Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“Stop!” I’m shouting as I scoot around and sit up, but she gives me a look that shuts my mouth.

It’s only about four minutes before she takes her hand away and starts to slow the car.

“There,” she says. “You made me very angry, Con. Please don’t make me angry like that.”

“You kidnapped me.”

“So much has gone wrong lately, I’ve got to do something right. I’ve got to help someone somehow, or else I’ll go all to pieces.”

“I’m going to tell.”

“Nothing’s working like it did. Usually if I’m feeling down, all I have to do is drive at high speeds and it’s like everything gets left behind.”

“You’re fired, lady. You are so fucking fired.” But I say it sweet, like “you are so fucking nice,” or “you are so fucking beautiful.” And she is beautiful. Her face is still flushed, and her hair is charged up and curly around her head like her anger made it that way.

“So I’m thinking just give somebody a hand and God will lift you up, too. There is also love in the world, and I want to be that.” She turns her head to look at me. “Do you understand?”

“Sure, but you should take me home.”

“I saw your card, your awful card that said how much you hate and hate and I thought, Ouida Montoya, there is also love in the world and it is needed right here in this very moment. In this little boy.”

“I’m not really a boy,” I say. “I don’t count as a boy, except that it’s a serious offense to kidnap me.”

“You said you understood, but you don’t understand.”

“I have to go home. I have to take care of my little brother. You take me home right now.”

“Soon,” she says. “Fasten your seatbelt. My brother died at high speeds, and that’s only the half-worst part of my awful year.” She stomps on the accelerator and her Volvo, which heretofore had been gliding smoothly down NW Thirty-sixth and then I-95, flies madly across the Julia Tuttle Causeway, across the bay. Where is all the traffic? That’s what I want to know. Where are all the people to whom I might scream for help?

“Ai yai yee!” she calls, gnashing her big white teeth. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Well, it is, with the sun on the water and Miami Beach rushing toward us. She fiddles with the console on her armrest and all the windows go down. She yodels again, or yiddles, whatever it is, that sound like some rebel parrot would make. She puts her hand on my leg and squeezes.

“Do you feel it?” she asks.

“Oh, yes,” I answer, though I don’t know what she’s talking about and I’m starting to be afraid.

“It’s all our troubles, losing their breath behind us. We’re too fast for them. Do you really feel it? Are your troubles falling behind? Are your birthday troubles back there?”

“Yes,” I say, though all I feel now is her hand on my leg. I am thinking of More Joy of Sex , of all the penetration lovingly rendered in charcoal. And for once I care, it’s more than gory pictures like in Dissecting Your Feline , not just knowledge but experience, a hand on my leg. She doesn’t mean it like that. I can tell that when she brings her hand up and tweaks my nose, but even when she takes her hand away to wave it in the wind outside the window, the feeling stays.

“I’ll tell on you so bad you’ll never work in this state again,” I say.

“You won’t tell,” she says, not looking at me. “I read your card and you’re just like me.” She’s right, or I wish she was, or maybe I don’t know about anything. She turns on the radio. It’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” playing, and she accelerates again, to fantastic speeds, during the chorus.

I don’t tell.

“You’re late,” says Mama, when I get home.

“Yeah. I was talking to the teacher. We have this sub.”

“I see.” She’s in the kitchen — not her usual place. She turns away from the sink. “Yorkshire pudding,” she says. “And roast beef!”

“Nice,” I said. “Milo coming over?”

“No. I thought we ought to have a special dinner. A birthday dinner.”

“What about the chicken?” She stares at me, wiping her hands back and forth across her jeans.

“I’m real sorry. I thought yesterday was the sixth.”

“Like I said, no big deal.”

“But this isn’t your birthday feast, anyway. We’ll have a real party, later.”

“You’re not serious.”

“It’ll be good for you.”

“Like hell.”

“Watch it!”

“I do not want a party.”

“You’ll like it. We’ll have a cake and hats and candles and games — everything.”

“And where will you rent the friends?”

“Relax. Just relax! It’s going to be great.”

“It’s going to be a disaster.” Caleb comes up behind me, reaching up to put his hands around my eyes, but all he gets is my mouth.

“Beth baloo?” he says.

“Arthur Treacher,” I say.

“Niha,” he says.

“Flip Wilson?”

“Niha. Try again.”

“Con Markowiecz Clooney?”

“Close.”

“Caleb Cartoris Clooney?” I say.

“Sia-fee,” he says. “You’re very hot.”

“I give up.”

“Not allowed.”

“Well, it might be Belac of Helium, but I understand he perished fighting the synthetic men of the poles.”

“Lies!” he says, giggling, and moving his hands away to tickle me.

“Look, Caleb,” says Mama. “Roast beast!” She holds the bound meat up to us, bleeding between its strings, and high-steps it over to the oven with flourishes. I am thinking that it is a nice little moment, even as I am thinking that it is so fucking weird.

The next day I walk to school and past school. I don’t want to go where Ouida Montoya is. So I play tourist for a while, taking the bus to Villa Vizcaya, Mr. Deering’s pink abomination. When someone looks at me like I’m a truant and asks me questions, I fake a French accent and say I’m looking for my daddy, he’s right over there in the bushes, and then I run away.

The grounds at Vizcaya are lovely, and it’s mostly there, among the live oaks and banyans fronting a big chunk of the bay, that I spend the next three days. There are no calls from school. In fact, I’m having a pretty good time, though all I do all day is sit in a tree and watch the sky and think of Ouida Montoya driving fast, maybe flying, maybe skywriting in her Volvo.

After three days a letter comes for me in the mail. From a pen pal in Puerto Rico, I tell Mama, but it’s not. It says:

You didn’t tell, I didn’t tell. Go for a drive? De Soto and De Leon, Thurs 430p. Okay?

OM

So, Thursday at 4:15 I tell Mama I’m going to Frieda’s and then to the library and she says fine but I must be back by 7:30. And down on the corner of De Soto and De Leon the silver Volvo is lurking. The silver Vulva, I think, and giggle inside like a silly eighth-grader.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she says when I get in. I shrug.

“Thanks for not telling Sister Gertrude on me.”

“Same same,” she says. “So what do you want to do?”

“Like before,” I say. At the beach the other day we sat on the hood of her car and looked at the water. “You can run away,” she told me, “but I’ll only catch you again.” I didn’t want to run away, because she had gathered me into her lap, and she had her arms around me, and she was telling me that she would break me open and that all my troubles would fall out of me and melt away in the sun.

She goes back to the beach but doesn’t stop there. Instead she drives up Collins to Broad Causeway and heads to 95, where she opens up the Volvo and we do eighty-five toward Jacksonville. She puts a hand on my leg again and starts talking. “I’ve never got a ticket,” she says. “My brother is watching over me.”