Liz is in the Cincinnati train station at 3:55 a.m., typing away on her laptop. She’s revising the script she plans to pitch to the money people who back the Marvel Comics movies, a story with a female superhero who isn’t just bash and bam but is complex and nuanced. What should be her name? She’s just completed the scene she started on the train when the stationmaster interrupts her.
“We’re closing at four. You have to leave.”
She’s dumbfounded. Since when do train stations close? When Amtrak changed her schedule at the last minute, bumping her arrival up from 7:15 to 3:30, she’d called Alan, her husband, but it was late and he hadn’t picked up. Somehow, Alan is always unavailable when she needs him. She’d resigned herself to wait at the station until he arrived at the agreed-upon time of seven-thirty. It hadn’t occurred to her that she might be kicked out of the station.
“Why are you closing?”
“No trains coming or leaving till eight a.m. Saves money.”
“Can I wait outside?”
“It’s not safe.” There’s no equivocation in his voice. “Why don’t you get a ride to a hotel?”
This sounds sensible. Liz doesn’t mind paying for a room, maybe getting a few hours of sleep. She can text Alan to pick her up around lunchtime. The sleep part sounds good. After days riding trains cross-country from Los Angeles, she’s exhausted. She closes her laptop and follows the stationmaster through the corridors of the empty station. The drone of the rollers on her luggage is punctuated by the click-click of her stiletto heels. She always wears them when traveling to message an L.A. attitude in case she runs into someone in the movie business. It offsets the bias they automatically have when they learn she’s a screenwriter from Kentucky.
The stationmaster holds open the door. She steps out into the cold December air. The door locks behind her. She rolls her suitcase to a spot under a streetlight decorated with plastic Christmas holly, glancing nervously at a man in a hoodie walking by who doesn’t slow down but gives her a good looking-over. Her heartbeat accelerates. She pulls out her phone and sends for a Lyft.
She waits, watching both ends of the street for signs of approaching danger. No businesses are open. The only life on the sidewalk is a food wrapper tumbling past in the wind. What Liz fears is a carload of men looking for trouble and spotting her alone. The phone buzzes. A Lyft driver will arrive in one minute in a black Camry, but in fact it’s only seconds before a black Toyota Camry pulls up. Maybe the driver was parked nearby, waiting for fares from the train station. Liz wheels her luggage to the street.
The driver hops out and pops the trunk. He has straggly hair, a pot belly, possibly a mustache – it’s hard to tell in the dark. She likes how he moves so quickly, but then it occurs to her that maybe it’s because he wants to get out of this neighborhood. He stows her luggage, and she climbs in the back seat. The heater is turned up high, a comforting contrast to the cold, wet air outside. The driver slips behind the wheel, shifts into drive, and pulls away from the curb. Liz thanks him for rescuing her.
“The train station closed. Can you believe it? My husband’s not picking me up till seven-thirty. Do you know a fairly nice hotel that’s close?”
He mentions two or three and she recognizes the names.
“Any of those are fine.”
“Where do you live?” He asks. His face is partially illuminated by streetlights they pass. She tells him she lives a few miles north of Lexington.
“You going to a hotel just to wait for your ride? Why don’t you let me drive you home? It’s only about an hour and a half.” He quotes her a price. It’s less than the cost of a hotel room. Being driven home sounds splendid. She can sleep in her own bed again.
“Okay.” She gives him the address. He speeds up, swerving around cars and circling the block on one-way streets. She pulls out her phone and texts her husband. Go back to sleep. I’m taking a Lyft home.
The confidence with which the driver handles the car comforts Liz. She’s gone from being bait for muggers and rapists, abandoned by a sleeping husband, to riding home in a warm Camry piloted by a man who knows what he’s doing. She pulls out her phone again and checks Facebook. Mary Ellen has posted a selfie tonight at a restaurant favored by their circle. All the ladies are wearing reindeer antlers and smiling, and Mary Ellen’s eyes are bright with the shine of alcohol. Liz gives it a like. Her daughter has posted a feminist meme and Liz gives it a love, composes a comment, pausing before posting, weighing whether Alan will see it and think it’s about him – it’s not, but truth is rarely a successful defense to marital infractions, notwithstanding what Dr. Phil says. Liz decides it’s okay and posts. Alan will never notice, anyway. Something in the corner of her eye makes her look up. They are on an unlit two-lane road. She’s somewhat familiar with Cincinnati and this doesn’t look like the way to the interstate.
“Aren’t you taking I-75?”
“There’s a wreck at the Erlanger exit. We’re going around it.”
Is he deliberately taking a long route to rack up miles? But he quoted a flat fee. She will hold him to it. If he’s tricked her and demands more money when they get to Lexington, she won’t be weak and give in, just because she can afford it.
“Do you have to run this by Lyft?”
“I said you declined the ride. This is off the books. You can pay me cash, right?”
“Sure.” He doesn’t want the employer or Uncle Sam involved. That’s okay. But she’ll hold him to the price he quoted.
They ride without speaking. The landscape grows darker. They are way out in the country. Where the hell are they? She opens an app on her phone for GPS and plugs in her home address. Turn around and proceed East on…
“Hey, the GPS says to turn around.”
He laughs. It sounds forced.
“I’m taking a shortcut the GPS doesn’t know about. You can’t trust those things, anyway.”
She’s heard stories of people guided by GPS to non-existent roads, but in her experience the little voice in the phone is usually right. But he’s the driver and seems to know where he’s going. She looks out the window. The sky is clear now, and a half moon is shining. There’s nothing on this road except an occasional house with no lights on.
The driver slows and puts on his turn signal, then turns left. This road is narrower than the one they’ve just left, and overhanging trees block the moon. This doesn’t feel right. Carefully, as if the driver might be watching, she powers on her phone to text her husband. Scrolling to messages, she types I’m riding home in a Camry and we’re on some country road outside Cincinnati. She pauses, realizing she doesn’t even know whether they crossed the bridge into Kentucky – she was playing on her phone. Don’t know where we are. More later. She taps send. Liz starts to ask the driver where he’s going, but she doesn’t even know his name, so she scrolls to find the text Lyft sent. It identifies the driver as Darlene. There’s a tiny picture of a woman. She hadn’t noticed before. She’d been focused on what car to look for. It’s the right car, but the wrong driver. Oh shit. Liz is like the wife in Breakdown, but her husband is no Kurt Russell who will come looking for her.
Liz starts to look at the driver, then jerks her head back to straight ahead in a mixture of guilt and fear. If he sees her looking at him, he’ll know by the look on her face that she’s on to him. She leans back, away from him. Her heart flutters like a bird trapped in a chimney. She glances at the rear-view mirror and sees that he can see her if he wants to, but he’s looking at the road. Then he begins to whistle. She doesn’t recognize the tune. It doesn’t even sound like a tune. It’s just whistling.
Why is this man driving Darlene’s black Camry? She feels an impulse to imagine awful things and resists it, fearing that imagining it will make it happen. She must keep her head about her. First, she must text her husband and let him know what’s going on. She powers on the phone. The previous message she composed hasn’t been delivered. There’s no signal.
Now her heart is pounding like Jodie Foster in Panic Room. She feels dizzy. She takes a deep breath and tries to regain control of her body. She must think only useful thoughts. What can she use as a weapon? She mentally inventories what’s in her purse. Nothing sharp, no nail file, no scissors. A ballpoint pen, maybe. Then she remembers the pepper spray that her husband bought for her daughter a year or so ago. He’d bought one for Liz, too. What would I do with pepper spray? she’d said. Spray somebody attacking you, he’d said. She’d rolled her eyes.
What had she done with that pepper spray? She thinks back to when she transferred the contents of her old purse to her new purse. She doesn’t recall seeing pepper spray. There’s only one way to make sure. She’s holding the purse in her lap, but she can’t look down and paw through it – what if he sees her in the rearview mirror and asks What are you doing? She’ll have to make something up and he’ll know it’s a lie. Serial killers can tell. Keeping her face forward, she slips her right hand into the purse, systematically touching everything as if she were blind. Her wallet, her keys, makeup, tissues, some papers from the screenwriting workshop she just attended, a paperclip, random individually-wrapped peppermints, lipstick, a couple of coins, a half-eaten package of peanut butter and crackers, but nothing that feels like pepper spray. The lipstick is close, but it’s too small, though she pushes the top off and feels the waxy tip to make sure. A ballpoint pen could serve as a makeshift knife, but her pens are in the carrying case for her laptop, which is in the trunk.
She looks around the back seat for something to use as a weapon. If this were a movie set, or a scene from a screenplay, there would be a prop. Maybe the last customer was a drug dealer who left his 9-millimeter, a fisherman who forgot his fillet knife, a terrorist who left an envelope of anthrax. But there’s nothing in the back seat of this Camry because this is not a movie. She glances at the rear-view mirror. He isn’t watching her, but he’s stopped whistling. Does that mean something?
The imagining starts again, and she can’t control it. What will he use to tie her up? Is there rope in the trunk? Duct tape under the seat? Maybe the kidnapping paraphernalia is stored in some little shack in the woods where he stashed Darlene’s body. Liz tries her phone again – still no signal. She considers opening the door of the Camry and jumping out. But she’s not a superhero, like the one in her screenplay, or a stunt performer who knows how to roll and not get hurt. She’d probably break a leg. And even if she survives the impact, she’s unlikely to outrun him in these stiletto heels.
Stiletto heels. She remembers that Jennifer Jason Leigh murdered a man with her stiletto heels in Single White Female by kicking him in the eye. She has a weapon after all. But she can’t kick the driver in the face from the back seat. She’ll have to wield the shoe with her hand.
Liz lifts her right foot up as if crossing her leg and removes the shoe without bending over. She slips it in the left pocket of her coat. Then she lifts her left leg up and removes that shoe, turning it so she’s grasping the topside with the heel end pointing in an outward direction from her right palm. She imagines herself thrusting the heel into his eye with all the force she can muster. She will only get one chance and has to get it right if she doesn’t want to end up like Darlene. The Camry slows and Liz looks up at the rearview mirror, alarmed, but he isn’t looking at her.
“Car trouble,” he says. His tone sounds worried, and she almost believes him. She tightens the grip on her shoe as he pulls over and comes to a stop. She feels time slowing down. Her body is a coiled snake, ready to strike when the opening presents itself.
“I’ll be right back,” he says. He opens the glove compartment and takes out a flashlight. Then he steps out, flicks on the flashlight, and goes round to the front of the Camry. When he pops the hood, smoke rolls out like thunderclouds. Liz looks at gauges on the dashboard. One of them is flashing fire engine red.
“Damn!” she hears him say, and the Camry shakes when he kicks the grill. She gets out of the car. The temperature outside has dropped, and the moon has disappeared. She puts her heels back on and walks uncertainly in the dark to the front of the car.
“This isn’t even my car. I borrowed it.” He sounds like he’s crying, or about to. “I was trying to make some extra money. We can barely come up with rent. Now Timmy won’t have Christmas. This is unbelievable.”
The wind suddenly picks up, blowing cold through her coat that is designed more for appearance than warmth. He hands Liz the flashlight, then reaches in his coat for a pack of cigarettes, shakes one out, puts it in his mouth, and flicks a lighter. His hand is shaking.
“Darlene will kill me for breaking her car,” he says, exhaling the smoke. “Mary Lou will divorce me. She’ll take Timmy.”
Liz realizes that she’s in the middle of nowhere at five o’clock in the morning with an idiot who’s having a nervous breakdown. She turns her back on him, points the flashlight up the road, and starts walking.
“Hey! You’re not going to leave me here, are you?”
She doesn’t answer. She can’t walk fast in these heels and the darkness makes it harder to keep her balance, but it’s too cold to walk barefoot and who knows what broken glass or nail she might step on.
“Wait for me!”
She hears him running up behind her. Five minutes ago, she would have whipped off her shoe, whirled around, and thrust the heel in his eye. She’s still inclined to do so, but for different reasons. He’s walking beside her now.
“My name’s Eddie.” She doesn’t respond. If she were Elsa in Frozen, she would shoot ice from her fingertips and turn him into an Eddie-cicle.
“Sorry about the car trouble. Hopefully, Darlene will see that it wasn’t my fault. She probably hasn’t checked the oil in a while. Do you belong to Triple A? The car needs to be towed and I don’t have any cash.”
Liz looks for solace at the stars, but they are hidden behind clouds and probably laughing up their sleeves. And she does belong to Triple A. She’s beginning to feel like a first responder at a catastrophe. What would the hero of her screenplay do, the hero without a name? She stops walking and looks at Eddie. “We need a phone. I can’t get a signal.” He pulls out his phone. He can’t get a signal, either.
“There’s a shopping center up ahead,” he says. She sees nothing up ahead in the pitch-black darkness and suspects Eddie is a pathological liar, like Hannibal Lector. They walk in silence. Eddie begins whistling, the same tuneless whistling as when he was driving. It’s annoying, and Liz wants to tell him to stop, but she knows that the whistling is a friend Eddie conjures up to keep him company. She doesn’t want to know these things about Eddie. She just wants to go home.
As they round a bend in the road, the overhanging trees part and there, up ahead, is the light and noise of a highway and a shopping center. It’s too early for stores to be open, but one place is lit up – a donut shop. Liz crosses the empty highway. Eddie trails behind like a puppy. The sign on the front door reads Closed but lights inside are bright. A lady in a white uniform with green stripes is bustling about. Liz bangs on the door. The donut lady comes over, unlocks the door, and says they open at six. Liz quickly explains the situation.
“Come in,” the donut lady says, opening the door for them. “You should be able to get a signal here, but you can use our landline if you want.” Liz follows her around the counter to the phone behind the register. She picks up the receiver and prepares to punch in her home phone number.
“Are you calling Triple A?” Eddie asks. Liz sighs, terminates the call to her husband, opens her purse, and finds the Triple A card in her wallet. She asks the donut lady where they are and the name of the road they were on when the car died. Then she phones Triple A. She gives them the information, explaining that Eddie will be waiting at the car. Then she phones her husband. There’s no answer, so she leaves a message. When she hangs up, Eddie puts his hand on her arm and squeezes.
“You need to pay me a hundred dollars,” he says.
“What?”
“I took you part of the way. And I’ve lost the entire morning on this fare.”
She’s at a loss for words but realizes he won’t leave until he gets money. She opens her wallet, finds five twenties, and hands them to him, a small price to get him out of her life. She imagines Eddie’s wife, Mary Lou, and what she must put up with. Eddie takes the money without thanking her.
“I’ll have the tow truck swing by here to drop off your luggage,” he says. Then he asks the donut lady if she can fix him a coffee to go. “It’s cold out there.”
The donut lady smiles, brings him coffee in a large Styrofoam cup, tells him it’s on the house. Eddie leaves without saying goodbye. Liz takes a seat at one of the tables near the window – it’s still pitch-black out – and the donut lady brings Liz a cup of coffee. Liz reads the name tag. Mabel.
“Thanks for helping us, Mabel.” Liz holds out a ten and tells her to keep the change. Mabel waves it off. Liz looks into the kindest brown eyes she’s ever seen, a pond without a bottom. Mabel sees Liz seeing her. She smiles.
There’s noise at the front door. A handful of men and women are standing outside, peering in. Mabel turns, walks to the front door, flips the Closed sign over to Open. Liz looks at her watch. It’s only 5:30. The customers begin to file in. A young girl wearing a uniform like Mabel’s appears from the doorway to the kitchen with a tray of glazed donuts and slides them into a glass display case. Mabel joins her. The two of them take turns filling orders. A teenage boy, not uniformed, emerges from the kitchen with a tray of chocolate donuts to add to the display case. Liz studies the care with which Mabel and her assistant grasp donuts with wax paper and put them in paper bags or boxes. One by one, customers leave with their orders filled. A man in dirty, ill-fitting clothing stands some distance from the register, waiting. After all the other customers have been served, Mabel motions him over. She gives him a plate of donuts and a cup of coffee. No money changes hands. The man takes a seat in the corner of the shop. Liz watches him eat his donuts and drink his coffee. She wonders what his life is like, whether free donuts before the sun rises is an anchor in an otherwise hopeless life. Liz’s reverie is interrupted when Mabel appears at Liz’s table with a chocolate cake donut. Mabel tops off Liz’s coffee. Liz reaches into her purse.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mabel says. Liz is embarrassed. She’s being treated the same as the homeless man.
“I can pay, really.”
Mabel touches her shoulder. “Pay it forward.”
Liz is embarrassed again, but for a different reason. The point is not the donuts or money. The point is kindness.
“Thank you. I will.”
Liz nibbles the donut and gazes out the window. She pulls out her phone, sees that Mabel spoke the truth – there’s a signal. Soon, Alan will wake, see the voicemail, and call back. She can almost hear the veiled resentment in his voice implying Liz has engaged in some shenanigans, creating a crisis, just to impose on him. It makes her want to switch to airplane mode.
She lays her phone on the table, sips her coffee, and watches more early-morning characters filter into the donut shop and sidle for a position near the counter with greedy mouths and trusting eyes. Mabel serves each of them with genuine attention. This donut shop is a sanctuary of donuts, coffee, phone coverage, and love. And Mabel is a more compelling character than the action figure in Liz’s screenplay.
This morning seems longer than the entire train ride from L.A., but Liz is content. When her phone finally buzzes, her first thought isn’t what to say to her husband. Liz’s first thought is she wishes she were married to Mabel instead of him. Her second thought is wishing she’d given Eddie more money so Timmy will be sure to have Christmas. Her last thought, as she accepts Alan’s call, is a revelation –the superhero in her screenplay will be named Mabel.
Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in magazines including The Pettigru Review, Fiction Southeast, Mud Season Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Deep South Magazine, Still: The Journal, Barely South Review, and Anthology of Appalachian Writers Vol. X. He’s also the author of a collection of poetry, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, and resides in Lexington, Kentucky.