by Sarah Bruni
Your son,
Peter
There was nothing about the note that felt right, but it was the best he could come up with after several hours of trying. He went to sleep with the note under his pillow, and when he read it again in the morning, he decided it would do. Then he brushed his teeth and made a pot of coffee. With every action, his joints tingled beneath his skin. He sat with his mother on the patio for half the day, and only in the late afternoon, just before his shift, did he begin to pack a small duffle bag. When it was time for work, he let himself quietly into his mother’s room. He found the gun wrapped in one of her stockings as if it had been quietly waiting for him there for years. He left the note face-up on her dresser. He kissed his mother goodbye. Then he walked to the Yellow Cab lot, duffle bag in hand, and picked up taxi number ninety-seven, whose FOR HIRE sign he extinguished halfway down the Coralville strip, and continued driving to the gas station where he would collect the girl whom he had already begun to think of as Gwen Stacy, and explain to her the nature of the responsibility they shared.
TEN MINUTES LATER she was beside Peter in the car, heading due east on Interstate 80 in a stolen taxi. The radio in the taxi was promising a cloudless, breezy night, lows in the low sixties. The air on the interstate felt thin and bright and hydrating as a glass of water. All the windows were open, and the longest strands of Peter’s hair were blowing all over the place, skirting in and out of his eyes. He didn’t drive fast like he’d said they would: he was a cautious driver, using the left lane only for passing, the needle of the speedometer hovering just above sixty-five. Most of the guys that Sheila knew—Donny and his friends, mainly—were pretty reckless drivers.
The CB radio was saying, “Fifty check. Fifty check. Fifty, head out and check me at Mormon Trek. Fifty, where the hell you at?”
“Are you fifty?” asked Sheila.
He nodded.
“Can’t you turn that thing off?”
“No. You’ll be able to tune it out after a while.”
All together, there had been $716.64 in the cash register. Usually it would have been less on a weekday, but Sheila was nearing the end of a long shift. There was a single surveillance camera in the corner of the station, which would eventually be viewed, but there was no audio feed, so the crime would perhaps look authentic—which could be a good thing or bad thing, depending on the plan. But there didn’t seem to be much of a plan. Of course, if anyone viewed the tape, there would be the matter of the five minutes of calm conversation she and Peter had before he pointed the gun at her. There was the possibility it wouldn’t look authentic in the least. Sheila had turned the pumps off and left a little sign on the door of the station that said BACK IN A MINUTE, which probably wasn’t the right sign to leave. OUT OF ORDER may have drawn less suspicion. It didn’t take her long to realize that she had left her phone on the back counter beside the radio. She could picture it ringing in the empty station. Who had called her? Her father, maybe, would have called by now. It was past nine o’clock.
“What’s in Chicago?” Sheila asked when it was clear that she’d be doing most of the talking on this trip.
Peter exhaled slowly. He smiled. He said, “We make it up. Is that worth anything to you?”
Sheila thought about it for a minute.
“Yes,” she said.
They drove. They drove through the night and through the state. It was pitch black and they were about fifteen miles shy of the Illinois border when Peter slowed the car along the road’s shoulder. Half settled in a ditch there was a car, or part of a car, smoke pouring from where the engine would be. Peter turned off his lights and pulled up just behind it.
“An accident?” Sheila said.
It was obviously an accident, and a serious one, but Peter said nothing. Pieces of the car were scattered between the taxi and the white line of the road. Peter got out of the taxi and closed the door behind him. Sheila watched as he walked up to the driver’s side door of the car. It took some effort to force it open, but he used his body as a counterweight. He dropped to his knees at the spot where the door fell open. Peter knelt on the shoulder of the road and started to rock his body back and forth.
Sheila ran from the passenger side of the taxi. She didn’t want to see what Peter was seeing, but she felt her body move toward the spot independent of any will of her own.
An SUV whizzed feet away from Peter’s knees on the white line of the road. The vehicle pulled off to the shoulder a little further up, and a man emerged from the driver’s side.
Peter just looked at her. “I failed,” he said.
“Failed what?” she yelled. The passing traffic on the other side of the median made it hard to hear. “Failed who?”
She saw them then, the people in the car. It was impossible not to see them then. There were two of them, girls, a little older than Sheila, driving home from college for the weekend, she imagined, their bodies now slumped against the dash. One of them had red hair. One of them was wearing a thin silver chain that ended in a locket near her chest. The one who had been driving had a gash on her cheek.
“They’re dead?” Sheila whispered.
The man from the SUV caught up to them now and stood on the other side of Peter. “I’m a doctor,” the man said, like someone on television.
Peter shook his head. “We’re too late.”
The man leaned into the car and reached for each girl’s wrist. A moment later the ambulance pulled up and the paramedics and police took over. Sheila and the man who said he was a doctor stood to the side of the car, and Peter took a few steps back toward the taxi. The paramedics asked what they had seen, but what could they say? They had seen nothing. They could do nothing. They had come upon the car just moments before the ambulance had arrived. They shook their heads, and the police thanked them for stopping and asked them to be on their way. Then, too quickly it seemed, Sheila and Peter were back in the taxi, the drone of the road beneath them, the steady pelting of insects on the windshield, like nothing at all had happened, and this felt not right, that two girls were dead on the side of the road now, but that she and Peter could just keep driving, the highway under them impartial and unchanged.
“I feel sick,” Sheila said.
Peter stared straight out the windshield. His eyes were wet.
“Hey,” Sheila said. “Are you all right?”
He nodded.
“There’s nothing we could have done,” she said.
He shrugged. He opened his mouth but his voice shook. He tried again. “That’s what I’m tired of.”
“Of what?”
Peter blinked. He said nothing.
But this was something Sheila could understand. There was the way things should be and then there was the way things were, and the two rarely seemed to overlap. Peter’s hand was on the gearshift and before she had given thought to what she was doing, Sheila placed her hand on top of his. She was driving away from her home with a stranger, away from her family and everything she knew. She was driving past mile markers, away from cornfields, cows, from roadside debris, from the mangled bodies of two girls who, half an hour before, like Sheila, were still making plans. She squeezed Peter’s hand in that moment without knowing why, but feeling the uneven jitter of the road through his hand cradling the gearshift, Sheila felt grateful—that his hand was there, that she had thought to take it.
After four and a half hours, the skyscrapers could be detected, but only in the distance. The landscape looked as much a certifiable city as anything Sheila had ever seen. You couldn’t see much of the buildings in the dark, but Sheila could see enough to be impressed by their height alone. Peter merged with the lanes of traffic headed into the city, and pulled off the expressway at Western Avenue. This was the longest street in the country, he told her, and they were heading north on it when suddenly he parallel parked the taxi and said, “We’ll hail a local cab from here.”
In the glove box, Peter retrieved an envelope full of his fares, unrecorded—a sum that ne
arly matched the Sinclair register count. Just after crossing the Mississippi, they had pulled over at a rest stop to scrape the company decals off the car doors. He had by that point already smashed the CB radio on the side of the road with the sole of his boot and thrown his own cell phone in the Mississippi as they drove over it. Sheila had gasped, “Why did you do that?” Peter shrugged. “I don’t want to talk to anyone else,” he said. Her phone in the station, his in the river. They were acting recklessly. They were cutting themselves off from the rest of the world. But there was a strange calm in it, a promise implicit in the risk. WELCOME TO THE PRAIRIE STATE! LAND OF LINCOLN! the signs in the grass by the bathroom had shouted. Now Peter unscrewed the license plates and grabbed the laminated sign off the dash—so aside from being the wrong color yellow, the wrong make and model of car to blend in with Chicago taxis, with the wrong type of FOR HIRE light affixed to the roof, and parked on a busy street through several rush hours, the taxi fit right in.
A Chicago cab drove them to a hotel. Peter carried the duffle bag full of money.
“Have a seat,” he told her.
Sheila sat in the lobby while he checked in. It wasn’t really that much money. Sheila had more saved in the bank than what they had stolen.
“What if we get caught?” Sheila asked.
“You can say you got kidnapped. If you wanted to bail on me.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Sheila.
“I’m glad,” said Peter.
“I’m not a kid,” said Sheila.
“It’s late,” he said. “Let’s get something to eat.”
For dinner they ate hamburgers at a diner around the corner. Peter wasn’t much of an eater, but Sheila was starving. She finished her meal and most of his french fries.
Sheila moved his plate closer to hers on the table, so she could easily sop up the ketchup on her plate with his discarded scraps. She said, “Is this your first time on a trip like this?” She was trying to gauge exactly what kind of trip this was going to be. The truth was she had never really been on a trip, and she wanted to figure out how things were going to work.
Peter looked up. “Oh no,” he said. He shook his head. “I’ve been all over the place. I’ve been to Lincoln, Nebraska. I’ve been to Nashville, Tennessee.”
“When did you go to all those places?” Sheila asked.
Peter said. “I’m twenty-six years old. I’ve been a few places.”
“But never Chicago.”
“My first time,” Peter said. He smiled hugely without showing his teeth. He had been fingering a book of matches, as if getting ready to light one. Of course, the diner was nonsmoking, and though his cigarettes were nowhere in sight, each time he came close to snapping one of the matches between his fingers to ignite it, Sheila felt nervous. Finally he set the matches on the table and looked up at her. “You too, I guess?”
“What? Oh yeah.” Sheila hadn’t really wanted to admit that aside from family camping trips it was her first time away from home, but Peter seemed edgy; she wanted to offer him something, to set him at ease. “It’s my first time staying in a hotel,” she said.
Peter whistled. “Wow, I guess I should have checked us into somewhere nicer, tried to impress you a little bit.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It seems real nice,” Sheila said.
“There’s cable TV,” he said. “I guess that’s something. There’s a continental breakfast.”
“There’s a pool,” Sheila said. She had seen tile arrows pointing around the lobby, smelled the certain stench of chlorine.
“Hey, there is a pool, isn’t there?” Peter brightened for a second. “I say first thing we do when we get back is dive in.”
“Deal,” said Sheila, and they smiled at one another across the booth, carefully, politely. Sheila noticed then that his foot had brushed up against her leg under the table. She wasn’t sure if he noticed or not, but she left her leg where it was. It was only later, when they were walking back to the hotel, that it occurred to her that they hadn’t packed swimsuits. That they hadn’t packed anything. It wasn’t going to be that kind of a trip.
She stopped on the sidewalk and turned to him. “What are we doing here?” she asked.
Peter took her hand. He said, “You know, don’t you?” He was looking at her so seriously, it seemed to Sheila that no one had ever taken her so seriously in her life. He said, “Isn’t that why you asked me to point the gun at you?” He seemed then as scared as she was. It was true that she had asked him to do this, but it was at his suggestion, and anyway, she thought he would direct things from there. Sheila considered the possibility that this was how all such arrangements began when there was the irrational question of desire hanging around in the corners of every half-thought. It came down to this: a series of actions, a series of reactions. He would say something, and then she would say something, then there would be time to interpret, to analyze, before acting again. She thought of hearts beating under floors, hearts inside drawers. It was no wonder there were so many casualties. But the important thing now was to keep reacting. The important thing now was not to stop.
She had never shared a bed with anyone before. Even in her parents’ house, she and Andrea always had their own rooms. When they got back to the hotel Peter fell asleep still in his clothes, on top of the covers. Sheila tried not to be disappointed; she had been hoping for more attention. Sheila tried to sleep, but she could feel his weight next to her. She watched him while he slept, as if she might miss something if she dozed off. Peter was on his back, stray strands of hair over his eyes. Sheila cautiously pushed one of the strands behind his ear with the tips of her fingers. He blinked, opened his eyes. He smiled at her and closed them. When his breathing steadied again, Sheila began playing with the buttons of his shirt, and before she’d really considered what she was going to do once his buttons were unfastened, she found she was pressing on them, silently encouraging each one to fit through its little neighboring slot. She had wanted to get a good look at him. Under his shirt, Peter was wearing a ribbed sleeveless undershirt, the same kind Donny wore around the house, but Peter’s shoulders were thinner and darker, like a boy’s.
“Hey, go to sleep,” he said with his eyes closed.
“I can’t sleep,” Sheila said.
“You should try.”
Sheila licked her lips. She traced the lines of his undershirt with her thumb. Peter gave a little grunt after a minute and lifted her up on top of him.
“Hmm?” he asked, although she hadn’t said anything.
Immediately she felt panicked and exhilarated. There was nothing to say, so she kissed his eyebrow quietly, in a spot where there was a little white scar, a small response to his odd question. In reply, he pulled her face down to his and kissed her mouth. The other boys she had kissed didn’t kiss so hard. Peter gripped her face between his hands when he pushed his tongue into her mouth. He pulled her face away from his and eyed her with a quiet reprimand. “You don’t look a day older than sixteen,” he said.
Men took her for an early twenty-something all the time, but Peter didn’t seem to care what her answer was to this charge, because suddenly he became very awake, his hands moving quickly under her clothes. She had his attention, and now she was going to have to figure out what do with it. She had heard the men who sat in a line at the bar she went to with her sister say to one another that there were two types of women in the world: flirts and cock-teases. When the girls walked away from the bar with the words ironed into the asses of their sweatpants, the men decided which category each fell into. Flirt? they asked one another. Nope, definitely a cock-tease. Sheila had wanted to ask someone, but didn’t: Which one was better? And: Weren’t they kind of the same thing? But she wasn’t stupid enough to say this kind of thing aloud. She understood that only a girl would get hung up on such distinctions. She ran her hand along the place where Peter’s belt fastened shut, understanding that once she got him out of the jeans, she had no idea what to do with what she was sure to
find there. But Peter stood abruptly before she could do anything else. He said, “Are you sure about this?” and Sheila nodded.
“Okay,” he said. He kissed her neck and grabbed his wallet from the dresser. “Back in a minute.”
The door slammed and she was alone in the room. She flopped back on the bed and studied a crack in the ceiling. Back in a minute? Hadn’t that been the contents of the note she left on the locked door of the gas station after she turned off the pumps? Had she done something wrong? Should she take off her shirt or something while she was waiting? Sheila scooted to the end of the bed so she could see herself in the mirror above the dresser. She pulled her hair out of its ponytail and peeled her shirt over her head. “Hi,” she said to the girl in the mirror, but then she felt ridiculous for saying anything to that idiot in her underwear. She was still sitting there trying to decide if she should put her shirt back on when the door swung open again. Peter walked to her quickly, placed his hand in the crevice of her side above her jeans and kissed her. In his hand there was a small yellow box. Already Peter was removing the rest of her clothes; he was waiting for her to reciprocate. “Will you put it on me?” he asked, pushing the box into her hand.
Sheila willed herself to finish what she’d started. Don’t be a baby, she told herself. Don’t be a flirt. She fit her hand under the buckle of his belt and unfastened it. She ripped the packaging away from one of the condoms, and she was holding it up to him when Peter pushed forward so that he was already in her hand. Peter pulled the rest of her clothes off, and he looked a little like he was going to cry. At first it didn’t feel like anything, then it sort of felt like something, but she was afraid it was not the right thing, and then she realized she wouldn’t even know if it was the right thing. She thought of asking him what it was supposed to feel like, but when she looked up at him, it was clear he was feeling something, the way he was pulling her thighs closer to him and gasping for breath like someone coming up for air from underwater. The smell of latex stung in her nostrils. Andrea had advised her that even if she didn’t like it the first time—and eventually, she would like it—she should make a lot of noise, or the guy would think there was something wrong with her. But every time Sheila opened her mouth, Peter cupped his hand over it and smiled, asked her if she wanted to wake everyone up. Each time she opened her mouth to sound pleased—pleased in the way one was supposed to sound while having sex for the first time with another person—Sheila had to focus to be sure her mouth produced a moan instead of a question. The question her mouth was trying to form still wasn’t entirely clear to her, but it had something to do with the women who had been in the car on the shoulder of Interstate 80. She looked down at her skin, her body beside his, below his, but alternately, in place of her own, she saw the girls’ narrow bodies, as they had been wrapped around the steering wheel, the glove compartment. Then Peter started gasping again and he pulled away from her fast, closing his eyes, helpless to whatever it was that was passing over him. Sheila breathed in and the air tasted sweet and she felt an odd calm settling in her own body like a kind of quiet accomplishment.