I stayed in the kitchen the rest of the night and let my limbs grow tired and sore pushed against the window frame until the weak white sun climbed into a gray dawn.
CHAPTER 14
The next morning, Sunday, I drove west. I passed miles of shuttered shopping plazas, peeling billboards, strips of ribboned paper flapping in the wind. A barn folded in on itself like a collapsed lung. Forgotten towns and towns that were never known by anyone outside their borders. After fifty miles or so, feeling far enough out of Sawyer, I found a gas station. No one was there, no cars coming or going. I parked in back next to the dumpster, out of view of the street and anyone in the station office. I moved slowly, without urgency. I didn’t see a security camera and there was nothing suspicious about what I was doing, but I wanted to appear relaxed and unconcerned. I pulled out the garbage bag with our clothes from the night before. I tossed it in.
I looped through the town. Most businesses were closed—if not permanently, for Sunday church. Signs announced homes repossessed by banks. Taken back for what? Families pushed from houses that would remain empty, unoccupied. No life would return here. I moved onto the next town, and then found what I was looking for: a giant orange sign announced a car wash. I cut the wheel and pulled in. A man rose from a metal folding chair and ambled in my direction. He was stick-thin, blue jumper hanging off him. I rolled down my window.
“What’s your full service?”
“Prestige cleaning,” he said, and motioned to a placard behind him. “Inside and out.”
“Great.” I passed him the keys and steadied my voice. “Would you take care of the trunk, too?” Would he be able to guess, just from looking in, its contents from the night before?
“Inside and out means inside and out.”
In the office, I found a self-serve coffee station. I poured myself a cup and dumped in a plastic pod of half-and-half, and then another. Yellowish liquid pooled on the oily surface. I waited in the folding chair. A younger guy had joined the attendant and they shouted back and forth as they worked, jokey and light. “Darryl is crazy. I don’t know why someone would listen to anything he says. Especially not her.” They both laughed.
I was convinced some trace of Addison had been left behind. For Tyler, this was not a problem, they shared a room. But I didn’t want any DNA linking me to him. I’d brought a towel in a plastic bag that I held in my lap as the attendants worked. When they finished and I’d paid, I smoothed the towel across the front seat. In case anything was still on me, I didn’t want to taint the now-clean car. Back at home, I repeated my ritual from the day before, stripping and bagging my clothes and the towel. I would dump this in some other town, in another direction, tomorrow. I scrubbed myself in the shower under a burning spray. I emerged with raised, red skin. I filled a bucket with soap and scalding water, scouring every surface of each room of my apartment, digging into untouched corners, sweating in nothing but shorts. It felt good to work, to focus on just the square foot in front of me and then the next. I needed it all—my body, my clothes, the car, this apartment—to be renewed. Reset from what we had done.
Late Sunday afternoon. By now, campus would be filling up: the hallway of Tyler’s dorm resonating with the exuberant shoutsof return. I imagined friends asking after Addison, Tyler’s face as he lied. I don’t know if you could call it praying, but I repeated silently to myself in loops,Please let him stay calm, please let him keep it together.
Finally, that evening, my phone rang.
“I did it.”
“Turn on some music, point it toward your door.” He did as I said, the sound bursting across the line and then shifting, fading as he moved from it. “Do this any time you call me, okay?”
“Okay. Yes.”
“Go on.”
“I saw the RA. I told her Addison wasn’t around. That I hadn’t heard from him.”
“And what did she say?”
“She kind of played it off at first, said I was worrying about nothing. I said it probably was nothing, but it seemed kind of strange. I asked if she knew anything. She acted weird, like why was I asking that.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told her I knew she had let Addison stay in the dorms. That he’d been here all break.”
“How did she react?”
“She got kind of jumpy and defensive. I think she’s stressed about getting caught. She asked if I had told anyone, or Addison had told anyone else.”
“Good.” Eventually, she would have to admit that she had broken the rules and left Addison in the dorms. Her agitated energy would be a good distraction; it would pull the focus to her, away from Tyler. “Did she say what she was going to do?”
“She said she’d check with me in the morning. If he was still not around, she’d call his parents.”
She had done us a favor. Once Addison’s parents knew, wheels would be set in motion. But she was so concerned about getting in trouble she would slow things down to protect herself.
“What about everyone else? Your friends?”
“Honestly everyone is so self-absorbed. They just want to talk about stupid shit from their trips. They don’t even care.”
“Good. It will help things stay calm. You did well, Tyler.”
“I’m really scared.”
