Chapter 16
Daphne
“I’ll drive this shift.”
“Very funny.” He nodded his head to get me to step away from the driver’s side door.
“You said I could. If I don’t drive now, I might not get another opportunity.”
“I received new information. All bets are off, and there’s no way you’re driving this car. Not for the first time at night.”
“We should really go back to your house. Everyone keeps talking about the storm.”
“I told you after the club, we’re doing the Lights and then we’d be on our way. There’s still plenty of time before it’s expected to hit.”
A few miles down the road, I was squirming in my seat from the effort of trying not to talk. I knew he was keeping his emotional distance, since we couldn’t keep physically distant in this tiny car, breathing the same air, and feeling the warmth radiating off each other’s bodies. I was trying to respect that. But I couldn’t bear his very ducal playlist of sleepy time Christmas choirs.
The GPS wasn’t just counting down the miles, but the time left on our relationship. In three hours and forty-eight minutes, I’d be home, and Chris would be driving away from me.
I was desperate to keep him. To tell him how it really made me feel for him to cast me aside like this. But after the strip club... and the car, afterward... I had nothing left. He wanted to shut down, closing off access to parts of himself he’d shown me freely before.
Maybe I was wrong not to make it easier on him.
“Tell me things you know,” his voice cut into the silence. He’d flicked on his blinker to merge onto a road heading north. We were only a few miles outside Lebanon, which was no booming metropolis, but it boasted nationally recognizable chains and the comfort of humanity. Suddenly, we were on a black road to nowhere, the lights of the car cutting a path through the black night and encroaching forest.
“Like what?”
“Anything. I’m not asking you not to talk for the next three hours.”
“Um. I know your mother’s chinoiserie is probably Ming dynasty, won at some New York auction house and not a reproduction bought from an online catalog.”
“Ah... you’d be correct about that assumption.”
“Which part?”
“All of it. The piece I think you’re talking about is called the Hundred Crane Ginger Jar. There’s a matching pair of garlic- necked jars in the main entrance. All Ming. Sixteenth century. Bought from Christie’s, who acquired it from Marchant, for an ungodly amount of money.”
“Ooh! I hadn’t even seen the others.”
Ever since I was a kid, I’d been bougie. I’d always swiped back copies of Southern Living and Architectural Digest when the library left them for the taking, dreaming about what it might be like to live in a house where you could choose your decor, rather than picking up castoffs from the side of a road.
“How much? Ten thousand?”
“No…”
“Fifty?”
He stayed quiet and looked at the GPS. Ignoring me, essentially.
“Come on. I want to know how the other half lives. And how much they pay for pottery.”
“Let’s just say that damn jar was the reason I wasn’t allowed in the solarium until I’d graduated college. I think my mom expected me to throw a football into it, or skateboard into the table. Absolutely ridiculous.”
“Would you have?”
“Probably.”
“Smart woman. I still can’t imagine you as a child. I refuse to believe you weren’t born thirty, except…”
“Except what?”
“Except when you dry hump me in the parking lot of a strip club and fingerfuck me until I’m squirting in your precious—”
“Okay.”
“You hypocrite.” I smiled at him, even if he couldn’t see. “You did the things. You’re just too gentlemanly to hear about them?”
“Fair enough.” He laughed. “For an only child of a wealthy family, I was a fairly normal kid. I built rickety forts in the woods behind my house. I cut myself trying to whittle when I discovered knives. Burned the fort down when I discovered fire and thought I could upgrade it with a fireplace. I played baseball and soccer and football.”
“No. You did not play football.”
“Kicker. Honestly, that’s all my parents would let me play. The ironic part was I was the player injured the worst, senior year. Blew out my knee. But that’s what made me get serious about school. And music. I had nothing else to do while I recovered.”
“I was never a kid. We have this one photo album where I must have been four or five and I looked like I was happy. Doing little kid stuff. But I don’t remember any of it. A few years after that, my parents divorced, and I went back and forth between Mom and Dad’s. One day Mom took me to Dairy Queen for Blizzards and told me she was getting remarried. Greg, her boyfriend, had a two-year old, and I’d finally have a brother—not that it mattered much to me. She was so nervous to tell me. Couldn’t stop messing with her rings. But she was happy and excited, so I acted excited, too. Even by eight, I knew I had to give people the reactions they wanted. It was easier for everyone when I pretended.
“Then they had the twins. They lived halfway across the state and my dad was rarely concerned about driving me back and forth. Whenever I went there, I was always a visitor. I had my own room, but more and more, Mom used it to store her craft stuff.
“Dad’s felt more like home, so I’d stayed with him when my mom moved to Franklin with Greg. But that wasn’t what I needed either. I’m what they call a parentified child. I know that now. Back then, I was praised for being an old-soul, or mature for my age, because I was quiet. But I wasn’t those things at all. I was quiet and observant because I was stunned into muteness when other kids talked to me. I didn’t know the right things to say or how to move my body like they moved theirs. I was desperate to be like them, loud and uncaring. I just didn’t know how to be. I didn’t know how to play. I didn’t know how not to be ashamed if I accidentally did step out of line and get too loud or happy. I always felt like I was offending somebody for just being me. Every time I stopped being hypervigilant, something would happen to prove that I wasn’t worthy of the same love or consideration everyone else seemed to get so easily.”
I chewed my ragged cuticle. Chris remained silent, allowing me to continue when I was ready.
“Everything I did had greater consequences than anyone else. Even now. I finally meet the man I want to be with, and it’s supposed to be so easy. But he won’t keep me, because it’s too hard.”
“Daphne, keeping you would be the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”
“You know why I just recently graduated? Because my mom transferred my college savings to my sisters and my dad didn’t fight it. I lost my academic scholarship because I couldn’t keep full-time enrollment with my full-time job. And it took me six years to graduate. I should have my master’s already.”
“Timing,” he said. “Always timing.”
“None of this should be an issue right now.” I took a deep breath. “I know why we can’t be together. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I’m just trying to add texture to the portrait. To be open and show you who I am. I don’t want to hide with you, or pretend and be polite.”
He squeezed my hands before returning them to the steering wheel. Something was happening with the fog outside. “Have you ever talked to someone about this? A professional?”
“You mean TikTok videos don’t cut it?”
He chuckled a little, but I knew he didn’t want to. My words hurt him. My self-deprecation hurt him. That was one of those things I loved about him.
“No, sweetheart. An actual therapist.”
“Therapy costs money. Dad has TRICARE, which is really good insurance, but I got kicked off that too, when I was no longer enrolled full-time. Work didn’t have insurance, and I didn’t get any through the school, because it was too expensive. I’m hoping, once I’m at UT, I can talk to one of the school counselors. I know I shouldn’t feel like this, but it's so hard not to be resentful. For falling through the cracks the way I did. For the way my brain works, filling up every nook and cranny with random junk thoughts. In the meantime, I’m making up for it by being a brat.”
“You’re not a brat. Even if you were, you’d have every right to be.”
“Are you giving me permission to keep pushing you?”
“Technically, you don’t need my permission to do anything.”
“Except what I want to do with you.”
“Which is?” He straightened the wheel.
“Start twining our lives together.”
He groaned.
“I know. Don’t say it. I can’t hear another no right now.”
We rode in silence for a few more miles.
“But, do you think it’s wrong that I like to call you Daddy, now that you know I kind of need a father figure?”
“Daph, we can’t—”
“I’m not trying to start something, but can we talk seriously about us for a minute? Because even if you make us wait two years, we’ll be right back here, and I’ll be asking the same thing.”
He exhaled loudly. “I don’t know a whole lot about the subject, but I was under the impression kinks aren’t born from trauma. They’re just kinks. This is new to me, and I never thought it would be something that I’d respond to so… viscerally. But I obviously do. Does that mean there’s something wrong with me? I don’t think there is. And you don’t need a father figure. You need someone to nurture you, let you grow in your own ways, hold you accountable… cherish you. Isn’t that what any partner should do? It doesn't matter what kinky name it has. That’s love.” He smirked. “What you call me is just the cherry on top. Sweet in a raunchy, toothsome way.”
“Are you saying you love me?”
“That wouldn’t be fair, would it? Telling you. Then having to hide it.”
“Not fair at all.” He hadn’t really said it, so I wouldn’t really say it back. But I smiled in the dark, letting his half-spoken words sink in and letting myself feel loved—maybe for the first time.
“Toothsome,” I repeated, echoing his word from earlier.
He laughed. “You can bite into it. Gnaw on it. It has meat.”
“It feels good in my mouth. The word. Daddy. It makes me feel like Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
“I’ve always had a thing for Marilyn. Your voice is like hers. A little. Darker. But you both have that breathless quality. Like you just woke up from..."
His words trailed off. He pushed his glasses higher up on his nose and squinted into the mist, flicking the windshield wipers in vain to clear the thickening fog.
He drove several more miles, or maybe it was only one more mile the way he slowed and shifted gears to a lower speed.
The tires were slipping like they were bald and we were driving on a greased track.
“Uh, Chris?” I gripped the door handle and glanced over at him, even though it was too dark to make anything out beside his profile in the dim cabin lights.
“Fuck.” Chris slowed the car almost to a crawl, then downshifted once more. The car slipped again.
The brake lights up ahead told me we weren’t the only ones in trouble.
“Tell me that’s not—”
“Black ice. For the last five miles, we haven’t been driving. We’ve been skating. And it’s getting worse. That’s not rain you hear hitting the windshield.”
“Drive slower.”
“My foot’s barely on the gas as it is. We can’t make it to Knoxville like this.”
The car skidded again. German-engineered, electromagnetic steering or not, even Mercedes-Benz couldn’t save us from this. The only bit of luck we’d had so far was the light traffic.
Chris tried to downshift and gritted his teeth. He was already in the lowest gear.
He steered into yet another skid when the tires lost their grip on the sheet of glass that had been pavement all but fifteen minutes ago.
Blood rushed through my body, as if every beat of my heart might be its last.
We were sliding across the lanes to nowhere. The car began to spin. It was the same floaty feeling I’d had in the hospital when they’d given me all those drugs.
I didn’t know what was real. What sensations my body was feeling. Not like this , I thought. Not like this. My brain slowed down, trying to capture each flashing image as a still shot. Maybe it was easier to process trauma one frame at a time, rather than as a whole movie.
I scrabbled frantically to grip something: the console, the seat, the door handle. Grasping for anything to help brace myself for impact. However it would inevitably come.
Comically soft, it turned out, or it would have been funny, if I’d been my usual self. We’d hit the guardrail with a slow, agonizing crunch. The sudden stop of momentum wasn’t even jarring. I’d barely noticed we weren’t moving.
Then I opened my eyes.
From our diagonal position, the headlights shone into nothingness. Blackness. We were inches away from a steep drop. Whether it was into a ditch, or off the side of a mountain, I couldn’t be sure, but it would have hurt a lot. And not just Brigitte.
My heartbeat pounded in my neck and ears, as I stared ahead into the blackness ahead.
“It’s okay. Sweetheart, it’s okay,” Chris was saying softly. His warm hand was on my cheek, turning my head to him. “Look at me, Daphne. Breathe. We’re okay.”
I gasped and sucked in a lungful of oxygen.
The car had gone into a skid and rotated one-hundred-eighty degrees. We were on the shoulder, facing the wrong direction on a one-lane road. No headlights shone in our direction, but there would be soon enough.
“Slower, sweetheart. With me. Inhale for four counts. Ready? One, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four. Keep that pace, okay? I need to get us out of here.”
Chris had done everything right. He’d steered into the direction the car had swerved. He’d already been in the lowest gear when he engaged the clutch and hit the gas as lightly as possible, to flatten out the tires. But even perfect driving and four-wheel suspension were no match for Mother Nature at her cruelest.
Once we were going in the right direction, we inched along as slow as possible.
“Careful,” I said. Not because he wasn’t being careful, but because I didn’t know what else to do.
He was quiet for a while, gritting his teeth in concentration. “We’ve got to get off this road.”
“I agree. There was..." I shook out my hands, willing them to stop shaking, “a sign. A while back. I wasn’t paying attention, but maybe there’ll be something up ahead.”
“I read it. Something tells me you’re not going to like it very much.”
“Anything’s better than spending the night in a ditch.”
“See that?” He pointed to the neon sign glowing in the woods on the side of the road.
“O-EL,” I read. “Noel?”
“I’m pretty sure there’s supposed to be an M and a T in that sign.”
“An M and a... No, Chris, you can’t be thinking—”
“I’m thinking staying the night there might save our lives.”
“Shit.” My voice trembled. My body was still shaking.
“Talk to me, sweetheart. Let me hear your voice.”
“Okay, um... what does this button do? Do you think maybe the traction could—”
“Not about the car. Tell me something you know. Something you’ve always wanted to do. If you could take a road trip anywhere, where would you go?”
Okay, I could do this. I could distract us. I’d been training for this event my whole life. I had a mind built for distractions. “I’ve always wanted to go to the Smithsonian. Especially, the one with the jewels.”
“I’ve been there. It’s the Natural History one. It’s impressive, although I always preferred American History.” His breathing was steady, as if we weren’t in mortal peril. It calmed me as well.
“Of course you’ve been there.” I laughed, already recovering from my panic and starting to feel pretty silly about it.
I loved that he’d been there. He could take me and tell me things. He could probably even navigate Washington D.C. traffic the way he drove, and from everything I’ve read, the roundabouts were a nightmare.
“Still have that Mountain Dew? The sugar would be good for you right now.”
“It’s somewhere behind me. I’ll get it later. Tell me about D.C.”
“My parents took me there every few years. We rarely had vacations that weren’t educational. D.C. was always great, but some of them were so boring I wanted to claw my eyes out. One time, they sent me to a ranch in Montana.”
“That sounds fun.”
“I wasn’t. It was also the worst time to find out I’m allergic to horses. Plus, it ended up being one of those scared straight places. It was me: privileged rich kid, and four teenage gang members who’d been granted leniency from juvie.”
“Were you bullied?”
“At first, yeah. But then they realized I was in it with them. And maybe I even had it worse since my horse changed gait every time I sneezed. They took pity on me, and we all made it out together. I’m still good friends with José; he’s a social worker now. I went to his wedding a few years ago in Scottsdale. Two kids. Just took his kids to the ranch. It’s a lot nicer now. They loved it.”
Even in the dim moonlight, I could tell he was smiling.
“You want kids, Chris?”
His smile faltered. “Maybe. But..." He flicked on his blinker, even though there were no other cars around us.
“But what?”
“I’m... I don’t know if..."
I understood. “If I told you I want children? Does that make it easier to answer?”
He paused for a moment, then looked at me, at my flat belly, which he clearly longed to unflatten. “Yes. Unequivocally yes.” He turned off the road into the motel driveway that sliced through the woods. “I want a family.”
“Me too. With you.”
He didn’t look at me. It was still too dangerous to take his eyes off the road, even driving... I looked at the gauge... six miles per hour.
“I’ve always loved kids. Always thought I’d be a great mom, but I guess I never thought it would actually happen. I expected to end up sad and alone. Like how I’ve always been. It’s hard to manifest what you’ve never seen before.”
“Daph—”
“I know, Chris. I know you don’t want to hear this for two years, but I have to say it. If I don’t, I might explode. You make me want things I’ve never seen for myself. I look at you, and I..." Shit. He wasn’t going to like this. “I see a more full life than I’d allowed myself to imagine before. I always thought I’d end up like Jeanette. Married to my work. I love the work, don’t mistake that. But before I met you, there was a big part of my future that felt like a shadow. Now you’ve shown me the full, colorful, rainbow spectrum of what it could be like. I want the dude ranch and the Smithsonian and the loud annoying road trips to boring, hot, educational historic sites with kids fighting in the backseat. I want it all. As long as you’re driving.”
He said nothing. I knew why. He couldn’t say what he really thought about any of that. It was fine. But I still wasn’t going to give him up, even if that only meant fighting with him for the next two years. It was something.
There was barely an audible rumble as we drove over the cracked and broken off bits of pavement. The long driveway to the top of a hill. The parking lot looked an apocalyptic wasteland. I half expected zombies with unnaturally bent limbs and dangling eyeballs to start swarming the car in their slow, brainless way. Not even the tight harmonies of the Andrews Sisters singing through the speakers could counteract the uneasy feeling I had. In fact, I might never be able to listen to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” again without thinking of impending doom.
Great. Now I was picturing Zombie Santa. Jitterbugging with Mrs. Claus.
On the bright side, these potholes were no match for the AMG suspension, which still functioned beautifully after two fender benders. When would I get a better opportunity to experience this?
Chris parked in front of the flickering vacancy sign. The “no” wasn’t illuminated, but the rest of the sign didn’t seem to be in excellent working order, which wasn’t exactly encouraging.
Without speaking, he reached into my lap and squeezed my hand, holding it until I flipped it over and laced my fingers with his. Then I raised our joined hands and kissed each of the knuckles of his trembling hand. He’d been so calm on the road, but now he needed to let all that adrenaline out.
“This is going to be fine. It’s gonna be fine,” he repeated. “We’re okay. We’ll be okay.”
I didn’t know if he meant tonight, or for the long haul, and I didn’t want to ask. There were other cars pulling in, the parking lot wasn’t empty, and we still didn’t know if they actually had any vacancies. We weren’t out of the woods yet. Not tonight. And as far as our relationship went, according to Chris, we were so deep in the damp underbrush of some dark forest, it was hopeless to think we’d ever see the sun again.
Chris’s eyes closed and he rested his head on the seat back, finally letting on that he might have been just as panicked as I was.
“You drove perfectly. You steered into every skid, took it slow. No one could have done it better.”
I kissed his hand again and let it go.
Then we both looked up at the rental office.
Jagged shadows of cracked and torn shades swayed in the green light of the windows. A faded arrow pointed right, toward a pool, and when I turned my head, curious to see the sorry state of it, it was even worse than I thought. The “pool” was a gaping wound in the ground, not only drained, but un-barricaded. Not even a dusty ribbon of caution tape flapped in the breeze.
“Chris, I think this is a murder motel.”
“It’s... probably not.” His eyes were now trained on the flaking paint on the sign.
“No, seriously. We’re about to walk right into a true crime podcast. The couple are so relieved that they escaped the first problem, they don’t even realize they walked right into the lair of a killer.”
“The ice was nowhere near our first problem today. On the bright side, if I get murdered, we don’t have to wait two years to see each other. I can haunt you. You’ll just have to check in the same room every Christmas Eve, when my spirit turns corporeal for a few hours.” He did a spooky hand gesture. “How’s that for a Christmas tradition?”
“Suddenly that ditch on the side of the road is looking pretty good.”
He laughed. “Stay in the car. I’ll see if they have some rooms.”
I nodded and did as I was told. I wasn’t about to be the damsel who inserted herself into where she didn’t belong and mucked up the works.
I breathed deeply when he locked the doors behind him and ice skated into the rental office. We’d made it safely to the motel without incident. Without further incident, anyway. It had been a long day of incidents. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath for quite a while. When I let out a long, slow exhale, his last words hit me.
Some rooms?
Headlights shone in my eyes as another car parked next to us.
I unclicked my seatbelt, clicked off the car, and grabbed the keys. I hustled to catch up with Chris before he made a huge mistake.
“Chris,” I shouted. There was a woman in line behind him.
“Good news,” he said cheerfully. “There’s room at the inn. We won’t have to find a manger.”
“Yeah, about that. Rooms? Don’t you dare get us two rooms.” I turned to the motel manager, a pale, stringy-limbed twenty-something-year-old man, desperate for some green veggies and a retinoid lotion, and told him the same thing. “We don’t need two rooms. We’ll make do with one.”
“Daphne,” Chris said with a tone.
“Chris,” I used his same tone. “This isn’t the time for ethics. There are cars streaming into the parking lot, all needing a place to stay.”
He looked around like I was playing a dirty trick on him. “Fine. Get back in the car.”
“Fine.” I wasn’t about to fight him on that. Not after pulling my elbow through some kind of gelatinous puddle that had been drying on the check-in counter.
I just hoped the water ran clear. I didn’t expect a hot shower, but I wanted to at least wash my hands after using the toilet.
In the time it took him to complete his transaction, two more cars had driven up behind us. The NO flickered to life above the VACANCY and Chris and I exchanged a look of gratitude at our timing. Finally, a bit of luck.
Then he turned the car around and parked in the farthest space at the end of the low, cinderblock building that looked like it hadn’t been painted since... well, I couldn’t say when, but it needed painting.
A rusted gutter hung off the corner of the roof.
Tennessee was one of the most beautiful places on earth. Why was the universe so determined to highlight the ugliest parts of her tonight?
“You still don’t think this is a murder motel?” I raised my eyebrows, looking at big 13 on the door. Good thing I wasn’t superstitious.
“Nah. If I had to guess, it’s more of a… suicide motel.”
Fucking death care workers and their morbid sense of humor.
He shrugged. “Want me to check it out first?”
“No point. No matter what lies inside the room, it’s safer than out here.” He gave me side-eye. “Isn’t it?”
“Let’s leave this part out of our future Christmas traditions.”