River Air

By the time I get in the Uber, I’m already late for Mads’ funeral. Celebration of life, my mother calls it even after I told her that Mads would’ve hated that phrase. Your mom needs to make everything a party, Mads used to say. But the kind of party where the alcohol ran out an hour in.
The app tells me that my driver’s name is Cam. When I close the door of his car behind me, it slams a little. 
Sorry, I say, hoping I sound sorry. Cam doesn’t say anything, and I look up at the rearview to see he’s looking back at me. Something hot thrills down my spine, like maybe he’ll tell me to get out.
I’m kind of in a rush, I say. Because I’m running late. To, um, a funeral? It sounds bad, I know.
Still, he says nothing, and I think I might have to get out, the embarrassment like a cliff I’m falling from in slow motion. Then he holds up a small flip pad, which has something written on it in fading ballpoint. I lean closer and read: Hi! I’m Cam + I’m deaf. He flips to a new page, where he writes: If u need anything, write it here.
I look back at the rearview, where Cam’s eyes are still watching. I say hi, realizing as I do that he can’t hear it. But Cam’s eyes crinkle with a smile, and he flips to a new page in the notebook. He angles the pen at me, and I take it, writing, I’m Alexandra. Or just Alex. Then I add: Running late 4 a party.
He inspects what I’ve written. Outside, traffic eddies around us like an impatient tide. I clear my throat for no reason. When Cam hands the notebook back to me, he’s flipped to a fresh page and written: Don’t worry. Will get u there.
A notification pops up on my phone, reminding me that we’re picking up another rider. I’d figured taking a pool would cut into the cost of the drive from downtown Richmond to the Northern Neck, but now I can’t believe I’ve sacrificed fifteen minutes, maybe even of Mads’ eulogy, for a few bucks. 
I press my forehead against the muggy window as Cam changes gears and pulls out into traffic. A Yankee Candle air freshener swings from the rearview, smelling like pine. It’s nice in the close July heat. Cam’s phone is propped on the dash and still dictates the directions aloud. 
Maybe thirty seconds in, I’m aware of rumbling somewhere in the car. It sounds like a stomach that hasn’t seen food in days. Does Cam know? Even if he can’t hear it, it’s hard not to feel. It vibrates up through my ass and spreads across my shoulder blades. He has to feel it. I don’t reach for the notebook.
Soon, we pull up to the sidewalk outside a place called the Hen & Hare, which is thronged by fellow twenty-somethings waiting for their turn to overpay for mimosas. A woman walks out and trips her way to Cam’s car. She sees me on the right side and circles around to the left. When she gets in and slams the door behind her, I clench my jaw and remind myself I did the same thing. She’s talking loudly on her phone when Cam passes the notebook back to begin the ritual again.
And then I was, like, he still looks at all my stories — she stops short, seeing the notebook. She cranes over it and then leans back. Cam is holding the pen toward her, expectant, but sees she’s lapsed back into her conversation. As he puts the notebook back onto the center console, I feel justified in my irritation toward her.
We pull back into traffic, and the woman starts talking louder over the car’s rumble. Yeah, she says. Sorry for the background noise. There’s something wrong with this dude’s car. I’m in the Uber now. She places a hand over her other ear, which I find dramatic. She continues: My Uber driver is deaf. Are you even allowed to drive if you’re deaf? Like, you hear sirens before you see them.
The absurdity of her reasoning is more than I can take, and I shoot her a look. What? she says when I catch her eye. He can’t hear me. She sits a little straighter, like what she’s just said is new information. All the things I could say roll around on my tongue like small, hard beads. All that comes out is: He’ll get us there.
My co-rider shrugs, then goes back to her friend on the phone. I look up and find Cam’s eyes, which are seeing me in the rearview.

When Mads was sixteen, she snuck off every Friday and Saturday she could manage with a boy she’d met at Kroger. He worked in the fish department. Let me get this straight, Grandaddy said one night when she got back late with the Buick. This boy so fine, he stink like day-old tuna and that don’t make you turn your nose up? That’s about right, Mads told him. Grandaddy said, Well I don’t want you seeing him no more, and Mads put her face right in his and said: Don’t you get it? I’m in love, stupid.
A month later, the boy from the fish counter started going steady with another girl at their school. For two days straight, Mads lay on her bed and cried. She didn’t even get up when Grammy made orange cake, her favorite. On the third day, she sat up, faced the wall, and recounted the entire story of their romance: long glances over the fish counter, ice chips everywhere, hard kisses in the back of the Buick. She told all this to no one in particular; she just had to get it out.
When Mads would tell me this story (because she told it to me many times), she was usually standing over the stove with a spoon in her hand. She’d look over at me with that half smile I knew had laughter on its heels. When I focus, I can still hear the sound of it: full-bodied and dancing circles around everyone else’s sadness.

The rumbling gets worse. I try to ignore it for as long as I can, but my co-rider raises her voice to something like screaming. I grab Cam’s notebook and pen and scribble, Something wrong w/ car. Loud noise.
I tap his shoulder, and his eyes meet mine in the rearview. Just as I’m handing him the notebook, the car sputters beneath us, and I see a red light flash on his dashboard. The rumbling crescendos. I see Cam’s body tense, and he flicks his blinker on, pulling onto the next exit ramp. 
What is going on? my co-rider says. 
Recalculating, says Cam’s phone. 
The car gives more resistance as Cam navigates to the first parking lot off the exit. We slide into an empty space at the edge of the lot just as the engine dies, and then everything is quiet. For a few seconds, all three of us feel that the vehicle might still find some will to live, that it will remember the promise of a few more good miles. But nothing happens.
God, my co-rider says, piercing the silence. This is the worst Uber I’ve ever taken. I have to be somewhere, so.
She gets out. I don’t think she’s going to turn back, but then she does, her hand still on the door. Cam has turned around, and we’re both looking at her. She sighs through her nose. 
Hope the car isn’t, like, permanently fucked, she says, and then the door slams as she takes off across the parking lot.
With that benediction, we get out of the car, and Cam goes around to the hood. I lean against the passenger door and push my sandals off so that the asphalt burns the bottoms of my feet, which is a welcome distraction. I realize I’m still holding the notebook, so I write, I lied. Actually going 2 a funeral. I show this to Cam, who has his hands deep in the car’s insides. He pulls them out, now streaked with something that looks like tar, and takes the pen. 
He writes, Sorry. U should call new ride.
I consider this as he goes to the trunk to pull something out. When he does, I see him emerge too quickly and hit the corner of the hatch. 
SHIT, he yells, holding his head. It’s the only word he’s said the entire trip, and it shocks me like a punch to the throat. Across the parking lot, a woman stares at us like maybe she should come over and do something. I stare back at her until she looks away.
Cam goes back to rummaging around in the trunk, and I chew on the end of the pen. 
I write: Getting snacks. Back in a few. I leave this on the edge of the open hood and cross the parking lot.

The plan was that my mother would get knocked up. That’s what sisters do for each other, my mother said. Mads was skeptical at first, kept saying she would just hire a surrogate like everyone else did. For a while, she held out, until she didn’t. They got a sperm donor, and my mother was pregnant within the month. I didn’t cry when I arrived nine months later, the blue dark pushing its way through the hospital window. My baby fists wouldn’t unfurl. Both of them held me that night and tried to open the little fists. And both of them knew, as they did this, just how much the plan had gotten away from them.
After it became clear that my mother couldn’t give me up, Mads couldn’t bring herself to try for another kid. Instead, she came to Richmond every other weekend, took me to the park and to get ice cream that made my whole face go numb. She wouldn’t even come inside the house when she picked me up — your mother’s busy, she told me. But we both knew my mother was just sitting on the back porch, reading a magazine and smoking her second cigarette. They were like divorced people who couldn’t get too close to each other’s orbit.
Years passed. My mother got married, and she asked Mads and my uncle Jamie to come to the wedding. Gradually, they could meet at the doorway again, could look each other in the eye when handing me off. In time, we started going to her house on the Rappahannock for a week every summer — to feel the river air, my mother said, like it was an embrace we couldn’t shake. But more than that, I knew she just wanted to see her sister. 
The year Mads was diagnosed, I’d just started high school and sometimes forgot to call her back or respond to her emails that always had a handful of JPEGs attached. Those photos still sit in my inbox: Mads planting her garden, Jamie fixing up his motorboat. I remember my mother getting drunk one night and laying her head on the kitchen table. I asked what was wrong. 
It’s not fair, she said. First, she couldn’t have kids, now this. She lifted her head and looked at me, like she was seeing me for the first time. I tried to give her the world once, she said. I tried. Now this.

Cam and I sit in the parking lot, waiting for the mechanic to show up. There’s something broken under the hood that we need a new part for. I pass him the bag of Chex Mix I bought at the Giant across the lot, and we sit there chewing for a few minutes. I look down at my phone to see a text from my mom: Where are u?? Getting started. 
I lick my fingertips and type back. Got held up sorry. On my way. 
When I put my phone back in my pocket, I see Cam staring at me from the front seat. I feel my face heat up and take back the Chex Mix bag he’s handing me. Then he passes the notebook back, too, and I look at what he’s written: Why didn’t u call another ride? 
I look out the window across the hot parking lot. A mom and daughter come out of Party City clutching shiny balloons. I never got to ask her what to do with this kind of sadness. The kind that has no floor or ceiling but expands to fill an entire atmosphere. Giving voice to it was like throwing a rock at nothing.
When I was sixteen, I had my first breakup. There wasn’t much that distinguished this brand of heartbreak from Mads’ boy at the fish counter, but it still felt wholly its own. Mads couldn’t leave the house anymore, so when I called, she told me to come immediately, that I could sleep over that night even though I had school the next day. On arrival, I pulled out the tub of Rocky Road I knew was in the freezer, and we sat on her bed. 
Get it out, she said. Some things just need to be said.
But now, the words won’t come, and I’m late to her funeral. I turn back toward Cam and shrug, hoping he can’t see the tears barely contained. For a second, he only watches me. Then he picks up his phone, tapping several things while I try and make the air fit in my lungs again. He shows me the screen. On it, there’s a photo of him and a kid who clings to his back. Cam is years younger. They look like they might be dancing to something. He makes a swiping movement, meaning I can look through the other pictures. 
As I do, he writes on his notepad: My son. Lives out west now.
I smile. You guys look happy, I say, knowing he can’t hear but he seems to understand anyway. 
He writes again: Sometimes can’t be there. 4 the ppl we love. I blink hard. Cam writes: Not ur fault.
The mechanic arrives, and Cam gets out to show him what’s under the hood. Sitting there, I remember the rest: I’m sitting on Mads’ bed, and I face the wall, square my shoulders. 
I don’t know how to start, I say. 
Mads shakes her head. Doesn’t matter, she says. No one ever started pretty.
So I begin: I think about you all the time, and I hate that. 
Good, Mads says. 
Continuing: I’m crying over you even though you’ll never cry about me. This hurts so bad that I feel like everyone will pity me, because it’s obvious and sad. Like I’m wearing my winter coat in July. At the beach.
Mads takes the spoon out of her mouth. What else? she says.
I look at the blank wall, imagine I could paint a canvas there with just my eyes. Something lush, impossible, steadfast. I say: I’m in love with you, and one day, I won’t be anymore.

Cam and I get back out on the road. For a while, ten minutes maybe, neither of us says anything. I try focusing on the thin line of horizon, but the interstate gets in the way. As we get closer to the place where Mads’ funeral is being held, I pick up the notebook and write: Want some cake? I show him, and he hesitates before smiling, just slightly, then nodding.
I leave the notebook on the center console and hop out as we pull up. Inside, I see my mother sitting close to the front. She locks eyes with me, and I can see where she’s been crying. At the back of the room, there are slices of orange cake on a table, and I make my way over, moving as quietly as I can. At the front of the room, by the podium, Mads’ pastor, who she knew for years and years, is talking. His voice booms. 
The people who touch our lives are always with us, he says. They leave they’uh mark. And they coluh yo’ view. The words are full and long in his mouth, a twang so thick I could dip a finger in it.
When I get back outside with the cake, Cam’s gone. If I were in a movie about my life, I’d see his car getting smaller at the end of the road, a dust cloud clinging to the air. But there is just the chirping of cicadas not far off and wet air coming in from the Rappahannock. I didn’t get the chance to write that I hoped he’d see his son again soon. That they’d find each other across all those miles between here and there.
When Mads got worse at the end, my mother and I would spend long stretches at her house, and Mads would tell Jamie to just go fishing or something. She and my mother would stay in the kitchen after I went to bed. They’d mix two rum and Cokes and put the dishes out to dry. Sometimes, from under the blanket, I heard them fighting. Sometimes they just talked. 
One night, Mads said, I never wanted to forgive you, but I did. Remember that. 
I couldn’t hear what my mother said in reply. But I imagined she smiled, said she knew. I’m in love, stupid.
I take a bite of cake, and the citrus plays across my tongue. I think how maybe there is never the car receding and the trace of dust behind it. Maybe it’s only ever cicadas, grinding their tune just offscreen, and river air pressing on you like all the things you wished you’d said but hadn’t.

ξ

Lauren Eller lives and writes in Washington, DC. She’s a 2018 graduate of Kenyon College, where she served as an intern for the Kenyon Review. Her previous work has appeared in Bound Off.