After the funeral, I drive west and keep driving.
The interstate unravels to finer threads at each turnpike. I hurtle past prisons and state lines and chrome diners. Horizon swallows sun.
It is at a filling station in Nebraska that I find him.
A misting rain is sequining the night. Billboard floodlights drench the lot in flickering gold. I crouch in the tall grass behind the building, skirts hitched to piss after seeing out-of-order signs slapped on all the restroom doors.
He is a movement at the corner of my eye when I straighten and smooth my mourning attire, a figure so small in the shadows I mistake him at first for something animal. The boy is hunched low to the pavement, shoulders shuddering like he is crying. I edge closer, and the neck of a broken bottle catches light and glisters in his tiny fist. He stirs at the rainbowed film of oil in a puddle.
I approach slowly, not wanting to startle him.
“Hi, there. Are you lost?”
I expect a face streaked with tears, but when his head snaps up his smile is face-splitting. Diamonds of rain are caught in his tangled hair.
My breath catches.
He is no older than my own son James, grin missing all the same teeth, beautiful even with the dark smear of blood under his snubnose. My veins simmer to boiling at the sight.
“You’re hurt,” I breathe, lowering to my knees in the gravel. “Are you all alone?”
He grins wider, unblinking.
“Is someone here with you? Your mom or dad?”
He is still silent, but I see the dimples of his knuckles working as he grips the glass tighter.
“What is your name?”
Nothing.
“Is there someone I can call? Is anyone looking for you?”
No answer. Not to any question I put to him.
“I’m going to go call the police,” I finally decide, pointing to the payphone.
He shakes his head adamantly, smile faltering. His whisper is almost imperceptible, and I lean close to catch it over the whip of passing rigs on the slicked highway. “It’s okay. You don’t have to worry. My mom is coming back for me. She always comes back.”
I don’t manage another word from him.
I clean the blood from his face with my own black dress, peel back a tiny, quivering finger at a time to toss the bottleneck he clenches away, shrug from my jacket to drape it around his narrow shoulders. My rage is nearly as uncontainable as my sorrow, and I cannot help myself from whispering the words when I draw him close and feel the way he is shaking.
“This isn’t fair. This isn’t fair.”
____
“Whatever you want,” I nod at the shelves.
It takes three more urges and a gentle nudge forward for the boy to understand, and then he is racing back and forth stacking his small arms to overflowing with colorful packages, leaving a trail through the gas station’s aisles of dropped Oreo-sleeves and licorice-laces and circus peanuts and yogurt-dipped pretzels.
I box taquitos spinning under the heat lamp. The boy yawns and rubs his eyes while I pay, and when we have our feast in two plastic bags and are back in the storm, I point to my beater Impala. “Do you want to wait with me? Out of this rain?”
I run the engine for the heat, doors pulled closed. Droplets tick on the windows and smear the service station’s circus of blinking neons.
After the boy has settled low in the seat beside me, he produces a pack of mint chewing gum from under my jacket, passing it to me. His face is triumphant.
“Wait. I didn’t buy this. Did you steal it?”
He has a pickle-in-a-bag I never purchased. Cool Ranch sunflower seeds. Slim-Jims. Sour worms. He points to me, looking like he might burst with pride.
“When did you—”
He twists in the seat and yanks a can of Diet Coke from his waistband, dropping it in my lap.
“You didn’t need to do this for me. We have to give all of this back. It’s not right to steal,” I try to scold, but I can’t help myself from returning his conspiratorial smile.
____
After he is asleep, I spin my map around in the dome-light looking for the nearest police station, and then swing onto the glistening sheet of the highway. Wet pavement thunder-rumbles beneath us. My knuckles whiten at the wheel. My anger sharpens to a blade that could cut through bone.
The boy is impossibly small, curled knees-to-chest under my jacket on the passenger seat. He whimpers once while he dozes, bolts upright a minute later. His eyes are huge and terrified at first, fear dissolving into a lopsided smile when he sees me.
I am too uneasy to return it. How can he be calm as he is, in the moving car of a stranger? “Don’t worry. I’m going to make sure you get home safe,” I assure him.
He nods, seemingly indifferent, hugging his package of Oreos and slipping back into sleep.
At the precinct, I roll four times around the block rehearsing what I will say to the officers, grinding my teeth until my jaw aches.
Can any of you believe this. That a mother would leave her child behind. Hurt and alone. In the rain. Don’t you understand that I would have given my life. Killed if I had to. For James. I would never have left him like this. She’s no mother to him.
It feels good, clenching this fury between my molars. Chewing at something besides my grief. Having something more than loss roiling in the pit of my stomach.
The boy’s shoulders rise and fall as he breathes steadily beside me.
She doesn’t deserve him.
I re-enter the highway aimed east, my highbeams knifing the mist.
____
In mid-Iowa, the rain clears. The sky violets. Lavenders.
I don’t hear it when the boy stirs. Only the hissing of the Coca-Cola can in the center console when he pops the tab. There is a static-crackle of carbonation, a liquid glug while he pours it into his lap and over the passenger seat’s polyester upholstery.
“What are you doing?” I slam the brakes and jerk my vehicle onto the shoulder, gaping.
When I reach to stop him, his eyes go wild, almost feral. He lets out a caterwauling screech and pitches the aluminum can at me. Kicks his feet out and catches me in the side. Palms Oreos against the glass. Flings his weight against the seat. Wrenches my glove compartment open and crumples handfuls of papers in two fists, shreds my map, tears my registration in half before I realize what he has.
I observe his outburst in motionless shock. He has worn himself out by the time I understand, by the time I have caught the stale scent of urine in the air.
“You had an accident,” I say, looking at the dark bloom of cola now soaking the seat, and he goes so still I am not even sure he is breathing.
“No,” he whispers.
“It’s okay. I’m not angry. It was just an accident.”
____
At a diner off I-80, I order us waffles that we drench in syrup. After licking his plate, the boy swallows all the butter pats and creamers and jelly cups at the center of our table, and then clambers over our booth to the next for seconds.
I don’t have it in me to admonish him, not even when he starts to smear concord grape across the wall. I can hardly look at him without my chest aching. The knots of his hair have been picked through and slicked back with my comb, and he wears a change of clothes I kept for James in my trunk, loose on his tiny frame.
He looks like he could be mine, enough that no one in the diner has batted an eye, and it feels almost like betrayal, the way I wish it were true. Dawn scorches the tassels of a cornfield outside, and the reality of what I’ve done bears down on me.
Did the boy’s mother come looking for him during the night? Did she weep while she searched? Scan the gas station’s camera footage for my plates, lie when she filed her missing person report and say she only looked away for a second? Is the same aching gape I’ve carried all week now yawning within her?
Try as I might, I cannot conjure any sympathy for her.
I hope that she feels it.
I hope that the loss is gripping her by her shoulders, shaking her by them, shrieking in her face. I hope she knows how ungrateful and careless she was.
When our waitress brings the boy a coloring sheet, he drags the crayons so hard across it they all snap.
“Do you know how to spell your name?” I ask, hoping I might catch him in a more talkative mood.
The boy does not look up from his frantic scribbling.
“I can show you how. If you tell me what it is. Do you want me to show you?”
Still no answer.
“What about your mom’s name?”
Nothing.
“Do you know where she went last night?” I ask, certain the question will only earn me more silence. “Don’t you want to find her? Do you want me to take you to her?”
The boy freezes, but does not look up. He jams a crayon between each finger, swirling a whole fistful of colors at once, layering wax until the paper pulps.
“That’s a really nice drawing. What are you making?”
His head whips up, and he points an accusing finger at me.
“Me?”
His grin is devious.
“Wow. I look crazy.”
He giggles.
I lean even closer. “If I said you could come stay with me for awhile. Would you like that?” I wait. I want the decision to be completely his. “It’s up to you.”
He slides his drawing across the table to me, and smiles with all his teeth before taking a bite of a green crayon.
____
When the bill comes, my wallet is missing from my purse. I search everywhere, going to hands and knees on the diner’s sticky tile to peer underneath booths. I scour the restrooms, shove whole arms beneath the seats of my Impala and come up with fistfuls of Cheerio and animal cracker crumbs.
They are dropped from snacks packed for James when I used to pick him up from school, and it knocks my breath from me to see them in my palms.
A manager coughs behind me. “It’s okay, ma’am. I can see you’ve got your hands full. Consider your meal on us,” she says, and offers a black coffee to go and a sympathetic smile. I follow her eyes, and the boy is across the lot, scooping up handfuls of gravel and hurling them at a black crow, at the diner’s vintage neon, at a clutch of parked vehicles.
I wipe cereal-dust on my dress and murmur a quick thanks and apology before I run after him.
____
It is an hour later on the open road that the boy pulls my wallet from under his shirt and begins rifling through the contents. He counts dollars, dumps my coins down the crack between seats, studies my credit card. A first-grade portrait is examined carefully, and when he waggles it in front of my face, it feels like a kick in the stomach.
“My son. He was about your age,” I explain, voice fracturing. “He isn’t here anymore.”
The boy jams the button to lower his window, and flicks the photograph out into the roaring slipstream. I watch in horror as it takes flight and disappears in our wake.
Window sealed, the boy returns the wallet to my purse. After he’s settled back into his seat, he recites my credit card number to me from perfect memory, swelling with self-satisfaction as he does.
____
“We’re getting close,” I announce at the Illinois border, pulling into a fueling station and cutting the engine at a pump. Before I can open the door, the boy lets out an earsplitting yowl that has me clapping my hands over my ears.
“What’s the matter?” I demand.
“Not the right one!” he is panicked, breathing hard, scrambling to grip his seatbelt and clutch the door handle. His whole arms quiver from the strain of holding himself in place. “Don’t leave me here. It’s not the right one.”
“That’s not—I would never—” before I can stammer out the right words he is crying, face buried in his elbows, shoulders shaking, breaths hitching on snot. He tenses when I put a hand on his shoulder, and I draw back, waiting.
“I want to go home,” he manages to choke. “Not the right one. Not here. I want to go home.”
My stomach drops. “That’s where we’re going.”
The boy sobs harder.
“I know you’re tired. We’re almost there. A couple hours. We’ve got a room for you. Toys. Everything,” I say through teeth, my smile forced.
He hiccups as he cries. Grinds fists into his eyes. “Home,” he repeats.
“You’ve got a new home. You’re going to love it,” I tell him. “And if you don’t. I’ll take you back. Okay?”
Of course I will leave the choice to him, when he is in a state to make it.
And even after our short time together, I know what he decides could shatter me.
Surely my skeleton will not be able to bear another loss.
____
My eyes grow heavy in the final stretch. My chin nods. I calculate that I have been on the road for something like twenty hours since the funeral ended and I told my husband I was going for a drive.
My zippered case of CD’s is discovered in the center console just in time.
“Do you like music?” I ask as the boy flips through my collection. Cranberries and Garbage and Sonic Youth. He greases both sides of a Pixies album with fingerprints while he is fumbling it from the sleeve and shoving it into the player.
We bob our heads, tentative at first. By the final tracks, I am drumming the steering wheel theatrically while he kicks the dashboard. We swap wicked, delirious grins.
The interstate widens like a bloating river as we dance. Space between billboards and ramps and shopping centers narrow. Silhouettes of distant high-rises grow like teeth out of the horizon, and when the album finishes, the boy ejects it and snaps it in half over his knee.
____
“You did what?” My husband gapes at me in shock.
His car is in our driveway when I pull in, and I instruct the boy to wait back while I explain.
“I can finally make sense of it,” I tell my husband, swaying on my feet in my exhaustion, palming my welling tears. “It feels like there’s a reason we went through all of this. Like it wasn’t for nothing. I can’t stand the idea of it all being for nothing. I think it was meant happen this way. It had to be. Someone had to be there to save him.”
My husband’s eyes are hollow and bloodshot. He’s been crying, too. He shakes his head in disbelief. “Do you hear how insane you sound? It doesn’t work like this. You can’t just pick up kids off the side of the road and take them home. We have to go to the authorities. Right away.”
“So they can send him back to his mother to get abandoned again? Or what, put him in the system? You and I can take so much better care of him. We already have everything we need.” I nod toward James’ closed door, the one we’ve been giving as wide a berth as a gaping pit while we made the funeral arrangements.
My husband pinches the bridge of his nose hard. “This is so fucked.”
“I didn’t force the boy to come with me. He wants to be here,” I say. Photographs of James are magneted to the fridge, framed on every wall, pressing against me from every side. My ribs feel like they will crack. “Please. I need this.”
My husband’s jaw trembles. He steps forward, snatching my keys from my quaking hands. A dizzying flare of sunlight cuts the space between us when he opens our front door. “This is completely crazy. You’re not in your right mind. We need to get this sorted out while there’s still time.”
Outside, the only trace we find of the boy is the halved Doolittle tossed into my backseat, and a Coca-Cola stain on my upholstery.
____
We track him down a little ways up the avenue, our neighbor’s post-boxes hanging open and a bundle of our whole block’s mail tucked under his arm. He’s already torn every envelope and separated out the checks, and he hands me the stack of them proudly.
I hold him close in the backseat of my car while my husband drives us to the precinct, bracing myself for our goodbye. My husband is stony-faced, incredulous, and I aim my daggered glare at the back of his neck.
“What’s your name, son?” my husband asks in a grumble as we near our destination.
“He won’t tell me. He doesn’t talk much,” I say, but the boy heaves forward, leaning himself halfway over the center console, his whole face one bright, eager, enormous grin.
“My name is James,” he announces, and my husband slams on the brakes.
We stare for an awestruck eternity, horns blaring behind us.
At the next light, my husband turns the car around.
Shauna Friesen
Shauna Friesen (she/her) is a mountain climber, rock collector, and author living in Los Angeles, CA. Her words have been featured in Gone Lawn, Chestnut Review, Foglifter Journal, and Vestal Review, among others.
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