A manual for how to love.., p.2
A Manual for How to Love Us, page 2
We dressed, stuffed last night’s clothes back in our bags, and left the room key on the desk—saving the weenie dog some calories, if only by a little. We settled into the Chevy’s sun-warmed seats and returned to the road.
Here’s the thing about the desert: it represents something to everyone, whether or not they’ve been there. To a lot of people, it means freedom, a geographic incarnation of American individualism as noble, a choice. But like American freedom, it’s only presented in curated fragments: the landscape bordering the highway, not the endless crannies so far out you couldn’t reach them without heatstroke. Not the ruthless drought, the parched and cracked earth warning of a future that lurks in plain sight, and not the pioneers of the past who ate their own families to drive somebody else’s out of the home they’d inhabited for centuries. Walk into the frame of any promise without knowing what it’s made of, and you’ll get what’s coming. Take the everything you’re offered in one fell gulp, and it will swallow you up.
We’d watched the landscape gradually shift from one end of the Southwest to the other; mountainous bleached Nevada, Arizona streaked red, New Mexico yellow and emerald-tufted, West Texas with its brown trees like arthritic hands. The things that grow here aren’t a miracle. They don’t carry mystic wisdom, secrets about how to mine life from the barren dust. Survival in desperate conditions is not magic; it’s a fuck you, an insistence on being.
Before noon, Zell at the wheel, we broke from one side of the panhandle to the other.
* * *
We whittled away the days in surprisingly incident-free stretches, the landscape flattening out into miles of green. At a little bricked town square near Tulsa, we stopped for booths selling fresh peaches and cantaloupes, and Zell bought a candle from a woman with a port-wine birthmark who said it would “shield her heart from negative energy.”
Often as we drove I remembered us as teenagers, sitting in the same spots in the same car, trailing through the desolate streets of Phoenix and planning how to get gone. Time folding in on itself, one page of history kissing the other. How lucky I was to live long enough to see them meet.
For me, disappearance was mostly hypothetical, but for Zell, freedom always meant New Jersey. A state that notoriously smelled like garbage and exhaust. A state Zell had never been within a thousand miles of, but spent a decade-plus idealizing into a promised land: her mythic beacon of the Northeast, grittier and more authentic than New York, and the forest that survives undisturbed at the edge of metropoles; the ruins of old mills absorbed by nature; whole towns abandoned to the bog, pulled back into the earth by vines and time; the Magic City artists’ commune hidden somewhere in the depths. Basically a glorified campground, she’d once told me, but that doesn’t mean people didn’t find magic there, or make their own. Her eyes sparkled, inhabited by a love you can only hold for something you don’t really know.
Zell, familiar as the earthy-sweet smell of my own bedsheets, still seemed to me a mythical being. Her long black eyelashes, nose with the slightest crook to it, her body all sliding tectonic plates. A tenderness that opened and then shut again before you got too good a look. Zell was a person of extremes, and she invited it, curated it: the worship and the demonization. She would allow for nothing in between.
We stopped for the night somewhere in Missouri and popped into a gas station across from the motel to buy drinks and chips to take back to our room—too tired to search for a real meal, uninterested in engaging a stranger or shopkeep to ask.
Perusing the liquor shelf, I suggested, “How about a bottle of Jack, to remember old times?”
Zell smiled mischievously. “How about stealing a bottle to remember old times?”
But I stood at the counter lamely while the clerk ran my card through the grimy machine, then discarded the bag in the trash can by the door.
* * *
Two days ago. Four days gone, and we were running out of money. I knew this, even though Zell insisted it wasn’t true. The brick of cash we’d left with was now a single roll of five- and ten-dollar bills, nestled into the breast pocket of Zell’s flannel shirt. She ritually circled the bills around her pointer finger until they stuck like that.
An hour outside Indianapolis, Zell broke the silent rhythm of the road:
“Oh shit, we forgot about Memphis.”
“What’s in Memphis?” I asked.
“Memphis is in Memphis, duh.” She clicked the blinker and started merging toward the off-ramp.
“What are you doing?”
“Well, we have to go. We can’t just miss Memphis.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Come on, I’ve never been,” she whined, like Memphis was a roadside attraction and not a day’s drive in the opposite direction.
“You want to get stranded in Tennessee? We’ll have to sleep in the car. We’ll have to live in the car.” My face hung open, incredulous, but she took a left under the overpass and onto the other side of the highway.
Was she trying to delay us? Was she dreading that moment of arrival, as I was, when our shared bubble of adventure would end and I would leave? The hope—the fantasy of something to hope for—was a sugary jolt to my brain, but I couldn’t allow myself to get lost in it.
“Just take a nap, we’ll be there before you know it.” She was trying to pacify me like a huffy child, and I found myself irritated with her—a foreign feeling, a little satisfying even, so rarely did I regard Zell with any kind of negativity. But I was a helpless passenger to her hurtling us off course for some reason I couldn’t make sense of, which stung more for what it represented about our friendship—the foundation I tried not to look at, tried in my shame to distract Zell from noticing. It had been dark for hours already, and by the time we arrived, the sun would be up.
I wanted to call it out, lay our roles bare: my worshipful surrender, her manipulative impulsiveness. But I only turned away, my cheek against the rattling window.
* * *
I woke on the side of the road, the world quiet. Soft purple light falling over a field, so lovely I wondered if I’d floated peacefully into death, or a dream. I looked over at Zell, and she wasn’t there. Her door was wide open, the interstate rushing ruthlessly a few yards away.
I sat up, got out of the car, and looked around in panic. I was ready to trudge into the field to look for her, but then I glanced to my right and caught a glimpse: far away enough that her body looked like a deflated beach ball, squatting down by the fence. I ran, feet squishing in the damp ground, the untended grass lashing my ankles.
When I came upon Zell she was digging at the base of a fence post, rutting at the earth with her hands, fingers pointed clawlike. I walked closer and she startled, looked up wide-eyed, like an animal who realizes it’s being hunted.
“What . . . what are you doing?”
“Oh, did you have a good nap?”
“I woke up and you weren’t there,” I said, sounding as childish and disoriented as I felt.
She held up a slip of notebook paper, torn and folded into a lopsided square. “Don’t laugh, but it’s this thing I do, sort of for good luck? I’ve been burying these notes along the trip, little snippets of secrets, or worries, or stories from the day. Or wishes. Like bread crumbs, so when someone uncovers one, they can follow my trail and know where to find me.”
“Who is going to come find you?”
She sighed, as if exasperated by having to explain. “I don’t know, someone important. Whoever is meant to. I mean, life is so twisty. We never know what’s going to happen to us.”
I turned my back on her, the road, the pastel sky melting toward sunrise’s orange peak. A headache coming on.
“Don’t laugh,” she repeated, wiping her dirty hands on her thighs. “I know you probably don’t get it, but . . .”
I looked at Zell, her features softened in the dawn light, and searched for something behind her face—a clue these notes should unlock about the person I knew, or thought I knew, or how to reconcile those people with the person she’d become. For some hint of wavering, a flicker of harm behind her impenetrable confidence. But she was walled off as ever. I was not afraid of her; I was afraid for her.
I said, “We should get going.”
We walked back to the car and drove in silence, the radio and its nineties hits wedging space between us. Zell flitted anxious glances in my direction every couple of miles, but my eyes burned defiantly forward. For the first time, it dawned on me that running away, for her, might’ve been about more than adventure, or reuniting, or New fucking Jersey. That maybe my saying yes had given something unwieldy inside of her permission to grow.
On the edge of the city, we checked into one of those shady by-the-hour motels, and I didn’t ask how much it cost. Just rolled into bed and slept, and when I woke, the sun was sinking down between the curtains. The maid knocked, tried to push open the door against the deadbolt before I yelled out, “We’re still in here!” She looked confused, but went away, barely shutting the door. Zell was awake now, too, so we pulled our jeans back on, brushed our hair, and left.
She drove up to a barbecue place, and we ate pulled pork and mac and cheese from white Styrofoam trays, not talking much; Zell trying, me mumbling simple acknowledgments, her trying harder in response. I was tired, and didn’t know what words I’d use to argue if I had the energy to. For the first time, I just wanted to get where we were going.
Zell moved to start up the car again, then stopped and looked at me. “I know I freaked you out, okay? I’m sorry.”
“I just wish you’d help me understand what’s happening,” I said, not fully sure what I was asking. She looked ahead.
“What I said in Albuquerque, about the years rolling over?” she started. “When I was a kid, I never understood how people didn’t grow up and follow their dreams—like in movies, how a sad housewife settles for someone fine, but who she doesn’t love. Or a person who has a passion or talent, but life gets too hard and they give up on being famous, or even trying to be good at it. But I get it now: you make a choice because it’s there, and you keep making it, and then one day your life is over. You only get the time you get.” She paused, and I waited.
“And when I thought about the choices I wished I could go back and make again, I thought about New Jersey, and I thought about you. So I decided to start there.”
* * *
Yesterday. We blazed across the midlands, burning through every decaying town in our path, sweeping through cities made of glass, lights clustered behind us in the distance. The Chevy roared, devouring miles in fistfuls. We cranked the windows down by hand, blared “Going to Georgia” so loud that fifteen miles away they could feel the chords pumping through their veins. Half the country passed in a blur of melting starlight embedded across the sky.
More than a place, we were escaping lives that felt at once unbearably short and long, lives with no room for being alive inside them. Now, asphalt over Nashville, I was watching all of that crumble. I was seeing the murky red future flatten itself like a canvas, the landscape bleeding from mountain to mossy grave, the star-spangled heartstring of the stretching road. We were singing the Mountain Goats as the past burned in the rearview.
What I remember most was Zell, knuckles white on the steering wheel, hair in a flurry, dark-brown eyes lit ablaze. Screaming to the song at the top of our lungs, what I remember thinking is this: I hope we fucking crash, I hope we die, I hope it’s messy and unavoidable, our flesh and bones mangled together for all eternity. Because nothing will ever be more exactly right than this—alive, electric. Free.
* * *
I stirred awake in the dark. Tall, overgrown brush scraping against the windshield. Again, I looked for Zell and found myself alone. Beyond the driver’s-side door where she should be: a tin-roof house slouching into the tangle of weeds that surrounded it. My gut sank into terror, then embarrassment, when I realized I’d been tricked and abandoned by Zell once more. A middle-of-nowhere darkness, the kind where stars shine diamond-cold and cast the only noticeable light.
Danger seared through my every nerve as I tried to calculate where Zell could’ve gone—maybe she pulled off the road to pee under cover of a bush? Or was burying secrets in the dark, cool mud? But my mind rang with her words: We never know what’s going to happen to us. And suddenly I was terrified she’d done something—hurt herself. That this was all a warning I’d missed. My body filled with a choking urgency to find her before something awful happened. Hopefully, I’d be quick enough for it not to have happened yet.
I crept toward the house, whipping my head around to check for attackers. The foundation was held up on cinder blocks, the wood porch caved in. I climbed up, and my shoes scuffled shards of glass; as if passing through a strange portal, I climbed through the blown-open window frame, slicing my thigh on a small, jagged piece stuck in the windowsill. But it only ripped the material of my jeans, not the skin beneath.
Old records, some still intact, littered the kitchen. The living room floor had sunken in, sucking a floral sofa down with it and collecting thick pockets of leaves, and as I stepped over the orange carpet I feared snakes, raccoons. My heart pounded in my ears as I struggled to adjust to the darkness. It was a place where wild things scurried to shelter, but it wasn’t hard to imagine the people who were here before—as if some echo of their living still pulsed between the walls, in the peeling wallpaper grown fuzzy with mold.
I didn’t have to go looking for Zell: she was right there, beyond the sunken entry of the farmhouse, standing at the bottom of the staircase. I moved quietly toward her, braced for the chance she’d bolt—or attack.
“Zell, are you okay?”
She startled and turned around, let out a tiny squawk.
“Holy shit, I thought you were a ghost.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but it was swallowed in a noise outside: a man’s distant holler, and then the yell of his rifle, cracking open the night sky.
Zell’s eyes went wide as they met mine, frozen in a single panicked moment.
“What the fuck—”
“Shhh.” Zell clamped her hand over my mouth. We stilled and listened, leaping in our skins when another gunshot sounded.
“Sounds like he’s coming from the front. If we go out the back . . .”
“We can sneak around the side.”
“Then run to the car.”
I nodded. Took a last, deep breath.
We bolted through the sunken kitchen, out the back door, leaping across the overgrown yard to the car. The rifle blasted again, and Zell fell reaching for the door handle—for one sharp instant I was sure she was dead—and then she stumbled up, making tiny, strangled noises, slid her body into the front seat, and we sped off through the grass. It wasn’t until our wheels found pavement again that I saw the blood pooling on her shirt.
* * *
Hey, stay with me.
My foot grinding into the pedal. The intestines of the battered car gurgling under the pressure. Dirt and grass and road, skidding, a half-airborne leap from a pothole. Telescopes of light revealing only what’s in front of us, almost too late to swerve. Time moving like this, in seizurelike flashes—a movie playing every third frame. Zell in the front seat, clutching her arm. A bloom of blood seeping into the black upholstery.
* * *
Even over the roar I hear her silence so loud. Except for little gasps, grits of teeth. Hair damp with sweat, curling in the delicate places behind her ears and sticking to her forehead.
Goddamn it, Andrea.
That’s good. You’ve got to stay conscious.
Find a place—
Press the wound. I know it hurts. You have to.
Pull over, or—fuck— She winces, bites down on her lower lip. More blood.
This piece-of-shit car—
Hey, don’t talk shit about my car.
I don’t know why she thought any of us would survive to reach the coast.
* * *
A wave of panic bubbles up, sure, but I exile my body to some corner of the back seat. No time to be flesh, to feel; we slice clean through the muddy darkness.
There’s gotta be a hospital—
No, I told you. I won’t—
I want to say: You’re a grown-ass woman. No one’s going to call your mom and drag you back home. But my voice is too wobbly, the metallic smell of her blood perforating the car, and her mom long dead. Irony she’d appreciate in a less compromised state.
It’s a gunshot. We’ll get fucked for trespassing.
What other option—
She expels a scream. Feral kinetic energy ripping through her. Her eyes are black and wide, the look on her face animal, otherworldly. It scares the shit out of me. I don’t know what’s inside her, but it’s this. The reason she digs in dirt. The reason without a reason.
Come on—just give me this. We’ll figure it out, alone, together, like we always did. Please just get us someplace safe.
I keep pinned to the road but feel her eyes pleading a hole through my skin, and shiver.
Okay. Hold on.
* * *
No way to know where we are. Back roads, pitch dark beyond three feet of ghostly searchlight. How to find a hospital without our phones; too dark for maps, no X marking a spot where we arrive and are saved. It could be hours. If we ever got there. Whose fault would that be? Whose fault was any of this?
I don’t know, just know we have to stop the bleeding. Get the bullet out. Sew her together. Put her back how she was before.
The wheels pound relentlessly against the asphalt, a kind of lullaby.
What other option?
* * *
What does it feel like?
Like a white-hot cut. Like sunburn giving birth.
She’s almost gleeful behind the pain.
Like a goddamn supernova is gushing from my body.
* * *
Dark and dark and dark and dark. Zell’s labored breath, the engine, deep vegetal stench of blood. Just over the Kentucky border, a sign for a town called Bugtussle. All black forest and road. Until.
