Page 50 of Open Road

ROAM

Rose finds me before breakfast, which is not unusual. Rose operates on her own timetable, which runs approximately forty minutes ahead of everyone else’s, and she has decided somewhere in the last two weeks that the first order of business each morning is to locate me and present whatever is currently on her mind. This morning it’s a drawing. Crayon on a torn piece of a paper bag, the good side.

She holds it up with both hands, dead serious. “It’s you,” she says.

The figure in the drawing is enormous. Silver scribble at the top for hair, a rectangular body, and two circles at the bottom, which, after a moment, I understand them to be my bike’s wheels. The whole thing is outlined in purple, which seems to be Rose’s default color for things she considers important.

“Accurate,” I say.

She studies it one more time, nods, and holds it out to me.

It takes me a second to understand she’s giving it to me, not showing but giving. Her face has the particular solemnity of someone making a transfer of something valuable. I take it with both hands because it seems worth both hands.

She pats my knee once, satisfied, and goes to find Gerald.

I look at the drawing for a while.

She gave it to me unprompted, before the rest of the compound was moving, the coffee was finished, and no one had asked either of us for anything. Rose woke up this morning, made something, and decided it belonged with me.

I don’t have a framework for this. No prior experience that maps onto it. I’ve been in this club for twenty-two years of roads,compounds, and the particular way men love other men through loyalty, proximity, and things they never say out loud. I know what it is to have people who’d take a bullet for me and never mention it.

Rose is thirty-one pounds, and she gave me an outlined in purple drawing before breakfast.

I fold it carefully and put it in my chest pocket.

And I carry it around for the following two days.

***

The compound is running its evening quiet when I come back to my room. The bag is where I left it, half unpacked, the project I’ve been working on in increments all week. I pull the chair out and reach for it. It’s then that I realize the shower in my bathroom is running. I go still and turn toward the bathroom door. Someone is in my bathroom, which means someone came into my room, which doesn’t happen. The bag goes on the bed, and I cross the floor and put my hand on the doorframe.

The shower cuts off, and I wait in the silence that follows. A moment later, I hear her voice—low and private, the kind people use when they think no one else is listening.

The bathroom door is slightly ajar, and through the gap I can see the mirror. Janie is standing in front of it, talking to her reflection.

What stops me isn’t the sight of her.

It’s what she’s saying.

I should step back.

The polite thing, the decent thing, is to move away from the door and give her the privacy she thinks she has. I know this. I stay anyway because something in the register of her voice, not the words yet, the tone, lands wrong in my chest in a way I’ve learnednotto ignore.

Then I catch the words.

‘You’re embarrassing yourself.’A pause. ‘Look at you.’Her own voice, flat, reciting something. ‘He’s going to get tired of it. They all get tired of it. You know what you are.’

My hand is on the door frame.

What I’m hearing is not Janie’s voice because the cadence is wrong. The specific contempt in it is wrong. She’s been hearing it long enough that she can reproduce it exactly—the pitch, the particular cold precision of a man who found the most efficient way to make a person small and used it until it became her own internal voice.

Craig is in that bathroom.

Not Craig. Worse than Craig. Craig’s voice coming out of Janie’s mouth, aimed at Janie’s reflection, while Janie stands in a towel in a bathroom in my compound, not knowing she’s doing it.

Something moves in my chest that I don’t have a clean name for.

I knock once and open the door.