The Girl We Locked in the Trunk Is Very High Maintenance
“Driving Through Pennsylvania” by Mack Gelber
We’ve been driving through Pennsylvania for almost two months. People give us stunned looks when we tell them: “How long?” When they ask what brings us through, we tell them we’re traveling children’s entertainers, or we’re land surveyors scoping out sites for a new mall, or we’re searching for our troubled niece Paula, she’s been missing since December, have you seen her? Sometimes they offer to buy us vodka sodas, flagging down the kid slinging drinks at the Best Western Plus. Sometimes they silently mouth the word “wow.” Sometimes they actually say the word “wow,” and each time I’m struck by its fundamental vacancy, its desolation. There is no true wonder at the core of “wow.” The core of “wow” is an IV bag filled with lemon-lime Gatorade. The core of “wow” is a dog eating grass to make itself vomit.
“It says here 16th-century Scots first used ‘wow’ as an exclamation of delight or amazement,” Derf says when we’re back in the car, thumbing through search results. I can picture with near certainty the precise mental image he’s conjured up, visions of Scottish hordes cresting the highlands in their fur and flannel, “wow”-ing at each other dementedly. By now, I don’t need to look at his face to know what he’s thinking.
Although the sky is still dark, the world outside the car is bright with gas stations and loading docks and fast casual restaurants. Beyond them, the faint outlines of foothills—never mountains, always foothills, sanded off on top like the glaciers couldn’t be bothered to finish the job.
“We’re getting there,” Derf says after a moment, quietly, when I don’t respond.
But I know we aren’t. We’ll be driving through Pennsylvania tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. We’ll glide in our midsize sedan past the same hills, the same convenience stores. The same billboards, tucked into the far ends of sorghum fields, advertising Amish buffets and stump-grinding.
“We’re getting there,” he says again, not believing it either.
A little before lunchtime, we stop at a pull-off with a Walmart and a Panera Bread, and I get out to check on Trunk Girl. From afar, it looks like I’m digging around in the back of the vehicle, sorting through groceries or luggage. But really, I’m refilling her water, applying barrier cream to her pressure ulcers, manually repositioning the parts of her body that most closely resemble limbs. Today, Trunk Girl has a happy pinkish color about her, and when I rub in the lotion she relaxes further into her labrador-sized dog bed. “Hi, Trunk Girl,” I say. Trunk Girl never says anything.
Derf is already sitting when I go inside the Panera, bent into a goblin-like position over his Pick Two.
“This Panera Bread is a good Panera Bread,” he says. As he chews, the centipede-shaped scar beneath his earlobe wriggles. Derf’s name is really Fred, but he had it legally changed because he has a cousin in North Dakota who is also named Fred, except that Fred has curly red hair and sells Kias. Derf, on the other hand, has curly brown hair and steals Kias. Due to some clerical oversight on Derf/Fred’s part, the change was rendered effective only within Ohio state lines; at the federal level, he is still considered Fred.
“Her skin is getting dry back there,” I tell him. “Can we please buy some lotion that’s not from the dollar store?”
“Does she look uncomfortable?”
“Would you be uncomfortable?”
He ignores the bait and opens his turkey avocado melt, removes the turkey and the avocado, leaving only melt. I glance past his shoulder toward where the car is parked—it’s a hot day and I’ve left the trunk cracked open. A man walks by with no socks or shoes and a huge rolling suitcase, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“I’ll pick up new lotion,” Derf says. “We’re low on root beer anyway.”
When we’re done, I duck into the women’s room and fill my empty soda cup with foaming handwash. I dump tampons out of the dispenser and reach into the metal box in one of the stalls to dislodge the toilet paper. There’s a back exit just outside leading to a dumpster area, followed by a huge garden center. Big enough, maybe, to slip inside and vanish among the ornamental grasses.
But just as I’m about to rise, the toilet paper box closes around my hand like a trap in a “Saw” movie. I contort myself into a series of Twister poses to avoid being degloved. When I finally get the roll loose, a tiny envelope slips out and lands on the tile floor.
RETURN TO YOUR VEHICLE, the note inside reads.
There’s a pair of American Express gift cards, both marked $200 and bearing the words Happy Birthday! As always, the message has a palm tree emblem stamped in the corner, and I stare at it, the image growing hazy as my eyes glaze over. Then, with a sigh, I tear the paper into strips, put each piece in my mouth, and swallow them.
I stopped trusting geography a long time ago. Maybe I never trusted it. The world can trick you, can expand and contract at will, sprout mystery appendages or fence you in like the invisible wall at the edge of a video game world. When I was younger, I’d sit in my bedroom gripping an N64 controller and fling my 1992 Dodge Viper into the ocean, while one floor up my mother watched “Judge Mathis” and slowly went insane. I’d watch as the car careened across the bay, holding my breath in anticipation before it inexplicably burst into flames. Maybe, soon, the same thing will happen to us. Out of nowhere we’ll collide with the boundaries of the rendered world, collapsing the car and our earthly selves with the hollow thwank! of a cartoon cat getting smacked in the head with a frying pan.
“They didn’t have A&W, I had to get Mug,” Derf says when I pick him up in front of Walmart.
“You forgot the lotion?”
“Oh, son of a bitch.” He hoists the 12-pack onto the roof of the car, groaning like it represents the great burden of his life. “I’ll go back in and get it.”
“It’s fine,” I tell him. “Just get in.”
The first few weeks hadn’t been so terrible. Each morning I’d cue up the song “Mr. Maybe” by the 1960s vocal group Fillmore Dave and His Tru-Vettes, from an old CD I’d had as a kid. There was something hopeful in the thin jangle of Eisenhower-era guitars, as if we were charting some unexplored northern territory instead of the necrotic rest stops along I-80.
I once was Mr. Maybe
I once was Mr. Sad
Baby, one thing you know for sure
You’ve made me Mr. Glad
But there were only so many repetitions until those breezy open chords began to feel like stasis, not momentum. Only so many half-acknowledged disquisitions on why Kevin Costner never produced a sequel to “Dances With Wolves” until they were exasperating, not endearing. And there was so much Pennsylvania. Days of Pennsylvania. Weeks of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania silently unfolding itself, forming acres of new nerve and muscle and semi-rigid asphalt.
As we drive, there’s an occasional muffled thump-thump-pause, thump-thump-pause behind us—Trunk Girl communicating that her battery-operated portable fan needs new batteries. When we get to the next exit, we pull up to a tobacco store with a statue of a wooden Indian by the front door, and I walk to the back of the car.
“Everything okay, sweetie? Your fan need fixed?”
Trunk Girl doesn’t respond, just looks straight at me with her one watery blue eye. In it, I can see my own silhouette reflected back, bent into a funhouse shape. Pinched-in shoulders. A head like a swollen eggplant. The words repeat in my mind unbidden: Baby, one thing you know for sure.
One thing you know for sure.
You know.
You know.
And I hate that I do.
She was already in the car when we left Ohio. SILVER COROLLA, the text read when it came through, just before 5 AM. FRISCH’S BIG BOY. PENNSYLVANIA PLATES. Three sunny digital chirps from Derf’s phone, each bringing the edges of the room at the Duct Avenue Comfort Suites into sharper focus.
The car was waiting for us two parking lots over, the doors unlocked and a key fob with a metal palm tree charm tucked beneath the floor mat. A square of paper on the dash: KEEP HER ALIVE. EAT THE NOTES. WE ARE WATCHING.
“Definitely not a Lexus,” Derf said, and put it in reverse. “Lying fucks.”
He never told me who we were working for. Just that the connection had come from Geno P.—yes, he said, the Geno P. he used to owe a bunch of money—yes, the Geno P. who once kicked the shit out of him and poured gasoline all over his head, but like, that’s Macedonian humor for you, okay? Beyond that, he only offered a vague allusion to a pair of Polish gangsters called the Zjawiński brothers, who allegedly operated out of an abandoned glove factory in the Cleveland flats. Another time he told me there were bikers involved, which made even less sense. If we’ve been hired by bikers, I said, why are they willing to outsource anything involving long-haul transportation, especially when the cargo appears to be A) Illegal, B) Alive, C) Not thrilled about it?
I wondered what would happen when we got there—wherever “there” was. I pictured a generically distressed warehouse, a biker dude walking out with a duffel bag.
Instead of answering the question, Derf would just stare at me with a dyspeptic look, as if my skepticism about the opportunity—a Capital O Opportunity, he’d called it—was giving him heartburn. He’d stand there and scratch at the nape of his neck, waiting for me to press the case. I never did. And anyway, I had nowhere else to go.
It took me a few days to open the trunk. I’d heard the sounds as we were driving, of course—the taps, the thump-thump-pauses, and a wet, throaty noise that was almost like laughter. Usually Derf would ignore these sounds until we parked for the night, then he’d creep around to the back of the car with a bag of Pirate’s Booty, raise the hatch a couple of inches, and fling the bag inside, jerking his hand away like he was tossing a piece of trout into the crocodile habitat at the zoo.
At first, I’d ignored them too. The same way as a kid I’d ignored the room in the house where a pregnant opossum once chewed through the wall, returning night after night to scrabble and hiss in the dark. I’d hear it as I crept up to the attic to bring my mother saltine crackers and warmed-up cans of chicken and dumpling soup, and then again through the floorboards while I sat there to make sure she remembered to eat them. Eventually the opossum had babies, and I had to start sleeping in headphones so I wouldn’t hear their cries. I listened to my one CD, playing “Mr. Maybe” again and again until I couldn’t tell what was music and what was an opossum sound. After a few days I stopped hearing them at all; it was just Fillmore Dave and his golden sunshine voice.
Then, one morning, Derf was taking a shower at a Love’s Travel Stop when it happened again, louder than before—that half-exhale, half-whimpering laughter that wasn’t laughter. Opossum sounds, I thought—and in fact, they were distinctly opossum-like. Still, I turned off the radio and slipped through the door. I unlocked the trunk. I opened the trunk. I closed it. I opened it again.
I saw fingernails, but no fingers.
Kneecaps, but no knees.
A mouth, maybe.
I was frightened. I could tell she was too.
We wake up from a nap in front of the tobacco store, and beneath the wiper blades there’s a greeting card with a picture of an ice-skating cat and the words Meow-y Christmas! in big red letters. In the corner, the familiar palm tree stamp, rain-saturated and beginning to leach through the paper.
PROCEED ALONG THE ROUTE, the inside reads, and another clutch of Amex gift cards tumbles to the floor mat. Derf tears the message into strips but doesn’t swallow them. Instead, he balls them up and drops them out the window.
“I’m gonna go check on her,” I say, and open the door.
“Didn’t you just check? It’s been like 40 minutes.”
“I’m checking on her,” I say again. And I’m glad I do, because something is off with Trunk Girl. Her happy pinkish color has taken a pale cast. The parts that most closely resemble limbs are heavy and limp, like bags filled with pennies, but everywhere else her skin is bone taut. Her fingernails, I notice, have grown longer.
Something is off with Trunk Girl. Her happy pinkish color has taken a pale cast.
I ask her if she’s okay, reaching out. She’s warm to the touch. Trunk Girl doesn’t say anything.
“We have more Pirate’s Booty,” Derf calls out the window, not looking at me. His phone chimes with a text message, but as I’m walking back, he flips to a live video of a large, blindfolded man comparing brands of specialty barbecue sauce.
“Can you run in and see if they have Advil or something?”
He flicks his eyes toward the store, announced by its sign as FRANK’S SMOKS. A shirtless man in gym shorts comes out the door and rubs the wooden Indian’s neck in a sensual way, then flattens an empty can of Red Bull against its head. Derf glances back toward his phone, giving the barbecue sauce man a long look as he adjusts his bib. Then he sighs loudly and reaches for the door.
“It’s fine,” I tell him. My endless refrain. “I’ll do it. Leave the car running.”
The inside of Frank’s Smoks isn’t much more welcoming than the outside. There’s a single dark refrigerator filled with beer and energy drinks. A wall of tobacco and tobacco-adjacent products, CBD powders, kratom gummies. The floorboards have sunken in on one side, and when a nickel falls out of my pocket it rolls diagonally across the shop, past the fridge, and clinks against a back door where “Employees Only” has been etched into the glass in old west lettering.
“It’s unlocked,” says an elderly gentleman in a vest, perhaps Frank, who emerges from behind a rack of candy.
“What?” I hear myself reply. My voice sounds higher, more alarmed than I’d intended. It’s only then that I notice my hands are shaking and I’ve been staring at the rear exit.
“Sweetheart, listen,” Frank says, speaking softly. “There’s a path behind the shop. You follow it a half mile, you’ll hit 30A. There’s a police station. Or I can call someone for you. Here,” he says, reaching for the sign, “I’ll close up shop.”
“Are we near the end?” I ask, and this time Frank is the one who says “what?” He’s one of those old people with a face that’s both rugged and weirdly smooth, like it’s been sandblasted.
“Do you have Advil, Tylenol, something?”
He regards me for a moment, then flips the sign in the window back to “open.” “Right over here,” he says, and I follow him.
Here’s the thing about opossums: They’re committed, stubborn creatures. For months they scraped and slunk behind the closed door of the former sewing room, dozens of opossums proliferating through the space they’d adopted as their generational home. Occasionally I’d find my mother at night, nudging a shallow bowl of milk through the gap beneath the door. “Hungry babies need to eat,” she’d say in the strange, clotted voice she used the rare times she ventured out of her room. “Hungry babies get big and strong.” By then, she’d dropped almost 50 pounds, and her nightgown hung from her frame like a magenta parachute.
Gradually, the opossums migrated to the bathroom, then my bedroom, then took over the upper level entirely. When they expanded their territory downstairs, we moved into the unfinished basement, where we had an open-air bathroom configuration known as a Pittsburgh toilet. I came and left through the rusty cellar door, sleeping on a bag of fuel pellets, never entering the main part of the house. The house wasn’t our house anymore. The house was now—the words dissolved into view like a movie title—The House of the Opossums.
“That’s crazy,” Derf said when I told him about The House of the Opossums—he was still Fred then, before we started messing around, before he started stealing more than Kias. “Why didn’t you call an exterminator?”
I didn’t have an answer for him. Actually, the question had never occurred to me. An air of inevitability hung over the opossum situation, as grim and impenetrable as Midwest cloud cover.
“We did,” I lied, “They sealed the place off and did some kind of gas bomb thing, and all the opossums died.”
“Damn, that must have stank when you came back.”
“It wasn’t that bad. The team was very helpful and efficient.”
“You must’ve been pissed at your mom, though. For letting it get like that.”
“She did the best she could.”
Now, Derf is asleep in the passenger seat, his breath forming islands of condensation against the window. When he’s unconscious, it’s easy to see him again as Fred. His face has that slack, puppyish look, like he hasn’t quite grown into his own skin. Even the centipede-shaped scar has an innocent quality, like a playground injury instead of Geno P.’s Macedonian handiwork. Without thinking about it, I reach over and push his hair out of his face.
We pass a Hampton Inn by Hilton. We pass a Hilton Garden Inn. We pass a Hilton Extended Stay Homewood Suites. We pass a wastewater treatment plant. SHE DID THE BEST SHE COULD reads a billboard at the end of a sorghum field. LET BANKRUPTCY MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS HANDLE THE REST.
In moments like this, I don’t mind so much that we’ll be driving through Pennsylvania tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. As in The House of the Opossums, there’s a brittle comfort in knowing what the future holds. Tomorrow, there will be more opossums. Tomorrow, there will be more Pennsylvania. I will drink flat root beer. I will visualize Scottish hordes. My eyes will track the words written on the faces of mile markers as they glide into view, each stamped with the outline of a tiny palm tree:
KEEP
HER
ALIVE.
EAT
THE
NOTES.
WE
ARE
WATCHING.
There’s this one song by Fillmore Dave and His Tru-Vettes where they sing about a guy named Bill, who drives a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. In the song, Bill has a girlfriend named Sally, who’s always hanging ’round the alley, which I took to mean the arrangement between Bill and Sally is not so much romantic as transactional in nature. Anyway, Coupe de Ville Bill takes Sally from the alley to a drive-in movie, and after that they go to some kind of soda fountain/diner/non-alcoholic teen hangout-type place, where Bill catches Sally—the song assumes his version of the events—quote, “making eyes” at another man. So while Sally is in the bathroom, Bill decides, in the heavily sanitized language of early “beat” music, to kidnap her (“take her”), non-specifically violate her (“shake her”), and dispose of her body in an old oil drum (“dispose of her body in an old oil drum”). The song ends with Sally walking back to their table at the soda fountain, innocent of what the coming hours hold.
By the way, the name of the song is “Fun Times USA.”
Years ago, listening in my room, I’d go cotton-mouthed with dread as the song progressed from verse to chorus. By the time it reached its bridge section, the anxiety had become almost too much to bear: “Get out of there, Sally,” I’d scream in my mind. “Sally, he does not have your best interests at heart.” And I’d hit the skip button in anticipation of the song’s ending, unable to suffer the terrible knowledge of Sally’s fate. (The next track was called “Cheeseburgers,” and it was just about cheeseburgers.)
Now, though, I wonder: What if Sally knew something bad was coming? What if she sensed, as she studied her reflection in a cloudy bathroom mirror, that the world had quietly coiled against her? What if, though—what if she just didn’t care?
“Do you want a scratcher?” Derf says as he wanders out of a liquor store, his hands full of lotto cards and airplane bottles of coconut rum. “I just got a butt-load of scratchers.”
I don’t, but I take one anyway, not asking what he’s doing with six sheets worth of Double Buck Blowouts when we haven’t had to spend our own money in weeks, then realizing I’ve just answered my own question.
“Oh shit,” Derf says, rubbing a coin over the scratcher. “I won five dollars.”
MAINTAIN AMBIENT TEMPERATURE 70–73 F, the text reads on the card’s underlayer, after the wax has been rubbed away. MINIMIZE INTAKE: TERT-BUTYLHYDROQUINONE, PROPYL GALLATE, ANTI-CAKING AGENTS.
The Advil helps for a day or two. I crush it up with the palm tree charm and sprinkle it into cups of strawberry Ensure. For a few hours Trunk Girl’s color returns to normal, and the cold film of perspiration on her skin evaporates. She sinks back into her dog bed, deflating further with each exhalation, until finally she falls asleep.
That night, though, she goes feverish again. I sit on the lip of the trunk outside a Kwik Check, holding the straw up to her maybe-mouth as the wind bites my ears. She draws on it ferociously, glomming the stuff down with abandon. Then I feel something close around my wrist, and when I look down, I nearly drop the drink: not just fingernails, but fingers, attached to a hand, attached to something like an arm. “The core of ‘wow,’” I think. Her grip tightens, then releases. Her one blue eye stays fixed on mine.
“I’m telling you, something’s off,” I say to Derf. It’s late now, and we’re winding our way through another sawed-off foothill, the guardrail on the left side of the road punched open where a vehicle must have crashed through it to the valley below. “To be honest, it’s kind of freaking me out.”
“I promise you, there’s nothing to worry about.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Actually, I can,” he says, suddenly defensive. “Are you trying to piss me off? Because it’s working.”
He presses down on the accelerator. The engine groans, and the glove compartment’s bad latch rattles.
“Listen,” he says, a contrite note entering his voice. “I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m just saying, I’ve got the situation under control. The situation is my bitch. Okay?”
I almost say: Enough of the bullshit. I almost say: I think you’re lost here too. But instead, I drop it, and we drive in silence the rest of the night, both staring directly ahead at the next dim stretch of road. It’s dark enough that the dashboard casts the ghosts of our reflections against the windshield, and I’m reminded once more of the invisible wall and the 1992 Dodge Viper. Maybe, it occurs to me now, there would be no great eruption upon impact. Maybe I’d hit the wall months ago without even realizing it—before Fred became Derf, before the gray, wordless morning I left my mother to herself in The House of the Opossums and boarded an eastbound bus. I’d fallen asleep with my head pressed against the window, the sound of some kid’s iPhone game invading my dreams. When I woke up, I was in Ohio.
“I have to take a piss,” Derf says eventually, and eases the car onto the berm.
Moths flit back and forth in the twin beams of the headlights. I watch as he struggles over the guardrail and unzips in front of a half-collapsed farmhouse. He’s left his phone in the cupholder, and when a text comes in—ping!—dozens of bats erupt from a hole in the roof. For a moment, against the thin light of the moon, it almost looks as if they spell out some kind of message. But they don’t. They’re just bats.
It wasn’t so much that I made the active decision to leave. By the time I finally walked away from The House of the Opossums, I was on emotional autopilot—sleep-deprived, subsisting on boxes of expired breakfast cereal, ears ringing at a high-pitched marsupial frequency. If the Pittsburgh toilet wasn’t enough to produce lifelong trauma, there was also the reality of my mother’s diminishment, her physical and cognitive decline having finally intersected on the line chart of total collapse.
By then, she was almost entirely dwarfed by her nightgown, which lay around her on the cement floor like a fried egg. She rarely spoke. When she did, it was in response to whatever was playing on the ancient CRT TV I’d dragged out of deep storage and set up on a card table. I’d wake in the middle of the night to find her face awash in the screen’s hospital glow, murmuring over the sound of a “Jeopardy!” rerun.
Then I walked out of the house in my pajama pants, crossed the street, and never went back.
“What is tarmac?” she said. There was a strange urgency in her voice, a vinegary rasp of accusation. It was only when my pupils adjusted that I realized she wasn’t looking at the TV, but past it, straight at me. “What is tarmac?” she said again.
Instead of going back to sleep, I got up and wrapped her sweater around her shoulders.
“I’m up $200,” she said, her expression softening.
I rubbed her back. Her spine felt like a string of pearls. Then I walked out of the house in my pajama pants, crossed the street, and never went back.
The background image on Derf’s phone is an enormous, pixelated photo of Kevin Costner’s head. He has two browser tabs open, a porn clip (“Apolitical White Girl Sucks for SBA Debt Relief”), and the same taste test livestream he’d been watching three days earlier. “Please,” says the guy with the bib, still blindfolded and wiping barbecue sauce from the corner of his mouth. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
The text message reads ENJOYING THE SCENERY?, followed by a series of photos, taken at a distance: Derf at a gas pump, smoking a cigarette. Derf in a Taco Bell, squeezing hot sauce onto a chalupa. And then, a Derf-free shot of the hood of the car, with a lone matchbook balanced on top.
I scroll backwards, past a series of increasingly arcane directives (41.19683731741196, -75.93131217837407 MISTY), past the note about Frisch’s Big Boy and the silver Corolla, to the start of the conversation. CONFIRM: TWO (2) PACKAGES, it says at the beginning of the chain. There’s no response from Derf, just an appended thumbs-up icon in the corner.
Two.
I see the same desolate warehouse, with the biker and the duffel bag. Derf stepping out of the car, opening the trunk. I picture myself staring straight forward while, in the background, the wet, throaty sound that’s almost like laughter slides a step higher, into a pitch that’s more like a scream. And then—
I don’t tell Derf I’ve looked at his phone. But as the days pass, I begin to have more reservations that the situation is, in fact, his bitch. He disappears into restrooms for extended periods and returns in a sweat, nervously scratching the back of his head. He leaves the radio on scan mode without noticing, letting it climb repeatedly to the snowy heights of the FM band. When we wake up in a Holiday Inn Express with the TV on and the words WRAP HER IN BLANKETS flashing against a palm tree background, he becomes agitated and throws his sneaker at the screen. It bounces off the edge, leaving a brown tread mark, and tumbles beneath a curtain.
“Could you get that?” he says. His phone buzzes again. He turns it upside down on the bedstand, groaning.
“Get your own fucking shoe,” I tell him, and walk off to the bathroom. Behind the door I hear him whining: Why do I have to be so mean to him, can I please give him a break, please? Then he starts to cry.
There was a time when I could overlook these moments. I thought about how, after the Geno P. incident, Derf sat in a bathtub with his knees tucked against his stomach, holding a fistful of sodden medical gauze against his jaw. “You’re gonna stick me with that thing,” he’d said, smiling, then grimacing as I held a lighter beneath the needle.
“It hurts to smile,” he’d said.
“Well, lucky for you,” I’d replied, “You won’t be smiling long.”
Now, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, I kind of wish I’d stuck him after all. I hear him moving around outside the door, groaning and grunting. I turn the water on, and after a minute, I don’t hear him anymore. The lights buzz. The room fills with steam. I don’t hear anything at all.
After a few hours we leave the hotel room, take the stairwell down to the parking lot, and unlock the car. As we approach, I’m overcome by a sweet, chemical smell that burns my nostrils, and I rush to open the trunk.
Overnight, the not-limbs have resolved into actual ones: two arms and two legs, each terminating in a fully formed hand or foot. A flat purple scab has appeared a few inches from Trunk Girl’s eye, sealing over what had previously been a fold of skin. The sound of her breathing is no longer pinched, opossum-like. It sounds like mine.
Quickly, the sweat-soaked dog bed is discarded and replaced with a vinyl inflatable pool float shaped like a pineapple. In the afternoon I take the pineapple out of the trunk and hose it down at a truck stop, where a jellied buildup sloughs away and gathers in clumps around the floor drain.
Across the street there’s a squat, windowless medical building next to a Honey Baked Ham. I consider pulling into the pavement-patched cul-de-sac by the drop-off area, popping the trunk. “We’re gonna get you some help, okay?” I’d tell her. “I’ll be right back.”
Instead, we keep going—through service depots and toll roads and drive-thru windows. Through small towns. Through gridlocked traffic where, when we reach the choke point, there’s a nude man with a pillowcase over his head wandering blindly between lanes, holding his hands out in front of him.
“This is yours,” Derf says as he drives, handing me a greeting card with a picture of a winking cartoon gopher and the words Gopher it! in sparkle-foil letters. When I open it, a piece of paper falls into my lap. It’s blank, no note.
I stare at it for a long time.
“Are you going to eat it?” he says, and I sense him trying not to look at me.
“What happens if I don’t?”
“Well,” he says, putting on a dopey action hero affect. His Costner voice. “I’ll have to kill you.”
I think of the texts on his phone, and it occurs to me I’ve never seen what happens when Derf is cornered. I notice now how firmly he’s gripping the steering wheel, how tightly he’s clenching his jaw. I fold the paper twice and put it in my mouth.
The night before we left for Pennsylvania, in the vinyl-planked darkness of the Duct Avenue Comfort Suites, there was a moment—not even a moment, a matter of seconds—where I fluttered awake—not even awake, briefly, liminally alert—and realized Derf wasn’t asleep anymore. He was sitting in the overstuffed floral-print chair where, hours earlier, we’d thrown our two duffle bags in a pile. He was fully dressed even though it was the middle of the night, and he was looking at me the same hard way my mother had looked at me in the basement of The House of the Opossums. But unlike my mother’s, his gaze didn’t soften when he saw I was awake. “Go back to sleep,” he’d said instead, and after a few seconds I did. When I woke up again, he’d slung the duffle bags over his shoulders, and I remembered it was time to go.
It’s beginning to get dark when I notice we’re no longer on the highway. To our right, there’s some kind of vacant industrial site. RESIDENTIAL INFILL NOTICE: MISTY OAKS SUBDIVISION, a sign reads, zip-tied to a chain-link fence. A PALM TREE COMMUNITY.
Derf nudges us past the sign and around a pile of rebar, pulling onto a dirt track surrounded by the frames of unfinished one- and two-story homes. With a chill, I think once more of the imagined warehouse.
“Hey,” I say, and it’s then that I realize Derf looks edgier than I’ve ever seen him before. He’s drumming the fingers of one hand against the side of his seat, digging his nails into the soft part of the steering wheel with the other. When he turns his head toward me, I can’t tell if he’s about to throw up, or start crying, or both, and I almost—almost—put my hand on top of his.
“Where are we going, really?” I ask him, and as he opens his mouth the centipede scar twitches above his throat.
But then: a sound from the back of the car. Thump.
Thump thump.
“I’m not stopping,” Derf says preemptively. “So before you say anything—”
Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump
thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump.
There’s a hollow thwank! as the latch of the trunk tears open, so loud, sharp, and sudden that I feel it in my teeth. I hear metal grind against metal, then a shriek from the car’s tires as we come lurching, swerving to a stop. As my head snaps forward, I shriek too.
I look at Derf, but he’s not looking at me. He’s staring, his eyes impossibly wide, at a faint outline about 20 feet behind us, near the mound of rebar. Or actually, two outlines. One is an inflatable pineapple. One is something else.
The core of “wow” is a dream of the house you grew up in, with its crabgrass lawn and spent shingles and portable TV playing “Judge Mathis” on repeat, and in the dream it’s late at night and you’re tiptoeing down the hallway, leaving a shallow bowl of milk at the foot of the bedroom, the bathroom, the narrow stairs leading to the attic. The core of “wow” is knowing your mother probably died in that house, alone, not understanding what was happening to her, while you were asleep in a motel three states away. The core of “wow” is realizing you never really woke up.
“Son of a bitch,” Derf says, stepping out of the car. It’s not just the rear latch that’s been destroyed. The entire trunk has been obliterated off its hinges, bent and steaming at the foot of a tree. The pineapple pool float slides listlessly along the road, still inflated, buoyed by the wind.
The something-else has vanished. I can see, in the light of the car’s emergency blinkers, a row of dark smudges in the dirt, headed toward the skeleton houses. Handprints.
“Son of a bitch,” Derf says again. I barely hear him. In my mind there’s only the idiot gallop of “Fun Times USA”—slap backed guitar chords and Fillmore Dave. Somewhere far away, Derf’s phone rings, rings again, and on the third, he slowly brings it to his ear, the color draining from his face.
“Yeah,” he says quietly, cupping the phone with his palm. And then, glancing at me: “Yeah, she’s here too.”
I don’t hear what he says after that. In the distance, at the edge of my vision, there’s a murky figure, not much taller than myself, slowly moving towards us.
Dark hair. Long, pale arms. With each flash of the car’s emergency lights, a clearer image forms in my mind. Shiny skin—still fresh, still fragile. A pair of bright blue eyes. A flicker of something like recognition.
I don’t speak as she silently places herself behind Derf, who’s bent over the trunk, still talking on the phone.
The emergency lights flash.
A shadow, a smeared thumbprint.
An opossum, a magenta parachute, the “Jeopardy!” theme song.
As she looks at me, moving closer to Derf, I realize there’s more than recognition in those eyes. There’s a question. One I already know the answer to.
A mouth, maybe, or many mouths.
“Wow,” I hear Derf say, ending the call. “I never realized, there’s like barely any storage in here.”
I take a step back. I look straight at Trunk Girl. And I think: Hungry babies need to eat. Hungry babies get big and strong.
“You must’ve been pissed at your mom, though. For letting it get like that.”
“She did the best she could.”
“Hell yeah, she did,” Fred says, turning on his elbow across from me. And then, to an imagined audience: “Let’s hear it for all the moms.”
Hear what? I almost ask him. Do you hear something?
I’ve been driving through Pennsylvania for nearly 22 hours. At first, I drove in silence, watching the rearview, holding my breath with every passing vehicle. Once, a white pickup truck hovered behind me for an exit, two exits, and I was seconds from flooring the gas when it pulled into a police turnaround and started heading the other way.
Eventually, I stopped glancing over my shoulder.
I take Fillmore Dave out of the disc player and turn on the radio, scanning through a jumble of pop and country before landing on an oldies station. After a while, I turn the music off and just listen to the high, hovering sound of the car’s wheels as they move against the pavement.
I pull off the interstate, drive a quarter mile past a strip of boarded-up pet stores, and double-park next to a hair salon. I reflexively walk back to check the trunk, held together with bungee cords and duct tape, before remembering there’s nothing in it. “I’ll be right back,” I say anyway.
It’s a cool evening and I feel like walking, so I follow the sidewalk one block, then another, until I arrive at a convenience store at the end of a cracked parking lot. Inside, I walk from aisle to aisle, pick up a bag of chips and a bottle of A&W root beer. I take my time, perusing each row. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the beer fridge and briefly mistake it for someone else, mirroring my movements. But no. It’s just me.
“Twelve bucks,” the cashier says. She’s around 19 or 20, with a two-tone dye job and tired eyes.
I’ll take a scratcher too,” I say, nodding toward the back. She slides one across the counter and I take a dime out of my pocket, rub it against the thin wax coating.
“Look at that,” I say, holding the ticket up to the light. “I didn’t win anything.”
