Never Have I Ever(16)

I set us in motion, and we went.

The growly engine roared like a living thing, and Tig started singing that Pixies song again. I heard my own voice from a distance, winding in and out around his. The tires slurred against the dirt, and this was a song, too. We hit the railroad tracks, so fast, so fast. Up and over into a weightless moment, where my body disappeared around me and I was only motion, suspended in the darkness, and Tig Simms had kissed me.

The trees and the dirt road ended together, and ahead was a watery wall of moonlight glowing off the asphalt where the road became real. We went sailing out of the woods, into that white wall of light, and in that moment the road dropped out from under us and the music turned to clanging glass and the shriek of tires. Inside those sounds time itself changed. The stars spun, and they are spinning. The sky turned, and it is turning. I am inside a slide show of noise and flashing color. The lap belt cuts into my stomach as I jerk and flail to the grinding rhythm of metal ripping.

A small black beat of lost time. Am I asleep? Tig said that we should take a nap. Am I still asleep? Did he kiss me at all? My mouth floods with salt.

“Marmee?” Lolly Shipley calls, and her marmee must be sleeping, too. I must be babysitting. I have to go get Lolly. I swallow, gulping brine, and my mouth instantly refills. “Marmee, Marmee?” Lolly calls. She has blond pigtails, a soft belly, fat cheeks like my hamster. Little tiny things, hamsters and babies, they are so cute when they are fat. I touch my mouth, and my fingers come away sticky, my blood shining black in the moonlight.

Now I am standing in the moon-drenched road, Tig’s car behind me, and I am lurching forward, trying to follow Tig across the street. I am swayed by currents into a winding stagger toward the other car. I know this car, little and light and sporty, but the front side is now bent and twisted to an unfamiliar shape. It is so far away, shoved half onto a grassy, sloping lawn. Tig reaches it, and he is moaning, falling to his knees.

I see Lolly, and Lolly’s face is red. Her blue eyes are bruised pansies, wide and wet. Baby Paul, who never sleeps, wails in his car seat. Driving him to sleep worked, I remember Mrs. Shipley saying. Paul is beside Lolly in the back half, which is whole and like a car. But the front is strange and curved and lacy white and black with jagged metal. The nose is crumpled in profile, and the driver’s door is smashed. Pretty Mrs. Shipley stares silent at me through the missing window, and below her collarbones her body is smashed, too.

I go nearer, and Lolly sees me, and she says, “Amy, Paul is cry?”

I say, “Mrs. Shipley?” but I can see now that all the black wetness that is in the folds and crumples of the car is Mrs. Shipley. From the shoulders down, most of her insides are on the outside. Her face is still so pretty, even with the red-black wet splashed across it, even with the glassy open eyes that are so dead.

I feel myself toppling, the asphalt biting my bare, broad knees. I throw up salt and black and purple in the road.

Lolly cries, “Marmee? Marmee?” and it sounds softer now. Lolly is tired, and I must be tired, too. Paul wails from far, far away. Please let us be sleeping, napping on that filthy mattress, like Tig said. Tig lows like cattle, moaning on all fours.

Mrs. Shipley’s pretty body is folded and opened, and this is a thing I chose. I dragged us down the trail to the car. I understand this. This is a choice I can’t take back.

My face is stuck in an expression. My face is so surprised. I did not know I could lead us to a thing so big, so mean, something we can never undo or remove, that will echo in my life, in all our lives, forever.

I lie down in the road near my sick, and Lolly calls, “Marmee,” and of all the things I sank so deep down inside me, Mrs. Shipley’s dead, dead, pretty face, blood in strings like spiderwebs across her white skin, her eyes wide open, their blue washed down to pale gray in the moonlight, was the last. The hardest thing to never, never see.





3




I stirred, tumbled in the horrid wave of fear and worry that had pulled me into dreams of drowning and rolled me in and out of sleep all night. Drifting between sleep and waking, I was certain, for an endless, awful second, that Angelica Roux had all my past in her possession. If she owned my past, then she owned me with it. She could center it in her palm like a tiny gift—a fig, a wish, a duckling—and hold it out to Davis, to Maddy, to Charlotte, every neighbor, all my coworkers. Would it change me in my husband’s eyes? The very thought knocked me fully awake, left me breathless and askew.

I scrubbed at my face, sat up. It was impossible for Roux to know my past. Truly impossible, unless she was a mind reader. The gray light at the window told me it was dawn, and logic told me that Angelica Roux could have no power over me. But not even taking diver’s breaths, slow and even, could set my heart to rest. I kept hearing her throaty voice, seeing her knowing eyes as she told me, Come by my place. Soon. We have a lot to talk about.

A thin, unhappy humming began piping through the baby monitor. Oliver’s waking-up-hungry sound. I got out of bed and turned the volume down to zero in case he started sounding serious about it before I could reach him. My husband was sleeping. I wanted him to stay asleep.

I changed Oliver’s bloated overnight diaper and then brought him back to our bed. He blinked up at me, giving me his gummy, lopsided smile with its lone pair of tiny teeth poking up from the center bottom. He seemed mercifully oblivious to my anxiety.

I smiled back in spite of myself, whispering, “Morning times, good baby.”