I stop the car. For the first time in over a hundred miles I dare to turn around. She's tiny in the big back seat, her bright hair streaming down around her face. I glance at the gun. "Can I have that?"
She nods. I reach out and take it, tucking it into my belt. It feels real, but with a weird gut-lurch of relief I realize the whole time it wasn’t even loaded. I remember how to breathe again.
"Good," I say. "Good girl. Just wait there, okay? I'll be right back."
She nods again. She's not crying. Not yet.
I take the keys and pee as fast as I possibly can. On the way back I pass a vending machine and grab a couple of sodas, one eye on her at all times. I can see her head bobbing the back seat. When I get back she's crying so hard she can hardly speak.
"You want a soda?"
She shakes her head, her long hair swaying.
"Cigarette?"
She nods. I open the back door wide for her, so that she can light up. She rummages in the holdall, tossing out a handful of shirts and a book (Madame Bovary) before she finds her pack of Luckys.
"I'm sorry," she says, when she can speak again. "I just...I couldn't take it any more."
"It's okay," I say, like I didn't spend the last hundred or so miles thinking of how I'd like to say goodbye to my friends and family, thinking of the sugar skull I'd never get to give Chuy for Dia de los Muertos. "I think I understand."
She swallows hard and stares back at me. "Do you? Really?"
"No. Maybe not."
"I'm sorry, Jimmy," she says.
"Jaime."
"Jaime?"
"It's my name."
She starts to cry again, thinking I was making some kind of point to needle her. I grab her hand. "No, please don't cry," I say. "I'm just saying. It's funny how these things matter at the strangest times. After everything I feel like you should know how to pronounce my name."
She sniffs hard. "You'll be pleased to know there's only one way to pronounce mine," she says, with a flicker of something almost like humor. "God, I'm so sorry I dragged you into this."
"De nada," I say, gazing up at the sky. It's dark now, dark the way the desert is dark - big skies spattered with a million billion stars. The rush of the traffic mingles with the roar of the ocean, but she's close enough for me to hear her throat work as she swallows.
"Well, it's not exactly nothing..." she says.
"I know, right? Would this be a good time to ask 'where the fuck are we?'"
She laughs and it's as startling and sweet as a birdcall in the middle of the night. "Not where we should be," she says.
"Where's that, exactly?"
"Another hundred miles or so," she says, scratching the nape of her neck. "I've got a place up the coast, up at Big Sur. I guess I just felt like I needed to go there."
"What about your Dad?"
"I'll call him. Smooth things over."
She spots my skeptical expression right away. "I will," she says. "Honestly. This is not gonna blow back on you, I swear."
"And you'll call your Dad?"
"Yep."
"Swear?"
Amber shakes her head. "I never swear. Not any more. I guess you'll just have to trust me."
Chapter Twelve
Amber
I haven't been back. Not since.
I don't know why I even wanted to go there. I don't know what I was expecting. Would the place be exactly as I left it? - the towels on the floor, the phone off the hook. Maybe it was some kind of sick desire to return to the place where my life fell apart - I don't know. It wouldn't be the first time, like when Dad brought me back from Vegas.
But when I switch on the light the room looks like it did the first time I ever saw it, right down to the striped rug and the wide adobe style fireplace that was such a novelty to me that I wanted to build fires every night, just so that I could watch the flames dance.
Jaime whistles. "Nice. Not what I was expecting."
"What were you expecting?"
"I don't know. When you said 'cabin' I suppose I expected something more...I don't know...Eighties slasher movie, I guess."
For a second I see nothing but red, but I laugh it off. "Nothing like that," I say. "But exercise caution should you find any books bound with human skin, if you know what I mean."
"Hell no. According to the rules we'd be first on the chopping block - the ethnic friend and the girl who takes her top off?" He pulls a face and draws a finger under his throat.
He catches me by surprise. I thought he'd never mention that again - too much of a gentleman. He's a good Catholic boy. He knows ballroom dancing, for heaven's sake. I feel the blood hot under the skin of my face and the old, nervous, hyperactive tug between my thighs. I'm still full of adrenaline, buzzed on the dipshit combination of fear and lust that used to make life so exciting. "You looked," I say.