She did not agree verbally, but gave a small nod and wiped her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “Did I hurt you bad?”
“
You
didn’t hurt me.” He tapped his cast against the door, and regretted it almost instantly as a spike of pain volleyed between his knee and ankle. One every four hours? Hell, two hadn’t even done the trick. “And it’s not so bad.”
She winced with him. “It hurts.”
“I don’t have any races scheduled, so I should be okay.”
She nodded and seemed to brighten right then. “So you’re a runner? My—”
“No. It was a joke.” He saw her deflate again, and wondered why that was.
She looked past him to the small space that was his. A bed. A chair. A closet and a door that looked like it led to a bathroom, though the end of the tub she could spy in there looked awfully lopsided to be of much use. Bags piled in the far corner, the large green trash kind, with bulges everywhere about their surface and the necks of bottles poking through a few small tears. “You live here?”
“Yeah.” He glanced behind and shrugged. “It’s not much but—”
“No, its fine,” she said, interrupting.” You’ve got a bed, and a bathroom. Those are nice things to have.”
“Yours are probably nicer than mine.”
She shook her head. “My bathroom is wherever I can pull off the road, and my bed’s the back seat.”
“You live in your car?”
She nodded.
Jay snorted. “You hit me with your house?”
A laugh burst out of her, but she quickly put a sleeve-covered hand to her mouth to staunch it. It seemed to hurt her, the laughter, and very quickly all glee was gone and her eyes were threatening tears again. “I’m sorry.”
“What are—”
She waved off his question and from the front pocket of her jeans she removed something. Two envelopes. Jay’s envelopes. “These were in the street after the ambulance left. I figured they were yours.”
Jay nervously took them as she held them out. They were scuffed and dirty, but otherwise unopened. She had not read them.
“How did you know where I lived?” he asked her. This was clearly not PO Box 12, Plainview, Missouri.
“When the police were done talking to me, that’s when I saw the envelopes. I asked someone in the diner who’d come out if she knew you, and she said she did, and she told me you lived above the old shoe shop on...on...on Todd Street.” Her eyes closed right then, squeezing tears that unfurled down her tan face.
“What’s wrong?”
Tears dripped from her cheeks to the floor as she shook her head. Once more her sleeve was put to good use, dragging across her face high and low. “I just...I just thought I might find it here.” Her damp sleeve came down and she was looking not at him, but above him, with wayless, glistening eyes. “I don’t know, I thought that it was here. I mean, this town. And that because I hit you maybe you could help me, but...” She sniffled and shook her head at the ceiling behind Jay.
“What are you talking about?” Jay asked her very gingerly.
“I don’t know what I’m talking about,” she replied, as though it were an admission of complete and total failure. Her gaze slid down and settled on his chest. She seemed unable to look him in the eye. “I don’t know a thing anymore. All I do is drive around from here to there, because I think this place is where I’m supposed to be, then the next week it’s that place, and then another, and then...” Her head shook again. “And I come into your this town and almost kill a stranger.” She snickered wetly, humorlessly. “Happy birthday to me.”
Whatever it was the woman was talking about, it was consuming her, and with that Jay could sympathize. He supposed he hadn’t cornered the market on dysfunctional existence. Maybe a certain very specialized corner of the market, but not all of it. Hell, part of this was his fault, stepping in front of her car like he had. This woman obviously didn’t need any more trauma than whatever had put her in the state she was in.
“It’s your birthday?” he asked, seizing on the last thing she’d said, wanting somehow to make her not feel the way she was. It had been so long since he’d even been able to help anyone, to do something good for someone and have a reasonable chance of success at it, and it struck him as the desire to help this woman rose that it was the first time in eight years that he’d felt neither superhuman or subhuman—just human.
“Yeah,” she answered, and looked into his eyes. “My thirty second.”
His heart throttled instantly, and his lungs pulled in just that much more breath that his chest seemed to swell and recede a bit more than the moment before. But he did not react openly. His eyes did not bug, and his voice did not crack when he asked her, “You’re thirty-two today?”
She nodded.
Okay, he thought. This could not be a coincidence. Not strange luck. No, she was here, this woman who was...
...this very day, and she had hit him with her...
Now his eyes inflated. “Do you have your car? The police didn’t impound it, did they?”
She looked at him curiously now, some excitement welling in him. But why? “No.” She pointed down the stairs. “It’s down on the street.”
Jay swallowed hard, and now his breathing showed, and his heart was a locomotive going flat out across some desolate plain. Realization surged in him, and made the sweat upon his body tingle as though each salty drop had turned to rime. “Take me to it.”
Her head leaned toward him. “To my car?”
He nodded spryly. “Please.”
“All right,” she said, and walked ahead of him as he made the descent, taking each tread with a hop on his good foot. At the bottom she opened the old door, its inlaid glass jittering as she pulled it to its stops, giving Jay room to make it outside into the slanting shade of the Todd Street building. She closed the door and helped him to the curb, taking half his weight on her shoulder. “Here it is.”
Yes, there it was. It was old, a dozen years right then, and its once blue roof had been splotched a scaly white by foul things in the rain, as had its hood and trunk. Dings from countless hits in too-close parking spaces peppered the two doors Jay could see, the front passenger one bearing a deeper wound, a foot-long gouge that had laid the metal bare long ago and was now scabbed with a spreading welt of rust. The tires that bore it were not bald, but were not far from that state of wear either. Through the dirty side windows Jay could make out in the back seat a large brown suitcase with one missing buckle strap, and on the wearsprung upholstery a number of blankets lay folded in a neat pile. She liked her house neat, he found himself thinking.
“Is there something you wanted?” she asked him.
He looked to her and pointed in the direction of the driver’s seat. “What’s the mileage?”
She puzzled at the request for a second, but did not question it. Instead she went around the car’s front and opened the door and sat behind the wheel long enough to commit the number to memory, then came back to the sidewalk where Jay was waiting. She could have sworn he was holding his breath. “Twenty five thousand, five hundred and forty two.” She caught herself in an error. “Actually, it’s a hundred and twenty five thousand, five hundred and forty two. The little mile thing’s rolled over once.”
“But it says two five five four two on it right now?” he asked, and she nodded.
“Why?” she asked, not shrinking from the odd things he was in want of. In fact, she seemed engaged by his quest.
“It’s just...” Jay began to say, then stopped. It wasn’t right. 25,542 was not right. It was not 25,511—the other number. There was one of the pair already, cast to his knowing in the most devilish of ways, if what he was beginning to suspect was correct. Yes, 32 had been found, its meaning revealed. It was her. But the other? He was certain it would be the car. Its mileage, a convergence of her and the exact instant he was hit.
Yes
, he thought, his eyes brightening. The
exact
instant. The
exact
place.
She could see his face light up, not with joy, but revelation. Some solemn revelation. “What is it?”
“Did you drive anywhere after you hit me?”
“When the police let me go I did.”
“Where?”
“I was going to the hospital to see how you were, but I didn’t have enough gas,” she explained, embarrassed. “I saw how low the needle was and I turned around.”
“How far did you drive?”
“I don’t know.”
Jay chewed on his lip, thinking. There had to be some way— “The police, did they give you any kind of report? Anything at the scene of the accident?”
They had, she remembered, and slipped her hand into her pocket and pulled the folded copy of the accident report out. “This.”
“Is there a mileage noted on there?” he asked, the moisture wicked from his mouth.
She checked. There was. “Twenty five thousand five hundred and eleven.”
The other number. Her, and it. An intersection.
“What?” she asked when his face went ashen.
Jay looked at her, fear and forgiveness in his eyes at once. “I know why you’re here.”
Now it was her heart that raced, and her blue eyes that flared eagerly, hungrily, wanting what this stranger was offering. An answer. Some reason. “Why?”
“I think you were supposed to kill me,” Jay said, the act of speaking the belief, and believing what he’d spoken, mixing right then with the pills, and the heat, and the pain to turn the world beyond his eyes to a tableau of shapes and colors and motions that seemed beyond some damningly imperfect pane of wavy glass. Edges fuzzed, the daylight spun, and to the ground he was heading when he felt two slender arms take hold of him and help him back inside.
Twenty Nine
Confession
He didn’t even know her name, this woman he had accused of attempted murder, though to him it would rightly seem a mercy killing. This woman whose blue, blue eyes and troubled face hovered above him now as he lay in the bed she had helped him to.
“I think you almost passed out,” she said when his eyes fluttered open and stayed that way for a moment.
“How did you get me up the stairs?” Jay asked, the world crisping up again.
She lifted his head and adjusted the pillow beneath it. “Life on the road toughens you. Plus you weren’t all the way out.”
Jay shifted on the bed, and winced aloud when repositioning his casted leg. “Damn.”
“Bad?” she asked, standing near the bed in a way Jay remembered his mother doing when he was sick as a child. A way very like that.
He took the bottle of painkillers from the rickety table next to his bed and popped the top. “Can you get me some water from bathroom?” No dry swallowing this time, he decided, thinking maybe that was why the other two pills taken near an hour ago now hadn’t stopped the hurt. Maybe there wasn’t enough liquid in his stomach to aid in the dissolving and absorption process. He hadn’t had anything to drink since before getting hit. Nothing at the hospital, and nothing once home. He hadn’t actually thought about needing water, even with his body sweating out buckets this day, but then his mind had been on other things. On two numbers. Two numbers that had brought this nameless woman to town. “There’s a glass on the sink.”
She left, and he heard water run, then a glassful be dumped, and run again, and dumped again as the maternal thing made her rinse his glass out. Finally she returned with it brimming. “Here you go.”
Jay already had two more pills in his palm, figuring that the two already in him needed dancing partners. It was only fair. Besides, if this didn’t deaden the pain, he was going to knock himself out in trying. He tossed the pills in his mouth and downed them with a swallow, handing the glass back to the woman whose name he still did not know. That was fixed easily enough. “I want to thank you, but I don’t know who to thank.”
“Mari Gates,” she told him. “M-A-R-I. Rhymes with sa
fari
.” She put her hand out. He shook it gently, and she pulled it back against her chest, snugging her sleeves down over her wrists.
“I’m Jay,
Mari
,” he said, precisely enunciating her name. She grinned pleasantly, and for the first time it struck him that she wasn’t sweating. She was in a damn sweatshirt and jeans in a hotbox of a room and there wasn’t a glimmer or a glow on her face. “Aren’t you roasting in that?”
She shook her head, that kind of quick shake that begged no more talk of the subject. “I just think cool.”
Jay scooted up against the headboard, his face scrunching at the sharp ache as he moved, sitting mostly now. He gestured to the open foot of the bed and she sat, keeping both hands on her lap and her sleeves gripped tight in loose fists. She seemed the epitome of nerves right then, a teenage girl on her boyfriend’s bed while his parents were home, eyes darting about everything in the place but him, but that was not the situation at all, and it was not long before she had trained her very blue eyes on Jay once again.
“Why did you say that down there?” she asked. “About me being here because I was supposed to kill you.”
Jay snickered wanly and shook his head at his knees. “If only I could make it sound sane enough to understand.”
“Sane enough?” Now she snickered. “It sounds like we share a problem.”
He looked up to her. “What do you mean?”
“One day four months ago I was sitting at home, at the table in the kitchen, and I was staring at a cup of coffee I’d poured like an hour before. I hadn’t even taken a sip. It had grown cold in my hands. And then...then I went and I got my old suitcase from the garage, and I packed some clothes, and I threw it in the car and I started driving. Just driving. I didn’t know where. But...”
“This is the insane part coming, right?” Jay prompted her, and the smallest bit of relief crept onto her face in the form of a weak but pretty smile.
“But I knew that there was someplace I was supposed to be,” she said. “Is that vague and ‘out there’ enough, or what?”
“Not out there at all,” Jay said.
“So I was driving,” she continued. “These last four months I’ve been driving. I’ve been everywhere, it seemed. I’d get these...these
feelings
that I was supposed to go a certain way, or take a certain highway, or stop in a certain town, and I’d follow those feelings and end up in places just wondering why I was there. That was the hardest part, you know: not knowing why I was there, or why these feelings were...pushing me. Or guiding me. Can you understand that? Even a little?”