Soon I Can Give You My Heart

A story of sorts.

Jackie drove with her eyes pinned to the road and both hands on the wheel. One might think she was entranced if not for the steady tap of two fingers to the rhythm of the stereo, like a comatose patient half-awakened by the familiar. In the passenger seat, Angel curled his legs close to his chest, periodically scanning the rearview mirror. It was something about Jackie’s apprehensive, fastidious driving that alerted Angel’s own senses, each of them tethered to the other’s fits of peculiarity by some psychic wavelength. Angel reached over to the stereo and pressed pause.

“What’d you do that for, man?”

“I need to pee.”

Jackie signaled, checked the right-side mirror, looked past Angel through the window, and maneuvered diagonally across the wide stretch of empty highway, landing at long last in the exit lane. Having sufficiently caught Jackie’s attention, Angel pressed the stereo once more, resuming their journey through The Magnetic Fields’s 69 Love Songs. Early dawn light sprawled shamelessly on the horizon in their direct path, spitting saccharine pinks and oranges that swallowed any lingering stars. Angel rolled down a window as Jackie gently braked down the exit ramp. He stuck four fingers out past the car’s interior, then a full hand to the wrist, then at last let a sun-spotted arm dangle languidly out into the cool air.

Jackie signaled at the red light. With his free hand, Angel brought a pointer finger to a thumb and scratched at an errant hangnail.

“They’ll probably start looking soon, y’know,” said Angel.

Jackie didn’t respond, though out of malcontent or an abundance of vehicular caution Angel wasn’t quite sure.

“Just saying,” Angel pressed on, after letting the silence stretch past comfort. “I don’t know what you expect to happen when they find us, but -”

“They won’t.”

Angel glanced over at Jackie, eyes obscured behind her massive drugstore sunglasses with the taped-up nose. She was still tapping a finger on the leather steering wheel, now to Stephin Merritt’s oozing lament on ‘Epitaph for My Heart’: And life goes on, and dawn, and dawn, and death goes onward without end…

“You don’t know that, Jack.”

“Ang, dude, they wanted us gone.” Jackie let out a short, bitter hack of a laugh. “Trust me.”

“I think you misunderstand your mother’s true feelings.”

“What are you, my shrink? If she’s so damn scared of us getting out, she can chase us down and stop us.” The light changed and she turned left.

Angel had met Jackie a couple years back when they were both in their junior year of high school. Jackie had worn a greasy mop of pink-streaked hair and smoked cigarettes behind the bleachers at lunchtime while she half-read Keats, half-ogled the training cross-country runners, the collars of their white t-shirts darkened with sweat from the stale New Hampshire sun. Angel had been on a similar mission, except the cigarettes were joints and the Keats was D.C comics, when he stumbled upon Jackie, knees pulled into her chest, jean jacket spread out on the concrete beneath her like a camping tarp. Angel had turned Jackie onto pot, then acid, then Ween and Grant Lee Buffalo. In exchange, Jackie had scored Angel a job at the café where she worked odd, clipped hours, meticulously balancing high school journalism with meager wage labor. Angel had gotten fired his fourth week on the job after a particularly heated interaction with a lactose-intolerant customer. Even Jackie, in all her well-mannered glory, couldn’t rear him back from that one.

Now Jackie squinted into the growing daylight as she peeled the car into an empty gas station. Through its glass door’s reflective glare, Angel could make out the figure of a man inside the attached convenience store, hunched over a register and thumbing through bills. Jackie circled around to a pump and put the car in park.

“I’ll be quick,” Angel said, and shut the door.

As Angel ambled into the gas station, Jackie reached over the vacant passenger seat and opened the glove compartment. She unearthed a lighter, a pack of Camels, and a map folded many times over in neat squares. Then she wriggled backwards through the driver’s side door and lit a cigarette. Pouting around the cigarette, she unfolded the map against the dented front door of the old blue sedan that had taken herself and Angel from New Hampshire to here. Jackie handled the map gingerly, as though it were a rare artifact and not a document she had spent the past year scouring and marking up with red ink in Angel’s basement. They’d only been on the road for two days but were nearly in Chicago now, on the lip of some unheard-of yet nauseatingly attractive suburb. Jackie traced the map’s central pen-marked line with a gentle finger. The route ceased only at the easternmost point of Northern California, where the pen dropped off by virtue of the ocean pressing up against it. The End of The Known World. Really, the end of the known world for Jackie and Angel was upstate New York. Some of Pennsylvania, maybe. But the name had stuck.

They’d chosen California because it seemed like a wise decision to get as far away as possible from the mess they had left behind. And because neither of them had ever been but the photographs made it look like paradise. When Angel’s parents first announced the divorce, Angel was convinced his mom would take off for California to get the widest possible berth from her newly-gay husband. The thought of seeing her husband with another man - the man that had convinced him to leave her, no less - was undoubtedly great fuel for her heartache. But she stayed, and kept shuttling Angel’s sister to her after-school soccer practices, instead electing to tack up pictures of faraway sunnier places in permanent consolation.

Angel strode out of the gas station, chomping noisily on grape bubble gum and blowing fat purple bubbles that snapped against the tip of his nose. He’d tucked the gum in his shirt pocket and was carrying two large paper cups of coffee: black for Jackie, cream and sugar for himself.

“Are we smoking?” Angel asked.

Jackie put out her cigarette. “No.”

“Be nice. I got you coffee.”

“Shit, thanks - I’ll cover you.”

“Nah, I have your money right here.” Angel reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a plastic baggie of crumpled dollar bills, which he returned to the center console as he slid into the car.

“I told you that was for emergencies,” Jackie said, slamming her own door and starting the ignition. She set the folded map and her cigarettes down on top of the bag. “Personal funds for personal use.”

“I consider keeping you awake at the wheel an emergency, but OK.” Angel rolled his window up halfway. Summer was giving way to autumn, and the early morning air was a tad too cool for comfort. 69 Love Songs resumed as Jackie pulled out of the gas station, and Angel squinted into the growing daylight. Now, relieved of his urges, Angel could notice that they’d pulled off into some ugly strip of nothing, populated by fast food chains and run-down convenience stores. The roads were wide and barely maintained. On their left, a car sped by, trailing the roar of its engine.

“I’m sorry,” said Angel after a moment.

“Huh?”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For embezzling.”

At the red light just before the highway, Jackie spared Angel the risk of a glance. Her eyes were hidden behind the deep black of her sunglasses, but her lips were split in a telling grin. “I love you, you know that?”

“Yeah.”

They’d made the pact a year to the day after graduating, Jackie having done so by the skin of her teeth. Everyone had expected the flunk to be Angel, of course. But when Jackie’s father left her mother for Angel’s father, Jackie’s mother blamed her daughter exclusively for bringing Angel (and, subsequently, his once-closeted father) into their lives. It made the blow easier, Angel had explained to Jackie gently as she accumulated wet tissues on her bedspread, if she couldn’t blame herself. If she outsourced her grief. All the same Jackie was rattled. As it turned out, her idea of personal stability was less so based in structural integrity and more so on how many moving parts she could haphazardly wrangle together at once. The divorce, alongside her mother’s newfound and unwarranted iciness, knocked something loose just enough to topple Jackie’s whole elegant facade. Angel, having anticipated something like this occurring nearly since the pair’s meeting, stuck by Jackie’s side religiously until he was certain she wouldn’t do something awful to herself. But even graduation and the premise of freedom weren’t enough to propel the two out of that peculiar shared sadness. Instead they’d sunk further into the gray world of their hometown, souring like forgotten milk. Jackie held fast to the café, and Angel to smoking pot, playing records and enduring his mother’s berating over his perpetual state of unemployment.

Angel had been the first to procure the map and the red pens and, in what Jackie considered somewhat of an unnecessary flourish, the myriad travel brochures. He’d swiped the whole lot from the local bookstore when no one was looking. The map, and its promise of distant lands, had been Angel’s version of a rope thrown into quicksand, a last-ditch plea for a life beyond their own. All the same, it had taken Jackie a good portion of the time they spent planning their escape just to claw up out of her own numbness. Each session spent on Angel’s basement floor in front of that map had been like an intravenous micro-dosage of some novel antidepressant. By the time she’d really grasped the scope of her constructed future, they had been halfway out the door, clutching prized possessions and dresser drawers of saved change.

By late afternoon, in the middle of a desolate farmland highway, Jackie’s old sedan began to slow. It began so subtly that at first that Angel suspected Jackie might have fallen asleep at the wheel, easing up her weight on the gas pedal as her body slipped into unconsciousness. But Jackie was pressing harder on the gas now, as though to coax the last dregs of life from the engine, and grimacing in a determinedly wide-awake manner. Finally surrendering, Jackie spun the wheel toward the shoulder of the road, where the car pathetically chugged until it finally sputtered to a halt.

“Fuck!” Jackie drove an impassioned foot down again on the gas pedal, and the car answered to her anger with a nonchalant inch forward. “Why didn’t we get gas this morning? Jesus, I’m a moron.”

Jimi Hendrix’s guitar drifted out from the car radio, sharpened by the silence of the engine and their vacant surroundings. Angel took a dreg-soaked sip of cold coffee. A dim sliver of a moon sat low in the deepening sky. Jackie opened the driver’s side door and slid out of the car into the cool air. She brought a flat palm down on the hood of the sedan. Then she looked at Angel through the dirty windshield.

“What if you were right?”

Angel looked up. “About what?”

“About them looking for us. Wanting to get to us before we get to San Francisco. I don’t know, any of it.”

“I think,” Angel said, “we should hope we’re in Nebraska by nightfall.”

Jackie slumped against the front of the car and closed her eyes against the breeze of early dusk, half-listening for a passing savior. Abandoning that husk of a hometown and its associated gloom had sharpened the edge of every sensory signal and passing emotion. She could feel the ironic, ridiculous beauty of the moment resounding in her chest, and she couldn’t tell whether to laugh or cry. Some strange hybrid choke arose in her throat in their stead. Jackie had long since been feeling the press of any given emotion across her sternum with the weight of a hot iron. She leaned dangerously and inevitably toward sensitivity at all times. She couldn’t remember a time when the world’s symbiotic cruelty and gloriousness hadn’t taken turns branding themselves into her.

When Jackie opened her eyes, Angel was standing beside her. In one hand, he held a half-full bottle of cheap pink moscato. In the other, he clutched a clear plastic to-go container containing crisp white pinwheel sandwiches.

“Wanna picnic?” he asked. “I’m starved.”

After Jackie had turned up the Hendrix, the pair clambered on top of the car, boosting themselves off the backseat armrests and slamming the doors behind them with their feet. Angel cracked open the wine, then the sandwiches, setting both down between Jackie and himself. They hadn’t eaten since a brief stop mid-morning, and fell upon the food like vultures. For a moment, only a soundtrack of noisy chewing and occasional loud gulps overtook the previously serene silence of their surroundings.

“Shit!” Jackie said suddenly, still in the middle of a bite. “It’s Wednesday, right? We were supposed to call today.” Then she looked out toward the road, as though a passing car might arrive at that moment and answer her sudden, unspoken prayer.

“I know,” Angel said.

Jackie looked at Angel quizzically.

“It’s still pretty early in California,” Angel said, by means of elaboration.

“Why didn’t you remind me?”

“Because we’ll make it.” Angel offered a small smile. Then he busied himself with collecting their trash. “Did you wanna put on Sinéad?”

Before Jackie could formulate a retort through the haze of the wine, Angel was rounding the car and popping the trunk. Jackie slid off the car and opened the backseat, rummaging through a disorganized crate of tapes they’d clumsily buckled down to the leather seat. After a moment, Jackie’s fingers found the glistening white of The Lion and the Cobra, which she slid into the tape deck, carefully returning Jimi Hendrix to his home amidst Angel’s beloved cassettes. She left the door open, and the music drifted out into the boundless highway. Angel slid around to meet Jackie on the driver’s side of the car, facing the road. They leaned against the cool metal, perpendicular to the falling sun.

“And now we wait,” Angel said, and took another swig of the wine.

As it turned out, it had been Jackie and Angel’s fathers who had first made the great escape to California, that fabled place that seemed relegated to postcards and refrigerator magnets. After a few painstaking months of attempts at collaborative domesticity, the two men silently left their newly shared New England apartment at dusk on a Saturday night, loading up Angel’s father’s truck with little more than the bare essentials. In a little over a week they were in San Francisco. Angel had first received the news of their fleeing from his mother, whom he found crouched beneath the telephone vibrating with a rage that resembled grief. It wasn’t until he began to receive his own series of letters from his father - whose words now dripped with a self-assured, foreign happiness - that Angel began to finalize his own dream of a getaway with Jackie in tow. Their fathers had largely kept to themselves once the divorces were finalized, only exhibiting friendliness or paternal instincts when repeatedly prodded. Nonetheless, their absence felt like the loss of an ally to Angel and Jackie, further souring the deal of their present standings.

Once he had sufficiently untangled his own feelings on the matter, Angel had begun sending letters back to his father’s San Francisco address. Seemingly relieved of the burden of his pseudo-heterosexuality, Angel’s father was newly generous and warm, extending frequent offerings for visitation as well as cheeky, yet often inapplicable words of wisdom for young adulthood. Angel kept such plans from his mother. Jackie, who had been receiving far less frequent but equally kind correspondence from her own father, hadn’t needed to be told to do the same. The two grew cartoonishly private with their plans, curating coded language on the off chance that they needed to discuss things in the presence of their remaining family. Mostly, they’d kept to Angel’s basement, a small, rehabilitated storage space that frequently reeked of pot and Indian takeout and had been willfully avoided by Angel’s mother for long before their familial rupture. Eventually, after a few months of carefully formulating routes and budgets, their official ticket to freedom had arrived in the mail, a brief, scrawled letter co-signed by both fathers. We have a spare room. XX

Their saving grace arrived soon after the sun had completely fallen, the sky still a pale, bruising indigo. The savior in question drove a bright red pickup that she pulled quickly over the shoulder and set into park. Angel and Jackie watched in silence as the stranger stepped out of her car, then surveyed the sedan, then furrowed her brow. She was a tall, stocky woman with sizable upper arms and a tangle of ginger hair that seemed incorrigible even in its loose knot at the nape of her neck. Across her arms was a smattering of fading black tattoos. She had dark, deep-set eyes that seemed almost comically expressive as her gaze skimmed over Angel and Jackie.

“What’d we do here?” the woman asked.

“No gas,” Angel said.

The woman clicked her tongue. “It’s your lucky day,” she said, and returned to her truck.

Once she’d returned with a red can full of gasoline and crouched by the sedan’s fuel tank, the woman looked up. “I’m Jes,” she said. “What brings you around a place like this, anyway?”

Jackie looked at Angel, silently willing him to calculate the wisest possible amount of information to divulge in front of a stranger.

“Our fathers are lovers,” said Angel. “So we kinda got the brunt of the heat for that. From our moms, anyway. Not like that makes any sense, I know. Anyway, our dads invited us to San Francisco. I mean, each of our dads. We’re not related. They didn’t raise us. They met way later. But would you believe it, they found a waterfront condo in California and now they’re happy as clams. Our moms on the other hand… I don’t know. They needed us around, you know? I think we were the last thing keeping them sane, but they never would’ve said so, if they even knew it. So, maybe we’re on the lam. Depends on whether or not they come to their senses. Mostly we just needed to get the hell away from that place. Sure, we’re broke as all hell, but we’ll get where we need to be. I mean,” Angel finished, casting a glance toward Jes’s offering, “as long as this doesn’t become a habit.”

Jes quirked a ginger brow. “Is that all?”

Angel took an inhale as though to continue, so Jackie intervened. “Yes,” she said. “That’s all. I’m sorry about my friend. He got into the wine.”

Jes shook her head, smiling. “It’s alright. I’ve gotten into worse.”

Jackie eyed Jes. “Any words of wisdom, then?”

Jes let out a disbelieving half-laugh. “Why ask me? You two don’t need to be told what to do. If I’d followed your footsteps, I’d have spared myself half the trouble I ended up having.” After a moment of silence, she stood up and shook off a moistened hand. “That’ll get you to food and beds. And more gas.”

“What do you mean? Did you run away too?” Jackie stared imploringly after Jes, who was already moving back in the direction of her truck with the empty canister.

Jes looked back at Jackie. “Something like that,” she said. “Though by the time I got out, my life depended on it.”

Jackie looked over at Angel, as though she might pull him into her desperation and help her yank Jes back into their gravitational orbit. Instead Angel merely whistled to himself, staring into the middle distance.

“Thank you for the help!” Jackie called after Jes. She felt her tone grow girlish and hungry. Jackie suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to cling to this woman, to follow her through life and absorb her experiential wisdom. She had the irrational yet guttingly clear feeling that she could not lose this tether to otherness, this mirror of a wandering life. Instead she coughed up a meager “Do we owe you?”

Jes shook her head. “Don’t mention it.” Then she got back into her truck and sped off into the distance, leaving Jackie’s chest feeling hollow.

Once Jes had vanished on the horizon, Jackie smacked Angel’s bicep with the back of her hand. “Jesus, Ang,” she said, “you’re gonna get us into some shit some day. And here I was thinking I might ask you to drive.”

“No can do,” Angel said by way of response.

“Yeah, I know.”

It was nearing midnight when they pulled off the route and into the Husker Inn in central Nebraska, fast food cartons littering the back seat. Angel grabbed their plastic bag of cash, ever-dwindling, and fished out a handful of quarters before shoving the remainder upon Jackie. “I’m gonna make that call. Wanna get us a room?”

Jackie blinked through a haze of half-sleep, having hardly maneuvered the car off the exit ramp and into a parking spot. She nodded in assent, then trailed behind Angel with her own meager belongings, locking the car and turning back to watch her best friend stack quarters in his palm. Angel’s thick, dark hair fell to the denim collar of his jacket, and the glint of a silver hoop adorned the cartilage of his ear. He walked, as he often did, with both feet turned out just a hair too far for normalcy, so that he appeared like a small animal imitating fearsomeness.

Angel inserted the change into the hotel lobby’s payphone and dialed the number he knew by heart. He stuck his nails in his mouth and teethed as he pressed to call. His father picked up on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Dad,” Angel said.

“Angelo! We thought you’d forgotten about us, so we had a few drinks. Forgive me.”

“All forgiven,” Angel said. “I just wanted to make sure you know we’re on our way. We’re in Nebraska, actually. Like we said. Nearly halfway there.”

“Oh, what wonderful news.” The sound of breathing encroached upon the speaker, and Angel saw in his mind's eye an image of the two aging men hunched excitedly over one small landline, pressing an ear each up to Angel’s distant voice. “We’re so excited to see you.”

“I’m excited to see you too. Hey, did anyone call? Mom or Sylvie?”

The breathing seemed to catch. Then, Jackie’s father’s voice. “Sylvie called,” he said, “but please don’t tell Jackie. She’s already had to take on so much this past year. The last thing she needs is to know that Sylvie’s been berating us too. Not like we didn’t know she wouldn’t approve.”

“But she’s not looking for us? They’re not, I don’t know… gunning it down the highway in chase?” Angel lowered his voice at this point, and glanced over at Jackie, who was quietly exchanging cash with the front desk clerk.

“Not to my knowledge,” said Jackie’s father into the phone. “Up until last night, all she’s been is at home and angry. That could change, but you’d be long gone.”

“Okay,” Angel said. “Thanks.”

“But really,” said Jackie’s father, “Don’t talk to Jackie about this. You know how rough she had it. We’re tough old men. We can handle the occasional whinings of an old crone.”

“Alright. If that’s all it is, I guess.”

“All it is for now.”

There was a muffled, inaudible exchange, and then Angel’s father returned to the line. “O.K., hon, we’ve gotta go. We invited a couple friends over and we still need to put out the cheese. I’m glad you’re safe.”

“O.K., have fun. Love ya.”

“We’ll see you soon!” Angel’s father said, voice fading as though he were already vanishing into the night’s more pressing plans.

Angel hung up the phone and approached Jackie, who was showing off a plastic room key between two fingers like a new credit card.

“Sleep?” she said.

“Sleep,” Angel said.

As they made their way down the hallway, Jackie turned to face Angel. “How’d the phone call go? Alive and well?”

“Very much so.” Angel adjusted his duffel bag over his shoulder.

“Did you ask about my mom?”

“I asked about both of our moms.”

“Well?”

Angel swallowed. “Well, they’re not after us, at least not yet. And your mom called, once or twice. But they said she didn’t seem angry. Just confused, I guess. Nothing they couldn’t handle.”

Jackie looked sideways at Angel. She smiled, but there was a raw, wounded sadness behind the thing that made Angel’s chest ache.

“You’re a very good liar,” Jackie said. She said the words gently, but with a firm finality, like a polite goodnight. They arrived at their room. Jackie let them in and dropped her things on the floor. They fell asleep within the hour.

Back when they were planning their great escape, and when Jackie remained in the muck of her depression, Angel’s most frequent solution to Jackie’s glum immobility was a long car ride down the interstate. They couldn’t go far, back then, and they didn’t want to. The timing wasn’t right. But it was enough of a thrill to throw a tape on the deck, roll down the windows and pretend, for the hour, that they were making a break for it. With enough suspension of disbelief, the moment felt blissfully true, earnestly nestled in an urgent and victorious reality. Jackie nearly always took the wheel, with Angel in the passenger seat crowing to the wind. She never asked once to trade. Angel figured she got enough of a thrill from stepping on the gas and feeling herself and Angel speed eastward, with the action’s sure, measured control. Then, they would reach their habitual exit, slow to the pace of non-escapists, orient themselves in the opposite direction, and begin the whole thing again until they were home.

After the first couple drives, when it began to seem like the whole thing might just become a habit, Angel made the pair a tape. He compiled all of the best known songs about California, starting with the obvious: Joni Mitchell, The Mamas & The Papas, The Beach Boys, The Eagles, Carole King. Then, once you started getting geographically specific: Elliot Smith, The Doors, The Magnetic Fields, Missing Persons. But the playlist’s real gem was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’s ‘California’, with its certain, sun-soaked refrain. Angel and Jackie had always heard Tom Petty’s insistent ‘it ain’t like anywhere else’ as its own secret affirmation, like the lyrics had been written for them and them alone. Those lines served as a reassurance of the necessity of their journey, and, more crucially, the sweetness of its destination. Angel had timed it just right, too, so that they were always on the highway when Tom Petty came on, cruising at an easy 80 or 90, feeling nothing but the wind. On the days when the rain fell too hard or Jackie’s ache was too hot to the touch, Angel would lay on the floor of his basement, put on his headphones, and turn up the track. He’d close his eyes, swaddled in that premature darkness, and envision the Western sunlight, warm enough to fix everything.