Don't Turn Around

by Jessica Barry

  Rebecca nodded. “A lot longer.”

  Driving through the second time was like watching a movie you’ve already seen, Billy the Kid still glaring down from the museum sign, the banner flapping outside the high school. When they passed the gas station, Cait saw a figure hunched against the wall of the shop and the red glow of a cigarette cupped between hands.

  Cait heard Rebecca mutter the word “prick” under her breath and turned to see that she was giving the attendant the finger, so Cait laughed and stuck hers out, too, not that he’d be able to see them in the dark. In the rearview mirror, she saw him toss his cigarette and head back inside, oblivious. “That guy was such an asshole.”

  The two women started to laugh, gently at first and then harder, until they were near-hysterical, and the atmosphere between them suddenly lifted.

  Cait looked at the woman next to her wiping tears from her eyes and wondered, for the first time, if maybe they would have been friends had the circumstances been different. If maybe she liked this woman after all.

  She brushed away the thought. It didn’t matter if she liked Rebecca or not. She wasn’t here to make friends.

  She was here to take what she was owed.

  Five Months Earlier

  Cait pulled into the Rite Aid parking lot and killed the engine. It was 8:32 on a Saturday morning, and the streets of downtown Austin were deserted except for a few exhausted parents wheeling their babies to coffee shops and ponytailed women carrying organic tote bags and yoga mats.

  Cait wiped the sleep out of the corners of her eyes. The Dark Horse had closed at two a.m., but by the time she’d broken down the bar and tipped out the barbacks, it was closer to three. She’d had four hours of sleep, tops, but most of it had been junk, her precious few hours in bed spent checking the time on her phone and worrying about missing her alarm. Lisa promised that she was ready for a Saturday, but Cait was less convinced. She’d had nightmares about the guy who’d thrown a pot of red paint over her a few Wednesdays before, screaming that she had blood on her hands. The cops had taken him away—the protesters weren’t allowed to touch anyone, though you wouldn’t know that by how close they got, so close she could tell what they’d eaten for dinner the night before, so close their spit peppered her face as they shouted—but it had rattled her, and he was just one of a handful that day. On Saturdays, Lisa had told her, they could have upward of a hundred protestors. How was she supposed to manage them all?

  But she also knew that this was what she wanted. Doing this work over the past month had been more rewarding than anything she’d ever done. For the first time in her life, she felt like she was doing something that made a difference, as cheesy as that sounded. It was true, though: she saw it in the relief on the women’s faces as she helped them from their cars and steered them into the clinic, the way they held her hand right up until the last moment, their nods when she blasted Pink or Madonna through her iPhone to drown out the protesters’ screams.

  So when Lisa told her that she’d been tapped for a Saturday shift, she’d jumped at the chance, despite her nerves and the fact that she’d be coming off a Friday double. Sisters of Service thought she was ready for it, and she wanted so badly to believe them.

  She tugged the tabard over her head and walked the few blocks to the clinic. The protesters were already starting to gather out front, handing around thermoses of coffee and Tupperware full of muffins like they were in line for Antiques Roadshow rather than waiting to shout abuse at a bunch of frightened women.

  Cait pushed past them, ignoring their jeers, and checked the barrier positions. The patients would have to drive past the protesters to park in the lot and would then walk the twenty feet to the entrance. A few volunteers would stand by the barriers to make sure the protesters stayed on the other side while the others—including Cait—would escort the women from their cars to the door.

  Twenty feet wasn’t much, but Cait had learned that a lot of damage could be done across a short distance. Some of the protesters tried to scare the women by telling them that they were damaging their health, saying they were destined to get cancer or to be infertile. Some used kindness as a weapon, offering boxes of doughnuts from Big Kahuna, knowing full well that if a woman took one bite, she wouldn’t be able to go through with the procedure. You had to have an empty stomach, or it was too dangerous. Some just straight-up screamed in the women’s faces and told them they were going to hell, which was the least effective at changing minds but the most upsetting, from what Cait had witnessed.

  It was a hot day, not even nine a.m. and already in the nineties. Cait had hoped it might keep some of the protestors away, but they kept coming, and soon the barriers were lined on either side, and there was a spill-out onto the sidewalk, which meant the protesters would be the first thing the women saw before they even pulled in to the lot.

  The first car of the day pulled up, a Honda Civic with Alabama plates. The crowd snapped to attention, signs raised like spears, and began to chant.

  Cait went to work.

  The women came to the clinic. They were brave and afraid, cowed and defiant, tearful and stony-faced. They were teenagers who came with their mothers and women in their thirties who came with their husbands and women Cait’s age who came with friends. Some came alone. Cait stayed close to each of them, shielding them as best she could, distracting them with a joke or a smile or leading them to the door in silence. She felt able to divine what each woman needed from her, and she gave it to each of them as best she could, hour after hour on the baking tarmac, while the protesters howled.

  At the end of the day, she could still remember the face of each woman she’d led through the doors, still feel the heat of their palms pressed against hers. She couldn’t remember the face of a single protester. To her eyes, they had become a shapeless mass, a blur.

  Maybe that was why she didn’t notice when one of them followed her the three blocks to the parking lot where she’d parked the Jeep. Maybe it was the heat, or the exhaustion that had set in to the marrow of her bones. She wouldn’t know.

  All she knew was the sickening crack of the rock when it landed on her windshield, the glass splintering into a spiderweb, her heart pounding wildly in her chest as she peeled out of the parking lot, not daring to look back.

  Fort Sumner, New Mexico—158 Miles to Albuquerque

  Rebecca sagged in her seat. All the adrenaline had leached out of her now, leaving her weak and exhausted. They had to be halfway there by now, or close. She pulled her phone out of her bag. There was a single reception bar. She waited to see if any missed calls would appear on the screen, but the little phone icon stayed blank, and after a while, she allowed herself to believe that maybe he hadn’t called to check in on her. Maybe she’d get away with this after all.

  Cait looked over at her. “You got anything?”

  Rebecca nodded. “I’ve got a little reception now.”

  “Did he call? Your husband, I mean.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “It doesn’t look like it.”

  “That’s good. Right?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “It’s good.”

  “So he doesn’t know where you are.” It wasn’t a question.

  Rebecca shook her head, hot shame flooding through her veins. Cait wouldn’t understand the situation—couldn’t possibly ever understand, because Rebecca barely understood herself. How did she get here? She wasn’t meant to be this person. This wasn’t meant to be her life.

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Ten years.”

  “Ten years is a long time.”

  Rebecca tried to conjure up the sharp, bright happiness she’d felt on her wedding day. Neither of them had two nickels to rub together, so they’d asked friends to stake out a spot in Washington Park early one Saturday and brought along a bunch of folding chairs and blankets for the guests to sit on. She’d worn a white slip dress she’d found at a vintage place in the Mission, baby’s breath laced through her hair. Pa
trick had worn a suit he’d borrowed from a friend and a smile so big it looked like it might crack his face in two. She’d felt that they were the two luckiest people in the world.

  “What does he do for a living?” Cait asked now.

  Rebecca scanned her face, looking for some trace of slyness, but Cait just seemed curious. Maybe she really didn’t know. Rebecca wasn’t about to tell her now. “Oh, he works for the government,” she said vaguely. “I don’t really understand it. What about you?” she asked, desperate to change the subject. “Are you married?”

  Cait barked out a laugh. “Me? God, no.”

  “You’re too young, I guess.” Though she couldn’t have been much older than Rebecca had been at the time. But Rebecca had the sense that women Cait’s age didn’t aspire to marriage, not in the way her generation had. Theirs had been the last to invest in their parents’ model for life: marriage, mortgage, kids. People Cait’s age didn’t seem to care about those things the way they had, or perhaps it was more accurate to say they had accepted that the promise those things offered was often empty and unachievable. Rebecca had read the articles about how hers was the first generation destined to be worse off than her parents’. She guessed they hadn’t gotten the memo in time. Cait’s generation had. “Do you have a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend?” Rebecca added hastily.

  “Nothing to write home about.”

  “Well, you’re still young. There’s plenty of time.”

  “I guess. How long did you know your husband before you got married?”

  “Just a couple of months. Not long.”

  “Jeez. I don’t know if I like a pair of shoes until I’ve worn them for a couple of months. Never mind marry them.” Cait winced. “Not that I’m comparing your husband to a pair of shoes.”

  “Don’t worry, I know what you meant. You’re right, it was fast. Our friends all thought we were crazy.”

  “Ten years,” Cait marveled. “How old were you? Twelve?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “That’s how old I am!” The way Cait said it made it clear that this was unfathomable to her. “God, it’s just . . . I feel like I’m barely an adult, you know? Like, I’m still impressed when I pay a bill on time or remember to get the Jeep serviced.”

  “I guess we were pretty young, though I don’t remember feeling that way at the time. The opposite, really: we were completely sure of ourselves and each other.”

  “How did you know he was the one? Like, this guy I just started seeing—I like him, but there’s no lightning bolt, you know? I always thought that, when I met the right guy, it would be like getting struck by lightning.” Cait tossed her an embarrassed look. “But in a good way, obviously.”

  “I guess it was a little like being hit by lightning,” Rebecca said. “I guess people would call it love at first sight.” She could remember those early weeks, when it felt like the entire universe had aligned itself toward the two of them. Neither of them slept longer than a few hours a night, too consumed by the newness of each other’s bodies and minds and hearts. There was a feeling of something precious slipping through their fingers. When he proposed to her over a bottle of Ernest & Julio Gallo, holding a dime-store plastic ring in his outstretched hand, it felt like a warm blanket spreading out, waiting to catch her.

  Rebecca looked at the girl, one hand resting lazily on the steering wheel, the other fiddling with the mess of curls on top of her head. She tried to picture herself living Cait’s life: single, scraping by on tips, making these long drives with strangers, ignoring the inherent dangers that lay around every corner for a woman like her. The truth was, even when Rebecca had been living a similar life, she hadn’t really believed it was hers. She was waiting for her real life to begin, and when she met Patrick, she believed that it had. The thing she’d wanted more than anything was a love like her mother and father had. Even though it was embarrassing to admit, even though it went against all she and her college friends had purportedly railed against, all she’d ever wanted was to be a woman who was loved.

  “What’s he like?”

  “My husband?”

  Cait nodded.

  “Oh, you know. He’s great. Smart. Good-looking. Considerate.” Were these things true? she wondered. He was certainly smart, and no one could deny that he was good-looking. Could she still think of him as considerate? In his way, she told herself. In his own way, he was. “My father never liked him, though.”

  “Really? How come?”

  Rebecca smiled to herself. “Have you ever shot a gun?”

  Cait’s eyebrows shot toward her hairline. “No. Why?”

  Now it was Rebecca’s turn to be surprised. “You haven’t? You said you grew up in Texas. I thought it was like a rite of passage. My husband’s from Texas, and his grandmother had him out in the backyard with a rifle as soon as he was taller than it.”

  “My brothers shoot, but I never wanted to learn. They used to call me the conscientious objector.” Cait thought about this for a second. “Probably still do. What does this have to do with your father not liking your husband?”

  “My dad taught me how to shoot when I was sixteen.”

  Cait shook her head in disbelief. “You’re telling me a girl from California learned how to shoot and I didn’t?”

  “My dad was a navy man. He thought it was his duty to show me how to protect myself. He bought me a gun when I turned twenty-one. A Smith and Wesson M and P nine-millimeter.”

  “You’re kidding. What did you say?”

  “I told him he could keep it. There was no way I was going to own a gun.” Rebecca could still picture the light blue box wrapped with a white bow. When she first saw it, she thought it was from Tiffany. And then she felt the heft of it, heard the rattle of metal when she picked it up, and realized she was wrong. She should have known better. Her father was a practical man. He wanted to protect the people he loved, not indulge them.

  “Was he disappointed?”

  Rebecca thought about her dad’s expression when she pushed the box back in his hands, a strange mix of annoyance and amusement and pride. “I don’t know if he was disappointed, but he definitely wasn’t surprised. Anyway, that was my dad all over. He wanted me to be independent, self-sufficient. He wanted me to be able to fend for myself.” She shook her head. “My husband is one of those larger-than-life people, and I think my dad worried that I’d lose myself inside him.”

  Cait’s eyes were tight on her face, watching. “Did you?”

  Rebecca turned her head toward the window. “The jury’s still out.”

  Mike

  It started with a photograph.

  He was driving through Austin on his way to see his sister in Abilene when he passed a bunch of people holding signs and shouting something he couldn’t catch over the sound of his radio. At first he didn’t pay them any attention—he didn’t consider himself political, and he didn’t have time for people who did—but then he saw a picture on one of those signs of a little baby no bigger than a walnut curled up at the bottom of a wastebasket and the word murder written over it, and he thought of the babies he’d always thought he’d have until Bonnie died and his heart broke in a thousand pieces, and that was enough to make him stop. He pulled over to the side of the road and went up to one of the sign holders and asked him what it was all about and the man looked at him, eyes solemn as a funeral, and said, “We’re trying to stop the murder of millions of innocent children.”

  Which was a pretty convincing argument to be starting out with. The guy handed him a couple pamphlets with pictures of fat, smiling babies on the front and told him his name was Ken and that the building over there was a clinic where women came to kill their unborn babies and did he know that a baby’s heartbeat starts at six weeks and it’s been said that they can feel pain from as early as eight and yet these women didn’t care, and the doctors inside didn’t have a conscience because how could they go through with something like that if they did? Ripping a baby out of its mother’s womb, cutting
it up with scissors, and throwing it in the trash like it was nothing. Like life was worth nothing.

  That made Mike think of Bonnie and how she used to kiss him goodbye every time she left the house. Hell, every time she left the room, and how the man who’d killed her must have thought life was worth nothing if he was willing to get behind the wheel when he was three times over the legal limit—that’s what the officer said during the trial, three times over the legal limit—and smash his car straight into Bonnie’s going seventy-five on the wrong side of the road.

  What Mike had been thinking must have shown on his face because Ken put a hand on his arm and squeezed, and when he looked into his eyes again he saw understanding there, which was rare. Most people didn’t understand what he was feeling. It wasn’t for lack of trying: Bonnie’s friends had kept him fed for a few months after she died, and his own friends had turned up on his doorstep with a six-pack most nights for a long while, but he could tell they didn’t want to understand his pain because understanding it would make it real, and making it real would mean there was the possibility it could happen to them, too, and they didn’t want to think about that. He understood. He didn’t want to think about it happening, either, but it had, so he didn’t have a choice.

  Anyway, Ken was a nice guy, grew up in Morgan City, Louisiana, which was where his uncle lived for a while back in the ’90s before the floods got too much for him and he moved north. They talked for a while about the Morganza Spillway and whether or not it was a waste of taxpayers’ money and how the Saints could have gone all the way last season but the team was still young and then a Jeep pulled up to the entrance and the crowd surged forward like a wave and started shouting all at once and waving their signs and the girl driving the car—she couldn’t have been more than twenty—flipped them the bird and kept driving. Nearly hit some poor woman who was just trying to express her disgust for what was going on in that building, which was her right as an American the last time he checked.