Deer in Headlights

The truck stop beacon is a 50-foot tall neon waitress trapped in an endless purgatorial motion of kicking one high-heeled foot back while holding an immortal tray of drinks, her faceless smile, faceless wink beaming out on the interstate for miles around in the falling dusk. The advertisement seems unnecessary considering the only other options are a decaying Exxon that you passed an hour ago and the uncertainty of the long night ahead. Robin feels that the giant waitress is a kind of lighthouse. A sort of north star for the weary traveler, in need of a coffee and a reasonably clean toilet. She sets her sights on it as the highway falls into dark.

“This seat taken? Honey? This seat taken?”

Another one, on her other side. What did she expect? This is theirs, the highway is theirs. She is out of place, after dark, on he own. He says something loud and she thinks he is talking to her but realizes he is addressing the other one over her head.

“How’s the road tonight?”

“She’s a bitch, man, a bitch.”

A TV set in the corner above the counter. A plastic pig in a bikini rests on top, blissfully ignoring the news report going on beneath her—a harrowing farrago of police and lipsticked reporters, grainy footage of gas station parking lots, tired-looking mugshots, an interview with a hospital worker, a woman covering her face. Robin can’t tell if the TV is muted or just drowned out by the dull roar of cutlery and conversation. She looks back at her road atlas and follows the blue pen with her finger, like tracing a vein to the artery.

“Stuck there for 2 hours. Had to piss in a coke bottle.”

Laughter. A denim knee breaks through the careful plexiglass box visible only to Robin that encases her at all times. The waitress who took her order three minutes ago brings her a plate of biscuits, eggs, and home fries. She remembered the ketchup and even brought hot sauce. The coffee into which Robin has dumped five tiny creamers and three sugar packets is already in a Styrofoam cup with a plastic lid, even though everyone else at the counter is drinking from industrial ceramic. The waitress tops it off and slides Robin a hand-written bill. There is something conspiratorial in the way she says, “take your time.”

Robin looks into the waitress’s face, which is tilted up to look at the TV, where a teenage girl is being handcuffed in a Walgreens.

“Hey, honey! That coffee hot?”

Robin watches out of the slatted corners of her eyes as that one gets a good look at the waitress’s doctored cleavage, and she notices two things: that the waitress’s face has disappeared, and that she is wearing a nametag that says Wilhelmina. The label-maker sticker has been stuck on over another name—what happened to Wilhelmina’s predecessor? Or did its current owner update her own name? When Robin looks back up from the nametag, Wilhelmina has a face again, and it winks, neon.

“Whoa, sorry sweetheart!”

The coffee is hot. It soaks into the western half of North America like a rapidly-melting glacier, a lava flow, sea-level rise.

This one tries to undo the apocalypse with a wad of napkins, as Robin moves to shake the map out of the floor, and it rips down the middle

“I’m sorry, ah, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to rip that, there. I was just trying to, if you use the napkins it might stain, there, it might stick to the map.”

Robin folds the atlas and stuffs it under the counter with her backpack, the straps looped around her ankles. Coffee drips its way down her leg and into her sock. She lets it.

“You know you really should get a GPS on your phone, like Google maps. It’s a lot better than a map like this. Paper maps—anything can happen to them.”

Robin smiles at the denim knee and nods her head, agrees, shovels egg and potato into her mouth, covers everything in hot sauce, burns her throat with coffee, chews with her mouth open, pays the bill.

“It’s a lot easier to use, that’s what I use, and you don’t have to worry about it being out of date, it’ll even tell you where the traffic is or if there’s road work going on, honestly, you know you can just download it onto your phone. You just put in your location—”

Robin watches Wilhelmina watching the news. Wilhelmina rests a hand against her throat like a Hollywood actress. Robin leaves a 25 percent tip even though she is running out of money.

“Where are you headed, anyway? Maybe I could help you out with

directions. I’ve been driving these roads longer than you would guess by looking at me. I could—”

“Need anything else, miss?” Wilhelmina refreshes her coffee again. She has a tattoo on her wrist that Robin reads upside-down: Hope is the thing with feathers.

“The ladies’ room is just down the hall.”

A pair of police officers have staked out the booth behind her and are smiling over at Wilhelmina, who mouths be right with you, with a flirtatious wrinkle of her nose, a bat of her false eyelashes. When she turns to Robin, it’s with a nod, a yes to every question Robin doesn’t know to ask.

“Uh-huh, that’s right love, just down the hall to the left.”

After Robin has vomited up her breakfast, climbed out of the bathroom window, checked underneath her car and in the trunk and the backseat, and re-locked the doors, she finds that her car won’t start.

The electrics come on with a blast, the lights blinding, the radio turned up to drown-out-the-highway level. Robin startles like a rabbit. The car squeals bestially over the deafening OH MICKEY WHAT A PITY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND which Robin can’t seem to turn down fast enough, her heart hammering, hands shaking—

“Need a jump?”

She knew she checked the backseat. How did she miss him?

“Let me take a look under your hood.”

How could he have caught up to her? She had driven so fast, too fast IT’S GUYS LIKE YOU, MICKEY!

“Better let me check it out, Robin. You know, those mechanics will rip you off. They always overcharge girls like you. Because you let ‘em. You just don’t know how to say no!”

Robin pretends he is not really here. She does not look in the rearview mirror. Here he comes anyway, crawling up into the front with her, long arms snaking around the headrest, lips on her neck ANY WAY YOU WANT TO DO IT, I’LL TAKE YOU LIKE A MAN he reaches over across the steering wheel and into her lap and Robin turns the music up louder then she can stand so she can’t hear his voice in her head, punches the dashboard, pumps the gas pedals, not here, not here, not here BABY PLEASE BABY DON’T

“Are you okay?”

Wilhelmina is illuminated starkly in the glare of the headlights, a cigarette pasted into the corner of her mouth. The engine roars to life. Robin peals out of the gravel parking lot, past the rows of 18-wheelers asleep under the neon waitress’s blind watch.

Gas pedal. His arms are not on her anymore, but she doesn’t dare look in the rearview mirror. She doesn’t want to see the flashing lights, the deputies tearing out after her. She doesn’t want to see his empty face grinning at her from the shadows. Worst of all herself, herself, herself; her deer-in-headlights, it-wasn’t-me-officer, I-couldn’t-stop-him, poor-little-me face. It will always be there, that one. That face. This body. No matter how far she runs.

She closes her eyes. The highway is empty. The radio blares. Her car whines. She pretends he isn’t somewhere behind her in the dark. She flies.

Robin opens her eyes in time to see it run out in front of her car, some kind of animal. She makes impact and it feels like death. The airbag doesn’t deploy, but the seatbelt jerks over her belly and she curls around it, fetal. Stumbles from the car onto the roadside weeds. No oncoming traffic. Probably not for miles.

She is not surprised to see him there crumpled in the headlights like a pile of broken parts. She sees him everywhere. Why should he not be here, too? She is hopeful for a moment that it’s really him, somehow. That he has hitchhiked from the New Hanover Correctional Center over a thousand miles and followed her scent in the gas stations and Super 8s across America to throw himself in front of her Crown Victoria and die broken on the interstate in the distant glow of the neon waitress, like Saint Peter, like the angel Azrael. Robin leans against the hood of the car and cries to the empty road.

“I hoped it was you.”

Wilhelmina comes limping out of the darkness, her arch-support sneakers filthy, her hair falling flat. She is sweating in the humid summer night, and there are dark patches of damp in the armpits of her toothpaste-colored uniform. Robin thinks she has never seen anyone so beautiful in her entire life. She finds her voice, and it’s hoarse. She realizes she’s been screaming since she got in the car.

“Wilhelmina? What are you doing here?”

“Are you alright?”

“Are you?”

Wilhelmina comes around the front of the car. “Looks like you got lucky.”

“Yeah, uh. I think my fender’s trashed but. It just ran out in front of me, I—I couldn’t—"

“They come out of nowhere like that, after dark.”

“Do you think it’s dead?”

“If it’s not, it’s probably not going to live much longer.”

Robin is wracked by a sudden, hiccupping sob. She can’t get enough breath in. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to do it. I couldn’t stop in time. I didn’t mean to.”

Wilhelmina rubs her back. She smells like coffee. “It’s not your fault,” she says, as if she knows anything about it.

They stand there until Robin quiets herself into intermittent whimpers. The car’s lights blink out.

“Do you have a gun?”

“What?”

“To put it out of its misery?”

“Oh, no I don’t.”

Robin should have thought to get a gun. All she has is a heavy flashlight in her glove compartment.

Wilhelmina knows where a gun is, but it’s far behind her now.

“It looks really bad. Oh god, you can see it breathing heavy—"

“It’s probably in a lot of pain.”

“We could break its neck?”

“Okay, yeah I guess we could.”

“Do you want to do it?”

“Do I look like I’ve broken a neck before?”

“No. Do I?”

“No.”

Robin thinks Wilhelmina looks like she might have broken a neck before. Or at least clocked someone with a frying pan.

 “Are you going to do it?

“Break its neck?

I don’t think I can. I don’t think I could do that.”

“We should probably just leave it here, it’ll die eventually.”

“We have to help it. It’s bleeding from the mouth. Its guts are hanging out.”

Robin is surprised that she can look at it without being sick. “Those aren’t its guts. That’s just its, where I—"

“Oh my god. I think it’s pregnant.”

“It’s pregnant?”

“Look. Look at that big, like big swollen part.                                     

“Is it moving?

Oh—oh my god it moved,            Jesus Christ it’s moving you’re right.

it’s moving—oh my god—              We have to get it out.    

Like, what, induce labor? I don’t—"                                                         We have to get the baby out!”

Wilhelmina pulls a kitchen knife out of her apron pocket and tests the edge against her thumb thoughtfully. Robin wonders why she brought it with her. She is glad she did.

“We can’t cut the baby out of this—"

“It’s still alive in there!” Wilhelmina’s eyes are bright with tears. Robin can see the truck stop lights reflected in them like distant stars.

“Just leave it in there. Just let it die.”

“You really want to let it die?”

Robin wants to let everything die, but she can’t say this to Wilhelmina. “It—no, but it’s—it’ll probably die anyway if we get it out and what if its—what if it’s not—right, what if it’s all messed up and broken or not—done all the way yet, what if it’s this horrible, mangled mess—"

“But what if it isn’t? You know, what if it deserves a chance?”

A chance to what? Robin thinks. A chance to live briefly and fearfully on a dying planet? To cross highways in search of food and safety? To join the endless ranks of others trying to do the same? To eat garbage and run from what hunts you?

“They’re overpopulated. I saw on the news. There’s too many of them, and not enough space. And that’s why they run in front of cars.”

“That’s not the baby’s fault.”

“Its mother is broken. Its mother can’t take care of it.”

“Its mother is dead.”

“Is she?”

“Feel her. She’s getting cold. Will you help me?”

Robin doesn’t want to feel her. She doesn’t want to look at the splatter on the grill and stare into the dead brown eyes. She doesn’t want to feel the cold thing that she is responsible for. She doesn’t want to be responsible for anything—not for this, not for herself, not for something else’s baby. Wilhelmina is getting on her knees in the dirt, and Robin turns the headlights back on so they can see what they’re about to do.

“Have you ever done this before? Are you a veterinarian? Nurse? Paramedic?”

“I’m a waitress.”

Wilhelmina twists her hair up with the pencil from her apron and sticks her tongue out in concentration. In the whitewash headlights, her face is carved in lines and shadows. She looks like a mother, a surgeon, like Eve still tasting apple on her lips. She is not afraid of blood.

Robin holds the stiffening legs out of the way while Wilhelmina makes a long, careful incision. Blood. Wilhelmina is not afraid. She peels back the soft belly skin with her bare hands. Robin takes the knife from her and slits open the placenta.

“Careful.”

“Wider.”

“Good?”

“Almost got it. Here it comes.”

“Careful, careful, careful.”

“That’s the umbilical cord. Can you                     “Do you want me to?

Grab                                                                            oh the

no the knife                                                                where’s the

can you"                                                                    here I’ve got it”

Wilhelmina holds the bloody, unlikely thing aloft. Then she wraps it gently in her apron.

“Do you feel a heartbeat?” she asks.

“Yes.”