The Blue Light Between Beds

By the time they crossed into South Carolina, the radio had found a country station and held it just long enough to be annoying.

Emmett kept it low. Fiddle, steel guitar, a man singing about a woman and a county line and something he regretted too late. Nora let it go for twenty miles because the day was cold and the heater had finally decided to work and there were stretches of road where the music sat in the cab like another piece of weather. Not good. Not bad. Just there.

Then a voice came through in the middle of a song—deep, easy, too confident in the space it took up—and something in her went hard.

She reached over and shut the radio off.

The truck went quiet except for the engine and the tires.

Emmett glanced at her, then back at the road. “Signal was getting spotty anyway.”

She kept her eyes on the windshield. “I don’t like noise.”

The words were out before she could fix them.

The cab changed.

Not dramatically. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t go stiff. He only adjusted his cap with two fingers and nodded once like she’d said something useful about the weather. But after that he stopped talking. Completely.

They drove an hour in the kind of silence that has edges.

Nora watched pine woods slide by and old farmhouses sunk back from the road and a church sign that said PRAISE THROUGH THE STORM. Her thumb pressed into the center of her palm. She had meant the radio. Glenn’s television. Glenn’s voice filling rooms because a quiet room might let a person think. She had not meant him.

But she had, a little. That was the trouble.

At a stoplight outside a town too small to have a name she caught, Emmett leaned down one-armed and reached under the seat.

“There’s a tape somewhere,” he said. His voice was careful now. “Just guitar. No singing.”

He came back up holding a cassette in a cracked plastic case with no label. He slid it into the deck. After a hiss and a click, the cab filled with fingerpicked guitar. Nothing fancy. No studio shine. Just strings and wood and a pair of hands somewhere taking their time.

Nora looked at the windshield crack, the branching line on her side catching the flat afternoon light.

“That’s fine,” she said.

Emmett nodded. “Yeah.”

They drove on.

The road narrowed, then widened again. They passed pecan trees with bare dark limbs and a feed store with rusted implements lined up in front like things waiting for a second use. The guitar went on quietly. Without words in it, the cab felt larger. Or maybe only less crowded.

Around midafternoon they came around a bend and saw the Buick in the ditch.

It sat nose-down in a drainage channel, one wheel spinning uselessly in muddy water. An older woman in a church coat stood beside it with both hands wrapped around her purse. Her white hair had gone loose in the wind.

Emmett was already braking.

He pulled onto the shoulder and was out of the truck before the engine had settled. Nora got out a second later, the cold hitting her face clean and hard.

“You alright, ma’am?” Emmett called as he crossed the ditch.

The woman nodded too fast. “I’m fine. I’m fine. Dog ran out. I just—” She looked at the car as if it had done this by itself.

Nora went to the truck bed. There was a tow chain under the blue tarp, heavy and cold. By the time Emmett looked back, she had it in both hands and was coming toward him.

He took one end without comment.

They worked without needing much said. Emmett crouched in the ditch and found a place on the Buick’s frame. Nora fed chain through with her sleeves shoved back and mud wetting the knees of her jeans. Then she got into the Buick, put it in neutral, and put both hands on the wheel while Emmett climbed back into the truck.

The chain tightened. The Buick lifted with a sucking groan and came up out of the ditch in one hard pull.

When it was done, they checked the tire, the axle, the scraped fender. Nothing serious.

The woman opened her purse and took out a folded twenty.

“Oh no,” Emmett said. “You keep that.”

“So do I,” Nora said.

The woman looked from one of them to the other, then tucked the bill away. “Good people,” she said, like a fact she hadn’t expected to encounter today.

They watched her drive off. The ditch water settled. Wind moved through the pines.

Emmett coiled the chain, his hands quick and practiced. Nora stood beside the truck and watched the rope-burn scars across his knuckles move as he worked. He looked up once and caught her looking. She looked at the road.

Back in the cab, the air between them was different. Not warm exactly. But used. Like a room after furniture had been moved and set down somewhere better.

Without asking, Nora reached for the tape deck and restarted the guitar.

Emmett started the truck.

“Appreciate the assist,” he said.

She looked out the side window. “You had it.”

“Still.”

She gave one shoulder. Nothing more.

Rain found them again an hour later. First as spit on the windshield, then a steady gray sheet. Emmett slowed. The wipers knocked time back and forth. The heater ran full on now, making the cab smell faintly metallic and old.

Nora had slept badly the night before and the road in rain had a way of pulling the eyes down. She sat with her jacket folded in her lap and watched the same stand of pines blur into the next until the blur became one long thing. The guitar moved under it, steady as hands at work.

Her head dipped once.

She straightened.

A few miles later it happened again.

When she woke, the truck was still moving and the rain had thinned to a mist. A canvas jacket lay over her from shoulder to knees. Not hers. Too heavy. Too long in the sleeves.

She sat up fully.

Emmett kept his eyes on the road. “You were freezing.”

She looked down at the jacket, then at the windshield, then at the side of his face.

The right thing to do would have been to hand it back at once. Make clean lines of things. Keep each item with its owner. Instead she left it where it was and watched a billboard go by advertising fireworks and pecans.

They drove another half hour before he pulled into a gas station.

While he pumped gas, she folded the jacket carefully and set it on the seat beside him. Not dumped. Not dropped. Folded.

He got back in, looked at it, and put it behind the seat.

No one thanked anyone.

By dusk they found a motel outside Vidalia. One story. Brick painted a color that might once have been white. A neon sign with three dead letters. The room had two beds with polyester spreads and a radiator under the window that clanged like somebody knocking once every few minutes to see if you were still in there.

They did what they’d done the night before. Boots off. Bags down. Bathroom one at a time. No discussion of the arrangement because the arrangement was already there, like weather.

Emmett came back from the vending machine with two packets of peanuts and a Coke.

“That all they had?”

“That and peanut M&M’s older than the Constitution.”

She took the peanuts he held out.

They ate sitting on separate beds while the radiator knocked and the television in the next room murmured through the wall. Emmett talked a little—about a marina outside Beaufort where pelicans stole bait off cutting boards, about a bait shop owner who kept minnows in his bathtub one whole summer because the freezer died. Nora listened with the packet crackling in her hands. The stories were good. She still didn’t laugh, but she stopped pretending she wasn’t hearing them.

At one point he said, “My nephew Caleb used to like pelicans. Said they looked prehistoric. Which I guess they do.”

He said the name and then looked at the peanuts in his hand as if he’d found something there worth study.

Nora waited.

He cleared his throat. “Anyway.”

That was all.

Later, with the lights off and the blue motel sign leaking through the curtain, Nora lay on top of the blanket in her T-shirt and jeans and listened to the room settle around them. The radiator stopped. A car door shut outside. Water moved in the pipes somewhere in the wall.

She woke in the middle of the night to the wrong kind of quiet.

The room was blue.

Emmett was sitting on the edge of his bed in his undershirt, facing the wall. His hands were on his knees. His cap sat on the nightstand beside him. Without it, his hair was flattened on one side and standing up on the other. He looked older. Smaller somehow. Not physically smaller. More like the day had gone out of him and taken some shape with it.

He wasn’t doing anything.

He was just sitting there the way you sit in a waiting room when you know no one is coming to call your name.

Nora lay still and watched him through half-closed eyes. His shoulders were rounded in. The blue light from the sign caught at the gray in his hair and at the scar on one of his hands. He sat like that long enough for the room to change around him.

Then he lay back down and pulled the blanket up.

In the morning he was loud again.

He came back from the motel office with two muffins in plastic wrappers and made a face at the coffee after one sip. “Tastes like somebody described coffee to a machine and the machine got nervous.”

Nora took the cup anyway.

He ate both muffins, hummed under his breath while he packed, and talked about the weather clearing. She watched him tie his boots and did not mention the night. Neither did he.

Back in the truck, she noticed the bag before she understood she was noticing it.

Her duffel was no longer centered between them. She had put it there by habit, by principle, by the need to have something in the gap. Now it sat against her door, leaving an open stretch of cracked vinyl between them wide enough for the console and his hand when it rested there loose beside the shifter.

She looked at the space and then at the road.

Emmett drove south.

An hour later they stopped at a grocery store in a town whose main street had one stoplight and a post office with a bench outside. They needed bread and water and something that wasn’t peanuts.

Inside, they separated without discussion. Nora moved through the store with a basket over one arm. Bread. Peanut butter. Apples. A small jar of instant coffee because motel coffee was becoming an insult.

She turned down the health aisle looking for soap and found herself in front of a wire rack of hand cream and work gloves.

She stood there.

His hands had been on the steering wheel all morning, cracked at the knuckles, skin split in the lines of the palms, old rope burns white against weathered skin. She had seen them on the tow chain. On the lug wrench. On the peanuts. She picked up a green tube of working hands cream, read nothing on the label, and set it back.

She walked away.

At the end of the next aisle she stopped, turned back, and took it again. This time she put it in the basket between the bread and the apples and did not look at it after that.

At the register she paid cash. Back at the truck, she put the groceries behind the seat and slipped the tube into the glove compartment under a road map and a handful of napkins. Then she shut it and got in.

Emmett came out carrying his own small bag.

He started the truck, drove them onto the highway, and did not open the glove compartment until noon, when he reached for a napkin at a stoplight.

His hand found the tube.

He took it out. Looked at it. Looked at the road ahead.

Nora watched the side mirror.

He set the tube in the console between them and closed the glove compartment.

No thank you. No who bought this. No performance of not knowing.

When they stopped again for gas, she reached into the grocery bag for an apple and found another bag inside it.

Small red apples. The same kind she had bought.

She held them a second. Then she put them back with the rest.

They drove on with the cream in the console and the apples behind the seat and the guitar tape low in the cab, the road unspooling south under a sky finally clearing at the edges.

By late afternoon the sun broke through in strips. Wet fields flashed silver. The light came low through the windshield and turned the crack on her side into a pale branching river.

Emmett tapped the wheel once in time with the guitar and said, “South Carolina’s almost done with us.”

Nora looked at the line of light on the dash. “Good.”

He glanced at her.

After a beat she added, “About time.”

His mouth moved at one corner. Not the full easy smile. Something smaller. Less practiced.

The truck kept going.