small,” said Audrey.
It was a weak gray slit in the firmament—the new moon was on its way. Frank enjoyed the views without taking his eyes from the road, which resumed a straight, flat course.
“And it smells so good . . .”
Grace had left the window open since she’d lowered it to watch the road. There was a touch of cold in the air, but much less than Frank had expected in Idaho’s mountains—the summer was making its mark on the night. Grace breathed in, filling her chest, the cleavage under her open shirt becoming more pronounced. When she exhaled, Frank sensed her letting it all out, giving herself up to the aroma of the pine trees, to the immensity surrounding them.
“I have a good feeling about all of this,” she said. “I really do.”
Grace looked back at the forest. She surfed the air with an arm outside the window. The innocence in her face made her as beautiful as the sky. When she closed her eyes, Frank felt proud to have been by her side as time painted the wrinkles that now extended toward his forty-something wife’s temples. In the rearview mirror, he saw his children also spellbound by the scenery. Audrey was resting her cheek on her brother’s shoulder. A moisture that had nothing to do with the landscape condensed in Frank’s eyes. Because he was certain that leaving Seattle had been the right thing to do, moving even if they’d had to do it in such a rush and even though Simon would have to complete his treatment in a different city. At that precise moment, inside a motor home where all the members of his family were happy at the same time, everything was back where it should be.
Everything was again how it should always have been.
It was when he looked back at the road that the figure appeared in front of the headlights. Frank’s brain wanted to play a trick on him, make him believe it was a deer, that the smartest thing to do was nothing, to run it over, because the lives of the four people in the vehicle were worth more than a wild animal’s. But deer don’t have arms. Or wave them in the air requesting help like people do.
Because the figure was a person.
Frank turned the wheel to the left, certain it was too late to avoid a collision. He also hit the brake. His instinct was to search for a gear shifter that didn’t exist in this vehicle. First he felt the sudden jolt of his seat belt on his chest, then came the pain in his neck and back. A cupboard opened in the kitchen and things fell out of it. A scraping sound skittered across the dashboard. Audrey and Grace’s screams merged into a single howl. Simon shrieked Dad several times, turning the word into a siren. Dad-Dad-Dad-Dad-Dad. The RV shook, the wheels slid instead of turning. The rear and front fought against their inertia, generating a circular movement that twisted Frank’s elbows—he was gripping the steering wheel as if he could still control the runaway vehicle. In the short time the accident lasted, his brain considered so many variables and consequences that it was left exhausted, as if the braking had ground him down.
With a mechanical gasp more likely to be heard in a train station, the motor home finally stopped. The headlights were no longer lighting up the road, only the trees on one side of it. The human silhouette the light had outlined was now just a blotch on his retinas—the body must have been smashed into a jumble of flesh and bones under the vehicle.
“Grace! Audrey! Simon!”
Frank yelled their names with the last of the air in his lungs, his temples pulsed with pain. Another pain, in his ribs, told him he had almost been lifted onto the right-hand armrest, which was pressing into his side, burying itself in his sternum.
“What . . . what . . . what was it?” asked Audrey.
“Dad . . .”
Hearing his children’s voices enabled him to breathe for the first time since he saw the figure in the beam.
“Are you all right?”
They confirmed they were, gripping the edge of the table, their faces as wrinkled as when they were babies. Simon’s patch had moved toward his ear.
“Grace.”
Her hair had fallen onto her face, hiding it. Frank grabbed her by the shoulder. A frightened eye looked at him through locks of disheveled hair. Grace had both hands on her chest, the right one under the left. Remembering that she’d been holding her arm outside the window the moment they swerved, a dreadful image gripped Frank’s stomach, of a branch cutting off his wife’s hand, the entire arm. That was why she was covering the bleeding stump that resulted from an amputation. Then a second hand, unharmed, sprouted from under the visible one. It was trembling. Grace looked at it with horror.
“I . . . I touched it . . .” She held her hand out to Frank as if showing him something repulsive, some roadkill she’d picked up from the side of the road and wanted to get rid of. “I touched his face. Frank . . . it was a mouth, a tongue . . . I have his . . . saliva on me.”
She pushed herself back in her seat, holding her own hand away from her, her heels trotting on the floor as if wanting to go through the back of the seat to run away from what was beyond her wrist, to have nothing to do with those fingers plagued by the sensation that had distorted her face. She shook them as far away from her body as possible, spattering something imaginary on the windshield.
The seat belt pressed against Frank’s chest when he tried to stand up without unbuckling it. He relived the neck pain the first impact had caused. Releasing the clasp, he went to Grace. He brushed the hair from her face and made shushing sounds, calming her.
“Frank . . . what . . . what happened? We . . . we hit someone.”
These last words remained inside the vehicle. They echoed around the front cab and bounced off the ceiling above the table, the fridge door, the shower base, the bedroom, refusing to disappear. Then there was a silence that revealed that the forest that had at first seemed noiseless was actually a symphony of owls hooting, crickets chirping, and pine cones crackling as they opened with the change in temperature, just as Frank, his wife, and their children were shaking in the motor home. The four of them looked one another in the eyes, in the reflections in mirrors, in panes of glass.
“What just happened?” asked Audrey.
“Dad—”
Simon’s throat had gotten stuck on that word.
“Everything’s fine, son, we’re all fine.”
Frank slumped back into his seat. He sank his face into his hands, his elbows on the steering wheel. He took a long breath that brought to the surface more pains from the accident and another, deeper, pain from the soul. He couldn’t believe it. Just when everything was beginning to go well, what bad luck. At the moment when he’d felt most confident that accelerating away from the past was the right thing to do, something had happened that had forced them not just to stop, but to look back. Unless . . .
“What should we do?” he asked his wife. He did so in a low voice, the volume they used when they had to say something and it was best not to involve the children. “What should we do, honey?”
His whisper had a gravity to it that frightened him.
“What?” Grace asked. “What do you mean, ‘what should we do’?”
Frank sharpened his look, forced his whisper even more.
“What’re we going to do?”
He wasn’t even sure what he was suggesting. Drive off? He was seeing flashes of the silhouette waving its arms and a blood-soaked body under the wheels. Leave the body
behind like a problem that could just be forgotten? His heart accelerated until it hurt in his chest. Could they? The way Grace’s eyes refocused, the slight change in the angle of her chin, rekindled Frank’s memories of severe criticism in the past. The smell of gunpowder. Simon’s sobs.
“What’re you saying, Frank?” Her upper lip rose to produce a grimace. “There is only one thing we can do.”
She turned her seat with the force of her disapproval. While he asked cowardly questions about how to react to hitting a person, Grace jumped into action, driven by the adrenaline of feeling responsibility, more powerful than her fears. Just as she had been the first to get up to help the waitress on the floor, it was she who opened the door to go in aid of whoever was on the road.
“Of course,” murmured Frank. “Let’s go.”
He asked the children not to move. They both nodded in silence. Frank jumped down over the retractable steps. Grit crunched under his shoes.
“Honey, wait.” He reached her right shoulder from behind. “Wait. Where is he?”
“I don’t know, but we have to find him. Help him.”
The motor home had ended up diagonal across the road, with the front encroaching on the other lane. Frank swallowed, preparing himself to look underneath. He knelt down with his eyes closed, opening them when he rested a cheek on the ground. His imagination threw up a mutilated body under the chassis, but in fact there was nothing. Relieved, he rested his forehead on the earth, as if kissing it.
“Frank?” Peering around the rear corner of the vehicle, Grace was pointing at something in the road. “Frank, here.”
“I’m coming. Let me. Don’t look.”
He searched over her shoulder. The darkness was impenetrable beyond the reach of the RV’s lights, but at the border between the two, he could make out a shape on the ground. A body. A human body. Not even the most powerful delirium would turn that form into a deer.