Brenda had taken advantage of her weakened state. It was the only explanation Stella could come up with. Stella had told Brenda about the dreams she’d pushed aside—about her aspirations of working as a creative director for an ad agency or as an animator—and Brenda had made her believe they were possible. Brenda had tricked Stella into thinking if she just got in her car, drove to Boston, and tried, that she would succeed.
But the smoke billowing out from under the hood of her car told a very different, very realistic story: the end of the road was never where you expected it to be.
Often, it was much, much sooner.
2
Stella should have been paying closer attention to where she was going.
According to Brenda, driving blindly without concern for where exactly you were going was part of the fun, but Stella disagreed.
“Fun” would have been getting her car serviced before taking it on a long trip.
“Fun” would have been replenishing her emergency stash of water bottles and protein bars in the trunk.
True, genuine “fun” would have been informing someone in her life—literally anyone—about where she was going and when to expect to hear from her. As it was, though, no one knew Stella was now stranded in the middle of nowhere with no cell-phone service and one protein bar (in a flavor she despised). No one was looking for her. She was entirely alone.
The knock of loneliness at the back door of her mind grew louder, threatening to drown out the rest of her thoughts, but Stella took a deep breath. She was no more alone now than she had been at home this afternoon. No more alone now than she had been for the last five weeks. The problem now wasn’t that she was alone; it was that her car wouldn’t start back up. Making the problem bigger than it really was wouldn’t help.
Side-stepping the enticing pity party she wanted badly to throw for herself, Stella dusted the protein crumbs from her shirt and pulled the latch under her seat to pop the hood. Immediately, foul smoke swirled out from under the hood.
“It could be worse,” she said aloud, dispelling her own dark thoughts.
She rattled off all the ways it could be worse: it could be an outright fire in her engine. She could have gotten in an accident and been injured. She could have taken a wrong turn and driven straight off a cliff into the ocean.
Things could always be worse.
Luckily, Stella wasn’t entirely useless when it came to cars. One benefit of being a single mom was that Stella had learned how to look out for herself. She’d taught herself to change a flat tire when Jace was only six months old. He’d suffered from colic, so neither of them had slept more than a couple of hours straight in days, and the neighbors kept banging on the thin walls of her studio apartment and screaming for her to stop the crying. Stella remembered feeling as if the world was closing in on her like booby-trapped walls covered in spikes in an adventure movie.
To get out, she’d packed a diaper bag, a sandwich for herself, and a jar of pureed carrots for Jace and had driven to the edge of town. The farm was owned by someone, but Stella had been to the spot many times in her teen years with friends and boyfriends, and it was far enough away from the house that no one would ever know.
She had settled underneath a large tree just beyond a busted wooden fence. It offered plenty of shade and a worn spot at the base where too many people to count had sat and looked out on the fields beyond. She sat there with Jace, admiring his plump cheeks and pink skin in the sunlight, and the soft breeze felt like the first breath of fresh air she’d breathed in months. It felt like cracking open a window in a forgotten attic and dusting away the cobwebs.
She’d cried, Jace had giggled, and after an hour, they had gotten back in the car to drive home.
Only to discover the tire was flat. Somewhere on the dirt road, she’d driven over a nail, and while she’d sat at the base of the tree enjoying her afternoon, the air had been leaking out of her tire.
Once again, the world had felt heavy, the odds stacked against her. She didn’t have a cell phone, she’d already eaten her sandwich, and Jace only had enough diapers left for two hours at most. Stella had to figure this out.
So, she did.
Stella had set Jace’s car seat along the side of the road and sang him songs as she pulled out the spare tire and accompanying tools that came along with the car when she’d bought it. It had taken her an hour, and she had to change a dirty diaper in the middle, but she had done it, and she’d never felt more accomplished.
Of course, a flat tire was a bit more straightforward than whatever was happening now.
The battery light in the dash had never worked right. It flicked on and off for seemingly no reason—at least not that Stella or her usual mechanic could tell—so she had mostly taken to ignoring it. In this case, that may have been her downfall.
She could remember the battery light flicking on not long after she left her house. The lights in the dash also seemed dimmer, but she hadn’t paid them any mind as she drove, instead trying to take Brenda’s advice and push all worries from her mind. As it turned out, she should have been worried.
The sun was almost entirely hidden behind the horizon, and the sky was gray, only moments from fading to black. Stella pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight. She hoped illuminating the situation might make it clear what is going on, but all it did was make her painfully aware she had no idea what she
