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The whole thing had probably only taken thirty seconds, but I felt like I’d just run a marathon.
“What happened?” Russell asked, sounding as shaken as I felt. “What—was that?”
“I think—it was the tire,” I said slowly. That sound, the gunshot sound—I knew it. I’d heard it once before. And just like that, a memory was nudging at the corners of my mind, one I hadn’t let myself replay in a long time.
I had been seven. Gillian had been in Ashland, Oregon, for the summer, understudying in the Shakespeare festival. My dad had taken me up for the weekend, after I’d begged. That was when I still wanted to see her whenever I could; when I was still so sure that if I did everything right, and said everything right, she’d change her mind and come back to California, and me. I no longer believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the tooth fairy—I was going into second grade, after all—but at that moment in time, I still believed in my mother.
I was in the front seat, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to be, but she didn’t have a booster seat, or seem to know about them, so I was feeling grown-up and maybe only a little bit scared as we drove to get lunch together.
She’d been reciting Masha’s monologue from Three Sisters—she told me how you always have to be ready to go on; you never know what’s going to happen—when a sound like a shot had echoed through the car. I’d screamed, but Gillian hadn’t been scared, I remembered that—at the most, she was a little annoyed as she pulled off to the shoulder. She got out to investigate, and I scrambled out after her.
“It’s a flat,” she’d announced, twisting her hair up into a knot on top of her head and pulling the end through so it stayed.
“So we—call a tow truck?” My only experience with flat tires at that point had been seeing them happen in movies or TV shows.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Of course we don’t. We change it ourselves.”
“You know how to do that?”
“Your grandfather ran a garage. He taught me everything.” She frowned, her face falling slightly. “You knew that, right?”
Before I could answer, she was walking around to the trunk.
“I’ll show you. Everyone should know how to change a tire.”
And she’d done it. In what seemed like only a few minutes, she’d removed the hubcap, loosened the lug nuts, jacked up the car, and put the spare on.
And when it was finished and we were back in the car, she looked across at me and held her hand up for a high five.
Over the whole drive back to the theater—we didn’t have time for a sit-down lunch, so we just got McDonald’s drive-thru—I played it out in my mind. How everything would be different now. Oregon was pretty close to California, after all, and I was sure I’d see her more. I didn’t know that a month later she’d move to London and I wouldn’t see her for two years. In that moment—in the car, with my mother, a bag of warm fries between us and a mission completed together—everything had been perfect.
“The tire?” Russell echoed. I focused back on him, reminding myself where we were. I wasn’t in Oregon with my mother. I was in California with Russell, and we needed to figure this out.
“I think so.”
Russell located the hazards, turned them on, and we both got out. The second we did, I was hit with a wave of heat and the rush of the wind from the cars speeding by on the freeway, dust flying up in their wake. I crossed around the hood of the car to see that I’d been right—the tire was blown out, the car already listing to one side. “I’m so sorry,” I said, my throat tight. Wylie had made it clear just how precious this car was to him—and I’d still managed to run over a rock, or whatever it had been, and damage it.
“It’s not your fault,” Russell said immediately.
“I can’t believe this.” I’d just wrecked Wylie Sanders’s beloved car, the one he hadn’t wanted us to take in the first place. Even though I was surrounded by more horizon than I had ever seen, it was like I could feel walls starting to press in on me.
We had a flat tire on the side of the highway in the middle of the desert. Not only did this strongly resemble the premise of one of Didi’s horror movies—it also meant the very thin buffer of time we had to get home before my dad was going to disappear.
Just like that, it was playing out in my mind—my dad would come back to an empty house. It wouldn’t take him long to realize I still hadn’t returned from Silverspun—which meant he would realize I’d been lying to him for multiple days now. He was going to be furious. And worse than that, he was going to be disappointed in me. And then I was going to leave. Were we going to have to say goodbye like that—in the midst of a fight? The thought made my stomach hurt.
“It’s fixable, though, right?” Russell asked. He knelt down to look at it. “People get these things fixed.”
“I’m so screwed,” I said, my voice hollow. “My dad—when he gets back ahead of me…”
“It’s okay,” Russell said, already pulling out his phone. “I’ll call AAA. My dad made me get it after I was in that accident.”
“Do you even have service?” I could hear my voice going high and panicky. Reception had been patchy the whole drive—when Russell had been driving, I’d sometimes look down at my phone and see no bars at all.
“I do,” he said, and I felt myself breathe a little bit easier. “Let me just try to find my card.”
I nodded, and Russell went back to the Bronco. Not even sure why I was doing it, I crossed around to the back of the car. I lifted out the tent and my duffel and raised up the fabric panel. And there it was—a spare tire. And inside it, a jack and lug wrench.
“Darcy?” I looked around and saw Russell holding his phone. “I got my card. And it looks like there’s a 76 station a few miles from here, and they have a garage. So I’ll call AAA, and they can tow us there. We’re kind of in the middle of nowhere, so it might take them a while to get to us, but I think it’s the best we’re going to do.”
