Night Navigation Read online

The traffic is starting to increase. "Uh-oh."

  Mark leans forward. "What?"

  "Three lanes coming up."

  "Relax," he tells her. He turns down the volume.

  The road widens. She stays to the right. Cars seem to be traveling at their normal speeds, but the ice on the windshield tells the truth. She gives Mark a quick check. You look tired … you seem … In a support group meeting someone once said, Don't keep taking their emotional temperatures. She's gotten better, but here she is again feeling if she doesn't press on his chest, he won't be able to breathe. The umbilical SOS.

  "You need to get over. Think the exit we want is coming up."

  She checks the blind spot. "I can't get over. There's no room."

  "Put your signal on, and I'll tell you when it's safe … Go … go."

  But she can't. The SUV behind her is going to ram her rear. NEW YORK THRUWAY

  "That's it. That's it. That's where we need to…" Mark turns to check the right lane.

  But it's too late. Too many cars. Her timing too slow.

  RT. 5 SYRACUSE

  A big arrow sweeps left. She signals. "I can't handle highway driving now. This will take us in the right direction. As soon as we see a place to eat and a phone, I'll figure out how to get us headed toward Watertown." He doesn't say anything. "Maybe we should think about you doing the highway driving. I can't go at those speeds in this weather."

  Again he is silent. There are only a few cars on 5. One of them has turned off the radio. She looks over at Mark. His hood is up. "Got to get some matches," he says. In the rush, his fire has gone out.

  "You can close the window now and put the fan on high for a few minutes. I'm cold." Maybe he didn't hear her. "Mark?"

  "I'm starting to feel sick."

  "All the more reason to close the window and turn up the fan." He does.

  MICHELANGELO'S RISTORANTE

  "There," he says. "We can eat here." She slows. "It doesn't look fast-service."

  "I have to get matches. I have to eat. I have to get hold of Rozmer."

  Soft lights, low jazz. The smell of garlic and cheese. A long bar full of Saturday-evening people making merry. People dressed up for a night out. She and Mark, immigrants. They wait to be seated. Ashtrays. Essential or she knows Mark will be out, standing on the entry porch, smoking, two or three times before they get through the meal. Mark puts his hood down. He looks exhausted.

  As soon as they're seated, he goes to the men's room. It would have been better if he had waited until they'd ordered. She already knows what she'll have: a cup of soup, a small salad. Her stomach's so knotted, even this seems unlikely. She opens the atlas to New York (north). Even with her reading glasses, she still can't see the finer print. It always takes her an age to locate where she is. She tries tipping the shade of the table lamp up, with the map tilted toward it, but still it's too dim. People come here for dim, not to find out where they are.

  A smiling waitress appears. "Nasty night out there," she says.

  Tears. Even such routine commiseration. She's that close to giving way.

  "The other person should be right back. Could we have two coffees? And would you be able to locate a flashlight and, maybe, a marker?"

  "Sure. No night to be traveling though."

  Finally Mark returns with matches, lights up. "No pay phone."

  The sweet waitress with the long black hair appears with coffee, a small flashlight, an indelible pen. Mark aims his what-now look across the table. He orders spaghetti; she orders minestrone, a salad. This shouldn't take too long.

  "Food," Mark says, while they wait. "I didn't get much sleep. That's it as much as anything. If I could just talk to Rozmer, get some flash that'll remind me why I'm here."

  She knows his "here" does not refer to Route 5. She leans toward him. "As soon as we eat, we can find a phone. Rozmer must be home by now. Who'd be out on a night like this?"

  "Fools," he says. "Fools and moms."

  She turns the placemat over, the perfect size to list the directions. Then she moves the little light along 5, in the direction of Syracuse. "Here we are: Vernon." Vernon, Canastota, Chittenango. She resists saying, Canastota, where you were born in the little five-bed hospital. Mentioning his birth, too risky. Once years ago, when she was still teaching, he called her long distance during her ninth-grade art class. He told the school secretary it was an emergency. "Why did you ever have me?" he'd screamed. "It's always been too much bother." This, his enraged response to finding a fifty-gallon barrel gone from the barn on an unexpected return after a move to the city. A barrel he'd planned for his noise-making system. This attack, as she stood in a room full of students. Could she call him back later? She couldn't discuss it right then. "My point exactly," he'd said. Then the accusing dial tone. She had to face the curious eyes of those fourteen-year-olds, sure they'd heard the screams. "Let's continue from this point of perspective, shall we?" But she is not, forever, going to detour around every moment of their past.

  "We're going right through Chittenango, where we lived until you were about one." Their first apartment. A jerry-rigged second floor of an old house, with an open stairwell, no doors to close them off from the entry to the two apartments downstairs. Their early-marriage silence available to all.

  Mark makes no response. Several times the last few years she's started to tell him baby stories: how when he was only nine months old, he hauled himself up and edged around until he reached the record player where, with his legs planted wide, he jounced up and down to "All You Need Is Love." But just as she'd begin these stories, he'd put up his hand: Don't tell me that stuff, he'd say. And true, part of her impulse is to offer these memories as evidence: See, sometimes I was completely there.

  The waitress brings the bread, her salad. Though her jaw no longer feels wired shut, still, under her ribs, a clenched fist. Food seems impossible. Mark is managing hunks of bread, soaking them in the little pool of oil. He seems more okay. Thin as he is now, he looks like Lee those last months. Both of them graying early. Lee, thirty-nine, only two years older than Mark was when he died.

  He catches her staring at him. "Better eat," he says.

  Don't cry. Not now.

  Rain, steady and cold, but no ice covers the windshield. She hands the list of directions to Mark and starts the car. The steering wheel is clammy, the interior airless, rank with smoke, sweat, the odor of burning plastic. He switches on the overhead and tips the paper down so she can see it too. "Things may begin to look familiar somewhere along that way. Say … ninety miles from here?" he says.

  "Right. Then we should be able to pick up Route 11 to Brookfield. That looks to be about fifty miles."

  "Okay … one hundred and forty."

  "It's seven thirty now. Don't you think you better call the hospital after you get hold of Rozmer?" Maybe they won't admit after a certain hour, maybe they'll give that bed to someone else, maybe the roads north of here will be a glare of ice and we'll be stuck in a ditch…

  They're buckled up, the heat and defroster on. He gives her a reassuring look. "Once we get to the highway, I'll drive unless I'm in the throes. You're good this way," he says, motioning her back onto the road.

  Risky to have Mark drive without a license, but there's no way she can go sixty-five in this kind of weather. They pass into darkness. The only light the green numbers on the dashboard, that steady revision of now: 7:51 … 7:52. Killing time: how she's always hated that expression. "Killing time" and "keeping busy." When she first retired—more like graduated—people who were still working used to say, Are you finding ways to keep busy? She wanted to say, I'm finding ways to do nothing. Twenty-seven years of good, but scary, work, hauling herself out of bed at five thirty, to bump down in the midst of one hundred and twenty-five oscillating adolescents. Fear of all that random motion compelling her to overprepare: every minute planned. Minimal is what she longs for: a white room, a few pencils, good paper, the limb of the old maple leaning low and away through the open window.
Following the edge of that twig, the curl of that leaf. Nobody needing her.

  CHITTENANGO 5 MILES

  "Surely there'll be a pay phone in Chittenango. I remember Route 5 became a commercial strip even thirty-five years ago."

  "If I didn't have to find a bathroom, I'd say fuck it. Rozmer isn't going to be there. I can't stand to hear that carpet message one more time."

  Route 5 Chittenango is one grubby little business after another. Much worse than she recalls.

  Mark turns up the fan. "Be ready to signal on short notice. There's got to be a gas station along here. There, up ahead on the right. The Mobil sign." Mark starts preparing to disembark.

  "I'll get gas while you call." She sticks the nozzle in the tank and manages to figure out what to press to hear that reassuring hum vibrating through the hose. Raining hard, but her hiking boots are proving to be truly waterproof, no dampness in her socks. At least her feet are ready for whatever happens farther north.

  The glare of the lights, the racks of junk food bring on a sudden nausea. Edward Hopper emptiness. Back outside Mark leans into a phone-cubbyhole, his back to her. She can't tell if he's connected down the wire to Rozmer. His sponsor. An alternate lifeline. Always she is grateful for the times when she is not the only one. Any other link that feels safe, loosens the umbilical. Sammi, Mark's longtime girlfriend, is only a telephone support now. For self-preservation, she had to distance. But those first few years after Aaron died, Sammi's presence may have been what kept Mark alive. Sammi, the one who'd called the police that first time he overdosed on a fistful of Klonopin, wedged himself against the door, told Sammi, I am done with being here.

  If Mark has gotten hold of Rozmer, a blast of new energy will fuel the drive north; if not … Please let him say he's called the hospital, that whenever he gets there, they'll let him in. She waits in the car. 8:10.

  He gets in. Lights a cigarette. Puts away his phone card. Fastens his seat belt. He cranks his hand for her to get rolling. She pulls back onto Route 5. She could reassure him with the news that a man inside said DeWitt was only ten miles away, that I-81 is an easy connection. Or the less assuring news, that it was no night to be heading north. But goddammit, she is not going to say anything. She is not going to ask him any questions whatsoever. Fuck it, as he so often says.

  Then through the blur of rain she sees the house. A light in the upstairs hall window where she so often pressed her forehead against the glass to see if Lee was coming home. The Coors sign still blinks in the bar across the street next to the all-night Laundromat where all their sheets, all the diapers, Lee's shirts were stolen wet from a machine when she'd run over to check on Mark asleep in his crib. "Mark, there it is. Where we lived." Where you said your first words. Where Aaron was conceived. She weaves a little toward it.

  Mark turns the wheel back into her lane. "Rozmer's line was busy. This may mean he's still of this world. And, no, I didn't call the hospital. I didn't have the strength."

  DeWitt. Everything gets faster, more. Her heart ups its bang against her chest. Her hands, more clammy on the wheel. She sits up a little closer. "Eighty-one North can't be far."

  "Pull in at the Red Barrel coming up and I'll take the wheel. Going to try Rozmer one more time."

  While he goes to the phone, she looks for the restroom. Takes advantage of every opportunity. He's in the driver's seat with the engine running when she comes out. Classical music turned low. The smells of Juicy Fruit gum and oranges. He's smiling. She slides in and fastens her belt. "Well?" she says.

  "No Rozmer. But he's been there and left me a message: Call him when I get to detox."

  She squeezes his knee. "I'm so glad."

  "How about this one?" He deepens his voice and sweeps his hand toward the windshield. "'This being human is a guesthouse. Every morning a new arrival.'"

  "What?"

  "Rozmer's new message for the day." He laughs. "Especially comforting for us paranoids." He backs, adjusts his mirror, checks his blind spots, signals, pulls into traffic, makes the left turn across two lanes—without an arrow—all in a flow. Mark has that confidence in space that Lee had. What Lee called great peripheral vision.

  She's relieved to not have to drive into the speed, the rush of cars entering, passing, but it's still hard to let go. "Don't go too fast," she says.

  I-81 NORTH WATERTOWN

  Mark swings the car around the curve of the ramp and moves into four-lane traffic. She lets go of the door, breathes, and glances at the speedometer: sixty-five. Too fast for her. Especially in this weather, but she sees everybody's going that fast. Even faster. "Hard to see?"

  "I'm seeing all right." He lights a cigarette. "I'll keep it to sixty-five, but if you get too nervous, say so."

  She closes her eyes. That's much better.

  "How many miles to Watertown?" he says.

  She checks the directions. "Seventy. It's eight forty-five. We should get to Watertown by around ten."

  "Then fifty to Brookfield, right? Say eleven o'clock we should be there."

  She closes her eyes again as Mark passes the car in front of him. "If we don't hit freezing conditions," she says.

  "Don't go there," he warns her.

  But she must ask this: "How are you feeling?"

  "Not too bad. Sweaty. Nothing acute."

  With her eyes closed, she feels the car swing back into the center lane.

  "We'll see how we're doing when we get to Watertown. If it's getting too late, I'll call the hospital. Tell them I'm on my way."

  They are quiet. The radio's off and she's glad. One less thing coming in. He drives; she breathes. The gods willing, a couple of hours and they'll be there. Mark will go away, she will clean and draw. In the fall maybe the artist residency in the Adirondacks will come through. Owl Lake. Not that far from here really, but a much easier drive from home. Home. For the first time she thinks about the return trip. Of course she will find a motel. No way that she'll drive back alone in the dark, in this rain or worse. If no motels are open that late, well … she can sleep in the hospital lobby. Cars are slowing down. Mark turns up the defrost fan.

  "Freezing rain?" she says. Mark has slowed to fifty. Still a few fools speeding by.

  "Looks like it."

  And then it happens. Cars all over the road. "Hold on," he tells her.

  Dear Jesus. She squeezes her eyes tight and grips the door. She feels the car slide, but no impact, no impact, and then they roll to a stop.

  "A fucking miracle," Mark says. For a few seconds they sit and are grateful.

  Mark opens his door a little, checks where they are. "We should be okay if no one slides into us."

  She pulls off her coat and places it on her knees. A possible cushion against something head-on. They are parked as close to the guardrail as you can get. Several cars are off on the median. Everybody's creeping now. "Black ice?"

  "I guess." He taxis along the shoulder until he can ease out into the lane, slowly accelerates to thirty, finally forty—what the rest of the traffic is doing. Then there are a couple more cars off on the median, red flares, again the cars slow to a crawl.

  ROUTE 11 MANNSVILLE

  She rolls down the window enough to feel the icy rain on her palm. "Mark, I think you should get off onto 11 at this exit and not wait until Watertown. I don't want to be this scared for another forty miles." The cars start to move again. Mark signals as they approach the exit.

  9:45. They're the only car on the road. Mark edges up from thirty to forty-five. She's not going to press him with any more anxious pleas. He's a good driver; he'll let the feel of the road guide him. The rain has changed to snow, a vortex of white, them tunneling in. Mannsville. Pierrepont Manor. Adams. Route 11 is even less traveled than 5. No traffic lights, the towns, just main street-deep, often only the blue glow of TVs from otherwise dark houses or a single light in an upstairs room. No stores. No motels. Every now and then a beat-up gas station-garage, but of course these are closed, maybe no longer in business. A pay phone? N
ot likely.

  No snow, no rain for the last few miles. Maybe they're through the worst of it. She stretches forward and tries to relieve the tightness in her back. Turns her head from side to side.

  Mark taps a new pack of Camels against the dash. It's a sound she's often heard in her dreams. Mark, sleepless in the loft, in the middle of the night, but with the comfort of a new pack. Cigarettes: one of the strangest of habits. What had been its satisfactions? She knows she's always got to quell the righteousness of one who's quit. Every night for years, before he went to bed, Lee threw the last of his Luckies in the trash. Often the first sounds of the morning were him digging them out. Habits. Her quitting pot. The spring she planted her potatoes by the moon, took what was left of an ounce and dumped it into the rushing waters of the brook.

  Mark turns down the defrost. The quiet after the constant shoosh of the wipers. "You're going to be getting a lot of phone calls. Shit I'm leaving behind."

  Does she have to know this? "Like what?"

  "Smithy's going to call about the two hundred. Put the polite 'Your son' on you."

  "Nobody's going to try to break in the house when I'm there, right?"

  "You're Aaron's mother. No. Anyway they don't do things when people are around."

  "And when I'm not around?"

  "Just lock up and take the Mac to Richard's. Rudy's going to call collect from jail. It's a long jail recording to see if you'll accept the charges."

  "This has nothing to do with me. I probably won't even answer the phone. Just let the machine monitor my calls."

  "Yeah. That's the best way. Carla's going to figure out where I am right off. But I'll be able to refuse any calls I want to at detox. Smithy, Carla, Rudy—they're not going to mess with me much because if they do, I'm going to really fuck their shit over. Totally." He laughs and bangs on the wheel. That laugh that isn't a laugh.

  "Mark." She knows he took his medication. The anti-psychotic, Zyprexa. Neurontin, the mood stabilizer. But she feels the manic edge. She should be driving.