The storm was already in the KC metro area, moving north. People who had been in accidents were advised to wait in their cars, not to call 911 unless there was a true emergency, and to know they were probably in for a long wait.
“Really,” the DJ said, the opening notes to “Hotel California” steadily increasing in volume, “you’re probably better off to just get out and punch the other driver, you know, work it out yourselves. You’re both idiots for driving when it’s like this. Admit it, cut your losses, and go home.”
When the light from the sun was a little stronger, I rubbed mist off the windshield and noticed what looked like a sign for a gas station rising up from the horizon. It didn’t look that far away, a couple of miles at the most. I heard my father’s voice in my head and stayed where I was a little longer. But the colder I got, the less sense his advice seemed to make. I put my hat back on and got out of the car.
I found I had better traction walking on the strip of icy weeds between the shoulder of the road and the ditch. I carried my backpack in front of me for better balance. I had walked for five minutes, maybe ten, when it started raining again, fat cold drops that fell on the ice and made it more slick. I pulled my hood up over my hat and pulled the string so only my eyes peeked out. Things could be worse, I told myself. I had remembered gloves. I had on the good boots my mother had given me.
I heard the semi coming up behind me long before I saw it. The sky had settled low and foggy over a hill, and when I turned, I saw headlights, two yellow eyes shining through the early gray morning. I don’t remember the color of the cab. I did not expect it to stop.
But it did stop, its big engine still rumbling, the cab almost right in front of me. I waited, unsure of what to do. As far as hitchhiking went, according to my father, a girl would have to be out of her mind. “Once you get in somebody’s car,” he told both me and Elise, “you’ve got no control. You’re in their world, okay? They’re calling the shots.”
My father hitchhiked when he was young, of course. The summer before he started law school, my father, a guitar strapped across his back, had thumbed rides all over the country. But times had changed, he said. You just couldn’t do that kind of thing anymore, especially if you were female. He was sorry if that sounded unfair—here, he’d held up his palm when Elise opened her mouth. Life was unfair, he said. Get used to it. He had an arsenal of examples to prove the world was predatory, and young girls often the prey. If we didn’t believe him, we could read the paper.
I looked up at the truck, my eyes squinting, the rest of my face still covered by my cinched hood. My friend Becky Shoemaker from high school had hitchhiked all the way to California and back after graduation, and nothing bad had happened to her. On the contrary, she’d been invited to tour a cave with a church group traveling through Arizona, and a truck driver who had a family in Chula Vista gave her his wife’s phone number in case, when she got to California, she needed a place to stay. When Becky Shoemaker got to California, she’d called the trucker’s wife, and ended up staying with her for almost a week. When I asked Becky if she had ever been scared, getting in strangers’ cars, staying in strangers’ houses, she’d looked at me like I was crazy. “The only way you make something bad happen to you is if you think about it all the time and, like, attract it,” she’d said, with the earned authority of someone who had managed to spend two weeks in California for less than fifty dollars.
The truck driver rolled down the closer window and peered down over the edge. He was wearing a John Deere cap.
“What are you doing?” His voice was reassuringly friendly.
I tugged the hood beneath my chin. “I wrecked my car.” My car, I thought. I had just wrecked my car. I would not think about Jimmy.