He Started It

by Samantha Downing

  She shrugs. ‘I’m just telling you what I saw.’

  This time, Portia pays. She pulls out an impressive wad of cash and tips him well. Not broke after all, it seems, or maybe that’s all the money she has for the trip. Hard to tell with Portia because I’m never sure what’s up with her. She’s sneaky like that.

  Once again, Felix puts the spare tire on our car and we finally get to the auto repair shop. It doesn’t take long for the mechanic to figure out what happened.

  ‘Nails,’ he says.

  ‘Nails?’ Felix repeats.

  ‘Yep, two of them. Probably happened yesterday. Went flat overnight.’

  We all stare at the mechanic. He’s a young guy who looks like he’d rather be doing anything other than dealing with a flat tire.

  ‘I put on the spare,’ Felix says. ‘I didn’t find any nails in the flat.’

  ‘Here.’ The mechanic picks up the flat tire like it’s a tissue and points to the nails. They are small. Easy to miss.

  ‘Wow, didn’t even see them,’ Felix says.

  The mechanic doesn’t look surprised. When he finds out we’re on a long road trip, he tells us to replace it. ‘Don’t want a blowout, do you?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Felix says.

  He goes with the mechanic to pick a new tire. Portia is off in a corner of the parking lot, drinking her coffee and talking on her phone. She does that a lot, like all of her calls are so important we aren’t allowed to listen.

  Eddie and Krista are in another corner of the lot, not talking. Sulking, maybe.

  I send Eddie a text.

  Did you see that black pickup following us?

  I watch him take out his phone and read it. His back stiffens. Maybe surprise, maybe recognition.

  From Alabama? Seriously?

  Just asking.

  No, I did not see them follow us through three states.

  When Portia is off the phone, she comes over and says exactly what I know she’s going to say.

  ‘It’s hard to believe this was an accident.’

  I sip my coffee, wondering how far into this I want to get. Krista and Eddie are already in a fight and that’s a lot of drama for one morning. ‘You think?’ I say.

  ‘If we randomly hit nails on the road, why are they only in that tire? Why not the front one?’

  Because we were turning. Because we were changing lanes. Because Eddie was fiddling with the radio and swerved a little. A million other reasons I can’t think of because this coffee is too weak.

  Portia stands in front of me, her eyes unwavering, and I believe that she believes the truck is following us. In a movie, this would end with hillbilly cannibals, but we aren’t in a movie.

  ‘You’ve seen too many movies,’ I say.

  She stares at me, unsure. ‘Maybe. Still seems weird to me.’

  ‘It is weird, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘I should have taken a picture of them,’ she says.

  Again I agree and nod my head. It feels a bit like when we were younger and Portia screwed up but tried to convince everyone she didn’t. No one really believed her, though sometimes we pretended to because it was easier. She knows that now, and I bet she knows I’m doing it again.

  ‘It’s too bad none of us became cops,’ Portia says. ‘It would be easy to get this asshole’s identity.’

  Our movie is now a TV show. A police procedural. ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Too bad.’

  ‘Or a hacker. A hacker would work, too.’

  We are, thankfully, interrupted by Eddie and Krista. She is pouting, he looks fine. No surprise there. Eddie asks if we know how much longer it will take and Portia opens her big conspiracy-laden mouth.

  ‘You saw it too, right?’ she says.

  ‘Saw what?’ he says.

  ‘The pickup. It’s been following us.’

  Krista’s head snaps up, the sulk gone.

  Eddie turns to me, his eyes wide. I give him nothing.

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ he says.

  Portia looks like she’s about to stamp her foot on the asphalt. Before she can, Felix appears. I didn’t even see him come out of the garage.

  He starts talking about the tire, about the mechanic, about all the cool car things in the garage. Halfway through a detailed explanation for why he didn’t find the nails in the tire, he stops talking. No one is listening and he finally realizes it.

  ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘Portia has a theory,’ Eddie says.

  ‘It’s not a theory, it’s a fact.’ She turns her back to Eddie and faces Felix. ‘I’ve seen that truck. It’s been following us ever since Alabama.’

  Felix looks at her, then at everyone else. ‘Well, yeah. I figured everyone saw it.’

  Portia smiles. Triumphant again.

  ‘Wait,’ Eddie says to Felix. ‘You’ve seen it?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, not every minute of every day, but I’ve seen it. Honestly, I didn’t know it was following us, not at first. I just thought they were headed the same direction.’

  ‘Zigzagging through three states?’ I say. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me?’

  ‘I said, at first I didn’t know.’ Felix’s tone is the condescending one, the one I hate. ‘And now the tire,’ he says, with a shrug for emphasis.

  Eddie puts up his hand. ‘Whoa. You think these people followed us through three states to put nails in our new tire?’

  ‘Exactly. Who follows people through three states?’ I say.

  ‘Psychos?’ Portia says.

  We all stare at one another, almost like we’re in a contest, and we don’t break until the mechanic interrupts us.

  ‘Car’s ready!’ he yells out from the front of his garage.

  Portia walks off first, damn near stomping her feet. Eddie and Felix continue to discuss – or argue, or whatever – about the pickup, the tire, the nails, the impossibility of it all.

  Krista is the one who grabs my sleeve. The sun makes the gold in her eyes flash like blinking lights.

  ‘Beth,’ she whispers.

  I whisper back, because who wouldn’t? ‘What?’

  ‘They’re right. That truck has been following us.’

  She is so serious, so convinced. ‘How do you know it’s them?’ I say.

  ‘Last night, in the parking lot. Eddie was asleep and I heard something. When I looked outside, I saw him. The older guy.’

  I shake my head, which is filling up with questions. Did she tell Eddie? Did he tell her she was crazy? Is this what they were arguing about? Maybe this is why she called him a liar.

  ‘What do you mean you saw him?’ I ask. ‘He was just standing around the parking lot?’

  ‘Not just,’ she says. ‘He was sitting on the hood of our car.’

  I DON’T EVEN CARE WHAT DAY IT IS.

  What does ‘living authentically’ mean to you? Are you accomplishing it?

  This journal is worse than I thought it would be, but I’m still stuck on this trip, so here it goes.

  If living authentically means not lying on a daily basis, I’m not doing that. I wouldn’t even try because lying makes it so much easier to get through life. Should I tell Mom and Dad when I’m not where I say I am? Should I have told them the first time I tried alcohol or weed or anything else? Should I tell them about that time I went out with a guy who was way too old for me?

  Nope. No one my age lives authentically, and if they say they do they’re lying.

  Just today, I’ve told so many lies I can’t count them, starting this morning when I said ‘I’m fine’ to anyone that asked how I was doing. That was a lie.

  After eating one piece of toast and nothing else for breakfast, I said I was full. That was a lie. I was starving because I’m always starving but no way am I gaining weight on this trip.

  When I said I was excited about seeing the Three Corners, it was a half lie. I don’t care about standing in three states at the same time, but I am sick of Bonnie and Clyde crap. Especially when Grandpa starts going on and o
n about how much he loved Grandma. It’s all I can do to keep from throwing up all over him. Instead, I just nodded and lied and nodded and lied.

  As much as I hated it, that time lying was easier because you’ve got to pick your battles. That’s a Risk thing. You can’t fight everyone all the time, you’ll just lose your whole army.

  Now that I think about it, maybe I am living pretty authentically. It’s just the Risk version.

  Missouri

  State Motto: The welfare of the people is the highest law

  We’re back on the road now, headed toward the Three Corners. Everyone is looking out the windows, searching for that truck.

  ‘If you see it again, call the police,’ Felix says.

  It’s strange how adamant they are about that truck following us. I swear I haven’t seen it. This makes me wonder if there’s anything else I’m missing.

  And I’m not the only one. Eddie hasn’t seen the truck, either. Of all the things he and I don’t agree on, this is the one thing we do.

  I catch Eddie’s attention in the rearview mirror. Raise my eyebrow. He rolls his eyes.

  Eddie and I have to communicate silently, just as we did on the first trip. There were times we couldn’t talk out loud then, either.

  That very first night, we stopped in North Alabama and stayed at a roadside motel that looked a lot like the Stardust. Grandpa got one room with two beds, and he let us kids have them. He slept on a foldout cot he had brought with him.

  ‘No sense in getting two rooms,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to leave you guys alone in a motel.’

  ‘We’re old enough,’ I said. But really, I didn’t want to be alone in one of those rooms.

  ‘Too bad,’ Grandpa said.

  On our second night, he called our parents from a pay phone. ‘No cell phones for me,’ he said, although they weren’t too common back then. ‘Too invasive.’

  I’m not sure I knew what that word meant, but I knew it was bad.

  We stood outside the motel, at a bank of pay phones, and as far away as possible from the other man using one of the phones. He may or may not have been staying at the motel, just as he may or may not have been up to no good.

  One by one, Grandpa passed the phone to us.

  ‘Hi, baby,’ Mom said. Her voice was tight, the way it was when she tried not to yell. She and Dad had to be fighting again. ‘How are you? Everything okay?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, everything’s fine.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘Ummm … Louisiana? Yeah, we’re in –’

  Grandpa took the receiver out of my hand. ‘Let your brother talk now.’

  A few more days passed until I started figuring out what was going on.

  We were in Texas. Grandpa had driven north of it and then back down because he said, ‘That damn state is so big, it’ll swallow us if we try to go through it.’ For the most part we went up and around it, then crossed into the Texas Panhandle, near Amarillo. Grandpa wanted to see the row of Cadillacs half buried in the ground.

  Right after we crossed the border, we stopped for gas. Grandpa got out of the van and I was sitting right behind the driver’s seat. Something fell out of his pocket and slipped down a crack between the seat and center console. I reached for it and found a cell phone.

  I showed it to Eddie, and we opened the flip phone to see a long list of missed calls. They all came from our home number.

  Hundreds of them.

  They started the day we left on the trip.

  Portia is with us tonight, although she has gone out for some air. I can’t blame her, because it’s a little weird having all of us cooped up in a single space. Sure, we could start pre-spending our inheritance on an additional room at a crappy motel, but there’s no guarantee we’re going to get that money. We haven’t made it to the end yet.

  Felix and I are in the room alone. He sits at the table next to the window, pretending to work, but he’s really keeping an eye out for the pickup.

  I sit on one of the beds and turn on the TV. The reception is sketchy and the channels are limited, forcing me to choose a sitcom episode I’ve already seen. It wasn’t good the first time.

  Felix manages to stay quiet for 1.2 seconds.

  ‘Did you see the truck?’ he says.

  ‘Personally, no. I haven’t seen it.’

  ‘I guess you and Eddie weren’t looking,’ he says, turning back to the window. ‘The rest of us saw it.’

  ‘I guess you would make a better detective than me,’ I say.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ He sounds offended. Yes, really.

  Am I messing with him? Maybe a little.

  I turn up the TV.

  Despite all the togetherness, the close quarters, and being in a car with the same people every day, Felix and I have been getting along pretty well. Better than I expected, considering I never wanted him on this trip in the first place.

  Things hadn’t been going well before the trip – you may have guessed that. You also may have guessed that Felix wants kids, and soon. I’m not convinced. I’m not sure I want kids at all, actually. Not with him or anyone else. This has been the root of our recent arguments.

  The latest was a few days before we left. We went out to dinner with two other couples. Both have small kids and love to talk about them. Felix gobbled up every story, anecdote, and picture, almost swooning at one kid’s new dinosaur sheets and another’s discovery of reading. Yes, swooning. No exaggeration.

  When I placed my hand on my glass of wine to take a sip, Felix put his hand on top of mine. Everyone could see it. ‘We can’t wait to get started on our own family.’

  The comment surprised everyone, including me.

  ‘Wonderful!’ said one of the women at the table. We weren’t close. She was a dinners-only friend. ‘Congratulations.’

  I pinched Felix’s palm. He withdrew his hand from mine, his smile tight.

  He knew I was going to say something about this later, which was why he disappeared as soon as we got home. The argument never happened. It’s still there, simmering under the surface, waiting for us to pick it back up again. Maybe we will or maybe not. There’s nothing like an old-fashioned road trip to make or break a relationship. Each day, sometimes each hour, I find myself shifting between sides.

  ‘Don’t be pissed,’ he says. Still staring out the window, looking for that truck. Looking to prove me wrong.

  ‘I’m not.’ I turn off the TV and the lamp on the nightstand. ‘I’m just tired.’

  I pick up my phone to set the alarm and notice a missed text. It came in half an hour ago.

  From Krista.

  Eddie is lying to you. He saw that truck following us.

  11 Days Left

  Before this trip, I never met Krista and I have no reason to trust her – or distrust her. She has my phone number because we all exchanged them on the first day, just in case. I don’t answer her text, but it keeps me awake for a while. It’s one thing for me to lie to Eddie, but it’s totally different when he lies to me.

  At breakfast, everyone reports in. No one saw the black pickup or its occupants. No one even thought they saw the pickup, which makes this more interesting.

  I keep my mouth shut about Krista’s text. It’s left unanswered on my phone, and I don’t mention it to Eddie or Felix or anyone else. Let her mind race for a while. It’ll be good for her.

  We’re driving west today, straight to Dodge City, Kansas. It was hard to forget Grandpa saying we were ‘going to Dodge so we can get the hell out of Dodge.’ He must have repeated that a hundred times.

  No one says it today. Everyone is quiet until Portia opens her mouth.

  ‘So last night I calculated how long it would take if we just drove straight through,’ she says. Her voice booms out from the back seat, instantly filling the car. ‘If we take turns driving and stop only for gas and food, we’ll be there in less than two days.’

  It sounds like a challenge, or perhaps it’s a dare. We used to dare her
a lot when she was young and maybe she’s getting us back.

  ‘Can’t,’ Eddie says. ‘I mean, physically we could do it but that’s not the deal.’

  ‘You really think the lawyer would refuse to give us the money?’ Portia asks.

  ‘He has to,’ Felix says. ‘As executor, he has to follow your grandfather’s wishes.’

  Portia rolls her eyes. ‘But how would he know?’

  The car is a rental, paid for by the estate, and it has a built-in GPS. Easy enough to check where we’ve been, when the car was in use, and when it wasn’t.

  I point to the GPS screen in the center of the dashboard. ‘It’s being recorded. Everywhere we travel is on that thing.’

  Portia slumps back in her seat. ‘One of us should’ve gone into computers.’

  I can’t argue with her.

  Regardless, there is no chance we are deviating from the original trip. None. I won’t let it happen.

  No one else says anything, so Portia gives up and puts on her headphones. We return to a silence that doesn’t end until we stop for gas. Eddie randomly asks if anyone remembers full-service gas stations, and only Felix answers yes.

  Krista opens her passenger door. ‘I’m going in to get some water. Anyone want some?’ She raises an eyebrow toward me.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I say. ‘I want to get some snacks.’

  Alone in the Stop-Start Mart, Krista asks if I got her text.

  ‘Just saw it this morning. I must’ve been asleep when you sent it.’

  She nods once, curt and quick. Her voice is a whisper. ‘I think Eddie doesn’t want everyone to freak out, that’s why he’s lying. But he saw that pickup.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I ask. Also a whisper.

  ‘Because when I told him, he said he already knew they were in the parking lot. He had seen them.’

  I take this in while trying to decide between the salt-and-vinegar chips and the low-sodium popcorn. I grab both and decide Eddie may have lied to me. He’s lied before and no doubt he’ll lie again. Maybe this time it’s for a good reason.

  ‘He’s probably trying to calm everyone down,’ I say. ‘Makes sense to me.’ I move on to a row of coffee machines. These are the newer ones that spit out dollops of flavored sauce and I pick the one with the most sugar. Krista is right on my heels.