Shadowbahn(30)

and where will she go


Pointing at the cell, he says, “The songs are transmitting through you,” then pointing at her, “at least until you get too far away. Just like,” he snorts, “the good old days.” They ponder this in the dark awhile. “What happens if we turn off the cell phone?” he says.

She answers, “I think you need to turn me off.”

Nodding at the field beyond the windshield, he says, “Maybe we just get rid of it, open the window and toss it.”

For a while she doesn’t answer and then, quietly, “Can’t do that. All Dad’s songs.”

“Be nice if we could at least turn you down.” Several miles of silence pass before he blurts, “It wasn’t your fault,” and although she looks at him as though she has no idea what he’s talking about, and although the subject never has come up between them, or come up between Zema and anyone, she knows exactly what he’s talking about. She says, “Something you’ve had in your head all this time and just been waiting for the chance?” He can feel her staring at him but keeps his eyes on the small splash of road in the headlights preceding them.

? ? ?

She turns in her seat again, her back to him, her inner life always having been even more locked away than her brother’s, even if she never matched the stoniness of his silences.

“I’ve messed everything up since I came,” he barely hears her whisper now. For a moment he can’t figure out why the words ring such a bell, until he remembers the emancipation petition he found however many nights ago since Texas, and that he now knows for certain she read. Her whisper is full of not simply despondency and torment but grief, the grief of someone in mourning her whole life, grieving for that life’s lost source, for the lost family that she never knew and the found family to which she never believed she belonged. For the lost code of identity and the secret message of the self that she never deciphered or disclosed.





and what shall she do


An unfamiliar wave of sorrow for his sister overwhelms him. “Zema,” Parker says, “I was younger than you when I wrote that petition,” although he doesn’t suppose that this can be of solace to her; he doesn’t imagine she feels that young. After enough silence passes that he isn’t altogether sure she’s still awake, he says, “Zema?”

“Dad signed it,” he hears her answer.

“I know,” he says, “that you feel like you understand everything when you’re the age you are now—”

“I don’t feel like I understand anything. . . .”

“Well then you’re smarter than I was. Because it never was about you, and the truth is that, even then, I sort of knew that. But there you were, and you happened to come along when everything around the family seemed to come apart, and you made yourself easy for everyone to blame since,” he says, trying to make a joke of it, “you are a pain in the ass.” If she laughs, he doesn’t hear it. He sighs. “Are you listening?” She doesn’t respond. “Zema?”

“I’m listening,” she says, her back still turned to him in the seat.

In the middle of a nowhere so black that around them the fields vanish, they drive on. Suddenly more seized than ever by the importance of being older, he explains, voice struggling, “You know all those forms they make you bring home from high school? Permission for this and requirements for that, waivers and disclosures and shit? So I slipped the emancipation thing in with the others and took them to Dad, and he glances at the one on top and signs everything—oldest kid’s-trick in the book, right? And you know that sounds just like Dad. So be mad at me if you want,” says Parker, “but not him. At least not for anything other than being clueless half the time. Which we both know he was.”

Only as the volume of his sister’s music falls off, becoming barely audible, can he be sure she’s asleep, her channels changing violently as she dreams of their father. Having entirely lost track of their direction, Parker can only assume that they’re still heading north, since they’re still heading the same direction that they were heading a while ago when that direction was north. For long enough to lose track of time as well as their direction, he thinks of his girlfriend and tries not to cry, struggling for control in that way that his father always recognized when the boy was more upset than anyone else knew. Adrift in these thoughts long enough to no longer be certain who’s calling him, finally he concentrates on a distant voice: Wake up, it says; and finally he recognizes it as his own—and far away Zema transmits a song too low for him to make out. Wake up . . .

? ? ?

. . . and with a start he wakes. He’s terrified to realize, for a moment that now feels like hours, that he fell asleep at the wheel. It can’t have been longer than a couple of seconds, just enough to start veering off the road; if you want to wake yourself up good for the rest of a drive, try falling asleep at the wheel for a moment.

But he wakes to his heart pounding, and to a new, open interstate much bigger than what they were on just seconds ago. Pulses of dull light flash alongside them, and other than the dim illumination of the pulses, the highway appears to be entirely unmarked. In the one or two seconds during which Parker fell asleep, the low distant song that his sister broadcasts has opened before them like a tunnel, with the pulses of dull light to each side passing faster and faster until they’re single streaked blurs: and then, with growing excitement and further