She nodded.
“Then do it.”
He lay in the trunk, and she slammed the lid, hurried to the open door, got in, and drove. When she was on the highway, there were already police cars driving toward her with their lights flashing. She pulled over and slowed, then stopped. But Jimmy had been right. They saw her, drove past her, and went on. She moved back onto the road. When she made it onto Interstate 35, it seemed to her that she saw more police than she had seen since she had been in this state. They seemed to have come from nowhere. She would drive ten miles of empty road, and then four of them would come along in a line, heading north, covering the miles she had just passed, all in the far left lane with their lights blinking so they could go really fast and the few cars going north ahead of them at this time of night would get out of their way.
The car Jimmy had picked to steal wasn’t bad. The odometer said forty-one thousand miles, but the engine was powerful and smooth, and she knew that was all that mattered. She wasn’t sure whether he had looked at the gas gauge as soon as he had started the engine, but she supposed he had, because it was nearly full, and she knew he cared about that. It would get them to Minneapolis, and then things would begin to improve. She decided that this was the scariest night of her life.
She fought the fear by reminding herself that she had been almost as scared the time when Gwen died, and she had come through it. Gwen had passed out at the party and her chest had started going up and down, not like breathing, but like shivering. Mae had known it was an overdose. It had to be. But Mae had managed to keep her fear under control so she could do what she had to do. She had closed the door of the bedroom where Gwen was lying, so nobody else would see her and start calling ambulances and cops. Then she had stepped outside on the patio, as though she were going outside for a smoke. Only she had just kept walking into the night. She had avoided all the terrible unpleasantness that would have come if she had let herself get stupid and stay around. Just the single question—where did the drugs come from?—led into so many complexities and difficulties that it simply had to remain unsaid. Nobody at that party had known her name or where she had come from, so it had all worked out all right. She had been proud of her presence of mind. It was bad enough to have lost Gwen, who had been her friend for a couple of years, but the rest of it would have been too much.
Tonight she just had to keep her wits above the fear long enough to get them both down into a real city, and things would begin to improve. Jimmy would realize that once two people had been through something like this together, they were forever bonded. He would be grateful to her: she was saving his life, after all. He would take care of her for as long as she wanted. She liked the thought of that.
She controlled her fear and made the long, fast drive through the night, listening alternately to two radio stations: one that played music about two years out of date so consistently that she wasn’t sure if it was intentional, and one that had people calling in on the telephone to complain about politicians she had never heard of. When she reached Minneapolis she drove to a street near the hotel where they had stayed, because it was all that she knew of the city. She stopped, pulled the trunk latch from inside, and went to the back of the car. She watched Jimmy sit up and climb out. “We’re at—”
He was already looking around. “I see,” he said. “I can’t go into the hotel.” He had wrapped a piece of cloth from his suitcase around his arm to keep the blood from getting all over everything, but he still looked pale and weak.
He said, “We need to get out of this state.”
“But you’re bleeding.”
“That’s right,” he said. “But I want to be over the state line into Iowa before we rest.” He began to walk. “We need another car. I want you to go back to the hotel. Call a cab for the airport. When you get there, rent a car and come back for me.”
All the way to the hotel, she whispered under her breath the instructions he had given her. She sat in careful silence with the cab driver, because she was afraid she would say something that would give away her secret. It was more than an hour before she was back on the block where she had left Jimmy. She stopped the car behind the one he had stolen up north, but he was not in it. She faced the possibility that she might have to walk around, up and down alleys and things to look for him, but he was suddenly right beside her. He reached into the window, snatched the keys, opened the trunk, and put their suitcases in it, then sat beside her in the front seat. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “How about you?”
“Drive,” he muttered.
She supposed that it was a stupid question. He could hardly be okay. What she had been trying to do was convey some kind of concern, make a connection, like a touch. He must know that. Men seemed intentionally to miss the point sometimes, to pretend they didn’t know, or that they had forgotten, so they could look at a person with contempt for having said something that was literally stupid but wasn’t really.
She decided that he was simply in a bad mood, and she could not blame him. He was in pain. He was tired, and worried about what was going to happen to the two of them now. That was a special part of his problem. He was a man, and that meant he was used to being the one who made things happen. They expected that of themselves. When he couldn’t do it, he must feel like less than a man. She decided that all she could do was behave as though she believed everything would be all right.
Mae concentrated on driving. The distance to the Iowa state line from Minneapolis was about as long as the drive had been to get this far. Now she saw few police cars. Her problem was endurance. In the dim gray light before the sun came up, she saw the sign that said WELCOME TO IOWA, but he would not let her stop. She had to keep driving toward the east with the sun in her eyes until noon, when she could go into a motel and rent a room.
The hours after that were not as easy as she had promised herself they would be. She had to go out again and buy disinfectants, bandages, tape, then wash and dress his wound. It was a strange, ugly hole right through the forearm, and when she washed it, the hole started bleeding again. She could see that when she touched him, it hurt terribly, but he didn’t make a sound. Later, she went out to bring back food, and he slept. She managed to get into bed beside him for a couple of hours before he woke her and made her change the bandages, get into the car, and drive on.
Before he let her stop again they were in Indiana. She changed the bandages again. This time he said, “I’ll drive.” She was afraid. How could he be strong enough? “Are you sure you want to?” she asked. “I can keep going for a while.”
He got in behind the wheel without answering. Mae sat beside him, studying his movements, watching his face and especially his eyes. A person who had lost a lot of blood could easily faint. She watched for twenty minutes, her body tense, waiting to grab the wheel, but he showed no sign of weakness. She slowly let her muscles relax: her tight shoulders, her stiff shoulder blades, her tired arms. Then she was asleep.
Mae awoke when the car seemed to slow and turn at the same time. She sat up hurriedly, taking in a quick breath through nose and mouth that was almost a snort. It was night, and the glare of headlights hurt her eyes.
He said, “You’re awake.”
She was alarmed. She must look awful. Her mouth was dry and her throat was sore from sleeping with her mouth open. She ran her fingers though her hair quickly, and rubbed her face to be sure she hadn’t been drooling. She scrutinized him, searching his face for signs that would tell her what he was thinking of her. He didn’t seem to be looking at all. She took her brush out of her purse and began to brush her hair. “How long was I asleep?”