No Fixed Address

Katia Khrabrov arrived at the Woodrow Wilson Service Area shortly after two on Sunday morning with half a tank of gas, an overfull bladder, and Jessica’s last words rattling around inside her head. You’re thirty-eight years old, Katia. You can’t keep acting like you’re twenty-three. The green sign placed her at milepost 58.7 on the northbound Turnpike, between Exits 7 and 7A, almost eighty miles from Atlantic City. Distance did nothing to improve Jessica’s argument, but it generally made Katia feel as if she had won.

She parked her gray Mazda3 beneath the floodlights and called Leslie before getting out. Across the lot, tractor-trailers slept in two long rows with their engines idling and marker lights glowing red. The service building looked new and overlit, with restaurant signs shining above a nearly closed food court. It appeared less like a place to rest than a place designed by people who had heard about human hunger and urination but never personally experienced either.

“I found us a place in Santorini,” Katia said as soon as Leslie answered. “Two bedrooms, caldera view, little swimming pool hanging over the side of a cliff. May is shoulder season. Fewer tourists, better pictures, and half the price.”

“You called me at two in the morning to give me our travel itinerary?”

“I called because I knew you’d be awake.”

“I’m awake because I just finished twelve hours in intensive care. You’re awake because you’re insane. Where are you?”

“Somewhere named after Woodrow Wilson.” Katia unwrapped an ESSE Ultra Slim and lit it through the opening in her window. “I left Atlantic City.”

“Without Jessica and Boris?”

“They have their own car. Their own apartment in Manhattan. And a tiny person under construction. They don’t need me.”

Leslie was quiet. She and Katia had worked together for six years, traveled through Mexico, Spain, and Japan, and once, after a Christmas Eve shift and most of a bottle of aguardiente, awakened in Leslie’s bed with their clothing arranged along the hallway like evidence. They never mentioned it again. Leslie knew when Katia wanted sympathy and when she merely wanted someone to admire the wreckage.

“What did you say to her?” Leslie asked.

“Why does everyone assume I said something?”

“Because I know you. Your default mode is saying things you shouldn’t.”

Katia exhaled smoke toward the windshield. Jessica had spent dinner rubbing the small rise beneath her sweater while Boris described school districts. When she announced that Katia would soon be Aunt Katia and suggested, with a smile, that perhaps it was time for her to get serious about Daniel, or Keith, or someone in general, Katia had said she would rather die childless in Mykonos than spend her life discussing preschool applications with Boris. Jessica had called her selfish and a narcissist. Katia had called Jessica a boring trad wife. Both then switched to Ukrainian and started exhausting all the swear words the language had on offer – disturbing everyone in earshot.

“She wants everyone to want what she wants,” Katia said.

“And you want everyone to tell you that you are special.”

“I have to pee.”

“An excellent rebuttal.”

Katia ended the call, dropped the cigarette outside, and hurried across the lot. The restrooms were open twenty-four hours, as were the Burger King and the convenience store, but at that hour the rest of the service area had been reduced to humming machines and a guy named Suragan, with purple circles beneath his eyes, wiping the same section of counter with no apparent expectation that it would ever become clean. A muted television showed weather moving across New Jersey where it had rained for all of August. The fluorescent lights bleached every surface.

Inside the women’s room, Katia chose the last stall and nearly moaned with relief. Her Fendi Peekaboo handbag spilled when she hooked it over the partition: lipstick, charger, passport wallet, two loose cigarettes, and a tampon she had carried so long that the paper wrapper had split. She looked at it, did an idle calculation, and opened the calendar on her phone. Fourteen days. She checked again, because she mistrusted numbers that offended her. Her last period had begun six weeks earlier.

Night shifts did that. Stress did that. Being thirty-eight probably did that. She and Daniel had stopped using condoms because it felt better, but he was an emergency physician and should have possessed some professional immunity from consequences. Katia laughed once at the stupidity of the thought, pushed everything back into her bag, and told herself she would buy a test in Brooklyn if she remembered.

The convenience store had one customer. He stood at the register in a red-and-black flannel shirt, faded jeans, work boots, and a trucker cap embroidered with the words AXLE MIDNIGHT. His beard was gray in places and brown in others, stained amber around his mouth. A plastic water bottle, half-filled with tobacco spit, occupied one hand. The other rested beside two packs of Marlboro Reds, a tin of chewing tobacco, and an old-fashioned paper logbook. He worked a toothpick between his oddly white teeth while the clerk counted change.

Katia stepped around him and placed her credit card on the counter. “Do you carry ESSE?”

The clerk blinked. “Carry what?”

“ESSE. Ultra Slim. White package.”

“The line,” the trucker said.

Katia looked behind him. “You are one person.”

“I’m in front of you.”

“I need one thing.”

He tapped the Marlboros. “So do I.”

Katia picked up her card. “Fine. Finish conducting your international tobacco negotiations.”

The clerk suppressed a smile. The trucker was still looking at her. He took his change one coin at a time, slid it into his pocket, and studied Katia with pale eyes that seemed almost colorless beneath the cap. Up close, his face was difficult to age. The beard belonged to an old man, but the skin around his eyes was timeless.

“They don’t sell your kind,” he said.

“My kind of cigarette?”

The toothpick shifted to the opposite corner of his mouth. “Sure.”

Katia read the cap again. “Axle Midnight? That isn’t a name. That’s a rejected cologne.”

“Are you done?”

“Your name may be the saddest thing I’ve heard tonight, and I spent three hours with Boris.”

He gathered his cigarettes and logbook. As he turned away, his shoulder struck hers hard enough to move her back two steps. He did not apologize. Katia swore at his back in Ukrainian, bought a pack of Virginia Slims she did not want, and watched him disappear beyond the glass doors toward the truck lot.

By the time she returned to the Mazda, rain stippled the windshield. She pressed the ignition. The dashboard illuminated, the starter clicked, and the engine failed to turn over. Katia had handled trouble alone in Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Israel and Japan, and had developed faith that every problem eventually yielded to confidence, profanity, or a sufficiently large credit limit. She applied all three. She swore at the car, dialed AAA, and continued flooding the engine. The Mazda remained dead.

A toothpick tapped against her window.

Katia jumped and found Axle standing beside the car. His truck idled fifty yards behind him, a black tractor attached to a white refrigerated trailer. The exhaust rose through the rain and dissolved beneath the floodlights.

“Need a hand?” he asked.

“From you? I’d rather push it.”

“Cars don’t respond well to attitude.”

“Neither do I.”

She locked the doors while looking directly at him and pressed the ignition once more. The Mazda started immediately. Axle smiled as if it had answered to him, lifted two fingers to the brim of his cap, and walked back toward his truck.

Katia did not wait to understand it. She reversed, accelerated around the service building, and followed the signs toward the northbound exit. The black tractor appeared from the truck lane and swung across the ramp ahead of her. Its refrigerated trailer followed with magnificent slowness until it stood sideways between Katia and the Turnpike. She stopped so hard that her handbag overturned again on the passenger floor.

Axle climbed down carrying something white on a cord. Katia recognized her hospital identification badge when he held it against the window.

“You dropped this,” he said. “Katherine Khrabrov. Registered nurse.”

She lowered the window. “Put it on the hood and move your truck.”

“There’s a girl in my trailer. She crawled in somewhere south of Baltimore. I found her when I checked the load. She’s cold and she won’t wake up.” Katia did not touch the badge. “Call 911.”

“Already did. They’re coming from the other side of the Turnpike. You know what that means around here.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “You can stand there, or you can keep somebody alive until they get here.”

Katia searched the truck lot. The fuel attendants were hidden beyond the building and no one had followed them onto the exit road. Rain ticked against the roof of the Mazda. Axle held out the badge, and the familiar photograph of her own face made the situation appear official enough to be stupidly persuasive.

“Show me where she is,” Katia said. “The doors stay open.”

The refrigeration unit throbbed above the trailer like an enormous air conditioner. When Axle opened the rear doors, cold white vapor slipped into the rain. Pallets of cardboard cartons extended into the darkness, each stamped HONEYDEW MELONS and wrapped in clear plastic. Near the far wall, beyond the final pallet, Katia could see the sole of a white sneaker and part of a bare leg.

She climbed inside. The ribbed metal floor vibrated beneath her shoes, and the air carried the green, faintly spoiled sweetness of fruit. “Miss?” she called. “Can you hear me?”

The sneaker did not move. Katia squeezed sideways between the wall and the cartons, feeling the cold enter through her dress. She reached the last pallet and found a plastic mannequin leg wearing a woman’s shoe.

One of the trailer doors slammed behind her.

Katia turned as Axle seized her wrist. She drove an elbow toward his throat, but he moved with astonishing speed and twisted her arm behind her. A switchblade appeared against her cheek, its edge so cold that at first she mistook it for another current of refrigerated air.

“Nurses always come,” he said. “That’s the fine thing about people who spend their whole lives telling everybody they don’t care. Give them one stranger to save and they’re yours.”

He forced her down against the pallets and secured her wrists with a cargo strap looped around a metal load bar. Katia fought until the plastic bit into her skin. Axle sat on a carton opposite her, placed the open knife across his logbook beside his thigh, and returned the toothpick to his mouth. He seemed in no hurry now. Outside, hundreds of cars passed north and south, their sound reduced by the insulated walls to the whisper of distant water.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Company.”

“We’re not gonna be friends.”

“Your loss. You’re not a good person anyway.” He nodded toward the paper logbook. Its cover had gone soft with age, and dates ran down the exposed page beside names of service areas from Georgia to Maine. Some entries appeared older than Katia. “I don’t have a house. Don’t need one. I eat where I stop, wash where I stop, sleep in rest stops. Every town is just a stop. Life is on the interstate.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

Axle considered the question. “I remember when this place had brown tile and ashtrays on every table. I remember before they named it.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“You don’t want the real answer.”

He had heard her conversation with Leslie. He repeated Santorini, the Brighton Beach apartment her family had taken after leaving Ukraine, and the travel blog Katia planned to call No Fixed Address. That had intrigued him. Jessica believed she was with Daniel. Daniel believed she was with Jessica. Leslie knew only that she was somewhere on the Turnpike. Her hospital did not expect her until Tuesday night.

“You built yourself a life nobody can locate,” Axle said. “That takes talent. I should know.”

For the first time, Katia understood the architecture of her freedom from the outside. Every relationship had been placed in a separate room and told not to ask what occurred in the others. She had called it independence because that sounded intentional. In Axle’s mouth, it sounded like evidence that she could be carried across six states before anyone knew she was missing.

“People are waiting for me,” she said.

“Name one.”

Katia thought of Jessica staring at the blank space where she had been seated at dinner, furious enough not to call. She thought of Daniel, who had asked on Thursday whether she ever imagined sharing a home with another person and received an ambiguous noncommittal blow off. She thought of Leslie falling asleep after the intensive-care shift with her telephone facedown beside her.

“You see?” Axle said. “The road gets everybody. If you stay on it long enough – you’re liable to have an accident.”

He stood and reached for the second door. Katia watched his left hand tremble against the latch. It might have been age or nicotine or the refrigeration. She made her breathing quick and shallow, then allowed her eyes to widen.

“Wait,” she said. “Smile for me.”

Axle looked back.

“Your left hand is shaking and one side of your mouth is dropping. How long has that been happening?”

His fingers rose involuntarily toward his face.

“Raise both arms.” Katia leaned forward as far as the strap permitted. “Do it now. You could be having a stroke.”

“I don’t have strokes.”

“You wouldn’t know until the damage is permanent.”

He lifted his arms and glanced at the polished steel of the door as if it might return a reflection. Katia hooked one foot behind the open logbook and dragged it toward her. The switchblade slid off the cover, struck the ribbed floor, and spun within reach of her shoe. She trapped it beneath her heel, pulled it closer, and folded herself forward until her bound fingers closed around the handle.

Axle understood one second too late. Katia opened the blade, sawed through the strap, and drove her shoulder into the cartons with the force she ordinarily reserved for a HYROX sled. Honeydews broke through wet cardboard and rolled across the floor. One struck Axle’s ankle. Another took him behind the knee. He fell against the load bar, and Katia ran toward the remaining opening.

He caught the back of her dress. The fabric tightened across her throat. Katia turned and drove the heel of her hand into his nose. His grip opened just enough. She jumped from the trailer, landed on the pavement, and ran toward the Mazda while Axle stood behind her. He did not curse or threaten. He laughed as if her escape were simply another familiar part of the journey.

The Mazda started before Katia’s finger left the button. She drove around the nose of the tractor, scraping her passenger mirror against a concrete bollard, and entered the Turnpike without looking for a break in traffic. Horns erupted around her. A minivan swerved. Katia accelerated north until the Woodrow Wilson lights had disappeared behind the trees.

She called 911 first and identified the service area, the trailer, and the man who had held a knife against her face. The dispatcher kept her talking until two State Police cruisers passed southbound on the opposite roadway, their lights breaking across the median. Only then did Katia begin to shake.

She called Jessica.

Her friend answered on the second ring. “Katia? Where the hell are you?”

“On the Turnpike.”

“Are you drunk?”

“No. I need you to stay on the phone with me.”

Something in Katia’s voice erased the argument. Jessica asked where she was, whether she was hurt, whether she should call the police. Katia tried to explain the truck and the mannequin leg and the melons rolling beneath Axle’s boots. She sounded hysterical. She began crying so hard that Jessica made her slow down and breathe with her, the way they had when they were nursing students and Katia suffered her first panic attack over a dead child.

“Jess, I’m sorry,” Katia managed. “I was an asshole.”

“Nothing new there.”

“Jesus. You could deny it first.”

“You scared me. I’m still angry.”

“I know.” Katia passed the sign for Exit 7A and stayed in the right lane. She no longer felt any need to arrive home quickly. “And I think I might be pregnant.”

Jessica stopped breathing for a moment. “How late?”

“Two weeks. Maybe more.”

“Okay,” Jessica said, her voice becoming calm in the practiced way it did when somebody else’s world had become unmanageable. “We’re not deciding anything while you’re driving. You’re going to come to my apartment. Boris will make coffee. I’ll get a test. Then we figure it out. Okay?”

In the rearview mirror, a pair of high white headlights appeared over the rise. For several seconds Katia could see the red marker lights of a tractor stretched across the darkness behind them. Then another car moved between, and when it changed lanes the truck was gone.

Jessica continued talking. She described which exit Katia should take, where she would wait downstairs, and how angry she intended to remain after she was certain Katia was safe. Katia listened. Her wrists burned where the cargo strap had cut them, her dress hung torn from one shoulder, and a sweet piece of honeydew clung to the sole of her shoe. None of it felt like proof she was out of danger. Or that tomorrow was safe. The State Police contacted her. They never found a Honeydew melon truck.

Katia did not care about winning arguments anymore. She held the steering wheel tightly and followed Jessica’s voice north.