Into the Night

Emmie ended the call and set her phone next to where she sat on the hood of the car, then lit the cigarette she had been holding almost too tightly in her left hand. She took a long drag and exhaled slowly, watching the smoke float up toward one of the few illuminated/working lights in the parking lot. She squinted through the darkness toward the mall entrance and felt the silence of the deserted parking lot buzzing in her ears. The humidity emphasized the scent of shampoo and hair products that always clung to her hands and clothes and mixed with the smell of the smoke.

Since Mike’s car had officially stopped working and she needed to give him a ride home, this period between her shift ending at 8pm and his at 9pm, when the silence of the deserted parking lot rinsed away the exhaustion of a day spent on her feet making small talk with middle aged women, was usually her favorite hour of the day. Even though the mall didn’t close until 9:00, the parking lot was usually deserted by the time she walked out to her car. Honestly, the parking lot was pretty close to deserted all day, no matter what time it was.

She felt the heat of the cigarette approaching her fingertips and dropped it to the ground, stamping it out with the ball of her foot. She looked at the time on her phone – 8:42 – and pulled another cigarette out of the pack of Newports she always had stashed in her bag. She had just taken her first drag when she heard the doors of the mall opening and laughter bursting into the night. She was surprised to see Mike and Felipe, his manager at the cell phone kiosk, walking out, their bright red polo shirts gleaming in the night. As Mike headed into the parking lot, Felipe veered in the other direction toward the main road, and they gave hearty waves to each other.

“Hey, babe,” Mike said as he approached her and took the cigarette from between her fingers. He gave her a quick peck on the cheek before he took a drag, and then sat down next to her on the car. His weight abruptly pulled the car down a few inches and Emmie quickly put her hand behind her to steady herself.

“You’re out early,” she observed.

He nodded, taking another drag of the cigarette. “Mall’s dead. Felipe decided to close up early. I think he’s seeing that girl he met the other day and wanted to get a jump on it.” He laughed knowingly, and Emmie chimed in with a few chuckles.

“Have a good day?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The usual. How about you?”

“Same.”

She looked over at him, in awe of how her breath still caught in her throat at the sight of him, even after more than two years together. She reached out to a stray clump of dark hair that curled toward his eye and tucked it back behind his ear into the rest of his hair and let her fingers linger in its thickness for a few seconds. She dropped her hand back down to her lap and looked toward the mall entrance again.

“I just talked to Kelly,” she told him.

He exhaled up toward the sky. “Oh yeah? What’s going on with her?”

Emmie shrugged again. “The same. But she got another raise at work.”

“Good for her.” He offered her the cigarette, but she waved it away.

“Yeah. She brought up me going out there again.”

He didn’t say anything, but she looked at him out of the corner of her eye and could tell he was rolling his eyes. She realized she was holding her breath.

“It could be a really good thing. Her job sounds so good, and she can get me started where she did.”

“You could get a job like that around here. You don’t have to move 6 hours away.”

She took the cigarette from him and inhaled. “I’ve tried.”

She took another drag and exhaled slowly, then handed it back to him. “This town is just…”

“Yeah, I know, I know.”

“Kelly’s benefits are—”

“I know, Em, I know. Health care, tuition, blah blah. I get it.”

She knew he knew, they had had this conversation enough times that this could have been a recording they played instead of actually having to expend the energy.

He reached over and covered her hand with his. “Just wait a little longer and we can get out of here together. I just need to save up a little more. I promise you won’t need to be a hairdresser forever if you don’t want to.”

“I’m not even a hairdresser, Mike! I do blow outs all day long! I can’t even cut hair!” She shook her head, feeling her cheeks burning with contempt for herself. She took a deep breath and softened her voice. “You can come with me, babe. We can live with Kelly for as long as we need to. Even if for some reason you can’t get a better job, it’s not like you can’t get the same job you have here.”

He snorted and tossed the finished cigarette hard on the ground. The car bounced up as he stood up and moved toward the passenger side. “Just give me some more time. We don’t need your sister to bail us out.”

This time she didn’t ask what he needed more time for. He never really gave her an answer, and she had concluded that, at worst it was lack of inertia, at best it was just fear. She understood the fear of leaving, of the unknown. But she was more afraid of living a dead-end life and dying in the same dead-end town to which she had been born.

They both got in the car, Emmie knowing the first part of the drive would be in silence while Mike got over his irritation with the conversation. When she started the ignition, the radio came on, some currently popular song that the radio station in the salon seemed to play every hour, and whose words had forcefully forged their path in her brain. She turned it up and sang along under her breath while Mike sat next to her staring out the window.

She pulled out of the parking lot for what seemed like the millionth time and drove down the winding road to the stop light at the main street. She watched the giant mall, sitting nearly empty for the last 20 years, disappear from the rearview mirror, and turned right to continue the short drive past the fast-food restaurants and strip malls with too many boarded up shops, into the more densely populated town where she and Mike lived with their parents.

They were almost to Mike’s house when he finally spoke. “Scott’s having everyone over on Saturday night to swim. You know, before it’s too cold out.”

“Yeah, sounds fun.”

“Cool, I’ll let him know we’ll come by.”

Emmie nodded her head, thinking about hanging out with the regular weekend crew that consisted of the convergence of her and Mike’s friend groups, and many of whom she had known since she was in diapers. She thought about how easy it was to be with them, how natural. She loved them all, and she loved being with them, and she wondered if they would all still be hanging out on Saturday nights in 10 years. In 20 years. And she felt the complicated sensation of comfortable warmth and like something was wrapping around her throat.

She wondered what her relationship with Mike would look like in 10 years and thought back to when they first hooked up. He was four years older than her, was in the same grade as her sister, and so she had known of him for as long as she could remember. He was handsome and popular, and she had seen him hanging out with her sister’s group of friends, but never talked to him until she started working at the mall after she graduated from high school. She was taking community college classes at the time, and he saw her studying for a test at a table in the food court one evening and stopped by to say hi.

They started hanging out during their work breaks when their schedules matched up, and sometimes after work, sitting on the hood of one of their cars, talking like they had known each other forever. Finally, after a couple of weeks, he invited her to join him at a party. She had already fallen for him by that night, captured by his eyes that seemed to bore into her soul when she talked to him and made her feel like she was the only thing in his world. She was struck by his vulnerability when he shared his shame at dropping out of college after only a couple of months even though he had hated every part of it, and she felt excited when he talked about his ideas for his future – the ideas he had for starting some kind of business with friends, or maybe taking over a franchise. So she hadn’t thought twice when he invited her over to his house after the party, where they had quietly taken off their clothes in his bedroom and fallen into bed, hoping his parents wouldn’t wake up. And from there, they were always together unless they were working.

But that was two years ago, and they were both still working their jobs at the mall, Emmie had stopped taking classes because of the cost and because she wanted to spend her free time with Mike, and Mike didn’t really talk much about his future anymore. Since high school, she always assumed she would go somewhere for college, and even when she wasn’t able to afford it right after graduating, it always felt like a plan in the works. When her sister moved away for a new job the previous spring, she realized at some point she had stopped considering college a given, and that jolted her from the day-to-day existence she had fallen into. She began to feel a sometimes-crippling sensation that time was running out, and that nothing would ever happen to her.  When she tried to talk about it with Mike, and to encourage him to start thinking beyond the mall and Saturday night beers with friends, he became fidgety and irritable, changing the subject as quickly as he could.

Her sister called her at least weekly and texted her daily, and regularly pushed for her to move in with her. She watched her sister, in less than half a year, receive promotions and pay raises, and her company was paying for the college classes she started taking that fall. Her sister promised her boss would hire Emmie, too. But leaving Mike was always the thing that stopped her.

She pulled the car into Mike’s driveway.

“Come in?” he asked.

“Nah,” she said, leaning over toward him. “Not tonight. I’m tired and have some stuff to do.” He looked a little surprised, but nodded and leaned toward her. They kissed for a few minutes, then Mike told her goodnight.

When he opened the door to get out of the car, the cabin light came on, lighting up the interior of the car. Catching sight of the suitcase sitting on the backseat, Emmie held her breath. But Mike just closed the door and headed to the house, and Emmie felt relieved and regret that he hadn’t seen it. She backed carefully out of the driveway, and at the corner she turned in the opposite direction from her house a few blocks away, instead heading toward the freeway.