There are storm drains all over town. And the next town and the next. But somehow I can’t stop driving.

I’m at least a hundred miles away when I pull off the interstate and meander a few miles until I find a highway drain that looks deep enough to devour anything. I don’t even stop the car, just open my door. The bag slips from my hand into the abyss.

And then I keep driving.

The AM radio broadcasting from another era (Dottie West and Juice Newton and I want a lover with a slow hand) and the road black and empty, I drive with my right foot trembling the whole time, it seems. By the third hour on the interstate, the foot is nearly numb and then I know just where I’m going, the sky flattening on the land, the grimy wastewater-treatment plant all lit up in the distance like a great rust-furred wagon wheel on the Lanister marshland.

The chemical smell when I roll down the windows is exactly as I remember, so strong, like pressing my face into my old Pocahontas comforter or my mom’s pilled Hickory Hill Animal Rescue sweatshirt. Ammonia and marsh sulfur and pet hair and Lava soap and everything that stifled and smothered me and that now seems as magical and as extinct as a lost land in a fairy tale or the first few years of childhood when everything is fixed by a banana split with Spanish peanuts or a trip to the dusty old petting farm with your mom and dad.

Just before the city limits, I stop.

I pull the car to the shoulder and sit on the hood for a half hour and try to remember things, try to push aside everything else, try to hurl off the hushing breaths of Diane on my face, in my ear, her voice such an insinuation (We need to stick together now).

But why would I ever believe her? Can you ever believe a killer?

You’re a killer too now, Kit.

My head wasn’t right, I imagine telling someone, the police. I couldn’t think at all. I should have called 911 right away. My head wasn’t right. I just did what she said. But I never hurt anyone.

Inside, somewhere, I feel it. That flickering sense of guilt when someone you’re at odds with, who’s an obstacle to you, who’s trapping you, or so it seems, is suddenly gone. Dead.

Except then I start thinking about Alex. Alex as he was, that charming man, that flirty boy, his throat open before me. Did I do enough to stop the flood of blood? To save that wily little heart?

Alex, his hands to his throat, his scraping voice, You killed me, you killed me, you killed me.

Oh, Alex, I think. Poor Alex.

It’s nearly three a.m., only truckers on the road and the sky and horizon making one black sheet. The gas ticker shaking, I stop once, filling my tank and improvising a scattershot path through a very bright Flying J, Cinnabon steaming, pajama pants for sale by the register, the frozen-drink machine overflowing cherry slush into a far corner, red streaking the floor tiles and wall.

I buy beer.

It seems better than crying. I’ve been crying for hours, my face hot as a firecracker. Thinking of Alex twitching on that floor.

Still twenty miles from home, I take the back route, the lonely night roads, the strip of strip malls. I don’t remember how it happens, spotting a police station’s green lantern, my brain inexplicably filling with my father’s voice, making jokes about cops and doughnut runs.

What would my old man think of me, wherever he is.

That’s when I turn into the precinct parking lot. I don’t know what I mean to do but I sit there, watching, for a long time.

For a half hour, maybe more, a near-empty bag of ranch-dusted pretzels and a froth-lined forty of High Life next to me, I sit and think and wonder, my mouth aching, feeling the ghostly throb from that old tongue piercing long healed.

You do these things, my mom had said, and they can’t ever be undone. The hole closes up, but the body remembers.

That’s when I spot two officers walking toward the station house.

I step out of my car and call to them, my voice hoarse. “Hey! I need to talk to someone,” I say. “I need to tell someone, okay?”

The words aren’t coming fast enough. They’re too big.

They look over at me. I catch sight of myself in the glass door’s reflection. Sunken baseball hat, tank-top strap drooping, flip-flops. No bra. The smell of beer all over me.

I open my mouth again, but nothing at all comes out this time.

“Cabstand’s over there,” one of them says. “No way that chick should be driving.”

“Go home, honey,” the other adds, laughing as he pushes the door open. “Go back to your double-wide.”

In that second, I can’t explain, all my moral conviction slips to the pavement.

I stand there a moment, watching. Only flipping them off once they’re safely inside the building, my father’s daughter to the end.

The sleep that comes when I get home at last is epic, opiate, endless. Snow White in her glass coffin. Twelve hours or more.

At some point, I feel a grinding inside me, crawling from its deepest caverns, and I know what’s happened, the screw-clamp feeling in my spine. I slip into the bathroom, look in the mirror, and take two breaths. When I shove down my jeans, I see the telltale splotch of brown blood.

Back in the bedroom, I stand in the doorway and see what looks like a lump under my coverlet. A stray pillow, something.

A lump that looks like a person, curled up. A man curled, or a woman.

The nausea leaps up my throat as I step closer. Lifting the coverlet and seeing it there. The searing red of yesterday’s biohazard bag, slick and wet in my hands. Its insides leaking out.

Then comes the thump like the pneumatic punch of the lab injector, my skull striking my headboard. My body bolting upright, the orange of the sinking sun at my window.

And I’m awake, the bed shorn of coverlet, of top sheet, of everything.

Pushing myself from the nightmare, I pull my panties down; there is no blood.

There is no bag.

There’s only me.

I stumble from my bed into the kitchen, my feet spongy on the carpet. Trying to calm myself, the hammering in my chest. But all I can think of is the bag.

The bag. Filled with dirty Kimwipes, mop heads, shoe covers seamed with blood.

So careful in so many ways, we were so careless about that. Diane sauntering out of the lab with it spilling out of her backpack top, with it practically perched on her shoulder like a parrot.

Diane’s question comes humming back to me. The only moment she hesitated, unsure.

Are you worried about the Russian?

Serge.

I’m drinking coffee, three cups of instant, eyeing the clock and wondering where Sunday went. It’s already dusk.

No one has called. Not even Diane.

And I can’t help myself. I grab my keys.