Kurt is driving loose, drifting into the other lane as he maneuvers around bends. He’s in no hurry to get home, but he finds that he’s having trouble slowing down. Kurt is about to come up on the STOP sign at the end of Milton Turnpike when he sees someone—a girl—crop up in the corner of his eye. Kurt jerks the wheel and the whole truck lurches to the left. The pickup truck doesn’t have any weight in the back, so it fishtails, rocking Kurt from side to side. He slams on the breaks and the tires scream; the sound punctures his ears. He doesn’t dare open his eyes until he feels himself stop sliding, and when he does, he sees the nose of his truck landed not far past the stop sign, but far enough to where it could get smacked by another car.
I hit her, he thinks. I fucking hit her.
He sees tomorrow’s headline plastered on the local news: DRIVER KILLS HIGH SCHOOLER IN HIT AND RUN. Because he still hasn’t gotten out of the car. He could drive away and be gone long before the rising sun lights up the dead girl’s body. Kurt takes a breath and tightens his hand on the steering wheel, then lets his hand drop. It lands heavy in his lap. He should face what he’s done. The way home should’ve been straightforward: from Sal’s Bar, drive on Milton Turnpike for three minutes, turn right onto Holmes Road, and finally arrive at Granite Street, on his right. I shouldn’t be here, he thinks as he steps out of the car. He would still be at Sal’s if the woman with the hawk tattoo on her shoulder hadn’t screamed when he tried to touch her. He keeps seeing her face, her pretty mouth suddenly ugly. Fucking embarrassing.
His ragged breath cuts the silence. Kurt’s eyes sweep across the road, looking for signs of decimation: smeared guts, a loose arm, white bits of bone.
But nothing. The road is clear.
“Hello?” he calls. Kurt’s breath exits his mouth in little puffs of vapor. If he wasn’t drunk, he’d feel the bite of cold air.
Off to his left, Kurt hears a branch snap.
“Yeah?” says the girl. She steps up from the ditch she must’ve launched herself into to get out of the way of his truck. Her hands are above her head as if she was trying to signal, I’m harmless.
“What are you doing out here?” says Kurt. His voice carries over the sound of the still-running engine.
The girl is still now, her whole body coiled as tight as a spring. He can’t see her face; she’s eclipsed in shadows. There aren’t any lights on the roads, not this far away from Main Street. But he can tell from leftover caveman-instinct that her eyes are trained on him, pinning him down. He takes a step towards her. She takes a step back. Kurt sucks his teeth and tries another step forward. He wobbles; the ground has become uneven. Maybe the beer is hitting him harder than he thought. He tries again.
“I almost hit you,” he says. “Do you think I want that on my conscience?” He can feel the girl’s eyes look him over once, twice. After a beat, she says,
“Can I have a ride?”
His first instinct is to laugh. Pick up a hitchhiker? She could be bait; her “home” could be a house with someone inside waiting to mug and murder him. For all Kurt knew, she could be the threat. She could call him in for kidnapping her, and he could get arrested. Who would the cops believe, a young girl or a grown man who was thrown out of a bar not even twenty minutes ago?
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” says Kurt.
He turns around in time to see a speeding Mazda going fast enough to leave his truck rocking in its wind. He looks back at the girl. Hell, he almost hit her, and he was only going—not as fast as that car. Kurt sucks his teeth.
“How far are you going?” “Five minutes down the road.”
Kurt wonders how much damage can be done in such a short amount of time. The woman in the bar taught him that it took almost no time at all to ruin someone’s night. So, a lot is the answer he comes up with. But if he wakes up tomorrow and reads in the local paper about a girl getting smeared by a car, he’ll know it’s his fault. He should do the right thing.
“All right, fine,” he says.
He turns back to the car, and he tracks her footsteps, the wet scrape of her shoes behind him. Kurt gets into the car and buckles his seatbelt. The girl climbs in after him. She brings a wet dog smell into the cab. In the glow of his dashboard, he can make out a frizzy halo of hair and the hollow outline of her thin face. She’s somewhere in-between the melting of baby fat and the plumpness of a woman. But during this transitional phase, she’s all bony teenager. Pretty maybe, if she hadn’t just dragged herself through the cold and been wind whipped by passing cars.
“Where to?” Kurt asks.
“You know Gala Drive?” she says. “You live on old Gail’s farm?”
“Yeah,” says the girl. “We live in the old barn though, not the farmhouse.” Kurt knows exactly what she’s talking about. It was big news in town when
Gail Gala decided to sell her farm to a house flipper from New York City. The farmland was big enough to divide into two separate properties. He drove past the property after the FOR SALE signs were up, just to be nosy. If he didn’t know this town like he knew every notch in Sal’s bartop, Kurt would’ve sworn he was in a different part of town.
“I remember when that property was just a farm,” he says.
The girl doesn’t say anything. Kurt feels a sharp spike of embarrassment as if he’s shared too much about himself. He clears his throat and checks to see if the girl is wearing a seatbelt. He wishes he kept a tin of Altoids or something in the car. His breath smells like a bakery.
Kurt throws his truck into drive. He straightens the car and picks up speed, edging more towards the middle of the road. It’s a little hard to drive. His eyes aren’t what they used to be. The turns seem to come up too fast, and he breaks hard to keep control of the car and not go flying off the edge. He’s self-conscious about his driving now that the girl is sitting next to him. She’s rigid all the way through, her spine stiff enough to lift off the back of the seat. Her hands are clenched so hard, Kurt is sure she’ll have half-moon imprints of her nails on her palms, if she doesn’t bite the heads off. Kurt is trying not to stare at her, but he finds his eyes drawn to her.
“Can I ask you something?” Kurt says. “Me first: are you drunk?”
Kurt says, “More than I thought.”
The girls declares her own silence before she says, “Okay, shoot.” “You know my question.”
“My boyfriend,” says the girl. “He was driving like an asshole.” “Was he drunk?”
“High.” “Asshole.”
“I got out at a stop sign. He drove off.”
“Doesn’t really sound like an upstanding guy, just leaving you like that.” The girl scoffs. “Yeah, well. I think we broke up.”
“There are worse things,” Kurt says.
“Yeah,” the girl says. There’s a wateriness to her voice now. Kurt knows enough about people to know that now is the time to quit.
“Turn right up here,” says the girl.
Kurt does as he’s told. He drives past the old farmhouse, a spot of solid black in the darkness; the lights aren’t on, nobody’s home. Further along the dirt road that cuts the two properties in half, there’s the barn that was converted into a house. The windows are lit up like yellow eyes that seem to watch how straight he pulls into the driveway. He pulls up beside a Mazda the size of a matchbox, one of those cars full of high school kids that Kurt usually sees speeding on the backroads.
The girl twists in her seat to look at Kurt, really look at him. He swallows. In the beam of the motion sensor light, he can see that she is pretty. Hauntingly so, with her gaunt face and the shadows playing around on her skin. She has the kind of eyes that can make a man shut up.
“This is me,” she says. Her voice shatters the sound of the engine running for one blissful moment.
“Guess so,” says Kurt.
In front of them, the garage door rattles to life and begins to rise, exposing the white belly of a new car bay. There are a couple of tools hung on the walls. From their clean heads, Kurt knows they haven’t been used. Two fat Escalades sit in the garage, so shiny and brand-new, they make the Mazda in the driveway look like a junker. He wonders if the Mazda is maybe hers, but before he can ask, Kurt sees the door open on a man built thick and squat like a bullet. From the way he charges the car, Kurt guesses this is the girl’s father. Kurt shifts in his seat. He hadn’t considered what might happen when he brought the girl home.
The man stops inches away for the grill of the truck. He becomes an apparition floating in the steam of car exhaust. His eyes flicker across the windshield, but Kurt knows he’s blinded by the headlights, otherwise his eyes would’ve stayed still on the girl.
“Romina?” says the girl’s father. His voice is cloudy through the glass. “That’s my cue,” she says.
Kurt wants to ask her if she’s okay—he never asked—but she’s already on the way out of the car. She slips away from him so fast, it leaves him confused. One second she’s safe in the shell of his car, and the next she’s gone. He looks at her—Romina—finally all lit up in the good light of the garage and his headlights. He watches her mouth move fast as she rushes to explain where she was. She gestures to the car, and even though he can’t hear her or read her lips, Kurt is imagining that she’s telling her father that Kurt’s a good man, someone who saved her. Different from her asshole boyfriend.
Romina’s father deflates without the threat of a fight. He raises his hand to Kurt—thank you—and Kurt knows he’s meant it to take it as his cue to leave. He watches Romina disappear into the garage. Kurt feels a tightening in his chest like he did in the bar right before they threw him out. He tells himself to relax. Romina is safe, and he did a good thing tonight.
Kurt is about to throw his truck in reverse when someone else enters the scene of the garage. A boy bordering on manhood is standing in the door to the garage. Romina has stopped advancing forward, and she has returned to her coiled-cobra state. She turns to her father. Kurt imagines her asking: How could you? She wants to know why her father let her boyfriend—ex-boyfriend—in the house.
Romina’s father tries to wave her inside, but she’s not moving, and Kurt thinks he loves her for it. Kurt’s fingers touch the door handle, ready in an instant to move in if the boyfriend tries anything, but this is the moment when Romina’s father remembers Kurt is parked in the driveway. Kurt watches Romina’s father reach up and click the garage door button. He hears the rattle of door, and the doors begin to descend on Kurt’s view as if to say, That’s all, folks!
But it isn’t all. Before the garage doors touch down, Kurt sees them pause, shudder, and then begin to climb back up. The scene on stage has changed. Romina and her father have gone inside, and the boyfriend—ex-boyfriend— is standing by the garage doors. He has a pair of car keys dangling from his hands. There’s a look on his face that Kurt doesn’t like because he can’t tell if its smugness or anger.
The kid stares at Kurt through the windshield as if he can see him. A smile dawns on his face, and Kurt’s breath pauses in his throat. The ex-boyfriend walks out of the garage, into the dark of the driveway. The next second, the kid is tapping on Kurt’s window. Kurt hesitates before pressing the button down. Both of them are silent until the whine of the opening window stops.
“I just wanted to thank you for taking Romina home,” says the kid. Then he adds, “Sir.”
I’m probably old enough to be his father, Kurt thinks.
“She told me you were driving pretty reckless out there,” says Kurt. “You didn’t make her feel safe.”
The kid shrugs and looks off into the distance. He’s got a black earring that winks at Kurt in the garage light.
“Did she say anything else about me?” “Just that you two broke up,” says Kurt.
“She’s said that a bunch of times. Never means it,” the kid says. “Do you have a point you want to get to?” Kurt asks.
The kid smiles and shrugs again. “Thanks for hunting her down.”
The kid disappears into the headlights of Kurt’s truck and then reappears at his Mazda. As he ducks into his car, Kurt tries hard to think of other things, like the fact that he is not Romina’s father; or that a woman can fight her own battles; this isn’t his battle. And then Kurt thinks, Who cares?
Behind him, the Mazda horn sounds, and then speeds off, shattering the silence that blanketed the night. Kurt sits in the driveway. He sits for so long, the motion sensor light goes out.
Finally, Kurt puts the truck in reverse and maneuvers back down the driveway. A deep kink starts to crank his neck. Kurt takes himself back the way he came from. His truck feels lighter without Romina in it, and he flies down every hill and drifts around every corner. He punches the radio onoffonoffonoff. Presses the gas harder. Takes a breath. The ugly wet-dog smell Romina dragged in with her seems to be in everything: the air, on his seats, right next to him. Drives a little faster. He keeps driving and driving and driving. He doesn’t stop.
Gabrielle Esposito is a graduate of SUNY Geneseo’s Creative Writing program. Her short stories have been published in The Manhattanville Review, 34TH Parallel, Gandy Dancer, and others. Gabrielle is an Adult Programming Librarian and teaches writing classes at libraries throughout New York.