I shut my eyes and test myself. Like the game I used to play as a kid with my brother, when Mom would put a selection of items on a tray and we had to memorize as many as we could before Mom finished counting to five and covered the objects back up again. Then my brother and I would scribble furiously for twenty seconds writing down everything we could remember. I always won, which would infuriate my brother and send him stomping off to his room.
In law school I honed my technique and used a trick to help me recall the hundreds of cases I needed to know for exams. I would make up little stories. Marbury v Maloney was Maloney on his owny. Doyle v Ohio was Doyle shot Mike Loyal. The trick was to picture an actual scene like a movie. Maloney on his own in a playground as a kid because his mother had abandoned him. Doyle at home drinking with his friends before an altercation with his irate, meth-addicted friend, Mike Loyal. It worked like a charm. Even now, ten years later, I can still recall the mailbox rules off the top of my head. And there’s a story here, for sure, a vivid nightmare of a story that I won’t forget soon. This time the lead character isn’t Maloney or Doyle, it’s me.
*
It feels like we are heading north. It’s difficult to tell because we’ve been driving for what seems like days, in different directions. But north is my best guess, north into Oregon, maybe even as far as Washington State.
There’s a change in the air. It gets fresher. Goosebumps strike along my bare thighs. The sun seems further away. The sounds are different too, closer. No longer the open spaces of fields but something else. I angle my head back. Trees—tall, substantial, the smell of pine.
We leave the sealed road and I feel roughness beneath the tires. The suspension screeches and gravel pings.
Moonboot clatters inside the glove box. A few moments later the stereo bursts into life. Neil Young. Jimi Hendrix. Johnny Cash.
It looks like Moonboot is stuck in the dark ages and hasn’t heard of an iPod or Bluetooth because the music is on a cassette tape and being played on what is probably the original Capri car stereo. A homemade mix tape, spliced together. The songs have been recorded directly off the radio. I can tell because of the awkward transitions, the accidental clunk of the pause button before the song has ended properly, the clumsy manner the DJ has been edited out.
There are eight songs on side one, and seven and a half on side two. As we circle the rough terrain, Moonboot lets the tape play over and over. He is apparently a Johnny Cash fan because there are four Johnny songs in total, more than any of the others. I think of Joaquin Phoenix thumbing that band saw and Reese Witherspoon in her June Carter dress and the day I was shocked to see the real Johnny Cash on MTV, bloated and pockmarked and ancient, singing a cover of a Nine Inch Nails song, “Hurt.” I think about how I wept because by that time June Carter was dead and Johnny looked like he was very near the end himself. It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen—this once great, diabetes-riddled old man singing about how hurt he was, the saddest thing, perhaps, other than being kidnapped from a gas station and tied up for days in the backseat of a car by a lunatic who had a liking for classic rock and Kermit the Frog.
8
I need the bathroom again. But I don’t want to ask. I don’t want his pity. I don’t want his favors. So I just go. Warm fluid seeps between my thighs and I experience a tiny burst of satisfaction that I am peeing all over his precious, mocha-colored upholstery. Then I think that maybe if I can make myself as filthy as I can he won’t touch me. But that would mean number twos, and I can’t bring myself to do that. Not yet, anyway.
My body is feeling the effects of being stationary for so long. The tendons in my shoulders are screaming. My arms ache from being tied behind my back. Both legs are in permanent cramp. The cloth mask has become like a second face and, perversely, I’m beginning to find comfort in it. Like a child in a living room tent made out of bed sheets. It gives me a sense of privacy, a distance between him and me.
We snake around the road. I feel the pull of gravity as we go uphill. Loose items roll inside the trunk. A hazy memory comes to me. He put me there originally, that first day at the Chevron, into the trunk. Then I get worried because I don’t remember how I got from the trunk to the backseat. Whole snatches of time are blank. Did he do something to me that I don’t know about?
The thought of him touching me when I was unconscious makes me sick, but there’s no way to tell because my clothes are intact. Then I start thinking that eventually we’re going to stop and eventually he’s going to want something from me—sex, violence, my life. But before I go further down that road, I stop myself. For now I’m alive and uninjured and lucid. Like my mother used to say—one raisin at a time, Amelia Jane.
*
He turns on the headlights. I know this because there’s an audible hum, like an old tube TV warming up. I can also see the blue glow of the dash. The Capri corkscrews up the mountain, because that’s what it is by now, a mountain, and my body rolls hard against the backseat and my ears pop and I feel oh so carsick. Just when I think I might throw up, the terrain flattens out and we are circling back down the other side.
About halfway Led Zeppelin begins to slur. Moonboot jabs a button and tries to remove the cassette tape but the ribbon is caught and he tugs and the tape unspools and the car swerves, then swerves back as he corrects the steering, and he finally gets it all out and tosses the empty cassette on the empty passenger seat in a cloud of ribbon. I think that this might make him angry, especially if it’s a favorite mix tape, but he doesn’t seem bothered.
Instead he declares, “That’s it, fighter, we’re here.”
And the car rolls to a stop.
9
I used to think my father was the smartest man in the world. When I was little I would find him in his attic study, glasses perched on his nose, pouring over rolls of technical drawings. He was an engineer. He designed bridges and was known for inventing a new kind of strut called the Beverly Strut (named after my mother) which helped bridges avoid collapsing during earthquakes. He had this little model of the Golden Gate Bridge on his side table. He’d frown whenever I touched it.
He was always in his study working with his rulers and protractors and pens and charts. I knew it was important that he get it right, that cars and buses and motorcycles and people crossed bridges every day and they had to be safe.
Sometimes if I hung around long enough, he would give me a sheet of paper and a pencil and show me how to draw a simple plan for a birdhouse or go-cart or jewelry box. When I became too much of a pest, my mother would arrive and usher me out. Your father needs to work now, Amelia Jane, give him some peace and quiet. When I’d protest, he’d reach into the tin of fruit candies he kept in his top drawer and drop one into my palm and tell me he’d come and play later. I would go outside in the backyard and wait on the swing set or ride my bike around the yard with my brother. Sometimes I would look up at the study window and see my father standing there staring at us, smoking the cigarettes he wasn’t supposed to smoke.
I didn’t know it then but he wasn’t interested in bridges anymore. He was planning his escape, visualizing a new future, a different life without us. Then one day he left and never came back.
I used to ask my mother if he left because of me and she would say through wobbling lips that my father loved me very much and that nothing was my fault. I didn’t believe her because when my father was at work I would sneak up the stairs into his study and spin in his squeaking chair and pretend to smoke and mess about with the Golden Gate Bridge. He found out and didn’t like it and he left.