It is after midnight by the time I am buckled into my sanitized-smelling midsize SUV. The parking attendant scans my reservation barcode and tells me to enjoy my trip with a genuine smile. She is drinking from a coffee tumbler that says Life with Christ is a wonderful adventure, written in the same loopy cursive as the letter that brought me here. The boom barrier lifts.
From Jacksonville, it is a long, mind-numbing drive on a wide highway that slants imperceptibly north to Tallahassee. I listen to Blue ?yster Cult and drum the steering wheel to the beat, feeling painfully wired. There are hardly any other cars on the road at this hour, and the pine trees fur together thickly outside my window. I realize with a jolt of panic that I need to pee. There are signs every twenty miles or so for interstate rest areas, but no way am I trapping myself in a public bathroom in the middle of the night, out in the middle of nowhere, where gators and bears would find my body sooner than a park ranger. No fucking way.
I pull over onto the shoulder of the road and hurriedly unbutton my wool suiting pants. It is early spring, damp and mild, but the backs of my knees are sweating as I drop trou and squat in the grass. I’ve left the driver-side door open for cover, not that I need it. The night is solid black, the highway quiet save for the harsh pulse of the insects in the trees.
I don’t hear the car or even see the headlights, and at first I think he’s come out of the woods.
“Excuse me?”
I shoot to my feet, snatching up my pants and looking right and left and up and down, trying to find the man attached to the voice. I spot him over the hood of my car, standing at the passenger-side door, a faceless silhouette. He could be nineteen or ninety; I have no sense of his age or his stature, where he materialized from, and if the passenger-side door is locked. I think about just diving behind the wheel, but what would stop him from diving in right alongside me, weapon of choice against my cheek. Drive, bitch. Do exactly as I tell you.
“You startled me,” I say stupidly into the dark. There is urine dribbling down my thigh.
“Do you need help?” he asks me in a sugared voice that I just know is fake. “With your car? I’m a mechanic.”
“I’m fine. Thank you.” I realize I am thanking the man who might kill me, and I am ablaze suddenly at this indignity. I think about what you’re supposed to do if a shark attacks you, something I read up on a long time ago, worried I might need it. I almost lived in the coastal town that boasts the second-highest rate of deadly attacks against humans. If you’re bitten, you’re supposed to dig your nails into its eyes, its gills. You’re supposed to fight back and prove you’re not prey.
“Go away,” I tell this fuzzy stranger. “I’m calling the police.” I hold up my phone and show him that I’ve pressed send on the 911 call.
The man laughs. “That won’t never go through out here.”
I look at the screen and see that the call is indeed stuck.
“That’s why I offered to help,” he says in this singsong way that knots up my throat. But then he turns and begins to cross the highway, and I see that he was coming from the other direction and parked along the center strip, and that’s why I didn’t see or hear him approach. Maybe he really did think I was having car trouble. Maybe he really was a mechanic. Or maybe he was a bull shark and I just managed to fight him off.
I get behind the wheel and burn rubber getting back onto the road. I slap at the media deck of the rental car until the music finally shuts off. I need to concentrate. I drive the rest of the way in silence, and my hands don’t stop shaking, not even when I arrive safely in Tallahassee. Janet emailed right before takeoff to tell me that she’d called down to let them know I was coming, and that the man who is threatening to kill me is still very much alive.
Day 1
In the morning, I carried one of those delicate porcelain cups out to the screened porch and listened to the frogs and shorebirds, singing Disney-like in the cold. The reason I knew what a shorebird sounded like still depresses me, but I’ll get to that in time.
Though I was clearheaded for the first time in twenty-eight hours, the problem was the sheer volume of my thoughts. I was making a mental list of the things I needed to pick up at the Northwood Mall before we went to see Jill and Eileen at Tallahassee Memorial. Flowers, maybe a soft blanket for the hard hospital bed. Yellow for Eileen, blue for Jill. I’d noticed they wore a lot of those respective colors. I was thinking about what Bernadette had told me with her face turned away in shame, and I was thinking about Denise and all the people she encountered in her daily life. The woman who sold Denise the multivitamin that made her hair healthy and strong and the family with the dog Denise sometimes walked for a little extra cash and the saleswoman at Denise’s favorite clothing store in Tallahassee who always set things aside she thought Denise would like. I was wondering who would tell all these people that Denise was dead and if it should be me.