Synesthesia: Chapter Twenty

serial fiction

Image: Polina Tankilevitch, Pexels

I ordered Hokas into the car and stood facing Amber. She hugged the little boy toward her as if terrified the wind would snatch him away from her again.

I scuffed the toe of my shoe against the asphalt. Finding words was proving difficult.

“Do you want me to take the two of you back to Phoenix?” I asked.

She looked down at the top of the boy’s head, caressed it with one hand, then looked back up at me.

“No,” she said firmly. “Gas Stove has people all over that town. He’d find us and hurt us again for sure.”

I kicked at the asphalt again, crushing a piece of broken glass into the ground.

“So then…”

“We can’t stay here either,” she said. “Same reason.”

I looked around at the adjacent parking lots and businesses, wondering if Gas Stove’s “people” were out there watching us.

“So where do you wanna go, then?” I asked.

Her eyes were still wet from crying, but the desert wind was drying them out. It seemed like it was taking their color with them. The verdant green of jungle leaves had mellowed into the color of a grassy field in early autumn.

She shook her head slowly, leaking a faint scent of sour milk mixed with rising dough, and just the tiniest trace of orange blossom.

And then I had an idea. Maybe it was a stupid one. But I couldn’t stand smelling her like that, sad and hopeless and scared of a big idiot named after a kitchen appliance.

I knelt down and addressed Jacob, who was doing his best to bury himself into his mother’s skin.

“Hey,” I said, doing my best to sound gentle. “You ever been to the Grand Canyon?”

Jacob shook his head, his dark eyes round and enormous, orange blossoms filling the air around him.

I stood again, and Jacob interred himself once more into Amber’s body. Her arms wrapped around him, and the way the two of them stood there reminded me of a photograph I’d seen years earlier of a mother hen shielding her chicks from the rain.

“Have you?” I asked her.

She shook her head too, the same slow movement, and I felt something inside me pop, almost with an audible click, some need to protect her and Jacob.

I opened the driver’s-side door and ushered Amber and Jacob into the back seat, then pushed the driver’s seat back into place and sat down.

Next to me, Hoka guy was slurping from yet another bottle of water.

Fuck, I thought; what am I supposed to do with this guy?

---

I was exhausted and needed to process everything that had happened that day, so I drove us all to a motel just outside of town—far enough away to avoid Gas Stove and his “people,” I hoped.

The clerk at the front desk barely looked at me as he took the cash out of my hand and replaced it with a metal key with a comically large plastic “2” chained to it.

“Checkout is eleven,” he muttered through an invisible fog of wood smoke that no one but me could smell.

I thanked him and walked out to where Amber and the others were waiting, the little bell on the door jingling as it closed behind me.

Room 2 had two double beds and smelled so strongly of mold and mildew when I walked in that I looked around to see who was panicking, but it seemed it was just the smell of the room itself. The brown-hued curtains and bedspreads looked like they must have been there since the 1970s.

At least it was bigger than the room at the Tumbleweed Inn.

Old habit had me searching the room for an ideal spot for the dog crate, but when my eyes landed on Jacob, huddled into himself and watching me from one of the beds, I decided to forgo the crate for the time being. Hard to explain something like that to a little kid, especially one who’d just been kidnapped himself.

I looked over at Hoka guy, who was hovering patiently by the air conditioner, apparently trying to dry the sweat on the backs of his thighs. He was watching me as if waiting for a command.

“Guess you and I’ll share that one,” I said, pointing to the double bed closest to the window, the one Jacob wasn’t already curled up one. “But don’t try anything funny,” I added, patting my pocket to make sure I still had the car keys and the only room key.

Amber emerged from the bathroom, her face damp and freshly washed. “Jacob’s probably hungry,” she said, looking over at the little boy. He nodded from behind his knees.

---

Hoka guy had been behaving, and I didn’t want to leave him in the motel room alone and not in a crate, so I drove the four of us down the highway a bit to a chain diner. Jacob yelled excitedly about pancakes as we pulled into the parking lot.

I got out of the car first and closed my eyes against the purpling sky, feeling the clean, dry air move across my face. It smelled gloriously like nothing at all.

Then Amber got out behind me, and the desert air turned into shit and vanilla.

Inside the restaurant, the four of us were seated at a booth. Hokas continued to behave himself, very graciously not saying anything to the waitress or anyone else about having been kidnapped a hundred miles to the north.

When the waitress arrived to take our order, Jacob ordered a stack of strawberry pancakes. Amber chose a burger and fries. Hoka guy looked at me with questioning eyes and I nodded, so he asked for a steak omelet with no cheese and no hash browns on the side. I ordered last—a southwest scramble, and I’d gladly take the hash browns he didn’t want, I told the long-haired woman with tired eyes and an aroma like a campfire.

She finished scratching it onto her little pad of paper and then walked away, the campfire smell lingering behind her.

When the tall stack of pancakes arrived, I was sure Jacob wouldn’t be able to finish them. But he ate voraciously, devouring not only all the pancakes but half of his mother’s french fries too. Hoka guy was so happy with his steak omelet that I had to move to the far end of the bench and hold my breath just to be able to eat my own food.

The cars outside were gleaming under the bright white lamps of the parking lot when the bill arrived.

$78.91.

I opened my wallet and counted my cash.

$35.

Shit.

I glanced at Amber and Jacob, both of them happy and oblivious, engrossed in a maze on Jacob’s strawberry-stained placemat.

I looked over at Hoka guy, who smiled back at me with a stringy bit of steak stuck between two of his teeth.

I was out of money.