Page 88 of Run Rabbit Run

Grady drives.

Ezra sits beside me in the back with his hand loose over mine on the seat, and we go down through the wet green switchbacks and out of the trees and onto the open road.

The world I used to live in scrolls past the window like footage of a place I've never been.

It's a test. I know it's a test.

Everything is still a test, even now, even after the months, even after I stopped being able to recall the exact color of my own fear.

He wants to see what I'll do with a horizon in front of me and a door that opens from the inside.

What I do is nothing.

I sit in the back of the car with my hand under his and I watch the ocean come up gray and enormous at the edge of the land.

Somewhere behind my ribs the old animal lifts its head, just once, at the sight of that much open space.

A gas station. A highway sign with a town on it and a number of miles.

A woman at a pump who'd hand me her phone if I ran to her crying, who'd call someone, who'd start the chain of events that might end in me being free.

I don't run to her.

There's a moment, though. Grady pumps the gas and Ezra goes inside to pay, actually leaves me, a test inside the test.

For ninety seconds I stand alone by the car in the cold salt wind with the woman at the next pump ten feet away.

She's ordinary. Fortyish, a minivan, a kid's booster seat in the back, sunglasses pushed up in her hair.

She catches me looking and smiles the way strangers smile, brief and kind and meaning nothing, and I feel the old language rise up in my throat, sudden and complete.

Help me. Two words. That's all it would take.

She has a phone in her hand.

She'd dial before Ezra came back through those doors, and the wheels would start turning, and somewhere at the end of them might be a room that isn't his.

I open my mouth.

What comes out is, "Cold out here, huh?"

She laughs and agrees and says something about the wind off the water, and the moment closes over like water over a stone.

Ezra comes back with two coffees and hands me one, and I take it, and I don't look at the woman again as we pull away.

He never asks what I said to her. He doesn't have to.

He watched it all through the station window, and he knows exactly what I did with my ninety seconds of open air, which was nothing, which was weather and a paper cup.

I've stopped even rehearsing it, the running, the way you stop rehearsing a language you'll never need again.

The words are still in there somewhere, conjugations of escape, but they've gone strange in my mouth, and reaching for them takes more than I have.

Anyway there's his hand over mine, warm, and the warmth is real even if nothing else is, and I've learned to live on what's real.

We walk the beach. He lets me take my shoes off.

The sand is cold and the wind comes off the water hard enough to sting.