“I’ll need a statement. If you’d like to follow me, ma’am?” She looks from Ripley’s dripping hair to her one mud-caked boot and back up again.
“No problem, Officer. Can I make sure my friend’s all right first? He’s, um, a little shaken up.”
“Sure,” the cop says dryly. “Take a minute with yourfriend.”
Ripley turns to James, and her heart sinks. He’s got an agonized look on his face again. “Are you okay?”
“Your rules,” he says, looking like he wants to send himself to prison. “I’m so sorry, Ripley. I shouldn’t have—”
“You’re fine. You’refine,” she repeats when he shakes his head. Her rules seem so small and far away right now, it’s like she’s looking at them in the rearview mirror. “I don’t think anyone who might start a rumor about us is on the side of the interstate right now.”
He smiles half-heartedly. “You’re very kind. But I also broke my own rules.” He’s back in his fortress of manners. After what just happened, it feels like a door slamming in her face.
Ripley blinks rain out of her eyes. She has a lot of questions, but now is clearly not the time. “Okay. But I need to know you’re all right before I give my statement.”
He seems to relent a little. “I’m all right, Ripley. I’ll wait in the…the car while you give your statement. Unless you want me to accompany you?”
“I’m good on my own.” She’s always been good on her own. “You should take your medication if you need it. We’ll figure out a plan once I’m done.” She turns to head up the embankment.
“Ripley.” There it is again, that plosive raindrop in the middle of her name. Except now it feels like a teardrop. Her throat aches where he stroked it, tight and burning.
“Yes?”
“You dropped this.”
He’s holding out her hat. Mud is smeared along the crown. Matching streaks decorate his right sleeve, like he doesn’t know you don’t wipe off a twenty-dollar ball cap with a two-hundred-dollar shirt.
“Your shirt,” she says, dismayed. The mud might wash out, but the rusty streaks from where he reached through the fence will not.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’snot,” she says, frustrated. She takes a breath, trying to reset herself. “Thank you, James. Would you mind holding on to that?”
“Of course.”
He brings it to his chest, where it ruins his shirt some more.
The storm has moved on by the time Ripley’s finished giving her statement, the sun peeking anemically through the clouds. Jamessays he’s fine to keep going, but there’s no way Ripley’s putting him in the car for another three hours when he looks this ashen.
Her dad’s place isn’t far from here. They can take it easy on the back roads. They’ll eat and rest, and she can check on her dad.
Ripley insists on waiting for James’s medication to kick in before they leave. He takes one of his pills—or, rather, two perfectly precut halves. She tries to imagine him biting through one of the tablets but can only picture him in a spotless kitchen wielding an overlarge Japanese knife. How a man this exacting has managed to get himself a tattoo six inches from the most sensitive place on his body, she has no idea.
She cancels the rental place in Drumheller for tonight, books one for tomorrow, then turns on the true-crime podcast so she won’t think about his tattoo. Or anything else in that anatomical neighborhood. It doesn’t work.
After twenty minutes, James sighs, closes his eyes, and curls against the window. Ripley doesn’t bother to turn on her navigation app. She knows these country roads.
It’s half an hour to Golden, a flat, two-stoplight town decked out in a bursting excess of red, white, and blue. Its Main Street belongs in a Hallmark movie, the false-fronted brick buildings covered in ghostly lettering from long-gone frontier hotels and feed stores.
The storm was supposed to miss the northern half of the state, but it looks like the edge grazed Golden. The organizers must have gone ahead with the parade, because the streets are jammed with people.
The sounds of friendly honking and impromptu renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Party in the USA” rouse James. He seems captivated by the odds and ends of Americana: cars moving at a post-parade crawl; damp, flag-bedecked people streamingalong the sidewalks; kids taking maximum advantage of their noisemakers before the adults snap and confiscate them. A teenager, his brass-buttoned jacket hanging open, plays a Chappell Roan melody on his trombone as he moseys across the street.
“Tell me about your parents,” James says, his voice slow and a little dreamy. “I need cheat codes before I meet them whilst high as the bloody sky.” He gestures at himself, eyes closed, head resting on his rolled-up jacket. He ironically failed to retrieve it from the back seat before kissing her in a downpour, so it’s dry.
“You’re not going to remember anything I say right now.”
“Tell me anyway. Talk to me, Ripley.”
