Henry started to snore and she opened her eyes, then sat up with a small prick of terror. Snow was dashing by the window, heaping up on the sill. She looked down at Henry, who was sleeping in his usual way, like a frog on a slide in a laboratory. “Look,” she said loudly, giving him a shove.
“What?” he said, drunk with sleep.
“It’s snowing.”
“Go to sleep.”
“We can’t go on like this.”
“What?”
“We can’t drive the whole way there. I’m too afraid.”
Henry sat up and turned on the light. “So what do you suggest we do ?” he said nastily.
“A former student of mine lives in Minneapolis. Do you remember Amy?”
Henry only stared, his eyes flat with rage.
“I could get us as far as Minneapolis. I’m sure Amy will know someone who we can pay to drive the car.”
“Who we can pay ?” Henry raged. “So we can sit in the back like children?”
“No. We’ll take a plane,” she said cautiously.
“Oh will we?” he said with a scary smile. “So you’ve got it all planned out then?”
“I think it’s best,” Susan said, careful not to look at him.
Henry went quiet, his teeth clenched together. He hated Susan’s grim authority, how it slowed everything down. She sat with her mouth drawn into a taut black line and looked eerily like one of the dominating nuns from his Catholic high school. Sister Fish, he thought, unable to remember her real name, only that it rhymed with fish. She was an awful, relentless woman with the speckled face of a trout.
He wished in that moment that he were a truly bad person, bad enough to desert his wife. To drive off on his own, speeding the whole way to Missoula. “You are un believable !” he shouted and Susan jerked, her green eyes bugged. It gave Henry pause. “I know you’re scared,” he continued with downcast eyes, plunging back into a softer fury. “But we’ll get there, I promise. If you let me drive , for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s not safe!” Susan burst into tears. “We don’t even have snow tires.” She shook her head. “I won’t do it.”
Henry said nothing, which was his way — despite insurmountable rage — of agreeing to her plan. “Good night,” he said with unmasked contempt, then switched off the lamp. But for the first time in ages, Henry couldn’t sleep. He groaned and sighed, writing speeches in his mind.
“Don’t move so much!” Susan said.
“Pity I’m alive.”
“Oh shut up.”
“One day you’ll wake up with a corpse.”
“Shut up!”
“It’s a horrible event I won’t be present for,” he laughed.
“I can’t believe you.”
“It’s a fact that men die first.”
“Shut up!”
“Fine,” Henry grinned.
Susan stewed awhile, arms folded over her chest. “You write these beautiful poems,” she said abruptly, twisting the word “beautiful” with scorn. “But you’re a sicko . If people only knew…” She glared at the dark mound beside her, the stomach rising and falling with even breaths. He was asleep.
• • •
In the morning Susan groggily called Amy, who was delighted to hear from her, then aghast when Susan described the accident.
“I’m okay,” Susan assured her, to Henry’s disgust.
Amy said she probably knew someone who needed the money. And within the hour, she called back to confirm that a friend of hers — a guy named Luke — had agreed to drive the van.
Henry heard the words “five hundred dollars” spoken and winced. But he remained dangerously quiet, mechanically packing his toiletries.
“Milwaukee,” Susan called out a few minutes later.
“Milwaukee what?” Henry asked.
“I found two tickets from there to Missoula. It’s a little out of our way… but cheap.”
“Fine,” Henry replied, zipping his bag.
In the car they were silent for over an hour, while Susan drove slowly, her face marked dimly with terror. The snow had melted but the weather application on her phone promised more. And after several coffees, her mouth had grown helplessly mobile, sealing itself tightly and then falling open, only to be bitten a second later.
Henry faced the side window, though he didn’t register any of the drab shapes flitting past. He had sunk into one long poem and the words sounded off in his brain of their own accord. It wasn’t pleasant. The words felt rancid inside him. Not a single one seemed worth writing down and besides, he didn’t want to move his hand. If he reached for his pen, he thought he might make a fist and shatter the window instead.
• • •
By dusk Susan was exhausted. Her eyes traveled continually to the road’s edge, where the concave earth looked bottomless, like one long hole leading to outer space. The steering wheel also seemed to have changed. It felt bigger in her hands, chubbier somehow. And it was breathing.
“I’m hungry,” she said loudly, straining to keep her hands from flying off the wheel. She didn’t actually feel the urge to eat but feared her starvation was awakening the snakes of her subconscious, giving them power.
She pulled into a gas station and wearily exited the car, shaking out her hands as she walked to the bathroom: a concrete room of humming fluorescence with a urine-spattered toilet seat.
Susan was spooked by her reflection in the mirror. She looked positively gaunt, with a gray-green hue around her eyes. “God,” she said aloud, staring at the wizened little face. How could that be me? The more she stared, the more the white light seemed to penetrate her skin, spotlighting her skull. I’m all bone, she thought, moving her face in the mirror until her flesh reappeared. It was a relief but a minor one that teetered quickly back to self-hate.
“I look wrinkly and crazy,” she declared upon reentering the car, a packaged cherry Danish in hand. “Like a kind of vegetable that has no name.”
Henry smiled with a sniff. They had apparently finessed their fight down to a small war that now allowed for conversation, if only out of lonesomeness. And he was glad. “You’re out of your mind,” he said. “But I love looking atcha.”
Susan smiled weakly, with gratitude. It was a smile that could have collapsed into a sob if she wasn’t careful. She was so tired.
“Are you alright?” he asked, touching her arm.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m a little kittenish.”
Henry smiled. “That’s exactly what you are.”
“There was a man by the register holding an umbrella,” Susan said. “I thought it was a rifle.”
“Oh honey.” He touched her shoulder. “You’re exhausted .”
Susan struggled to free the cherry Danish from its veil of plastic. Henry watched a moment. Then he opened it for her.
She took a bite and wrinkled her nose. “This is disgusting,” she said and continued to eat it. When the pastry was half gone, she stuck it back in the plastic and set it down on her lap. “Eating is a mistake,” she declared. “I think starvation is the better choice.”
“There are hospitals full of women who feel that way.”
Susan laughed feebly. She watched as he finished the Danish.
• • •
Luke lived in St. Paul. They arranged to meet at his apartment, then he would drive them to the bus that would get them to the plane that would deliver them at long last to Missoula.
Henry frowned when Luke appeared at the door. He looked like a teenager, though as it turned out he was twenty-three. And handsome in a way that made Susan smile like a maniac. He had a jaw of dark stubble and soft-looking brown hair that he raked his fingers through compulsively. It occurred to Susan that he might have taken speed to cut through the harrowing boredom that lay ahead. She stared at him and realized that he reminded her a bit of Henry as a younger man.
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