Chapter 10 #2
"What's the fourth," she said.
"I don't want to be your vest."
"Rafferty—"
"I've been somebody's doorframe my whole life," I said.
"I hold a cup. I stand next to a thing while it happens.
And I'd do that for you for the rest of my life and be grateful, but I'm asking for the other one.
I want the part where nothing's broken yet.
I want to know what you take in your coffee.
I want to argue with you about a movie. I want to be in the room on a Tuesday when there's nothing wrong at all. "
Sunday Marsh looked at me for a long time.
"I take four sugars," she said.
"That's disgusting."
"It's a personality."
"That's not a personality, that's a diagnosis—"
She grabbed the front of my jacket and hauled me up into the cab.
I want to say something about that truck, because I've thought about it since and I think it matters.
It smelled like her. Two years of night shifts, a legal pad in the door pocket, a coffee cup in the holder with a lid chewed at the edge, a dashboard with thirty-one dates written on a strip of masking tape in small neat handwriting where nobody would ever see them.
That cab was the actual inside of Sunday Marsh's head and she pulled me into it at three in the morning and shut the door.
The radio was on. It'd been on the whole time, turned way down, some station out of Vegas playing songs for people driving all night, and neither of us reached for it.
There is not a lot of room in a wrecker.
"This is a terrible idea," she said, against my jaw.
"You said that at the diner."
"I'm consistent."
"You are extremely consistent," I said, and got her knee up over mine, and the steering wheel got involved in a way that made her swear and laugh at the same time, and I hit the horn with my elbow and we both froze like teenagers for a solid five seconds before she buried her face in my shoulder and shook.
"Petra's going to see this on the log," she said.
"There's a log?"
"There's always a log, Rafferty, it's a fleet vehicle—"
I kissed her before she could finish itemizing her own humiliation, which was, I think, a mercy.
It was different from the diner. The diner was two people finding something out. This was two people who'd already broken it once and were doing it again on purpose with their eyes open, which is the whole thing, that's the entire difference between wanting somebody and choosing them.
She kept her eyes open the entire time. Never once shut them.
I noticed. She knew I noticed. And at one point she got both hands on my face and held it there and looked at me like a woman standing in the one clear patch of a lifelong fog, and said, "There's nothing there.
There's still nothing there," and it wasn't fear, it was the closest thing to a prayer I've ever been part of.
Afterward she was half across my lap with her head under my chin and my jacket over both of us and one of her boots somewhere in the footwell, permanently lost.
"Rafferty."
"Mm."
"Tomorrow night I have to go out there."
"I know."
"Alone."
"No."
"Rafferty—"
"You have to look at him alone," I said.
"Nobody else can do the looking, I get that, I've got no gift and I'd just be one more idiot in the stack.
But there's thirteen miles out there and I'm going to be on all of them.
" I put my hand flat on her back. "You can do the part only you can do. You don't have to do the driving too."
She was quiet a while.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"Okay." She sat up and pushed her hair back and looked at me in the dome light. "But I want to say something first and I want you to just let it sit."
"Go."
"If I don't come out the other end of that road," Sunday said, "I've had eleven days of somebody looking at me. That's more than I ever thought I'd get. And I want it written down somewhere that at the end of it I was not the woman who knew and didn't say."
I looked at her.
"That's a terrible thing to say to somebody you just—"
"I know."
"That's a hell of a thing to say in a tow truck."
"I know," she said, "I've got no range," and she laughed, and I pulled her back down, and neither one of us slept.
At six I drove her home and she made coffee with four sugars in it and I drank a cup out of solidarity and physically recoiled, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down on the floor, and I stood in a kitchen with a rectangle of clean paint on the wall next to a map and thought: this is the Tuesday.
This right here. Nothing's broken and I'm in the room.
Emmett called at seven, which meant he'd been up since five worrying, which is a thing he'd deny under oath.
"You found her."
"I found her."
"And?"
"And we're riding 9 at midnight."
There was a pause with a whole man in it.
"Raff."
"Don't."
"I'm going to say it and you can hang up." A chair moved sixty miles away. "You remember what you asked me in the bay? If a road wanted somebody, how'd it pick. And I told you roads don't want, people want."
"I remember."
"I've been chewing on that for a week and I got it wrong," Emmett said.
"It's not that roads don't want. It's that whatever's out there wants exactly one thing, same as every one of us, and it's to be seen.
That's why it takes the ones who look. It's not punishing them.
It's the only way it knows to say I'm here. "
I stood in Sunday's kitchen with a phone against my ear.
"That's not comforting, Emmett."
"It's not meant to be comforting, it's meant to be useful," he said.
"Because if that's true, then your girl isn't bait out there.
She's the first person in thirty-two years who's going to look at that thing on purpose and stay standing, and there is not one thing you can do to help her with that except not get in the way. "
"That's the worst advice anybody's ever given me."
"It's the only advice I've got," Emmett said. "And Raff — bring her back by, after. I want to meet her properly. First time she came through I had a sandwich in my hand and she told me how I die and I never once asked her what she does for a living."
"She dispatches tow trucks."
"Huh," said Emmett Shaw. "Well, I'll be."
Then I called Bishop and told him we were riding Route 9 at midnight.