Distances

It isn’t karma that gets you in the end—it’s something more vicious

At the gas station where they pulled off the side of the highway, the dry wind blew chaparral spikes against their tanned legs. A tree waved its bare limbs like a witch slashing a wand at anything in her way. Around them, the land stretched flat to the pointed peaks lining the horizon and reflected the sun’s intensity so that the pebbled ground shone like a giant, fiery opal.

Jane squinted and shaded her eyes with her hand as she contemplated heat waves distorting the air above the two-lane highway. They had traveled over three hundred miles since morning when dawn had painted the desert terrain in purples and the only other travelers had been cattle kicking up miles of dust just below the road. Now the sun poised directly above them, making Jane’s ebony hair hot to touch.

Yesterday in Santa Fe, she and her sister Beth had bought delicate silver anklets and wandered through the sidewalk markets eyeing turquoise earrings and necklaces. They had entered an art gallery, and the artist had shown them his studio and a series of his narrative paintings. In one picture, a naked Eve gripped an apple. Her arm was extended above her head, and the rendering froze her in ambiguous motion: was she catching or throwing the apple, the artist had wanted to know.

“Eve was throwing the apple,” Beth said now as she leaned against their green, two-door car. A purple bandana covered her shoulder-length hair and kept it out of her face when they drove with the windows down.

“Think so?” Jane undid her braid. She started twisting her thick hair, coarse and straight like a horse’s mane, into a bun.

“She wanted to get rid of it.” Beth kicked the car’s tire. “Soon as she touched it, she knew it was trouble.”

“The original apple was probably a fig,” Jane said.

“In the painting, it was an apple.”

“She was catching it.” Jane twisted off the gas tank cap and inserted the pump. A drop of sweat slithered down her leg.

“You’re just disagreeing to disagree.”

“Knowledge is power,” Jane said. “She was catching it.”

“Sometimes it’s better not to know,” Beth said.

They went inside the gas station’s mini-mart to buy more bottled water. Behind the cash register, a woman with a flowered, parachute-shaped dress rocked in a wooden chair. Her thick ankles swelled in the heat, and a black pug slept on the floor beside her. A ceiling fan whirred.

“Hot today,” the woman said as she heaved herself out of the chair. The pug grunted and waddled over to the door where it stared out the glass.

“It’s making me dizzy,” Jane said.

“Stop complaining about everything.” Beth walked to the refrigerated case. Sweat made her tank top stick to the small of her back, and she pulled the material away from her skin.

“Careful, this altitude can make you not yourself,” the woman said. “Drink water.”

“Yeah, someone’s getting snappy,” Jane said.

“You two twins?” The woman studied the girls as they paid for the water and a bag of pretzels.

Jane looked at Beth. “Just sisters,” she said.

“You’re lucky to have each other.” The woman held their change in her thick fist as she spoke. She dropped the coins into Beth’s open palm.

From the passenger seat, Jane pressed the radio buttons but found only static and a country station. “You’re too quiet,” she said. Reaching for a bottle of water, she took a sip and then poured some of it on her head. They were afraid to turn on the air-conditioning as the car climbed uphill in the overbearing temperature.

“We need to do a rain dance,” Jane said. “I can’t take this heat.”

Pulling her camera out of a bag by her feet, she looked through it to find her picture, but the brightness outside the car expanded like some alien terrain. Only a single Turkey Vulture interrupted the sky’s solid blue. Leaning slightly out the window, she focused on the passenger side mirror and tried to photograph herself taking the picture. Behind them the road stretched serpent-like and unending.

“You still mad because I stole your lipstick?” Jane asked.

“Karma,” Beth said as she kept her eyes on the road’s dividing yellow line, “will always get you in the end.”

“Will it?” Jane asked.

“Sure.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Don’t you believe in karma?” Beth asked.

“What goes around comes around? Is that how you operate?”

“I believe in doing what’s necessary,” Beth said.

“Even if it means bad karma?” Jane could feel the car accelerating, speeding along the highway like a shiny, green dragonfly. The wind seemed to suck the air from her lungs and stick in her throat. Pressing her head back into the seat, she closed her eyes and absorbed the car’s forward motion. She wanted to be pure velocity.

“I believe in not getting caught,” Beth said. Her knuckles strained as she gripped the steering wheel.

“So karma applies to everyone but you?” Jane focused the camera on Beth, satisfied with the way its click interrupted her sister.

“What are you doing?” Beth asked.

“Capturing you driving,” Jane said.

“Put that away.”

“I’m going to make a scrap book of our trip.” Jane clicked the camera at Beth again. “This series will be called ‘Older sister driving through desolate New Mexico.’”

“Jane.”

“What?” Jane dropped the camera into her lap. “What about karma?”

“Karma applies only when you get caught,” Beth said.

“So I get bad karma because you know I took your lipstick?”

“Now, you know what I mean.”

“No,” Jane said into the wind rushing through the side window. “It isn’t karma that gets you in the end—it’s something more vicious.”

Before their trip, Jane had known that something was coming, that something inside her was about to get outside. She had known this because all last week she had pictured cutting her waist-long hair up to the nape of her neck. She had known as she had driven the dirt roads through the hills and stopped to watch the alpacas behind a fence. She had known as she bought socks and underwear at a drugstore so she would not have to wash her dirty laundry. Showering later, she had run her razor over her legs again and again, only stopping when she realized she had been shaving for twenty minutes.

What she had not known was that it would happen in their mother’s kitchen as she continued to stir tomato soup long after it had come to a boil. She had been studying the wooden spoon’s rhythm through the red liquid when Dan, Beth’s boyfriend, came up behind her and circled his arms around her waist. Jumping, Jane bumped her elbow against the metal saucepan. Soup splashed her bare arm.

“Sorry,” Dan said. “Thought you were Beth.”

Twisting around, Jane looked up at him. Tiny bristles covered his chin, and a dimple pulled at the side of his mouth as he smiled. Jane did not move. She felt pure and honest as she said, “No, you didn’t.”

“No,” he said and leaned down to kiss her.

What was inside escaped. She kissed him back. The things we say we’ll never do, she thought. Behind her, the tomato soup foamed and bubbled over the pan, spilling onto the stove and sizzling out the gas burner.

The next day, she had baked a three-layer cake, frosted it with chocolate and decorated it with mint leaves and raspberries. The arrangement of berries had to be precise in the same way that guilt was completely absent. She decided then that she would become a skilled liar.

“I have a headache,” she said now as she slipped her feet out of her sandals and pressed her heels against the dashboard.

“How much longer in this heat?”

“You didn’t have to come,” Beth said.

“Mom never would have let you drive cross country by yourself.”

“She’d get over it.”

“Still,” Jane said. “I wouldn’t let you drive by yourself.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Beth asked.

The restaurant where they stopped for lunch was so dimly lit Jane could barely read the menu. The bartender wiped down the wooden bar with a cloth, and a man in a cream-colored cowboy hat sat on a stool and sipped at a beer bottle. Soft rock music played from a jukebox.

Their ginger-ales came in plastic cups, and as they waited for their food, Jane crunched ice cubes. Beth poured a quarter of a bottle of Tabasco sauce into the salsa before dipping a chip into it.

“I’ll be back,” Jane said as she stood and headed to the bathroom.

When she returned, the man in the cowboy hat was sitting in the booth next to Beth and had stretched his arm across the back of the seat. He smiled at Jane and reached out to shake her hand.

“Andy,” he said.

“He’s a guest rancher on his way to Colorado,” Beth explained and turned towards Andy. Jane would have sworn her sister was batting her eyes.

“A real cowboy,” Jane said.

“Something like that.” Andy tipped his hat to her. “Got a lasso and everything.”

Their lunch arrived, and as they ate, Andy told them about his travels through Texas. Jane noticed that his hand had come to rest on her sister’s bare shoulder. She separated the rice on her plate into four piles and listened as Beth asked Andy questions. She ripped a flour tortilla in half and then put it on top of the rice.

“Want to dance?” Jane asked, interrupting Beth mid-sentence. Beth stared at her sister and pressed her lips together. Andy glanced sideways at Beth, who gripped the plastic cup in front of her.

“Go ahead,” Beth said. “Jane’s a good dancer.”

In the open area between the bar and the table, Jane moved with Andy and laughed. She created her own velocity here and everything around her blurred. When the song ended, Andy twirled her and said he would order a round of drinks.

Back at the table, Jane plopped into the booth and sighed. “That felt good after being in the car,” she said.

“Just tell me one thing,” Beth said. She swirled the little bit of ginger-ale left in her cup and did not look up at her sister.

“Did you think he was a good kisser?”

“I didn’t kiss him,” Jane said.

“Not Andy—Dan.”

“Oh,” Jane said. Her acceleration equaled gravity’s, and she could not escape it. “Bethy, I didn’t mean—I’m sorry.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Beth poured the rest of the bottle of Tabasco sauce into the bowl of salsa.

“You going to eat that?” Jane asked.

“Maybe,” Beth said.

“Don’t be mad Bethy,” Jane said. “It didn’t mean anything.”

“No,” Beth said. “It didn’t.”

“Thought it’d be worse to tell you,” Jane said. She chewed on the end of her fourth finger nail.

At the bar, Andy waved at them. His hat had slipped low over his forehead and he seemed to peek out from under it.

“I’ll get our drinks,” Jane said. “We’ll talk in a minute…I promise.”

When she got to the bar, Andy grinned and picked up her hand. “Another dance?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. As they stepped to the music, Jane did not look in her sister’s direction and tried to think only about the circular motion of Andy spinning her around.

When they finished, Jane said, “Better bring Beth her drink.”

“Not there.” He gestured at the table.

“What?” Jane stared at the booth with their half-eaten lunches and the bowls of chips and salsa. “Give me a minute.”

She went into the bathroom and called Beth’s name, looking for feet in the stalls. Beth was not there. Outside, Jane stood in the space where they had parked. The metallic-green car was gone.

Daylight burned Jane’s eyes as she stared at the vast land dotted with brittle shrubs. Around her, the miles reached to the mountain-lined horizon, hot and white and unrelenting.

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