by Carol Anshaw
The upstairs was a maze of narrow hallways. The only sounds were the heavy whir of a fan in one of the bedrooms, and a thumping bass coming down through the ceiling. Carmen found the bathroom, and used the toilet, which was painted to make it appear melted in a Daliesque way. She washed her hands in a paint-splattered sink with a large, misshapen bar of soap the color of glue. She inspected her makeup in the mirror, decided against using any of the extremely funky hairbrushes in a basketful on the windowsill, and made do with running wet fingers through her hair. She closed the toilet lid and sat sideways so she could press her forehead to the chilled porcelain of the sink. She suddenly found herself wobbly in the middle of all this tradition rigged up around something she wasn’t all that sure about. Child brides in India came to mind, kidnapped brides in tribal cultures, and mail-order brides for pioneer farmers. The vulnerable nature of bridehood in general. Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. Forward was the only available direction.
“We cut with the knife upside-down, then we feed a piece to each other.” Matt told Carmen this as if she was a foreign exchange student just off the plane. His mother had given him this information. She was the boss of this wedding, the commandant. The only thing Carmen got was the location—behind the farmhouse in the dreamy flower garden, a relic from some earlier incarnation of the farm. Wood and wire fences submerged beneath waves of climbing roses, Boston ivy, clematis. Stone paths mossed over, the surface of the small pond at the back burnished ochre with algae, paved with water lilies. Throughout the wedding, in the late hours of this afternoon, the scent rolled off the flowers in sheets that nearly rippled the air. A small threat of rain was held to a smudge at the horizon. Just this once, Carmen got perfection. Now though, things seemed to be slipping off that peak.
“Maybe we could just skip the cake-feeding thing?” she said to Matt, trying to gauge how drunk he was. A little, maybe.
“Oh, my aunts really want it,” he said. “I couldn’t say no to them.” Carmen could see these women gathering, clutching their Instamatics, tears already pooling in the corners of their eyes, tourists on an emotional safari, eager to bag a bride.
It suddenly occurred to her that Matt was a stranger. This was not some nervous, paranoid overreaction. The truth was she had known him only a few months, as yet had only his general outlines. He was a volunteer on the suicide hotline she ran. She trained him through nights drinking burnt coffee while talking down or bringing in or referring out kids on bad drug trips, guys who’d gambled away the family savings, women despairing in abusive marriages, gay guys and lesbians running the gauntlet of coming out—all of these callers sitting in motel rooms with some stash of pills they hoped would do the job, or looking out high windows they planned to use as a door.
Like Carmen, Matt believed in the social contract, in reaching out to those in need. He wanted to do his part; he was a good guy. Also she was pregnant, which was an accident, but they were both going with it. She was optimistic about heading into the future with him, but still, he was basically a stranger.
Now his aunts were clamoring—waving stragglers left and right—to gather a lineup of the bride and groom and his parents. Carmen’s parents were hipsters and atheists, way too cool for weddings. They were not present today.
Fatigue hit Carmen like a medicine ball; she was a bride, but also a woman in the middle months of pregnancy, and even ordinary days tired her out. Everyone had had their fun, and now she just wanted them all to go home. She wanted to be teleported to the squeaky bed in the room at a Bates sort of motel Alice had found for them nearby; it was slim pickings for tourist lodgings this far from a main highway. It was okay that it wasn’t a romantic setting. This was more of a symbolic wedding night. They’d been living together since February, sleeping together since about three weeks after they met. Tomorrow they were going fishing. Matt loved to fish and had brought rods and a metal box of lures. Carmen tried to imagine herself fishing. It was a whole new world she was walking into. Everything important was just beginning. Her earlier fears gave way to little slips of the giddiness that comes with potential.
Setting everyone off in the right direction, getting cars out of the yard by the barn, washing casserole dishes and ladles, and making sure they went off with their proper owners was a huge project, like getting the Conestogas out of Maryland, setting the wagon train off toward Missouri. Although it was nearly three a.m., the moonlight in the cloudless summer sky set up a weak, alternate version of day. Olivia’s cavernous old Dodge had room for a few stragglers, refugees from already-departed carloads. Tom Ferris stowed his guitar in the trunk—filled, Carmen noticed, with a high tide of what appeared to be undelivered mail—and got into the backseat along with Maude and—a little surprise—Alice, who Carmen wouldn’t have thought needed a ride anywhere, as she was already home. Carmen tried to make eye contact with her sister, but Alice ducked. She and Maude looked softened by sleepiness and lust; they were holding hands as they tumbled into the car one after the other, like bear cubs. Carmen was clearly way out of the loop on this.
She thanked Tom for singing at the ceremony. He stretched himself a little ways out the car window to bless Carmen with a sign of the cross. “I only perform at weddings of people I think were made for each other. My blessing on you both.” Almost everything Tom said came off as pompous.
She walked around to see how her brother was doing—still pie-eyed on something. He had twisted himself so the back of his head rested on the frame of the open passenger window. The sky was alive with stars and he was lost in them, like when he was a kid. Carmen pinched his ear, but he didn’t so much as blink. She couldn’t get a read on Olivia, who was starting up the engine, which faltered a couple of times before kicking in and required a bit of accelerator-tapping to keep it going.
“You okay?” Carmen asked her, peering past her brother so she could get a better look.
“Oh yes,” Olivia said brightly, maybe a little too brightly, but then Carmen didn’t know her well enough to know how she usually was at three in the morning. “Everything’s copacetic.” She flipped Carmen a little salute of confidence, and shifted into drive.
Carmen watched them weave down the long dirt road that led to the highway. They were the last of the guests to go. Billy Joel was on the car’s tape deck, “Uptown Girl” getting smaller and tinnier as the car drifted away, Nick’s head still poking out the open window. Carmen could see only the vague yellow of the car’s fog lamps ahead of it. “Hey!” she shouted. “Your lights!”
When the car disappeared from view, Matt said, “She’ll figure it out eventually.” And then he picked Carmen up.
“To the cave, woman!” he said, carrying her to his car, where he set her gently on the hood. He kissed her and said, “Don’t get me wrong. This whole thing was great. But I am so glad it’s over.”
“Oh, me too,” Carmen said. “All I want is a good-looking husband and a bed and about fifty hours’ sleep.” Some of the time when she talked to Matt, she felt as if she was in a movie scripted by lazy screenwriters. The two of them were still generic characters in each other’s stories. Girlfriend/boyfriend. Bride/groom. Wife/husband. But maybe that’s all marriage was—you fell into a groove already worn for you. You had a place now. The music had stopped and you’d gotten a chair.
By the time the car reached the end of the dirt road, everyone had grown quiet. Alice looked around at her fellow passengers. Maude was sleepy against her, within the circle of her arm. Nick was zoned out in the front, watching a mosquito flit up and down his forearm. Tom Ferris, on the other side of Maude, was staring out the side window, tapping down, pulling up, tapping down the door lock. Olivia turned left onto the two-lane—Route 14—and let it rip. Alice stuck her head a little ways out the window thinking there was nothing like traveling a country road at night. The sky was so clear, the moon so high and luscious.
A few miles on, the road dipped a little, then cut through a stand of trees. The leaves shimmered in the high
moonlight, and now Billy Joel was singing “You’re Always a Woman to Me.” The first Alice saw of the girl was not her standing on the side of the road, or even running across it, but already thudding onto the hood of the car. A jumble of knees and elbows, and then her face, frozen in surprise, eyes wide open, huge on the other side of the windshield.
route 14
No owls hooted, no nocturnal animals skittered, no wind shivered through the leaves heavy on branches. It was as though, for an instant, everything had been stunned. The moon, a few slivers shy of fullness, hung ghostly white, referring out a pale, insubstantial light that made the surrounding sky appear navy blue.
The Dodge, in attempting to occupy the same space as a massive oak, had been thwarted by the laws of physics. It now rested on its side, front bumper embedded in the trunk of the tree. Its tires had stopped spinning, the passengers inside were as still as sacks of flour. This was a small inhalation, a bracing for the immediate future, which was racing in.
Alice both came into consciousness and wasn’t sure she had even been knocked out. She wiggled her fingers and flexed her feet and concluded she was not seriously hurt, just banged up a little. She could feel bruises purpling. The back of her head ached, her elbows, her butt. She craned her head out the window, which was now above rather than beside her. She found she was the top human in a pancake stack of three. Maude was beneath her; her hand—in a leftover gesture—was stuck inside Alice’s bra, still palming a nipple as if it was a coin in a magic trick. Any world where sleepy sex play might have occurred now seemed very far off, part of another epoch or universe.
She suddenly remembered the kid. She was out there somewhere in the surrounding darkness.
“You okay?” Maude said in a pinched voice beneath Alice’s shoulder.
“I think so.” Alice turned as much to her left as she could. “You?”
“Something’s wrong with my ankle. It’s jammed under the front seat. The guy, the singer, he’s underneath me, knocked out. Breathing, but there’s blood coming from his head. I’m going to try—”
“I’m awake,” Tom said. “I might be dying, though. Really.”
“Head wounds just bleed like crazy,” Maude said, wiping the blood away with her hand. “I don’t think this is deep.” She pulled her silver scarf from around her neck and tied it tight around his head. “There. Just keep pressing your hand against the cut.”
Alice said, “The big problem is there’s a kid, a girl, I think. We hit her. She’s outside somewhere.” Then to Maude, “I know this isn’t great, but I’m going to have to step on you a little to pull myself through the window.”
“S’okay,” Maude said, but groaned as Alice stood on her arm.
Once she hoisted herself out, Alice reached in and slipped her hands under Maude’s arms, pulled her to where she could boost herself up the rest of the way. In the front seat, the satin and polyester of Nick’s and Olivia’s costumes shushed against each other. Alice looked inside, and tried to rally them.
“What about you guys? Can you get yourselves out? There’s a little kid out here somewhere.”
“I didn’t see her, and then she was just hitting the car. I thought maybe she was an angel.” Olivia’s voice was coy and whispery. Like Marilyn Monroe’s. Given the circumstances, this voice was extremely annoying.
Nick turned from where he had settled, nearly behind the steering wheel, crushing Olivia, and looked up at Alice, smiling sheepishly, reaching a hand up toward her in a sort of semi-wave. She saw he was trying to approximate sociability. As though that was what was being asked of him.
“They’re useless,” Alice turned to tell Maude, then looked at Maude’s ankle, which was only minorly cut, but quite swollen. “Can you walk on that?”
Maude took a few test steps, inhaling sharply with each one, but said, “Let’s go. Let’s find her.”
This wasn’t difficult. The girl lay maybe thirty feet behind the car, in the ditch that bordered the gravel shoulder of the road. She looked to be about nine or ten, although she had the adult features of kids from rougher places. She was quite beautiful, with a mop of hair bleached white by half a summer, green eyes staring at absolutely nothing. She was wearing denim cutoffs and a plaid madras shirt, a crosshatch of pinks and greens. Indian moccasins patterned with colored beads. Her clothes were blackened by the earth she had fallen onto, skidded through. There was very little blood, just scrapes here and there. She could be napping but for the position of her body, which looked something like an extremely advanced yoga pose, limbs bent in unlikely ways. Also, beneath the skin of her forearm, a bone poked out midway between her elbow and her wrist.
When she noticed this, Alice turned aside quickly to throw up.
Maude knelt and pressed her ear to the girl’s chest. She listened for a heartbeat, held her fingers to the girl’s neck.
“I don’t know,” she said to Alice, who was still doubled over. “I’m feeling something, but it’s so faint, like an echo. I’ll try CPR; you go for help. Do you know where we are?”
Alice straightened, wiped her sour mouth with the back of her hand. She looked up and down the sign-less road into the woods lining a summer night mild and still as some interior place, a vast, darkened room without walls. The trees seemed to end a ways off toward the east, replaced by fields. But whose fields? Did they already pass the turnoff to the town? What bend in the road was this? Which of the many ancient oaks that were as common out here as pennies in a jar? Making out in the backseat with Maude had obscured both time and distance. They might be quite far from the farm by now. She shook her head. “I wasn’t paying attention. Of course I wasn’t. So now I don’t know. We’re between somewhere and somewhere else. But either way I walk, I’ll come across a house eventually.” Maude was already at work, pressing the girl’s chest, listening for returning breath.
Tom Ferris lurched toward them like a zombie, still holding the side of his head, bound up with Maude’s scarf, soaked with blood, which appeared black in the sharp moonlight.
“Tom,” Alice said, looking up from the girl, “it’s bad.”
But he was already folding onto his knees next to her. He was crying, sobbing really. His shoulders heaved. But although this was the saddest moment imaginable, something about his tears, the ease with which he accessed them, seemed false. Alice was brought up short by this, but had no time to think it through. When she stood to go for help, Tom said, “I’d better come along.”
Nick understood something had gone wrong. He had seen the girl dancing onto the road. He thought she was magical, but now it was definitely beginning to appear she was real. He looked over at Olivia. Maybe she could offer some clue, a prompt about what happened, what to do. But she was only staring up at him with curiosity, as if he was the one with the answer. She had a dark, serious bulge on her forehead.
With some effort, she wrestled her tapestry bag from between them, pulled out a Baggie, plucked from it a couple of pills, and extended her hand toward him. “Take one of these. We’re probably going to need something for whatever happens next.”
Despite the late hour, when Tom and Alice finally came to a house, all the lights were on inside. Bad Company poured out through screenless windows.
“This must be the Hell’s Angels place,” Alice said. The front yard was full of choppers. Before she could go farther, Tom put a hand on her shoulder to make her stop and turn around. “The thing is, I was wondering if you’d mind me sort of disappearing here. I’m just going to hitch a ride back to the city.”
For the first time, she noticed that his guitar case was slung over his shoulder. He’d had the presence of mind to get it out of the car.
“It’s just a professional consideration. The negative publicity. You know. And really, you guys don’t need me from here on. I was asleep. I basically missed the whole thing.”
“Hey. You need to stop. You’re not leaving now. Nobody’s leaving now.” What she held back from saying was that his celebrity was too small
to worry about ruining. All she could do in this moment was try to summon up her sister’s voice. Carmen was very good at keeping people from their worst behavior.
The bikers turned out to be tequila drinkers, bandana wearers, snake keepers. The whole place smelled like the inside of a very bad shoe, a shoe with a piece of cheese in it. In the clutch, though, these guys proved to be surprisingly model citizens. One of them offered up his bandana to replace Tom’s blood-caked scarf-bandage. Alice used their phone to call the cops. The Angels offered to go out to the accident scene, but they only had their bikes, no way to transport the girl. And so they hid their hookah and then everyone just waited. Alice and Tom sat, sunk in papasan chairs, watching the snakes writhe around on the coffee table. Eventually, an ambulance sped by, siren wailing, followed by a highway patrol car. Another pulled up the dirt drive to the house, and picked up Tom and Alice. They sat in the backseat in silence, looking out in opposite directions.
When they got back to the accident, the scene had gone static. Maude appeared to have run out to the end of her nursing skills. Now she just sat next to the girl, holding one of her hands flat between her own. She had rearranged the girl’s limbs into more reasonable positions, as though there was some element of modesty to consider.
Alice glanced over at Nick and Olivia, who sat on the other side of the road, silent and serious, a little too serious. High as kites, kites impersonating heavy stones. They nodded at her, solemn as judges. She wanted to bang their heads together, like coconuts.
The cops and the medics took over and began dismantling the tragedy. The girl went off in the ambulance, no siren. Maude stood in the sharp moonlight and the waving beams of flashlights, watching the ambulance go. Her bad ankle was swollen and dark.
“Hey,” Alice said, putting a hand to her arm to establish contact. “You did everything you could.”