How to Disappear (21 page)

“Can we
please
go?” he says. He takes the grocery bag and drags me out the door.

All the way to the car, he’s bent over me like a live raincoat with a hood. My head is under his chin for part of the walk, and then he’s moving from one side of me to the other on the sidewalk, like he can’t make up his mind.

I say, “You’re acting kind of strange.”

He says, “Hurry up.”

We drive through student housing, south of the college, and then pull onto the freeway. Then off. Then on again.

I say, “Do you even know where we’re going?”

“It’s a surprise.”

Then it occurs to me that maybe this is the big seduction scene.

A car that smells like peanut butter sandwiches so isn’t what I had in mind.

He reaches behind my head and weaves his fingers through my hair. “We could be in the mountains in two hours. It’ll be awesome.”

Except he’s changed directions twice.

I say, “Are you all right? Listen, if you’d rather go to a motel instead of the mountains, I might be open to it.”

One last slight fling.

Why not?

I know why not, but I halfway don’t care.

“You
might
be?” he says. “I have to keep outwitting you to hang on to my virtue.”

“Stop teasing me.”

“I’m sorry.” He sounds kind of shocked, actually. “You want to go to a motel with me?”

Shock is not what I was after. “That might not mean what you think it means. You know, fool around a little. Not conceive your first-born child. Sack out. Beats going into a ditch when the driver falls asleep.”

“So fooling around with me . . . or whatever . . . would be a step up from being in a car wreck?”

“Possibly two steps. Even three.” I have no idea what I’m doing to freak him out, but he’s driving like a crazy person. Perfect speed limit, checking his rearview constantly. First we were pointed south, then west, and now we’re pointed toward the mountains.

I say, “We could park and eat sandwiches. We could wait a while. Maybe you’ll feel better.”

“Wait for what?” He’s shouting at me.

“Don’t yell at me! It’s not like I’m questioning your manhood. Do you want me to drive?”

He shouts, “I’m fine!” Looking straight ahead, he says, “I need to talk to you. Let’s get out of here.”

We need to talk???
This is
so
not what I had in mind.

“Just so you know, you can’t break up with people after you drive them two hours from home. It’s bad form. If that’s what this is.” I’m rethinking my stealth breakup by disappearance. If this is what breaking up with him feels like.

“How can we break up if we were never together?”

This feels like a blow to the head until I remember I’m the one who said we weren’t together in the first, second, and third place.

“Are you teasing me?” I say. “Because I
thought
all was forgiven. Only
then
you call me at three in the morning because you’re pissed off and you want a sandwich.”

“Are you angry? You sound angry.”

I snap, “I’m not angry!”

“Because if you’re angry that I didn’t spill my guts about how it felt to have a guy three times my size come at me with a belt buckle, get used to being angry.”

“
You’re
the one who’s angry. And I wasn’t pressuring you to spill anything. When you said you couldn’t talk about it, I respected that.”

J accelerates around a curve so fast, I’m afraid we’re going to spin out.

I try again. I touch his arm. “I hate what happened to you. And”—giant leap—“I understand. I do. I get what it’s like to have somebody you lean on turn on you. I get not being able to talk about it.”

He tightens his grip on my hair. “Why, did somebody turn on you?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

He pulls his hand out of my hair. “That’s not funny.” Scary voice I do not want to hear again. Ever.

“You so don’t get me! I wasn’t mocking you! Stop growling at me!”

How could he think I’d tease him over something like that? I was being
honest
. We’re miles from civilization. We’ve turned off the main road and we’re heading into the national forest. Soon we’ll be fighting on hairpin turns. In mountains. Narrow roads, sheer drops. Fighting.

I’m from Northeast Ohio. It’s flat from crushing sheets of glacial ice. Taking the Greyhound bus across the Rockies was
a nightmare. Being scared that you’re about to crash through a guardrail because the driver is yelling at you isn’t romantic.

“I want to go home.”

He doesn’t say anything, just presses down on the accelerator.

“Turn the car around! I want to go home!”

He puts his hand on my hand. I don’t want it there. He says, “I’m sorry. Let’s go make up somewhere, okay? This is stupid. If I floor it, we’ll be there for sunrise.”

“Don’t floor it! Are you insane? And where will we be, exactly?”

“I planned this. This will be special.”

“Not that special! The first time we do it—
if
we ever do it—it won’t be make-up sex. Don’t even bother.”

“We have to talk. Not about that.”

“Talk to me
now
.”

“Wait until we get there.”

“Don’t order me around!”

“Don’t start!”

It’s like this all the way up into the mountains until we’re at the ridge of wherever we are—just us and the coyotes and whatever else they have around here that bites.

After three hours of acting like an asshole because, apparently, it’s my nature, I’m driving along with no idea of where I should take her. I had it planned out. I knew the terrain. Now all I know is I can’t go back there because I already led the lowlifes who followed me west from Yucca Valley Correctional to what was supposed to be the crime scene.

Where we go now is anyone’s guess, or, if I’m lucky, nobody’s guess.

Normally, I’m good under pressure. But this is life-and-death and, right now, I wish I had a sliver of my father’s lethal grace.

I pull off onto a gravel fire trail until the car is out of sight of the main road.

She looks so upset, I start to stroke her hair, but she pulls away. She says, “You’ve been yelling at me all the way here. You have to
say sorry like you mean it before you start making out with me.”

“I was patting your head!”

“I’m not your cocker spaniel!”

“Do you have a compulsion to turn things to crap?”

“No wonder your ex is your ex!”

She storms out of the car and runs into the unfamiliar woods, kicking the door shut behind her. It’s first light, and she’s running toward the rising sun. I squint, but I can barely see her.

I’m so pissed at her. I shout, “Wait up!”

She shouts back at me, “How could I be with such a jerk?”

I go running after her. This isn’t the way this was supposed to go down. I reach out—I’m about to grab her arm—but I wasn’t supposed to be overpowering her. There wasn’t supposed to be physical force and certainly not me yanking her arm out of its socket.

I take her hand instead, my fingers clamped like the jaws of a wrench.

“Don’t make me chase you down! Crap, Nicolette, I get that you—”

Nicolette?

What have I done?

Her hand twists out of my hand. I go for her wrist as she breaks away from me. A sharp kick to my ankle, and she catapults off me. There’s a yell like the cry before you break a board in half in karate, that
kiai
, and she’s gone. She’s racing deeper into the woods, and I’m running after her.

Every time my ankle comes down anything but straight on, where the terrain is uneven—every stride—I get a thrusting blade of pain. I want to kick her back. Then I have this feeling-like-shit moment because what kind of person wants to kick a girl who’s a foot shorter than he is?

And then the deeper thrust of realization: what I was supposed to be doing to her went far beyond kicking her. And the fact that I’m chasing her through this desiccated landscape with a gun in my hand doesn’t look good for me. But it doesn’t seem as if she’s going to stop long enough for me to tell her that the gun was in case the guys who decked me followed us. She’s not going to slow down long enough for me to say it’s in my hand because I can’t even walk fast with it stuck in the back of my jeans, and I couldn’t exactly drop in on her wearing a holster for her to discover while making out.

The girl can run. It’s the damned Cotter’s Mill Unified High School track team. Who knew she could sprint like this? When I catch sight of her, she’s bouncing off things like she grew up getting chased through the wilderness. She makes it over rocks and outcroppings of thistly bushes like Bambi—not Bambi in the headlights but surefooted Bambi.

She’s running toward the precipice, toward the cliffside of the narrow stretch of woods between the road and oblivion. When she realizes, she dodges back into the woods.

I’m waving this gun in front of me like a fool, like I was planning to shoot someone with it. This is something I’m not going to do.

I start to tuck it back into my waistband, not paying enough
attention. I go down, the thing in my outstretched hand, slamming a rock as I fall, and the thing fires. I fire it, and then my hand closes on nothing. I fire a gun, and I’m so startled, I don’t even hang on to it, don’t even brace my fall. I hear the thwack of my head against a tree trunk before I even feel it. My hands go to my head, without thinking, which you can’t do when there’s a gun involved. You can’t stop thinking ever (
think, Jack
) but especially not then.

I hear my head cracking open against the tree, and the gunshot, and myself saying, “Shit!” all at once, although they couldn’t have happened at once.

My forehead is wet, I’m bleeding from the temple, wet fingers, and Nicolette has the gun.

She’s crouched in a good position, a two-handed stance, the gun in her right hand, right arm braced with the left, not crying, not shaking, not in any way weak or hesitant or anything you’d want a girl with a gun on you to be.

“Did you shoot me?”

“Are you serious?” Her voice is vibrating with indignation. “You bumped your head when you ran into a bush. It’s a boo-boo. When I shoot you, you’ll need more than a Band-Aid.”

Then she lowers herself onto a rock, not losing her aim for a second.

“It’s not what you think. Cat, it’s not. Put down the gun.”

“Nicolette,” she says. “My name is Nicolette Holland. But you already knew that.”

She doesn’t put the gun down.

His name isn’t J.

And he isn’t my boyfriend or my semi-boyfriend or my friend.

He’s the angel of death. Maybe not death in general. Just
my
death. The opposite of my guardian angel.

The opposite of what I thought.

I’m staring at his face across his gun. I have to get this right the first time, because the kickback is going to throw me off. Also, the sight of him, his head coming apart in pieces like a clay pigeon, could be bad. I know it won’t happen like that, but I imagine his face breaking apart like a porcelain plate you drop on a tile floor.

This doesn’t upset me as much as it should.

Maybe answering the Sunday School question of whether, if it was either you or this other person you were deeply into until five minutes ago, you’d kill the other person.

It isn’t down to him or me yet, but I’ll shoot before it gets there.

So, yes.

I don’t want him looking at me like this.

Scared out of his mind but planning something.

I don’t want him to see my face.

I mean, I want him to see how much I want to kill him, but I don’t want him to think I’m weak because I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I want him in the dark.

My whole life is turning into a can-you-top-this fest of getting as angry as I thought I could possibly be. And then topping it.

This angry.

No,
this angry
.

No,
THIS ANGRY
.

I got therapy for this a long time ago, where the point was to figure out I wasn’t actually angry. No, Nicolette, you’re actually
sad
. Unbearably sad. Your mom is gone, and you’re left with this sweet Cuban stepfather you hardly even know.

But face it, as unbearably
sad
as I am now that my freaking boyfriend wanted to take me to see a romantic sunrise where he was going to freaking shoot me, the main thing is anger. Righteous anger.

Even if I deserved everything he planned to do to me, it wasn’t supposed to be
him
.

I’m this angry, and I’m not going down.

He is. Whoever he is.

I order him to close his eyes.

He just keeps watching me.

“Close your eyes!”

He says, “I can explain.”

I say,
“Shut the fuck up!”

I shut the fuck up because when the person with the gun tells you to do that, you do. We sit there as the sun gets hotter and starts to fry me, long enough for me to sweat through my flannel shirt, just this side of forever. The gun is trained on me. She doesn’t look away from me for a second, the whole time glaring at me.

And I’m not my father’s son as much as I was afraid I was because it’s taking a lot of effort not to piss myself.

I need to be thinking about ways out of here as I tense and untense my muscles, preparing to flee or lunge. I ought to be calculating what to do tonight—if I last that long—when it’s so dark, she can’t see me unless she comes so close that I can overpower her. But I’m just staring at her staring at me.

I can’t tell if she’s talking herself into shooting me or out of
it—or if I’m already dead. I wonder if the gun got messed up bouncing across the rock, and if she knows how to shoot it. But I look at her stance, the way she’s crouched, the way she’s got the gun braced, and I know she knows what she’s doing.

She says, “Eyes closed!” She sounds ferocious.

“What?”

“You heard me. Close them!”

I do, but not completely—I can still see a sliver of light and underbrush.