to.” There was a pause, the windshield wipers thumping. “Bet you do about anything.”
“There’s an exit,” I said, and again my arm and finger extended in front of me. I looked at him as blankly as I could. “This is the last exit for Lawrence. I need to get out here.”
He didn’t look at me. I turned back to my window and watched as we passed the exit sign. My eyes drifted down, to the faraway ground speeding by below. I looked at myself in the side-view mirror again. So this was how it happened. And this was how it felt. I was a fly in a web, a bear in a trap. I’d made bad decisions, or maybe just one, and it was too late to go back.
He was quiet for so long that I turned to look at him. His hands were clenched on the steering wheel, his posture straight. His breathing was long and deep, purposeful, his nostrils flaring as he inhaled. He seemed frightened himself. I didn’t know if this was good or bad.
“You have to let me out,” I said. I kept my voice low and calm.
He swallowed. He dragged his top teeth against his bottom lip. The windshield wipers beat on, though it was no longer raining.
“You have to let me out. Just pull over. Let me out. You missed the exits. That’s not a crime.” I said this last word heavily. “But I want to get out now.”
He shook his head, just slightly, starting to realize, perhaps, that he didn’t have to answer me one way or another. Another semi roared past us, its driver staring straight ahead. We were passing the western subdivisions of Lawrence, the new developments of houses with big lawns and three-car garages. One house already had Christmas decorations up, an angel with a trumpet in the front yard, a dark wreath on the door.
“I want to get out,” I said again, and then, hearing the threat of a break in my voice, I closed my mouth and turned away. Against my will, my parents appeared in my mind’s eye, and also my sister. I saw them the way they had looked in the last family portrait we’d taken together before the divorce. My mother and father stood arm in arm behind Elise and me, my mother’s hand on my shoulder, my father’s hand on Elise’s, Elise and I standing close enough to graze arms; we were all connected, a circle of shoulders and hands. In the picture, which had hung over the fireplace in our old house and now sat in the storage room of my father’s condo, everyone had been smiling. I thought of Tim, the way his hands felt in my hair, the note he’d left on my cheek.
“You have to let me out.” I stared up at the ceiling of the cab until my eyes were dry. I leaned forward and looked at his face. “Listen to me. I have a mother and father and a sister. I have friends, and they love me. They love me. My parents love me. Do you understand? I am someone’s daughter. Let me out.” My voice was quiet, calm, but very firm. “You let me out right now.”
He held up his hand, his fingers flexed, as if trying to block me from his view. He looked in his rearview mirror and wiped his hand against his brow.
I turned away again, looking down. I couldn’t jump out. I would hurt myself, and I would be out in the cold, no one to help me, and, at the very least, unable to run. The sun had broken through the clouds, and the ice on the trees and fields sparkled like a million shards of broken glass. The intense blaze of a sun-flooded jewel. My mother loved Mark Twain, and at the end of every ice storm I could remember, she’d quoted this line, staring happily out the car or kitchen window. I kept the words in my head, holding onto them, my hands tight fists inside my mittens. The intense blaze of a sun-flooded jewel.
The truck rolled on. We passed a billboard advertising a hotel in Topeka with an indoor pool, just fifteen miles away. A hawk circled high overhead. I had been on this stretch of interstate before, on a high school field trip to the state capitol. But that had been on a sunny day in April, cows grazing in sunny pastures, a colt galloping alongside a fence.