Sherri would have taken her, but she felt so responsible for Arthur’s accident that she knew she couldn’t be trusted with any creature with a heartbeat. She ran inside and grabbed her things. She took Arthur’s pillowcase and inhaled the scent of him. She took his newspaper, scribbled with notes. She went outside and opened the door to her car. It stank like a barroom floor.

The car had come with an atlas. She opened it up and found the arteries that led to California. She inserted the key, backed out of Arthur’s driveway one last time, and sped past the attendant in the booth without so much as slowing down. She’d hardly remember that stunned, silent drive to the West Coast. All the music that once filled her head was replaced by the very last words Arthur had spoken in an endless loop:

Anything for you, Sherri.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The atlas got Sherri to California without problems, but the blurry inset map did little to help her navigate the endless sprawl of Los Angeles. Her first mistake was to arrive during rush hour. The most traffic she’d ever experienced before that early California evening was at Alpine Valley. She’d never before seen, or even imagined, such serpentine freeways. They were as big and as jammed as the parking lot at the resort on a Saturday night, as if a giant octopus had descended on the city, wrapped its arms around it, and the arms became roads. In her abrupt departure, she hadn’t thought to bring her sunglasses with her, and the bright California sun left spots in her eyes from the light bouncing off the gleaming metal and glass of the cars.

Her face was wet from tears and she smelled faintly of the musty towel from the roadside motel she’d stopped at, where she had tried without success to get some sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Arthur hanging in the sky. She was certain she’d never sleep again.

Impatient to get there, wherever “there” was, she rode the bumpers of the cars in front of her. She lit cigarette after cigarette, her hands jittery from nicotine and speed. She didn’t even bother with the ashtray, so the ashes were sprinkled like dirty snow across the brown velour seat.

Every lane change felt like a death-defying act. All the other drivers, especially the ones who drove in convertibles, seemed so impossibly blasé. How she wished she could trade places with people who had a place to go; for them, this was just another day, and they were in the middle of their lives. Her only reassurance was that, aside from Mitch and Tina, nobody knew her there, not a soul. She could start fresh, but then she dismissed the thought. She’d never be fresh, never again.