by Blake Crouch
Stars burn above the Outer Banks.
We pass through tiny beach communities, interspersed by stretches of lonely highway. The sea stays mostly hidden behind the wall of dunes that crowds the right side of the road.
Half a tank of gas remains. I never want to stop. I could drive like this for eons, putting mile after mile between us and that stone house on the sound and the things we did today on Portsmouth. I wonder if Vi feels like I do—like we’re the only two souls on the face of the Earth who’ve been told this awful truth.
# # #
Traversing the bridge over Oregon Inlet, the beam from the Bodie Island Lighthouse becomes visible, projecting its luminescence out to sea. My thoughts turn briefly to Karen.
# # #
The beach has been practically paved in Nags Head, and the dunes of Jockey’s Ridge, tallest on the East Coast, resemble snow hills in the moonlight.
I pull into the parking lot of a Motel 8.
"All right if we stay here tonight?" I ask, first words spoken since Ocracoke.
"Yeah."
I walk into the office and request a room with double beds.
There’s only one vacancy left. It has one king-size bed.
We’ll take it.
I park in front of our room and give Vi a keycard.
Light from a supermarket and a burger joint shines in full bloom across the street.
"I’ll go get us some dinner. What do you want?"
"Nothing."
"You’re a fuckin’ rail, Vi. I’m getting you something. Might as well tell me what."
# # #
I cross Highway 12 and walk into Wendy’s.
"Can I get for you there tonight, sir?" asks the plump and smiling cashier.
I don’t remember how to talk to these kind of people.
# # #
I carry the greasy white bags into Harris Teeter, not that I intend to buy anything. It’s a compulsion. I can’t think of anyplace more ordinary and safe than the mopped, generic brightness of a supermarket. We’re at home among things, items, products, goods for sale. I want elevator music and strangers squeezing produce and price checks over the intercom.
# # #
The magazine rack is riddled with important news I haven’t heard in nine months. Smug celebrities watch me browse. None of it means a goddamn thing anymore.
# # #
On the wine aisle, I walk by three young women stocking up on Andre’s champagne.
I eavesdrop.
There’s a bonfire somewhere on the beach tonight.
They’re going to get wasted.
Going to get fucked.
They smell like cigarettes and energy.
# # #
Vi is sitting in bed nursing Max when I walk into the room, a romantic-comedy on the television. I set the bags of food on the table.
"Can I bring you yours?" I ask.
"He’s almost done."
I sit down on the edge of the bed and stare at the TV screen.
She lays Max, gorged and sleepy, at the foot of the bed on a towel surrounded by pillows. I grab the white bags, and we have a fast-food feast on the bed.
When Vi finishes, she says, "I want to take a shower. Watch Max for me?"
"Sure."
She walks into the bathroom, closes the door. I turn off the television and move over to the window. Peeking through the curtains into the parking lot, I check on the car, see the dunes of Jockey’s Ridge State Park glowing more brilliantly than before.
Vi gasps in the bathroom.
I rush to the door.
"Everything okay?" I call out.
No answer, only sobs.
"I’m coming in, Vi. I’m coming in."
I open the door slowly, giving her a chance to cover up in case she’s naked.
She’s slumped over against the sink, jeans on, T-shirt and bra in a pile on the floor.
"Vi, what’s wrong?" She shakes her head. "Tell me."
She straightens up, faces me, forearms hiding her milk-swollen breasts, and taps her right shoulder, taps the purple-yellow bruise the shotgun made when it bucked against her nine hours ago.
I step into the bathroom, wrap my arms around her bare back.
"Why don’t you take a bath, huh? I’ll run some water."
"My clothes smell like that house."
"We’ll wash them in the bathtub later. Here, sit down."
As she takes a seat on the toilet, I kneel down, close the drain, and turn the hot water knob.
"How warm do you want it?"
"Very."
I crank the cold water knob, get the mix just right.
"Check on Max, will you?"
I crack the door. Corralled by pillows, the infant sleeps, a stuffed dolphin at his side.
"He’s fine. Call if you need anything."
"Stay with me, Andy."
"You sure?"
"Just close your eyes for a minute."
I turn my back, listening to her jeans unzip and slide down her thighs. She steps into the bathtub, eases down in the water.
"Okay, I’m in."
I take a seat on the toilet.
Vi sits close to the faucet, her legs drawn up into her chest, arms wrapped around her knees.
"This feels so good," she says. "I haven’t had a bath in…I don’t know how long."
She bats the running water into her chest.
Her legs glisten, unshaven for months.
"I’ll pour water on your back if you like."
"Be great."
I tear the wrapper off one of the plastic cups on the sink. Kneeling down on the floor beside the tub, I fill the cup and drizzle hot water over her back.
Her skin turns to gooseflesh.
I do this for awhile and then she lifts her hair off her back and says, "Would you pour some on my neck?"
Feels good to please her.
I ask why she hasn’t called her husband.
"Andy, I feel like I’ve just come home from war. You know what I mean?"
"Yeah."
I drop the cup in the water, run my fingers through her hair.
"And I’m not sure how to go back. All the drugs, the hypnosis, those terrible movies we watched—what if Rufus fucked me up?" She turns and looks at me. "How do you feel?"
"I feel nothing."
"You have somewhere to go?"
"Yeah. A long, long way from here."
"Tell me about it."
I smile at the picture my mind’s eye conjures of my cabin in the Yukon forest. I smell the tall firs. See the meadow at night. Think of lying in its cold, soft grass, beneath the quiet majesty of the northern lights. God, I’d love to see the aurora borealis again.
"It’s paradise," I say, pouring more water down her spine.
"You could go back, yeah?"
"Sure."
"Is it quiet there?"
"Very."
"Middle of nowhere, right?"
"Yes. And beautiful. So beautiful."
"No one bothers you."
"Not there they don’t. You live quietly, simply. It’s lonely, but a good kind of lonely."
"Part of me would like to go back with you."
"Just turn your back on everything?"
"It’s all bullshit anyway. What I did today—if I’m capable, anyone is. Except they don’t know it. They live under the illusion of decency, goodness."
"You, me, and Max, huh?"
"I could have a garden. Live off the land, you know. Never see anyone. You could write."
"Have to come up with a great pseudonym."
"Yeah, and you’d publish books again, Andy. Maybe even write about this."
"And one day, after twenty, thirty years, when everyone’s forgotten, we come back."
I sit down on the tile. Steam curls off the surface of the bathwater, the mirror fogged, walls sweating. Vi leans against the side of the tub and stares at me, not quite as pretty as when I first saw her that raw November afternoon in Howard’s Pub, her beauty now ti
nged with hardness.
"No," she says. "We never come back."
# # #
At some point during the night, Vi lifts Max from his place between us, and puts him to bed on his pallet on the floor. She climbs back under the covers and snuggles up beside me.
I’m awake. I don’t anticipate sleeping tonight.
"Will you hold me?" she asks.
I raise my arm and she rests her head on my shotgun-bruised shoulder. It’s cold in this room. Most of our clothes lie drying in the bathtub.
Vi drapes her leg over mine and whispers, "What are we going to do tomorrow?"
I cup her face in my hands.
Last two souls on the face of the Earth.
There are things I want to say to her—shards of comfort and warmth and nothing’s as bad as it seems and no you are not a bad person and yes we did the right thing today.
But they would be lies, and we are so far beyond that now.
# # #
I don’t sleep.
Before dawn, I slip out of the room and walk down to the beach. I sit in soft sand, watch the tide push in. The lights of a shrimp boat shine several miles out. No sound save the breakers.
A lean and tall older gentleman jogs past, northbound toward the five a.m. twinkling of Kill Devil Hills. As I watch him dwindling up the coast, it hits me—there are people who will live eighty-five years and never know a fraction of the horror I experienced yesterday.
Sure, they’ll mourn the passing of parents, a spouse, close friends.
They might suffer the depression of living a life of compromise.
Shit jobs. Marginalization. Termination. Resignation. Envy.
They’ll see wars on television—children pulled out from rubble in scorched, bullet-ridden rags, maimed and dead.
But they will not know gunning a young woman down on a tidal flat to save themselves. Won’t face the knowledge that they’re capable. How easily they’d do it. That the squalor of humanity, broadcast by grim robots on the evening news, abides also in them.
Their decency is a luxury, their violence sleeps for now, those whose monsters are car wrecks and cancer and the boredom of the suburbs, those who believe goodness is the prevailing station of our species. Their age of civilization and progress is a flicker in the dark eternity of violence.
Now light tinges the Outer Banks with a soft peach stain.
I watch a fisherman wade out into the warm surf.
Gulls are crying, Nags Head waking, that delicate hour of the morning gone as the Earth turns into the sun’s dominion, a cuticle of pink fire peeking over the edge of the sea.
# # #
I climb into bed and spoon Vi. She stirs. I stroke her yellow hair, still damp from last night’s bath, smelling faintly of that cheap motel conditioner.
"Oh, Max," she murmurs. "I want to…yeah."
She turns over. Smiling. At peace.
When her eyes open, they die.
"I was dreaming."
"It was a nice one."
"Yeah. You shaved. I like it."
She sits up, crawls to the end of the bed, and peers down at her son.
"Where’d you go this morning, Andy?"
"Down to the beach. Watched the sun come up."
"I didn’t think you were coming back. Thought that’s how you were going to do it. Just slip away, back to your paradise."
I hear the baby’s soft cry. Vi leans down, lifts him up.
"Are you hungry, little baby boy?" she coos.
Vi slides off the bed and comes to her feet, standing there in panties and undershirt, Max groping at her breasts.
"I’m ready, Andy," she says.
"Ready?"
"To go home."
# # #
I drive 64 west, over the long bridges that span the sounds of Roanoke and Croaton and the Alligator River. We rise and rise above the ocean. The flatness of the coastal plain gives way to rolling pasture and forest, the consistency of the soil turning from sand to rich red clay, those toothpick pines of the eastern swamps now crowded and lost among maple and hickory.
It feels strange to be inland. The farther from the sea we run, the Outer Banks seem more like afterimages of dreams. It would be so easy and comforting to find atonement in the remoteness and disorientation of our imprisonment. I glance at Vi, wondering if she’ll coax the last nine months and what she did on Portsmouth into donning the aura of a brutal fantasy, one more nightmare to repress.
At four o’clock, we skirt the south side of Raleigh and bore westward, across Jordan Lake, through Pittsboro, Siler City, and Ramseur. We enter the town of Lexington as the sun balances on the horizon, so blinding I can scarcely see the road.
"You hungry?" I ask, catching Vi’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
She sits in the back nursing Max.
"I could eat."
"Best barbeque joint on the planet is just ahead. How about we stop there? Besides, the car’s running hot."
"Fine. I need to change Max anyway."
I pull the Kites’ Impala into the crowded parking lot of Lexington Barbeque # 1.
We walk together, like a family, to the back of the line that snakes out of the front doors.
"Whole fuckin’ town’s here tonight," Vi says.
"Yeah, well, it’s what they call good eatin’."
The evening is muggy and clear, and the hickory-fueled fire inside the kitchen spits the sweetest-smelling smoke up the chimney and out into the cooling night, no greater tease in the world if you’re hungry.
As we inch toward the doors, I glance at the families who’ve come out for their Friday night dinner, innocuous and tame, a cheery hopeless bunch, moving orderly and herd-like toward the feeding trough. They talk of church and jobs and things they want to buy at Wal-Mart. They feel so ordinary and safe.
We finally make it inside, find a pair of vacant stools at the counter, and order two large plates. They come in a hurry—chopped pork shoulder, red slaw, hushpuppies, and tall Styrofoam cups of sweet tea. I haven’t had western-style North Carolina barbeque in ages, and it’s better than I remember it.
I finish long before Vi and ask for a piece of peach cobbler.
Max squirms in her lap, making it difficult for her to eat.
"Let me hold him for you," I offer, taking the infant under his arms and lifting him into my lap. I dandle Max on my leg and he smiles.
An older woman on her way to the cash register stops and makes silly faces at him.
The waitress brings my cobbler and a scoop of vanilla ice cream that has already begun to melt. As I stab my fork into a steaming peach slice, Vi says, "I’ve been thinking."
"Yeah?"
"About what I’m going to say happened. I mean, this is all I’ve thought about in the car today."
She glances over her shoulder and then continues, her voice lower, barely more than a whisper above the din of restaurant noise.
"I leave you in a motel in Davidson tonight. We have just enough cash left. Then I go home. I’m sure Max thinks I’m dead. Everyone’ll want to know what happened. It’ll be crazy. I’ll tell them most of the truth. About Rufus and Maxine. About Luther."
"About Portsmouth?"
"What good would that do? I’ll make you a hero, Andy. Say you saved our lives, but that I left you in Ocracoke. Took the car, got the hell out of there. No one will question me running after what I’ve been through. I dare them to.
"And tomorrow, I find a way to come to you. I’ll bring money. We have some savings, enough to get you home, back to your paradise."
"Vi—"
"Shut up, Andy. This’ll work. You’re innocent. I know that now. But to everyone else, you’re the Heart Surgeon. They don’t know about Orson. What he made you do. All they know is your face, the Washington Boxes, bodies dug up at your home on Lake Norman, the rumors, the—"
"You think I’m innocent, Vi? Think you are?"