The Divide (45 page)

He didn’t say how pretty she looked, in fact he barely gave her a glance, just walked past her into the bar and said the place looked like shit and they should go someplace else.

They found a restaurant farther along the street, a darker place with wooden booths and little red candle jars on the tables. They sat in a corner and ordered two beers and he drank his in two long drafts and ordered another. The food was poor but Abbie wasn’t going to let it spoil things and she told him all about the fruit picking and the good people she had met and the harsh conditions they lived in. Rolf nodded as if he knew all of this already. He hardly said a word and sometimes didn’t even seem to be listening.

“Are you okay?” she said at last.

“Sure. Why?”

“I don’t know. You’re just kind of quiet.”

“I’m tired, that’s all.”

“Did you miss me?”

Even as the words came out of her mouth, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. He sighed and cast his eyes upward in contempt.

“Yes, daaarling, I missed you terribly.”

He said it with such a sneer that she had to bite her lip and look down at her plate, but she said nothing. Tears for Rolf were simply a sign of weakness and she knew better than to cry. But he must have seen how hurt she was for he reached out a guilty hand and took hold of hers.

“I’m sorry. But you know how I feel about all that bourgeois shit.”

“Like missing someone you care for.”

He moved closer and put an arm around her and kissed her temple.

“I’m sorry. I missed you. Okay?”

She nodded and swallowed bravely and smiled.

“Can we go somewhere? Just for the weekend?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, someplace by the ocean. I want to walk beside the ocean.”

“I have to be in Seattle on Sunday.”

“Can I come?”

“No.”

He had never told her much but these days told her nothing. But Abbie knew from the newspapers some of the things that had been going on and that he was probably involved. From the Canadian border to northern California there had been a string of arson attacks, mostly on logging and biotech companies, the damage running into many millions of dollars. He said it was too risky for her to be involved anymore but Abbie suspected the real reason was that in Denver she had failed him, shown herself too weak and fearful.

There was a time when the harshness of this verdict had hurt her. But no longer. The truth was, she didn’t want to be involved. She still admired his passion and resolve. But these actions that she had once considered so heroic now seemed only futile and dangerous. And counterproductive too, because all they succeeded in doing was to generate sympathy for the greedy corporations that were the targets. Anyhow, Rolf had no doubt found some other young woman to help him. And probably to fuck as well, but Abbie tried not to think about that. She needed him now, more than ever.

“Then let’s go somewhere just for tonight and tomorrow,” she said. She kissed his neck and put her hand on his thigh. “Please. It’s been so long.”

They drove south for about an hour and just before Big Sur, meandering high around the cliffs, they found a little place that looked out over the highway to the ocean. There was a blue neon
vacancy
sign in the window and they pulled in and parked. An old woman sat asleep in front of a blurred TV behind the reception desk and they woke her and got themselves a room.

Abbie put down her bag and turned to him and as he shut the door behind him she saw in his eyes a darkening glint she didn’t recognize.

“Rolf?”

He ripped the dress from her shoulders then threw her facedown on the bed and fucked her so violently and unlovingly that she screamed at him to stop but he didn’t. She managed to twist around and lashed out at him and he hit her hard across the face with the palm and then the back of his hand, the first time he had ever struck her. Then he grabbed her by the throat so tightly that she thought he was going to strangle her. And she was so scared, not just for herself but for the child within her, that she stopped struggling and let him do what he wanted to her until he was spent and rolled off her and slumped beside her.

How long she lay there listening to his breathing she couldn’t tell. But when at last she was sure he was asleep and she had summoned enough courage, she edged herself, inch by inch, away from him and off the bed and silently gathered her things, freezing every now and then when he shifted. She took the car keys and a roll of dollar bills from his jacket and thought about taking his phone too but didn’t. The warm, wet run of him on her thigh almost made her retch. She tiptoed naked to the door and let herself out, praying with every quivering breath that it wouldn’t creak and it didn’t.

The moon was angling in along the bleached wood walkway outside and she dressed hurriedly beside her shadow on the wall then walked barefoot across the cool, gray gravel to the car. It was parked on a slope under some ragged pines maybe fifty yards from the room, close enough, she figured, that he might hear the engine start and get to her in time. There was not a breath of wind and the only sound was the distant barking of a dog. She threw her bag into the back then quietly climbed in and put the shift to neutral and the car rolled slowly down toward the highway, the gravel crunching beneath the tires.

As the car nosed onto the highway she turned the key and the engine sputtered to life. Out on the ocean a trail of reflected moonlight shimmered to the horizon. She eased the car out onto the highway and gently accelerated away, heading back the way they had come. How long the journey would take she wasn’t sure. But she already knew where she would go.

 

 

 

She drove all through the night, working her way north until she found I-80 and headed east and watched the sun lift out of the Sierras, hazy and red and implacable. Just after Reno the sickness kicked in and she found a truck stop and threw up and washed herself and sluiced from her body all trace of him. She walked back to the car and lowered the seat and slept until woken by the heat and the glare of the sun.

It took eight hours just to cross Nevada, the names on the signs whipping by, Lovelock, Battle Mountain, and Elko, the Humboldt River curving and flashing beside her. Sometimes, to get gas or something to eat or simply to break the mesmerizing miles, she would exit the interstate and pass through forlorn and desiccated towns with boarded storefronts and sprawling trailer camps and the plundered carcasses of cars. Then across into Utah, the highway straight as a spear through the flat forever of the desert that glowed pink to each horizon as another night rolled in.

She passed Salt Lake City a little after midnight and by then, even with the windows wide and the night air rushing in about her, cooler now and sweetly laced with sage, her eyelids began to droop and her chin to jolt against her chest and she knew she had to stop. She branched off the interstate and found a cheap motel and was so tired she almost gave her real name but corrected herself in time and the boy at the desk jokingly asked if she’d forgotten who she was and Abbie smiled and said it was true, she had.

She had driven most of a thousand miles and, looking at the map the next morning, figured she had half as many more yet to go. She had considered calling ahead but decided not to. Maybe their phones were still being tapped. And anyhow, maybe he wouldn’t be there and his mother would answer instead and Abbie wouldn’t know what to say. Not that she yet knew what to say to Ty after three long years and all the heartache and trouble she had brought into his life.

She crossed the Continental Divide in the early afternoon and at Rawlins forked north to Casper. And as the sun was starting to slide into the Bighorn Mountains, at last, she turned off the interstate and drove into Sheridan. She cruised along Main Street, past the little plaza where she and Ty had sat that day and talked, the bronze cowboy still standing sentinel with his rifle resting on his shoulder. She found a place to park and on the paper she had picked up at the motel wrote the note that she planned to leave in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. She scrapped her first two attempts. The apologies sounded too futile and self-pitying. At the third attempt she wrote two simple lines.

After such an absence she worried that she might not remember the way out to the ranch and lose herself in the labyrinth of gravel roads but even in the fading light it all came back to her. She passed a truck coming the other way with McGuigan Gas & Oil written on its side and the name clicked the well-worn connection in her head to the image of the man’s son dying on his knees with the blazing house behind him. And as she drove on through the clarifying cloud of dust the truck had stirred, she wondered how she could ever have come to such a sorry state of mind and damaged so many lives.

When she stopped at the end of the Hawkinses’ driveway a flash of white caught her eye, and peering up to her left through the twilight she saw a small herd of deer, mothers and fawns, below a stand of aspen, watching her. She thought they would run into the trees but they didn’t, just stared as she walked to the mailbox. She stopped there and stood awhile, tapping the sealed envelope with her fingers and staring back at the deer. And whether it was something in their gaze that dared her or merely the encroachment of another lonely night, she didn’t know, but instead of leaving the note she took it back to the car and steered around and headed up toward the house.

As she knew they would, the dogs came running and hollering. And even before she had parked, there was a face at the kitchen window and the outside light went on. When she opened the car door the dogs at once seemed to remember her and stopped their barking and started to bounce at her and she got out and squatted and stroked them and let them squirm and lick her face. There were footsteps on the porch now and she looked up to see Ty heading out toward her across the gravel.

“Hi there, can I help you?”

Abbie stood up before him and saw the shock on his face as he recognized her. He stopped in his tracks.

“My God,” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry. If you want me to, I’ll go.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“I didn’t know where else . . . Listen, I’ll go.”

But he was walking toward her now and she just stood there unable to move and watched him. Without a word he put his arms around her and she started to quake and would probably have fallen had he not been there to hold her. He stroked her hair and let her cry and all she could say was his name and that she was sorry, so sorry, again and again, until he gently hushed her and walked her slowly toward the house. His mother was waiting on the porch but Abbie’s eyes were too blurred and the light too dim for her to know if she was welcome here or reviled. Then Martha stepped forward and took her from Ty and embraced her as if Abbie were her own, patting and soothing her.

“You poor child,” she murmured. “You poor, poor child.”

It was almost more than Abbie could take. To have her first hot bath in years, the feel of fresh towels, the smells and sounds of supper cooking, all these mundane things, familiar yet forgotten, opened the cell in which she had locked all memory of home and family. Martha found her fresh clothes and piled on her plate more food than Abbie was used to seeing in a week. And only when she could eat no more and the table was cleared and the three of them sat staring at each other with a fond yet wary disbelief did they begin to speak of what had happened and what might happen now.

Abbie had already noticed Ray’s empty chair in front of the TV and Ty now told her that it was almost two years since his father had died and that his passing was a mercy for them all. After the stroke he had never uttered another word. Abbie said how sorry she was and that she wished she had known him better. Then she took a deep breath and began to tell them about that night three years ago in Denver. And she tried to tell it plainly, without self-pity or the embellishment of any justifying motive, told them simply what had been intended and how events had gone so tragically awry.

And Ty and his mother listened to her with just an occasional question and listened too to the censored account of her subsequent life that Abbie said seemed like a fog in a valley from which she had only now managed to climb. And though she spared them the worst of the darkness and spoke of Rolf as if he were but a phantom of that fog, she said she had come to understand what madness was and could live with it no more.

Then Martha got up from the table and went to the sideboard and came back with what looked like some sort of scrapbook.

“Mom,” Ty said. “Please, not now.”

“I think Abbie needs to see this.”

She placed it on the table in front of her and Abbie opened it and saw at once what it was. Page after page of pasted clippings from newspapers and magazines, telling of Ty’s arrest and imprisonment, police pictures of him looking pale and haunted, name and number hung around his neck. And Abbie’s ubiquitous graduation face beaming alongside. The headlines screamed his guilt:
Denver terror murder arrest, Sheridan man is terror girl Abbie’s lover, Terrorist Tyler held for murder.
There were pictures too of Ray and Martha, smeared by association. Even the later stories about Ty’s release—much smaller and tucked away inside, for naturally the news was less exciting—somehow still managed to point a lingering finger of guilt.

Abbie closed the book and looked up. They were both staring at her. She couldn’t find her voice.

“I needed you to see what you did to us,” Martha said.

Abbie nodded.

“I don’t know what to say.”

Martha nodded and gave her a sad smile and reached across the table and took her hand. Ty was biting his lip. He reached out and took Abbie’s other hand and for a while the three of them sat conjoined in separate reflection while the old wall clock ticked away the sorrowful silence.