The car is still in the driveway and already she’s talking. For three days, David has not had a quiet moment to himself. Either the baby was crying or his grown children were bickering or his son-in-law was out in the driveway running the snowblower over the scant two inches that fell overnight. And of course, there is Cindy, with her steady stream of chatter that fills in every available pocket of silence. It is time to go home: home to his quiet house on his quiet street, where the only sound is the occasional half-hearted bark from his neighbor’s elderly terrier, Frank.
“Did Ali look OK to you? She seemed a little run down to me.” Cindy pulls off her gloves one finger at a time and holds her palms up to the vent. The car has yet to warm up and the air is still blowing cold.
“She looked fine. Beautiful as always.”
“Well of course she’s beautiful. That’s not what I mean. She looks tired, kind of stressed. I can see it in her eyes.”
He puts on his blinker and merges carefully onto the main road, his new Michelins crunching over a layer of ice melt. The exterior will have to be cleaned when he gets home; all that salt will eat away at the finish if he lets it sit for too long. “She and Jake seem to have everything well in hand. You worry too much.”
Cindy exhales loudly and the sound sends David flying back over the years. That sigh,
the soundtrack to their thirty-six years of marriage.
“And you never worried enough. I guess that was my job, along with everything else.”
David holds the wheel at ten-and-two, the car accelerating onto the long stretch of I-89 as acres of browning farmland retreat in the rearview. “It didn’t have to be anyone’s job,” he says quietly. “The kids turned out fine.”
She laughs, a harsh little sound. “They turned out fine because I worried. You never understood that. Who knows what could’ve happened to them if I hadn’t made sure they turned in their homework on time and chose the right friends and that Ali got on birth control when she started dating that kid with the spiky hair.”
“Drew.”
“What?”
“The kid with the spiky hair. His name was Drew.”
“Well thanks. That’s useful. Maybe it’ll come up on Jeopardy someday.”
This again. Cindy never understood his love for Jeopardy, declared it slightly less appealing than watching paint dry. When he caught the occasional daytime rerun on the weekends, she would accuse him of cheating. “You already know all the answers! Where’s the challenge in that?” He never bothered explaining: sometimes it was just nice to live in the past for a while, in a world where his wife still liked him and Alex Trebek was still a handsome forty-year-old with a graying mustache.
They slip into a tattered silence. Cindy looks out the window, pretending to be absorbed by the passing billboards advertising CBD gummies and suicide hotlines. David’s vision toggles between the road and the GPS, which announces the two hundred and ninety-two miles they have left on the interstate in a polite British accent. It was David’s idea to travel together. Rhode Island to Vermont, five and a half hours each way. Riding in separate cars seemed highly illogical at the time of their oldest son’s invitation to Christmas. He wishes now that he had forsaken reason and come alone.
The road is clogged with holiday traffic, the same handful of cars trading places on an endless stretch of highway. A red hatchback is weaving too fast between lanes, and David keeps his distance, dropping below the speed limit as he lets the car slingshot out of view. Cindy is a fast driver, hell on wheels, which is why he offered to be her chauffeur for the trip. Beside him, she pushes her right foot to the floorboards, her own phantom gas pedal. It’s a habit that was endearing in their twenties and thirties, maddening in their forties and fifties. Funny how time has a way of emphasizing certain grievances and minimizing others. The sun breaks through the cloud cover in dramatic fashion, the first light they’ve seen all day. David flips down the visor to shield his eyes from the glare.
***
Behind her sunglasses, the world streaks by in a muted blur. Everything has that hungover quality Cindy has come to associate with the days after Christmas. The deflated Santas puddled on browning front lawns, the strings of colored bulbs that once seemed festive and hopeful rendered tacky in the harsh light of midday. She unscrews the cap of her water bottle and takes a long gulp, an attempt to dull the pressure that’s building at her temples. Last night, they stayed up magnificently late guzzling cheap wine and playing gin rummy, she and Ali and Seth and Miles crowded around Miles’ thrift store kitchen table with their respective partners, the windows fogging with their whispered banter. They tried and failed to keep their voices low so as not to wake David and the babies, but some things can’t be helped. “Are we having another Christmas party?” Micah asked as he toddled into the kitchen in his footie pajamas, his eyes half-closed against the light. And then he climbed up into Seth’s lap and promptly fell asleep, his slack weight slumped over his father’s shoulder. That ended the evening, everyone agreeing that they were getting too old to carry on past one o’clock in the morning. But Cindy would’ve stayed up all night if it meant a few extra hours with her children. How David could turn in at ten o’ clock and miss all the fun was beyond her understanding.
Traffic has slowed and Springfield crawls by in the passenger window, shabby and tired and grey. Banks of dirty snow bookend office building parking lots; garish neon signs blink in the windows of rundown liquor stores and seedy tattoo parlors.
“Remember that time we went to the Springfield Science Museum?” David asks, the gray stone building materializing in the frame of the windshield.
“How could I forget? Seth spent the whole trip puking in my handbag and you refused to pull over because we were making good time.”
“He loved the museum though. Perked right up once we got inside.”
“We had to throw out his favorite shirt in the bathroom trash can. Bought him some tacky thing from the gift shop to wear on the ride home. He was devastated.”
“Still, it was a pretty great day. The kids loved the planetarium.”
Neither she nor David speak for twenty-six miles. Cindy is playing the game she invented when they were married, to see how long it will take him to break their silence. Often, if she doesn’t speak to him directly, he’ll say nothing at all, obliviously content in the quiet. She was always the first to cave. All those long days spent at home with the kids, no other adult with whom to carry on a conversation. By the time he got home from work, she was nearly bursting with the need to hear her own voice, to remember herself as a real person that existed in a world outside their four walls. And then there was David, whose words were wasted on all those eager undergrads, soaking up his thoughts and regurgitating them back to him in their papers, those rare and precious jewels squandered on a bunch of eighteen-year-olds who would forget them after the semester ended. In all their years of marriage, David never caught onto the game. She realizes now that she is no longer obligated to play.
“Julie passed away, you know.”
“This guy’s blinker’s been on for twenty miles.” David gestures out the windshield at a powder blue minivan camped out in the passing lane.
“You remember my old co-worker, Julie. The one that always hit on you at the Christmas parties?”
David laughs. “Ah yes, Julie. She was always pretty harmless. What’d she die from? Young, wasn’t she?”
“Our age. Sixty-two. Some kind of cancer, I guess. Her daughter said she’d been sick for a long time. She was in and out of the hospital for years, but she just got too weak to keep fighting it.” Cindy straightens in her seat. “And she was far from harmless that time at the beach.”
“All she said was she thought I looked good in a bathing suit. I didn’t take any offense.”
“Of course you didn’t. You were too oblivious to realize that she’d have preferred your swim trunks on her bedroom floor.” She laughs, the memory made comical with the passage of time.
“Listen, if that ever happens to me, just unplug me. Spending the last years of my life in a hospital sounds like a fate worse than death.”
Cindy presses the water bottle to her lips, deciding not to mention that his end-of-life care is no longer her decision. Seth’s wife, Camilla, is a lawyer. Maybe she can revise his will.
Dusk is settling in around them, Hartford’s towering skyscrapers silhouetted against the darkening skyline. One by one, lights click off in the office buildings, flicker on in the apartment complexes. She imagines the people inside arriving home from work, slipping off their uncomfortable shoes, uncorking a bottle of cabernet. Cindy’s stomach roils at the thought of wine, her stubborn hangover having persisted through the afternoon.
“Do you want me to drive? Your eyes aren’t great in the dark.”
“I’m fine,” David says. “The headlights on this car are unbelievable.”
Overhead, a billboard announces Connecticut singles’ most popular dating app, the smiling couple looking more like an advertisement for teeth whitening strips than lasting love. Back when she was married, she dismissed dating apps as senseless and unnecessary. Don’t people know how to meet organically anymore?
“Have you been, you know, seeing anyone?” Cindy keeps her gaze trained straight ahead. They’ve caught up to the red hatchback hours from where they first encountered it, still weaving between cars, narrowly avoiding a collision with a municipal truck loaded down with rock salt. The hatchback’s brake lights bath David’s dashboard in a red glow. David shakes his head, offering no explanation, no reciprocating question. He punches at a button on the steering wheel, and the jazz station that’s been emanating softly from the speakers rises by several decibels.
If he bothered to ask, she might have told him about Grant. Grant with his barrel chest and big, hearty laugh, his love of good food and good books and good conversation. She isn’t sure why she’s put it off so long, though her children, Ali mostly, insisted she tell David before Christmas. Her daughter was the one who had gotten Cindy on the dating apps in the first place and while it was true that she might’ve met Grant some other way—the library where they each took classes, perhaps—it was also true that letting fate take its meandering course required time she doesn’t have left. Maybe by next Christmas, she’ll have found the courage to invite him along.
David’s hands flex on the steering wheel and Cindy is embarrassed to realize that they still stir something in her. Her cheeks heat at the memory of those fingers, lithe and graceful with clean, rounded nails, slipping easily inside her with a quiet, understated confidence. David was a generous lover, regarding her pleasure like one of his mathematical equations, something that could be solved if he worked at it with enough care and diligence. Grant’s approach to love-making, to life really, is that of a starving man at an all-you-can-eat-buffet, and, to him, Cindy is the most appealing option on the menu. At first, it caught her off guard, the things he said in the heat of the moment making her blush in a way she didn’t think was still possible at her age. But afterward, they lie in bed for hours, talking and giggling like teenagers. He never falls asleep until he’s heard everything she feels like telling him.
All afternoon, her hangover has kept her hunger at bay, but now it’s returned with surprising intensity. David, in his single-minded effort to make good time, never stops for food or gas if he can help it, which means neither of them have eaten for hours. She opens her purse and takes out the turkey sandwich Ali packed her before they left.
“Here.” She peels away the foil wrapper and hands David half.
“Thanks,” he says, taking a bite. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”
They chew in silence as Connecticut slips behind them.
***
Cindy’s phone buzzes in her lap and David feels every word as she reads the message to herself. She thinks he doesn’t know about the boyfriend. It wasn’t hard to figure out—the way she’s been wearing her hair differently, the strange new perfume, her phone always close at hand in case a new message comes in. Seth confirmed it after a few beers, though he swore he would deny his betrayal if the information got back to Cindy. The kids’ allegiance has always been to their mother. In a way, the knowledge of this other man tainted the holidays for David, left him feeling like an outsider in his own family. But that’s nothing new; he’s always felt a sense of otherness among them. The kids are all like Cindy, quick-witted and outgoing with no patience for David’s finer sensibilities. He hoped that as they aged, he would find a foothold in his children’s lives, after they settled down and found partners and became parents. But those things have come to pass and he still feels like nothing more than a spectator watching from the sidelines. Now there is some other man with whom he’ll be forced to compete for his family’s affections. He curses himself for having gone to bed while they stayed up playing cards last night.
Cindy pulls her sweater around her shoulders and David bumps the heat up a few degrees. Outside, the temperature is dipping into the teens as they cross over into Rhode Island. The car is too quiet and he has a sense then that she’s waiting for him to say something, her posture drawn up expectantly, her knees angled slightly toward his. He remembers her at twenty-three, sitting in the passenger seat of his Ford Pinto, her body turned toward him in much the same way. Her floral printed dress trimmed out in lace, tanned legs parted slightly. Her hair, smelling of vanilla and coconut, the scent filling up the space between them, rendering him unable to breathe normally. Bright coins of sunlight dappled her dress, shimmering through the leaves of some great tree that hung over the street where they were parked. They had just gone to a movie and his car was idling outside her apartment building. He was sure her roommates were watching them through the windows.
“We’ve been on three dates,” she said, “and after each of them I was hoping you’d kiss me. Well, I’m tired of waiting.” And then she pressed her lips against his and as she drew him closer by the neck of his shirt, he swore to himself he would never make her doubt his intentions again.
“Listen,” he says, turning toward her now, “I just wanted to—”
Neither of them sees the truck coming until it’s jackknifing toward them, sliding across two empty lanes of traffic. Cindy screams and David jerks the wheel hard to the right, the tires skidding over a patch of black ice. The car makes a nearly full rotation before it leaves the road. As it tumbles down the hill that falls away from the shoulder, David has the disorienting sense he felt twenty years ago when his two sons all but wrestled him onto the newest rollercoaster at Six Flags, the laws of gravity ceasing to exist as they soared and plummeted through two minutes of pure hell. The car comes to rest at the bottom of the embankment and for a moment he is too stunned to do anything but stare straight ahead, numb and unseeing. His glasses have been knocked from his face, though they wouldn’t have been much help anyway; the darkness is as pure and absolute as if a paper bag has been pulled over his head.
And then he shakes himself out of his stupor. “Cindy.” His voice sounds like it’s coming from the end of a long tunnel. He tries to turn in his seat, but pain radiates through his ribcage, the airbag, now deflated, having struck him full in the chest. “Cindy, can you hear me?” He’s relieved to hear the sound of her breathing, until he realizes it was his own ragged breath echoing in his ears. With shaking hands, he fumbles for his seatbelt and unbuckles himself, stretching across the center console to touch any part of her he can reach. There is glass in her hair, and his hand comes back sticky and warm. “Shit, shit, shit.” He realizes then that he can’t be sure if her airbag deployed. Why can’t he remember? It’s as if the last several minutes have been erased from his memory. He feels as he often does when he awakes from a nightmare, the memory of the dream fresh and jarring, but the dream itself maddeningly out of reach.
Up above them, blue lights flash. “It’s OK, honey,” he says and reaches for her hand. “They’re coming for us, OK? Help is coming. Just hang on.” But the only answer is the click of his blinker, the sound beating a steady rhythm in the quiet darkness as David waits for someone to come and save them.