Driving along the lake at night is like looking into the sky and seeing stars blur against each other. The lake is murky in daytime, a trap for seaweed, but at night it grows deep and still. You could wade into the water and walk forever, I think, out toward the moon that is huge no matter your vantage point. It takes up the entirety of my apartment windows and peeks through crevices, spilling light. Tonight the moon rides the sky above the highway and is a torch on my car, so bright it is almost blinding.
I am thirty, a number that feels miniscule when superimposed over the moon and the lake. Even the roads are older, those snaking vines; they get poured over regularly, but new asphalt sinks into existing cracks. Trees grow rings while yawning toward the horizon, and they only die when felled. When I look out at the lake edging the highway, I see boats with decades of repair and sourceless beacons, maybe from lighthouses. My sister Kat is with me in the passenger’s seat, and she is eighteen, even more of a blip than I am.
Kat sleeps intermittently, her head lolling against the window. There is a slug of drool reaching to her chin. Occasionally she wakes long enough to change the radio station and roll down the window for a breeze. The outside air smells of lake water, a fishy thing, and trees—that wet dirt scent that makes me think of home. I picture the town, a circle of cottages and churches and the convenience store, and my family’s place a jumble of logs. Maybe the front stoop is set with jack-o-lanterns and brooms weaved from hay stalks; maybe my parents placed candles in the windows for ghouls. I didn’t stop long enough to see. I idled my car at the end of the road while Kat gathered her things into a backpack and a duffel bag and came lumbering, dragging the duffel through the dirt. She tossed her bags in the trunk, and I hovered my foot over the gas pedal, willing Kat to move faster.
I’m driving fast now, cruising through lights, but the lake churns slowly. At every juncture it seems to repeat, like a pattern, a strip of clear water ending in black that fades to clear again, ends clean.
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Up ahead is the parkland, shrouded by elm trees and a big forest of pines. Kat opens her eyes for this part of the drive; she stretches behind her seatbelt and yawns. The shiner on her right eye warps when she moves. It is purple, starting to go green, and the skin looks matte and holds lines like veins in a leaf. Kat puts a hand to it and grimaces, and I look back at the road curving and cutting through groves of trees. The moon follows overhead, wide as a maw.
“God, this bites,” Kat says. Her voice is a hum against the car’s motor. “You got anything for headaches?”
“Check the center console,” I say. Kat goes digging and finds a bottle rattling with painkillers, pops one and dry-swallows. I don’t ask about the black eye, but I have a good guess. I ease my foot off the gas to smooth the drive and cruise, and the night seems to settle around us like a bell jar. Kat settles in her seat. She reclines and puts her feet up on the dash, and owls call in the distance, soft and lowing. Above us there is a canopy of trees dotted with birds’ nests and moon sightings and stars pulsing out dead light. I think of space darkness—I imagine it would be neither hot nor cold, just blank, void of sensation. It is hard to hold that thought in my mind with the stars and the moon and the lake beyond the parkland, still spitting waves and rushing the beachfront.
Being back here feels like watching a very old movie, one I’ve committed to memory, and settling into the story’s formula and breaths between dialogue and the way music soars when it needs to and fades when it doesn’t. I remember the spaces between trees and the road’s curves, and it is difficult not to relax. A part of me wonders about stopping somewhere for ice cream, but I look at Kat and see the shiner, coal-black in the low light, and the impulse seems absurd. Stupid, even, as though painting over a crumbling fence could kill the rot inside.
“I don’t think they know I’m gone,” Kat says. She is not looking at me. “Pretty sure they’re asleep. I didn’t pack up until I saw them heading for bed.”
“Good,” I say, “and keep your phone off. They don’t have my new number so they can’t get to us through me.”
Kat nods idly, and her hair falls over her cheek. The darkness cuts her cheekbones and she looks tense, a spring compressed. I look to the road ahead and see the sign indicating woodland and picnic spots and the waterfall farther off, and I cut toward the woods where the overgrowth looms larger. I used to hike there for fireflies as a child—it was a long walk, but I got to be alone. The walking path juts up to the road and then spindles off into a cluster of apple trees, and when I pass it, I see a few deer standing startled by cars. The deer rear back and their eyes go glazed. I can see my car’s shine in their eyes, a flash, and then dusk.
Past the apple trees, the woods grow darker. There are no streetlights, just my car’s headlights and moonlight pooled on the road. When I drive over a patch of moonlight, I half-expect it to splash as though it were rainwater. It remains flat, though, and follows my car like something caught and dragged. The treeline tunnels as we move farther into the woods, and I can hear crickets chittering in the distance. A coyote wails and the sound is mechanical, like an engine grinding. Kat shifts in her seat, and I roll down the windows to let in the night air. The smell is autumnal, crushed leaves and mud and something deeper, animal musk cut with exhaust, grass wet with dew and gone brown.
“What do you think will happen when they realize I’m gone?” Kat asks. Her voice is measured and she talks between breaths, as though willing something in her chest to ebb.
“I think it’ll take them a while,” I say. “They didn’t call the cops until I’d been gone for a week. We’ll be a few states out by then, and they can’t actually do anything to make you go back. The cops can’t take you. You’re an adult.”
Kat sighs.
“I don’t feel like one,” she says, and I want to say, me too, but I swallow the impulse. It rattles around in my gut like a handful of rocks.
Kat turns to look out the window, and I watch the road as it darkens. I can tell I’m getting tired; my breathing is slowing, becoming languid, and every time I blink it holds longer. Kat switches the radio to a talk station. The announcer’s voice drones, and for a moment, I allow myself to sink into the monotone and the crickets’ calls ringing through the long fall night. I think of trick-or-treating as a kid, running from house to house with my pillowcase slung over my shoulder while coyotes and crickets wailed. I wore a devil’s mask most years, an ill-fitting thing that cut into my neck, and horns and a plastic tail and a red sweater that swamped me until my teenage years. The sweater and mask made it hard to move, but I liked them because they hid the bruises. I felt transformed, as though I could have been anyone beneath the costume.
I have the wild impulse to swing off the road and find an apple orchard, buy cider and donuts for Kat and me, but I keep driving. I can tell my reflexes are off, though; I ride the curb for a few moments and then overcorrect and take the center line before settling back into my lane. Kat sits up straighter, inclines her seat; it jumps and hits her back. She looks at me, and I can tell she wants to say something—her eyes move between mine and the road through my window and the radio dial, and finally she turns the radio down. The announcer’s voice dips and fades to static.
“Sorry,” I say, “I was getting a little tired. I’ll put on the air to wake me up.”
“No, it’s not that,” Kat says. She looks down and the shiner encircling her eye is magnified in the darkness as though a patch of slick road. “It’s just—”
The night is a black hole now, eating my car’s headlights. The moonlight is dampered. All around us the treeline curves in and owls shriek and the crickets chatter, still, like a chorus gone wrong.
“You knew what Mom and Dad were like,” Kat says, “and you left me there anyway. Why didn’t you take me with you?”
My car’s engine purrs, and the horizon seems to swoop low, press down on us. I don’t know what to say. I could talk about the cops and the courts and how custody works; I could say I was so young when I left even though I was grown, that I didn’t know any better, that I did know better but was scared. All of that shrinks and dies in my throat. It feels nasty and cold and pathetic and bad, and I turn away from Kat.
Up ahead, I see something move on the road, a blur of brown, and I ease off the gas. The car drifts while I watch the road. Kat sits up straighter too and peers over the dash. A shape comes into view slowly—I think it is a tree’s shadow at first, then a person hunched strangely. Then I think it’s a deer. There are antlers protruding and hooves on the road, spotlighted by my headlights, and eyes shining dully as though twin moons. The thing’s hide is matted and its legs are skinny, bowed like curved branches. I edge the car forward, barely tapping the gas, and the thing does not move.
Kat reaches over and hits the horn in bursts, and the sound seems to split the night. The crickets fall silent. I hear an owl’s call and see a scatter near the treeline, an opossum’s slinking tail. The thing on the road ahead of us does not seem bothered by the sound, though. It scuffs a hoof and settles back with its weight on its hind legs and lowers its head. Its gaze is straight. I put the car in park and watch, hoping the thing will spook and jump the guardrail, make a run for the woods.
Then I look at its face, and the eyes are off. The pupils are long, vertical slits so black that the whites seem to shimmer in contrast. One eye is on us and the other slips, peering toward the treeline, before refocusing. The thing huffs and shudders, and when its ears flip, I see they are bitten in places and paper-thin, lined with prominent veins. The chest is broad and juts, and I can trace a bone outline like a cage.
Without the crickets’ calls, the night is like something held underwater. I swear I can hear the thing’s breath, a slow chug, and the sound of its hooves on the road. Next to me, Kat is breathing loud too, and I feel her link her arm with mine.
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” she says in a whisper, leaning close. “That thing seems wrong. Just drive around it in the grass.”
I can’t move, though. I know that in the same way I know the night is dark and the road is long and winding and the city is hours out, all car sounds and high-rises. I think of my apartment and its second bedroom, more of a closet, clothes piled on the ground and an air mattress set in the back. There is one bathroom with a skinny shower and a sink and a plastic cup for toothbrushes. The kitchen is a galley, counters stacked with bags of chips and clamshell takeout containers; the living room is a loveseat and a television on a milk crate. I imagine Kat moving through the space, stretching out on the loveseat and sleeping curled on the air mattress, hogging the bathroom. The thought is a bundle of nerves that wriggle and swirl and make me wonder about me not leaving Kat at home all those years ago just to be alone. It feels repugnant to think that, but I cannot shake the image of my apartment cleaved, shrunk that much more with her in it.
Then I think of home. I haven’t seen the house since I left, but I remember the way it smelled, like pancake syrup and iron and dirt. I remember my mom gutting deer in the yard, tossing viscera and bringing in long cuts of meat to be frozen or sectioned for weekly meals. She and Dad would slice the meat and call for me to wipe the counters, and I dragged the blood in circles with my rag. It sunk into the wood grain and stained it, and the scent hung like a fog. I lay awake at night with a broken wrist or a bruised thigh and tried to breathe through my mouth because I could handle the blood taste better than the smell.
When I left, I felt chased. I packed without thinking and ran through the woods until I was far enough away to hitch a ride from someone who wouldn’t know my parents. I think my stomach hurt, and my leg; I remember a limp and hot tears. I left Kat in her bed, but I hadn’t seen bruises on her, and she was only a kid so I thought she was safe—I told myself that, let the thought bob and pulse until it drowned out any doubts. The night felt like a cloak, and I went to the city because it was the farthest place I could imagine.
Now, I look up at the thing in the road, and it walks closer to my car. Its gait is rough—the legs bend out, the knees like hinged joints on some machine, and the hooves seem very heavy. When the thing raises a hoof and stomps, the sound is a crack. I think of my hand moving to put the car in drive and my foot moving to the gas pedal, flooring it, but my body reacts sluggishly; I uncurl my fingers, stretch my legs. All the while Kat is gripping my arm, and her hands are like claws digging.
“Go!” she hisses. “Just go!”
I look into the thing’s face again, and the cockeye drags from the road to me. My headlights hit the eye just right, and I see the surrounding iris is red as blood. Then the thing opens its mouth and inside there are rows of teeth, jagged, cut. It howls. The noise starts off sharp, like a whippoorwill’s call, and moves deeper into the throat until it is a ragged hack—like an engine misfiring, a bone breaking, a child yelling in pain. I remember hearing Kat crying as a child behind closed doors and listening for glass shattering or the sound of a fist hitting a wall and hearing nothing, and thinking it must be okay—that maybe she was just feeling sad.
I put the car in drive and hit the gas before I realize I’m moving. The pedal grinds the floor and I press harder, picture it flattening. The thing is closer and I can see its scruff stained with blood and its eyes, so dark, the cockeye dancing in its socket. When the car makes contact, the thing yelps and there is a flurry of legs and antlers, hooves streaking; then a blot of blood on the windshield. Kat is holding onto me, and we both pitch forward and are caught by our seatbelts and the car’s velocity as we tear off. The car rides a bump and I hear a sickly crack, and we slide and then correct. I curve along the guardrail and hit the wipers, and the blood on the windshield smears. It is immense, a thick brush-stroke.
I think of all the deer my parents killed and the blood streaked on the grass. The deer’s middles ballooned after death and grew mottled with bruises from the gunshots. I think of my legs streaked with bruises and Kat’s black eye like a well, the socket puffed, the half-moon curve of blood against her nose.
I stop the car short and make a U-turn, back the way we came. Kat pitches into her seat and yelps. My stomach flips. I can feel my hands shaking on the wheel as I navigate back to the thing. As we get closer, I imagine the thing crawling on ruined legs, dragging itself into the trees, and I drive faster. My car wheels between lanes, and Kat holds her seatbelt with both hands. I keep thinking I see the thing coming, all rolling eyes and jagged teeth, but it is a branch swaying in the darkness or a gaggle of raccoons on the shoulder.
Soon, I see a form on the road. The thing is laid out on its back, legs stiff to the sides; the antlers are splintered and hooves are cracked. There are tread marks over one of the legs and a flattened center, and the trunk is bloated and blooming with red. Blood is pooled around the thing and spools through cracks in the road toward the woodland. I cannot see the thing’s face for the darkness, but I imagine the cockeye still spinning, the pupil a slit.
I floor it. Kat shrieks as we hit the thing again, and the car jerks roughshod over the body. I can hear metal scrape and something dragging. I want to reverse and roll over the body until it sandwiches against the road, but I don’t think my car can take it. Something feels tenuous, the engine’s rumble or the frame shifting, so I stop next to the thing and put the car in park. Kat rolls down her window and leans out.
“It’s dead for sure,” she says. “You wrecked it.”
I smell the killed animal scent, a sour note on top of blood’s heat, and try to breathe through it. It is just like at our parents’ place.
I put my arm around Kat’s shoulder, and we sit for a while. Eventually, I shut off the engine, and I can see moonlight spread and hear the lake’s roar beyond the roadway. The shiner on Kat’s eye is faded by darkness, an oil spill reduced to a gleam.