The Driver - Part Four
That time in the barn, he'd said it felt like something rising inside you, the way warm bread rises and expands, filling empty spaces you didn't know you had. Chick lies awake with the pillow to her chest, wedged between her knees -- her own empty spaces are not secret to her. She knows what would fill them up. Three days, then four, she does not hear from him. Billy and Sam haven't seen him, no one answers at his mother's house.
"Tell him I'd like the apron back," his father says when she calls the bar. "And do yourself a favor, Chick -- find a new boyfriend. That kid's going nowhere fast."
Friday night she watches reruns in the dark, listening to the wind gusting outside the window, the mumble of her mother's voice through the wall, talking to Chick's father in California. She twists the bedsheets in her hands, replaying the moment again and again: the cool, dry feel of his lips, the wet snow, the way his body felt under hers. She would never leave him, she tells him in her mind. Never ever ever.
The next day she says she's too sick to work, drops her mother at the salon and drives straight to Billy's. The temperature has plummeted again, icy winds freezing all that had begun to thaw. The fields are stretched smooth with ice, blue and dull and sculpted, a world of polished bone. Each turn of the steering wheel is a gamble, the roads full of secret pitfalls. If he couldn't understand she would show him, she would make him believe. She would get underneath that surface and stay there - and one day he'd wonder why he'd tried to keep her out.
Billy and Sam are lying by the stereo, studying a record jacket. Chick tosses her coat onto the couch and rolls up her sleeves, lights a cigarette with shaking hands.
"I want to try it," she says. Her words hang in a cloud of smoke, suspended in the windowlight. Billy passes her the joint and she takes a long hit while Sam eyes her curiously. The old Dylan record ends, needle lifting off the vinyl, returning to its carriage.
She reaches under the couch, sweeping her arm until she finds what she's looking for. "You said you'd help me," she says, opening the pouch and taking out three bags. "I do all this stuff for you. I drive you everywhere."
Billy looks at Sam, who says, "Chick, wait--"
"I don't want to wait. I'll do it myself. I know how just as well as you do," she says. "I just thought you were my friends."
Sam and Billy whisper to each other while Chick turns the packet between her fingers. Her stomach and her heart are doing little drumrolls. The room is as bright as she's ever seen it.
Finally, Billy looks up. "You sure about this?"
When the needle breaks her skin she hiccups once and tears spring to her eyes. She watches a wisp of her blood snake into the tube, then the warm thread travels up her arm, up and inside of her. She realizes she is biting her bottom lip just like Trey. "I wish it were my first time," Sam says, hugging her from behind, stroking her hair -- and when Chick exhales all the anxiety travels out of her body, flows from her temples and her fingertips and her navel and convects into the air. The windowglare softens, and with the next breath she is crying freely, though it doesn't hurt, she can't smile enough to let out the warmth in her chest, her throat, her fingertips.
"Oh Chick," Sam whispers. She can hear her heart, someone's heart. "Oh, oh baby."
She doesn't know she's going to vomit until it's rolling over her chin, onto her sweater -- there's no pain, only a little smooth, sour belch, she spits the rest into the can and stretches on the floor, head in Billy's lap. Sam disappears to put something on the stereo -- in a moment there's a tinkle of bells, a beautiful guitar, a voice that enters all of her body at once.
"Please," she hears herself say, lying on her back, two moon faces appearing above her. "Please make it louder." And they do.
Someone hands her a cigarette and she sucks hungrily, feeling the smoke move through her extremities. When the song ends she asks them to play it again, still louder this time, bass pouring up and around her -- but it can't touch her, the world outside is bright and cold but it can't touch her. Sam's fingers are in her hair, running along her arms; she loves Sam now, loves her so fiercely, her sweet smile and touseled hair, and she loves Billy, too, the way he tries so hard to be tough but is really just a kid, like all of them. When the song ends, the room filled with stillness and light, she looks up to find Trey standing in the doorway.
"We're going to do it!" he says. "We're totally going to do it!" The next song begins and Trey walks to the stereo, clicks it off. "Claude and I had a long talk," he says. "He said if I work full time for six months, he'll buy us bus tickets."
Chick stares at his mouth -- his smile unguarded and hopeful, a small boy with beautiful eyes. She has only seen him smile this way when he's high, but he isn't high now. He looks at each of them in turn, at their cigarettes smoking in the ashtray. "We're going to fucking Mexico," he says, his voice already fading.
Chick decides to stand up and take him in her arms. She will hold onto him, show him that she understands, she's one of them now. The backs of her arms have started to tingle and itch. He looks into her eyes and then quickly -- very quickly -- away.
"What the fuck's with her?" he says.
She tries to sit up, stretch out her arms, but the itch has spread to her armpits, across her belly, the palms of her hands.
"Look, man," Billy starts, but Trey is already moving across the room, lifting him up by his shirt.
"What the fuck did you do?" he says, pushing Billy away so he stumbles against the table and falls onto the couch. "You assholes, you stupid fucking assholes!" he says, throws his pack of cigarettes at Billy's face. Chick rolls herself sitting in time to see him kick the coffee can, wet cigarette butts and brown mucus splattering the wall, watches him flip the card table, empty bottles raining around her, CDs scattering across the floor.
"Wait," she says, standing, trying to take his hands, but he won't let her touch him. The itching is hot down her back, her neck. "Baby listen," she says, but he shakes her off, backs toward the doorway.
"You shouldn't have done that," he barks, eyes burning at Billy and Sam.
She steps in front of him. "Baby," her voice echoes in her head, and finally it's time to tell him, she has to tell him, the thing she's been waiting to say: "I'll never leave you."
He blinks at her, shakes his head. Finally, he laughs, a cruel laugh that twists his mouth and sours the warmth in her belly.
"Grow up, Chick," he says, then turns and storms down the stairs.
It's dark by the time she gets home, pulls slowly into the driveway, her body tingling and exhausted. There's a sweet taste like postage stamps in the back of her throat and her cheekbones ache from crying. The darkness of the garage takes her by surprise, she touches the brakes too hard, releases, slides forward with a dull thud, a crush of glass, the car stalls and dies.
Dazed, she gets out and gropes for the light switch, surveys the damage: her father's boxes, two stacks mashed against the wall, strewn across the hood of the car. CDs and cassettes spilling everywhere, old clothes, one brown shoe, a half-crushed tackle box. A sheaf of glossy black-and-white photos lies scattered on the concrete, his name in large block letters -- her father's headshots. She picks one up and stares at it, his face as she remembers it, dark-haired and handsome, one eye opened wider than the other as though he knew all your private thoughts. She sits on the concrete and holds the photo in her lap, wondering if he looks the same as he did three years ago. She was fifteen when he left. A baby. She wonders if he'd even recognize her now.
"What in God's name..." her mother says, standing in the door to the house. She surveys the garage, the cockeyed car and ruined boxes. "Are you alright?" She bends and touches her hand to Chick's face; Chick reaches up for her mother's arms.
But her mother sees the photo in her hand and backs away. "Are you drunk?" She peers at her daughter. "I can't believe it. You're goddamn drunk!"
"No, Mom--" she says, but her mother is screaming, waving her hands in the air.
"Get inside! Get in the house right now!" Her mother hauls her by the arm, shoves her through the door. "I trusted you," she screams, pushing Chick down the hall. "I treated you like an adult and this is how you repay me? Just wait till your father hears this!"
Chick's mouth is thick with saliva, a salt-hot taste on her lips. "Mommy--" she moans.
"You're never driving again! You're not leaving this eff-ing house again until you go to college." Chick tries to put her arms around her mother, but her mother pushes her away. "And no more hanging out with those goddamned hoodlums. You may think you're going to screw up your life, young lady, but I am not going to let you."
In the doorway to her room Chick stops, miserable at the sight of her single bed, the heart-covered pillowcases, notebooks strewn on the floor: Chick. She steadies herself, catches her breath. "I can do whatever I want," she mumbles.
Her mother stops in the hallway. "What did you say?"
"I can do what I want," she says, her voice getting louder, until she's flinging the words at her mother's face. "I can go out with whoever I want and I can go wherever I want and there's nothing you can do about it! Just because you fucked up your life doesn't mean I have to do what you say. If I want to fuck up my life that's my choice. I get to choose."
Her mother's eyes are enormous. For a moment she thinks her mother is going to slap her face. But instead she crosses her arms and purses her lips into a smile. She looks straight at her daughter and bursts into laughter.
"You get to choose?" she says, with something that sounds strangely like sympathy. "Baby, you don't get to choose. No one does."
