Driving

It’s already been an interesting morning by the time Teri gets on the road, and nobody has even died yet. There are four hours left until they do, four hours left, NASA says, before the large asteroid NASA has just spotted crashes into the city of Roanoke, Virginia, and before that happens Teri fully intends to reach her girlfriend up in Massachusetts and spend what will probably be the rest of her life with her.

The asteroid is roughly three-quarters of a mile wide. That figure is easy to remember, but Teri can’t remember exactly how fast it’s going. Fast enough to wipe out the entire east coast of the United States, for certain, which probably means tsunamis for everybody else, not to mention the dust cloud, the deep freeze, and all the other lovely side effects the NASA people have frantically worked out to the decimal point. Of course they’ve tried to find solutions, and of course they’re doing anything that looks like it might help, but the stiffly worded interview with the single NASA employee that CNN could get hold of was enough to convince anyone with a brain that they’re just as panicked as everyone else. Of course they are. NASA headquarters isn’t much more than three hours from the strike zone.

Teri isn’t crying. Her hands are steady and firm on the wheel and gear shift, she isn’t biting her lips or panting shallowly or wide-eyed and white-knuckled like some of the other drivers she sees. Everyone’s listening to the radio, everybody’s panicking, trying to leave the country, go somewhere more populated, less populated, anywhere they think their chances might be better.

Earlier, back at the house, Teri hadn’t been crying either, nor had her mother. Her father was crying, although he didn’t seem to notice, white-faced, hands clenched on the back of a kitchen chair, but her mother had been flushed and furious when Teri grabbed the keys to the Honda and started toward the door.

“Theresa Robins, I don’t know where you think you’re going, but that is not your car and you’re not taking it anywhere at a time like this! That is the family car and you are going to stay right here, safe and sound with your family until this all gets sorted out – ”

And how you think you’re going to sort out an asteroid hit I don’t know, Ma. But she’d said only: “You’ve still got the new van. I’m going up to see Sonya Nicholson.”

“You are going to stay right here,” her mother started, grinding the words between her teeth, and Teri cut her off.

“I’m going to be with my lover,” she said, walking out the door hearing the shocked breath of a “Holy Mary Mother of God” behind her as her mother crossed herself. She’d gotten down the front steps before the door slammed open again behind her and she started running in case her mother intended to grab her and drag her back inside.

“Theresa!” her father yelled from the porch, leaning over the railing. She turned to look, walking backwards toward the driveway.

“Honey, you can’t just leave us here while you go off to see your – friend, girlfriend, whatever!” His voice had sounded strange and raspy from crying, his face blotched red and white with stress, and she felt in her gut how fiercely she loved him, but he and Ma had each other, and if she went back to hug him he wouldn’t let her go. “We have to stick together right now,” he continued, “pack what we need and go – if we head west, we might make it far enough – ”

Teri had nodded, trying to smile. “You do that, Dad, I’ll have a plenty good chance going up the coast. I promise not to do anything stupid, I love you.” She’d turned and run for the car, trying not to hear his voice break as he called after her.

She checks the dashboard clock, now, flying down the interstate. Three-and-a-half hours left. Sonya would normally be in ceramics class at this time of the morning, but by now the news has probably gone all over the campus. Sonya is probably in her room or with friends right now, packing or outside looking at the new-leafed trees or surfing online chat-rooms – Teri has no idea what she’s doing. She knows how Sonya has reacted to other catastrophes, to terrorist attacks and deaths in the family and when her driver’s license got taken away, when her laptop fried and the time she got mugged on the way home from a party – but how about the knowledge that your world is about to change beyond your comprehension or survival?

Teri is fairly certain that she herself is in shock, and her parents both seemed to be at different levels of denial, but she doesn’t know how her lover of two years might react. It’s disturbing, when she thought they knew each other so well. She can imagine Sonya furious, hysterical, terrified, fatalistic, even refusing to believe it all, but she can’t guess which is the real picture right now.

People on the road have forgotten how to drive, if they ever knew. Some cars are stopped in the middle of the road, drivers and passengers standing outside having screaming arguments, eyes crazed and passionate. Teri swerves carefully around the fights and goes on, driving at eighty whenever she can manage it. Ninety is too fast for her reflexes, and eighty is probably still fast enough to get her killed right now, when people are treating the road like a Grand Theft Auto computer game, but Sonya’s college is still two hundred miles away, and Teri is going to reach it with an intact car in the shortest time possible.

While she was in her room this morning, changing from the pajamas she’d still been wearing into jeans and t-shirt and making sure her wallet had all the cards in it – credit, license, etc – her father had watched the news with the sound turned up loud enough to hear all across the top floor, his face a blank mask. She’d listened to the reports intently, trying to think at the same time what she might need on the way or once she got to Massachusetts. If they lived to the end of the day? She’d almost smiled at the strangeness of the knowledge that it wasn’t likely. Everything was so simple now. No more thoughts about how soon could she quit her job, how much money could she save first, when could she move into a place with Sonya. No more condescending paralegals who knew what to do with the briefs she never could format correctly, no more demanding lawyers, no more too-short weekends with her lover squeezed out of the only free time she’d had for the past year. Teri’d almost welcomed the simplicity of life pared down to the necessities.

Flights cross-country and out of country were more than booked, the reports said; the airports were swarmed, as were train and bus stations up and down the coast. The interstates west were crazy with people diving off-road to avoid the solid traffic jam, slamming into ditches and road signs and each other, anything not to be standing still, anything to feel like they were doing something.

Stores across the country were even worse, deserted by their employees, ransacked by them and the ravening mobs that followed, people piling food and anything they could grab into shopping carts and fleeing for their cars, the less fortunate tearing after them to slam them to the pavement and take what they had.

The roads west may be packed, but I-93 seems almost normal as far as Teri can tell, except for all the people who have lost their minds. At least four cars have passed her going more than a hundred miles an hour, and she’s already had to avoid several accidents, one a severe pile-up that started right in front of her. She is intensely grateful for all the years of inner city driving that have given her the reflexes she needs now. One man actually ran out into the road right in front of her and stopped dead, and she is still not sure how she avoided him. Teri shakes her head, thinking of him. Why kill yourself now when you’re going to die soon anyway? She checks the clock. Two hours.

When she looks back up, she sees a businessman in a rumpled suit standing in the breakdown lane ahead, holding a sign that says “Repent” in large, careful block letters. His drawn, pale face stares desperately at each car that passes, his mouth moving in constant, unheard exhortations. Teri doesn’t much want to repent of anything at the moment, and she doesn’t feel like being told that her life has been wrong, and she doesn’t need to accept Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior, either. All the religion she has ever needed lies within the circle of Sonya’s arms, and she is on her way to worship. The businessman doesn’t need a ride, either, she realizes as she flies by, because the silver SUV parked just past him has to be his: it looks like a Mercedes.

Teri wishes she had a cell phone. If she had a cell phone, she could call Sonya, tell her not to worry, Teri’s on her way up. Sonya may not be thinking about Teri yet, she may be trying to think of a way to move fast enough to get far away and live, but if she finds a solution, her next thought will be who she wants to be safe with, and then she will think of Teri and her heart will feel twice as strange as Teri’s feels right now, twisting and urgent and throbbing. Teri knows this. The idea that Sonya might not even think about her, or might think about her and then abandon her to whatever fate she might find, has already occurred to Teri, and she entertained the theory in a kind of curious, academic way for a moment before it fell apart. She may not know what her lover’s first reaction to imminent death is, but she knows how Sonya feels about her; she’s seen it a hundred times in her eyes, heard it in her voice, and despite a natural cynicism about her own luck in life, Teri has been reluctantly convinced over the past two years that Teri’s well-being is more important to Sonya than her own.

Which means that Sonya will have called Teri’s home, as she has done every weekend that Teri wasn’t with her for the past year, these calls carefully disguised from the Catholic parents as keeping up with “that cute little junior Teri’s senior year,” and there is perhaps the barest chance that Teri’s father will have answered the phone – if they were still home – and perhaps he may have told her that Teri is on her way. In the least pleasant of tones, most likely – he won’t have approved of this choice of lovers much more than her mother, now it’s had time to sink in, and nevermind his love for his daughter; both her parents have marched in the anti-gay parades as long as she can remember – but surely, in the interests of basic courtesy, he would tell Sonya that Teri is coming to see her.

Maybe. If they’re even there. If they have been delayed on their way out of the house, or perhaps have been wise enough to see that really there isn’t much point. Teri can’t decide if she hopes they were still there when Sonya called, or long gone, hasting to the west and – just barely possibly – out of immediate range, if they manage to find a less-swarmed route, if they get to an airport, if her father bribes any employees still left to let them on the plane ahead of less-fortunate passengers not carrying cash…

One and a half hours. Teri drives at ninety to a hundred now, as fast as she feels she is at all likely to survive, and she is almost to Sonya’s college. As she gets closer the traffic gets crazy again, snarled and full of drivers who don’t think following the laws is necessary anymore, never mind the people who could die in the accidents they cause. Teri isn’t going ninety anymore, she is crawling along at thirty now, watching as the hour and a half flows away like the last bit of sand running out of her personal hourglass. An hour and a quarter. Sixty minutes. Fifty, and traffic moving slower than she can run.

Teri understands the man who steps out of the car beside her, grabs the tire iron from under the seat, and tears down the line of traffic to find the source of the holdup, and probably to beat its windshield in. She understands, but instead of imitating, she turns across the opposing line of traffic and slams on the gas to dive into a side street before she gets hit. From the maddened honks behind her she may have caused yet another accident, but she is maneuvering past another few desperate cars to go up to sixty down the empty, winding road.

Forty minutes, and the campus is right here, pavement flying under her wheels. The place is almost empty, remnants milling in and out of buildings, students and teachers finally equal. A girl sits on the flat roof of the painting studio in lotus position with a beatific smile on her face. The girl is not Sonya; her hair is short and red.

Teri weaves across the campus, which seems to expand under her wheels. Thirty-five minutes. She reaches the dorms. Someone leans against the wall, a boy, a freshman she guesses from the expression, although anyone could have that empty, desperate look at this point. She screeches into a parking spot – thirty minutes – turns the car off, curses the moment wasted to habit – what matters a car now that she’s finally here? The boy gives her a flashing, wide-eyed glance as she flings herself out of the car and toward him, then he goes back to staring down the road and off-campus. Teri is already past him, slamming through the heavy door and down the silent, carpeted hallway to the stairs; Sonya lives on the third floor and if she isn’t there she will have left a message, something to tell Teri where to find her, but she’ll be there, she’ll be waiting for Teri and Teri has finally come to sweep her into her arms and make them both forget everything that’s happening. She flies up the stairs, legs aching from pounding three flights of industrial carpet, hits the door at the top without pause and runs down the hall to the third door on the left with the cheerful display of origami taped to it.

Teri knocks and opens in one movement, expecting to see Sonya at the desk, or peering out the window, or sprawled on her bed listening to her favorite CD in this short period before the world goes dark…

Sonya isn’t there.

Teri steps into the room, crosses to the bed as the heavy door slams behind her, turns in a slow circle, as if Sonya might be hiding behind the lamp or the dresser. She cannot understand. She crouches to look under the bed, laying her cheek against the old wood floor. A dusty pair of underwear and a t-shirt, but no short Asian girl. At a loss, Teri peers into the closet, feeling her thoughts unhinge at last under this final shock. Her mind spins like the info disc she stuck in a CD player once by mistake, with no output but a quiet humming noise, faster and faster, and she wonders dizzily if she has time to go completely around the bend. Maybe she should have stopped and prayed with the rich man on the side of the road, asked him if he had a girlfriend. Perhaps her single-minded purpose up to this point is a kind of madness in itself? But a much more useful one than the twitchy insanity she can almost see out of the corner of her eye now…

The door handle turns behind her and Teri whips around to see a slender olive hand push the door open, and her eye sweeps from the hand up to a startled oval face, wet black hair hanging in a curtain around it, the other hand clutching the damp towel wrapped around her torso, and Teri’s face pulls into a helpless grin as her knees give out.

“Teri,” Sonya whispers, poised by the door as her eyes sweep up and down long angular limbs, checking for what Teri doesn’t know as she half-falls forward to wrap Sonya tightly in her arms. The door slams behind Sonya, and for a long moment, the world is hyper-clear, all the edges highlighted and solid around them in relief.

“Your hair smells good,” Teri mumbles, when it has faded back a little bit, rubbing her face against the smooth wet black.

“I used that herbal stuff you like.” Sonya reaches up for a kiss. “Everyone said the roads are insane, people going a hundred miles an hour, I wasn’t sure if you were going to get here. So I went to take a shower. I figured if anything would persuade you to show up, it’d be me in a towel.”

So this is how the stress affects her lover, Teri realizes as she laughs, almost giddy with release from the pressure of time. Sonya has taken up superstition today. Surely right now it makes as much sense as anything.

“It worked,” Teri smiles, tugging her towards the bed, then turns back hesitantly, just to check. “I have a car. Did you want to – ”

Sonya shakes her head. “What’s the point? I’d rather be where I am, and not worry about anything else now that you’ve made it.”

Teri stares down into deep brown eyes. “You knew I was coming?”

“I called your house. Your dad changed the message on the answering machine. He said they were going to try to catch the last flight to California, and you were going up to Massachusetts to see someone you loved.”

Teri stills completely, staring. “Did he say that?”

“That’s what the message said.” Sonya strokes one hand down the side of Teri’s face. Teri begins to move again, breath running easy, smile floating on her lips now as she tugs Sonya’s towel gently away, strips off her own shirt, lies down on the messy bed to pull her lover down on top of her, all the while feeling something vast and powerful welling up within her, something huge and warm as the sun, as precious as life.