It unnerved Milo to think that perhaps he was no different from Louis the Porn Fiend or Michael and Emily Bryson or Arthur Friedman or Eugene or even Linda the pancake saleswoman. Just like him, these people were imbued with qualities that made them different, sometimes outright bizarre. Even relatively normal people like Edith Marchand had their quirks and eccentricities. Yet these were people willing to live their lives out in the open and share their differences with the world. These were not people burdened with secrets like Milo was, and in many ways, Milo admired them for their honesty and courage. But as hard as he tried, he could never imagine sharing his life with all its strangeness and peculiarity the way they had.
He was simply not that brave.
And when he tried to share the little things, like contemplations on urinal flow, it always seemed to backfire.
“Are you ready to go?” Emma asked, moving past him to dump her tray full of trash into the bin.
“Sure,” Milo said, suddenly fearful about what else he might say to her, concerned that the next revelation might be stranger than the last.
By the time they had doubled back onto Interstate 95, the need to bowl a strike had lit up in his head like noontime sun and his fear of not being able to satisfy it was blossoming. Milo also sensed that this was just the first in what would soon become a six-car pileup of demands that he would not be able to control.
chapter 29
Bowling was a bad place to begin.
With the discovery of the twenty-four-hour bowling lane in Vernon, Milo had rarely needed to put off fulfilling this demand, so for reasons that he did not fully understand, it was more difficult for him to quiet the need now. Had a word like conflagration or placebo lit up in his head, he would have been better equipped at stemming its tide, particularly if a solution was found and only required time to enact. But the need to bowl a strike was so often immediately satisfied that it demanded the same now.
Also, it would be difficult to explain to Emma why he suddenly wanted to go bowling, since he had explained how he needed to be back in Connecticut by midafternoon the following day. Half an hour after leaving McDonald’s, Emma had broached the subject of their evening plans, suggesting that they stop and sleep whenever Milo felt the need to rest. He had been relieved, fearing that she might want to drive straight through the night in shifts. Luckily she, like Milo, did not think that driving overnight was the safest idea, even with two of them shouldering the load. Though the decision over sharing a room had not yet been raised, Milo guessed that Emma would want her own room, which was fine by him. The privacy might permit him the opportunity to go out bowling, provided that he could find a lane that was open.
“Where do you think you might want to stop?” Emma asked. “It’s your choice. Okay?”
Milo told her that he’d drive until he was tired and then stop at the next hotel, though he had a specific place in mind.
The jelly jars in the trunk began calling to him (he suspected that two jars would not be nearly enough this time) about fifteen minutes after the demand for bowling had made its appearance, and this was followed closely by something new: the desperate need to let the air out of his tires. He could only guess that the demand arose after driving by a motorist experiencing car trouble, but no specific incident came to mind. The demand was also connected with the sudden realization that the majority of the air in the Honda’s tires was more than five years old, and though it made no sense to him, this seemed entirely too old to be driving long distances.
As Milo had feared, these three demands began echoing in his brain, feeding off one another, making his attempts to hold them off ineffectual. The added stress of the mounting demands only served to heighten their intensity and potentially bring on others, and Milo knew that if he didn’t find a way to satisfy them soon, his ability to think clearly and even drive effectively might be compromised.
It appeared that the U-boat captain was flooding all tubes, ready for an all-out assault.
There were mechanisms that Milo had developed in order to keep his demands at bay, but even these were impossible while trapped in the confines of the Honda. Small pressure releases were often enough to stay the demands temporarily, things such as the snapping and unsnapping the buttons on his jacket or jeans, the popping of a sheet or two of bubble wrap, or the inflating and deflating of a balloon (he kept a supply of them in the glove compartment). But without the proper jacket, a supply of bubble wrap, or a means of explaining his balloon procedure to Emma, Milo’s only option was to begin snapping and unsnapping the snap that closed his jeans around his waist, and he doubted that this action would go unnoticed. Had he known that he would be carrying a passenger, he might have worn one of his multi-snap jackets or carried a supply of bubble wrap in a coat pocket in order to surreptitiously pop, but unprepared as he was, his jacket closed with a zipper and bubble wrap was not among the items that he had packed.
Without these pressure-release strategies, things became steadily worse.
Emma had begun to ask him questions about his job, but, no longer able to focus clearly on the driving and the conversation simultaneously, Milo attempted to turn the conversation back toward Emma and get her speaking instead. He asked her questions about her writing career, discovering that she was a romance novelist as well as an advice columnist for her local newspaper and several online publications. Though Milo was intrigued by her profession, he knew that follow-up questions in this realm would lead to less of a narrative on Emma’s part, so he put them off in favor of subjects that would promote more long-form answers.
He asked Emma about her trip to North Carolina so many years ago, and here she offered up a story that carried him and his immutable demands for miles.
Milo had envisioned her hitchhiking her way to North Carolina, climbing into the cabs of trucks and into the backs of pickup trucks on her way south, but this proved not to be the case.
“Milo, I was thirteen, but I wasn’t an idiot. And besides, when you grow up with a father who is a monster, you don’t trust very many men. Even Uncle Owen and Uncle Paul made me nervous for a long time. Hell, I didn’t even start dating until after college, and that was after a shitload of therapy. I wasn’t about to climb into a truck with some strange man. Besides, if I was going to hitchhike, why would I spend all that time planning with Cassidy?”
Milo conceded the point and encouraged her to continue, busy as he was with waging a silent war in his head, and losing badly.
Instead of hitchhiking, Emma (Tess at the time) had walked, following a route of secondary roads that she and Cassidy had mapped out, avoiding highways for fear of the police or something worse. It took her a week to make it to Baltimore, one day ahead of schedule, where she used the allowance that she had saved, along with Cassidy’s forty dollars, to buy an Amtrak ticket to Alexandria. From there she returned to the road, where she tented in public campgrounds and in wooded areas just off the road as she made her way south. She ate at fast food restaurants and roadside vegetable stands, but mostly from the supply of candy bars, beef jerky, and dried fruit that she had packed for the trip. She filled a two-liter Coke bottle with water at every public restroom she could find and drank as much water as possible.
“The two-liter bottle was actually a bad idea. I can’t remember if it was mine or Cassidy’s, but I should’ve sprung for a canteen. It was impossible to fill the thing in restroom sinks because it was so tall and the sinks were so shallow. I ended up using a Pepsi can to transfer the water from the tap to the bottle. What a pain in the ass.”
Thanks to their planning, Emma knew the location of many public campgrounds, but her inability to gauge the walking time between them caused her to spend many a night off the side of the road in a copse of nondescript forest.
“I wasn’t ready for rain, either, and for two straight days, it poured like nobody’s business. I had no raincoat, so I was soaked for the entire time. This was just after I crossed the North Carolina—Virginia border, I think. I remem
ber that I was so wet that I didn’t dare go into McDonald’s or Arby’s for fear of being reported to the police. I was shivering and cold and a complete mess. Even my tent was soaked through. It’s a miracle that I didn’t catch pneumonia.”
Emma explained that she eventually found shelter by pitching her tent under pine trees or stopping beneath bridges when the rain became especially bad. One night in Virginia, she slept in the toolshed of an abandoned farmhouse.
“It wasn’t easy,” she told Milo. “It was hard. Harder than I had expected. God, I was only thirteen. I was tired and cold and scared the whole way. But the darkest, coldest, hungriest nights on the road were better than any night in my house with my father. That’s what kept me going.”
Twenty-three days after leaving Blackstone, Massachusetts, she arrived on the doorstep of Aunt Kaleigh and Uncle Owen. “I was tired and dirty and I had lost about fifteen pounds, but I remember seeing my aunt’s face in that doorway and knowing that she knew exactly why I was there. I didn’t have to say a word. She just took me in her arms and I cried and cried and cried. I cried for my mother, because I knew that I would probably never see her again, but mostly I cried out of happiness. I knew I would finally be safe.”
“You must have been one tough kid,” Milo said with genuine awe.
“You’d be surprised at how tough a father like mine can make someone. After fighting him off for four or five years, locking yourself in the bathroom and hiding under your bed and running away, you’d be tough too.”
Milo continued to be stunned at Emma’s willingness to confide in him about her relationship with her father. Though she knew that Milo was aware of her father’s criminal history and had accurately surmised the reason for her disappearance, she was willing and able to talk about him without hesitation or emotion, rather than leaving the dynamics of the relationship like some unmentioned elephant in the room, as he thought most would.
“So you remember Cassidy well?”
“Absolutely,” Emma said. “We were great friends back then. It was hard for me to be close to anyone with everything that was going on at home, but I was as close to Cassidy as I could be to anyone at that time. I don’t think I could’ve made it to Chisholm without her. Her and those maps. I’m surprised she didn’t end up becoming a geographer. Or a travel agent. It breaks my heart to think that she’s blamed herself for all these years.”
“She’ll be happy to see you,” Milo said, shamelessly envisioning himself as the hero of the reunion, the one who brought them together.
“I hope so.”
Karaoke struck Milo about an hour south of the nation’s capital. On top of bowling, the pressure seals, and the need to deflate the Honda’s tires, this demand hit him like a freight train. The impossibility to satisfy it (what were the chances of him finding a karaoke bar in Virginia or Maryland?), combined with its sheer intensity, made it almost too much for Milo to bear. He knew that once he arrived at the hotel, the demands of the jelly jars could be satisfied with ease, and even the tires could be deflated without much trouble (though inflating them would be another story entirely). But the bowling, he knew, would be problematic, and the karaoke would likely prove impossible. If so, that meant that these two dueling demands would continue to ring out in his head for the remainder of the trip, increasing his level of tension, elevating the pressure, and strengthening the vise on his mind, which would likely lead to still more demands on him. He was trapped in a vicious circle that would only become worse with each mile.
Fifteen minutes later, Emma told Milo that she needed to pee. Considering that it had become exceedingly difficult to drive with the physical pain that his demands were now causing, he was thrilled with the opportunity to exit the highway and attempt to satisfy at least one of them.
And that’s when—in the throes of opening his fifth jar under the sodium glow of a parking lot florescent at a Burger King just south of Washington, D.C., along Interstate 95—the unthinkable happened, the moment that Milo had been avoiding for almost his entire life: Emma had come back to the car, and he had been discovered. In the midst of satisfying a demand, one in a pile of demands that were beginning to tear him apart, Milo could not stop. As she opened the passenger door, Emma paused for a moment, staring at the four opened jars of Smucker’s grape jelly on her seat and the one currently clutched in Milo’s hands, before asking “Uh … what’s this?”
Surrendering to the pain and pressure of the demands and the impossible circumstances at hand, Milo decided that the time for secrets had come to an end.
“Just give me a minute and I’ll explain everything,” Milo said, then turned the lid on the jar, absorbed the satisfying pop of the pressure seal, and sighed heavily.
chapter 30
Milo knew three things:
First, during the twenty-five minutes that he spent explaining his condition to Emma, she had remained silent, only nodding when appropriate but never interrupting. Perhaps his opening statement (I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone else in my life) aptly conveyed the difficulty that he might have in relaying his story and for this reason she allowed him to proceed without disruption.
Second, the process of telling his secret, one that he had held sacred since the age of eight, had alleviated some of the pressure that was building inside, although it in no way satisfied any of the demands that continued to occupy his mind.
Third, Christine had called him three times during his twenty-five-minute monologue, judging by the repeated interruption of the “Take a Chance on Me” ring tone that he had assigned his wife long ago (knowing if she was calling, she would never hear his choice of song).
The irony of the situation was also not lost on him. After keeping his demands from his parents, his friends, and his wife, he was finally telling his secret to a woman who lived under an assumed identity and had many secrets of her own.
He began by opening the remaining four jars of jelly, all in Emma’s presence, which proved to be both awkward and embarrassing for him. Despite his attempts to dampen his physical reaction to the popping of each pressure seal, he was unable to hold back the sigh of relief and body shudder that came with each one. Emma had not reacted to the fifth jar, which he had opened while she was still standing outside the Honda, but she was sitting beside him when he had opened the sixth, having moved the opened jars to the backseat. The infinitesimal hiss and audible pop of the seal forced a soft whine from Milo’s nose, and his arms and upper torso nearly convulsed in relief.
Relief and embarrassment, satisfaction and shame, washed over him all at once. As the pressure of the demands decreased with the opening of the jar, the mortification associated with carrying out the process in the presence of a witness began to replace the space in his mind that the demand had occupied.
Emma would say later that she had tried not to laugh, but to Milo, it seemed as if no effort had been made at all. As his body shuddered in relief, the silence of the car was broken by a snort from Emma, the kind of swallowed-up laugh that escapes a person’s nose and eventually forces open the mouth. “Sorry,” she said. “But what the hell is going on?”
Before he spoke, Milo took a deep breath and checked to see if the demand that had been searing his brain for hours was gone. As he had expected, it was not. Among the pileup of demands still ravaging his mind, the pressure of the pressure seals remained, grinding on in the form of a mind-numbing headache among the echoing clutter.
“Just give me a minute,” Milo snapped, and immediately regretted doing so. “Sorry. It’s just that I’ve got to get these jars open first. Then I can explain. Okay?”
“Oh,” Emma said, reaching for and grabbing a jar from Milo’s lap before he could stop her. In seconds, she was holding the jar in her left hand, her right hand positioned on the lid, ready to open.
“No!” he shouted, his voice sounding enormous in the confines of the automobile. Emma flinched at the sudden boom of his voice, releasing the jelly jar, which struck the e
dge of the upholstered seat, reversed rotation, and then struck the carpeted floor between Emma’s legs with a thud. Milo released the jar in his own hands and lunged for it, and as he did so, the jars in his lap, including the one that had just been in his hand, clanked together, glass on glass, before tumbling to the floor between his own legs in a series of successive thuds. Attempting to avoid the gearshift, which was set in a console between the two front seats, Milo veered slightly right in his lunge and found himself a moment later fumbling with his right hand for the jar between Emma’s legs while his face was planted squarely in her crotch.
“Milo, can you get your nose out of my vagina?” Emma asked in a surprisingly serene voice, offering some assistance by gripping the back of his hair and lifting. Thankfully, his right hand had found and latched on to the jar just before his left hand gained hold of the steering wheel and he yanked his body back to its original position.
“Sorry,” Milo said, cradling the recovered jar in both hands now. “It was—”
“Awkward?” Emma suggested.
“I was going to say unintentional.”
“Great,” Emma said, smiling now. “First guy that close to my vagina in months and he got there by mistake.”
Milo returned the smile, feeling slightly more relaxed despite the awkwardness of the situation. “Sorry. But can you just wait one minute? I’ve got to open these jars, and it has to be me who opens them.”
“Sure,” Emma said, her response lacking even a hint of sarcasm. Though Milo wasn’t certain, he thought he detected understanding and acceptance in that single syllable.
As he opened each of the remaining jars, the pressure of the demand lessened, but his physical reaction to the hiss and pop did not. A shudder, a sigh, and an exhalation of breath that he didn’t even realize he was holding all accompanied each turn of the lid. And each time, Emma could not help but snort or even giggle as his response. Though he would’ve thought that her reaction would engender even more embarrassment and shame in him, the contrary seemed to be taking place. Her amused laughter did not sound mean or judgmental in any way. Simply amused and perhaps even a little affectionate. Oddly enough, Emma’s reactions helped Milo to relax a bit and tell his story with greater ease.