Since You've Been Gone

Frank just looked at me, his head tilted slightly to the side. He wasn’t jumping in to agree to this, but he also wasn’t saying no.

“I’ll pay for gas and everything,” I said quickly. “And it won’t be that long. I have to be back by tomorrow night.”

He just looked at me, still not speaking. He took a breath like he was about to say something, but then just let it out slowly, and I had a feeling I knew what his answer would be, could tell in that silence how ridiculous he thought this was.

“I know it’s stupid,” I said, breaking eye contact with him, and looking up to the tree above me as a bird alighted on the uppermost branch. “But I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“You want to drive to South Carolina and back by tomorrow night,” he said, finally breaking his silence. He didn’t phrase it like a question, more like he was just trying to get a grasp of the facts. I nodded and Frank looked away for a long moment.

When he looked back at me, though, he had a ghost of a smile on his face. “Then I guess we’d better get going.”

16

TAKE A ROAD TRIP

An hour later, we were on the road.

I had gone home to take a shower and try and get my head around the fact that we were actually going to do this.

I’d gotten dressed but hadn’t put on any more makeup than usual, or attempted to do anything special with my hair. The last thing I wanted, after kissing him in my car, was for Frank to think that this was some kind of plot to get him alone so I could seduce him or something. I thought for a moment of wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved shirt, but the fact was, it was simply too hot out. I’d looked at my pajamas for a long moment, doing the math. According to the directions I’d found, it seemed like the drive down there was going to take around ten hours, which would also mean ten hours back. Which meant that, at some point, we’d have to get some sleep.

But I headed out of my room without packing my pajamas, or anything I would normally bring for an overnight stay. I couldn’t even begin to picture where we would be tonight, or what it would look like, so it was like I couldn’t make the leap to prepare for it. I somehow still couldn’t understand that I might be seeing Sloane in just a few hours.

I’d closed the blinds and poured some extra food in the cat’s bowl, despite the fact he hadn’t been inside for a week or so. And as I’d left the kitchen, I’d grabbed the emergency cash from the conch shell even though I was pretty sure my Paradise wages would cover all our food and gas. Then I’d locked up and headed outside just as Frank pulled his truck into the driveway.

I got in the passenger seat and buckled up while Frank turned around and headed down the driveway to the road. “Ninety-five South?” he asked, at the end of the driveway, and I nodded. I had directions on my phone, and I’d also printed them out, in case my phone died on the return trip. “Here we go,” he said quietly, turning right, in the direction that would take us to the highway.

We drove for maybe half an hour in silence before I fully grasped the impact of what I’d just gotten us into. Not the trip itself—though I was well aware that it was crazy in its own right. But I hadn’t thought through the fact I was putting myself in a confined space with someone I hadn’t really spoken to in over a week. And we were going to have to be together for twenty hours, at least. This somehow hadn’t been factored in to my earlier decision to ask Frank, and as we crossed into New York, and then New Jersey, I started to regret not investigating how much it would have been to take a cab, or a bus. Because our conversation on this road trip so far had been limited to only the most basic driving talk—Can I get over to that lane? How are we on gas? Take the left exit. And I was realizing that it was pretty terrible to be sitting in silence with someone who you always used to have something to say to.

“Music?” I asked, after we’d been driving in New Jersey for a good twenty minutes and I just couldn’t stand the silence any longer. Frank glanced over at me and shrugged, nodding down at his iPod on the console.

“Sure,” he said, politely, like I was a stranger. “Whatever you want.”

I could feel myself getting mad at him, which wasn’t really fair, since he was currently in the middle of doing me a huge favor. I bit back saying something to him, and reached forward to the radio. I scrolled through until I found something not-terrible, a station that seemed to mostly be playing music that had been popular five years ago. “This okay?”

“Whatever you want,” Frank repeated, with the same inflection, irritating me even further.

“Fine,” I said, turning the volume up slightly, so that the silence in the truck wouldn’t be quite so apparent. We’d only passed two exits, though, before I reached forward and turned it down again. “Thank you for doing this,” I said, when I realized I hadn’t told him this yet. “I really appreciate it.”

Frank looked away from the road and glanced at me, then turned back to the highway that still seemed pretty clear, despite my parents’ worries. “Sure,” he said, in the same overly polite and formal voice that was currently driving me crazy. “It’s what friends do, right?”

He put a spin on the word, like he was saying it sarcastically. I wasn’t even sure what to make of that, so I just gave him a tight smile, turned the volume back up, and looked out the window again.

Maybe Frank had been feeling as annoyed as me, because by the time we crossed into Pennsylvania—the Keystone State—the tension between us was palpable, and rising, like the shimmering heat coming off the asphalt in the distance. And in contrast to the occasional license plates I saw, it was becoming clear by the charged silence between us that neither of us currently had a friend in Pennsylvania.

We’d long since lost the somewhat decent radio station, and while I’d tried to scan through them to find something else, I kept getting commercials and what sounded like polka. So I’d finally just turned off the radio, but the quiet in the truck felt oppressive, and I couldn’t help but wonder if we would have been better off with the accordions.

“We need gas,” Frank announced four exits later, breaking what felt like hours of silence.

I leaned forward to look at the signs that were posted by every exit, letting you know what you could find at that turnoff—usually just food, gas, and lodging, but I had seen the occasional ones for camping and swimming. Once we had gotten out of the tangle of the tri-state area and cleared New Jersey, things had opened up, and now I could see across the horizon, as this stretch of the state was pretty flat—blue sky stretching out endlessly in front of us, and bright-green grass on either side of the highway. It wasn’t congested, and Frank had mostly been staying in the left lane, driving fast but always within shouting distance of the speed limit. “It looks like there will be some in three miles,” I said as we passed the sign, and he moved a lane over.