Blood Highway Read online

  A party of four came in, business-casual. They were trading polite laughter at a joke that had been delivered outside. They passed me, disappeared.

  “Four please. Nonsmoking.”

  The plunk of menus and a tinkly hostess voice: “Right this way.”

  I went in.

  The secret is posture. If you stand up straight, everybody thinks you belong there, wherever you are—as long as you look the part, and I did. A trifle young, maybe, but the tables at City on Tap were low and candlelit, putting a helpful distance between the diners and me.

  Lots of awkward dates going on. My favorite. Women never cleaned their plates on dates, but a surprising number of dudes didn’t, either. I found a Brooks Brother and a native of Banana Republic in a corner booth. She was talking with her hands while he nodded and sipped an inch of liquor. He’d left two sliders; she’d hardly touched her—what were those? Wontons?

  “All finished?” I said.

  “Yes,” the woman said, not looking at me. “It’s breathtaking,” she continued. “I’ve spent my whole life in ignorance of what an interior designer can bring to a room, and now I’m converted.”

  I turned. It wasn’t just any turn; waitresses do a kind of ballet. As I curved around another booth, a hand rose out of it. “Miss?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’d like our check. We’ve been waiting ten minutes.”

  “Right away, sir. Just let me set these down and I’ll be right back with that.”

  The busing station was adjacent to the kitchen but not in the kitchen, which was another reason this place ranked high in my marks. I took a paper sack from the ten or so folded in my apron, snapped it open, and tipped the leftovers in with a trio of fluid motions. They were tucked away when another busser approached with a brimming tub. We did a two-step around each other, and I cruised right for the front, untying the apron and tucking it under my shirt.

  “Thanks,” I said to the hostess.

  “Have a great night,” she said.

  I mounted the stairs, banding the wig back into a ponytail. I unbuttoned my blouse, rolled up the sleeves, wiped off as much lipstick as I could. I found a bench with a view of Marquette Street and opened the bag.

  They were wontons. Fried, crab. Not bad. The sliders were greasy, juicy, bacon-y handheld heaven. After that, I wanted something sweet. And a beverage, other than water-fountain water. I didn’t like pulling the waitress schtick more than once a night, so I backtracked to my backpack, carefully folded and ziplocked my button-down, left my apron, and coded the locker shut.

  The Barnes & Noble Café was crammed. I got some E. E. Cummings and claimed a seat. In less than an hour, I’d collected three two-thirds-eaten pieces of cheesecake, various flavors, which translated to one whole piece of cheesecake, or, as I preferred to think of it, a cheesecake sampler platter. All it involved was watchful observation and table-hopping. When I was done, the barista called out a hot chocolate that nobody claimed for a full two minutes. It was fate.

  So, exiting onto the street at six thirty, backpack situated firmly on my shoulders, I felt almost uncomfortably full. It’d gotten chillier while I was inside. Not some wimpy five-degree dip, either—my sweater might as well have been made of mesh. The sky above me was clear, spookily so. No clouds, no stars. Flat black. People were still out in force. Minnesotans hold on to their warm days with a denial that’s almost admirable.

  I took the ponytail out, but I left the wig on. I had another hour before my house was feasible, and I liked to pad it, give her an extra twenty minutes for the pills to kick in.

  Tomorrow was Friday. It’d be smart to get cash for the weekend. I didn’t want to; I never wanted to. I tried to think of ways around it, but I failed.

  Most of downtown was pretty open, not a lot of alleys. The exception was an area around Target headquarters, where the retail chain had elbowed its way into an already dense crop of luxe restaurants and bars with kitschy drink names—those places you gotta go when your life is nine hours in a box and two more each way in another box, eat, bed, get up and do it again.

  A handful of corporate buyers were huddled at the bus stop, checking their watches. A guy in his early thirties—pudgy, geek glasses—was trying to crowd a few women farther under the overhang. He was catching runoff from the stop’s plexiglass roof. He could’ve avoided it by staying to the side, but clearly it was the principle of the thing.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and turned to see who’d bumped him.

  “Sorry,” I said, and raised both my hands. Empty. “I’m so sorry,” I said, pouting my contrition. There’s really no such thing as laying it on too thick.

  He got an eyeful of me. This delightful moment of incredulous blinking, his long, tedious day a dissolved cloud. He took a wide step, holding an arm out to indicate where he’d been standing a second ago. “I insist,” he said.

  I went where he pointed. The women had witnessed all this and had formed an opinion of me that was as negative as his was positive. Two crossed their arms. A third’s smile said, “If murder were legal, I’d stab you in the throat with my pen. Oh, yes I would.”

  “Long day?” the man said.

  “Very,” I said sweetly.

  “At least the weather’s holding.”

  “Yes, it’s nice.”

  The third woman piped up. “It’s supposed to snow a foot tonight.”

  The man said, “Maybe a miracle will happen and it’ll pass us.”

  “Christmas miracle,” I said, intent on the sidewalk.

  Men love women who hate themselves. And most women do. We’re taught to from the age of nine or ten: you bleed, you’re weak, ick, ack, you’re disgusting. A great many women fight their self-hate, though, by hating other women more. Particularly women they’re jealous of. I had ample experience with this. I had, after all, lived through junior high.

  But men? They’re scared shitless of us. And not because of any complicated Freudian business where they think our wombs are going to open wide and swallow them, negating the existences we have the power to create—but because they want to fuck us, always, and these days they have to ask our permission unless they want to face about a 2 percent chance they’ll get jail time.

  I was a virgin, obviously.

  “Finally,” someone said, and I knew the 7 was close.

  “Could I—” The man took out his phone, a Nokia so new it didn’t have a flip feature. “I’d really like to call you sometime.”

  I mumbled nine digits. He asked me to repeat them, and I waited for the bus’s loud rush of air. He’d think he typed it wrong. He’d think: Wasn’t meant to be.

  “Go ahead,” he told me.

  “I’m waiting for the 9.”

  “Oh.” He waggled his phone.

  “You should hurry,” I said, grinning. A flattered damsel.

  He climbed on, the doors closed, and the bus gusted away.

  I stayed alone at the stop until it swung right, then I took an alley. I pulled his wallet out of my sweater cuff, pushing against remorse at his dorky driver’s license photo. Ignored the name, counted the cash: eighty, all twenties. I stuffed it in my pocket. I took off the wig and unpinned my hair. When I emerged on Tenth, I tossed the wallet in a trash can and reluctantly aimed my legs toward the house.

  It was getting cold. The temp had dropped an easy twenty degrees since Heather and I ran our laps. I doubted it was much above freezing now. The uppermost Midwest loves its dirty tricks. This one time in the 1800s, there was a crazy drop in temperature, and the teachers at the one-room schoolhouses told their kids to hurry now, it might really be blowing soon. The storm hit minutes later. Some of the children’s bodies weren’t found until spring, when the snow melted.

  I thought about what I’d do if that same thing happened tonight. Idiotic question, because I was surrounded by houses, shops, cars. I probed the idea anyway. It was a quasi-grown-up version of What If. My first-grade teacher had taught us that game, and I was class champ.
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  What if a blizzard hits right now while you’re out in the open?

  I’d knock on the nearest door.

  What if it’s locked?

  I’d bust a basement window.

  What if this is the 1800s—no houses, no stores, just land and fences and cows?

  I’d find a pasture, slit a cow’s throat, cut open its belly, crawl inside, and dig out every few hours to see if visibility had improved.

  That was why I became class champ in first grade. That was also why my teacher retired the game as a fun activity. At age seven, I offered answers like “Cut open a cow,” and it gave my classmates the willies. I’d taught my mom the rules so we could play at home: No spaceships, no Uzis, no fairy godmothers. Just you. You and the problem. She was beyond awful at solutions, but she was incredible at coming up with problems.

  What if a stranger drove up to you in a van and told you to get in?

  What if he had a gun?

  What if he chased you?

  What if he caught you?

  She elaborated on the stranger in the van a lot. Every strategy I had, she’d counter with a variation of “What if that doesn’t work, Rainy?”

  My life would’ve been a very different story if she’d been wacko from the beginning. But she was a wonderful mother in my earliest memories, despite pronounced quirks, which, back then, I never associated with a larger, time-bomb-type problem. Why would I? The person or people you’re born to become your baseline. They’re reality. Her rules were my rules. Her ethos of “No shoes in the house, they’re full of bacteria” and “The neighbors are always watching us, so we close the blinds at night” and “It’s fun to dress up and play pretend, but it’s a secret; it’s a secret that we do it”—none of it registered as warning signs. I guess I questioned the instances where she told me to pretend we needed to leave the house forever and we only had five minutes. I vaguely remember thinking, “Oookaaay,” as I packed my favorite Barbies, wondering if every other kid on the block endured similar scary games.

  I mulled it over every night when I went back to her. So annoying—you’d think I’d give up. Part of it was necessity. Depending on how many lies I had to tell on any given day about my mom the cancer nurse at Mayo, I sometimes started to believe the charade. I had to sort of reset. I picked through mind-movies of the real her: playing badminton with the sprinkler going in summer; shared afternoon snacks of nachos or buttered Saltines, with a knife down the middle of the plate so we knew which were whose; old movies on the couch with greasy popcorn and Mom mouthing Audrey’s lines; watching her make dinner while “Landslide” spun on the old record player. She’d lift the needle every time it ended, move it back to the beginning. Rumours was her favorite album, but “Landslide” was her favorite song.

  Annually, at the end of May, when the crab apple tree in our backyard exploded bright pink, she used to take the cooler to the picnic table on our patio, fill it with Popsicles, and connect the record player by extension cord. “And now,” she’d say, coming from the house with a huge pitcher of what looked like plain water, “the moment you’ve all been waiting for.” She’d pour it into our birdbath. She said it was a magic potion, and I believed her.

  Normal birds came. So did hummingbirds. They were fairy-size, and I asked if they were fairies. Mom said yes, they were my guardian fairies and she’d brought them here to say hello.

  What if you thought your mother was an angel, or a sorceress from another world, a better world?

  What if you didn’t know her sanity was as thin and fragile as a cat’s whisker?

  What if you tugged it?

  This was the hazard of trying to build a bridge between now and then—the gulf between them was too wide. I wound up swimming in it, every time, and it was dense, dirty, self-pity water. I had no use for it. It got me nowhere.

  My street was glowing windows and smells of roasting meat. I passed the Porters’ house. They were in the dining room. Their youngest was still in a high chair, his mouth creamed with baby food. Jana and Cole were jabbering; I could hear it from the sidewalk. The wreath on their door was traditional red and green.

  Ours wasn’t; it was purple, to match the door. I was dreading our door so much that I slouched over my feet, watching the blue letter Ns on the sides of my running shoes catch light, their iridescence the last sensible thing, the last shine of balanced reason as I got to the middle of our lawn and stopped dead.

  All the blinds were wide-open.

  Two

  Hard, sharp edges of our naked windows. I blinked over and over, to soften them. There were no lights on inside.

  I divided. One half of me invented reasons Mom might leave the blinds open after dark: she overslept, she’s sick, she forgot, she fell, she had a car accident coming back from the grocery store.

  The other half heard familiar horns and strings. They were kicking up to a crescendo. The music was muted by distance, by the door. What was she doing in there? What kind of total breakdown had her violating the number one house rule?

  I considered going to the neighbors, telling them my seemingly sweet mother was actually batshit nuts and asking if I could use their phone. It would’ve been second nature to think up a lie, but I was smack-dab in first nature, my true nature, the nature she’d nurtured, whose number one rule was: It’s a secret. Never tell.

  Willing myself to the front door, I lifted the knocker and let it fall. Nobody answered. I was going for my key, but I stopped and tried the knob. It turned. Air went stale in my lungs as I held a breath, pushing the door wide. I walked into my house like I was underwater.

  The music was so loud. Celine Dion. Her best-of CD. Mom found it under the Christmas tree last year, a gift from me. She loved Titanic. She played this track every night when she was in the bathtub.

  Though never this loud. Never with the bathroom door open.

  That hall branched to my left. Her bedroom was at the very end, her bathroom the last door on the right. The darkness there was flickering, candlelit. Shadows danced on the wall, out of time with the song. Even Celine’s pianissimo was ear-shattering.

  Behind me, I felt a cold breeze. I’d left the front door open. I’d put my backpack against it, to hold it open. I didn’t remember doing that, but I was glad I had. I could finally see the grandfather clock in the hallway. The pendulum had gone still, either by itself, or she’d opened the glass door and stopped it. The hands were frozen at 9:27.

  Someone had turned on my autopilot function, which was something I rarely had use for. I have no other explanation for why I walked up that hallway and stepped into a gentle orange glow. The open door sat flush to the bathtub. I lost time but not much. Celine was in full forte when my mind unfroze and brain feedback let me process what was in front of me.

  My initial thought, hand to God: I tried to decide what color the bathwater was. I couldn’t call it “red” or “pink,” since it was in-between. It was a gorgeous color. Like a rose, but not a rose raised in a hothouse. A rose on a bush on a well-loved lawn, opening at the tail end of summer, saying hello and goodbye in the same bold blush. In the tub, my mother’s head and knees stuck out, the rest of her was sunken in rose water. A razor glinted, floating beside her knee. Six prescription bottles lined the rim of the tub, their caps set beside them. I leaned closer, to read their names, and as I did, their mechanisms of action and side effects and chemical structures—mnemonically stored for the AP Psych final last year—crowded my head.

  “Mom?” I said, then remembered that hadn’t worked when she’d been alive.

  People wax poetic about how a dead body looks so different from a live one, how a spark is missing. I disagreed. She just looked bored. I had a sudden, overwhelming mental image of her reaching out of the water and grabbing my neck. I straightened and blundered on wobbly knees.

  I turned. The girl in the mirror told me, “Calm down.”

  My reflection nodded. She was so white. As white as her exsanguinated mother, who would not sit up, who would
not reach with another blade and slice my Achilles from behind.

  What do I do?

  “Call the police,” I said. “You prepared for this. Not for this, but same—” Same what? “Go ahead. Call.”

  My reflection nodded again—yes, yes. But we went farther into the room. The candle on the counter was one of those enormities with three wicks that can burn for twenty hours straight. It was more than a third gone. It smelled like clean laundry. I looked in the trash can and spied a Yankee Candle Company label. I was close; the scent was Fresh Laundry. A cup of tea rested by her makeup mirror, and I bent to read the tag: green, Lipton. The cup was full. A wheel of lemon floated in it.

  I sat on her makeup bench. She’d done her makeup. Her lashes were combed to eradicate mascara clumps. Did she use waterproof? The idea almost made me laugh, and I clapped a hand over my mouth. Tears welled, as if the laugh had liquefied but still needed a way out. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t do this, could I?

  “You’re doing it,” I said, and tore some toilet paper. “You’re doing it,” I said again, “You’re doing this.”

  So. So, okay. I could just leave. Blow out the candle, shut off the music, and leave.

  Instead, I went to her bedroom. Her comforter was perfect. Her green housedress was laid atop it, white pumps on the floor underneath. She didn’t get dressed this morning. The clock there was also stopped: 9:27. Two hours after I left for school. Maybe she finished her coffee. It probably took her the entirety of The Today Show. She drank a whole pot by herself.

  I wanted to close her blinds, but that would be tampering with a crime scene. Suicides were crimes, technically. Perp and victim were the same person. Strange.

  I wanted to do something strange. I went back in her bathroom—she was the same, of course she’s the same. I considered putting on makeup. She used to make me over all the time when I was little. She got dresses and heels in my size. She bleached my hair a couple of times. I didn’t know it was weird for a mother to do that. Not until my fourth-grade teacher asked me if I got in trouble for bleaching my hair and I told her my mother did it.