Killer Move

I drove for a long time without stopping, and as I took us up the coast and then north across the panhandle, I also talked. I tried to explain everything that had happened to me in the last days, to recount it, at least, but I kept getting tangled, caught up in trying to work out who had been running things at each point, and why. I couldn’t think straight. I had not eaten for a long time. I was exhausted. I had seen people killed and I had seen what happened to them after that, without at any point understanding why. At first Steph asked questions, though not many, and in a voice that sounded increasingly tired. After a while she stopped asking and so I just kept talking, trying to put it all together and glad she was giving me the opportunity, glad that she was sitting next to me and letting me run. Sometimes that’s what you need in your loved ones. Someone who just lets you run on, who provides a safe track for your thoughts and hopes to revolve around. It was a long time—in fact, only when I stopped for gas in South Carolina in the dead of night—before I realized that she’d fallen asleep.

When I’d gassed up I got back in the car, put a blanket over her, and went back to driving and talking to myself. I drove straight through the night, up into the woods of Kentucky, wondering how long it was since we’d done something like this. Simply been in movement together, without an agenda, without a five-year plan. A world without walls. Eventually the sky started to soften and the forest on either side of the road turned from being an undifferentiated mass of black into individual trees. I tried to make something metaphoric of this, but I was so tired I was incapable of joined-up thought. I’d stopped talking by that point, had become content to keep driving with Steph sleeping in the seat beside me.

No matter how much I talked through the last five days, the final analysis remained the same. Everything we’d had was gone. There would be people who’d try to blame a lot of things on me, at least one cop who’d be ready to help, and as much evidence as they could need. It was all gone, then—everything, except for the two of us. After a decade of accruing baggage, of earning and seeking and building our lives layer by layer until we were held apart by our accretions of shell, it was back to just the two of us, naked in the world—and the weird thing was that it felt good. It felt like what I’d always wanted, back when I had an idea of who I really was and who I wanted to be. You put one foot after another, one word after another, and it makes sense at the time—until one day you look up and find you’re lost in a future you don’t understand, someplace you never wanted to go and do not recognize. That’s what had happened to us: had happened, most of all, to me. You get up in the morning and look in the mirror and find a stranger looking back, and you brush your teeth and smile, and when you leave the room there’s no reflection left in the mirror because you have climbed inside the fake.

What do you do if you realize this has happened? Go back to the beginning and start again? It isn’t possible. Time flows but one way and all rivers make for the sea, and so we keep trudging on, writing our story-lives sentence by sentence, hoping that sooner or later we’ll be able to steer them back onto a track that we recognize. It never happens. We just die, and in death it becomes contextualized. Everything makes sense at the instant we close the book on ourselves.

That’s what happened, for better or worse.

I’m done now.

Good-bye.

In the end, a little after six in the morning, I got too hungry and tired to continue driving. I took it as a sign when, five minutes later, I glimpsed in the distance the blessed great yellow M of a fast-food outlet Stephanie and I had been going to for all of our lives together. So much of a sign, in fact, that it was only when I parked in the lot outside that I realized my face was wet. I sat looking up at the golden arches as if they were the gateway to the promised land.

“Hey,” I said gently. “Look what we found.”

Steph was lying with her head propped against the window, wrapped up in the blanket I’d put around her. Her face was pale. She looked peaceful. It still took me a long time to realize that, at some point in the last few hours, Stephanie had died.

She is buried in the woods near where I live. Her mother passed away a few years back, her father never reappeared. I’m the only person left to care. The world notices your passing, then turns back to the remaining group of revelers at the bar and orders another round.