Elena can’t stop thinking about the girl in her seat, how her head snapped when the car flipped over while her boyfriend got barely hurt at all. Elena can’t remember the words that she read in the Stillwater local newspaper, whether cut off, or severed, so she thinks of terms that she knows in Italian: decapitata, ghigliottinata, the girl’s neck merely hanging from a thin strip of skin. She even thinks about it at night, when Dave comes by in his big pickup truck. Dave honks and she runs out immediately, so he doesn’t have to wait.
Dave has been teaching her how to drive and he takes her to the dirt roads between Stillwater and Perkins—the backroads, as he calls them, a new word for Elena. That’s where the accident happened. Dave told her that she shouldn’t be scared of those dark paths with no lamplights: there is only the black sky and the quiet fields, maybe a raccoon or a deer slithering through the tall grass.
When Dave asked her why she doesn’t drive, she avoided telling him about her dad, and she just said that she was scared of people.
“What do you mean?” he asked, and then, reaching for the steering wheel, he snapped, “eyes on the road,” with a taste of anger and frustration and spit between his teeth. Elena had gotten distracted—she had seen an armadillo running on the side of the road.
Sometimes Dave reminds her of her father. The way they both growled, their voice breaking off in the pit of their stomach or maybe somewhere at the very end of their throat, their hands grabbing her wrists to push her away from the steering wheel.
“People,” Elena said, in her nervous English. “I’m scared of people. Not the car,” and she let the tip of her fingers slide on the soft plastic of the wheel as it spun under her palm at every turn.
She actually likes driving, especially at night—the quietness, the words that seem to come out of her better when she doesn’t have to look Dave in the eyes.
“I’m scared of what people can do,” she said. The armadillo eventually dissolved among the tall grass in a deserted field.
A new article comes up the day after the accident and reveals the name of the girl. Then the name of the boyfriend, and then all the ugliness. The gossip and theories about their fights. The screen of the girl’s phone had been broken for months. The boyfriend had apparently tossed it against the wall during one of their arguments. The article covers the frustration of the classmates, friends, sorority sisters of the girl. Social media overflows with anthems against domestic violence. At parties, he drank too much, yelled shut the fuck up, bitch, in front of everyone, and he pressed his open hand on her mouth.
He is still in the hospital, but he is going to be fine—a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder.
The girl’s funeral will take place on Thursday, at the Catholic Church just outside Stillwater. Elena would like to go, but the church is miles away from her apartment, and she would have to ask Dave to drive her. She decides against it.
“Do you wanna see something morbid?” Dave asks her the next day, when they go back to driving. Morbid, Elena has learned, doesn’t mean morbido, soft, but sinister, gloomy, and Elena knows that the only right answer is yes. She doesn’t want to irritate Dave as he drives; she doesn’t have the energy. She feels her temples weighing on her eyes, shrinking on her forehead, and something throbs behind her head like an infected nerve. She left Italy and her father to avoid feeling like this, but she never learned how to drive, and now she has to.
Dave gives her another couple of directions in a firm voice, then says, “Here it is.” Elena slows down, follows the trajectory of his finger as he points at something outside the window. A bumper on the side of the rough road is nestled in a deep smear of red dirt. Elena immediately knows.
“They just left it there after the accident,” Dave says. Elena stops. The bumper is embedded in the soil like a fossil.
There are no flowers.
“Spooky, uh?” Dave comments, then uses his firm voice again. “Keep going,” he says, and Elena starts the car, her gaze still glued on the bumper.
“Eyes on the road,” Dave repeats, and reaches out to the steering wheel quickly. Elena bounces back, her head pressed against the seat. He glances at her, his hand midair. “You scared of me?”
Elena doesn’t answer and just stares at Dave’s hand, his fingers reaching for the wheel. She looks at him too long for him not to notice. Dave repeats, this time almost in a snarl, “Eyes on the road, bitch,” and even though the insults that her father yelled at her – cretina, deficiente, ritardata – were completely different than this word, so short, so new, one syllable, bitch, Dave’s tone is the same. Elena stares at the road, tightening her fingers around the steering wheel so hard that she can feel the skin on her knuckles sap, as if slowly tearing, exhausted.
Dave finally lowers his hand and Elena keeps driving in silence, and she tries to think about something else, maybe the exact English words from the article, but she can only remember the Italian ones, the usual: decapitata, ghigliottinata. She thinks of the sorority sisters who say that the boyfriend did it, that something went wrong, that he drank all the time when he drove and when he and the girl fought at parties he crumpled the beer cans one inch away from her face to freak her out. Elena thinks of the boyfriend looking at the girl and smiling, the aluminum folding between his fingers. Not folding, she corrects herself. Snapping.
When Dave drives, he never crumples his beer can. He chugs it, face up, one finger on the steering wheel, then he tosses it from the window, the last few drops spraying in the wind like blood. Even now he’s drinking and looking out of the window in silence, waiting for her to say something.
Elena doesn’t want to feel scared. She wants to feel strong and independent like every woman who left her family and country should feel, a woman who moved to a foreign country all by herself, trying to understand words she has never heard before, in-between gestures and tones that sometimes sound too familiar.
“I’m not scared of you,” Elena says, trying her best to hold on to the steering wheel and not make her voice shake. “I’m just on edge when I drive.”
Dave shakes his head and tosses his beer can from the window. “You’ll have to face the road at some point,” he replies in his usual snarl.
Elena nods, but she keeps thinking of the girl crashing in that dirt road in the middle of nowhere. All the hours that passed before someone found her and her boyfriend. The blood dripping on the metal, the seats, the flies and the buzzards and the crows flying in circles.
“I’m sorry,” Elena says, not sure whether it’s for Dave, or for the girl.
Dave seems to soften up for a second. He holds out his hand, puts it on her thigh. “It’s fine. You’re getting better, love.”
Despite everything, Elena likes when Dave touches her, calls her love. It’s a great word. A verb and a noun. No one has ever called her that before.
A few days later, Dave gets bored. On the phone, he says, “Let’s go on the actual road today,” but Elena can only think about the accident; she reads everything about it, looks at the social media profiles of the girl’s sorority sisters, all the campaigns against toxic relationships, emotional abuse, domestic violence. Something behind her head keeps throbbing. “I can’t,” she says.
“Pussy,” he replies. “You can’t get your ass carried around forever.”
Elena has lost all the energy to retort. She knows that anything she says will be wrong.
So she gets up from the couch and goes to the Walgreens next door. She buys a small bouquet of white flowers for nine dollars and starts walking toward the backroads. She reads the label: white zinnia. A new word.
She walks for at least two hours. Dave doesn’t call her back.
*
When Elena finds the bumper, still nestled in the dirt, she feels stupid. It’s surrounded by flowers, beautiful roses and jasmine and thimbleweed, and some candles and cards with smudged ink. Elena feels like she should be crying, but she can’t. She imagines that, a second before the impact, the girl was talking or maybe laughing or probably, like people said, fighting. Even though Elena can’t drive, she knows that it must be unlikely to have such a bad accident on a flat, deserted dirt road. Something must have happened.
She thinks of Dave tossing the beer cans; she thinks of how she jumps in her seat whenever he reaches out; she thinks of the way her dad pulled her hair against the seat and screamed, la frizione, non il freno, idiota; she thinks of taking her bouquet back home instead of leaving it here, a few lifeless ordinary flowers among the beautiful, more appropriate ones.
Instead, she calls Dave on the phone. “What,” he says.
When he picks up, Elena immediately knows that he’s drinking, sitting on the stool at the bar where he takes shelter when he needs to get away from her.
Elena knows that she must find a foothold, a reason to end it. Some evidence that maybe she’s right for being scared.
She tells him that she received a bouquet of white flowers in the mail. A card: per Elena.
“It means for Elena in Italian,” she lies. She tells him that she has no idea who might have sent them.
He is quiet for a second.
Elena waits.
“Yeah, it was me, love. I sent them,” he says. “I’m sorry for today. I love you.”
Elena hangs up and places the flowers on the bumper. She is careful to hide the ones that look already dull and wrinkled behind the most radiant.
