Rufus fucked me up?' She turns and looks at me. 'How do you feel?'
'I feel nothing.'
'You have somewhere to go?'
'Yeah. A long, long way from here.'
'Tell me about it.'
I smile at the picture my mind’s eye conjures of my cabin in the Yukon forest. I smell the tall firs. See the meadow at night. Think of lying in its cold, soft grass, beneath the quiet majesty of the northern lights. God, I’d love to see the aurora borealis again.
'It’s paradise,' I say, pouring more water down her spine.
'You could go back, yeah?'
'Sure.'
'Is it quiet there?'
'Very.'
'Middle of nowhere, right?'
'Yes. And beautiful. So beautiful.'
'No one bothers you.'
'Not there they don’t. You live quietly, simply. It’s lonely, but a good kind of lonely.'
'Part of me would like to go back with you.'
'Just turn your back on everything?'
'It’s all bullshit anyway. What I did today—if I’m capable, anyone is. Except they don’t know it. They live under the illusion of decency, goodness.'
'You, me, and Max, huh?'
'I could have a garden. Live off the land, you know. Never see anyone. You could write.'
'Have to come up with a great pseudonym.'
'Yeah, and you’d publish books again, Andy. Maybe even write about this.'
'And one day, after twenty, thirty years, when everyone’s forgotten, we come back.'
I sit down on the tile. Steam curls off the surface of the bathwater, the mirror fogged, walls sweating. Vi leans against the side of the tub and stares at me, not quite as pretty as when I first saw her that raw November afternoon in Howard’s Pub, her beauty now tinged with hardness.
'No,' she says. 'We never come back.'
# # #
At some point during the night, Vi lifts Max from his place between us, and puts him to bed on his pallet on the floor. She climbs back under the covers and snuggles up beside me.
I’m awake. I don’t anticipate sleeping tonight.
'Will you hold me?' she asks.
I raise my arm and she rests her head on my shotgun-bruised shoulder. It’s cold in this room. Most of our clothes lie drying in the bathtub.
Vi drapes her leg over mine and whispers, 'What are we going to do tomorrow?'
I cup her face in my hands.
Last two souls on the face of the Earth.
There are things I want to say to her—shards of comfort and warmth and nothing’s as bad as it seems and no you are not a bad person and yes we did the right thing today.
But they would be lies, and we are so far beyond that now.
# # #
I don’t sleep.
Before dawn, I slip out of the room and walk down to the beach. I sit in soft sand, watch the tide push in. The lights of a shrimp boat shine several miles out. No sound save the breakers.
A lean and tall older gentleman jogs past, northbound toward the five a.m. twinkling of Kill Devil Hills. As I watch him dwindling up the coast, it hits me—there are people who will live eighty-five years and never know a fraction of the horror I experienced yesterday.
Sure, they’ll mourn the passing of parents, a spouse, close friends.
They might suffer the depression of living a life of compromise.
Shit jobs. Marginalization. Termination. Resignation. Envy.
They’ll see wars on television—children pulled out from rubble in scorched, bullet-ridden rags, maimed and dead.
But they will not know gunning a young woman down on a tidal flat to save themselves. Won’t face the knowledge that they’re capable. How easily they’d do it. That the squalor of humanity, broadcast by grim robots on the evening news, abides also in them.
Their decency is a luxury, their violence sleeps for now, those whose monsters are car wrecks and cancer and the boredom of the suburbs, those who believe goodness is the prevailing station of our species. Their age of civilization and progress is a flicker in the dark eternity of violence.
Now light tinges the Outer Banks with a soft peach stain.
I watch a fisherman wade out into the warm surf.
Gulls are crying, Nags Head waking, that delicate hour of the morning gone as the Earth turns into the sun’s dominion, a cuticle of pink fire peeking over the edge of the sea.
# # #
I climb into bed and spoon Vi. She stirs. I stroke her yellow hair, still damp from last night’s bath, smelling faintly of that cheap motel conditioner.
'Oh, Max,' she murmurs. 'I want to…yeah.'
She turns over. Smiling. At peace.
When her eyes open, they die.
'I was dreaming.'
'It was a nice one.'
'Yeah. You shaved. I like it.'
She sits up, crawls to the end of the bed, and peers down at her son.
'Where’d you go this morning, Andy?'
'Down to the beach. Watched the sun come up.'
'I didn’t think you were coming back. Thought that’s how you were going to do it. Just slip away, back to your paradise.'
I hear the baby’s soft cry. Vi leans down, lifts him up.
'Are you hungry, little baby boy?' she coos.
Vi slides off the bed and comes to her feet, standing there in panties and undershirt, Max groping at her breasts.
'I’m ready, Andy,' she says.
'Ready?'
'To go home.'
# # #
I drive 64 west, over the long bridges that span the sounds of Roanoke and Croaton and the Alligator River. We rise and rise above the ocean. The flatness of the coastal plain gives way to rolling pasture and forest, the consistency of the soil turning from sand to rich red clay, those toothpick pines of the eastern swamps now crowded and lost among maple and hickory.
It feels strange to be inland. The farther from the sea we run, the Outer Banks seem more like afterimages of dreams. It would be so easy and comforting to find atonement in the remoteness and disorientation of our imprisonment. I glance at Vi, wondering if she’ll coax the last nine months and what she did on Portsmouth into donning the aura of a brutal fantasy, one more nightmare to repress.
At four o’clock, we skirt the south side of Raleigh and bore westward, across Jordan Lake, through Pittsboro, Siler City, and Ramseur. We enter the town of Lexington as the sun balances on the horizon, so blinding I can scarcely see the road.
'You hungry?' I ask, catching Vi’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
