Chapter 34
34
SETH MAYS
Are you sure I can stay with you?
ELLIOT CRANE
Yes.
Do you think I’d lie to you?
I think you’d tell me what I wanted to hear.
I won’t.
Lie to you or tell you what you want to hear.
Unless I mean it.
You sure?
Yes.
I’m not usually a spontaneous person. I don’t make decisions on a whim. Especially big ones. And, okay, I’d been thinking about this for a whole week, but this was a really big decision to make after only a week.
Sometimes, though, life throws such a massive, steaming pile of shit that you don’t really have a choice. Like when Noah got sick. When I walked in on Devin’s little blow job.
Now.
Noah was still out of the country. Maybe it was stupid to do this before he got back, but I had the feeling that if I did wait for Noah and Lulu to come back from their cruise, Noah might be able to convince me to stay. Maybe through guilt, maybe through rational arguments, maybe a combination of both. But I had the feeling that if I wanted to just go , I had to do it now.
I texted Noah and told him Elliot had offered to let me stay with him if I decided to look for work in Wisconsin, and I was going to take him up on his offer. Because while I appreciated what Hands and Paws did, it wasn’t me. Or, rather, it was me. I was the problem. I wanted to use my degrees in biochemistry and forensic science. I wanted to feel not only like my work mattered, but that I mattered.
Noah tried to argue with me, but he hadn’t paid for international calls, so at least I didn’t have to listen to him yell and cry. It was pretty clear that he was probably doing both, but none of his arguments was convincing.
He’d miss me—and I’d miss him, but it wasn’t like I was disappearing forever.
I didn’t have a job there—I didn’t really have one here, either. Not one I wanted to keep, anyway. And I could find a stop-gap there just like I had here. Green Bay, which wasn’t too far away, also had a branch of Hands and Paws if I got really desperate.
And, he argued, Wisconsin was really far away—yes, but there were planes and cars that could close that distance for things like holidays. It was farther than we’d ever been from each other—by an order of magnitude, but it wasn’t like I was never going to see him again .
Next, I texted Quincy, who had been commiserating with me for the last nearly two months. She’d even gone in and tried to argue with HR to reinstate me a week or so after they’d fired me—I adored her for doing that, but I also knew it was futile. I told her I had a possible job offer, but that it was in another state.
She wished me well, told me she’d miss me, told me to keep in touch.
I texted Maza, who wished me luck and told me he’d provide any reference I needed.
I texted Ward, who asked if I wanted to work for BTV.
That one stopped me for a few hours. If I worked for Ward and Mason, I could stay in Richmond. I wouldn’t have to work at Hands and Paws. But. But Beyond the Veil didn’t have a lab. I had my stuff in storage, but I needed it so infrequently for them, that it wouldn’t be most of my job. They had two mediums, a historian, and a receptionist already. They’d be paying me for basically no reason, and that stung my pride. I wanted to be valued and important.
All of that, and this might be my only chance to see if Elliot was willing to compromise on Rule Two if I were living in Wisconsin.
It was stupid. Reckless.
It was the act of a completely hopeless romantic.
I packed up my backpack and a huge duffel, left a longer explanation for Noah in a note on the kitchen table, and walked downstairs and out to my car.
North Avenue to Laburnum, then I95 north.
I’d driven up to Baltimore before, but never farther. And Baltimore had seemed a world away from the only places I’d ever called home—Richmond, and a tiny town in the Shenandoah Valley where Noah and I had grown up .
And now I was going a thousand miles away—one thousand thirty-nine, to be specific.
I’d made my choice. I’d chosen to build a new life—hopefully one that would include Elliot in it.
The longest drive I’d ever made before this one was from Charlottesville to Virginia Beach, stopping to pick up Noah on the way when I’d had spring break my senior year of undergrad at UVA. It had taken just over three hours. I was currently looking down the barrel of a sixteen-plus hour drive.
I also had to figure out what to take with me.
Clothes, obviously.
Shoes.
Epi pens. Pain meds. Toothbrush and toothpaste and deodorant and soap and shampoo and all that stuff. I made up a duffel I could just take into a hotel in case I didn’t manage the drive all in one day. The rest went into old boxes from shit we’d ordered online, my laundry hamper, one of Noah’s old backpacks that he’d given me to use, and my messenger bag.
There wasn’t much. A fleece blanket that Noah had bought me a few years ago, which I wrapped around the print of Noah’s mermaid mural. Trinkets and odds and ends that I’d collected over the years. A couple boxes of books, although a lot of what I read were ebooks. My travel mug. My sad aloe plant. A big plastic tote I store my hiking and camping gear in.
Once the car was packed, I discovered that everything I owned in the apartment didn’t quite fill my FJ Cruiser. It was a pretty pathetic commentary on my life .
Sure, I had all my lab equipment in the storage shed—I’d leave everything there for now. Either I’d have Noah sell it or maybe try to figure out how to have it shipped out to me—once I figured out if this was an epic mistake. I didn’t want to pay to deal with that stuff if I was just going to have to move it again.
This way, it would only cost me gas and dignity.
I had no idea what that was going to be like or, to be completely honest, what it was going to do to my body. I sometimes spent a few hours in my car driving to and from the lab, out to a crime scene, maybe on errands out to Short Pump and back, and I knew from experience that after about two or three hours of driving, my knee started to get annoyed and my back stiff.
I wasn’t going to let it stop me. Slow me down, probably. I knew there were rest stops and gas stations and fast food restaurants and coffee places all along the route, and I was probably going to stop at a lot of them to give myself a chance to work through the inevitable aches and kinks.
How bad could it be?
After about three-and-a-half-hours, when I hit the start of the Pennsylvania turnpike, my whole body felt like it had been tied into a pretzel and shoved into a box. My knee had a low, pulsing ache, my back felt compressed, and my shoulders felt like they’d been worked into nothing but knots.
I pulled over and got gas at one of a whole collection of gas stations, filling up and giving myself a chance to walk out a few of the hitches in my legs. After filling up the tank, I moved the car and went inside, perusing the snacks on offer. I’d stop for a slightly late lunch in a few hours, but I was already hungry. And snacking on things helped to keep me from being lulled into a kind of boredom-induced sleepiness. So did coffee.
I’d gotten used to all manner of horrific coffees working for the state crime lab—I’d had RPD precinct coffee, lab coffee, and a lot of gas station and convenience store coffees over the years. Sure, Quincy and I splurged now and then by going to Starbucks or Blanchard’s or Ironclad, but there were far, far more bad cups of coffee in my past than good ones.
This wasn’t bad, in the realm of gas station coffee, and I’d also bought a bag of prepackaged minimuffins and a family size package of trail mix.
The muffins were fairly terrible in comparison to Hart’s muffins, but not too bad as far as prepackaged blueberry muffins with more preservatives than fruit in them went. They took the edge off my hunger, at any rate, and helped to soak up the acidity of the coffee.
Two hours later when I was ready to stop, the Pennsylvania Turnpike very unhelpfully had no travel plazas, so I had to wait another hour until I crossed into Ohio, my knee throbbing and my back a mess of cramps.
It was hot, humid, and deeply unpleasant outside the car, but I figured I would get fewer stares if I laid down on one of the weird molded picnic table benches outside than I would on the floor or a table inside. I put an arm over my eyes to block out the sun, trying to use my breath to ease the pain out of my lower back and limbs.
It helped. A little.
My stomach growled. I’d finished the muffins about two hours ago, and the salt of the trail mix had made me overly thirsty, so I’d stopped eating it about an hour or so after that. I was hungry, thirsty, tired, and in a lot more pain than I’d expected.
About the only thing I had going for me was the fact that I was still somewhat excited about where I was going to end up, even if I wasn’t nearly so enthusiastic about the process of getting there. I pulled out my phone and checked my route with a grimace. I knew from experience that tomorrow was going to be much worse than today, so I needed to push on at least another couple hours to make that hell somewhat less awful.
That would put me somewhere else in Ohio.
I sighed, but at least the Ohio Turnpike had regular rest stops. If I needed to, I could pull over, get food, stretch, get more coffee… And question my life choices going all the way back to going out into the woods as a kid without first coating myself in DEET. And the fact that I hadn’t learned my lesson and still didn’t coat myself in DEET when I went into the woods, which is how I’d ended up with both Lyme and alpha-gal.
I rubbed at my eyes, dry and tired from staring at nothing but highways glimmering in the July sun. I wanted to take out my contacts, but I hated driving with glasses. I promised myself it would only be a couple more hours, then I’d stop.
I held up my phone again, using it to block the sun from my eyes as I pulled up my text messages, of which there were quite a few.
Noah, still arguing with me.
Quincy, telling me she didn’t want me to go, but if I was going to go and get my man, I should drive safely.
Ward wishing me a safe trip and telling me if I changed my mind, the offer of a job stood .
Hart, telling me I probably wanted to avoid spending most of my day in Ohio. Oops.
Too late , I sent back.
Which waystation hellhole are you in? he asked me.
No idea. The first one.
They like to name them all in the midwest, he informed me. Midwesterners are weird.
I felt a smirk pull at my lips. Noted , I sent.
You driving the whole way today? he asked me.
I don’t think I can, I told him. My body is very angry with me. I didn’t know why I was telling him that. But apparently Hart and I were becoming something approaching friends.
Don’t push it, he said. Post-driving muscle soreness is a bitch.
It made me feel better that Hart also didn’t enjoy this drive.
More advice? Avoid Chicago.
I switched over to the map. How? I asked him.
Get off 94 and take 294. It’s fucking insane to drive through Chicago if you don’t have to.
Thanks.
No problem.
I set the phone back on my chest, trying to decide if my back had eased enough for me to go inside to explore the exciting food options presented by the Ohio Turnpike authority, when it buzzed again.
I looked at it.
Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Hart had sent.
I was hoping to avoid near-death experiences , I informed him.
Har har, asshole. Seriously. Take care of yourself. And good luck.
Thanks.
I wasn’t sure what to do with the fact that I’d managed to make friends with a bunch of people right before I decided to move a thousand miles away. And then I wondered if it was going to take me another decade to make new ones.
I hoped not.
My stomach growled again.
I decided to wait to text Quincy and Noah again until I’d stopped for the night, which was probably going to be somewhere else in Ohio. At least the plazas were twenty-four hour, which meant that, in theory anyway, if I decided to sleep in my car, I probably wouldn’t be murdered while I was unconscious. Also, I’m a pretty big guy, and if being six-three and over two-hundred pounds is good for anything, it’s that people don’t generally try to start shit with you.
It was starting to get dark-ish when I pulled into an Ohio Turnpike plaza named ‘Blue Heron.’ It was more than halfway through the state, which was… well, pretty boring, honestly. I didn’t have much experience driving across the country, but I assumed that was probably the consequence of being on a turnpike more than it was being in Ohio. There had been some pretty boring parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania, too—until I hit the mountains in Pennsylvania, anyway. But those had given way to Ohio, and it had all been pretty flat from there.
I limped my way into the plaza itself, twisting a little to work some of the strain out of my back. It didn’t really work. I wasn’t particularly excited by the prospect of sleeping in my car, but I didn’t think I had enough money to waste it on hotels, given how expensive all the turnpikes and the gas were going to end up being.
One more thing that I hadn’t factored in .
I wasn’t very good at life, clearly. I wondered if this was going to end up being as disastrous as some of my other major life decisions. So far, about the only good choices I’d made were running away from home and going into forensic science. Two out of a whole bunch. It wasn’t a good track record.
I overbought food—or, rather, I overbought what I thought I needed, which ended up at least addressing the hunger problem, although I didn’t feel actually full. At least Hardee’s had fried chicken in both tenders and sandwich form, and french fries, of course. I augmented this with a bruised banana and a sad red delicious apple from the convenience store tucked on the far side of the plaza. I contemplated getting myself a latte or frappuccino, but I wanted to sleep first—I’d get coffee when I was ready to get back on the road.
When I finished my dinner, I went back to the car, dug out my blanket in case it got cool at night, and rearranged the passenger seat so that I could be a tiny bit less uncomfortable than I would be if I tried to sleep on the driver’s side.
I pushed back the seat, trying to make my brain slow down so that I could sleep—God knew my body needed it.
Naturally, sleep eluded me.
I don’t know why I thought that it might not—I’m an insomniac most of the time, anyway, even when I’m in actual darkness and in a comfortable bed. Reclining in a stiff car seat in a parking lot with overhead lights—that I was admittedly as far from as I dared—that painted weirdly angled shadows inside the Cruiser.
So I did what I always do when I can’t sleep.
I pulled out my phone.
And then remembered that I hadn’t texted either Quincy or Noah, so I did that, telling them both that I was in Ohio for the night.
Quincy sent back a smiley face and a zzz emoji.
Noah asked me if I was sure I knew what I was doing.
I wasn’t, of course, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.
I need to do this , I told him.
I’m worried about you , he sent back.
Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.
Promise you will check in. Every day.
I promise.
I put the phone down on my stomach, screen facing in. I thumbed the volume, putting the phone on mute. I didn’t want to see or hear if Noah responded.
I hated that this was upsetting him. I was going to do it anyway, but I hated that it was hurting Noah. I didn’t know what to do about that, though—I needed to do this, and I had no idea how to do both.
I flipped over my phone. Nothing.
Love you Nono , I sent.
Right before I shut my screen off again, his message came in. Love you too Sethy. Be careful.