*Fiction — May 29, 2021
Exits
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Mara wants her money, so we’re crossing the county line. When we drive over the timber-truss bridge, her hands leave the wheel and she howls. The tires rock against the uneven wood slats and my body jostles in the front seat, where I’m holding a bottle of Aged Tempranillo between my thighs. It’s from the Rioja Region, bursting wet with dried fig and cedar.
“He owes me two-hundred-seventy-five even,” she says. Her voice tonight is strained and husky with allergies, the corners of her nose red. Otherwise, she’s all gloss and hair spray, gold glinting in the corners of her eyes. “I want my money, or I want to get laid.”
Her Volkswagen hasn’t been a reliable vehicle. It came from the dealership with a faulty windshield, a malfunctioning electrical system. The transmission died after two years. It groans now against an August wind that pushes the smell of campfire and sheared grass and ripe honeysuckle through the car. To my right, the state game lands stretch on and on. In the distance, a thousand trees crowd together, everything dark until the headlights throw electric light against the night.
We find Route 19 and the land opens up, flat and wide and knowable. We pass working farms, pastures. An old drive-in marquee hangs in a tangle of vegetation and weeds, the ticket booth covered in graffiti. Mara accelerates and we dip down and away beneath the Maryland mountainside, tucked so tight into the rural landscape that it seems possible the outside world might never miss us if we disappear.
“You’ve been here before?” I ask.
“Once.” She hits her turn signal with an open palm. “I called you that night—remember? From his bathroom? They had a fox in the house; someone was rehabbing it.”
“A fox?”
“Yes. A fox. How could a person forget a thing like that?”
I shake my head, swipe the sweat from the back of my neck. The air conditioner stopped working. It only flushes the cabin with warm air. I don’t remember the fox. Mara is always calling me at three a.m. with stories.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’ll be fine.”
Mara is always telling me we’ll be fine.
She spins us onto a dirt road, and some gutless part of me—the moneyed suburban upbringing that bred a soft and persistent anxiety into me—wants to crawl out of the Volkswagen and go home.
Mara slows the car, and the wind becomes audible. No streetlights, only the moon’s white shine. The silk perfume of flowers. An animal baying up over the hills.
We turn into the gravel driveway of a brick ranch, low and sprawling with a flat roofline. The grass runs right up to the house. There is no sidewalk, only a bent and blinking lamppost.
“We’ll be fine,” she says again. “Leave the wine in the car. I’m not feeling particularly generous.” She throws her keys on the driver’s seat, leaves the windows rolled down.
A man named Andrew answers the door. He’s tall, lean. Shirtless. He pulls at the gold cross around his neck. The three of us stand in the pink tile entryway next to a stinking pair of steel-toed boots. The house is hotter than Mara’s car, and each inhalation brings wood burn and rot up my nose.
“Is Pat here?” Mara asks.
“Patrick?” Andrew lowers his eyelids, squints with a snarl rising onto his lips.
“That’s what I said.”
“No.”
“His Buick is parked in the driveway.”
“Come meet Nik.”
“I don’t want to come meet Nik. Where is Patrick?”
“Does your friend want to come meet Nik?” Andrew flicks his eyes onto me for the first time. His shoulders rounded, his neck thrusting forward. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” He hits the syllables hard.
I want to ask Mara how well she knows Andrew, but her ear is too far to reach at a whisper. She’s leaning against the wall, the edges of her hair curling and wet in the heat. All of her features are round and full and soft, and the usual thought burns into me: I want her allure—whatever magnetism draws every person close to her. Close enough to sense the salt gathering on her skin.
Andrew dismisses me and touches Mara’s hip. “Patrick’s not expecting you,” he says, his voice thready and wild. “I assume you’re not just here to visit?”
Mara spins away from him and reaches out for my hand. I take it.
We turn down hallways, pass half a dozen doors. The house is a maze.
I look for the exits. How many doors in this house? How many lead outside? Is the basement closed off? Forget it; don’t go into the basement. Don’t walk first into a room with only one way back out. Are there locks on the doors? Don’t go into rooms with doors that lock.
This is not innate. No; this I have been taught. I’ve been taught to look for exits in shopping malls and movie theaters and classrooms. I’ve been taught to look for exits when I am with a man I don’t know, and, sometimes, when I’m with a man I know well.
We stop in a room dominated by floor-to-ceiling windows. Exposed wood everywhere. I bump my thigh into a glass end table. On top sits a two-week paycheck stub for five-thousand dollars and an apple stripped down to its skeletal core, the little remaining flesh brown and softening.
“That’s Nik,” Andrew points. “He’s Russian.”
Nik spreads himself across two cushions, his torso and limbs too long for the camelback sofa. His naked feet hang over the edge. His arches are deep and smooth, nails manicured. He too is shirtless. There is no central air-conditioning, only a window unit dangling its unplugged cord.
Nik doesn’t acknowledge our presence.
“Where’s Pat?” Mara asks.
“I’ll tell him you’re here.” Andrew sucks in his stomach until his ribs stretch against the skin. “Sit tight.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No. You’ll sit in here with Nik.”
Andrew and Mara lock eyes, their bodies symmetrical. Andrew points at the sofa, and some small terror claws up the sides of my skull. He moves his hand to her waist, but she grabs his wrist and squeezes. She grips him until his wrist goes red.
Andrew disappears, and while I am staring at the coffee table menagerie—a bowl of half-eaten cereal; a plate of smoked salmon; two stacks of Swisher Sweets; a diamond stud; a compression hand brace—Mara disappears, too.
“Shit,” Nik says. He has no accent. He whips around and rolls his shoulders in circles. Tiny bruises speckle his right bicep. “Shit. Shit. Shit. I had a dentist appointment this morning.”
He sits up and paws at his eyes.
“Have you ever had a dream about losing your teeth?” he asks me.
“I think everyone has that dream.”
“So, you have then? You, specifically.”
“Yes, I have.”
“All my teeth came out. But, I could feel it—what it was like to be all gums. I can remember the sensation. So, tell me how that’s possible.”
My brain tells my shoulders to shrug.
“You’re uncomfortable,” Nik says. He tosses the television remote at me. “You can change the channel.”
“I’m fine.” I sit on the loveseat. A low gurgle streams from my bowels, acid climbing into my mouth. I consider finding my way outside, sliding back into the Volkswagen’s passenger seat to wait for Mara.
“You look familiar,” Nik says. “You from around here? Where’d you go to high school?”
Everyone around here is obsessed with where you went to high school.
“White Pine.”
“Nope. I don’t know you.” He clasps his hands together before pulling a pair of white socks up high over his calves. “I was going to be a wrestler. But, I’m too big. I had no finesse. It’s an intellectual sport—wrestling.”
He gives me a hopeless smile. He’s got a wide chest and sturdy hips and a handsome face. His eyes are bloodshot. My thigh touches something cool, and I find a Damascus knife with a polished wood handle stuck between the cushions.
“Mara told me there was a fox here the last time she visited?”
When I glance up, Nik is staring at me. “I don’t know nothing about a fox.”
#
Nik and I sit in silence for some inordinate stretch of time until Mara slinks into the room and reaches out for me. We leave as if in slow motion, an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond covering the room in alternating shades of neon light. Nik smokes a joint.
Some two hundred paces from the house, a detached four-stall garage has all its doors open. In one bay sits a new Jeep, its front obliterated, both mirrors gone. The radio thumps from a speaker mounted in the corner while Andrew wipes down a stainless-steel smoker on the lawn. The smell of oil, of burning, of paint. I step into the garage in my sandals. The floor is warm.
Mara presses her body against mine, eyes glossy. Mascara flakes onto her nose. She nods towards a man in a Scorpions t-shirt and khaki work pants.
“That’s Pat.” Her voice drags, a soft lisp.
“Did you get your money?”
“No.”
“Let’s get your money and go. Please. I’m hungry. Let’s go get something to eat.”
“Okay, baby.” She giggles at me.
She’s changed. Some chemical addition—sex or drugs or both—has flooded her insides.
“I told her I’d write her a check,” Patrick says as if he’s heard us. He extracts himself from the cabin of the truck he’s cleaning out. “I offered her a check five times now.”
“I’m not taking a personal check,” Mara says.
“That’s all I’ve got. Even your friend here can tell I’m good for the money.” Patrick’s eyelashes are long, thick. He’s tan with full lips. Something savage tugs at my extremities, rearranges my organs when I look at him. Through his buzzed hair runs a dyed pink strip from the temple to the base of his neck. He shakes my hand. He holds onto me. He holds and holds and holds my hand, and my whole body feels vulnerable, as if it’s been marked as communal space by these men. “Tell Mara it’s only two-hundred.”
“Two-hundred and seventy-five,” she says.
Mara and Patrick were supposed to attend a country music concert together in the city. She bought VIP tickets, and Patrick never showed, never paid her. It’s like a whole car payment worth of money, she told me last week on the phone, or I’d leave it alone.
“Fine. You want cash, we’ll go get cash,” Patrick says. “You’ve already ruined my Friday night.”
“We were going to smoke deer meat, have some beers,” Andrew chimes in from the lawn. He’s still working on the smoker, cleaning and wiping it obsessively. “You ruined it.”
“Just go get the money, and we’ll leave,” Mara says. Her eyes won’t focus on anything at all.
Patrick snorts, pushes a wide smile onto his face. He looks at me, not Mara or Andrew. His eyes focus with no problem at all. “I am not leaving the bunch of you here, alone, in my house. I leave you here, you steal all our shit.”
“Mara.” I lean in close to her. Her pulse thumps in her throat. She keeps swallowing, and from the noise alone I can tell she’s parched. “Mara, let’s come back tomorrow.”
“No. I want my cash.” She pinches my arm. “Then we’ll go get food.”
“Let’s take my truck,” Patrick says. “There’s an ATM about fifteen minutes from here.”
No. “We’ll follow you,” I say. “I’ll drive Mara’s car.”
“You shouldn’t be so scared,” Patrick says as all three of us walk in an uneven line towards the driveway. Patrick steps close to me. His breath is sweet. “It’s god-damn awful to go through life being afraid.” He skips one step ahead and pivots so he’s walking backwards in front of me. “Worry will kill you dead before anything else.”
#
Mara insists on the radio. I try to talk, but she can’t hear me. She keeps turning the volume up and down, her fingers lingering on the knob.
“How well do you know them?” I finally ask.
“I know them.” She touches her collarbone.
“You think Patrick’s a good guy?”
“I do.”
It was a question that had to be asked, but, even in the asking of it, I knew her answer didn’t matter. She could have any opinion at all—any number of stories to show his good nature and kind heart—and he might still be a man who would back you into a corner.
“He’s just high,” Mara adds. “Nothing serious. Some pills.”
“And you?”
She shakes her head.
Mara is smart. She runs the food services department at the community college. She coordinates schedules and executes training seminars and writes memorandums and hires people and fires people. She reads, endlessly. She’s the emergency contact for all of our friends. For her own parents. She works in her office until nine p.m., and sometimes I bring her coffee flooded with cream. I sit with her in silence. She bites her fingernails while she drafts emails and approves food deliveries. She peels off her panty hose and curls her calves beneath her thighs on her swivel chair.
And then, on the weekends, she swallows whatever anyone offers her.
It would not be wrong to call her my only friend. I have a collection of acquaintances; former college roommates and coworkers. Girls who sat with me on dusty linoleum floors as we switched from tap shoes to ballet slippers at the local studio, a frenzy of nylon and polyester and baby hairs broken from too much Sun-In. But I could never match their enthusiasm for each other, or for life. I’d spend all my time listening, searching for an opening in the conversation; a place to insert myself. I was mostly called unfriendly, until Mara came around and didn’t care how much I talked or didn’t talk.
We pull into the parking lot of an abandoned medical center next to a dollar store and gas station. A solar spotlight shines on a FOR SALE sign the size of a billboard. It leans against the medical center’s interior window.
“Everything around here is dying,” Mara says. “Everything.”
Andrew jumps down from the passenger’s seat to get the cash. When he’s done, he runs back to the truck in large strides, kicking his feet out in exaggerated movements as though being chased by some predator. He hops onto the running boards and crawls in through the window. I hear them holler and howl to each other inside the cabin.
Patrick honks the horn. He blasts it again and again until a woman in a wrinkled collared shirt appears in the dollar store doorway. The electric sliding glass keeps trying to close on her. Her face contorts with annoyance as she pushes her head forward to get a good look at us, the disruptors.
I pull the VW up beside the truck and roll down the window. Patrick spreads out the money into an unimpressive green fan.
“The machine doesn’t give out anything under a twenty-dollar bill,” he yells, unnecessarily. “I’ve got two-eighty right here. That means you owe me five dollars.” He turns his gaze from Mara to me. “What do you think five dollars is worth?”
“Five items from the dollar store over there,” I say.
“A comedian. Did you develop a personality in the last fifteen minutes?”
Mara allows herself the most fragile laughter.
“She’ll take two-sixty,” I say.
“No, I won’t,” Mara says. “Give me the two-eighty.”
The dollar store woman is still standing there, watching the four of us shout at each other.
I hate myself. I hate myself because I don’t know these men and I am judging them. They might just be assholes. Assholes to us or assholes in general. They might be insecure, or they might be sad—real sad, sad a lot of the time, sad when they’re together and sad when they’re alone. Or they might be afraid, despite Patrick’s insistence otherwise. How quietly the minutes slip forward out here, lulling you into the belief that time doesn’t accumulate.
I hate myself because I should give them some benefit, and I hate myself because I’m trying to make excuses for them. I hate myself because I’m no fun—men are always telling me this—and because all the men I know rejoice at the popularity of the phrase resting bitch face because they finally have a way to describe me that is, somehow, publicly acceptable.
Maybe these two men are very good men.
I hate myself for making assumptions. I hate the world more for telling me I must be safe but not judgmental, for telling me to be less anxious but watch my back; for telling me I am a strong and capable woman but that I am also prey—everywhere, every day, all the time.
When Patrick asks us to come to some place called the Vault, I ask no questions. I am trying to keep my answers brief and my face blank and get us out of there with Mara’s money.
But Mara says, Oh Jesus, and she squeezes the seatbelt around her chest and yanks it outward half a dozen times before allowing it to snap back in place. She says, Let’s go.
#
I don’t know it until we’re at the door—until we’re three steps inside the breezeway—but we’re at a strip club.
Lights hang across the bar, attached with clear plastic clips. The kind you peel and stick. Atop a card table wait tiny cups of Jell-O, alcohol infusions of raspberry and crème and vanilla. Mara, Patrick, and Andrew all take one, two, three. They stuff them whole inside their mouths and groan. Mara tells me they’re buttery, sticks out her tongue to show me.
There is a young cat mewing in the corner, and one woman at one table. No one behind the bar. No one anywhere else at all. Everything smells of Pine-Sol and bleach, and everywhere there are random strips of orange carpet that my feet sink into as I walk.
Becca is the stripper who greets us without making a show. She’s pretty and pragmatic and she asks me, like everyone else, where I went to high school and what year I graduated. She sits down beside Mara and Patrick in nothing buy grey Calvin Klein high-rise underwear. She has the body of a runner.
And then we all start to chat, and I try to be quiet and then I try to be loud and I keep looking at Mara to make sure she’s OK. I go to the bathroom, and it’s clean, bright. There are baby changing tables in the women’s restroom, and I laugh so hard at this until I’m not sure what I’m laughing at and I’m standing in front of the mirror hating myself again; my own myopic behavior. When I come out, everyone asks if I’m alright. I must’ve been in there for a long time.
I buy bottled water from a refrigerator that looks less commercial and more like the one in my mother’s house while Becca dances for Patrick and Mara and Andrew, who doesn’t seem interested. Becca is smiling and talking about how her uncle smokes salmon, which makes me think about Patrick’s house and about Nik and his chest and his handsome face.
There are shots of tequila and more girls and then a man behind the bar with a white spray of hair and a big belly to match his big laughter. He shakes all of our hands when we go to order, even though Becca offered to comp our drinks. I pass on shots and pass on cocktails and pass on the wine offered to me.
At some point, Becca crouches down so her knees are pointing into me, her arm slung over my chair. She asks me what I want to drink.
“For real,” she says. “On the house.”
“Nothing,” I tell her.
“Nonsense,” she says. “If you were going to have a drink, what drink would you have?”
Her breath smells like spearmint, and I wonder if my body looks like her body. It’s such a nice body.
“I would have a margarita,” I tell her.
“Perfect. That’s my specialty. Rocks only. Salt on the rim. We don’t have a blender anymore.” She bounces away and I’m smiling, and Mara is smiling, and I haven’t seen Patrick or Andrew hand over the money, but I imagine two-hundred-eighty dollars tucked deep inside Mara’s back pocket.
I drink one margarita and then I drink two. Two becomes three. There is little actual stripping happening on the stage: just two women bouncing around, up and down, up and down, no pole.
I’m slurping and wondering about Nik while Andrew and Patrick and Mara are talking about the community college and whether or not Andrew should apply. I tell them I am an actuary, which is true. I keep telling them this, shouting it, but no one cares, and everyone has moved on to new drinks, but Becca keeps making me these awful strawberry margaritas and I’m wondering whether or not I’d make a good stripper.
I run into one of the strippers when I go to the bathroom for the fifth time thanks to my bladder. The stripper’s doing a thorough job of washing her hands.
“Those boys are okay,” she tells me. Her name is Theresa and she has thick, dark hair that brushes her shoulders. “They’ll treat you nice.”
“They come here a lot?”
She nods and asks me for a cigarette, but I don’t smoke. She gives me her phone number.
“You know, to hang out sometime,” she says. “I’m trying to make more friends.”
I flush. I wash. More drinks, the threesome of people next to me plus Becca talking about canning jam. How to can and what to can. About tops sealing and popping, about botulism. And then Becca and another woman are dancing, and Andrew’s trying to dance, but he can’t.
And then we’re leaving, and I’m deleting Theresa’s name and number from my phone where I entered them an hour ago. Backspacing her right out of existence, because what’s the point? I don’t make new friends. Can’t make new friends. There is only Mara. In the parking lot, Patrick sees my wine rolling on the car floor, steals it. He runs off with it to his truck. He and Andrew are laughing and laughing. They bring back the wine, uncorked and poured into dirty protein shaker cups for Mara and me to drink.
I’m drunk and telling Mara not to drink the wine. I’m asking if she has her money, and she’s telling me no. She’s crying just a little, and we are driving and then I am on the same couch that Nik laid across but there’s no more Nik.
I am falling asleep and fighting falling asleep and actually falling asleep until I am waking up to Mara screaming.
#
I pull myself vertical and wait for my head to stop its sloshing, but it doesn’t. My eyes grab at images as if through a glass of milk, everything frothy and white. I don’t nap because this is how I feel when I wake: my entire physical being tired in the bone and weighed down by some invisible anchor, flu-like and swimming.
The noise—a wailing—rises sharp in my right ear and dwindles to an echo. The room is dark, the TV blasting a commercial for women’s vitamins. When I make it to the staircase, the drywall I’m grasping crumbles in my hand. I think I’ve imagined it as I stare at the chalk dust covering me. I’m staring and staring at my own palm until the wailing comes again. Not more than ten feet from me there is Patrick pushing my friend down the stairs.
She keeps trying to sit, but he prods her forward with the barrel of a shotgun.
I stare at this object, which I’ve seen countless times in movies and on TV. I can’t make it real; can’t make meaning of its brutal immensity. And maybe that’s half the problem.
“Out,” Patrick says. The word vibrates away from him. “Out of my house.”
“My money,” she says, her voice in my ears still pushing through water.
Patrick turns to me with those steel-toed boots now on his feet, mud-wet and unlaced. Mara’s chest is flushed and splotched, so I know she’s been drinking the red wine. Her dark tangle of hair clings and sticks to her cheeks. She keeps moving it away from her eyes, but it falls right back into place.
Patrick tries to step but the laces catch underneath him, and he has to steady himself on the railing. He flips the muzzle upside down and rests against the butt of the gun.
“Get out of here,” he says to me, pointing. He’s breathless.
My eyes ache, and nausea lurches up, up, up into my throat.
“You go,” Mara says, standing now. She pokes at Patrick and kicks the gun right out from underneath him and grabs it.
I stumble backwards, catching myself in enough time to pivot and see Andrew sitting at the kitchen island down the long, dark hallway. He’s sitting there on a stool in boxers and a grey t-shirt. He’s sitting and spooning cereal into his mouth and looking right back at me, a mirror reflection.
#
When I wake up again, I am back on the couch with warmth pushing into my side. It’s Mara.
“You’re okay,” I say. It’s partially a question and partially disbelief that dribbles from my mouth.
“I knocked him the fuck out,” she says. “He’s harmless. The gun wasn’t loaded.”
“But it could have been.”
The redness on her chest has passed. So has the liquid seduction of her voice. She’s back to her allergy huskiness, her usual throat-clearing. She’s watching the television with an intense stillness. There is Everybody Loves Raymond again, a repeat of the same episode from earlier in the evening, and there is Ray Romano in his faded jeans and plaid button-up shirt. He’s complaining earnestly about something and shaking his head as he plops onto the sound stage sofa.
“That house looks cozy,” Mara says. “I just want to go into their kitchen and eat their leftovers and fall asleep right in that living room.”
She snuggles into me.
“If that gun were loaded, you’d probably be dead right now,” I say. “I’d probably be dead.”
“No.” She’s thinking about it. “Yes. Maybe. Probably.”
I feel or pretend to feel all the apologies she does not say, does not ever say. I tell myself this is the last time I follow her into a house with no easy exits, but I know better. It’s always going to be the last time, but the last time never comes.
I can’t stand the studio laughter on the TV, so I search for the remote but can’t find it. “We should have left. We should have demanded your money and never gotten drunk.”
“I can handle myself. Listen, we’re alive and we’re fine.”
Ray is rolling his eyes. His hair is so thick and shiny. If Ray Romano was in the kitchen like Andrew last night, cereal milk dripping off his chin, would he have helped us?
“Did you get your money?” I ask.
“No.” She turns the opposite side of her face towards me and points to her cheek, where a gash slides into a thin line of blood that pools into purple freckles beneath her skin. “It’s going to scar.” She stands and stretches her hands out in front of her. “But it’s fine. We’re fine.”
She slides away from me again, her bare feet leaving impressions in the carpet, and I follow.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 9. View full issue & more.