David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

Later, the world rushed back to her in the caw of a bird. They lay curled together in the back of the Escalade, slicked in cool sweat.

Claudia stared at the ceiling. Benji would be comforting him by now. Or perhaps Max, beyond comforting, had left. Perhaps he was gone for good.

The harsh, hoarse cry of the bird sounded again, offending her. She made a failing effort to rise to see where it came from. “What is that?” she asked.

“A crow.”

“Awful.”

Nick extended an arm under Claudia’s head, making her a pillow of his sizeable biceps. She cozied up, ignoring the crow, which in most books had to be a bad omen, and breathed in the sweet drugstore spice of cheap soap and a musky something, something long forgotten but rushing back to her now, something fundamentally Nick, that crept (almost imperceptibly) beneath it. “Grab that blanket,” he said.

“What is that?” she asked, not moving, except to bring her foot against the hard, oddly shaped form that the blanket covered. “A body?”

“Not quite.”

“For a second I thought I was in for a threesome.”

“Why? Would you be into that?” Nick asked sleepily. He squeezed her tighter, then said, “It’s Stan.”

Claudia sat up quickly, hitting her own head—“Motherfucker!”—and pulled the blanket from the guitar case. She popped the latches and opened the lid to reveal the battered, honey-brown dreadnought that had sung her to sleep many a night. “Stan.”

They’d had a language all their own that was coming back to them. Shared sounds, tonic endearments, words laced with private meaning that returned to her after all these years.

“Sing me something.”

Without so much as a raised eyebrow, Nick shifted obediently into sitting position, pulled the blanket round Claudia’s shoulders, and took the guitar from her hands. “What’s the lady’s pleasure?” he asked, plucking a few notes to bring the instrument in tune.

“Do you have to ask?”

“Yusuf?” said Nick. “Always Yusuf.” He played a teasing medley of the opening bars of a song that now seemed ineludible.

“Trouble,” he sang.

She was the worst person in the world, the absolute worst. She hadn’t sold missiles to the Taliban or pushed through Tea Party legislation to slam shut the borders. She wasn’t an assassin or serial killer or Ponzi schemer, but as she sat in the parking lot of the Guilderland Travel Plaza, she racked up a list of crimes that seemed to her comparable:

She’d driven three hours not to meet the son she’d never met before — as planned, as promised — but to crack open a chapter of ancient history and fuck his father.

She’d fled from Nick as fast as a coward could without so much as a word about said son.

She’d sliced her mother and perhaps, if he was lucid enough, her father with the knife of a decades-old decision she had always intended to keep sheathed.

And worst of all, she’d let down the boy who knew her only as the woman who’d let him down.

Her selfishness astounded her. After Nick dropped her at his office, she began the drive back to the city, rocketing along as if chasing a line that, if crossed, would return her to the time before she picked up the phone to find Max on the other end. She wanted normalcy. The world didn’t need to be simple or happy, so long as it wasn’t completely upside down.

Under a long, shadowing range of perfect cumulus clouds, Claudia made it safely through Mechanicville and Clifton Park, but by the time she reached Halfmoon, her hands started to shake. The more she drove, the more distance she tried to put between her and the problem twiddling his proverbial thumbs on her parents’ front porch, the more she felt like she was wrestling another person for control of the wheel. One pair of hands fought to steer the car straight ahead, while another, with its equally implacable grip, struggled to turn it around. The warring led Claudia to drift between lanes, a deviation met with a wee but rousing horn blast from the tiny silver Smart car behind her. Shaking herself as if waking from a dream, she eased into the right lane and took the exit for the next rest stop.

She sat in the parking lot with the squeals of car-dodging, sugar-shocked children ricocheting around her. Listening to Benji’s livid voice mails or responding to Oliver’s backlog of frantic texts still proved beyond her, but she pulled her phone from her bag and put it on her lap. Of course it was only a matter of time before the thing rang, and when it did, Claudia kept her eyes shut against it. If asked, she couldn’t point to the road that bypassed her maternal— maternal? — responsibilities so completely and led instead to the shabby cemetery where she stumbled out of Nick’s Escalade with her panties in her hand. How, she wondered, did she get here?

The phone continued its trill, and Claudia opened her eyes to find her brother doing Stanley. Hey! Claud-ia! She knew that Benji would flay her for failing Max, turn the life preserver of her meeting with Nick into a sinking ship, but on the fourth ring, she broke down and answered anyway.

“Tell me you’ve been kidnapped,” Benji whispered fiercely into the silence before she had a chance to say hello. “Tell me you’re bound and gagged in some cabin in the woods and that’s why you’re not here right now.”

“Why are you whispering,” she asked with dread. “Is he there?”

“Of course he’s here. He’s where you’re supposed to be. Here!”

“Can he hear you?”

“ Now you care about his feelings? Where the fuck are you?”

She told him.

“What are you doing there?”

“Heading back.”

“Wait.”

“Benji.”

“Here’s what you do, Claudia. You put the key in the ignition. You’ve got the key, don’t you? You turn the car on. Then you turn your ass around and get here. Turn around and get here now.”

But she couldn’t. She could no sooner find her way to Palmer Street — to Max and her mother and the fallout of a decision she’d made when she was barely old enough to order a drink — than she could transform her car into a plane and jet back to the city through the cloud-slung sky.

“Then I’m coming to you.”

“Don’t,” Claudia pleaded. “Please don’t.”

“Those are your choices.” His voice struck her, sharp as a hatchet and just as hard. “Stay where you are. Don’t even think of leaving. I’ll drive to the city if I have to, Claudia. I’ll break my leg again, I swear I will, I’ll kick down your door.”

She sat in the car, the rolled-up windows turning it into a sweatbox, the discomfort of which she felt she deserved. As the minutes rolled by, twenty, thirty, forty, the chime of Oliver’s incessant texts arrived, like the traffic report on New York 1, every ten minutes. Finally, feeling the next ding would be the hammer blow to the head that would end her, she dinged back with a text of telegrammatic brevity: Sorry! Case of nerves. Call later.

The echoing sound of yet another message stirred her to crack the window just enough to throw the phone out of it. It was from Benji. Inside,it read, @ McDonald’s.

She made her way into the violently lit faux-timbered lodge where people peed and bought forty-ounce drinks in a mad cycle, wearing the enormous sunglasses of a Hollywood starlet in hiding. Wending her way through a herd of elastic-waistbanded feeders on a do-or-die hunt for pumpable ketchup, Claudia positioned herself at the mouth of the dining room, glancing from one sticky table to the next until her eyes stopped on her worst nightmare. There, at the back of the room, framed beneath a forged Bob Ross depicting the saccharine splendor of fall Adirondack foliage, sat Benji and Evelyn.