“You brought Sophia?” Ashley looked surprised.
“What else was I going to do?” Erica said. “She’s my buddy. She comes everywhere with me. What kind of music do you want to listen to?”
Ashley shifted Ethan’s geeky atlas, a deluxe model sporting detachable maps of all fifty states, around the center console, and riffled through the large stack of tapes wobbling below. “How about Billy Joel?” she asked.
“Okay,” Erica agreed, sticking in the tape though it hardly fit her mood. “Do you like Rat Debris or Bloody Tampax? Or Barf?”
“Oh no, yuck!” Ashley said, pushing back her curls. “That’s Jared’s thing. He knows I hate that type of bands. Do you like heavy metal, honestly?”
“Kind of,” Erica said, realizing that was true, that she’d acquired a taste for heavy metal like one might a tannic wine, through a combination of desire and numbing repetition.
Despite the midmorning hour, they hit all the usual traffic snags: the hill between Douglaston and Little Neck, the merger with the Cross-Island Parkway, the inevitable clog by the Shelby Manor Assisted Living Center. Erica kept switching lanes while accomplishing little forward motion.
“How convenient,” Erica muttered to herself. “A nursing home next to a cemetery.” Even after they merged onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the gravestones continued for mile after tortuously slow mile. As many live people as there were in New York, there seemed to be more dead ones. She wiped her sweaty hands off on her shorts and scratched the spot at the top of her head where it felt like an artery was pulsing and bulging out. How did that song go from the seventies, was it Art Garfunkel? “Nothing but the dead or dying back in my hometown”? A tractor-trailer backfired, spewing a waft of black smoke through the front windows of the car. Despite the thick, hot stink, Erica breathed in rapid bursts, the air muddy against her throat.
They joined the slow crawl over the Verrazano Bridge. Below them, whitecaps rustled in a soft, sour-smelling wind, frothing over the brown water like a cappuccino. To their right, they lapped against the towers of lower Manhattan. A few months ago, she’d looked out at this same view from the opposite perspective, at night, and it had all seemed magical and limitless. What an illusion.
“Mrs. Richards, are you okay?” Ashley glugged a bottle of Evian water.
“Yeah, why?” Erica asked, blowing her nose into a crumpled tissue. She made the mistake of looking at it, spattered with drops of blood. She squished it into her pocket.
“You scratched the back of your head.” Ashley twisted the bottle cap closed and returned it to her bag.
Great, she was starting to scratch the back of her head when she got nervous, like her mother. She wondered if her mother ever felt that tangible increase in arterial pressure, the sensation as if something was about to burst. “I hate this traffic,” she said.
The truck in front of them stopped suddenly, forcing Erica to brake in order to avoid hitting his flatbed. They stood still on the downslope of the bridge for a second before the traffic jounced forward onto Staten Island, which, as Ethan had noted so long ago on Josh Hendrie’s balcony, was quite unremarkable in the morning. On one side of the highway stood dingy rows of worn-out houses with aluminum siding and dingy pizza shops; on the other side equally dingy water slapped against a trash-strewn beach. At one spot, the trash accumulated into an honest-to-God landfill. Seagulls shrieked around the sulfurous mound, while across four lanes of heavy traffic, an elderly lady hung out her laundry. Everywhere was in reach of a grabbing hand, a ceaselessly ringing phone, an ominous knock on the door.
Ashley’s fingers danced across her backpack. “Mrs. Richards,” she said, “what are we going to do when we get to South Carolina? “
“I figure we’ll get down there and play it by ear. Scope it out, figure out what we’re up against.”
“Wow,” Ashley said. “That makes me nervous.”
The centipede of traffic crawled over the Goethals Bridge. On family trips, her father had always referred to this span as the Goebbels Bridge, giggling under his breath at his own black humor. As a child, she’d never had any difficulty imagining Elizabeth, New Jersey, the wasteland of oil refineries beyond the bridge, as a concentration camp—all those foul vapors arising from bodies burning in the chimneys. But today she thought of it simply as not New York. She put on a Bruce Springsteen tape in celebration.
“‘Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, and cut a valley through the middle of my soul,’” Erica sang along with Bruce. The industrial moonscape gave way to dull farm fields and big-box stores. Erica pulled off the parkway at the Walt Whitman rest stop. Her father used to obsess about that too: why a highway rest stop in dreary New Jersey was named after a famous Long Island poet. They sat on a picnic bench near a strip of anemic oak trees while Erica fished out formula and diaper-changing supplies. Sophia’s bowels were loose and her cheeks flushed. She didn’t seem much interested in her formula and after half a bottle turned her head away and whimpered.
“Is she all right, Mrs. Richards?” asked Ashley. She fumbled in her pocketbook. “Drat. I need more cigarettes.”
“I think so,” said Erica. It figured Sophia would pick this time to get sick. She gave her a dose of infant Tylenol. “Let’s go inside where it’s air-conditioned and get something to eat,” she said. She wasn’t very hungry, but coffee sounded good. And something sweet.
A poodle walked by. “Doggie, doggie!” Sophia cried, reassuring Erica of her health. In the midst of the frenzy of the previous week Sophia had uttered her first word other than “mama,” a distinct “dog-gie,” which turned out to apply to any animal, be it Lisa’s cocker spaniel or Sam the iguana.
In the cafeteria, they got in line behind a flotilla of families that reminded her of the ones at Disney World: overweight, blond, and dressed in polyester primary colors. Like a herd of colorful elephants, they stomped to a counter where slimy chicken a la king and overcooked broccoli steamed sulfurously from metal pans.
They slid their trays down the metal rods to a cold case, where, for lack of any better option, Erica chose a wedge of lemon meringue pie.
“I’m a vegetarian,” Ashley informed her, grabbing a mound of cottage cheese garnished with a canned peach. “Hayden told me more stuff,” she said.
“What?” Erica searched for a high chair. They were all taken, and the yellowish linoleum beneath their feet was punctuated every few inches by a squashed french fry, crumpled napkin, or blot of ketchup.
“They have to eat this crazy diet to balance their blood enzymes or something. Some concoction with cider vinegar for breakfast and raw milk from the cows on the farm. All this gross stuff, but there’s never enough to eat. Their showers are cold, and they have to wash their laundry in a bucket. And they have to watch these stupid inspirational videos all the time, and if they don’t toe the line, they’ll get demoted and sent to solitary. Like in Alcatraz or something.”
“God,” Erica said. “That’s disgusting.”
They ate their snacks as Sophia lay quietly in Erica’s lap. Afterward, Erica asked Ashley if she could watch the baby while she went to the ladies’ room, promising her an opportunity to buy cigarettes afterwards.
Like in Disney World, she performed the same grotty act in a comparable bathroom stall, snorting her diminishing coke store with one leg on the toilet seat. By the time she slid the metal lock open, her perspective felt totally refreshed. The patina on the tilework shimmered luminously. All those fat folks whose clothes she had scorned before looked purposeful and beautiful in a distant sort of way, a mass of migrating humanity, dappled with light. As she reached the bench where Ashley sat cradling Sophia, the chorus of the pop song on the loudspeaker, which she vaguely recognized but didn’t recall the title of, swelled to such a peak of poignancy that tears came to her eyes. She reached down and gathered the baby onto her shoulder, Sophia’s mouth drib
bling a dot of curdly spit-up onto her neck. She touched Sophia’s forehead with her lips. Cooler. Everything was going to be all right.
: : :
Ashley kept up a steady burble of chatter, mainly regarding clothing bargains she’d found with her mother on the Lower East Side, in between applying various makeup items and drawing intricate designs on the back of her hand with a ballpoint pen.
They drove through eighteen miles of spewing smokestacks in Delaware. When they reached the Baltimore tunnel, rush hour traffic slowed their progress. Erica imagined the fierce pressure of the water against the walls of the tunnel and all the ways they could be crushed and inundated. Her heart fluttered. Sophia began to cry, a snuffly, weak sort of whimper.
“Are you sure the baby’s okay, Erica?” Ashley asked. “She’s not usually so irritable.”
“Yeah, I think it’s the long car ride. We’ll make a quick stop as soon as we get out of this tunnel.” Erica wiped her sweaty hand on her thigh.
At the J. Millard Tawes Rest Area in Maryland, the midsummer sun still lay high on the horizon. A sea of gnats orbited their heads.
“Who the hell is J. Millard Tawes, I wonder?” Erica asked, shielding Sophia’s body with her arms. With coaxing, she took a little milk but refused both cereal and applesauce.
“I dunno,” Ashley said. “Maybe he’s another poet?”
Erica changed Sophia’s diaper and wiped her runny nose. Her forehead felt warm again. She gave her another dose of Tylenol, even though you were supposed to give it every four hours and only three hours had elapsed. But they couldn’t afford to stop again, in another hour, just for that. Plus, Sophia was feverish now, so why wait.
“When I think about what we’re doing, I get scared,” said Ashley.
“Try not to think,” said Erica.
: : :
By early evening, they had cleared the clot of the Washington, DC, metro area, passing the exit for Dulles Airport, passing the suburbs and exurbs until the buildings thinned out, hills mounded greenly, and horses nibbled grass behind white fences. They drove west, into a setting sun so glaring that Erica kept adjusting her position so as not to be blinded. Rounded violet shadows of mountains rose in the distance, and then they were upon them, climbing up forested roads. High wispy clouds sailed through the darkening sky. The oppressive heat in the car lifted, and a pine-scented breeze drifted in. They turned right on a Route 81, which looked correct, according to Ethan’s atlas, and drove south, bracketed by trucks. Sophia slept so soundly that Erica sometimes forgot she was there; then she would remember with a start and turn to the back and check, yes, there she was, her breathing congested but steady, her fists knotted, her chubby thighs poking out of her seersucker onesie.
“D’you think we should find a motel, Mrs. Richards?” When she was nervous, Erica noted, Ashley reverted to Mrs. Richards.
“No, I can keep driving through the night,” Erica said.
“I wish I had my license; then I could help you drive.”
“No, don’t worry about it.” Night was her favorite time to drive, just her and the ribbon of road, her radio and tape deck.
Soon Ashley fell asleep, her stream of chatter replaced by a lolling head and a heavy, nasal breath. Her belly button peeked out from beneath her silk top. There were a few downy hairs on it. Her belly looked blank and innocent, like a child’s. Up ahead, the road split. Any signage was obscured by the high truck bed in front of her. She took her chances and bore to the right.
The trucks disappeared. The mountain road twisted. Here and there she could see a long driveway or a trailer set among the trees. Road signs pointed their way to unknown locales: Harrisonburg, Elkton, Staunton, Clarksburg, West Virginia. The people she loved still tugged at her with insistent tendrils: Ashley and Sophia asleep in her car; Ethan in Florida; Jared in South Carolina; the twins at Lisa’s; Dylan in the Poconos; her parents in Bucharest; hell, even Debbie in Albany. If it weren’t for all these attachments and responsibilities weighing her down, she would float like a dandelion seed. She would fly up into these black mountains.
She chose turnoffs at random. A deer skittered across the road, right in front of her car. She plugged in Robert Palmer and drove deeper into the mountains, deeper into the night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The near-absolute darkness comforted her at one level; at another, it terrified her. What it did primarily was focus her attention. The narrow road rose higher and higher into the mountains, curving in corkscrews, and it took all her concentration to determine where the road ended and something else began, and she couldn’t be sure whether it was forest or empty air. Apart from her headlights, the sky, milky with stars, provided the only illumination. There were no gas stations, no rest stops. Every now and then a series of boxy shadows, perhaps a cross rising from the triangular roof of a church, indicated human habitation. More deer crossed the road, and once, a lower, longer animal with a long tail, his fierce eyes glowing in the darkness. Occasionally a car passed her going in the opposite direction, blinding her with its headlights.
In what passed for a turnout, she stopped for about twenty minutes and fed Sophia, glancing about nervously for bears or whatever else might swoop out of the darkness. Sophia drank about half of her bottle and then lost interest. Erica bounced her about on her knees, hoping to generate her usual energetic curiosity. The dark seemed to scare her; she snuggled into Erica’s armpit. Her forehead was hot. She coughed, a dry cracking heave that shook her chest. Erica gave Sophia a sweater, more Tylenol. She fell back asleep.
Erica drank her gallon of coffee and munched through her bag of potato chips. She slid in tapes one after the other—Steve Winwood, Peter Gabriel, Jefferson Starship, Bon Jovi, Cyndi Lauper, John Cougar Mellencamp, Phil Collins—avoiding the heavy metal so as not to wake Ashley and Sophia. A couple of times she stopped to pee, squatting on the narrow shoulder between Vince and the edge, where the land fell away down a sharp slope. She snorted several lines of coke right there in the car, driving very slowly, one hand on the wheel. Ashley slumped against the passenger door, breathing softly, her sweater bunched up against her ear, a blotch of eyeliner on her closed lids.
Eventually, a faint line of light appeared on the horizon. She was driving down out of the mountains into land somewhere flatter and greener, dotted with pine trees and ranch houses.
At a gas station with a neon dinosaur sign and a couple of freestanding pumps, Erica leaned back and felt Sophia’s head. Cooler again, and she wasn’t coughing so much. Maybe she was on the mend. These viruses didn’t usually last very long.
“Erica, I gotta pee!” Ashley rolled and stretched and yawned. “And I gotta brush my teeth. My mouth tastes like a sewer.” She dashed indoors.
As Erica unlocked her gas cap, shaking her left foot, which had fallen asleep, an attendant emerged. He stared at Vince’s New York plates. “Y’all aren’t from these parts,” he observed. “Where y’all headed?”
“Burkittsville,” she blurted, her voice sounding foreign to her ears, harsh and nasal. “Is it far from here?”
“’Bout fifty miles down the road, give or take a few. Take a right on Route 40. Don’t tell me—you’ve got family in the penitentiary?”
“Why do you ask?” Erica said.
“Can’t think of any other reason why folks would want to go to Burkittsville.”
The boy, Erica noted, was rather attractive, with longish strawberry-blond hair, an open face, full lips, well-defined arm muscles. “You’re frownin’,” he continued. “You’re hidin’ somethin’, I can tell. Is it your husband in the pen? Your boyfriend? The father of that cute li’l baby back there?”
Sophia’s eyes fluttered open. “Dog-gie!” she said, pointing at a black lab sniffing the base of a tree.
Ashley emerged from the bathroom, holding her nose.
“That guy was gross,” she said as they pulled back on
the road. “Did you see that one tooth he had that was totally black?”
“I thought he was kind of cute,” Erica said.
“Sometimes you’re very strange, Erica.” Ashley sprayed her face with rosewater. “Are you sure you’re okay? You look kind of flushed.”
“I’m fine,” Erica said, though her face did feel bright and hot, her eyes dry, her nose congested and dripping. Her right calf ached from pressing on the accelerator. When she glanced down at the leg, she noticed a long scratch on her thigh that she didn’t remember getting. Perhaps she’d scratched herself on the spiky weeds by the gas station. “I think I’m allergic to something around here,” she said, inserting REM in her tape deck in honor of the South.
They ate at the Pine Cabin Cafe, which smelled of grease and coffee. The place was full, despite the early hour, everyone chatting like they were best friends, all turning to stare suspiciously at the newcomers, their gazes turning friendly as soon as they saw Sophia. Babies. Erica could not get over their power, how they rendered their caretakers harmless.
She rolled out Sophia’s changing pad on the floor tile of the ladies’ room. Sophia’s diaper wasn’t dirty, like it usually was every morning. It wasn’t even very wet. Unsurprising, Erica supposed, as Sophia had eaten virtually nothing since the start of their trip. She lay there, casting her eyes listlessly about, allowing Erica to give her a fresh diaper, powder, and a pink stripy sundress. Erica dabbed water on the gash on her leg, brushed her teeth, splashed her face, redid her banana clip, and did a couple of lines off the changing pad.
A middle-aged waitress sporting a beehive hairdo so out of style Erica was stunned to see it existing in the real world, poured Erica and Ashley big mugs of coffee. “What can I get you folks?” she asked.
Erica studied her laminated menu, sticky with syrup. “I’ll have the biscuits and gravy with a side of bacon,” she said. “And can I get a chopped up banana for the baby?”
“Sure thang,” the waitress said. “Such a sweet little girl.”
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