The Other Driver

Mile 184 was the first place where Daniel understood that he had been followed.

Not by a car. By himself.

He noticed it when he pulled into the rest stop at 2:17 in the morning and saw, through the rain-streaked windshield, a man sitting alone under the fluorescent lights of the vending alcove. The man was wearing his coat. Not a coat like his — the coat, the brown canvas one with the torn pocket flap he had been meaning to have sewn since the spring, sitting open the way it sat open on him, because the second button had been gone so long he had stopped registering it as missing.

Daniel turned off the engine.

For a while neither of them moved.

The rest stop had been built in the seventies and renovated just enough times since to make it impossible to say what decade it belonged to. Beige block walls. Blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor in rows, as though someone had once expected a crowd. A bank of vending machines glowing with the artificial cheerfulness of aquariums. Behind the building, an industrial fan clicked on, ran four or five seconds, clicked off, and then, after a pause that was not the same length as the last pause, clicked on again. He kept catching himself waiting for it. It never came when he was ready.

The highway was empty. No trucks. No headlights. Just rain coming down through the sodium light in long uninterrupted strings.

He looked again.

The man was gone.

Daniel sat with his hands on the wheel and let the wipers finish their arc and stop. He had been driving six hours without deciding where he intended to stop, which was not, lately, unusual. He had discovered sometime around March that if he kept going past midnight the difference between leaving and arriving became pleasantly difficult to maintain.

Karen had folded receipts. Every one of them, in half and then in half again, before it went into her purse — the pharmacy, the hardware store, a gallon of milk, it made no difference. He had found one in a coat pocket two winters after she left, a small stiff square gone brown at the creases, and he had stood in the kitchen with it a while and then put it back, because there was no version of throwing it away that he could get through.

There was a version of all this he could have explained to her, once, in the years when she asked. There was no version he could explain now, and no one to hear it, and that too had stopped registering as missing.

He checked the clock. 2:18.

Then he laughed. It wasn't funny.

He got out of the car. The rain smelled like wet asphalt and pine. The automatic doors opened before he reached them, and the air inside was warmer than a building like that has any business being at two in the morning.

A woman stood behind the counter. Sixty, maybe. Eighty. Her hair was white, but her face had a smooth unfinished quality, like a face that had never happened to be photographed.

"Bathroom?" Daniel said, and found that he had already begun turning toward the hall.

She pointed at it anyway.

He took three steps.

"Daniel."

He stopped. She was looking at him over the top of a newspaper.

"You forgot your receipt."

"I haven't bought anything."

She held up a narrow strip of thermal paper and waited, patiently, the way you wait for a child to come take the thing you are holding out.

He took it. There was a date at the top.

Tomorrow's.

COFFEE — $2.19

WATER — $1.49

KEY — $0.00

ONE NIGHT — PAID

"What is this?"

She had already turned away. "Bathroom's down the hall."

The men's room had four sinks, six urinals, three stalls, and a mirror so large it seemed to have been ordered for a different building entirely — a dance studio, a boxing gym, somewhere people were supposed to watch themselves work.

Everything was clean. The floor had been mopped recently enough that his shoes squeaked. Under the fluorescent hum he could still hear the fan out behind the building, keeping its uneven count.

He washed his hands.

The water came out too hot, and he let it stay too hot, watching the skin of his knuckles go pink, thinking about nothing in the deliberate way a man thinks about nothing when he has been driving since dark and does not want to arrive at the thought that has been riding in the passenger seat for six hours. He shut off the tap. He looked up.

His reflection was still washing its hands.

He did not move. He had the sense, very precisely, of a floor tilting somewhere under a house.

The reflection finished. It shook the water off with two short flicks of the wrist — his gesture, his father's gesture before it — pulled a paper towel from the dispenser and dried between each finger the way you do when you're stalling.

Daniel's hands hung wet at his sides.

The reflection dropped the towel in the trash. Then it stopped pretending, and looked at him. Not the flat outward stare of a man checking his own face. It found his eyes across the room and held them, the way you look at someone through a window when neither of you can hear the other.

Its lips moved.

There was no sound. There was no sound and he understood it anyway, the words arriving already inside him, the way your own name arrives when someone says it in a crowd.

You shouldn't have come back.

The lights stuttered.

For half a second the mirror held a kitchen. Yellow overhead light, a table with a scorch ring in the veneer, a woman sitting with her back mostly turned and a child asleep against her shoulder. The smell came through — onions gone soft in butter, and under it the butter starting to burn, which meant she had been sitting there a while and had not gotten up. The child's hand hung down over her arm. It opened and closed. Opened. Closed. On. Off. The uneven count of the fan, exactly, pause for pause.

He knew the woman.

He had never seen the child.

Then it was tile again, and urinals, and his own face doing what his face was doing.

He left without drying his hands.

The woman behind the counter had the newspaper open to the back page and half a sandwich beside it, wrapped back up in its own foil like a letter she meant to answer later. She licked her thumb before turning the page. She did not look up.

"They take your money?"

"What?"

"The machines." She turned another page. "Middle one eats quarters. I keep a can back here if it does."

"No," Daniel said. "No, they didn't."

"Then you're ahead," she said, "which is more than most."

He put his hand in his coat pocket for no reason he could name, and the receipt was there. He did not remember putting it away. The paper had gone soft and slightly warm, the way thermal paper goes after it has been held a long time.

COFFEE — $2.19

WATER — $1.49

KEY — $0.00

ONE NIGHT — PAID IN FULL

He read it twice. The last line had been shorter before. He was certain of it in the way you are certain of things at two in the morning, which is to say completely, and with no means of proof.

He folded it in half.

Then in half again.

Then he put it back in his pocket.

The man in his coat was in the alcove, in the chair nearest the window, holding a paper cup in both hands like someone who had come in out of a long cold.

Daniel walked over.

The man looked up, and it was not a resemblance. It was the crooked front tooth. It was the scar over the left eyebrow from the porch step in 1989. It was the gray coming in at the temples, except further along — fifteen years further, or thirty; the arithmetic wouldn't hold still.

"What is this place?"

"A rest stop." The man turned the cup a half rotation on the table, squaring it to some edge only he could see, and Daniel watched his own hands do it and felt the small nausea of being caught. "You always start there."

"Then where should I start."

Nothing.

The man pushed the cup across the table.

Daniel looked at it. Coffee, gone the flat brown of coffee that has been sitting.

"It's yours," the man said.

Daniel drank it. It was cold, and bitter, and he did not decide to drink it.

The clock above the doors said 2:41.

It had said 2:41 when he came out of the hall. The second hand rested against the six like something that had died there.

"How long have you been here."

"There it is."

"How long."

The man looked at the window. Outside, the rain, and the sodium light, and no headlights in either direction, and none for some time now.

"Sit down," he said.

Daniel didn't. But he saw what was on the table beside the cup.

A notebook. Black cover, the corner soft and furred where it had ridden in a bag for years. He knew its weight before he touched it. He had lost it in a motel outside Amarillo eleven years ago and had spent an entire afternoon calling the front desk about it, and had then never thought about it again until this exact second.

He picked it up. The man in his coat did not stop him.

Inside, his own handwriting, tighter than it was now. Not stories. Descriptions. His father. His mother. A man he'd worked with at the plant whose name he could no longer produce. A girl from college with a chipped tooth. Karen twice — once at twenty-six, and once further on, in a paragraph he did not remember writing and could not read past the second line.

Under each name, the same instruction, copied out by hand every time as though the repetition were part of it:

*Write what they would say if they knew you were watching.*

He turned pages. The handwriting stayed the same. The paper got newer.

His thumb found the place without looking for it.

DANIEL

The ink was darker than the rest.

Rain. He comes in off the highway at 2:17 and does not dry his hands.

He asks what this place is.

He picks up the notebook.

He turns to this page.

The date at the top was the one printed on the receipt.

Behind the building the fan clicked on. Ran. Stopped. Waited a length of time that was not the last length of time.

Daniel closed the notebook and went on holding it, because setting it down would have required deciding where.

"Who wrote this."

"You know how to read your own handwriting."

"When."

The man in his coat finally looked at him, and there was nothing knowing in it, nothing patient or superior — only the flat exhaustion of somebody who stopped being asked a long time ago.

"You don't want that answer," he said. "You never have."

"Try me."

"That's what you say."

Daniel opened his mouth to ask when he had said it, and heard the question start, and it came out in the other man's voice — the same words, the same tired shape, arriving a half-beat before he had finished deciding to speak them.

Neither of them acknowledged it.

Behind the counter, the woman folded her newspaper in half, and then in half again, and set it down, and looked at the doors.

Something in Daniel's chest turned over and lay still.

He walked to the doors.

They didn't open.

He pushed. The glass gave that small dead flex of a door with nothing behind it, and stopped.

Somewhere in the building, a toilet flushed.

Through the glass, his car sat under the sodium light where he had left it, except the driver's door stood open now, and there was a shape behind the wheel, dark against the dark, rain coming in onto the seat and nobody bothering about it.

The shape raised one hand.

Daniel stepped closer.

It raised its hand again. Not a signal. A wave — unhurried, faintly amused, the way you wave at someone taking too long inside a store.

Daniel raised his own hand to the glass and could not have said which of them had moved first.

Behind him: "You've always had trouble with this part."

"Which part."

"Getting in."

Daniel watched the rain come through the open door of his car. "And if I don't."

The man in his coat said nothing at all, and after a while Daniel understood that his silence was not refusal.

The lights began going off a row at a time, back to front, like a man closing up a place he has closed a thousand times. The hallway behind the bathrooms lengthened while Daniel was looking at it, the way a hallway does in the last second before sleep, and went on lengthening, and disappeared.

The woman was behind the counter again. She set a key on the counter and slid it across, and beside it a bottle of water, sweating cold.

"Your room's ready," she said.

There was no number on the key. Only his name, stamped into the brass and worn shallow in the middle where a thumb had gone over it many times.

DANIEL

He picked it up. He left the water.

"Dry your hands first," the man in his coat said, from somewhere behind him, or possibly not.

The man in his coat was gone. So was the notebook. So was the clock — not the time on it; the clock, and the four screw holes, and the rectangle of unfaded paint where it had hung.

Then the fan clicked on, and the vending machines buzzed, and the rain ran down the windows, and the rest stop was an ordinary building at the side of an ordinary road.

The automatic doors opened.

Outside, the highway waited.

He walked to his car. The driver was still in it. He opened the door and the man behind the wheel turned toward him, and Daniel could not see his face — only the shape of a head against the far window, and his own voice coming through the rain.

"Where have you been?"

Daniel looked back at the rest stop.

The woman was watching from inside. She raised one hand.

Not waving. Counting.

One.

Two.

Three.

She kept going.

He got in. The man in the driver's seat slid over to make room, unhurried, as though this had been arranged some time ago and only Daniel had been late. Daniel pulled the door shut, and only then understood that the car was already moving, and had been for a while, and that the key in his fist had gone warm.

He looked down. His hand was opening and closing around it. On. Off. Then a pause, and another pause that was not the same length. He made himself stop. A moment later he found that it had started again without him.

The pocket flap of his coat had been sewn. Small even stitches, brown thread, slightly darker than the canvas.

The highway ran ahead under the rain. Mile marker 184 went past and did not come back. He looked into the side mirror. There was no rest stop behind them. There was no light back there at all.

"Who are you," Daniel said.

"You know."

He faced forward.

"Don't worry," the driver said, and Daniel recognized the voice, and it was his own, and it was kind.

2:17 a.m.

Ahead, through the rain, a rest stop.

Daniel reached for the door handle and found his hand already on it.

And somewhere far behind him, in the dark, someone was just beginning to arrive.