Open Road

From the notebook in the glove box. Page one hundred and twelve.

…

*September 14. A year later. Somewhere on U.S. 50, Nevada.*

My father used to say you should write it down.

He meant numbers, mostly. Inventory counts. Serial numbers. The weight of a crate. He kept a green ledger in the kitchen drawer and filled it in every night with a pencil, in a square neat hand, and when I was nine and asked him why, he said: Because a thing that's written down can't be argued with, Vee. And because someday you'll want to know how you got here.

I never wrote anything down. For eleven years I didn't leave a single trace of myself on any page in any town. It was the whole point. A person who leaves nothing can't be found.

I found this notebook in the glove box of the Charger in March. Roman had put it there. He didn't say anything. It was a plain green ledger, hardbound, with a pencil on a string, and the first page had one line in his narrow upright hand.

In case you would like to know how you got here.

I haven't forgiven him for being right.

So here's a page. It's the middle of the afternoon. The road is straight and empty and the color of an old bone, and the Charger is doing seventy-five on its own with my knee on the wheel, which Roman says is illegal and unsafe and which he hasn't asked me to stop. He's in the passenger seat with his boots on the dash and a paper map in his lap, pretending to read it. He hasn't turned a page in forty minutes. He's watching the road.

I'll write quickly. He's going to want to stop for pie.

…

Things that have happened since Vegas (a partial list, in no order):

*One. The plaque went up at Fort Benning on the first of March. Bronze, about the size of a cookie sheet, in the Ordnance hall, between a case of antique fuses and a portrait of a man with magnificent whiskers. Colonel James A. Callahan. A man of exactitude and honor. There were forty people there, none of whom I knew. A brigadier named Hollis made a speech. I don't remember a word. What I remember is a very old man in a wheelchair who came up afterward, with an oxygen tube in his nose and a medal on his chest, and took my hand in both of his and said, I served under him in 'ninety-one. He counted the bullets in the box. Every one. He said somebody had to.*

I held on to that old man's hand for a long time.

Roman stood behind me. He didn't say anything. He just put his palm flat between my shoulder blades and left it there, a warm weight, the way you'd put a hand on the back of a horse.

*Two.* Silas and Juno were married in June, on the ranch, under the cottonwoods, by a judge from Winnemucca who turned out to be Bianca's godmother. Juno wore lime green. Silas wore a black suit, a gray tie, and the expression of a man being led to a firing squad that he's been looking forward to for years. He wept during the vows. He has denied it. There is a photograph.

The ring was made from the bullet. Juno's said yes to that already, in March, in the kitchen, at four in the morning. She said, Silas, I've been answering for about eight weeks now, and you've been too polite to notice. He said he'd been waiting for the correct moment. She said, This is the correct moment. He said, It's four in the morning. She said, Terminator Ken, I swear to God.

They live in the guest house. They have a dog.

*Three.* Dante got his job back.

Not the old one. A new one, with a different title and no keys. He runs logistics for the Foundry's civilian division, out of an office in Reno with a window and a plant. He sees Bianca every day. He takes her to school. He told me once, over a bowl of pasta, that he'd spent three years waiting for someone to tell him he was forgiven, and had finally understood that it was never going to come in a sentence. It would come in a Tuesday. It would come in a school pickup line. It would come, he said, in the quiet way that a thing stops hurting.

Roman hasn't said the word to him. He hasn't had to. He passes him the salt.

*Four.* Adrian Kessler pled guilty to thirty-one counts. He got twenty-two years. He writes Roman a letter every month on lined yellow paper, in handwriting like a spider on a bender. Roman reads them on the porch. He doesn't answer. But last week, when I was cleaning out the study, I found the stack in the bottom drawer, tied with a ribbon, and on top of it a note, in pencil, in the margin of the latest letter.

He is learning to knit.

I put it back. I thought about it for a long time.

*Five.* Nikolai Rurik is in a federal facility in Colorado. He's refused to speak. He's refused visitors, lawyers, books. But Whitaker says he asked for one thing, in his second month. A pen. She gave him a cheap blue ballpoint. He's been writing, in Russian, in tiny close handwriting, for hours every day. Nobody knows what. She thinks it might be a confession. I think it might be a letter.

I don't know who to.

I find that I can't hate him. I tried. I sat in my shed in Newark one night with a wrench in my hand and a picture of the rope in the garage in my head and I tried. But all I could see was a boy of nine in a basement in Leningrad, deciding that he would never need anyone, and keeping the promise for fifty years.

I'm not saying it's an excuse. I'm only saying I know what it costs.

*Six.* I've started a second Challenger.

It's for Mateo. He's twenty-four. He's got a nineteen-seventy-three Dart that a man in Elko was going to crush, and I got it for four hundred dollars and a case of beer. He's learning the carburetor. He's terrible at it. We have fights about the choke. Roman comes in sometimes with a thermos and stands behind us with his arms folded, saying nothing, with a look of the most exquisite suffering.

I think he's happy.

I think it's what happy looks like on him.

…

I'll say the last one slowly.

*Seven.* I haven't counted an exit in four hundred and nine days.

I know because I counted the days. It's funny. It's the only thing I still count. Every morning I wake up and I look at the ceiling and I think, no, and I roll over, and there he is, asleep, with one arm flung out across the pillow and his mouth a little open, looking about twelve. Some mornings I lie there a long time. Some mornings I put my hand flat on his chest and just feel it go, up and down, up and down, a tide.

It's a very small thing. It doesn't seem like it should matter. A woman doesn't look at a door. That's all.

But I used to know the way out of every room in America. I'd lie awake in a motel in Tulsa and draw the floor plan on the ceiling in my head: window, stairwell, laundry chute, roof. I'd done it so long I thought it was a talent. I thought it was what I was for.

It turns out I was only afraid.

It turns out those are different things.

…

The old line, the one I used to say, the one I had tattooed in my head like a number on a wrist:

Fish swim in the deep ocean. Birds fly in the high sky.

I said it the day I met him. I said it in a hangar, with a gun on me, with my chin up. I meant: I belong to nobody. I meant: You can't hold me. I thought it was the bravest thing a person could say.

It was only half a sentence.

I figured that out in a garage in January. I'd been sitting there with a socket wrench and Roman was on his back under the car and a radio was playing. I remember I stopped, with the wrench in my hand, and thought about it. The ocean. The sky. How they never touch. How you can stand at the edge of the world and look out and see the exact line where one stops and the other starts, and it looks like a seam, and it's a lie.

They're the same blue.

If you stand in the right place.

So here's the rest of it. I'm putting it in the book so I can't argue with it.

Fish swim in the deep ocean. Birds fly in the high sky.

And sometimes, at the end of the day, they choose the same shore.

…

I can hear him.

He's put the map down. He's leaning over, one hand on the dash, looking out at the road. There's a little town coming up. I can see a water tower and a gas station and a sign that says *PIE* in red paint. The light's going gold. There's a hawk riding the wind over the sagebrush, a mile off, turning slowly, like a thought.

He has just said, with great gravity, "I believe I would like to stop."

I said, "You always want to stop."

He said, "I have a weakness for rhubarb."

I said, "It's a gas station."

He said, "It has a sign."

Pencil down. He's doing the eyebrow.

…

*

The Charger rolled into the little town at six o'clock and did not stop.

She had meant to. She had slowed at the water tower, and put on the signal, and eased across the empty main street toward the red-painted sign and the pumps. She had a hand on the wheel and a foot on the brake and an entire speech prepared about the dangers of rhubarb.

And then, as she came level with the gas station, he put his hand on her knee.

It was a light touch. A warm one. She looked across.

He was looking at her. He had taken his boots off the dash. The map lay on the floor. In the last gold light, with the dust on his face and the hawk wheeling in the window behind his head, he looked just as he had in the jungle, in the rain, in the Vegas dawn, like a man who has seen the end of the world and been surprised by what came after.

"Where to?" said Roman.

"What?"

"You have the keys. You have a full tank and a free week. You have a pardon, and a passport, and no one in the world who has the right to tell you where to go." He smiled. It reached his eyes. "I merely wished to ask where you would like to drive."

She looked at the road.

It ran away in front of her, long and straight and golden, past the gas station and the water tower and the last tired fence post, into a country of red rock and pale sky and enormous silence. It had no end that she could see. It went on and on, past the edge of the map, through every state she'd ever run from and a hundred she'd never seen. It was the same road. It was the same car. It was the same woman behind the wheel.

But the thing that was different, she thought, was the direction.

For eleven years she had driven away. Away from towns, from names, from faces. Away from the rope in the garage and the lies on the paper and the dead man in the doorway of her memory. Every road she had ever taken had pointed at the rearview mirror. She had held a map of everything she was running from, and called it freedom.

She glanced in the mirror.

There was nothing in it. Only the road, and the dust, and the sinking sun.

She turned her eyes back to the windshield.

"Home," said Vega.

"Home?"

"The long way."

"That could take some time."

"I know."

"A week, at least."

"Maybe two."

"I shall have to cancel a meeting."

"You hate meetings."

"I do." The corner of his left eye creased. "That is rather the point."

She laughed.

She took her foot off the brake. She put it on the gas. The Hellcat gave a deep, content, rumbling purr, and the gas station slid by, and the sign that said *PIE* went past in a blur of red, and Roman said, with extreme dignity and a slight tremor in his voice, "I note for the record that we have missed the rhubarb."

"We'll get it on the way back."

"Will we?"

"We'll get it on the way home."

She felt his hand tighten on her knee.

The town fell behind. The light poured out across the sage, long and gold and unhurried, and the shadow of the car ran beside them on the shoulder, narrow and quick, like a dog. The wind came in the windows. It smelled of dust and rain and a thousand miles. She rolled her shoulders. She flexed her hands on the wheel. She felt the road come up through the tires, through the frame, through the seat, a long low hum, the pulse of the world.

Fish swim in the deep ocean, she thought. Birds fly in the high sky.

She reached over without looking and found his hand.

It was there. It was always there. It closed around hers, warm and dry and sure, and held on, and she held on back.

"Roman," she said.

"Yes?"

"Put on some Springsteen."

For a moment he was quite still.

Then he leaned forward, slowly, with a soft, caught, unsteady laugh, and turned the dial, and the old song came up out of the dark of the dashboard like a light coming on in a window. A guitar. A drum. A voice full of gravel and wanting and a long, long road.

They drove into the sunset with the windows down.

Neither of them looked back.

There was nothing behind them that they needed to outrun, and everything ahead that they'd chosen, and as the engine settled to a steady purr and the sky went from gold to rose to violet, she found that for the first time in her whole life the word forever did not sound like a trap.

It sounded like a road.

It sounded like a Tuesday.

It sounded like home.