The Drive
BY YUN WEI
They never would have gotten married if Clinton had won. On the night of the 2016 election, Hannah and Nate got in the car and drove West. He said he had family in Pennsylvania. She got the Volkswagen keys out of her purse.
They had already driven out of DC by the time he first spoke, I like your hair. Reminds me of a geyser.
Her high ponytail in a neon pink scrunchie had taken half a can of hairspray and fifty-five minutes before the 90’s themed election party. Nate, she had met a few times before, but always in large enough groups where they barely ventured past each other’s names. The silence of the party, after the last state turned red, was making her nauseous. She had followed him out when he went for a cigarette.
My stomach hurts, said Hannah.
It’ll pass, Nate said. The immediate effects of shock tend to wear off within fifteen minutes.
He wore wire-rimmed glasses. His high shoulders would un-hunch when he spoke. Angles – of the nose, the narrow hips – would grow sharper. He had a radio voice that she found soothing as her eyes set on the road dashes ahead. She was soft-waisted and thin-voiced. He mistook her mildness for kindness.
By the time they left I-495, she knew he was getting his PhD in biochemistry and worked for the government. By 270 North, he learned about the time she fell out of an ash tree and her grandmother made her apologize to the tree. Halfway through 70 West, they agreed that people who worked in humanitarian organizations were the least humane, and that sparkling water was just a way to give you gas.
In Pennsylvania, his family stuffed them with mac and cheese and cries of revolution, then laid them to rest on hard pillows. Nate came into the guest room where Hannah was itching under the wool blanket. Years later Hannah couldn’t remember if the sex was passionate or just intense. Either way, on the drive home to DC, they were already talking about ski weekends in Vermont, and whether they would get a cat or dog if they ever decided to get a pet.
Mostly, he had a voice that folded and broke her.
They married on his great-uncle’s farm. Her upstate New York family, weeded down by infertility and heroin addiction, made for a quiet discreet corner table at the reception.
It was Nate’s job that made her want a second child. She didn’t think she would after the first one: a lemon-haired screaming bun of a girl that they named after Nate’s aunt, had nearly torn her in half. Hannah spent her two-month maternity leave stitching herself back together, and by the end of it, she had run out of thread. She didn’t go back to work, having already forgotten the beige wallpaper and thumb tacks in the shape of whales, and why she had joined the non-profit in the first place.
When Nate finished his PhD, the government offered him a team leader position, then the same year their daughter was born, his own lab. As his hours at the lab lengthened, their H Street garden apartment grew to a four-bedroom in Alexandria then a two-garage house complete with fenced-in yard and patio. Their daughter couldn’t fill all the rooms of the house, so Hannah asked to have another. Nate looked at his wife and his daughter flattening applesauce on the high chair tray, made some unknown calculation in his head, and said yes.
Their son was yellow-haired too like Nate, and even had his sharp angled joints, as if his genes couldn’t help but wash out hers.
It was easy to hide in the thinness of her voice, behind the noise and spills to wipe, especially while the kids were still young. When they started going to school, her blue days started to show, though not enough for Nate to look up.
There were times when Hannah found Nathan’s ability to focus admirable. Once when he was fixing the toaster, there was a power shortage, and he had lit candles and continued to fix it while their son screamed from his crib, and their daughter used lasagna as her breadcrumb trail to navigate through the living room. That single-mindedness, pristine in the middle of chaos: it scared her.
Scared, his colleagues were, or so she thought when they went to holiday work parties: the way they laughed at his jokes with flattened eyes, or how they drained their cups to hasten their return to the bar. With her, the spouses engaged in carefully chosen small talk, to avoid spilling any candor that would be shared with her husband.
The nausea became constant. She tried ginger ale, seltzer, various pills. The only remedy that worked was driving. So after the kids had been put to bed, and Nate had settled into his study, she would get in the car and drove around the neighborhood. Sometimes she made it halfway to Pennsylvania before the nausea subsided. She found that each time, it took a little longer to turn back.
One night after she had driven about fifty miles, nearly reaching West Virginia, she came home to find the house empty. Panicked, she rushed through every room and looked for her children in closets and under the beds. She called Nathan on his cell phone. Their daughter’s appendix had burst and they were at the hospital.
Nathan waited until after their daughter’s operation was a confirmed success, and all four of them had returned home, to blame Hannah. He did blame her, for having left the house without telling him, for leaving her phone at home, wedged somewhere between the couch cushions. You can control this, whatever this is, he said. You need to find something to focus on. The kids are clearly not enough.
He found her a job at the lab. Once the security clearance was approved, she started out as an administrative assistant, then transferred to data entry. That was when she knew, one morning while sipping grainy coffee in the breakroom: they were working on a weapon. Though there were other words for it – protection, safety, shield.
There were the nights she sat in the living room with her thoughts, after the dishes had been washed and put away, and the kids were in bed, Nate locked in the study. She couldn’t even call it sleep. Just a tense immobility with flares of fever that passed the night until it was time to make breakfast.
There were the business trips Nate took. She could tell by the seriousness with which he folded his clothes into his suitcase before, and afterwards, the flint sparks of excitement in his eyes meant that things were advancing. When Nate announced he was invited to the conference in Reykjavik, she said she would go with him. He agreed. It’s like another planet out there. You’ll feel better.
They drove to Pennsylvania to leave the kids with his parents. His mother kissed Hannah too close to the mouth before they left, and she had to sit through the drive to the Philadelphia airport, stopping herself from furiously wiping her face.
At first Hannah stayed at the Reykjavik hotel while Nate was in meetings. She wandered the carpeted hallways, past the double-doors that stayed closed until late hours of the night. On the third day, she took the shuttle bus into the city center by herself. The November days were short, and even during the day, light was tinged with blue. She walked past the wooden houses and brightly painted roofs. She passed the sparse dwarf-trees, and thought of herself as a giant. She watched the water bruise itself on the pier, under the watch of the sculpture of a skeleton Viking ship.
She peered through the hive-eye windows of the concert hall, and standing at a distance, she laughed at the spots of sun that burst through glass and steel. She stood under the shadow of the church tower shaped like a bullet. Are they aiming to shoot down God?
When she got back to the hotel, Nate told her to meet him in the ballroom where they were having cocktails to celebrate the end of the conference. He went downstairs first, leaving her to figure out what to wear. Nothing seemed right: the one dress she brought was too tight and her slacks had gotten strangled in the luggage so that it was more wrinkles than cloth. Finally, she put on some jeans and went downstairs to the gift shop and bought a soft pink t-shirt with a puffin in a Viking hat on it. In the lobby, as she picked at the plastic wrapping and pulled the t- shirt over her head, she thought of how there wasn’t much of a purpose for her to go anyways.
The ballroom was scathingly bright with the longest navy-colored drapes she had ever seen. People in dark suits seemed to detach from those dark endless drapes as they glided between hors d’oeuvres tables and the bar. She noticed people were staring at her, furtively, between sips of wine, and no one came to speak to her. She tried to glide through the room as they did, and every once in a while, shadowy words (“tactical agent,” “manageable deformities,” “incapacitating”) would prick her with images that made the nausea rise in her throat. Nate was by the bar, looking brighter and his suit crisper than in the morning, surrounded by a group of scientists from somewhere sunnier with warm seas.
She found a group of six or seven kids playing Go Fish in a carpeted corner of the ballroom so she sat down to play with them. When one girl – a fortress of red hair and her daughter’s age – started crying because her older brother had won three times in a row, Hannah told the brother he wasn’t allowed to play anymore and sent him to go find snacks for the other kids.
By the time Nate found her crouching over cards on the floor, she had banished half the kids and the red-haired girl had won twice.
Where did you get that t-shirt? What happened to your clothes? he asked.
The gift shop. It’s comfy..
I had wanted you to meet… Well, as long as you’re comfortable. He frowned then faded back into the suits.
When they got back to their rooms, Nate said he was famished so they ordered room service. He found the mushroom soup creamy and foresty, exclaimed the freshness of the greenhouse vegetables, and picked out the fish bones with glee. Everything tasted bitter and slightly sour to her, as if the ingredients were just past expiry.
You’re happy with the outcome? she asked.
Nate smiled. You know I can’t talk about that.
Who do I have to tell? The kids?
He set the wine down and measured her earnest face across the table. He mistook her acuteness for excitement.
OK, but remember, we’re only protecting ourselves.
When he finished explaining, she was dizzy from the images in her head. She had to take a moment to flatten the pictures – splashes of red not blood, a gray dust not ashes, lines, just lines painted on a canvas, not the lines that bodies twisted into. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t help seeing the red-haired girl smashed on the ground, cards fluttering through the air. She got up to call the front desk to come clear the room service tray. By the time she put the phone down, she had decided.
Let’s go for a drive tomorrow, she said. Your meetings are done, aren’t they? We can’t leave without seeing a glacier. Or a geyser at least.
I was hoping to go over some notes in the morning.
You can do that on the plane.
They said there might be a storm tomorrow.
We won’t go far. Just along the cape and we can always turn around. C’mon, I’ll drive.
They left the hotel the next day around ten, just as the blue sun was beginning to rise. The road stretched in even dashes of white over gray concrete. Even the waterfalls and flat-top mountains and occasional basalt columns became repetitive. Once they turned onto the West- bound road towards the cape, it had started to rain.
Shouldn’t we start going back? asked Nate, leaning back. He liked it when she drove. In the passenger seat, he could afford to be careless.
The volcano is just a little further. Don’t ask me to pronounce the name.
The kids would have loved this. Maybe we should have brought them.
Maybe.
She loved her kids, she did. Her daughter was smart but couldn’t concentrate for long. Her son did everything his older sister did. They looked like their father in coloring but neither of them had his single-mindedness. She didn’t like Nate’s parents but they loved their grandchildren and would give them generous helpings of freedom. They would grow up hunting squirrels with BB guns and digging up worms for fishing. They would be safe.
The rain was turning dark, making the road glisten more sharply from the bushes and moss lining on either side. The white dashes sped up, swallowed by the bottom of the windshield.
This rain’s getting worse. Feels like it could break the windshield, said Nate, just as an idea occurred to him on the fluid dynamics process he was debating with the Mexican delegation. Let’s head back. It’d be pointless to go see the volcano now. Look at how low the clouds are.
It’s only fifteen minutes away.
Turn around. Nate sat up, his hand on the side window. The car’s shaking. I told you there was a hurricane warning.
She slowed down before the roundabout and turned back the way they came. The wind lashed against the car, making it sway on its wheels. By the time the thunder started, the dashes were speeding up again. Only thin lines of moss and stone were visible under the headlights. The mountains and waterfalls were muted. The rain was so thick, it was impossible to distinguish streams in the constant, pounding water.
When she first spoke, he didn’t hear her, so intensely was he trying to find a light, a shape out there.
She said again, When I was fifteen I robbed a store.
What?
My friend, Ally, she wanted to do it. We were hanging out in her basement, smoking weed she got from her cousin’s boyfriend, and she just said it, like that. I don’t even remember why. I think she had some big party to go to that weekend and wanted to bring something hardcore. Or maybe she was already on meth then. I think I went because of some vague sense of protecting her. To keep her from hurting other people. But if I really think about it, I did it because I was going to scream if I didn’t do something.
What happened?
There was this Pakistani deli open late. We wore her brother’s ski masks and baggy clothes that made us look like boys. She took her dad’s gun. We went in. We got, maybe, 300 bucks from the register and a bottle of Johnny Walker. We never got caught.
You never told me that, he stared out the window. It was unsettling how the thunder kept coming but the lightning wasn’t there. He tried to imagine seeing the flatness of the plains and the sudden mountains that must have been just a few meters from the road.
Hannah knew she was absorbing the lightning. At every clap of thunder, she felt the jolt. It took a lot of effort to keep her hands around the wheel, instead of flailing and shaking off the electricity in them.
You’re never going to stop are you? she asked.
Will you keep your eyes on the road?
You’re not going to stop the tests.
I shouldn’t have told you. He sighed impatiently, as if the conversation was slowing down the road.
The car swerved. Nate yelped and grabbed the hand hold by his head. What the hell are you doing? Let me drive.
No! She was crying now. A slow release of warmth on her cheeks, not like the emptying sobs when she found her father in the basement with the needle in his arm. No, she felt calm. Brimming.
She swerved again, running over rocks and bushes before getting back on the road. Nate banged his head on the windshield, and a line of blood started running down his temple. It was so bright against his pale skin and the outer darkness that she stopped hearing the roar of rain.
In the minute it had taken her to phone the hotel reception last night, she had flipped through the options: no access to poison, given his height and swimming abilities, pushing him into the ocean or on a hike was out of the question. She had remembered reading somewhere that every hour, three and a half people die in a traffic accident. It had seemed so clear then, like picking a pair of shoes out of a catalogue.
Now, at the brightness of the blood that had reached his unshaven chin, she wasn’t so sure. She thought of all the times he fixed things around the house without telling her, how the kitchen cupboard would just stop creaking one day, and lightbulbs were replaced without her knowing, how she didn’t realize the third shelf in the bookcase had stopped slipping until she went to return a book. Maybe she had been choosing from the wrong catalogue.
Are you okay? I’m sorry, couldn’t see the road.
What the fuck Hannah? You drove off on purpose.
He wiped the blood off his chin with the back of his hand, and cleaned his glasses on his shirt. She should have known before the lie that he would see through it. It had been so long since her last lie that she had forgotten what it felt like: that slight flush of blood running faster.
I’m really sorry Nate.
He blinked away the shock, examined his forehead in the visor mirror and was satisfied with the level of coagulation. It’s minor, it’ll heal within two days I’m sure.
You always do heal fast. I’ll be more careful.
Just let me drive! Look, I don’t know what this is but I do know you can’t proceed like this. I thought working, contributing to something was helping. Apparently not. You need a purpose Hannah. We all need one. Stop at that tree over there.
You were so sure of yourself then.
When? What are you talking about?
That first night we drove off together. That’s the problem. You’re so goddamn sure.
If this is about me quitting, I can’t. They could never do it without me.
She gripped the wheel tighter. The rain slowed just enough for her to glimpse the basalt columns to the right. She confirmed by glancing at the GPS: the turn was coming up. She couldn’t see any lines ahead – the edges of the road had blurred with the dark bog – only the white dashes that slipped below, one after the other, faster.
They wouldn’t have gotten locked together if they had just waited: for the election party to thin, to leave without each other because there was no each other – him walking to the metro with his cigarette, her driving home, trying to swallow down the nausea.
She couldn’t blame him. It was her. She mistook the leaving for escape. In the car that night, his words had been flat and clear as if printed on a fresh piece of paper. He had given her time to breathe, to choose. She had chosen the voice that folded and broke her.
Since then she had learned how to focus in a crisis. Before the crash, there was time enough for flight.
