“It wasn’t just news for us,” Julie says. “It was like . . . an artifact from some other universe. A universe with different rules. Different possibilities.”
Tomsen looks back and forth between them. Her confusion gives way to deeper emotion; her throat clenches. She climbs into the driver’s seat and buckles up and sits there for a moment, staring through the huge, wraparound windshield. Then she flips a few switches and checks a few gauges and turns the key. The antique engine—or whatever customized contraption her father installed—coughs a few times, waking up from its long nap, then roars to life with a deep diesel rumble. The air fills with an unexpected odor.
“Is that . . .” Julie sniffs. “French fries?”
“Vegetable oil,” Tomsen says. “Fryer waste.”
“Wow,” Nora chuckles. “I haven’t smelled French fries since . . .” She thinks for a moment. Blinks a few times. Her smile falters. “Don’t know. Can’t even remember.” She spins her chair to face the windshield and it clicks into position.
I glance at M and find a similarly unsettled expression. He looks at the back of Nora’s head with a gravity I rarely see on his jocular face.
We all fall back onto the couches as the ancient RV surges into motion, and by the time we’re onto Brooklyn Avenue, the shadow has lifted from M’s features and Nora’s too. But it lingers in my mind. I glance at Julie and find her lost in her own preoccupations, some of which I can guess while others remain obscure, and I am suddenly conscious of a fact I often forget: I am not the only one with locked doors. Everyone around me is full of hidden hurt, but the hoarded heap of my own has always blocked my view. What’s in their forbidden attics? Their boarded basements? Are their monsters a match for mine?
Julie is staring out the side window, oblivious to my gaze, so I let it wander her face and body, from her matted hair to her stained clothes, fresh wounds and old scars. Despite my romantic flights of fancy, she is no spotless angel. She is no standard of perfection by which to measure myself. I think of her rage in Detroit, gunning down three people with barely a blink, the ice in her eyes as she shot Abram once, then twice, looking ready for a third. I remember all her tales of drugs and razors and blacked-out fucking in alleys, ugly truths she was never afraid to share with me. Was I afraid to listen? Have I ever really known this woman, or did I paint an image that inspired me and prop it up in front of her? Did I glamorize her defects, give her pain a glow of noble tragedy, and cheerfully omit whatever I couldn’t beautify?
I feel something dissolving between us. A hazy film of mythology and abstraction. I see her in the unflattering sharpness of reality: a fragile human being with neuroses and psychoses, smelly feet and greasy hair, who acts rashly and contradicts herself and fumbles her way forward in the dark.
She has never looked so beautiful.
Still unaware of my slack-jawed stare, she stands up, testing her balance as the RV accelerates onto the highway, and moves to the rear bedroom. She presses her fingertips to the huge window, watching the ruined husk of New York recede behind us in a red-orange blaze of sunlight. Then she sits on one of the couches, looks at me, and pats the spot beside her.
I sink down next to her on the brown plaid cushion, wondering if she’s aware of the storm in my head, the lump in my throat. For as long as she’s known me, I’ve insisted I was no one. Now that I know I’m someone, she deserves to know who.
“I’ll . . . tell you . . .” My tongue fights the words like it’s my first day among the Living. “I’ll tell you . . . everything.”
Her eyes are guarded. She looks young, vulnerable, but not quite afraid. “Do you want to tell me everything?”
I hesitate. I let her see all my turmoil and terror. Then I say, “Yes.”
She nods. “Okay.” She leans her head against my shoulder. “But not now.”
“Not now?”
She releases a long, slow breath and closes her eyes. “Not now.”
Her face is pale with exhaustion. Her eyelids are puffy from recent rivers of tears. Of course not now. There will be time for confessions—and their consequences—on the long road ahead. For now I’ll let her rest. For now I’ll be grateful for her head on my shoulder, for each remaining moment of trust.
Behind us, the city shrinks against the sky like it’s melting in the sunset’s fire. I watch until it’s gone and imagine everything I did there melting away with it. Then I dismiss this useless fantasy. My past is not behind me. It’s in front of me, marching west with a vast army. And we are chasing it.
WE