Second Born

“No, no, no!” Ashoke snapped. “We’re not stopping.” He didn’t raise his voice all that much; not, that is, until the last shattering no, which he punctuated by slapping the dashboard all but hard enough to break it. Ashoke glared menacingly in the mirror at his distressed son. On account of his lazy eye it was often hard to tell just where he was looking, but Ellis knew the corrosive look was meant for him. The gunshot echo of Ashoke’s voice faded and it was quiet for a while. He turned back to the road and drove a little faster into the thickening snowstorm.

Ellis tried again. “Mom…? Please?”

“Now, honey, hang on for just a bit longer,” Elizabeth instructed absently. “Your father is right, you should have planned ahead.” Her mind was elsewhere. She stared at the passing scene of white on white. It was true that Ellis had asked too many variations on are we there yet? But whether he’d worn out his welcome or not, his situation was becoming dire. He squirmed in his seat in pain. His pale blue eyes looked close to tears.

Riley glanced at her stricken little brother. She did not rush to comfort him. Rather she edged farther away and tried not to so much as smell him. Like her mother, she stared out the window. But she got even closer, pressing her nose and forehead into the chilly glass to meditate on the sparse winter fields, trying to escape the car’s captive misery.

Ellis crossed, uncrossed, recrossed, and clenched his legs. He all but grabbed himself to fight back his need. His fair skin was starting to look ashen, for him an early sign of carsickness. This, too, was his fault. At their last stop, a dusty country gas station with day-old newspapers and month-old magazines, he’d eaten a mealy tunafish sandwich despite Riley’s declaration that it smelled bad. She had curled her lip at him and made retching noises as he ate it. She further disapproved of the soda he gulped down, volunteering that she’s sooner eat live cockroaches. Ellis now rubbed his throat uneasily and hoped the porridge of half-chewed tuna and orange soda would stay where it was. He opened his window to get some relief. Ashoke immediately closed and locked the window, defeating Ellis’s only acceptable avenue to throw up.

Riley paid no attention. She focused on the rising and falling waves of fences along the road. Most were rusty waist-high tangles of stakes and wire, others post and chain link, and a few were dense cords of pickled gray wood rails that might have dated from the era of Mark Twain. All were neglected and decrepit. In accord with the curves of the hills and the drift of the snow, their remains popped in and out of view randomly. Riley imagined the car was stopped while the fences moved by in a lazy rhythm. She ignored the grind and thump of the tires over the patchy ice, the whistle of the wind, and the strain of the motor as Ashoke pushed the car past eighty. She imagined Ellis being somewhere else. She wouldn’t have minded Ashoke being elsewhere, either.

Relief wasn’t coming soon for any of them. The snowfall was getting worse. A tunnel of silent flakes rushed up in the beams of the headlights. It was late in the day, the light was dim, and they’d lost track of where they were on the map and in the directions. One lonely highway led to the next, a monotonous series of concrete strips bisected by ghostly lines. The tiny towns, the barely detectable black dots on the map, were far behind, not that they had been much to speak of: clumps of three or four forsaken houses, hamlets with forgettable names like Botkins, Bettsville, and Belcher’s Bend. Most of the road signs were buried, faded, or missing—assuming they had existed. The directional arrows were mischievously redirected, some gesturing into the sky or the depths of the earth. These roads were for locals who didn’t need reminding.

They were looking for the driveway to Aunt Frances’s house where the children were going to spend winter vacation. Unfortunately their aunt’s directions were nearly useless. She had supposed city people could understand things like “turn left at the old hemlock.” And the man at the gas station had been openly hostile. He told them he was eager to close up, that the storm was getting worse and only an idiot would be driving in it. He gave them their change and propelled them out the door with instructions to make various lefts and rights. When Ashoke asked him to repeat himself he declared, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t belong here,” and slammed the door.