The desert landscape seemed to melt through the windshield, blurring inescapably around Leah in wavering rivulets. Leah momentarily was brought back to her childhood in Mississippi, when her father would let her sit in the closed cab of the pickup truck as he sprayed the soap off the windshield with their coiled, green garden hose. Leah always felt comfortable watching the world swirl away into giant streams of soap and come shimmering back, clearing in the still, humid summer heat.
Leah was awoken with a start by the blaring horn of a semi-truck, and cried aloud as she wrenched her rusty '84 Volvo back into her own lane. The glare of the headlights had momentarily blinded her, and the muscles of her body braced themselves for the impact she had barely missed. Leah pulled over the the side of the road with her heart hammering in her chest, like a hummingbird fluttering helplessly in a glass jar. She shakily ran a hand through her hair and looked back to the toddler in the backseat, his tiny mouth parted in sleep.
The two lane highway was curiously quiet in the still desert night, and as Leah turned off the ignition the whole sky seemed to come ablaze with thousands of pinpricks of stars. Leah bit her lip against oncoming tears, pressing the heels of her palms into her eyesockets to prevent the reaction. She had been driving for almost 26 hours, stopping only once in Texas to get applesauce for the baby and take a two-hour nap in a gas station parking lot. Her whole body ached with exhaustion, her legs and temples throbbing. She bit on her lip so hard she tasted blood in her mouth, but refused to let the tears come, her knuckles turning stark white against the black plastic of the steering wheel.
Leah had fucked up badly, and she knew it. She was in over her head and so she did what she always did best whenever she felt overwhelmed: leave. She packed a bag of mismatched clothes in the Volvo and put Tony in his carseat, smearing dark mud on the license plates of her car and fucking bolting out of Atlanta at 3 in the morning two days ago, heading for the blazing neon and dead, wavy heat of Vegas. Leah took a deep and almost wheezing breath, like she was pushing through the surface of a dark and nearly bottomless pool. As soon as Tony was safe at her sister's, Leah would finally be able to breathe. Or so she hoped.
"Fuck," she whispered softly to herself, leaning her forehead against the steering wheel. She wished Anthony was here to brush the hair out of her face and tell her it was okay like he used to before he lost his mind, choosing imaginary voices instead of her and their child. The thought of Anthony just created a dull, throbbing ache in her gut, like something had been cut out of her. Like something was missing.
Still, she couldn't blame Anthony for her problems. She struggled to stay on her feet and keep from drinking too much, but it was hard to raise a baby in a new city by yourself. Leah had turned to people she thought she could trust.
And she always trusted too easily. Or she thought she could get away with fucking up by wearing low-cut shirts and speaking in her sweet Southern drawl. But charms like that don't pay back twenty-five grand, or make up for the fact that she tried to use counterfeit bills to front the drugs. She should've known that drug dealers always can tell. The cut from where they pushed the blade against her throat in the basement of their house still glared red and angry, even in the dim and bluish light of the desert nocturnal glow.
She looked at the odometer on the dash. Just a couple more hundred miles 'til the safety of the grey concrete and fake bamboo flooring and chlorinated pool of her sister's. Just a couple more hours 'til she and Tony were safe.
Leah turned the key in the ignition, the engine thrumming solidly to life as she pulled back onto the highway. She didn't notice the car parked a half-mile back alongside the road do the same, keeping a clear distance from the scrutiny of her rearview mirror, its Georgia plates reflecting dimly in the pale wash of the desert moon.
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