He stares at me. I stare back.
This is my last and only hope. I slow my breathing. Inside I am screaming, but my face is calm. I just stare into his eyes, trying to radiate love.
Time creeps by. One minute. Two minutes. I don’t even blink.
Finally, Sean lets out a huge sigh and his mouth curls into a strangely sweet smile. For a moment he looks about ten years old. “I love you more than I ever loved her,” Sean says. “You don’t have anything to worry about. That was just a fantasy, but this…” His lips are over mine, his breath is hot, his teeth knocking against me. It takes everything I have in me not to gag. He pulls back and strokes the side of my face with the gun. “…this is real.”
Thirty-nine
I shift in my seat and press my face against the glass, gazing out at the soft blue arc of the sky stretching for miles in every direction. We’re two hours closer to San Francisco on a mostly empty highway, driving fast.
Sean reaches down and takes his extra-large iced coffee out of the cupholder. His third of the trip so far. “I was supposed to go to San Francisco once, a long time ago,” he says. His voice is soft and gentle, like he’s telling me a bedtime story. “My mom was going to take me, but we never quite made it there.” He holds the straw up to my mouth, offering me a sip because my hands are duct taped behind my back. I shake my head. “It’s kind of a funny story actually.” He raises the straw to his own lips and sucks. “So we were staying at my family’s house in Big Sur. This was when it was just me and my dad and my actual mom. My mom didn’t like to ski but my dad was out skiing every day, and I guess my mom was getting bored and lonely or maybe she was just mad at my dad, I don’t know. But one night at like three in the morning she just woke me up and told me we were going on vacation, just her and me. She told me to get in the car because she’d already packed and everything and we needed to leave before traffic got bad. So, I mean, I was five at the time so I didn’t think much of it, other than that it sounded fun, so I just got into the car in my pajamas with my pillow and my blanket. After she started driving, she told me she had friends in San Francisco and that we should go and visit them because she hadn’t seen them in twenty-five years and she wanted to show them how cute I was. So we drove along for a while, stopped at an all-night mini-mart for ice cream sandwiches and then kept driving. I don’t remember anything else after that except at some point later we were surrounded by about fifteen cop cars with their sirens and lights on. Turns out my mom had never mentioned her plan to my dad, so when he woke up the next morning and found the house empty, he freaked. She hadn’t been taking her medication for a couple of weeks so she ended up back in the hospital for a while after that, and then about nine months after that she went away for good. My favorite part of the story, though, is that later the maid was unpacking the bags my mom had put in the trunk and you’ll never guess what was in them.” He pauses. “Try and guess.”
“Clothes?” I say.
“For me she’d packed nothing but this tiny winter jacket that I’d worn when I was about two, a bunch of action figures and a bunch of mini juice boxes. And for herself all she brought was,” Sean starts laughing then. Laughing so hard he has to stop and take a breath. “A bag of…floor-length…black-tie…gowns!” Tears are filling his eyes, he’s laughing so hard. “These custom-made designer gowns, probably worth a total of about a hundred thousand dollars.” He reaches down for his coffee and takes another sip, hiccups, and wipes the tears off his cheeks. He takes a deep breath. “In my dad’s version of the story, when the police finally found us, I was curled up in the backseat of the car, scared out of my mind, covered in ice cream. But that’s just not how I remember it. I think it’s probably my very favorite memory of my mom actually.” Sean turns toward me and smiles. “I guess we didn’t pack that well, either, come to think of it. But anything we need we can get while we’re there, since I figure we’ll want to go…Hey, you know what we should do? We should go on a big shopping trip after…” Sean stops then, reaches down for his coffee. He turns toward me and smiles this sweet sheepish smile, like he’s just slightly embarrassed by what we’re on the way to do.
The sun is high up in the sky now and the road is filled with other cars. We are not talking anymore, just driving. Sean has one hand on my knee, as though to make sure I’m still there, to keep me from floating away.