They say that no matter what life throws at you, there’s always a lesson to be learned, and I sure have learned some important things in the last eight hours while we’ve been on the road, such as exactly what it feels like to spend the better part of a day sitting in a Volvo with your wrists taped together, and that I am, as it turns out, capable of pulling my pants up and down that way, too, to go to the bathroom. Also, I learned that I am probably the most talented actress the world has ever known, too bad my best and only performance is taking place in a car in front of an audience of one.
The sun is setting now. Sean pulls over on a long stretch of highway surrounded on either side by giant fields of waist-high grass that no one has touched for years. “I’ll be right back,” he says. He gets out of the car, walks fifty feet into the middle of the field, and holds the gun straight up over his head. There’s a loud CRACK. It echoes. A delicate whisper of smoke curls from the barrel of the gun up toward the sky. Sean walks back to the car, gets in, and shuts the door.
“I just wanted to check,” he says, “that it would work.”
Sean starts the car again. We will be there soon.
I’m staring out the window at the early evening sky, at the swooping red cables of the Golden Gate Bridge lit by a thousand tiny lights and the sparkling ocean beyond it. It looks like a postcard that we just so happen to be a part of.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“Yeah,” Sean says, the tension is back in his voice. Maybe it’s the nine extra-large iced coffees. Maybe it’s just that what he’s about to do is finally sinking in. “Haight Street?” Sean says. “That’s where you said you think we’ll…” Sean stops, for the last twelve hours he hasn’t, not once, actually directly referred to what we’ve come here to do. “That’s where you think we should go?” He turns toward me.
My organs, my bones, everything inside me, has dissolved into a pool of molten hot liquid panic. But I smile calmly. “Oh yes,” I say. “Haight Street, I’m sure of it.”
Sean reaches into his pocket, then behind him into his seat, then leans down and sticks his hand between the seat and the door.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeaaaah,” Sean says slowly. “I’m just trying to find my phone and I’m not sure where it is.”
“How weird,” I say. “I hope you didn’t leave it back at the motel.”
“Me, too,” Sean says. “I wonder what happened to it?”
I shrug. “I guess it’s just a mystery.” I close my eyes and picture that phone, exactly where I left it. And I have to turn my face toward the window because at this moment it is impossible for me not to smile.
Forty
To everyone else out here we’re just another young couple enjoying an evening stroll on Haight Street. No one can see the loaded gun shoved down the front of Sean’s jeans. And the red marks on my wrists where the duct tape was ripped off. Or the fact that Sean is crushing my fingers with his own, as though to keep me from running, as though he never plans on letting go.
A girl in a tiny plaid skirt and fishnets walks past us and smiles at Sean. When she gets a few feet away she turns around and looks back. Is this…? Nope, just some girl who thinks he’s hot. She sees what most people see when they look at him, just a seventeen-year-old kid, with f loppy skateboarder hair and a heartbreakingly beautiful face. I used to see him like that, too.
“Whatcha looking at?” Sean asks. His hair falls over one eye and he pushes it away, anxiously.
“I’m just glad we’re here is all,” I say.
He tries to smile but he’s too nervous. His teeth are chattering. “Me, too,” he says.
We keep walking up the steep hill—we pass a fancy home goods store, a store that sells handblown glass bongs, a tapas restaurant, a place with psychedelic posters stuck up in the window.
We keep going. Sean squeezes my hand again. I can feel his heart beating through his fingers. Or maybe that’s my own.
Everything we pass seems somehow meaningful. A man in a pair of too-yellow pants walks by, struggling with grocery bags filled with too much fruit. A girl in a maroon hooded sweatshirt is very deliberately looking for something in her pocket. A man drops a bottle of water and the water splashes on his shoes. He looks up, we make eye contact for just a second. He looks away. Two men in tuxedos are walking arm in arm.
“Hey, dude, can you spare a cigarette?” We turn to the right, look down. There’s a girl and a guy sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk behind a cardboard box with a few coins inside, and Why Lie? We Want Beer! written on it in pencil. The girl has short bleach-blonde hair and a steel bull-ring through her nose. “Or some change?”