Rain has fallen in fitful trickles the last three hours I’ve been heading west towards Greenbush, Ohio. The wipers squeak. Traffic moves fast in all three westbound lanes.
“Greenbush is a bucolic bliss,” Christine had said, using a word I’m sure she’d looked up and she wasn’t referring to her new locale but her luck. She filled a job few could, in nuclear waste management and then, seventeen days after she advertised for a man on Facebook, Gregg appeared. Usually wearing his cap crooked and his shirts open three buttons, he stoops in all their selfies Christine posts on her Timeline. They smile by the gibbons at the Cincinnati Zoo, in front of the Art Center, on rollerblades, at sidewalk cafes. Most entries are taken outdoors, where the sun always shines.
Tinny plinks on my windshield announce the drip-shower escalating into a downpour. I slow down. Trucks don’t. Grit-filled water sloshes over my Ford Focus as if I’m in a grimy carwash. I accelerate. The car hydroplanes. I depress the brakes and careen from the first to the second lane. Breathing feels forbidden.
In the way back of my mind I want oxygen masks to drop; to have a red lever to pull; to toss the door out onto the wing, where it’ll bounce, before plunging into the raging ocean. I’ll crawl out and stand moored on the wing’s wet gradient to assist in the evacuation. I’ll be in control. That’s the deal with the exit row.
My head jerks. My stare locks on where I was as the car spins toward the third lane. Will I get hit? Or hit someone else?
I imagine that, despite the emergency landing, I make it to Greenbush, but won’t have time for Christine. By overcoming my fear of flying so remarkably, the national news is all over me: Factory Worker Rescues 122 from Plane Crash. And I’m getting a book deal.
By the third, the passing lane, I gyrate faster.
My book on panic will be a coffee table version, like the three-inch whopper about Chagall’s stained-glass windows Christine always displayed, never opened.
Last week she posted Gregg moving in. Only now am I to meet him.
Tires hit the medial strip. Rubber tears over mired turf. The smell of mud fills the compartment. I rip the steering wheel left, to no avail.
I’ve owned a poster of Chagall’s The Wedding for years: A chicken head observes a floating couple. All-ultramarine, except for his wavy, auburn hair, the man looks like Gregg, who’s also much taller than Christine.
Asphalt millings grate the tires. The tang of clammy dirt hardens. But at the edge of the highway’s eastbound course, I stall as if I’ve hit a roadblock.
I’m 5’10,5”.
My panting almost drowns out the rain’s pummeling.
Christine and I grew up together. We giggled on the recycled tire swings; tittered when undressing dolls; moaned, then sobbed over Sam Lavarlis, our high school’s track star, two-years our senior. We told people we were twins and swore we’d die not seeing each other every day. I thought we’d settled on working the assembly line, ladies-nights beers, rating men, Snap chatting, and snickering over Lavarlis who turned obese.
I’m sure I’ve broken down. Murky water sheets the windows and casts back the cabin’s indistinct shapes, including mine. Everything shudders in the wakes of passing cars.
An SUV pulls up in front of me. It ought to be a Bronco, and not green, but white like the t-shirt of the guy who hops out. He’s short and stout. But, really? A ten-gallon cowboy hat? He walks over, hands deep in his front pockets, negotiating the miry ground in a toe-to-heel-gait similar to Lavarlis’s. The cowboy’s drenched shirt—now the color of latte—makes his bellybutton look like a sink’s drain.
I turn the key. The engine coughs but, astoundingly, switches back on. The windshield wipers swoosh. The guy halts and water slops out the front of his hat, obscuring his face. He waves.
It’s as if I’m still balancing on the wing as I inch up and align my Focus with the pavement. Through a break in traffic, I pass into the right-most easterly lane and vow to redecorate my walls with real art once I get back home.
# # #
Pernille AEgidius Dake is pursuing an MFA in Writing from VCFA. She is a finalist for Glimmer Train Press’ 2014 New Writer Award as well as December’s 2015 Curt Johnson Prose Awards and has been published in Carolina Arts, Skirt!, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Glassworks Magazine and elsewhere.
Photo: Xiaolong Wong
