Synesthesia: Chapter Thirty-Five
serial fiction
Stay calm, I chided myself. She wouldn’t leave you.
But then I remembered her sitting in Hoka guy’s lap, giggling and batting her eyes, then leaving him to face Gas Stove alone mere minutes later.
Despite the heat, I shivered.
I searched the road ahead of me, but I couldn’t see a single trace of red.
Less than twenty minutes after losing Amber on the highway, I spotted my exit. I moved carefully into the right lane, the ethereal sounds of Empire of the Sun’s “Awakening” doing their best to keep me calm as I sailed down the frontage road and turned left.
Even if Amber never showed up, I had decided to stick to our plan. If she was really gone, I’d figure out my next steps once I was sure she wasn’t coming back into my life.
My heart was in overdrive, refusing to shift into a lower gear. I sucked in deep breaths of the hot dry air, barely able to appreciate its clean scentlessness.
I drove slowly down Mesa Flower Road, painfully aware that mine was the only car on the narrow strip of faded asphalt, which quickly devolved into sharp gravel and fine dust.
As I watched the odometer crawl upward, I slowed down even further to minimize the force of the shocks and jolts as the car bumped along. One mile. Two. And then three.
Ahead was the place we had agreed to, the spot we had marked on the map. Labeled as a campsite on the state road map, in reality it was little more than a blackened smear on the ground, a few misshapen rocks laid around it, the corpse of a scraggly tree pulled up alongside.
I parked a few feet from the sad remains of someone else’s campfire and got out.
Amber wasn’t there.
I sighed and kicked at the black ash. Pieces of it fluttered upward in the weak wind, turning the toe of my black sock gray.
Easing myself onto the desiccated tree trunk that had apparently served previous campers as a bench, I let my head drop into my hands.
What was I going to do now?
I tried to focus on the positives. I had a car. Even if it wasn’t in my name, at least it wasn’t stolen. And I didn’t think that Amber would go to the trouble to report it as such.
Maybe I could even sell it or trade it in. I wouldn’t get what it was worth, not without a title. But it was an option, if I got desperate enough.
And I had my CDs.
That was the really important thing.
I dug into my pocket and pulled out my wallet, counting the bills twice just to be sure.
Eighteen dollars.
Eighteen fucking dollars, and a car in Amber’s name.
I put my wallet away and looked out into the distance. Under the blue gradient of the sky, saguaros held themselves upright like royal scarecrows. Scattered across the dusty ground, prickly pears, scrubby mesquites, and clumpy wild grasses prostrated themselves below the cactus giants. Behind this desert forest stretched layers of tabletop hills, fading into a dusky blue as they receded toward the curving horizon.
This isn’t so bad, I told myself. I’ve always been alone. What’s so terrible about being alone now?
But what I didn’t want to admit was that this time was different. That this time, it wasn’t just me, my car, and the highway. That this time, there was an empty space in my heart, its outlines all skinny ribs and scrawny arms.
That I wasn’t sure whether the fear-scent of orange blossoms could fill that hole.
I stood up, dusting off the seat of my black jeans with my hands.
And from my new vantage point, I could just make out a smudge of red moving along the road I’d just driven, surrounded by a cloud of dust.
Finally all caught up!