#ignore the awful quality i have no scanner and no good lighting and no good camera

[rattsbian]

drawing rena in kyute outfits i found on pinterest (these fits in particular come from photos of yukiko okada and a scan of japanese seventeen magazine)

[apparitionism]

Road 4

Sometimes when I’m working on a thing, I caution myself about what not to do. What’s greeted me every time I’ve opened the file that contains this chapter and next one are the words “My worst impulses: happily and uncomplicatedly ever after.” It’s not that I don’t want them to be happy; I do want that. I always want that. But in some contexts, ease is untruthful, and maybe even immoral. Anyway, not that anybody cares, but there’s some strong language in this part. Disclaimering just because. I suppose when you get down to it, I’m writing just because, too. Part 1, part 2, and part 3 preceded this.

Road 4

Ignore a problem long enough, and it eventually goes away. Or it kills you, and Myka would be fine with either of those outcomes.

She doesn’t trust herself to drive home—because she might drive somewhere else instead—so she sleeps in her office at the garage. That’s not so unusual, really, and her body knows how to position itself in her chair so that she can nod off pretty quickly. No matter what’s on her mind.

By the time Alicia and Manny get in the next morning, she’s back at work on the fuel pump. Manny says “hey.” Only under very special circumstances does Manny’s conversation get much more elaborate, or engaged, than “hey.”

Alicia, however, greets Myka with “What’s with all the fresh sealer on that old pump?”

“Long story,” Myka tells her. In terms of actual mechanics, the story isn’t long at all: she’d thought she was installing the new fuel pump, but she had in fact begun to reinstall the old one. She’d got as far as placing the gasket, with sealer all over it, onto the busted pump before her hands started telling her strange things about grit and grime and new parts don’t feel like this. So she told herself to focus, started over, and didn’t think about the long story.

She doesn’t think about it now. She pays close attention to the rest of the install, takes a little longer than she otherwise might, but once she’s done, it starts up fine and fires fine, so she parks it out back and calls Wayne, praying she won’t get his wife instead. Mrs. Darnell hates the Cutlass, begrudges the repairs, wants Wayne to trade it in for a Camry because she’s read that they are very reliable. Myka doesn’t bother bringing up anything about Wayne’s driving. Mrs. Darnell also always asks for Myka’s help in making the pro-Camry argument, because “Wayne likes you—he’ll listen to you.” Wayne doesn’t listen to me, Myka would be inclined to tell her. Nobody listens to me. Even I don’t listen to me. But she doesn’t bother bringing that up either.

She gets the answering machine. “Wayne, come get your car,” she tells it.

She works her way with great care through the next job, too: replacing a set of worn-out semi-metallic brake pads with new ceramic ones. She would’ve replaced the skinned pads with the same quality product, but she got upsold by the driver rather than the other way around. She’s not going to be an idiot about it; it’s not her job to keep people from going pricier than they need to, not if they’re bound and determined—so, ceramic it is, pal.

People want such unnecessary things. They never believe you, never listen, when you try to tell them that good enough really is good enough.

Up for her after that is a silver Infiniti sedan, only two years old. Pricey car. Powerful. All its owner said when he brought it in was that the check engine light came on, which hadn’t really surprised him because it’d been driving a little hinky.

She plugs in the scanner, reads the error codes. They suggest she should give up on the car completely, send it to auction or junk: everything is wrong. “Everything is wrong” and “driving a little hinky” don’t equate, so she announces to Alicia and Manny, “I’m going to get this out on the road to try to figure out what its problem is.”

“What’d the OBDs say?” Alicia asks.

“Nothing that made any sense. I’ll feel it out, then bring it back and reset the whole thing. See what we get then.”

Manny looks up from under the hood of the pickup truck he’s working on. Myka’s pretty sure that’s the one with the fan-belt issue—but since when is she only pretty sure about such a thing? He lifts the bill of his dark blue Sky Sox hat from his graying head, then pulls it tight back down. Manny doesn’t waste motion much more than he does words, but he picked up the cap-adjusting tic when he pitched in the minors, decades ago. The omnipresent dip lodged behind his lower lip is from baseball too, and he tongues it before he speaks. “You check the gas cap?” he asks Myka.

“Of course,” is her automatic response. A loose cap: it’s the number one cause of weirdo codes. It’s always the first thing you check.

Myka has not in fact checked the gas cap.

“Yeah, okay, no,” she mutters, and she goes to check it.

Myka ascertains that the cap is tight. Then she says to Alicia, who has followed along behind her, “I seem okay to you, right?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? I’m fine.” A foolish response, given that she’s the one who asked the question.

Alicia snorts out a disdainful little breath that suggests she’d agree with “foolish.” She says, “One, you didn’t check the gas cap.” That, she offers with a raised finger that immediately reminds Myka of Helena’s one, two, three archaeological explanations. The memory ambushes her in its fullness, and she doesn’t know whether to congratulate herself or cry at having warded off such detail for this long. Instead of letting herself fall back into that terrifying conversation of last night, instead of letting herself open the folded piece of paper in her pocket, she focuses on how Alicia’s counting off reasons on her gloved fingers—she always wears gloves, to protect her nails, which she gets elaborately done twice a month. Myka and Manny have both been trained to express appropriate awe at the artistry involved, though Manny usually gets away with something on the order of “that looks nice.”

Alicia’s manicure, Alicia’s gloves—Alicia counting on gloved fingers is familiar. Better, Myka tells herself. It’s familiar, and it’s better. It’s familiar, so it’s better. Alicia goes on, “Two, you lied some lie about a long story, first thing this morning.” Myka tries to protest, but Alicia stops her with, “And then three, you took three hours on those pads. I’ve watched you swap out a transmission faster than that. Watched you. I mean it was a manual, but.”

“I remember that. Because I remember you were watching and not helping.”

“I was timing. You could’ve broke a record. So you gonna take that Infiniti out and be gone for three hours? Me and Manny just need to know.”

“I don’t need to know,” Manny says. He retreats into the pickup.

“Talk to a customer ever and maybe you might,” Alicia calls to him.

Myka says, “I’ll text you or something, okay? I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You just said you were gonna try it out and then reset.”

“Right. Look. Like I said, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You look.”

Myka doesn’t want to look. “Okay. A thing happened.”

Totally justified derision: “Wow, yeah. I get why you need to drive around, work that out.”

Totally justified. Myka says, “I’ll ask you, seriously, what would it do to you if somebody came in here and—I don’t know. For you, it’d be like they came in here and reminded you of your ex.”

“Reminded me like came in and said ‘Hey, remember that psycho motherfucker?’” Alicia crosses her arms. She looks very, very tough. She is a very small black woman, one who can look very, very tough—because she is very, very tough. She and Myka have each been through some things, but Alicia’s things have been personal. Somebody out to get her as her. Myka tries not to forget how different that is.

“Reminded you,” Myka says, “like made you think about things you don’t. Don’t because you shouldn’t, because it’s a better rule.”

“Only thing that’s got a prayer to start that up is that psycho motherfucker himself comes in, which is why I got a restraining order says he can’t.” Alicia pauses. “But I know you got no restraining orders. So the fuck came in here?”

Myka weighs the pros and cons of telling Alicia, of telling anybody; it rings uncomfortably of therapy, which she was bad at, so she’s made it into another thing she doesn’t think about. Then again, talking to Helena last night had had a similar ring, and there’s another full, unavoidable thought: Helena with her determination to make Myka say things. And, worse, think about things.

She waits too long. Alicia’s posture stiffens, and her jaw takes on a hurt jut. Myka half expects her to start muttering okay be like that or fine don’t tell me like a teenager would. Myka sighs. “It’s a woman. She showed up last night. I hadn’t seen her in a year, but she walked in here last night.”

“A woman who’s a psycho motherfucker like my ex?”

Myka shakes off that suggestion. “Seems to want things I can’t give her.”

“Seems to.”

“Right. She shows up here like I owe her something.”

“Do you?”

Myka can’t immediately say no—even though she doesn’t owe Helena anything, not in any sense she can name. She pushes her dirty hands through her hair. She doesn’t remember taking her hair down, but here it is, down. Jesus. “What do you owe somebody you slept with because she seemed to need it and honestly so did you?”

“If you didn’t get her pregnant, probably nothing. You get her pregnant?”

“Doubtful.” Myka can’t stop a chuckle. “You never know, but doubtful.” She tries to linger on the laugh—tries not to think about a child, and the loss of her, and how that is really the only reason any of this happened.

“She do shit to hurt you? To fuck you up?”

“No. Other than show up here, no.”

“She know that was gonna fuck you up? Twisted like this, where you don’t check a fucking gas cap?”

“No.” Because Helena had thought that Myka was in a place better than her own bereaved self—objectively better. A place more whole. Myka wants to laugh.

“So she is not a psycho motherfucker.”

“She came all the way here from Morocco. England then France then Morocco then here. She said it was to see if I was all right. What’s the call on that?”

Alicia makes a “well, well” face. “Hardcore,” she says, and it’s praise. “She a stalker?”

“Technically maybe. But really not. Hardcore, though, yeah.”

“She good in bed?”

Myka is not surprised by this question; Alicia is, in her own way, very like Driss. But Myka’s more inclined to answer when Alicia asks, so: “Yes,” she says. It would be dishonest to say anything else. Because it isn’t just nostalgia that has kept Myka from trying with much enthusiasm to look for any companionship lately—it’s the real and sometimes too inconveniently present knowledge that anybody else would likely pale in comparison. She’s spent some time not being thrilled with that knowledge. “But that happened—not here. Obviously. And she shouldn’t be here. Elsewhere is elsewhere. You know how I feel about... elsewhere.”

“Shit went down, and home is not the place you want to keep all that. I get it. I live it. My kid lives it. But this hardcore stalker who’s good in bed, does she get it?”

Myka doesn’t have an answer.

Alicia takes off her right glove, points her index finger hard at Myka. Its nail features a profusion of delicate daisies that do nothing to sweeten her words. “If she is not a psycho motherfucker then don’t blame her for any psycho motherfucking shit. Am I gonna blame my kid? I gotta bring him with me, no matter what, no matter how much he looks like that psycho motherfucker.”

Myka says, “I don’t like how that fits.” Because Alicia’s son, twelve years old now, does look like her ex, such that Myka has never really understood how Alicia can look at him. Every day. And Myka is now considering that Helena can’t bring her kid with her. And yet she always brings her kid with her. What hurt Helena didn’t happen elsewhere. She doesn’t get to leave it in the desert. Myka’s inability to see that simple fact—to get to it—shames her. “I really don’t like how it fits,” she says.

Alicia shrugs. “Sorry, Corporal.” She puts her glove back on.

“Don’t,” Myka says.

“You’re the one brought up my ex. Reminded me. Gotta give you something back.”

“Yeah,” Myka acknowledges. She rubs her eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Yeah. Nobody does. Go drive. Or whatever.”

****

The Infiniti really is acting weird. Codes aside, there’s an overall lack of smoothness to its energy, somehow frantic and sluggish at the same time. Its engine should pick up like nothing’s happening at all, the noise a thick layer of butter in the deep, deep background, but instead there’s a hungry rumble forcing Myka to listen to how much labor it’s chunking, clunking through.

She pushes the pedal, drives even faster than she usually does. Maybe there’ll be a cop around and she can get herself stopped, ticketed, something that holds her up, something she has to deal with.

Instead, she just gets to Helena’s hotel really, really fast. In a car that worked far too hard to get her there.

But Helena’s probably gone already anyway. It’s late afternoon, practically evening, and even though she said she had a late flight, she’s probably gone already anyway. That’s what to hope for.

Myka parks in a space reserved for loading and unloading—maybe somebody’ll raise a stink about it and that can be the thing to deal with. But nothing happens, even after she’s sat there for a while, so she gives up. She gets out of the car, slams its door. The sound is expensive, yet unsatisfying. She goes inside, to the desk, and asks if the person in 327 has checked out yet.

The clerk, a boy who can’t be more than eighteen, gives Myka a look like he’s afraid she’ll strangle him if he gives the wrong answer. He taps at his computer. He says, with a quaver, “No. She hasn’t checked out.”

And what is Myka supposed to do now? Go up there, bang on the door? And then what?

So she mutters a surly “thank you” and goes back to the car. She sits in this expensive, nonsensically faulty car that isn’t hers, in a parking space she has no right to occupy, and she doesn’t drive away.

Thirty-four minutes later, Helena walks out of the hotel, wheeling a suitcase. She stops and waits.

Myka drives up, parks in front of her. Stands up out of the car. “Get in,” she says.

Helena gazes at Myka. Her breathing doesn’t change, and her expression stays neutral. She sounds far more like her desert self as she asks, “Where are we going?”

“To the airport.”

“I’m taking the hotel’s shuttle.”

Don’t be difficult, Myka would tell her, but she knows that she herself is the one being difficult. “Take this instead.”

“My turn now: why are you here?”

“I had to check out why this car was driving hinky.” That’s at least the truth.

“And that made you think of me. I’m flattered.”

“Would you just get in the car.”

“Why?”

“So I can drive you to the airport.”

“In a car that’s likely to break down.”

“It isn’t hinky like that.”

“That is clearly a term of art in your business. As for breaking down, I suppose you would know better than I.” But she gets in the car. She doesn’t look at Myka.

The car doesn’t break down, despite Myka’s roaring unreasonable wish that it would. She has the wild idea that she might pretend it’s stalled, steer it regretfully to the shoulder—but no, it drives like the dream it’s supposed to, creamy sound and all, and it’s only a five-minute trip anyway, and then they’re pulling up to the terminal, and it’s too late. It’s too late for everything.

Myka stops at the curb. She gets out and hauls Helena’s suitcase from the trunk, sets it on the pavement. Pulls up the handle, so Helena won’t have to. Helena’s out now, too, and she says, “The car didn’t break down. You were right.”

“Yeah.” She’s caught between wanting to memorize Helena’s face as she stands here, every strengthened detail of it as it is now, or to cling tighter to the past vision of thin grief. Neither one is going to be a comfort. (Neither one is going to recede.)

“May I kiss you?” Helena asks, and it’s her desert voice again. So wrong for it to emerge from this rejuvenated body. “Just once, just goodbye?”

The car decided to get here. That made clear what her answer has to be. “No,” Myka says.

Helena nods. She takes the bag’s handle, and she turns to walk into the terminal. The scarf, that Essaouira scarf, is around her neck and shoulders, like an animal, there to serve her, to protect her, as a familiar should. That, Myka did right. She reaches out to reassure herself of its nubbled weave, to flip it one last time between her fingers. One little last physical reminder of all those colors, all that beauty Myka couldn’t bring herself to face. It’s in her hand for an instant, and then it’s slipping out, as Helena moves away.

Tighten your grip.

Where the directive comes from doesn’t matter; it’s an order and Myka obeys it.

Helena turns around.

And she’s launching herself at Myka as she had at the end of the race last year, as if her body is spent but she’s won something.

They embrace like it’s first and new—and the first kiss still feels like this—but then again it is first and new: it’s their first kiss goodbye.

Helena holds her eyes closed for a moment after it ends. She looks, in that instant, like she’s asleep—sleep, that beautiful time, when if there are no dreams, there are no memories either. That’s the only real peace, that and the instant of waking, that one instant when everything is forgotten and fine.

How close to forgotten and fine it all had seemed, just now, when Myka was kissing Helena; how it had become no longer so when she opened her own eyes from the kiss. And she watches as Helena, too, now, when the instant of waking passes, takes upon her face again all of that remembered weight. Kiss me again, Myka imagines saying. It helps me, and it helps you, so kiss me again.

But trying to escape into a world of dreamless sleep: that’s cheating. So instead, she says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“For what?” Helena’s voice is as soft as the kiss.

For wishing, when I knew I shouldn’t. “For all of it. Not being as right as I pretended to be. Not being the same person here as I was there. Not being someone who could give you what you want.”

“What do I want?”

“That person in Morocco. That person there.” Because that person, there, did the right things, at the right times.

“Yes, that person, there. There, then. But if I’m not the same now, here, why would I expect you to be?”

“It was so beautiful,” Myka tries to explain. Tries to explain away. “So differently beautiful. That could never happen again.”

“No, it couldn’t. I for one don’t wish to be in need like that again.” Her words bring Myka dangerously near tears, because of course Helena doesn’t want that. All Myka wants to do is crawl back to Essaouira, back inside that differently beautiful sanctum of time and place—but she would have to drag Helena back with her, and she would not drag Helena back into that exile, not for all the world. (And yet it feels like all the world, that’s what she’d be getting back, for that moment; she’d be getting all the world.) “But Myka,” Helena says, and it’s a strange side-stepped reading of Myka’s mind she performs as she goes on, “you are still in the world, and no matter where in the world that is—no matter what you tell yourself about who you are in different places—no matter what you want to leave in this place or in that one—no matter any of that—you wear the same face.”

“This isn’t your face. It isn’t the same. You look better now.”

“And you speak with the same voice.”

“Even your voice is different.”

“You are still in the world, and so I did not have to resign myself to the loss of your face. To the loss of your voice. I could come here, and I could see you and hear you. You could still tell me things. Or did you forget them all?”

All Myka can manage is a shake of her head.

“Then tell me this: Why should I mourn the loss of you when here you stand? Would you wish more such grief upon me?”

“Wish grief on you? How can you say that? Why would you say that?” Here she is near crying again, this time from frustration.

“Myka.” That voice, saying her name, low and terse. But there’s a keen tension to it now too. “If I were to continue explaining myself to you, I would miss my plane.”

Myka recognizes that carefully articulated statement for what it is: one last chance. Myka can take this one last chance to keep being who she’s been. That person would let Helena walk away, into that terminal lit up from the inside, into all that light. It’s waiting for her.

That person would stay out here, in this mountain twilight, and let Helena walk into whatever future she can find.

She’ll go away, and Myka won’t see her again, because there are things she doesn’t think about. She will put Helena fully away, with those things she doesn’t think about, as she should have done before. Another thing that Myka will put away, with those things, is the fact that Helena tried—folded with the fact, plain in Helena’s gaze now, that she will not try again.

(We all have one grand gesture in us.)

This won’t ever happen again. Something else might happen, but it wouldn’t be this. A thousand other things will happen, but they won’t be this.

“Would you?” Myka asks.

It’s the second-most selfish question she’s ever asked. The most selfish was when her first tour was almost up, and she had to decide whether to extend. Her mother was sick, and she asked her parents, “Do you need me stateside?”, knowing that they would say yes, knowing that that would be her excuse. To get out from under the pressure of being magic: yes, to escape that pressure, she selfishly asked a question. The asking diminished her, both in her own eyes and in those of her parents. They were, they are, unselfish people. They never would have thought to request that she come home.

A wince of a question, yet she asks it. “Would you?”

Helena moves closer, but in a sidle, like she must stay balanced to dart away, like this is surely the most obvious of traps. She moves closer still, and Myka raises her arms, just a little, but as much as she can.

And it seems like a miracle, but really it’s just two bodies coming soft together one more time, with cars and people all around, suitcases and goodbyes, but this kiss is like those that were a year ago—like those that were not first, a year ago; like those that were instead deep inside two differently beautiful nights, in a country not their own.

If it were just this, everything would be all right, and nobody would ever hurt anybody, because Myka is thinking of every intimate touch. How her legs would slide against Helena’s. How her cheek would rest against Helena’s hip. How her hands would rise up Helena’s back.

Myka finds herself starting the car and driving. She is driving somewhere, anywhere. Helena is beside her in a car on the road, instead of beside a stranger on an airplane in the sky, and Myka is driving somewhere.

TBC