Part I
The girl stands next to a motorcycle, black and chrome, watching. There are few people in this dirt parking lot, only a white car and an old, faded, blue Ford pickup with the hood up. The heat radiates off the bike, the sun beating down relentlessly. She can feel her fair skin burning, but she stands and waits and watches. The humidity makes it hard to draw in a deep breath, summer is underway and apparently has an axe to grind this year. Her skin feels gritty and the hours until home and a shower seem like a long time away.
Fifteen miles down the road, she holds on to a man and watches the miles go by. She watches the heat of the day shimmer off the pavement of the highway. This man ahead of her is angry. He's been irritable all day. He accuses her of shifting to much, of leaning too far. She isn't even sure she understands what any of it means, but she keeps as still as possible, wanting him to forget that she is even back here, counting the miles away and wishing for soap and shampoo and a bottle of water. She is along for the ride, though she is sure they are both wishing she was not.
They turn off the main highway, onto a paved, but little traveled road. She knows this road. She used to jump in a car with her friends and a 12 pack and head off into the night. It seems like eons ago, but it was only a few short years. They are less than thirty miles away from home. She takes a deep breath, thankful. It has been a long day. A long, exhausting day of watching what she says, paying careful attention to where her eyes wander, of asking for too little and knowing that it was still too much. A day of counting the number of drinks passed across the bar. She will know better next time. She will not ask to be included. She will stay home and wait anxiously for a call, or for the rumble of the engine, for the garage door to squeak open, anything but this.
The light is fading. The air smells like summer and recently mowed grass. She knows the crickets will be chirping, though she can not hear them for the angry roar of the bike. A grasshopper flings itself against her leg, at fifty-five or sixty miles an hour, it hurts. She is one who bruises easily and she knows that for days after this ride is over, she will remember the feeling of it hitting her calf. Just below her knee, it will be a black and blue memorial. She squeezes her eyes closed, tightly. Her stomach opposes the amount of caffeine she has had today, the lack of food and also the bug guts that she is sure are splattered on her well worn Levi's.
All at once, the back tire catches the edge of the pavement and the rumbling machine shakes and scatters gravel and grass. The man ahead of her lets off the throttle and slows. There is an entrance road to a field ahead, and he brings it to a stop on dirt. His right foot catches her thigh as he heaves himself off, screaming and spewing words at her. Blaming her. She accepts the blame, even as she wonders what she did. Her mind is scanning the recent past, but she is inclined to believe it was the Budweiser, and not herself, for the swerve to the edge of the asphalt. She says nothing. It would be unwise, she knows.
Reluctantly, she takes off her helmet and watches him light a Marlboro Red. He is still telling her that she is at fault. She is quiet and condemned. So she waits. While the light fades and the crickets sing. She waits for her punishment. What will be the penalty for this act of foolishness that she is sure she did not commit? Her thigh throbs where his boot caught it. Another memorial of this day.
Minutes pass in slow motion. The glow at the end of his cigarette falls to the ground. She lifts the helmet back to her head.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" He asks, while putting his own helmet back on his head.
In a rush, it occurs to her that he is leaving her. The cost of doing bad business this day will be her, alone, on the side of a highway, miles from home with the day dying. She begins to shake, but remains silent. Perhaps he will change his mind. Perhaps his goal is to make her beg. He says nothing, and hefts the bike from it's stand in the dirt. It grumbles to life, an angry noise that makes her stomach drop. She stares at him, willing herself to apologize even if it will be insincere. But her mouth remains tightly closed, unwilling. Some small part of her is thinking that this is better than his fists. Alone is not the same as beaten and bruised and lying.
In a shower of rock, dirt and dust, she watches the single taillight, growing smaller and smaller up a hill. When it reaches the top, it brightens with the brake light, then disappears all together. She remains still, wondering of he has changed his mind. Listening to the rumble, trying to determine if it is getting louder or further away. The minutes tick by. There is nothing. Only bugs, caroling their song of summer. The sky is orange with the sunset.
She starts to walk, because there is nothing left to do. Farmland reaches out across the miles. Houses are few and far between in this area. Her boots turn from black to grey with dust. And a glimmer of rage is growing in her belly. She's learned to stop feeling angry anymore. Fighting back makes it worse, and nothing good has come from it anyway. She thinks about this now unfamiliar ball of fury that is inside her.
"Fuck him." She says aloud to the twilight. She is, for the first time in many, many months, allowing herself to dream of a different kind of life. She wonders where she will go, and how she will ever get there. She wonders what he will think when he comes home to an empty house. What kind of reaction will he have when it becomes HIS turn to wonder. She finds a sick satisfaction in the thought of repaying her hours of anxiety with the same. Then she begins to wonder if she can do it. If she can survive without him, because after all, he has given her many examples of how inept at living her life she really is. Shaking her head, she banishes that thought. No. She will simply put one foot in front of the other until she finds herself someplace. Someplace that is not the side of a barely used highway with a darkening sky for a blanket.
Left foot, right foot....there is a blister forming on her left heel.
Right foot, left foot....a dog is barking in the distance.
Left foot, right foot....headlights from behind her.
Her hands turn cold with fear, her feet are tingling. All of the blood has rushed to her face.
"Please," she thinks, moving off the asphalt down into the grassy ditch. "Please." It does not occur to her to finish the thought. She doesn't know what she is really even asking for.
The silver car passes, the taillights glowing like angry, red eyes. She exhales loudly, grateful. She climbs the incline of the ditch, returning to the pavement. She walks quickly, long legs eating up the white line. She climbs to the top of a hill and realizes that at the bottom, there is an intersection. A junction of a much used highway, with a stoplight and a gas station a few hundred yards to the left. To the right is the way home. The way back. Neither is an appealing option. Neither place comforts her. She knows that the gas station is a danger. He will probably be there waiting. Watching to see if she will make it this far.
In an act of defiance, she allows the growing embers of ire within her belly take over and make the decision to cut across a field to the left.
"Fuck him." She says again, aloud, to no one but the inky darkness that has taken over.
And so, adding to her punishment, she takes off across the bean field, smashing someone's crop as she goes, and not caring at all. Her rage is fueling her, and she looks back across the field after a time, surprised that she is a short distance from the highway. She's made more progress than she expected.
She follows the highway, being careful to stay far enough away that she is out of the line of the headlights, but close enough to allow the roadside lights to give her some comfort. Something moves to her left, something that she can not see, can only hear. She stops short, eyes squinted. She can not tell what it is, only that it is under leaves and running in the same direction she is going. Panting, she breaks out into a sheen of panicked sweat and begins to run. Boots pounding, she finds herself at the bottom of a steep ditch, and bends to empty the contents of her stomach, little though they may be. Scared and crying, she kneels in the tall grass and lets the nausea wash over her. This was so stupid. Childish.
Many moments later, she is again walking. She is so lost in mentally chastising herself, that she doesn't notice the silver car has pulled to the side. On this highway, there is a shoulder, and she is upon the car before she realized it was stopped.
A head pokes out of the driver's window.
"Need some help?" The voice asks.
She can taste the dirt on her tongue as she struggles to answer.
"No, thank you." Her voice shakes.
"We noticed you a few miles ago. Where you headed?"
She is next to the door, now. There is a middle aged man in the driver's seat, grey and balding, and a woman in the passenger seat, holding onto her purse. She realizes what she must look like, dirty jeans, a tank top graying with hours of dust, arms littered with last week's bruises.
"I...um...had some car trouble. I'm just going home." She spits out , and watches the man's face register her lie.
"Can we give you a ride?" This comes from the passenger seat, unexpected.
"No, thank you." She says, though her aching legs scream otherwise. Her father's warnings echo through her head. Never take a ride from a stranger.
"At least let us take you to the gas station. You can call someone from there." This, again, from the woman in the passenger seat, whose face remains hidden.
"No, really. I appreciate it, but I'm close to home." She shakes her head and smiles slightly. She is still miles from home, but Dad's warnings didn't fall on deaf ears.
The passenger door opens and a head rises above the roof of the car. Bottle blond hair and kind eyes peek at her.
"I've had car trouble before, too, Honey. It's no problem. Get in." She walks to the back of the car and opens the passenger side rear door. "I promise we just want to help. I saw you back there and we've been arguing about turning around to find you ever since."
"It's fine...really.." She says, but this time, less sure.
"My name is Anna. That's my husband, Frank." She admits, as she gestures to the backseat.
And so the girl accepts a ride from strangers. The car smells like vanilla, there is a thin blanket on the driver's side of the backseat. The kind one would use for a picnic, if the occasion arose. She longs to grab the blanket and stretch out across the backseat and close her eyes and let someone else worry about what will happen after that.
"So you say you had car trouble?" Frank asks.
"Uh huh." She answers.
"Do you want to go back and take a look at it?"
"Sure! Frank knows a little about cars, maybe it's something easy." Anna says, cheerfully.
"Ah...no....it's....I'm not sure..." The girl hesitates. She knows so little about cars, she can not think of anything to make up.
Anna turns and stares at her. A burning, stare. She reads the lie on the surface of the girl's skin. The girl's eyes fall to her lap. After a time, Anna turns around, but she remains silent.
"Well, then...." Frank says, breaking the silence. He does not finish the sentence.
Minutes pass. Town is closer and closer.
"Honey, would you mind if Frank stops at the station up there? I'm just dying of thirst and I bet you are too after that long walk."
"No, it's fine." She remembers that she has no money with her. She has only her driver's license, tucked into her back pocket. The man who left her behind has all of the money. She watches Frank's eyes silently question his wife, and ease the car into the turning lane.
The girl thinks that they will leave her here, and that is fine. In their shoes, she would leave her here, too. She steps out of the car, under the harsh lights of the parking lot, and looking down, sees that the damage is worse than she thought. She is so dirty. Grass is stuck to the bottom of her boots, her jeans are cruddy and her hands are grimy. She turns from the car and away from Frank and Anna, the Strangers. She is ashamed. This is not the girl she has ever been. This is not who she is, but they will never know that. She will always be only a bedraggled stranger that they found on the side of the highway. They will never know what led her here, what made her decide to take a ride from strangers. They will not know her fate.
"Hey!" The woman named Anna calls out to her. "Do ya want something?"
The girl shakes her head.
"I forgot my purse in my car." She answers, and even as she says it, she knows the bit about the car trouble is transparent. Anna knows that she has lied to them.
"It's okay. We'll get you something if you want." Under the lights, she can see that this woman stranger is wearing khaki pants and a blue, floral, button down shirt. She has on sensible shoes, the kind that the girl's mother always wore to work.
"No, really. I'm pretty close to home. I'll just walk from here. Thank you. Thank you so much. You saved me from walking a good six or seven miles."
"Honey," The woman calls her, because the girl has not offered her name, "I've had 'car trouble' before, too." Their eyes meet, and Anna's eyes move to the bruises that climb up the inside of the girl's biceps. They are undoubtedly the fingerprints of someone's large, strong hands. Both of them know that they are no longer discussing a vehicle that breaks down. "I mean, there's car trouble, and then there's car trouble. Let me get you something to drink."
The girl follows the strangers into the gas station. She quietly tells Anna that she is going to use the restroom, and slinks off, avoiding the stare of the man behind the counter. She washes her face with the cold water from the dirty sink, and catches her reflection in a water spotted mirror. This day has taken it's toll, but she is grateful for the soap and water. She rinses her mouth with the coppery tasting water. She is thinking that if she stalls for enough time in this bathroom, maybe the strangers will simply drive away into the night, leaving her behind for the second time today.
Later, much later, after Frank has asked her where she wants to be taken, she stands in front of a small house, and Anna exits the car.
"You're sure?" Anna asks.
"Yeah." The girl answers, "This is my house."
Anna reaches out for the girl's hand.
"Well, okay, then. I'm sorry for your troubles." The girl can see the tears welling in the stranger's eyes. She reaches out, taking Anna's hand in her own.
"I don't know how to thank you...." She feels something being pressed into her palm. She pulls back, opening her hand, in which lies a fifty dollar bill. "No." She says, loudly into the darkness. "No. I can't. It's...." She swallows. "I can't take money from strangers." Shaking her head, she hands the bill to Anna, who is backing away.
"We aren't strangers, Honey. We're Frank and Anna." She opens her car door. "Sometimes a little help from a stranger is all that it takes."
The strangers drive away into the darkness, while the girl watches.
The light is fading. The air smells like summer and recently mowed grass. She knows the crickets will be chirping, though she can not hear them for the angry roar of the bike. A grasshopper flings itself against her leg, at fifty-five or sixty miles an hour, it hurts. She is one who bruises easily and she knows that for days after this ride is over, she will remember the feeling of it hitting her calf. Just below her knee, it will be a black and blue memorial. She squeezes her eyes closed, tightly. Her stomach opposes the amount of caffeine she has had today, the lack of food and also the bug guts that she is sure are splattered on her well worn Levi's.
All at once, the back tire catches the edge of the pavement and the rumbling machine shakes and scatters gravel and grass. The man ahead of her lets off the throttle and slows. There is an entrance road to a field ahead, and he brings it to a stop on dirt. His right foot catches her thigh as he heaves himself off, screaming and spewing words at her. Blaming her. She accepts the blame, even as she wonders what she did. Her mind is scanning the recent past, but she is inclined to believe it was the Budweiser, and not herself, for the swerve to the edge of the asphalt. She says nothing. It would be unwise, she knows.
Reluctantly, she takes off her helmet and watches him light a Marlboro Red. He is still telling her that she is at fault. She is quiet and condemned. So she waits. While the light fades and the crickets sing. She waits for her punishment. What will be the penalty for this act of foolishness that she is sure she did not commit? Her thigh throbs where his boot caught it. Another memorial of this day.
Minutes pass in slow motion. The glow at the end of his cigarette falls to the ground. She lifts the helmet back to her head.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" He asks, while putting his own helmet back on his head.
In a rush, it occurs to her that he is leaving her. The cost of doing bad business this day will be her, alone, on the side of a highway, miles from home with the day dying. She begins to shake, but remains silent. Perhaps he will change his mind. Perhaps his goal is to make her beg. He says nothing, and hefts the bike from it's stand in the dirt. It grumbles to life, an angry noise that makes her stomach drop. She stares at him, willing herself to apologize even if it will be insincere. But her mouth remains tightly closed, unwilling. Some small part of her is thinking that this is better than his fists. Alone is not the same as beaten and bruised and lying.
In a shower of rock, dirt and dust, she watches the single taillight, growing smaller and smaller up a hill. When it reaches the top, it brightens with the brake light, then disappears all together. She remains still, wondering of he has changed his mind. Listening to the rumble, trying to determine if it is getting louder or further away. The minutes tick by. There is nothing. Only bugs, caroling their song of summer. The sky is orange with the sunset.
She starts to walk, because there is nothing left to do. Farmland reaches out across the miles. Houses are few and far between in this area. Her boots turn from black to grey with dust. And a glimmer of rage is growing in her belly. She's learned to stop feeling angry anymore. Fighting back makes it worse, and nothing good has come from it anyway. She thinks about this now unfamiliar ball of fury that is inside her.
"Fuck him." She says aloud to the twilight. She is, for the first time in many, many months, allowing herself to dream of a different kind of life. She wonders where she will go, and how she will ever get there. She wonders what he will think when he comes home to an empty house. What kind of reaction will he have when it becomes HIS turn to wonder. She finds a sick satisfaction in the thought of repaying her hours of anxiety with the same. Then she begins to wonder if she can do it. If she can survive without him, because after all, he has given her many examples of how inept at living her life she really is. Shaking her head, she banishes that thought. No. She will simply put one foot in front of the other until she finds herself someplace. Someplace that is not the side of a barely used highway with a darkening sky for a blanket.
Left foot, right foot....there is a blister forming on her left heel.
Right foot, left foot....a dog is barking in the distance.
Left foot, right foot....headlights from behind her.
Her hands turn cold with fear, her feet are tingling. All of the blood has rushed to her face.
"Please," she thinks, moving off the asphalt down into the grassy ditch. "Please." It does not occur to her to finish the thought. She doesn't know what she is really even asking for.
The silver car passes, the taillights glowing like angry, red eyes. She exhales loudly, grateful. She climbs the incline of the ditch, returning to the pavement. She walks quickly, long legs eating up the white line. She climbs to the top of a hill and realizes that at the bottom, there is an intersection. A junction of a much used highway, with a stoplight and a gas station a few hundred yards to the left. To the right is the way home. The way back. Neither is an appealing option. Neither place comforts her. She knows that the gas station is a danger. He will probably be there waiting. Watching to see if she will make it this far.
In an act of defiance, she allows the growing embers of ire within her belly take over and make the decision to cut across a field to the left.
"Fuck him." She says again, aloud, to no one but the inky darkness that has taken over.
And so, adding to her punishment, she takes off across the bean field, smashing someone's crop as she goes, and not caring at all. Her rage is fueling her, and she looks back across the field after a time, surprised that she is a short distance from the highway. She's made more progress than she expected.
She follows the highway, being careful to stay far enough away that she is out of the line of the headlights, but close enough to allow the roadside lights to give her some comfort. Something moves to her left, something that she can not see, can only hear. She stops short, eyes squinted. She can not tell what it is, only that it is under leaves and running in the same direction she is going. Panting, she breaks out into a sheen of panicked sweat and begins to run. Boots pounding, she finds herself at the bottom of a steep ditch, and bends to empty the contents of her stomach, little though they may be. Scared and crying, she kneels in the tall grass and lets the nausea wash over her. This was so stupid. Childish.
Many moments later, she is again walking. She is so lost in mentally chastising herself, that she doesn't notice the silver car has pulled to the side. On this highway, there is a shoulder, and she is upon the car before she realized it was stopped.
A head pokes out of the driver's window.
"Need some help?" The voice asks.
She can taste the dirt on her tongue as she struggles to answer.
"No, thank you." Her voice shakes.
"We noticed you a few miles ago. Where you headed?"
She is next to the door, now. There is a middle aged man in the driver's seat, grey and balding, and a woman in the passenger seat, holding onto her purse. She realizes what she must look like, dirty jeans, a tank top graying with hours of dust, arms littered with last week's bruises.
"I...um...had some car trouble. I'm just going home." She spits out , and watches the man's face register her lie.
"Can we give you a ride?" This comes from the passenger seat, unexpected.
"No, thank you." She says, though her aching legs scream otherwise. Her father's warnings echo through her head. Never take a ride from a stranger.
"At least let us take you to the gas station. You can call someone from there." This, again, from the woman in the passenger seat, whose face remains hidden.
"No, really. I appreciate it, but I'm close to home." She shakes her head and smiles slightly. She is still miles from home, but Dad's warnings didn't fall on deaf ears.
The passenger door opens and a head rises above the roof of the car. Bottle blond hair and kind eyes peek at her.
"I've had car trouble before, too, Honey. It's no problem. Get in." She walks to the back of the car and opens the passenger side rear door. "I promise we just want to help. I saw you back there and we've been arguing about turning around to find you ever since."
"It's fine...really.." She says, but this time, less sure.
"My name is Anna. That's my husband, Frank." She admits, as she gestures to the backseat.
And so the girl accepts a ride from strangers. The car smells like vanilla, there is a thin blanket on the driver's side of the backseat. The kind one would use for a picnic, if the occasion arose. She longs to grab the blanket and stretch out across the backseat and close her eyes and let someone else worry about what will happen after that.
"So you say you had car trouble?" Frank asks.
"Uh huh." She answers.
"Do you want to go back and take a look at it?"
"Sure! Frank knows a little about cars, maybe it's something easy." Anna says, cheerfully.
"Ah...no....it's....I'm not sure..." The girl hesitates. She knows so little about cars, she can not think of anything to make up.
Anna turns and stares at her. A burning, stare. She reads the lie on the surface of the girl's skin. The girl's eyes fall to her lap. After a time, Anna turns around, but she remains silent.
"Well, then...." Frank says, breaking the silence. He does not finish the sentence.
Minutes pass. Town is closer and closer.
"Honey, would you mind if Frank stops at the station up there? I'm just dying of thirst and I bet you are too after that long walk."
"No, it's fine." She remembers that she has no money with her. She has only her driver's license, tucked into her back pocket. The man who left her behind has all of the money. She watches Frank's eyes silently question his wife, and ease the car into the turning lane.
The girl thinks that they will leave her here, and that is fine. In their shoes, she would leave her here, too. She steps out of the car, under the harsh lights of the parking lot, and looking down, sees that the damage is worse than she thought. She is so dirty. Grass is stuck to the bottom of her boots, her jeans are cruddy and her hands are grimy. She turns from the car and away from Frank and Anna, the Strangers. She is ashamed. This is not the girl she has ever been. This is not who she is, but they will never know that. She will always be only a bedraggled stranger that they found on the side of the highway. They will never know what led her here, what made her decide to take a ride from strangers. They will not know her fate.
"Hey!" The woman named Anna calls out to her. "Do ya want something?"
The girl shakes her head.
"I forgot my purse in my car." She answers, and even as she says it, she knows the bit about the car trouble is transparent. Anna knows that she has lied to them.
"It's okay. We'll get you something if you want." Under the lights, she can see that this woman stranger is wearing khaki pants and a blue, floral, button down shirt. She has on sensible shoes, the kind that the girl's mother always wore to work.
"No, really. I'm pretty close to home. I'll just walk from here. Thank you. Thank you so much. You saved me from walking a good six or seven miles."
"Honey," The woman calls her, because the girl has not offered her name, "I've had 'car trouble' before, too." Their eyes meet, and Anna's eyes move to the bruises that climb up the inside of the girl's biceps. They are undoubtedly the fingerprints of someone's large, strong hands. Both of them know that they are no longer discussing a vehicle that breaks down. "I mean, there's car trouble, and then there's car trouble. Let me get you something to drink."
The girl follows the strangers into the gas station. She quietly tells Anna that she is going to use the restroom, and slinks off, avoiding the stare of the man behind the counter. She washes her face with the cold water from the dirty sink, and catches her reflection in a water spotted mirror. This day has taken it's toll, but she is grateful for the soap and water. She rinses her mouth with the coppery tasting water. She is thinking that if she stalls for enough time in this bathroom, maybe the strangers will simply drive away into the night, leaving her behind for the second time today.
Later, much later, after Frank has asked her where she wants to be taken, she stands in front of a small house, and Anna exits the car.
"You're sure?" Anna asks.
"Yeah." The girl answers, "This is my house."
Anna reaches out for the girl's hand.
"Well, okay, then. I'm sorry for your troubles." The girl can see the tears welling in the stranger's eyes. She reaches out, taking Anna's hand in her own.
"I don't know how to thank you...." She feels something being pressed into her palm. She pulls back, opening her hand, in which lies a fifty dollar bill. "No." She says, loudly into the darkness. "No. I can't. It's...." She swallows. "I can't take money from strangers." Shaking her head, she hands the bill to Anna, who is backing away.
"We aren't strangers, Honey. We're Frank and Anna." She opens her car door. "Sometimes a little help from a stranger is all that it takes."
The strangers drive away into the darkness, while the girl watches.
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