The Passenger

by Lisa Lutz

My heart was broken just once. But completely.

Maybe I’d send her a postcard from the road.

I drove with the windows open, trying to lose the scent of Frank.

had no destination in mind, so I headed west, mostly because I didn’t feel like squinting against the morning light.

I hadn’t brought music for the drive, so I was stuck with local radio and preachers all night long.

I switched off the radio and drove to the sound of wind swishing by and wheels on asphalt while headlights of people on a different path blinked and vanished in my peripheral vision.

I woke with a hunger so fierce it had turned to nausea.

I thought it would be nice to be Carla, maybe just for a little while. Try her on and see if she fit.

But I didn’t want to turn thirty before my time.

If I looked a man in the eye, I’d know his intent. I wasn’t always like that, but I’d learned over time.

What’s the point in starting at the bottom? You always have time to land there.

I drank it, though, trying to convince my taste buds to transform.

Always said hello with a smile, which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Tell the truth when possible. The lies add up and you’ll never keep track.

Anything that I might be qualified to do would likely plummet me to depths of despair I hadn’t known in years.

I had fought so hard to forget my past, forget who I once was, that as I said my story, it felt like fiction.

It had been so long since I’d spoken the truth, it sounded like a lie.

I could feel that exhaustion where every part of your body seems to be sinking into itself, but I couldn’t quiet my mind.

I even have a clear picture of the cheap one-bedroom apartment we’re sharing. It’s a third-floor walk-up. We sit on the fire escape on hot summer nights and drink beer and look at the stars.

The Austin library circuit became my second home.

Vigilance keeps you sharp, like an animal. There isn’t much time for melancholy.

Who is Frank? Do you mean Lou, your husband? I suppose if that’s not his real name it might be easy to forget. Or maybe you slipped and told me his real name. How is Frank?

But I discovered, after a few failed attempts, that men don’t hire women for construction jobs.

Before computers and mammoth databases and the NSA, I could have picked a name, moved to a new town, and run with it.

But the only two men who ever thought I was truly beautiful were my daddy and Ryan;

He was tall and lean and a bit weather-beaten, like an actor in an old western.

He seemed like the kind of man who had nothing to prove.

Chinese symbols that meant something that was supposed to remind you to do things that come naturally, like breathing.

My heart started pumping as if I were on speed. It felt like the air had thinned and the only thing I could do to calm my nerves was walk away.

my instincts had once failed me so deeply I’ve still never quite forgiven them.

I wished I had taken more when I had the chance.

“I’ve never had grand ambitions,” I said. When I said that, I suddenly realized how many ambitions I had lost along the way. It was one of the biggest lies I had ever told.

I learned young that my mother would pay more attention to me if I didn’t give in to emotion.

wouldn’t have minded a bit of wind or rain or a chill in the air. The end of summer conjures images of one’s childhood more than any other season.

I was good at thinking my own thoughts while mumbling encouraging conversation prompters—yes, uh-huh, you don’t say—

let’s hope that unqualified teachers working under an assumed name are an anomaly.

Drowning would be just fine with me. Let’s pretend that’s how I went. When you think of me, try to imagine me tied to a glorious antique anchor at the bottom of San Francisco Bay.

I still couldn’t read him, and I had learned how to read men over the years, after reading a few of them so wrong it cost me everything.

I’m not a rat, which some people might consider an asset, but I’m fairly certain it is my fatal flaw.

I found the Greyhound station in Casper, drove a mile away, parked in a strip mall, and walked back to the bus depot. I went to the kiosk and bought a ticket to Denver, Colorado.

During the four hours I had before I boarded the train, I found a thrift store, where I bought a small backpack and a change of clothes. Then I stopped in a drugstore, where I purchased water, energy bars, and a disposable cell phone.

I woke to a hunger so incapacitating that the stroll down the train to the café car felt like a two-day journey through the desert.

There I sat by the picture window and watched the landscape dash by so fast I felt like I was in a perpetual state of just missing something important.

Most men think they’re doing you a favor, keeping you company, curing you of the shame of being alone in public.

But some men can only read their internal weather report and have no concept that another human might not want the same things they want.

That’s what the women’s movement was all about. Not equal rights, but the right to be rude. We don’t have to make polite conversation anymore.

I cleaned up my shorn locks off the linoleum floor as best I could, having more sympathy for the hotel maid than your average guest.

The few times I’d ventured out on the weekends, the town seemed to have doubled in size with moneyed folk from the city getting away from it all.

This got under my skin since I had an expert’s grasp of the US interstate highway system and an internal compass that failed me only on moonless nights.

Even when I was young and had no concept of the limits that my future life would hold, whenever I’d see a happy family, a jealousy would overtake me that was so ugly, it felt like my soul was rotting.