“This is some kind of omen,” said Rachel.

     She was talking about a car fire about a mile ahead. It was too far away for Jeff to fill in any details, if anybody died. All they could see was a black smoke column across an unfamiliar red sky. Three lanes of rush hour traffic were trapped in place all around them. Below the elevated highway, roofs of apartment blocks stretched off like mesas.

     “It’s not an omen,” Jeff said, “they had it in the traffic report.”

     Rachel didn’t say ‘omen’ as if she thought it was a bad thing. She said it like something she wanted to add to her list of experiences, like female ejaculation. Rachel’s eyes were intensely blue, but with the sun a red ball just over the Philadelphia skyline, her irises had turned to amber.

     Jeff rolled their Jetta another five feet forward, and stopped. “This is nothing but a waste of time,” he said.

     “We definitely forked left when we should have forked right.”

     Rachel’s lap was covered with the brittle, yellowed maps Jeff had insisted they use, rather than buying new ones. She was using both hands to line up two ends of the interstate. Philadelphia hadn’t been on the slate for this trip. It was supposed to be Montreal to DC and back.

     As they inched closer to the car fire, Jeff could see it was an older model Civic that had caught. Flames poured out all the windows and skated across the roof.

     “What could make it catch fire like that?” said Rachel.

     Jeff thought they had wasted enough time already around this car, but despite himself, his machinery kicked in, an autopilot asking why and how. An over-hot engine could melt insulation on the wires, or a bad gasket seal from an oil filter change. His dad had been a high school science teacher, and taught him to approach every problem with the scientific method. “Always have a system,” he told Jeff. Washing the car when Jeff was a kid, his dad taught him to start at the top, letting him aim the hose and spray the roof, and then lifting him up to scrub it. Jeff loved the way his dad had clutched him tightly to his chest. From one end of the roof to the other, Jeff made overlapping circles with the sponge, as wide as his six-year-old arms would let him. “That’s good. So you don’t miss a spot.” He could feel the scratch of his dad’s chin on the back of his neck. “See how the bubbles run down?” The best way, then, was to douse and soap the windows, then the hood, and finish with the trunk and doors.

     When Rachel washed the car, she started wherever she was standing. Rachel scoffed at gravity and entropy, as if they were hokey religions. Watching her scrub the doors and rinse them before washing the roof, Jeff fought the urge to grab the sponge out of her hand. It wasn’t as if his dad was even watching—he died long before Jeff and Rachel met—but Jeff couldn’t seem to make his wife understand how important it was to him, that they do it his way.

     By the time a fireman waved them into a single lane, past the burning car, the sun was gone. Beyond the fire, the road opened up in front of them, and Jeff accelerated freely for the first time in an hour.

     “The Turnpike should be east,” she said.

     “Mm. Using your male hunting instincts, I see.” With her hand, Rachel squeezed the quad muscle in Jeff’s leg. But this wasn’t the time. What irritated Jeff was that Rachel knew he wouldn’t want this distraction, and she was fondling him all the same.

    The raised beltway slanted down, toward a pack of glass high rises. Jeff cut across three lanes to exit right.

     “What are you doing?” said Rachel.

     “Before we end up downtown.”

     She sat back hard in her seat, opening up the tear in the map. “Aargh! We should have just stayed on the highway.”

     Jeff was just doing what she would have done in the driver’s seat: turning somewhere without being sure how it was going to end up. She had offered her brand of arcane navigation advice all through the previous year, on their backpacking trip across Asia. In Delhi, after they had taken a few wrong turns in a row, Rachel made him hand over the guidebook, which she shoved into her bag without another look. Jeff had trailed behind. All around him in those market alleys, local men chattered, likely discussing in Hindi how best to separate him from his wife. She let him walk right by her in his distraction. More infuriating than her lilting “Oh, Je-eff,” to call him back was the fact that, within minutes, she had led them to the Old Delhi Mosque, where they had been heading all along.

     Their Jetta spilled from the off-ramp to a secondary road lined with bungalows. There were no lights or people anywhere. Jeff turned left at the first intersection, their headlights sweeping a tree shadow across a house on the corner.

     The ripeness of shadow leaves on blackened bricks reminded him of when he was five or six, sitting on the front porch in soupy summer darkness, watching the rise and fall of headlights on houses across the street, as cars rounded the corner. “It’s the angle of the headlights changing,” his dad had explained, sitting in the lawn chair beside Jeff, transistor sibilance of a baseball game under his chair. Jeff could never cross his legs the same way as his dad—one leg so far over the other that his foot dangled loose, almost vertical—but he took a sip of beer every time one was offered. “Put hair on your chest.” It had always tasted awful—what Jeff referred to in later years as skunk beer. As early as he could remember, cases of the cheap stuff had always been piled up in their garage at home.

     The new road Jeff and Rachel were on was almost identical to the first, and just as dark. He rolled down his window. The wash of traffic sounded like a nearby sea.

     “Why don’t we find somewhere to ask for directions?” said Rachel.

     Jeff kept his eyes on the road.

     “One of these days, I’m going to get out and walk.”

     Jeff’s neck flashed cold hot cold. Rachel didn’t sound like she was serious, but that was a scientific theory he didn’t want to test. There was a point of light at the end of the road they were on. As they got closer, Jeff saw that it was the assured fluorescent glow of a strip mall. He pulled the car off the road and into the parking lot.

     “7-Eleven,” he said.

      “I’ll go” said Rachel.

     On the slice of walkway lit up by their headlights, three teenaged boys shoved each other and laughed. They wore bandanas pulled low to their eyes, and tent-like basketball jerseys. Perfect for a concealed weapon.

     Jeff clicked open his seatbelt. “I think I should.”

     Rachel popped her door open. He knew she was daring him, telling him that what he was saying about her if he didn’t let her go was worse than anything that could happen to her if she went.

     Rachel applied the same abandon to everything, as she did to washing the car. On their first dates, she would drain two crantinis for every Coke Jeff ordered. The first night he stayed over at her apartment, she had thrown her skirt and panties in a corner of the room before he could even close the front door. Then she bent over to rip the duvet off her bed, her t-shirt riding up her back, above a smooth, unbroken curve of hip and leg. Rachel looked over her shoulder, to find Jeff scanning the bedroom for the right spot to put his overnight bag. “Are you still dressed?” she had laughed.

    Jeff watched the teenagers, who were now peering into their headlights. The car rocked as Rachel pushed the door open and stepped out. The boys stepped between her and the door. She stopped and put her hands on her hips. That’s it Rachel, Jeff thought, start something. But the kids just laughed and did a high-five as they continued past the door. Rachel went inside.

     Jeff released the steering wheel and looked over at the road, where headlights of cars whooshed past. Rachel threw herself so fully into everything—workouts, cocktails, sex. She had cracked everybody up at their wedding by being the one in front of the head table with his groomsmen, blowing smoke rings from their cigars. Life of the party, just like his dad. Conversely, she could go weeks without touching a drink until the next time they were out. This strength of Rachel’s electrified Jeff, just by virtue of basking in it. Having Rachel play with him sometimes was the price he paid for his attraction. Rachel was definitely a fighter, but at the same time, in very specific situations, she relied on Jeff desperately, uncharacteristically. Rachel hated big things that flew. In pigeon-infested Delhi, Rachel had refused to walk anywhere until Jeff promised to shield her with the arc of his forearm. Jeff had told her, “You’d be screwed without me,” wishing it were true. In the courtyard of the mosque in Old Delhi, two pigeons had swooped down, their wings slapping around her ponytail. Rachel had screamed and screamed. All they could do was run into a teashop across the road, Jeff holding Rachel’s head down like a secret service man rushing the president to a helicopter. When Rachel was sure nothing was going to dive-bomb her, she had tried to laugh it off. But instead of her usual smirking offhandedness, Jeff had glimpsed an eruption being held in check by the thinnest mantle.

      Rachel came out of the 7-Eleven after a few minutes. “Back alive, see?” she smiled.

     “What did they say?”

     “He said to take this road we’re on, through the next town. He said for sure the Turnpike goes through there.”   

     Jeff pulled back onto the road. After a few miles of hopeful scanning left and right for the next town, they ended up at an intersection. Jeff turned left.

     “The guy said straight!”

     Jeff couldn’t explain why he knew they needed to turn.

     “It feels like we’ve gone too far,” he said.

     On the new road, there was no hand on his thigh. Worse, he still had the feeling they needed to turn, to be going the right way. On their left, the road was lined with more of the same darkened bungalows. On their right was a clear-cut strip with high-tension rigs as far as Jeff could see.

     His hands were hot and swollen from gripping the steering wheel. Workman hands, Rachel called them. Nobody since his grandfather—a logger and then a public works foreman—had needed hands like these. But Jeff had them and so did his dad. He had studied his dad’s hands in great detail the first time he and his mom went to visiting day. They sat facing him at a folding card table in a flimsy conjugal visit cubicle. To spare himself the papal audience smile pasted on his dad’s face, Jeff had focused on his index finger, yellow from rolling his own cigarettes in his cell. His dad looked pale, his body deflated in the denim prison uniform that was too big for him. He looked like he didn’t belong there; and at the same time, Jeff couldn’t help a flash of smugness at the fact that he was. Jeff hated that his mom had to be hearing those wet sounds coming from the next cubicle; that she had to be there at all. 

     “Where’s this famous on-ramp?” Jeff asked Rachel.

     “The guy said straight.” She was looking out her window.

     Overhead, on the power lines, Jeff could pick out the black silhouettes of hundreds, maybe a thousand birds. “I wonder why there’s so many birds here.”

     Rachel shivered. “I was trying not to think about them.”

     Wordlessly, she tore one of his hands off the steering wheel, and clamped it tightly in her lap. She pushed her head softly into his shoulder. He felt his stomach slip downwards, as it had in their rickshaw after the pigeon incident: she had pulled his arm around her shoulders, and he let himself melt into her side.

     Rachel put Jeff’s hand back on the steering wheel. “Look, there’s a gas station on the corner.”

     Pulling into the parking lot, the pumps and service building were dark. A black pickup truck idled near the curb with the windows open. Jeff pulled up beside the truck and rolled down his window.

     “Help yuh?” said the man behind the wheel. 

     “Uh, yeah,” said Jeff, glancing at the man’s greasy, blue coveralls. “We’re looking for the Turnpike.”

     The man bared a hungry smile at Rachel, his mouth packed with what looked like twice the normal number of teeth..

     “Actually, forget it,” Jeff said.

     “No, wait,” said Rachel. “He must know how to get there.” She leaned forward to smile at the man in the truck. “Just a little way down this road, was it?” She was almost purring to the lunatic, as if Jeff was the one intruding on them.

     In the rear view, there was sudden movement. A big shadow crossed behind their car, heading around to the passenger side. Still no lights anywhere, Jeff couldn’t see who or what was heading toward Rachel’s door. He slammed his foot on the gas. The car bounced over a sidewalk, into the traffic. 

     “Are you crazy?” Rachel yelled.

     An SUV swerved out of their way, blaring its horn. The driver shook his fist as he passed.

     “I agree completely,” Rachel yelled in Jeff’s ear.

      Maneuvering the car into a lane was a good excuse to delay facing the electrical storm in the passenger seat.    

     “I’m really going to get out,” she said, “I will.”

     Jeff’s neck burned, and he was sixteen again, in the minivan with his friends, being driven home from the hockey rink. His dad turned on the wrong side of the median. The oncoming cars had time to get out of the way, but the road was full of honking and flashing headlights. Jeff avoided his friends’ eyes. At the next red light, he slid open the minivan door, and slammed it in his dad’s heavy-lidded face. His team mates were still in the back seat, but Jeff walked home anyway. That night, at supper, his dad acted as if nothing had happened. His mom didn’t ask why Jeff had walked in a half hour after his dad got home. 

     “Stop the car,” Rachel said.

     “No.”

     She will not get out of the car, Jeff willed, feeling Rachel’s eyes drilling into him from the passenger seat.

     “Stop,” she said, more quietly.

     Jeff turned to look at Rachel and found a face much softer than her voice had sounded before. She was looking at him with tenderness. Or pity. He wiped his eyes with a quick sleeve, and slowed the car. 

     She did not get out, even when they were pulled over.

     “OK,” she said. “OK.”

     They sat in silence.

     Through a break in the trees that lined this road, Jeff saw a smokestack with flames rising into the night sky. He thought of the burning compact from earlier, and what his dad might have seen on that highway at midnight, from behind the wheel of the totalled family minivan. The man whose picture Jeff had seen in the newspaper, school teacher, 45, husband and loving father, stumbling from the wreckage, dying on his feet.

     Jeff had seen a flaming smokestack exactly like this one alongside the Turnpike, on their way down to DC, a lifetime ago. Rachel had snorted then, at the self-indulgent sprawl of seemingly never-ending refineries. Now, she took his hand in the seat beside him. Together, they watched the flames from the smokestack get torn apart by the wind.

The End