“Just something I forgot to do before.”
BACK IN THE car, they started on the eight-hour drive to New Orleans. Gavin had friends there who they could stay with for a day or two. Once they were on I-75, she drifted in and out of sleep. When she was awake, she circled the events of the night in her head in a deep panic, convinced one minute that the worst of her suspicions were true, and then the next that she’d let her fear get the best of her. She’d barely noticed that she was in a moving car, let alone that Gavin, heretofore known as the guy from the record store, a friend of her psycho-ex-boyfriend, was in it with her. They’d known each other, formally, for less than three days. It seemed like so much longer.
But there they were, at the Circle K near Live Oak. They stopped for gas, gas station coffee in a foam cup, and original Corn Nuts at a convenience store in such a desolate place, even the dimmest lights drew hordes of moths and flying roaches as big as a toddler’s hand. As she was shaking the last clotted flecks of Coffee-mate into her cup it occurred to her that it was the kind of place where one might not be entirely surprised to bump into people who were fleeing a possible crime scene.
“You should get some rest,” she said, her voice dry and cracked from booze and adrenaline. “I’m OK to drive for an hour or two. It’s the Corn Nuts. Tough on the dental work, but they keep me awake.”
“You sure?” he asked, putting his hands on her shoulders.
She nodded, staring at the asphalt, inspecting a splatter of thick red ooze that she hoped was day-old Slurpee.
“Wake me up in an hour,” he said, as he moved his palm to the side of her face.
“I know this is weird—all of it,” he said, not in an unkind way. “Everybody’s leaving town. Classes were canceled, remember? We’re just changing the scenery. Getting a little distance. You’re gonna love these guys we’re staying with in New Orleans. It’ll be OK.”
“I know,” she said. “I think I know.”
The last time she made this drive north was when she was ten. She and her dad made a mostly silent journey north to Connecticut, in his off-white Buick LeSabre with brown velour interior, for his mother’s, her Grandma Young’s, funeral. Why did people have to die in order for her to leave Florida?
Betsy made it across most of the Panhandle before she couldn’t take the silence and the swarm of her own thoughts for another minute. She’d been memorizing the lyrics to the Afghan Whigs’s “You My Flower,” on repeat for an hour, astonished by Gavin’s ability to sleep through her “singing.” So she woke him up with a doughnut, a pint of Tropicana, and an airplane bottle of vodka in a parking lot near Mobile.
The original thought was that they’d stay with two of Gavin’s friends from Jacksonville, Tulane guys who worked at a bar near campus. When they arrived unannounced at their crumbling house off of St. Charles, the last address Gavin had written in his book, the place was empty. There was no sign of anyone, anywhere. In front of the house there was a wide porch with enough half-assembled bikes to make even Betsy wince, and a withering, yellowed pile of The Times-Picayune in the corner. Gavin left a message on an answering machine from the pay phone down the street, saying that they were in town and they’d swing back by again later.
“I didn’t recognize the voice on the recording,” he said. “I’m hoping it’s a roommate. Otherwise, they moved.”
They stopped for more coffee, better this time, but the heat of the day was mounting, pressing down on their hangovers, and they needed a place to sleep it off. They wandered around looking for a room. When they stumbled onto a sloping, defeated Victorian bed-and-breakfast with a vacancy sign in the window, they climbed the creaking steps before Betsy paused on the shady porch.
“I’m sure that you think I’m an unbelievable moron right now, and possibly a little crazy,” she said. “But thank you, you know, for getting me out of there.”
“You’re cute when you’re crazy. Plus, I’ve got nothing better to do,” he said in a way that made her think that maybe he meant it.