Chapter 11

Of course, we lose Fertility at a truck stop outside Denver, Colorado. Even I could see that coming. She sneaks off to get me some Chap Stick while the truck driver is out taking a leak. Adam and me are both asleep until we hear her screaming.
And of course she planned it this way.

In the dark, in the moonlight through the windows, I stumble through the furniture to where Adam has thrown open the two front doors.
We’re pulling away from the truck stop, gaining speed as the driver upshifts with Fertility running after us. Her one hand outstretched with the little tube of Chap Stick. Her red hair is flagging out behind her. Her shoes slap the pavement.
Adam is stretching his one hand out to save her. His other hand is gripping the doorframe.
With the shaking of the house, a marble-topped little occasional table falls over and rolls past Adam out the doors. Fertility dodges as the table smashes in the street.
Adam is saying, “Take my hand. You can reach it.”
A dining-room chair shakes out of the house and smashes, almost hitting Fertility, and she says, “No.”
Her words almost lost in the roar of the truck engine, she says, “Take the Chap Stick.”
Adam says, “No. If I can’t reach you, we’ll jump. We have to stay together.”
“No,” Fertility says. “Take the Chap Stick, he needs it.”
Adam says, “He needs you more.”
The windows we left open suck air inside, and the easy-living open floor plan channels this airstream out through the front doors. Embroidered throw pillows blow off the sofa and bounce out the front doors around Adam. They fly at Fertility, hitting her in the face and almost tripping her. Framed decorative art, botanical print reproductions mostly and tasteful racehorse prints, flap off the walls and sail out to explode into shards of glass and wood slivers and art.
The way I feel, I want to help, but I’m weak. I’ve lost too much attention in the last few days. I can hardly stand. My blood sugar levels are all over the map. I can only watch as Fertility falls behind and Adam risks leaning out farther and farther.
The silk flower arrangements topple and red silk roses, red silk geraniums, and blue iris sail out the door and flutter around Fertility. The symbols of forgetfulness, poppies, land in the road, and she sprints over them. The wind throws mock orange and sweet peas, white and pink, baby’s breath and orchids, white and purple, at Fertility’s feet.
“Don’t jump,” Fertility is saying.
She’s saying, “I’ll find you. I know where you’re going.”
For one instant, she almost makes it. Fertility almost reaches Adam’s hand, but when he makes his grab to pull her inside, their hands miss.
Almost miss. Adam opens his hand, and inside is the tube of Chap Stick.
And Fertility has fallen back into the dark and the past behind us.
Fertility is gone. We must be going sixty miles an hour by now, and Adam turns and throws the tube at me so hard it ricochets off two walls. Adam snarls, “I hope you’re happy now. I hope your lips recover.”
The dining-room china cabinet comes open and dishes, salad plates, soup tureens, dinner plates, stemware, and cups bounce and roll out the front doors. All this smashes in the street. All this leaves a wide trail behind us sparkling in the moonlight.
Nobody is running behind us, and Adam wrestles a console color television with surround sound and near-digital picture quality toward the door. With a shout he shoves it off the front porch. Then he shoves a velvet love seat off the porch. Then the spinet piano. Everything explodes when it hits the road.
Then he looks at me.
Stupid, weak, desperate me, I’m groveling on the floor trying to find the Chap Stick.
His teeth bared, his hair hanging in his face, Adam says, “I should throw you out that door.”
Then a sign goes by saying, Nebraska 98 miles.
And a smile, slow and creepy, cuts across Adam’s face. He staggers to the open front doors, and with the night wind howling around him he shouts.
“Fertility Hollis!” he shouts.
“Thank you!” he shouts.
Into the darkness behind us, all the darkness and scraps and glass and wreckage behind us, Adam shouts, “I won’t forget everything you told me must happen!”