Fiction by Carrie Close
David had bought a forest-green 1997 Volkswagen Golf off Craigslist. Marnie found it hideous, but David thought it was a gem. He wanted to teach Marnie how to drive it, but she was terrified. She didn’t know how to drive a regular car, let alone a stick shift.
“It’s so easy, Marnie. You’ll see,” David tried to reason with her.
“I told you already, I don’t want to.”
“What if you and the baby need to go somewhere while I’m at work? You’ll have to learn how to drive eventually.”
Marnie touched her belly—at 3 months she wasn’t yet starting to show. “Well, eventually isn’t right now.”
—
The car had a funny smell. After more than an hour at a time of being cooped up inside it with all the windows rolled up, she would start to feel light-headed.
She tried rolling her window up and down to air it out, but this only irritated David.
“Marnie, please. We’re on the highway. You’re getting dust in the car.”
“I can’t breathe,” she moaned.
“Do you want to stop for a minute to get some air?”
“No. We just stopped. I want to get where we’re going already.”
“Then please stop playing with the window.”
Marnie sighed and rolled it up.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw David’s fingers hover over the window lock button, but he didn’t press it.
Marnie had pitched a fit the last—and only—time David had locked the windows on her. They had been on a particularly long stretch through Kentucky. Marnie couldn’t sleep in the car and kept badgering him to stop, but he’d insisted on driving “just a little bit longer.” So she started rolling the window up and down to annoy him. When he locked it on her, she had a real temper tantrum meltdown—the kind you would expect to see from a two-year-old, not an almost 17-year-old. It was how she and her mother communicated with one another—in vicious, blood-curdling screams. She had never talked to David that way before.
He had been different with her since that day, more careful. She worried that she had ruined it, made him realize this was all a big mistake. He should have driven her straight to the clinic and had their little parasite sucked clean out.
That’s what Marnie called it sometimes, when she was angry with David, even though she was the one who had insisted on keeping it. She would rub her belly and whisper so only she could hear, “How’s my little parasite doing in there?”
She had been afraid, at first, that he was going to turn around and bring her back to the trailer she used to live in with her mother.
She had apologized profusely, blamed the stress and the hormones. He said it was fine, that he understood, but he hadn’t touched her the same way since. If he rested a hand on her knee while they were driving in the car, it was tentative, too gentle, as though he wasn’t letting its full weight rest on her—just floating it there, ready to snatch it back if she erupted again.
—
They were driving through West Texas now. There was nothing but desert for hundreds of miles. Marnie was beginning to wonder if they would ever make it out of the wasteland alive.
Maybe that had been David’s plan all along. Drive her out to the middle of nowhere and dump her body where no one would ever find it. Start his new life fresh, without any baggage from the old one dragging him down. The more Marnie thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. David could never have stayed in Ohio. Someone would have found them out eventually—with or without the baby—and she was too much of a liability to be left behind.
David squeezed her knee.
She turned her head to look at him, and he flashed her a wide smile, the way he used to, before everything got so complicated. He’d started growing a beard since they’d been on the road. He had more silver hairs than was usual for a man his age, and they glinted in the bright Texas sun.
Marnie’s belly did a little flip.
“You know I love you, don’t you, Marnie?” David asked.
