Twenty-Eight
Late December should have made a terrible time to travel cross-country by car, although Sarah found it perfect. The three of them shielded from hostile winds and ice in their steel cocoon, skimming over snowy plains, a scarred white earth as far as the eye could see and the imagination reach.
There had been no talking Clay out of this once he’d made up his mind. He was going to Boston, by way of Indianapolis, and that was final. He would drive and drive, and if his car fell to pieces along the way, he would walk, and if he froze, he would die where he fell.
There had been no talking Clay out of it, but Sarah didn’t think Adrienne had really tried. Perhaps because she recognized its futility and was now past doing things for the sake of obligation. Or perhaps because, by insisting she accompany him as he went to confront his mysterious mentor, she might wring a few extra final days out of their allotted time before bureaucracy slammed the door on them for good. She would thwart institutional callousness with one last act of defiance.
“You’ve really gone rogue now, haven’t you?” Sarah asked her, barely an hour out of Denver but already they were crossing chilly white plains, the mountains forgotten. Adrienne behind the wheel of her own car, no less — it was newer and more reliable than Sarah’s, and certainly Clay’s.
“I guess I have,” said Adrienne. “Do you think I’m wrong?”
“Well of course not, it’s not like you’ve kidnapped a minor, now, is it?”
“No, but… I’m not sure exactly
At the moment Clay lay sleeping across the backseat. He had looked very tired when they’d left; had looked that way each time Sarah had seen him during the past few days, as if he were slowly wearing away from some effort within that she could only imagine. Sleeping, he looked worse; fragile, even.
They weren’t so tough, men weren’t. She had met several women who had problems with men on the basis of gender alone, as if that XY chromosome pattern was in itself deserving of hatred. But Sarah had often caught wind of a strange underlying resentment in such attitudes, resentment of men’s heavier bodies, their denser bones, thicker muscles. She had always found it a shortsighted view: as if brute strength really equated with inner power, and precluded sensitivity entirely. It wasn’t necessarily so.
She had been intimate with a man only once in her life. Her sole heterosexual fling, it was memorable not only for its singularity, but for just how truly wrenching the experience had been… though not for the expected reasons.
It had come late in high school, before she had been certain who she really was. In this cliquish world, classmates were already talking about her behind her back, although she was finding that she cared less and less. She accepted a rare date, and when he later wanted to park she didn’t try to talk him out of it. This was something she
The night had been autumn cool, the backseat of her date’s car roomy. She would always remember the way his hands trembled as he touched her while pushing into her. She would always remember the endearing hesitancy of his kisses, and the pounding of his heart that she could feel against her own chest. He had wanted so much for everything to be perfect — this was obvious in retrospect — yet even before they were done, she lay there knowing it wasn’t for her. No repulsion, and while it would have been hard to deny that at least a few of the sensations were pleasurable, neither was there any real gratification. It was simply wrong; this was not her, not who she was, nor the person she was growing into. It was like trying to align two puzzle pieces with a hammer instead of relying on a natural fit.
Maybe she shouldn’t have been so honest afterward. She could have lied to spare his feelings. But likely he would have known anyway, sensed her remoteness. He was young and he was eager, but he was also shy enough to be terrified and considerate enough to ask how she felt rather than presume to tell her.
So Sarah hit him with the truth, and just as clearly as she would remember his hands and heart, so too would she remember the crushed expression he wore. And the way he cried, silently, turning away from her to face the nearest window as the glass fogged from his breath. She would always remember the immensity of the power she felt: a simple rejection could devastate, could shake people to their foundations and make them wonder if everything they had always believed about themselves hadn’t been wrong all along.
It’s not your fault, this is just the way I am, she tried to convince him, her hand on his bare shoulder until he pulled away. While eventually it seemed to sink in, how sad he looked all the same, when finally he could face her. Trying to smile, half-sick, through wet eyes, and only then did she realize it wasn’t just sex — the wound cut deeper. Maybe he loved her, or thought he had, or had attached hopes to her that she’d never anticipated. He was not an especially popular young man; few noticed him; he blended well into backgrounds. Maybe he had been thrilled just to be with her.
She could see it all in his eyes, those hopes. Only he seemed clearly unable to speak of them.
“I won’t tell anybody if you don’t want me to,” he said at last. “About you, I mean.”
How naive this was. Surely he had heard rumors of her by now, but if not, then he had to know that rumors were sure to spread whether or not he contributed. Bless his aching heart. If he could not share with her any of his misbegotten hopes, at least he could grant her what he saw as one final gift: a vow of silence.
It was something men excelled at… even when it ate them alive.
So men weren’t so tough, no. But they could try to be noble. Noble was better by far.
As she turned toward the backseat, to watch over Clay’s sleeping form, disturbed only by the small twitches, she knew that the noblest endeavor of all was to attempt to conquer everything that was worst in yourself.
“I think you’re doing the right thing,” she finally said to Adrienne.
“Then why do I feel guilty of something?”
“Because the situation, and the people who led you into it, forced you to make decisions you never had to make before. If you’d been a team player all the way,
Hands clenching on the wheel, she watched plains of filthy white wash past the car. “I’d rather not feel either way.”
“You couldn’t abandon him in two more days just because they cut your money. You couldn’t let him make this trip alone.” Sarah doodled in the film misted on her side window. “Maybe when we get back to Denver, he’ll feel like it’s time to close out what you’ve been doing — did you ever think of that? Look at it like cultures where the people don’t segregate their spiritual values from everyday life. Pilgrimages often mark the end of one phase of a person’s life and the beginning of the next. Maybe it’ll be that way with Clay. Maybe this is his way of putting the last few months behind him, so he can get on with the rest of his life.”
“Oh, my optimist.” Adrienne smiled at her, her lean face too thin, cheekbones sharper than before. She wore the recent strains as well, and made them her own. But she was so plaintively hopeful in that smile that all was softened. “I hope you’re right.”
They both turned to look once more at the slumbering Clay when he voiced some low and inarticulate cry from the heart of a nightmare at midmorning. One fist brushed spastically at the side of his face, fell still, curled open. Sarah reached over to drape him with a small blanket they had taken along, and it seemed to calm him. For the moment, at least.
“To dream,” she said, “perchance to sleep.”
The day ground onward and they lost it to driving, lost an hour in western Kansas when crossing time zones.
