Synesthesia: Chapter Thirty-Six
serial fiction
I watched the dusty red shape crawl along the dry strip of dirt, growing larger as it moved steadily toward me.
My heart was hammering in my chest. I could just barely make out the shape of a head and shoulders behind the steering wheel.
It was her.
The Mustang slammed to a halt in front of me. The door opened, and Amber stepped out, her turquoise sandals and white denim shorts making her look like a piece of the sky that had fallen to earth. Jacob slid out after her, fighting off his seat belt and the folded-down front seat and latching his arms around his mother’s left leg.
All I could do was stare.
I had so much I wanted to say. I wanted to get angry, to demand an explanation of why she had made me believe she wasn’t coming. I wanted to throw my arms around her and beg her not to go away like that again. I wanted to tell her that my life without her in it was just as dry and desolate as the Sonoran.
Instead, I just stared, not moving, my hands still held behind me where they’d been knocking dust off of the seat of my jeans.
“Jacob needed the bathroom,” Amber said matter-of-factly. There was no apology in her voice.
A whisper of a breeze pushed a hint of patchouli toward me.
“Well, come on,” Amber said, retrieving the grocery bag of cash from the back seat of the Mustang. “Let’s get out of here.”
I felt a tear sting my eyeball, but I couldn’t articulate why. Anger? Frustration? Happiness?
All I knew was that she was back, and I didn’t want her to go away again.
After double- and triple-checking the Mustang for personal belongings and wiping it down to hopefully remove any fingerprints, the three of us piled into the Honda and bumped back toward the highway.
My mind wasn’t on the road. It was sifting through a mountain of conflicting feelings and a strange sense of nakedness, like Amber could see through my skull and know exactly what I was thinking.
The song on the CD ended, and “First Crush” started to play, its notes carving the air like a pastel rainbow.
Suddenly I felt even more exposed. Like the lyrics were spilling all my secrets to Amber, who sat beside me staring out the window.
I reached out and turned the music off.
Amber looked over, a faint wet-dog scent emanating from her. “What’d you turn it off for?” she asked.
I felt my cheeks go red.
“Don’t wanna be distracted and miss the turn,” I said.
“There’s only one highway out here,” she replied.
I just drove in silence.
“Where are we going?” whined Jacob from the back seat.
“To the Grand Canyon,” I said, thankful for the distraction. “You know what that is?”
I noticed movement in the rear-view mirror and glanced up to see Jacob shaking his head.
“It’s a huge big hole in the ground,” I explained. It was the best I could do, never having been there myself.
Uh-oh. Orange blossoms from the back seat.
“Are we gonna fall in?” Jacob wailed. In the rearview mirror, I could see his little face contorted in terror. “I don’t wanna fall in the Gan Cranyon!”
He exploded into loud, long howls. Against my better impulses, I inhaled, savoring the floral scent of the little boy’s fear of falling into a hole in the ground.
Amber twisted around in her seat, reaching back to comfort her terrified son, while I merged back onto I-17.
I accelerated, trying to tune out Jacob’s hiccuping sobs and Amber’s clarifications about what the Grand Canyon was and was not. Outside, sun-baked brown hills stubbled with saguaros flew past us, disappearing to the south.
I sniffed the air greedily, relishing the scent of fear until Jacob finally calmed down.
An hour later, the fading light of the sinking sun was lulling me to sleep, but I was reluctant to turn the music back on, worried that Amber would somehow read the truth of my feelings in the lyrics of the one and only band I had CDs of.
I must have been more exhausted than I realized, because I snapped my eyes open to the sting of a hand across my cheek.
“Wake up, Zodiac, you lunatic!” Amber was shouting.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. Outside, the sky was darker than I remembered.
“Pull off at the next exit!” she demanded, orange blossoms and hotel soap hovering in the air around her.
The smell of her fear woke me up a little, and I complied with her order, signaling right.
A couple minutes after exiting the highway, I saw a Marriott. I pulled into the parking lot, rubbing my eyes to try to wake myself up.
We got out of the car and headed into the lobby, Amber carrying Jacob, who looked as sleepy as I felt.
“We’d like a room for the night,” I said to the woman scrolling on her phone behind the counter at the front desk.
She looked up, and a whiff of wood smoke floated toward me. She glanced at her phone once more, then reluctantly set it aside.
“IDs, please,” she said.
Amber set Jacob down and dug around in her waistband. I looked down and saw that her shorts had pockets in both the front and the back.
Old habits die hard, I guess.
“Sir?” the woman asked.
I looked up.
“Your ID, please?” she asked. The wood smoke had taken on a rotten-egg edge.
“Sorry,” I said, reaching for my wallet. I handed her my driver’s license.
She looked at it and arched one eyebrow up. “You from Indiana?” she asked.
I felt my jaw clench. I didn’t like it when people asked me personal questions like that.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, watching her type my name into the computer. She was short, with small, slender arms that ended in red oval nails. Her long black hair was straight and dense, falling into her face as she typed. She reached a small hand up and tucked it away behind her ear.
My pulse quickened. I imagined how she’d look in a dog crate, her brown eyes wide with fear, and I felt a tingling across my skin.
“Here you go,” she said, looking up at me and holding out my driver’s license for me to take. I realized I was breathing heavily.
She scrunched her face up at me. The hotel lobby suddenly smelled like lavender.
For the second time that day, I flushed in embarrassment.
“Alright, now I just need a major credit card,” she said, directing her words to Amber now and ignoring me.
Behind me, Jacob whined and lay down on the tile floor.
“We were planning to pay cash,” Amber said.
I caught a whiff of sulfur from the woman behind the counter, but I didn’t dare to look at her. I’d already embarrassed myself enough.
“Major credit cards only,” the woman insisted.
I felt a hand on my arm. “You got a credit card?” Amber whispered, though not quietly enough so that the woman at the desk couldn’t hear.
I shook my head.
“My little boy is really tired,” Amber said, pointing toward Jacob, who now appeared to be asleep on the floor. “Couldn’t you make an exception, just this once?”
I looked at the high marble counter that stood between Jacob and the front desk attendant and doubted the woman could even see the boy from where she stood.
More sulfur from the woman with the straight black hair. “Major credit cards,” she reiterated. “Only.”
“Oh, never mind, then,” Amber huffed, leaning down to pick Jacob up off the floor.
I followed her back out to the car, but she pointed to the passenger side.
“You’re not driving,” she said. “You’ll fall asleep again and kill us all.”
Obediently, I sat down in the passenger seat. When I opened my eyes again, the car was parked outside a different, much more modest-looking hotel.
I was alone in the car.
I looked around, trying to figure out where I was and what was happening, when Amber opened my door.
“Get out,” she said. “We’re staying here for the night.”
I stood up and followed her, fighting to keep my eyes open and my legs moving me in a straight line forward.
As we passed the front desk, I saw a familiar face smiling at me—or maybe at the wall to the right of me—behind the low wooden counter.
The woman was wearing a hot-pink tank top instead of a pale pink ballgown, but her face and eyes were unmistakably the same ones I’d seen in an oil painting that same morning.
I closed my eyes and rubbed them vigorously, thinking I must be dreaming. Or maybe I was imagining things.
But when I opened my eyes again, Roberta just smiled and waved.