Page 3 of Buried Lies
The pause is a half-second too long. Not guilt. A man rerunning the last few hours and not liking the math or the implications.
"What happened?"
"Why do you assume something happened?"
"Because you answered like it did."
He's not wrong, and that's the trouble with him. I watch the road unspool flat and gray ahead of me and decide how much to hand a man who I'm not sure I can afford to trust.
"Somebody tried to run me off the pass an hour ago," I say. "Came out of nowhere. Tried to put me in the reservoir. I'm still here. They're wrapped around a guardrail."
The silence that comes back is different this time. I've heard a lot of men go quiet on a phone. This silence has weight to it, the quiet of someone deciding what he's going to do about what he just heard.
"Did you see the driver?" His tone remains cold, impersonal.
"I saw high beams and a black windshield."
"Plate?"
"No."
"Where are you, Greer?"
"You keep asking me that. You're the only one who knew I'd be on that road this morning." The words are out before I decide to say them, and the quiet that follows tells me he caught every implication I packed into them.
"I'm not the only one who knew. I'm the only one you told." A beat. "If I wanted you in that water, you'd be in it. I've had every chance. Use that."
He doesn't deny it. He argues it instead, and the two aren't the same, and we both know it.
"That's the worst comforting thing anyone's ever said to me."
"It wasn't supposed to be comforting."
And there it is, the exact reason I let him into my mother's house and the exact reason I shouldn't have. He doesn't soften anything. He hands it to you with the pin already pulled and lets you decide whether to hold on, and God help me, I keep reaching for it.
"I'll call you when I get where I'm going," I say.
"Greer."
I end the call before he can put my name in that voice again and talk me out of the only good sense I've got left.
The shaking starts somewhere past the second county line, long after the danger's behind me. On the pass my hands were steady. It's the straight, dull, safe road that undoes them, the fear arriving late and all at once, now that there's nothing left to do with it.
My hands won't hold the wheel right. My eyes keep snapping to the mirror for headlights that aren't there and won't be. Twice the tires catch the rumble strip and the ugly buzz of it is the only thing that keeps me in my lane, because the second I let myself picture the reservoir coming up through the windshield I'm no good to anyone, least of all me.
I pull off for gas I don't need, because stopping is a way of proving I still can. I stand at the pump with my back to the cinderblock and my face to the road and I watch every car that passes, and I understand for the first time exactly how my mother spent thirty years. The watching. The waiting for it. She lived inside that dread every day for thirty years. I've carried it since before first light and my hands already won't hold steady.
The clerk rings me up without looking away from his phone. I buy coffee that's been scorching on the burner since yesterday and a paper atlas off the rack by the door. A phone can be followed, and I am done assuming that mine can't be. I get back on the road before the stillness can finish what the pass started.
At a stoplight in a town too small to stop in for any other reason, I take the page out and look at the name in daylight for the first time. It's a woman's name. I knew that before I left. What I didn't let myself sit with in the dark is that I've heard it. Not read it somewhere and lost it. Heard it, spoken, a long time ago, in the low register adults use when there's a kid in the next room they don't want catching it.
No face comes with it. Just the shape of it in someone's mouth, my mother's or my father's, through a closed door, in the years before that door shut for good and my father's coat stopped hanging by the back step.
A horn blasts behind me, some ordinary person with an ordinary place to be. The light's green. I drive on, and the name rides with me the rest of the way, refusing to settle.
I don't know who she is. I know my mother trusted her with the one thing she guarded more carefully than me. I know the name was in my house once, spoken low so it wouldn't carry. I could hear the intensity between my parents, but not the actual words. All I know is my father left right after.
As a child I didn’t question it, but the man who had come and gone numerous times before that, never came back. He left my mother with a sadness I never understood.
