While I'm Falling (9 page)

O
N THE WAY TO THE AIRPORT
, Jimmy blasted electronica from the car’s stereo. I rode behind Haylie. The sky was still dark, the controls of the car a green glow, and only Haylie’s swinging, glinting earrings were visible between the seat and the headrest. I couldn’t see her face; there was no way of knowing what she thought of the music or the volume. But when we were on the final curve of highway, the lights of the economy parking lots for KCI already in sight, she made a sudden whimpering sound.

Jimmy turned off the music, saying nothing. We rode the rest of the way in absolute silence.

At the airport, he handed me the keys without a word.

“Bye!” I waved, the keys jingling in my hand. “Have a good trip! Call my cell if you want to check on things!”

But he was already walking up to the doors, the metal chain attached to his wallet swinging behind him. If he heard me, he did not turn around. Haylie was still getting her bag out of the trunk. When the automatic doors slid open for Jimmy, she looked up, and almost lost her balance. She was wearing jeans tucked into velvety black boots with spike heels that looked hard to walk in.

“He’s not really a morning person,” she said. She lifted her bag and glanced at me.

Apparently, despite all the pretense, some part of Haylie Butterfield remembered enough of her old life for her to worry what I thought of her new one. I walked around the front bumper to the driver’s seat. Haylie was still looking at me. I shrugged, and lowered myself into the car. I didn’t know what it was she wanted me to understand. She didn’t need to apologize for him, or make excuses, if that’s what she was doing. I didn’t care if Jimmy was a morning person or not. She was the one spending the weekend with him. I just had the keys to his house and car.

When I was ten years old, I left my bike unlocked outside the library, and someone stole it. My parents refused to buy me another. “How many times did I tell you to keep it locked?” my father asked. My mother seemed distressed by my sadness, but she held firm as well: “I know you loved that bike,” she said. “But if you have to earn a new one, you’ll be more careful with it. You’ll appreciate it more.”

I felt that same pure happiness when I was finally alone in Jimmy’s car, slipping my own CD into the stereo. I know some people hate driving. But I would guess most of them have cars. When they want to go somewhere, they do not have to sweetly ask for a ride, or figure out a bus schedule, or just stay home. They get in their cars and go. And maybe they don’t appreciate it, even if they paid for their cars with hard work. After a while, they don’t think about the ease. But I did. By the time I rolled out of the airport’s exit, I might as well have been flying, loving every second of all that freedom and speed.

I was just coming down the entrance ramp of the turnpike when a raindrop froze on the windshield. I saw another, and then another. And then there were so many that the glaze caught the windshield wipers, stalling their rhythm. An SUV in the eastbound lane fishtailed for several seconds before the driver regained control. I glanced in the rearview mirror, at the stretch of interstate behind me. There was just farmland on either side, barren fields, a silo. I wasn’t even sure if there was a decision to make. It wasn’t as if I could turn around.

The MINI Cooper, cute as it was, was hardly made for icy roads. But moving very slowly and going easy on the brake, I steered it through several miles of slick bridges and slippery turns. I passed a semitrailer jackknifed on the median, a van on its side in a ditch. I didn’t stop at either of them: from a very young age, Elise and I had both been captive audience to our father’s frightening stories about what could happen to a girl on the highway once she left the safety of her car. Don’t stop for anyone, he’d told us. He knew it sounded harsh, but there were people out there who would fake a wreck, fake an injury, just to get you to pull over, and once you so much as rolled down your window, they had you if they had a gun.
I don’t care if it’s a man or a woman,
he said. And anyone could dress like a nun, or look elderly. Ted Bundy had worn a cast. It was nice to help people, my father allowed. But on the road, you had to look out for yourself.

So I kept going. But after I passed the wrecks, I reached into my book bag to grope for my cell phone, thinking I would call the police. It wasn’t there. But I kept feeling for it, hoping, for at least another two miles. That’s what I was doing when I wrecked. It happened, as car accidents do, very quickly, and I doubt it would have mattered if I’d been driving with both hands. I pumped the brake, trying to steer, even as the car spun closer to the ditch and then slammed into it, front first. I went forward as glass shattered. My seat belt held. I fell back.

For several seconds, I didn’t move. I just sat there gripping the steering wheel, my foot pressed hard against the brake. The impact had dislodged the rearview mirror; it rested on the dashboard, tilted up at an angle where I could see my reflection, my wide eyes, my bared teeth. I took several deep breaths. I lifted my hands from the steering wheel, moved my fingers. I eased my foot off the brake and wiggled my toes. My neck and shoulder ached where the seat belt had yanked me back, but I wasn’t hurt in any serious way. I touched my head, smoothed back my hair.

I was okay. My hands were trembling. I was okay. It was not that serious. The air bags had not gone off. But I’d heard glass breaking. Something was broken. I tried not to think about Jimmy.

What to do. What to do. The engine was still running. I stepped carefully on the gas and heard a wild spitting sound, but there was no movement. I put the car in reverse, tried again. Going nowhere.

“It’s okay,” I said out loud. My teeth chattered. “It’s okay. It’s fine.”

I turned off the engine, put on my hat, and opened the door. The weeds beneath me crunched under my boot; each stalk and leaf was completely encased in a perfectly smooth sheath of ice. I pressed one hand on the hood, steadying myself as I worked my way around to the front of the car. The light from the clouded sunrise was faint, but I could see that the bumper was caved in over the right front tire. The glass I’d heard breaking was the right headlight.

I leaned against the car and rubbed my shoulder. It hurt where the seat belt had held. The wind blew hard, and tiny drops of cold rain hit my nose and cheeks. I rubbed my shoulder and looked around. There was just the gray ice, the low, silvery sky, and the empty interstate. A station wagon glided by in the eastbound lane. I watched it disappear over a hill in the distance. It was only fair. Nobody should stop for anyone. I could be a murderer, for all they knew.

I got back in the car and rummaged through my backpack for my phone, hoping I’d just overlooked it. But I hadn’t. I’d brought along my physiology book, my magnetic-stripped meal card, my driver’s license, a pack of Life Savers, and several pistachio shells. And that was it.

My father had, of course, given me plenty of advice on what to do if I ever wrecked a car. I was to stay inside with the doors locked and wait for the police or the highway patrol. When they arrived, I was to make them show me their badges before I rolled down the window. Before I did any of this, I was supposed to call my father with the phone that I was to always have with me, the phone that my father had purchased for me, not because he wanted me to better be able to, as he put it, “blah blah blah” with my friends all day, but because he wanted me to have one in case of an emergency.

I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. My nose was running. My face was pale. If he found out about this, he would yell. Later he would say he was sorry for yelling, and that he only yelled because he loved me and because he didn’t want anything bad to happen to me. But before he did that, he would yell.

I’m not sure how long I sat there. I’d forgotten my watch as well. It felt like an hour, but it might have been less. The freezing rain turned into regular rain, and then stopped. I got cold. Hungry. I wanted caffeine. The rising sun was a pale dot in the sky, and I looked at it without squinting, trying to guess the time. My physiology lab started at ten. My lab instructor, a PhD candidate from Ethiopia who appeared to be maybe two years older than I was, had informed us that she was aware that people really did get the flu and grandmothers really did die and that there were all kinds of legitimate tragedies that could keep us away; but she also believed that these tragedies were not her problem. In the end, work was work, and it had to be done at a certain time.

And yet there was nothing I could do. In either direction, there was just cold highway and ice, no sign of Highway Patrol. I turned on the radio, moving the dial past country music and scratchy commercials until I heard a DJ’s low voice warning of hazardous driving conditions. Bridges were especially dangerous. The storm was already in the KC metro area, moving north. People who had been in accidents were advised to wait in their cars, not to call 911 unless there was a true emergency, and to know they were probably in for a long wait.

“Really,” the DJ said, the opening notes to “Hotel California” steadily increasing in volume, “you’re probably better off to just get out and punch the other driver, you know, work it out yourselves. You’re both idiots for driving when it’s like this. Admit it, cut your losses, and go home.”

When the light from the sun was a little stronger, I rubbed mist off the windshield and noticed what looked like a sign for a gas station rising up from the horizon. It didn’t look that far away, a couple of miles at the most. I heard my father’s voice in my head and stayed where I was a little longer. But the colder I got, the less sense his advice seemed to make. I put my hat back on and got out of the car.

I found I had better traction walking on the strip of icy weeds between the shoulder of the road and the ditch. I carried my backpack in front of me for better balance. I had walked for five minutes, maybe ten, when it started raining again, fat cold drops that fell on the ice and made it more slick. I pulled my hood up over my hat and pulled the string so only my eyes peeked out. Things could be worse, I told myself. I had remembered gloves. I had on the good boots my mother had given me.

I heard the semi coming up behind me long before I saw it. The sky had settled low and foggy over a hill, and when I turned, I saw headlights, two yellow eyes shining through the early gray morning. I don’t remember the color of the cab. I did not expect it to stop.

But it did stop, its big engine still rumbling, the cab almost right in front of me. I waited, unsure of what to do. As far as hitchhiking went, according to my father, a girl would have to be out of her mind. “Once you get in somebody’s car,” he told both me and Elise, “you’ve got no control. You’re in their world, okay? They’re calling the shots.”

My father hitchhiked when he was young, of course. The summer before he started law school, my father, a guitar strapped across his back, had thumbed rides all over the country. But times had changed, he said. You just couldn’t do that kind of thing anymore, especially if you were female. He was sorry if that sounded unfair—here, he’d held up his palm when Elise opened her mouth. Life was unfair, he said. Get used to it. He had an arsenal of examples to prove the world was predatory, and young girls often the prey. If we didn’t believe him, we could read the paper.

I looked up at the truck, my eyes squinting, the rest of my face still covered by my cinched hood. My friend Becky Shoemaker from high school had hitchhiked all the way to California and back after graduation, and nothing bad had happened to her. On the contrary, she’d been invited to tour a cave with a church group traveling through Arizona, and a truck driver who had a family in Chula Vista gave her his wife’s phone number in case, when she got to California, she needed a place to stay. When Becky Shoemaker got to California, she’d called the trucker’s wife, and ended up staying with her for almost a week. When I asked Becky if she had ever been scared, getting in strangers’ cars, staying in strangers’ houses, she’d looked at me like I was crazy. “The only way you make something bad happen to you is if you think about it all the time and, like, attract it,” she’d said, with the earned authority of someone who had managed to spend two weeks in California for less than fifty dollars.

The truck driver rolled down the closer window and peered down over the edge. He was wearing a John Deere cap.

“What are you doing?” His voice was reassuringly friendly.

I tugged the hood beneath my chin. “I wrecked my car.”
My car,
I thought. I had just wrecked my car. I would not think about Jimmy.

“What?” He cupped his hand over his ear.

I cupped my hands around my mouth. “I WRECKED MY CAR!”

“Oh,” he said. “You and everybody. Need a lift?”

I shook my head casually, as if refusing a cup of hot chocolate. My teeth were still chattering, and it was hard to speak. “Could you just call Highway Patrol for me?”

“Sure.” He rested a hand on the rolled-down window. “But it’s going to be a while.” He nodded vaguely behind him. “They got their work cut out for them today.”

I looked back and nodded, too, but said nothing. We were like farmers agreeing on the weather. Rain hit hard against my chin. I pulled my hood tight again. The truck’s motor sighed and growled. When I breathed in, I tasted oil.

“You’re going to get pretty cold out here. Where you headed?”

“Just to that gas station.” I raised my arm, pointing, as if there were any other direction to go.

“Come on. Let me give you a lift. I’ll have you there in a couple of minutes.”

I looked up at him. He was clean-shaven, smiling, and not much older than I was. He did not look like a killer. It would be frustrating to be a nice man, I considered, to go through life trying to be helpful, only to have women wonder if you were out to kill them.

“You’re going to freeze,” he said. “And it’s not safe, walking by the highway.” He laughed in a way that showed he was, in fact, frustrated. He agreed with me. I was being dumb. I took a few careful steps toward the cab, and the door popped open. I had some trouble hoisting myself up—the step seemed to be made for someone with a much longer stride. But when I finally got up, there was a passenger seat with a seat belt. I felt the blast of a good heater, closed my door, and slid back into the seat with a sigh.

“Better?” He put the truck in gear and smiled, laugh lines branching out from the corner of the one eye that I could see. The cab smelled like onion rings, and a pair of black socks had been left to dry on the dash, but the heat felt good. A plastic sack stuffed with fast-food wrappers and empty paper cups swung from a hook just over my knees.

“Much better.” I was embarrassed by my earlier hesitation. I hoped to make up for it with gratitude. “Thank you,” I said. “Really. I appreciate it.” The cab was warm enough that I was already uncomfortable. I pulled my hood back and took off my hat.

He glanced at me, then back at the road. I could hear ice hitting the windshield, but he appeared unfazed, even as the truck picked up speed. He wore just jeans and a flannel shirt, as if the weather outside had nothing to do with him.

He nodded at my book bag. “You go to school?”

“I do.” I marveled at how high up we were. I had never been in a semi before. “KU.”

“Right on.” He snapped his fingers and made a gun with his finger and thumb. “Rock Chalk Jayhawk.”

“Rah rah,” I said, barely raising my arm.

“That’s in Lawrence?”

I nodded.

He gave me the look of thinking I was being dumb again. “That’s right up the road. Is that where you live? I’ll just take you there.”

I opened my mouth, but again, I could think of nothing. If he took me all the way into Lawrence, I could catch a bus to campus and probably still make it to lab. I could even go back to the dorm first. I could get some coffee and brush my teeth. We approached the sign for the gas station. He glanced at me and started to slow.

“Yes. Thank you. If you could take me to Lawrence, that would be great,” I said. “Thanks.” I put my balled-up hat to my mouth to stop myself from thanking him again. The cab was almost hot, but my teeth were still chattering. I felt strange, weirdly energized. I’d gotten hypothermia, maybe. Or I’d hit my head when the car wrecked, and I didn’t remember. Or I was just worried about Jimmy.