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  “It probably calms the baby looking at the cars going by. For God’s sake.” Jen looked at T as if searching for commiseration. “Throw the baby off the bridge…”

  “If I’m a little paranoid, Jen,” Lester said, “it’s not like I don’t have reason.”

  “Point,” she said.

  “So my question—” T allowed himself a dramatic pause. For reasons he fully grasped, he decided that he was actually at this point enjoying himself, though enjoying wasn’t the right word. If there was indeed a right word for what he was feeling, he didn’t know it. It would have to denote the pleasure one felt at the prospect of being engaged in any human activity with the potential to surprise as well as the potential to elicit real human feelings, even if the elicited feelings were potentially going to be very bad; especially, the word would suggest, after a long period of emotional isolation, or of emotional repression, or, simply, after a long period of emptiness, a period devoid of genuine human contact and intimacy. The pleasure at anticipating something exciting about to happen involving other human beings. Something like that. A species of exhilaration. “Is this,” he continued after his pause, “something you two do on a regular basis: random hitchhiking and robbery?”

  “Who said anything about robbery?” Lester said.

  Jennifer said, “We told you where we’re going. We’re going to the Thousand Islands.”

  “Yes, that’s what you told me. But you were lying. Just as you’re lying about Lester here being your brother.”

  “This guy’s sharp,” Lester said.

  “Shut up, Les.” Jen stretched her legs across the seat so that her foot touched T’s thigh. “You want to know the truth? Play the game. Ask us direct questions.”

  “All right,” T said. “Lester is not your brother, is he?”

  “No. He’s not.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Ex-lover. Past mistake. He appears out of nowhere— what? three days ago now?—having totally screwed up his own life and needing, apparently, to screw up mine too.”

  “Jesus, Jenny,” Lester said. “How many times—”

  “Be quiet, Lester.” Jenny pulled her hair away from her eyes. “Really,” she said. “Just be quiet back there. Let me play this game with T, okay? It’s amusing me.”

  “Fine,” Lester said. “Play.”

  “My turn,” she said. “Do you really own a Porsche?”

  “Yes. Bought it new last year.”

  “And you really are wealthy?”

  “How do you define wealthy?

  “A million or so, that you have access to, pretty easily.”

  “Yes, then, I’m wealthy, though I have to add, as a caveat, that’s a pretty meager definition of wealth.”

  “Obviously,” she said, “we’re from different backgrounds.”

  “Obviously,” he said. “My turn. Do you plan on robbing me?”

  “Right now?” she said. “This moment?”

  “At any moment, from the time I stopped for you till now.”

  “That’s not easy to answer directly.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because—” She pulled her foot away from his thigh, tucking her feet under her again. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts as if trying to hug and fold herself into as small a space as possible. “Because,” she continued, “though the plan was to rob you, I wasn’t ever really sure I’d actually let Lester go through with it.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” T said, “what exactly was the plan?”

  “I play like a hooker,” she said. “Which I’m not nor have I ever been, for the record. But I come on like a country tramp or a hooker or whatever once I figure you out; then I offer to go in the back seat with you while Lester drives.”

  “And this is something you’ve done before?” T asked.

  “No. It’s not. Though I think Lester here might have some similar past experiences. Lester?”

  Lester didn’t answer. He leaned back in his seat with his arms spread out grasping the backrest to either side of him.

  “Then what?” T pressed. “Once I get in the back seat with you?”

  “You don’t make it to the back seat. Before you get there, Lester hits you over the head with a piece of pipe he’s got stuck down the back of his pants.”

  “That’s great, Jen,” Lester said, breaking his silence but not moving. “Thanks for taking away the element of surprise. What am I supposed to do now, hit him over the head while he’s driving?”

  “Why don’t we drop the whole hitting-over-the-head thing?” T said. “It won’t be necessary. I already planned on taking you wherever you want to go.”

  “Really?” Les said. “And did you plan on giving us your car and your money?”

  When T didn’t answer, the Rover filled up with a silence that felt pressurized, as if it were pushing against the windows and doors. The vehicle continued rolling on, and Jennifer continued to sit with her feet folded under her, holding herself in her own arms, though she had turned to look out the front window and appeared to be quietly watching the sky as the last light faded and the somber clouds deepened toward darkness. T held the steering wheel with both hands and watched the road. Behind him, he could feel Lester’s presence where he occupied the whole of the back seat as if it were his throne. He hit a button and opened his window a crack to let in some fresh air, but the roar of wind was so loud he closed it again immediately. Jennifer sighed, as if saddened by the whole situation. She let her head fall back against the headrest. T noticed for the first time the slightest whiff of perfume. It was a faintly sweet odor that he both smelled and felt distinctly on the tip of his tongue. It was strange that he hadn’t noticed it before, as if the sense of smell were somehow enhanced by silence. When he saw, glancing at her, that she had closed her eyes, he took the chance to look more closely. Unquestionable that she was beautiful physically, with the allure of youth and lucky proportions: a narrow waist, full breasts, a sleek frame…But there was something else about her, something he could see more clearly through the silence, something in the cast of her face, in the way her lips were parted as if she were full of words waiting to be spoken. It made him want to touch her face, and when he found himself imagining how soft her skin would be, he turned away and pushed his thoughts back to the road.

  The stillness lasted for a full forty-five minutes, a space of time that felt at points like eternity. It grew dark. He turned on the lights. The surrounding hills and farms disappeared and were replaced by the nothing of darkness. The stars came out. They were more than an hour past Syracuse, having just passed Watertown, which would be the last urban center of any size in the U.S. They were approximately another hour from the Thousand Islands and the Canadian border, with nothing in front of them but farm land and marsh and eleven hours of night. T worked on a sentence in his mind. It seems to me, he thought of saying, that we’ll need to make a decision. But as soon as the sentence was fully formed, he rejected it as too dramatic. What he really wanted to say was something very simple, like: Okay. So what are you going to do? But he also wanted to inject into that question some rhetorical method of developing an argument to dissuade Lester from answering him with a pipe over the back of his head. He wanted to ask them what they were going to do and he also wanted to argue against anything that included serious injury to the driver, and he was having trouble finding a rhetorical tack that didn’t sound wimpy or desperate or, on the other hand, ridiculously nonchalant, as if it didn’t really matter to him at all what they decided—though, strangely, that was probably the closest to what he actually felt.

  He kept driving, figuring that someone at some point was bound to say or do something. He had spent most of the past year alone and doing nothing in Salem, Virginia, where after more than half a century of life, he found himself isolated, trapped in an indolence that manifested itself through addictions to computer games, chess, jazz, and good wine. The chess, jazz, and good wine were at least somewhat socially acceptable. The computer g
ames he kept secret. Now at least he was interested. He was interested in what might happen next.

  “All right,” Jenny said, as if only a moment had passed since the conversation had come to a halt. “Look,” she said to Lester, “we’re not robbing this guy. Period. Okay?”

  “Thank you,” T said. “I appreciate that.”

  “Shut up,” Lester said. To Jenny he added, “What do you mean we’re not robbing him? What the fuck are we doing then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  T said, “May I make a suggestion?”

  “What you may do is shut the fuck up,” Lester said. “What you may do is just be quiet before I cave your skull in just for the hell of it.”

  Jenny said, “Oh for Christ’s sake, Lester.”

  “What?” he yelled, the word percussive and loud as a gunshot.

  “What?” she shouted back at him, jumping to her knees. “What?” she screamed again, this time throwing a punch at his face, which T in the rearview saw him ward off by covering his head with his forearms. “Don’t you fuckin’ scream at me!”

  “Jenny,” he said from behind his arms.

  “What? What, Lester? What do you want to say to me?”

  T guessed Jenny was five-five, maybe a little shorter, but knotted up the way she was, clenched and tight and sinewy, he imagined she could throw a substantial punch.

  “Jenny,” Lester repeated. “Calm down.”

  “Who shouted first, Lester? Who brought out the big-bad-bully voice, Lester?”

  “Jenny,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Jenny, we have to deal with this guy. If we don’t take him off; if I don’t take him off, what are we going to do?”

  “That’s a good question,” she said. “Are you done screaming at us? Are you done cavin’ people’s skulls in?”

  He didn’t answer. He took his hands away from his face but continued to lean back and away from her.

  She said, “I asked you a question, Lester.”

  “Do you want me to be done?” he said. “Because I don’t know what the hell you’re really thinking, Jen.”

  “I’m thinking you should be quiet is what I’m really thinking.”

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “You want me to be quiet, fine.” He slid away from her, positioning himself out of T’s sight, directly behind the driver’s seat. “Because I’m sorry about all this,” he added. “But what the fuck are we supposed to do with no money and no car in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere except rip off somebody?”

  “So are you done now?” she said. “Are you going to be quiet?”

  “Fine, quiet. But we’ve got no money. Not a cent.”

  Jenny was still a moment, as if testing to see if Lester were really through talking. When they had driven a while in the dark and silence, she continued, “So, as I was saying, the plan was to rob you, but I don’t think it was ever really going to happen. I’m not really violent, and I’m not a thief.”

  T said, “You’re not violent and you’re not a thief, but you were planning to knock me unconscious and steal my car and my money. Is that right?”

  “That’s about right,” Lester’s voice came out of the back seat. “It was my plan.”

  “I’d feel more guilty about it,” Jennifer added, “except, as I said, I don’t think you were ever in any real danger.”

  As I said . . . T noted the use of the grammatically more formal as rather than the typical like. He also noted that her slight Southern lilt had almost completely disappeared. He said, “You’re becoming downright enigmatic, Jennifer.”

  “I’m a girl dressed in skin-tight red leather pants with her blouse half open. I would think that’s pretty easy to interpret.”

  “A girl dressed in red leather pants with her blouse half open who says as I said rather than like I said; who knows what enigmatic means; and who came into the car with a country Southern accent and a full-tilt airhead act— My feeet are juust kiillin’ me! —and who, an hour and a half later, sounds more like she’s from northern Virginia than Opelousas, Louisiana, and is beginning to sound like she might even have some higher education.”

  Lester said, laying on the accent, “I got fahmily in Opelousas, dude.”

  “All right, so,” Jennifer said, “if we’re not exactly what we seem—what about you? You stopped for a girl dressed like a whore and a seedy-looking guy in a black leather jacket—”

  “Thank you,” Lester interrupted. “Very nice.”

  “What are we supposed to think of you?” Jen finished.

  “That I’m stupid?” T said. “Or reckless?”

  Lester added, “Or a just a horny old man.”

  “Want to know what I’m thinking?” Jennifer said. “I’m considering the possibility that you’re majorly fucked up.”

  “Majorly fucked up?” T said. “Could you be more precise?”

  She shook her head. “It’s getting late,” she said. “And you have no idea how tired I am.”

  When T was in his late twenties, living in Manhattan, his life wrapped up as it would be for another twenty-plus years in the development of his businesses, he had taken a late-night drive east, out to the island, heading nowhere in particular, as was his wont when he was stressed and tense, though probably better to say overly stressed and tense since stressed and tense was pretty much the normal state of affairs at that time. He was a man whose idea of a great day in the city was to spend an afternoon wandering through MOMA or the Met or the Guggenheim, followed by dinner somewhere nice and a play that people were talking about, something like Albee’s The Play About the Baby or a new production of Chekhov; and at that time he was married to a woman who thought his interest in art was pretentious, who once actually laughed at him when he told her he dreamed of being a photographer and showing his pictures in the downtown galleries. Given that he didn’t even own a decent camera at the time, it wasn’t hard to understand why his admission elicited a quick, spontaneous laugh. It hurt nonetheless, and he still remembered the moment vividly, as was also his wont, to protect and nurture wounds for a lifetime. He was married to the wrong woman and would be for a few more years; he was spending the bulk of his life developing maintenance, house-and-office-cleaning, and restoration businesses that were of no interest to him beyond the large sums of money he was coaxing them to generate; he was edgy and anxious all the time; and during this aimless, calming ride out on the island he came upon two girls hitchhiking on an almost deserted back road.

  He stopped for them, of course, though he couldn’t see much in the dark beyond that they looked like girls, small of frame, with long hair and delicate features. After he pulled over, they both got in the back seat without a word, just opened the door and got in the back seat, so that he had to turn around and look before he understood that he had just picked up two very drunk, barely teenaged girls. They looked back at him with wide eyes and dopey smiles. “Ladies?” he said. “Where would you like to go?” They giggled in response. For a moment he thought they might be drugged out on acid or who knew what, maybe one of the designer psychedelics that were popular with teens those days, but the smell of whiskey on their breath cleared up that question quickly as it began to suffuse the closed atmosphere of the car. He looked them over more closely and saw they might not even be teenagers. Their small breasts might not just be small, they might be still developing. Their shortness of stature might not just be shortness, they might still be growing. But clearly they were two very young girls, drunk in the back seat of his car. He mustered the most benevolent and avuncular of smiles. “Ladies,” he repeated gently, “you’ve been drinking.” Which brought on more giggles. “Would you like me to deliver you someplace?”

  “Not really,” the one on the right said. “We don’t really have anyplace to go.”

  The one on the left smiled coyly and said, “Have you ever been in the back seat of your own car?”

  The one on the right added, “It’s cozy back here.”

  T had never doub
ted the moral correctness of what he had done at that point, which was to get out of the car, open the back door, lead them one at a time out onto the dark road, and leave them where he had found them. Chances were slim that another car would pass before they sobered up and made their way back to their respective homes, which were almost certainly in one of the nearby developments. It was very late. The area was remote. The road was lightly used, even during the day. He had never considered even for a second doing anything else but escorting those two girls out of his car. That was real. That was something that had happened in the real world, and he had revisited the incident often during the endless months of disgrace preceding his banishment, and it came to mind again as he drove through the dark, some thirty years later, with two new hitchhikers in his car.

  “Help me out here,” he said to Jennifer. “Forget about me, whether I’m majorly fucked up. What about you two? You’re not kids. This isn’t a joyride. What are you thinking? You rob my car and take my money, then what? You risk several years in jail for a few hundred bucks and a ride? That doesn’t make sense. What are you thinking?”

  Jen said, “You’re being far too rational.”

  Lester added, “Via circumstances beyond your control, you find yourself with no money, no transportation, and your life in danger if you don’t immediately get very far away from where you are. What would you do, Tom?”

  “Your life in danger?”

  “I bet you—” Jenny said to Lester. “I’ll bet you he wouldn’t go and put the only friend he’s got in mortal danger with him.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jenny— If I could take it back—”

  “Yes, but you can’t,” she said. “Here we are.” To T, she said, “Look,” and then paused as if collecting her thoughts. She seemed changed again, as if several layers of masks had fallen away and the real person smoldering under the pretense was burning closer to the surface. “Look,” she repeated. “You said you’d take us to the Thousand Islands. I wasn’t lying. We really are trying to get there.” She dug into her bag and came out with a scrap of blue-lined yellow paper, which she put on the dashboard in front of him. “This is where we’re going,” she said, indicating an address handwritten on the paper in red pen. “If you’d just take us there, I promise: we’ll say goodbye. We’ll be out of your life.”