The Colors in the Dark

Lena Pressesky

Inside smells of familiar mustiness: dust, sweetly rotting fruit, fearful sweat. When you turn the key in the ignition, the engine gurgles, coughs in greeting. You pat the dashboard, ready for the ride.

You weave along the freeway, your taillights making gently curving neon lines across the pavement. You look into the darkness, rain gracing you, and tonight, you feel blessed. It drizzles gently as your wipers make pendulous lines across your face. Once more, you are fifteen and in the back row of driver’s ed. Wild Bill points to blood-smeared asphalt on the screen and warns you of the dangers of rain.
“Remember—the road is at its slickest in the first fifteen minutes of precipitation.” But you are looking out the window, distracted by a bird in the parking lot, dreaming of the weeks to come when you will finally sit behind the wheel, content. So you will not remember hearing this until three years later, when a friend shatters his spine as his beautiful Corvette nose-dives into the road and crumples like paper. Tonight you remember this too, and your hands are on the wheel while your eyes skip across dashed yellow marks.

The needle rises to eighty-five but doesn’t stop. The road is so smooth beneath your tires that maybe you are gliding on air. An SUV commercial, one with the road. The insecurity of a sixteen-year-old behind the wheel is gone. In your very first driving lesson, you hit a dumpster as you pulled out of your apartment parking lot where Wild Bill picked you up. He said to you, “Get in.” And you do, awkward and gangly in the driver’s seat. Bill’s beard and hair, dulled white gold, tangle in the strap across his chest. The smothered cigarette smell rises from his grimy flannel and his little eyes are pink in their swollen sockets. You make sure that the very first thing you do is to buckle your seat belt. That much you remember, although everything else seems to slip your mind and your hands move without your brain. Bill turns up Steely Dan, feet sliding from hush puppies. You are in reverse and the gas pedal is too resistant at first, so that with more pressure you and Bill and this spectacular murderous scrap-metal machine hurl into that mighty fucking dumpster. “That’s okay,” Bill said. “You’re learning.”

Tonight is the perfect night for this drive, you think. It is nearing midnight, and the cars on the road have thinned, so that each one you pass is a precious landmark. You snap off the radio, so that inside it is silent except for the hum of the heater. Your limbs and joints prickle in the temperature, but with the press of a button the windows submerge and the outdoor air and flecks of mist join you in the warm inside of the car. You feel so good with the elements tickling your face that you close your eyes for a second or two. When you open them, nothing, mercifully, has changed. The lights still flicker by you like lightning bugs, your car still floats on a river of concrete, and you still want to go faster, faster! Down goes the pedal once again, and you think that nothing could be better than this.

Somebody flips you off. You see it only briefly as an angry flash of a face in your mirror. You might have cut him off, but you are speeding away with such gentleness that you hardly remember him anymore. The hot gash of his mouth fades after seconds and the burns from dull, pale eyes cool in their sockets. But still the intangible memory of his cursing head bothers you, because you recall your mother when you are sixteen and have gotten your first ticket. She has taken away your car privileges until your babysitting wages accumulate enough to pay that hulking, steaming pile of a ticket. And she is mad like that only briefly, because you drive too fast, and it is irresponsible. This is the first time you have felt so desperately needy, so that every time you are out with friends you offer to drive their cars—the two beers in your blood can hardly matter. But eventually the car is yours once again, and you can sleep easily.

You are pulled from the road’s spell by a furious rattling in your pocket, and your answer is still soaked in the edges of sleep. “Hello.”
“Where are you?” The voice on the other end is so distant you hardly remember who is it or where you are going, but you answer in a vaguely reassuring tone: You will be home soon, mother, save some turkey, you must hang up now, you forgot your hands-free headset so goodbye. Back to the road. The night is so thickly black that your headlights can only penetrate it for a couple feet. The black is like fog. Thick, wet, cool in your lungs like menthol. You wonder how many miles you have left, how many blessed dark hours before the sun shows its ruddy, blotchy face. You drive faster, though it is not home you are racing towards.

The lines in the road are jumping past one another so quickly now that you are getting dizzy. For a moment, you feel afraid at the whirling dust storm of yellow. But then you are eight-years-old and turning cartwheels so fast that you cannot see your mother when you stand up, only ten, fifteen, twenty skirted women who spin, hands on hips, in circles around you.
“M-Mommy!” You remember stuttering and giggling. But too suddenly you are ready for the spinning to stop but it won’t, it will not, so with hands on knees you spit up macaroni and cheese onto the grass.
“I told you not to make yourself dizzy!” And she wipes dribble from your chin and holds you steady as the backyard rights itself once again. In the car, there is no one there to right you, so you let the whirling take you somewhere else.

The scariest thing you have ever seen is Marcus Dawkins with part of a car door thrust through his ribcage. The sirens rouse you from sleep, and you pad barefoot down your darkened driveway, where your mother and father are already standing. You three are taking in the scene staged on the country road that passes by your house. You live in the boonies, where people hit deer far too frequently. You often pass a bloodied carcass on the way to school, the downy-white fur of an under-belly mashed elegantly with a pair of antlers and two eyes the shining brown of beer bottles. But this was different. You recognize the football stature of Marcus Dawkins, Marcus Dawkins who asked you to homecoming earlier that year. You went, bored. And tonight, in a drunken stupor, he hurtled too fast into the crunching wheels of a big-rig. Now he lies dead not twenty feet from your driveway, the glass of his open eyes flashing red and blue.

You need to stop; your tank is empty and you need to pee. So you exit, and pull into a brightly lit gas station. Its colors—red, yellow—brag in the night and make something itch in the very back of your mind. You park, and head inside for a bathroom. The man behind the counter eyes you for a moment, then returns his gaze to his magazine. But as you turn from him, you feel his eyes on your back, your ass. Inside the bathroom, the lights are too bright, and in the mirror, your eye sockets are hollowed and carved in your face like a jack-o-lantern. There is a vibrancy that seems to illuminate your pale skin from beneath, so that it looks like electricity runs through your veins instead of blood. You lean closer to the mirror and wipe the white powder from your nostril before tightening your pony tail. When you are finished, you feel so rejuvenated that you buy something from the man behind the counter. The bag of Cheetos lands in front of him, crunching in their plastic bag.
“A dollar ninety-nine.”
You give him two. The penny you drop in a plastic box labeled with a pencil-outline of a pink ribbon. The man looks at you again, frown-lines gracing his mouth. His eyes droop so elegantly at the corners and white sprouts from his ears with such energy that you want to draw him. You pull out another dollar and stuff it in the box. For the second time that night, you think of your mother. It was the tight line of the man’s mouth.

It was with your first boyfriend, Darren Simms, that you christened the back seat of your car. You are lying across the velvety interior with a seat buckle digging into your spine as Darren lowers himself from above you and places his mouth on yours. One of his hands traces up the plane of your stomach and beneath the wire of your bra. But he knows this is the night, he is eager, you undo his pants even though you are scared. You have seen his cock before, once. It was in the shower when you two soaped each other after the make-out session in the hot tub when his parents were at work. But now you are not so brave as when you were covered in foam, and you shudder before him and feel weak. He pushes within you and you grit your teeth. This is the worst pain you have ever felt, and a merciful sharp rap on the window distracts you from the chore. You cover yourself with a sweatshirt and you feel your skin shift over your bones like crawling ants as you find yourself staring into the official and mustachioed face of a police officer. He has also seen the Ziploc baggie of marijuana remnants lying carelessly on the front seat. When he brings you two back to your mother’s, he only mentions the weed. “I’m letting them off with a warning, but you should keep a better eye on your kid, lady.” And with a suggestive raise of a black brow he is gone. You pray that your mother does not pick up his sign. She doesn’t, only prays and sighs and turns teary-eyed to your father. That night you find the caked blood down your thighs.

Sirens blare past you. Their rage and urgency is too much. You want to cover your ears and scream so that their noise cannot bully you, but you keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the flickering yellow lines. You remember your friend and his beautiful Corvette, taken by the street on that first rain when the pavement was still slick with oil. They must have been graceful, turning over in the air, slow and deliberate, sharks spearing noiselessly through black ocean. Everybody cried for him. You were all eighteen and just out of high school. Now rain eases into drizzle, but you still pray, “Not me, not me.”

You always feel guilty when you worry your mother. She would stay up all night, knees hunched to her face as your father slept, rattling next to her. She doesn’t hear his snores, only waits for the rumble of an engine, the slam of a door, and your sneakered footsteps up the driveway. In her mind is everything she prays not to hear or see. Your voice, screaming. The face of a stranger, head floating above a uniformed body. Or worse yet, you disappearing into the night, kidnapped into the dark—alone and wanting only your mother. Now, you are twenty-four and your mother sleeps like a baby and never calls you past ten.

It could be your imagination, but the sky looks lighter. The night that once cloaked you so warm is lifting, the chill of early morning setting in your bones. You try to will the night back, but soon its inky comfort will be gone.

The center divide beckons you. You switch lanes so that you ride next to it, a companion humming by your side in the morning. You wonder what it would be like to inch a few feet closer, so that first it knocked off your mirror with a playful swat, then came for you. To hear the crunch of metal on concrete, the searing heat of friction, the jolt as you lose control and drift calmly back into traffic where you are slammed till you careen back into the concrete wall once again. If it would hurt, terribly, to be ripped through your center by shards of glass and strips of metal. Or if the pain would burn so that your soul would tear from you, rising and watching the smoking, twisted scrap-metal merge with a body that was once yours. Or perhaps you would feel nothing at all, wake up in a white room that smelled of the flowers placed at your head, your parents’ teary eyes swimming before you as a nurse injects something into your IV. The thought makes you sleepy and happy.

You twist the steering wheel so hard to the left that you barely have time to think of it. It is nothing like you imagined. The slow motion is incredible; you are the star of your very own action movie. With the first contact, your headlights scrape the concrete of the center divide and your front bumper follows shortly after, compressing like a Slinky and throwing your car in a spinning half-circle. Something comes from the side—you’re not sure which side, it could be both—and sucks the breath out of you so you feel like you will implode. Your neck snaps with such tremendous force that you fear your head will pop off and fly through the front wind shield. The crunching, scraping, screaming of the metal-on-glass-on-concrete-on-flesh turns your skin to goose bumps and you try to cover your ears but your hands are wound around the steering wheel, skin peeling over knuckles. Now is when you want the spinning to stop. Now is when you desperately need to throw up. Now, now, now. You silently scream to God to please, please throw your body through the windshield so that you can lie in the still morning air with your face in the grass so you can gulp deep, deep breaths of earth. But you are belted so tightly in, you smart one, that nothing can toss you from the hardened upholstery of the driver’s seat, and you must watch in resigned exhaustion as the road spins to black beneath your balding tires. You still feel thirsty, and you want to take a breath that fills you and fills you and fills you.