She Drives All Night
At the stoplight at Sunset and Crescent Heights, she fishes out a water bottle labeled Arrowhead that’s been rolling underneath her seat for the past two days. She pops off the cap and takes a deep satisfying swig of vodka that smooths the rough edges.
The radio is on. I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody’s looking for something.
Images come flooding back, Hana’s face merging with her mother’s, both screaming, leaving her shivering with shame.
Another swig. The images soften a bit. But not enough. Never enough.
Hana’s eyes beseeching her.
She’s on Sunset, jetting past cars going in the opposite direction. The Roxy and the Viper Room roll past her window where she and Dylan hung out with musicians, heads thrown back, laughing. A little white on the nose.
She’s doing her personal stations of the cross.
Another image flares. “You have destroyed my family!” The mother’s face distorted with grief. With rage. Everyone turns and looks at her. The silent appraisals. The whispering. One man gasps, “What the hell?”
Another swig. Another cigarette. Another scene from the horror show.
Security is walking over to her.
Shame floods her. I am outside the human family.
“You better leave now. Don’t come back now. You’ll be arrested.”
Memories of church. The girls well dressed, their mothers with their heads together gossiping about her — “Well, her daddy’s a drunk.” “And you know about her mother, right?” Looking down at her. Making her feel dirty.
The audacity to think I can teach anybody anything. She shakes her head. She shivers again.
Her mind is strangely blank, empty but the heaviness remains, and then another wave of images — the police woman holding Hana down, Hana twisting and turning. Her eyes beseeching her. She, Nikki, trying to put her coat over her to hide her nakedness.
She lights another cigarette, takes another swig. Don’t think.
But she does. She can’t help it.
The scenes play on a deadly loop, one scene merging into the other: Hana standing alone, whispering to herself strange words. Hana climbing the ladder. Freeze-frame on her dangling from the fly. I didn’t recognize the signs. How could I have been so stupid. So blind.
She winds down Sunset Boulevard canopied and dappled by towering oaks, past the university where she played Nina in The Seagull, a universe away, an eternity ago.
Another station of the cross.
Sunset dead ends on the Pacific Coast Highway and she turns south and runs like a wild thing along the ocean’s edge, to her right, the end of the world. The night settling in dark and velvety, the sun drowning itself in the chill of the ocean in blazing flames of orange and red and purple. But she doesn’t see the beauty.
She’s running backstage to check on an actor. She sees Hana there in the darkness, talking to someone. Whispering. No one is there. The strange light in her eyes. The way she’s holding herself. You told yourself she was going over her lines, but you knew. And you did nothing.
She hits Venice and turns back to the land, zigzagging down the narrow streets, past the old dives she and Dylan would stumble out of drunk and giggling. Now she’s on the freeway, zipping in and out of slower moving cars, heading east now, hitting seventy, eighty, ninety, until she drives into the interior of the city, its industrial wasteland, to Downtown.
She dodges the homeless woman pushing her shopping cart filled with bags and rags and a small sickly dog. Past the long rows of tents and tarps and dirty blankets strung up to make a home for the strung out homeless. She drives around the stretched out, elongated man, a silhouette of blackness frozen in a state of ecstasy in the middle of Fifth Street.
I am one step removed from you.
She takes another swig.
I am my father’s daughter.
Her kicking the door after her father left for the last time. Her opening the door and screaming down the hall with its dank wrinkled carpet — “I fucking hate you!” He looks back at her. And snickers and keeps walking. Keeps walking. To the end of the hall, around the corner where he disappears.
My mother’s sadness. The lonely black silhouette of her body leaning against the square of hallway light as she rests for a moment before she enters our apartment.
She drives past the Alexandria Hotel, another station of the cross, where she performed in a play whose name she can’t remember, past a tiny hole in the wall where she performed her one woman show when performance art was a thing, and takes a turn on third and floorboards it onto the Hollywood Freeway heading north.
Another swig. So tired.
More images: Hana standing transfixed, her arms aloft, her body twisted at a grotesque angle in the darkness. You saw. And you did nothing.
Her face burns. Tears are blinding her. The road rolling, speeding under her, the white lines zipping furiously, swallowed up by her car.
The speedometer hits ninety.
Strange. There are no other cars on the freeway. It’s almost a sign from God. If I believed in God. Just a slight turn to the left. Hit the gas to a hundred. And it would all be over.
The one thing in my life that mattered. The one thing I did well. That gave me meaning. And I fucked it up. I betrayed them. And now it’s going to be taken away from me.
I deserve it.
She begins to turn the wheel to the left. Just a few more seconds. The left fender is edging closer to the divider. On the other side, headlights grow closer. She wonders briefly what it’ll be like — on the other side. Just inches away now.
Her car’s interior is bathed in flashing reds and blues. A bright light blasts inside, turning the night into day. A siren shrieks. She fumbles turning the wheel and narrowly misses the divider. Shaking violently, she pulls off to the shoulder.
The cop car zooms past her down the freeway; its sound gradually growing smaller, disappearing. The cop a diminishing dot that vanishes. The freeway for a moment is dark, quiet.
Her foot trembles violently against the brake, tremors coursing through her body, She is convulsing uncontrollably, her head, her hands, her legs. Seconds pass. Can’t breathe. Can’t draw air. Her pulse pounding in her ears. Her heart a sledge hammer. A chasm opening at her feet, she’s falling, crushed by an oppressive loneliness stretching for an eternity. Even cradled in the hands of God she would feel alone.
Eventually, the tremors slow. She draws breath. Great gulps of air, taking them in deeply, filling her lungs, like a drowning man. Her throat convulses in a spasm of coughing, straining her lungs, sending her heart into wild palpitations knocking hard against her chest, gradually subsiding, leaving her exhausted, her throat raw.
She sits for long minutes her head thrown back against the seat. She sits up. Her neck stiff. The clock in the car reads 4 am.
Wearily she turns the car around, and heads home.
At four forty in the morning she pulls into a parking space several blocks from her apartment and walks home shivering in the predawn chill more from shame than cold. She takes a hot shower and cries, one horrible shameful image following the other flowing through her and down the drain.
She tries to eat something to sop up the alcohol. Drink some black coffee. But she can’t hold anything down. Feeling dirty, she showers again, then dresses — tennis shoes because she’s unsteady, a sweater and woolen slacks to keep her warm. Please don’t take my kids away she prays to an unknown god. At seven thirty she walks outside in the chill air, trying to prepare for whatever nightmare the day may hold.