Sample text for Last seen leaving / Kelly Braffet.
Bibliographic record and links to related information available from the Library of Congress catalog
Copyrighted sample text provided by the publisher and used with permission. May be incomplete or contain other coding.
Prologue: Crash
It had been a bad night, anyway. He"d had too much to drink, she
hadn"t had enough, and they"d ended up in the parked car, having sex while
fat summer raindrops spattered against the windows. He was fast and
grunting and she felt that she may as well have been alone in the car, in the
parking lot, in the state; impatience had welled up inside her like bad food,
the same feeling she had in tight spaces. She"d wondered how he didn"t
notice.
Then they"d argued, and now she was on the highway, driving the
twenty miles it would take her to be home. And the car was hers, the music
coming through the speakers was hers, loud and aggressive, and the
highway felt wonderful under her tires. She was on the new bypass, which
cost a dollar, but it was worth it because the road was empty. The cops
stuck to highways with more traffic, where they"d be more likely to fill their
ticket quotas, and so she gunned it, cutting through the empty darkness and
pressing the accelerator closer and closer to the Nova"s dirty floor mats.
Singing along with the music and pounding the steering wheel in time to the
beat, with all of that frustrated energy to burn. Raindrops smacked hard off
the asphalt, back up into the air, and that suited her, too.
When she drove, she liked to think she was plugged into a huge,
powerful machine. Like science fiction: the car"s nervous system joined with
her own through the sole of her right foot. That was where the car told her to
add more gas or take it away, when she had a low tire and was driving soft,
when she was on ice and when she was on dry pavement. That was where
she felt it when the car hydroplaned. She just had time to think Oh, shit
before time unlocked and she saw the guardrail racing toward her. Her
headlights lit the grass with surreal stripes of daylight as the car hurtled down
the high, artificial embankment and then the grass was in the sky and the
sky was in the grass, and inside her head there was only a high-pitched wail
of impossibility. She was rolling her car. People died when they rolled their
cars. She could die.
The wail intensified. She knew nothing else until it was over.
A man crouched next to her on the grass, rain spotting his glasses. "Are you
all right?" he said. "Are you hurt?"
She was sitting halfway up the steep slope. The crumpled Nova
lay at the base of the embankment, twisted into sculpture. She had no
memory of unbuckling her seatbelt and pulling herself from the wreckage, of
climbing this hill, of sitting down on the wet earth.
The man said, "You don"t look hurt. You"re not bleeding."
She was too busy taking stock of herself to answer. Her shoulder
burned where the seatbelt had dug into it, and her knees ached from bracing
her legs against the floor mat. Her jaw felt stiff and sore. But the man was
right. None of her hurts seemed serious.
"Did you see me go over?" she asked. Her voice cracked.
He nodded. "I was behind you. We should get out of the rain," he
added, pushing his dripping hair back from his forehead. "Do you have a
mobile phone?"
She shook her head.
"Neither do I. But I can give you a ride to the nearest pay phone."
He helped her to her feet. The world was finding its place around her, but her
legs still felt weak and disconnected from the rest of her body. She stumbled,
almost fell, and he caught her without hesitation.
"I"m not drunk," she said.
"I know you"re not," he said, his hand cool on her bare elbow.
Together they made their way up the rain-slick hill to his car, a silver
Mercedes. He helped her into the passenger"s seat, making sure her seatbelt
was buckled before carefully checking two lanes" worth of empty blacktop
and pulling onto the highway. Only then did all the advice she"d been given
about how to behave when you were a stranded female motorist come back
to her. She realized that she had done everything wrong. She had not stayed
in her car with the doors locked. She had not asked a passing motorist to
send help. A stranger had offered her a ride and she had taken it.
Then she thought, Fuck that, I"m alive. And her rescuer didn"t
seem interesting enough to be dangerous. He wore a button- down shirt,
khakis, and loafers, all slightly soggy from the rain, and wire-rimmed glasses
that he"d carefully wiped dry with a handkerchief before starting the engine.
He was about ten years older than she was, and he needed a haircut.
Her hands still shook with the aftereffects of the crash, and her
heart was loud and dire inside her chest, like the backbeat from music
playing too loudly in another apartment. The world felt foggy and surreal, and
she decided that she couldn"t be paranoid, not now. It was too hard.
For a time they drove without speaking, watching the flat gray
ribbon of road unfurling in front of the headlights. The Mercedes seemed to
glide above it without touching the asphalt. Even the rain was hushed. She
leaned back and rested her head against the soft leather seat. Gradually, she
relaxed. Her hands stopped trembling, and her heart quieted. She felt as if
she"d been crying, fiercely and for a long time.
A slow scowl spread across her face. Finally she said, "I can"t
believe I wrecked my goddamned car. What the fuck am I going to do? How
am I supposed to get to work tomorrow?" She lifted her hands and dropped
them hopelessly. "They"ll fire me. They"ll completely fucking fire me."
He said nothing, and she saw that he was smiling. It was a simple
smile, as if he"d just seen something small and pleasant, like a butterfly.
Suddenly she was angry. "Yeah, funny, isn"t it?" she said. "My car"s a piece
of modern art next to the bypass, by this time tomorrow I"ll be unemployed,
and by this time next month I"ll probably be living in my boyfriend"s mother"s
basement. I could die laughing."
The smile vanished. "I"m sorry," he said quickly. "It"s the way you
talk, like die laughing. You sound like someone in a crime novel."
"Oh." Her anger vanished as quickly as it had come, but it left a
strange taste in her mouth. Was that a compliment? she wondered. She
watched him carefully now, looking for -- she didn"t know exactly what she
was looking for. Some sign that would tip things one way or another, into
hazardous territory or out of it. "I swear like a goddamned sailor, is what you
mean."
"I think it"s quite wonderful," he said, and that was strange, but
was it dangerous? It sounded like the kind of thing some flake New Age
friend of her mother"s would say, didn"t it? Affirmation for affirmation"s sake.
You hated your job so you quit, and now you live in your car? How wonderful
for you.
"Wonderful. Right," she said, and then, deliberately changing the
subject, "This is a nice car." She meant it; the seats felt like real leather, and
the soft glow from the dashboard was all digital. She"d never been in a
Mercedes before.
He shrugged. "I travel a lot for work. I used to fly; now I drive. The
economy," he said, as if he expected her to commiserate.
"My economy always sucks," she said. "What do you do?"
"I work for the government. It"s not that interesting."
She tried to smile. "You want to hear not interesting, I"ll tell you
about my job." The smile disappeared. "Although I guess it won"t be a
problem after I get fired."
He nodded, not unsympathetically. "You"re lucky I came along,
you know. There"s not a lot of traffic on this road."
"I can take care of myself. A few months ago I had a fan belt
break not far from here. No big deal. I just fixed it with my bra."
"That"s very resourceful," he said, with enough sudden interest to
make her regret mentioning her underwear. "I always thought that was an
urban legend. Like giving somebody a tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen if
they"re choking. How are you supposed to keep the person from bleeding to
death while they"re breathing through your pen?"
It was hard to tell if he expected an answer. "Duct tape," she said.
He took her seriously. "If you have some. I guess it"s the sort of
thing that you never think you can do until you actually do it. It"s a common
phenomenon. Where do you live?"
"What?" she said, instantly tense.
"Where do you live? Where am I taking you?"
She moved uneasily in the seat. "There"s a truck stop off the next
exit. You can drop me there."
"I can take you all the way home if you"d like. The company is
nice. I spend a lot of time alone."
"The truck stop is fine."
"I actually enjoy driving," he said. "I find it meditative. I think about
things I"ve never done, things I"d like to do."
"Like what?" she said, thinking that if he said anything else about
tracheotomies she would jump out of the moving car, which was something
that she had never done.
But instead he said, "I don"t know. The standard things, I guess.
Haven"t you ever failed yourself?"
"You know, for a guy who spends all his time alone, you talk a
lot," she said.
"I"m surprising myself. I don"t really like people, as a rule."
"Great."
"Why?"
"Because I"m locked in a car with a strange man who doesn"t like
people."
"Oh," he said, and then, for the first time, he laughed. His laugh
was all in his throat. "You"re funny."
She turned and looked out the window just in time to see the
truck stop fly past in a blur of yellow lights. "Hey," she said. "That was the
exit. You just missed it."
"Did I?" he said.
Copyright © 2006 by Kelly Braffet. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication:
Mothers and daughters -- Fiction.
Missing persons -- Fiction.