Please Don't, page 17
“Well, I had some Sprite at lunch. Coffee earlier.”
Sometimes I can’t help myself. Both cops are out of the car now, grimacing. The driver has a razor sharp buzz cut, hardly looks older than me. The guy doesn’t budge. I nod towards the car. “I can turn the music down.”
“Go ahead and grab your registration, too,” Buzz Cut says.
“Yep.”
I lean in the car and kill the music. Molly is nearly having convulsions. Her words come out ragged, breath shaking. “Nat. What’s happening?”
“Molly, it’s fine,” I whisper, going for the glove compartment. But it’s not fine, her seat is trembling, her quick breath puffs on my arm. She’s radiating fear. “We’re okay,” I whisper. She wipes her hands on her shorts. I tell her again, under my breath. “Breathe, Molly. Just take it easy.”
The officers are out, staring hard. Not hotel security dopes like before, but real live cops with guns and badges. I pop out and make a show of coming out with the registration.
“We were at a convention in D.C., and now we’re just on the way home and I needed to dance,” I say, like an idiot. I look from cop to cop, Buzz to Baldy. Baldy takes my license and registration back to the car, dispatches flying out the window, traffic slowing to watch the excitement in the lot.
It takes forever, which gives Molly all sorts of time to continue freaking out. It’s beginning to freak me out, especially when Buzz nods at my windshield. “Expired inspection.”
Buzz approaches, gravel crunching under his feet as he circles the Honda, grunting and nodding. I keep nodding and smiling my best smile for Molly. Even as I fear the worst is coming.
After what feels like hours, Baldy returns, his radio squawking. He hands my license to me and nods to Molly, who’s visibly quaking. “Hey there,” he says and I’m just waiting for her to scream.
Molly manages a small nod. Baldy turns and faces me again, looks me up and down. “You play ball?”
“Yes,” I say, happy to make small talk. “I do. At Woodberry, back home.” I nod at my license.
Baldy nods. “Yeah? That’s good. Good. Okay, Casablanca, any guy who pulls over to dance, while sober, is all right in my book.” He taps the roof of my Honda. “But you need to get this thing inspected, got it?”
I nod and nod and nod, trying not to smile. “Yeah, yes, sir. I will first thing tomorrow. It’s actually just an exhaust leak, so I’ll—”
Baldy holds up a hand. “Be careful getting home, okay? This isn’t exactly a park.” He motions over his shoulder. “Had a lot of gang activity around here. Consider this your warning. Get your car inspected, soon. Or maybe just get a new car.”
I’m in no position to take offense. More nodding. Happy to be wrong about assuming the guy was a jerk. Speaking of which, Buzz hangs back, looking agitated, like he really wanted to do more here, maybe go through my car, give me a ticket, perhaps haul me into jail to wipe that smirk off my face.
But Baldy is already getting in his cruiser. “Have a good evening.”
“You too, sir.”
I get in the car, where Molly is sitting on her hands, shivering with panic. Buzz is behind the wheel, still waiting around, watching us closely as I put my seatbelt on and put the car in gear. Molly’s breaths come short and fast, she’s one blink away from losing it. “It’s fine, Molly. It’s okay.”
Another awkward wave as we get going. I’m ultra-careful to grind the brakes to a complete stop, click my signal, and pull out onto the road only when there isn’t a car in sight.
I find the ramp and hit the expressway. The thump-thump, thump-thump, of the road the only sound in the car besides Molly’s breaths.
“Molly?”
Silence. No radio. No basketball talk. No dimples. She turns to her window. A cloud of fog materializes when she exhales. She turns back to me, her voice low. “That was really, really stupid, you know?”
“Molly. I was just trying to have some fun.”
She won’t look at me. Only huffs at the window. I sigh and run a hand through my hair. Of course, Molly Martinez can’t have any fun. Minutes ago we were happy and light. She was a totally different person. Now, she starts to turn to me but stops. More fog in the window.
The butterflies leave my chest. We put some distance between us and the gas station. It seems stupid to keep worrying about. Sure, it was a close call, but it’s over. I want to go back to laughing and having fun. “Look, it all worked out, right? Besides, it’s not like I knew the cops were going to show up.”
Molly stays at the window with her fog cloud. We drive. And every time she shifts or coughs or sniffles, I look over at her hopefully, thinking she might decide to talk to me, but for nearly an hour she says absolutely nothing. Then, driving south down a stretch of road towards a wall of dark clouds, her head drops and she starts balling.
The balling becomes gasps and soon the gasps are almost choking sobs and she’s covering her face and folding over and heaving.
The Honda is again set at fifty-eight, but nothing is smooth anymore. Molly is a mess of tears and terror and hysterics all over again. I thought we could let it go, but apparently, she’s been thinking of nothing else this whole time.
I want to reach for her, comfort her, hold her. “We’re fine, Molly. We’re fine. It’s over.”
She bolts up straight, shaking her head, wiping her hair. Her voice cracks like glass against a wall. Before I can say anything else, she’s screaming at me, smacking her seat. “No it’s not, Nat. It’s never over!”
The power in her voice jolts me. I glance at her then the road. She shakes her head, her hair falling, her eyes accusing me. “Why did you pull over, why did you do that?”
Her wet glare kills me. She looks ready to slap me, punch me, even.
“Molly.”
She rubs her eyes. Her body is coiled tight, her voice strained and stuck in her throat. She shakes her head. “I can’t…I can’t be around you if you’re going to do that. Talking and joking with the police,” she says, still shaking her head. Left and right, left and right. It’s like she’s outside of herself.
“Molly, okay, I got it. We got lucky, I mean, with the inspection. We should be thankful.”
“Lucky? Thankful.” She spits out the words like I’m insulting her.
“Yes. Lucky. Thankful.” I nod at the windshield. “Not sure if you noticed but I do, in fact, have an expired inspection. And I don’t know why you’re yelling at me. It wasn’t my fault.”
She rolls her eyes. Her face is red and splotchy. Another glance out the window, then she turns to me with a whisper. “I didn’t say it was your fault. But, why can’t you understand?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nat. If that had been me. If…if you looked like me, do you really think we would be driving off, just joking down the road right now?”
“Molly. I had a license. I gave it to them.”
“You cannot be this stupid.”
“Oh come on, Molly. You don’t know that. You don’t know them. Look, you’re right. I don’t know what your life is like. But at the same time, my life isn’t what you make it out to be. You make it sound so, glamorous. It’s not. And again, we weren’t doing anything wrong.”
She throws her hands out as though she’s swatting away some imaginary force. “Nat, please. Please try to understand something for once, okay?” She bangs her hands on her seat, wipes her head, and begins to sob all over again. “To them, my whole life is wrong. Don’t you get that?”
30
The rain starts fat and heavy, smacking the windshield before the storm dumps on us. We slog through our misery, the wipers slapping side to side, smearing streaks across the windshield. I slow to a crawl as we approach an overpass where the rain goes silent as I pull off to the side beneath it.
Molly looks at me like I’m crazy.
I shrug. “Look, I can’t drive in this. My wipers are crap. I know you might find it hard to believe that a white person doesn’t have working wipers, but—”
I stop talking and take a breath. I’m being an asshole. Molly closes her eyes as though transporting herself, and we sit under the bridge and stew. I feel terrible for her, but again, why is she the only one who can have problems? I have all sorts of problems right now.
After a while, when the windshield fogs over and the wind blows the rain in from the back, I try again. This time to point out our similarities and not our differences. “Look, neither of us have a dad, okay? At least you have school. I don’t even have that.”
It’s petty and ridiculous and I’m ashamed of it as soon as it leaves my mouth. For me to compete with Molly’s problems. We should be celebrating after the day we’ve had, but instead we sulk. Molly’s anger and fear at ends as she sits with her arms under her legs and her mouth balled up tight.
I attempt to fix the bag in the window for something to do, then try finding a station on the radio, which doesn’t happen because we’re sitting under a bridge. Sitting with the rain and the fog and the quiet, I give up and turn the wipers off. I push the CD button and let Mazzy Star serenade our melancholy.
The storm rumbles. Cars and trucks slog past. I’m content to stare out at the downpour, even as I realize it’s no use, Molly’s too good. She wraps herself up in silence like a blanket, gets good and cozy. So after five, ten, fifteen minutes of mutual silence, I’m surprised when Molly pulls her knees to her chin and turns her glossy brown eyes to me.
“My dad worked construction. He was always coming home muddy. Big clumps of dirt like a cast around his boots. My mom always made him take them off outside. I remember staring at them, those enormous boots, the dried red clay, thinking how hard he must have worked to get so muddy.”
She turns away. I try to think of something to say but she’s not finished. “He worked construction all his life, one job site to the next. But he never got out of the mud.” She shrugs. “It never seemed to bother him. He didn’t mind. He would work through his shirts, tearing them, sweating them through then washing them until the fabric disintegrated. He was always in jeans, his hard hat and tools always by the door, ready to go. He loved to build things, to fix things. He said it was all he knew.”
Molly shakes her head, as though disagreeing with the thought. “That’s not true. He loved planes, watching them in the sky. Sometimes we’d go to the airport and watch them take off and land at night. He was fascinated with machines, how things worked. And he loved basketball. He loved to sit on the couch with me, pointing out things you wouldn’t see unless you knew what to look for.”
“The high-low game, right?”
She nods, a thick rope of tears streaming down her cheeks. “He was never afraid, Nat.”
I look over to her, her profile against the wet, blurry window. There is so much love inside of her, so much life and so much more I will probably never know. And so much fear. She lets the tears flow. Her eyes are wet, but her voice is even, back to normal.
I grip the wheel. “So what happened?”
She swallows, sniffs again. “He fell.”
“Fell?”
She nods, wiping her eyes. “He was working at the college. They were on the roof at the field house. I don’t know much else, only that he wasn’t wearing a safety harness. He must have slipped, but he fell and broke his arm and wrist, hurt his back. He went to the hospital. Mom said we couldn’t visit him. By then I knew why.” New tears flood her eyes. It’s all I can do not to wipe them away. Her voice cracks. “I remember thinking he was lucky. We were lucky he didn’t die.”
I stare straight ahead, to the water dumping from the sky. Molly lets out a breath, wet as the rain, then follows my gaze out the windshield. “So, the owner of the company, he calls and says he’s going to take care of everything. He tells my mother he wants to give us some money to tide us over. Mom was hopeful. Dad was happy. He’d been talking to a lawyer about workers comp or something, because he was going to be out for a while. Maybe for good.” She stops and swallows. “We thought it was real.”
Her mouth goes tight as she steels herself against the emotion. A motorcycle pulls in on the other side and parks. Molly’s eyes open and she looks past me, searching. But it’s just a guy getting out of the rain. I nod to her. It’s okay.
She sits back. “So the next day, my dad hobbles out of our apartment, down the steps and to his truck. He was smiling. I remember it so clearly, even the pain couldn’t take his smile as he slid into his truck. He thought this would help, solve our problems. Ashley was two and Mom was pregnant with Ana. And he drove, with a broken arm, wrist, a bad back, and some cracked ribs. He drove right into a trap.”
“Wait, what?”
Molly wipes her eyes. “He told me later, over the phone—I haven’t seen him since that day, Nat. Three agents were waiting for him as he pulled into the parking lot. It was a setup.”
“What, like the owner of the company set it up?”
She shrugs. “I guess. Called immigration. Easier than paying workers comp.”
“Damn.” I sit back, thinking about these worlds we live in. One with mommy bloggers talking about trips to Disney, LegoLand, contests and giveaways, glitz and glamour and all of those shiny SUV’s in a hotel parking lot, and now, looking at Molly, I see a world where a teacher preys on her status, an employer gets his way. I see the fear in her eyes when the cops pulled into the lot, all the helplessness in which she’s lived. How she must feel completely invisible.
“See, Nat. It’s not that our fathers don’t exist. They do. I have a father. He’s just not here.”
“I know. Look, I’m sorry about what I said, I just, I don’t know.”
She shakes her head. She sets her hand on mine. “I guess what I’m trying to say is yeah, we both have problems. I’m not arguing with you about who has it worse, okay? I think we’re both just trying to exist, you know?”
Exist. Yeah, something like that. I make a fist, tight, but the pain is gone. I miss it, even though I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t expect pain or enjoy pain. When I start to make a fist again, Molly takes my hand, softly, rubs her fingers on it. This whole time I’ve been thinking it’s me vs. everything. But it’s not. I’m not alone.
Molly gives my hand a squeeze. “I’m just trying to exist, Nat.”
Maybe it’s the rain. The gentle patter of all the water coming off the bridge. Her hand in mine, those big, glossy brown eyes of hers, but when she leans over the console and I lean over some, to where I can feel the warmth of her neck, smell the shampoo in her hair as I rub her hand back, our faces tilt closer. I feel her breath quivering on my lips, closer still, as I lean in to close the last inch between us. But when I go to kiss her, she gasps and pulls away.
I let go of her hand and sit up straight. “Oh um…Molly, I’m sorry.”
She blinks, stares at her lap, taking deep, deep breaths. “No, it’s okay, I just…”
We both turn away from each other. I look out to the guy with the motorcycle. I can’t believe I’m such an idiot. I can’t even face her. I talk to my window. “Molly, I’m really, really sorry.”
She shakes it off. “No, Nat. It’s not, I mean, I want to, but…I’m still, after the other thing, you know?”
“Right. I know, I mean, I don’t know why I did…that.”
Great, try to kiss a girl spilling her guts to you. Nice one, Reams.
31
Eventually, the rain lets up. And being how I’m too humiliated to sit under a bridge any longer, I start the car and we plunge ahead. Things are silent again, but it’s a new sort of silence. Not our usual comfortable silence and not the sulky silence from before, but the dreaded Awkward Silence. I can’t even peek over to her seat.
A few miles later I stop for snacks. Molly waits in the car and when I return, I hand her the water. “I got some chips, a candy bar, and Skittles. Molly, look, I’m really—”
She smiles and shakes her head. “Nat. Stop apologizing.”
The rest of the way home Molly flips through pages of notes. She’s got numbers to call and people to turn to for answers. I think about Mom, and what’s going to happen, what Dr. Wills said to do and how to talk to her and how to go about the school board hearing next week.
The storm clouds are behind us. A reddish sun peaks out for one last go at it. My phone rings. Cora’s name comes up. I silence the call.
“You should probably take that,” Molly says, eyeing the phone after I’ve placed it in the console.
“Huh? Why?”
She raises her eyebrows. “Because it’s your girlfriend.”
“Not my girlfriend. I thought I told you about that.”
“Mmm hmm.” She gets back to her notes. I laugh. Molly chews on her pen.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
I look at her, then the road. It feels like we’ve spent a week together instead of a day. Not even a whole day. One with plenty of ups and downs. Most of the downs happening on this rainy trip back home. At least that’s what I’m thinking when Molly, still staring at her notes, shakes her head. “You can do a whole lot better than Cora Connors, anyway.”
“Oh yeah?”
She nods, biting the pen, flipping through pages. I can’t help my smile.
It’s around seven when we pull into the driveway. The grass needs cutting but otherwise the house looks intact. No smoke or broken windows. Molly gathers her things and finds yet another banana and offers it to me.
“No thanks.”
She goes for the handle but then stops and looks at me and laughs. I leap out and get the door and before I can stop myself I blurt it out again. “Look, just let me say this. About the bridge.”
“Stop.” Molly brushes past me, but then stops and turns and comes back and we’re staring at each other, face to face, her eyes softer as her gaze falls to my chest and she steps closer. She takes my hand and my heart launches into a new gear as she smiles and comes closer still, and I take her other hand and I’m trying to think of something to say when the door busts open and Ana and Ash come shooting outside, squealing, “Giant man!”
