Marie sat in the back. She sat in the front, leaning so close to the window that her seatbelt grasped at her throat and left faint herringbone impressions. Rain trembled and slid across her window. Light stung at her eyelids, drove into her tender open eyes, and still she watched the sun burn the clouds into fiery translucence. Grass. She liked grass from a speeding window. She saw summer fields of it like fur trimmed close. She dreamed of lying tranquil and leisurely in the hollows, not always alone. When the grass browned, she felt it under her bare feet, crunching and poking the way dead grass did. Marie was brought up on bowers and faery circles and she always wanted her own. Her daydreams were warm languor -- trailing flowers, garlands heated by the sun, a horse's skin beneath her knees, twitching to frighten off flies.
She rode chestnuts and bays, even a palomino once, but she loved grey horses best. On Thursday evenings her mother drove her out to the stable where she took lessons and on the way they passed a grand farm with acres and acres of white sloping fences. All the horses at the farm were pale grey. Through the passenger window, Marie watched them run in the twilight. She developed a new game for the dream machine -- riding one of those horses the color of faded snow, warm air parting around their bodies as they galloped alongside the car.
During the winter that she turned thirteen, the fantasy changed. Someone else rode the light grey stallion; someone who loped easily beside the car, always following her. She never saw his face. Yet she imagined him constantly: fierce and beautiful and intent on reaching her. The air outside the car got colder and she let it stay that way in her mind. It was just the kind of little discomfort that seekers and lovers should bear.
She began to dream of Alaska, and she never asked for her own car, not even when Ginnie got one on her fifteenth birthday and offered to have her brother teach Marie once she got her permit. Instead, she pinned postcards carefully to her wall and draped strings of beads and silk flowers from tack to tack.
Marie learned to drive. Slowly and jerkily and absentmindedly, not at all the way she'd learned to ride. She looked occasionally into her passenger-side mirror and imagined the approaching chest of a horse. She saw muscles bunched under grey-haired hide, steam pushed from the flared dry-velvet nostrils, legs wrapped around the barrel of ribs. Dreams chased her down back roads. When she stopped and turned off the car and got out to lock it, she looked around and found herself disappointed, though she never knew why.
Eventually, even when she sat in the passenger's seat, she just forgot to look.
II. -- After high school, before college She sat with David in the hospital for an hour or two before she left, staring at his hands, which were limp and looked like sallow plastic. She studied the tracery of blue-green veins on the back of his right hand, around where the IV poked into his thin skin. No one noticed her in the room. He was not expected to wake, though he did, the day after she disappeared. It was in all the papers, even in Kentucky. Modern-Day Sleeping Beauty! Miracle boy wakes from coma caused by mutant girlfriend. Full recovery expected -- overjoyed mother ascribes awakening to "the healing power of God."
God, Marie thought, cared shit about her troubles, or David's. She hadn't packed her gold cross on its little filigreed chain, and she didn't pray for David. Instead, she asked him if it had hurt. He laughed. Yeah, he said, but it was pretty damn close to worth it. She knew that he was lying. It would never be close enough.
David liked to pretend to be tough and knowledgeable, he had the voice of a cultivated rustic and he used it to great advantage. And when are you gonna do that? Yes, she knew what about him had been cultivated, now. She knew how he had nurtured parts of himself and shuttered other fragments away from the sun. James Dean with a slow drawl, he thought, when he smiled into the mirror. A rebel who still plays for the team. He liked sports metaphors. She'd known that already.
But so much she didn't know. So much fact and feeling that had twitched and poured through her every day for the last two weeks.
Pretty, he thought when he looked at her. Sometimes he thought, coquette, and the word was drawn out even in his mind. He liked her hair, the pure rich brown of it, like spread spun earth. He liked the exaggerated, kittenish bow of her bitten lips. To him she was blushes in English class, a flirtation in the lunch line. When he drove her home after school, she was the girl in road movies with her legs stretched long and bare and her feet stuck out the window, free. Once he'd had a dream about shooting naked pictures of her and he'd set it on a beach, though neither of them had ever seen the sea. Small-town exotic, that was Marie. And he could be exactly what she wanted. When she left, she touched the pink blanket over his knee very lightly, and heard his response, and smiled.
On the truck that took her from Meridian, the passenger-side mirror was round. She watched her white face, isolated in the circle like a girl in an old cameo. Ready to be taken away and hung around someone else's neck -- a trophy. A milk-carton prize with no reward posted. She had no context; there was nothing in the mirror but her face.
Farther into Kentucky, they drove by farms of saddlebreds, and David smirked a few thoughts about high-tempered fillies. When that leg of her journey stopped, not much farther north, she thought about stealing a grey horse, but didn't. She went to Canada.
III. -- Rabbit They've stopped. Logan is doing something noisy in the camper and she's got her door open, just staring down at the snow.
They didn't get much snow in Meridian. Winter storms dripped ice down the limbs of the trees lining her back yard, thickening them until they snapped and fell, knobby dark-centered glass wands littering the frozen lawn. Since she's been up North she's watched the iced branches fall, leaving impressions in the snow as if each stick is digging its own little grave. Bones in the snow, or at least places for them.
This snow barely gets dirty. Slush she's seen before, ugly brown-gray stuff, slick and splattery. In this snow there are only the sticks and pieces of bark and the truck's lonely trail of oil. Animal tracks, which are clean and fairly precise until the snow gets really deep. They saw a bloody sprayed smear in the snow at a rest stop a month or so ago, and Logan nudged her gently and said, "Rabbit." He'd barely looked at it.
"How'd you know that?" she asked him.
"Smell," he said. Then he had turned back to the truck. There was snow in his hair, fading the tufts of black to a mottled grey.
He comes around her side of the truck now and there's snow in his hair again and some grease smudged high on his cheekbone. She doesn't reach out to wipe it off. "Tryin' to preserve yourself for spring?"
"Some of us do age," she reminds him lightly. "Nah, just watchin' the snow."
"Did it move?" He's in a good mood, smiling at her a little between the thatch of his sideburns.
"You never know," she says, full of dignity. Logan likes dignity on her; dignity, and dark red lipstick. She likes snow on him.
"Well, shut the door, 'cause we're good to go, okay?"
One of his military phrases, which he drops into speech every once and while as if he doesn't know their origin, and he probably doesn't, anymore. If he did remember, he'd never say them. She swings her numbed legs back inside, and shuts the door.
They're going to a bar in northwest New York that Logan's been to before, where he "did okay," as he tells her. She knows what he means. A week ago they were in the back woods of the Upper Peninsula and she sat at the bar nursing a bad whiskey while he fought. The place was big and warm, floored with finely chopped straw rather than sawdust. Her gloved fingers brushed it from Logan's hair afterwards as they sat at the bar together and ignored the way the bar's customers skittered wide around them.
When a fist hits flesh, it makes a slapping sound, not at all like the explosive noises in the movies -- unless it's Logan's fist, and he's hitting someone else. In the first bars, the first fights, she watched him so hard that she could feel the glow in her eyes. He's always teaching her things. She's learned how to drive in snow -- he showed her how to keep her hands gentle but firm on the wheel, as if her fingers were wrapped around reins and the slightest violence would scare her horse. Logan knows how to ride. She trusts his hands everywhere.
Relaxing back against the seat, she tucks her feet beneath it and turns to smile at Logan as he slams the door shut. "Hi," she says. Their look is knowing. She knows what she's doing to him, and he knows that she knows him -- all from one brush of mouthes.
"Hi, yourself," he responds in a half-growl, and the truck sputters into life. They drive for a while in silence. She pulls her bag of carrots out of the dashboard; Logan's radio was stolen years ago and he stores food in the hole, among the dusty wires. When she got in the truck in Laughlin City, he had beef jerky, salty and tough and smelling a little of gasoline and it tasted so good. He buys her vegetables, now, though he mutters about "rabbit food." In the last grocery store, she countered, "Horse food," and finally, "Big manly stallion food," until he started to grin and stalked off fast toward the register to hide it. At thirteen, she forgot to dream of a sense of humor, but Logan managed to find one anyway.
It's getting dark. She eats two carrots and is nibbling a third when she sees the sign, grey in the twilight and long as a sleeping man. "Logan, look," she says. "There's a place right up ahead." The sign is hand-lettered in dark green paint and says: TRUCK STOP EXIT 42 and FOOD FUEL SHOWER TV, the last bit squeezed on and kind of pitiful. Their kind of place: a warm rest between the snows, dingy and cheap and wonderful.
He looks over at her. "You wanna stop there?"
She cocks her head at him and watches his eyes trace the angle of her neck. "Yeah," she says slowly, consideringly. "Let's stop." And she ducks her head on a smile as the trailer moves eagerly into the exit lane, like a horse being guided home.
~fin