The Long Drive Home
Daniel Bullen

Spend as much time as you want with
him, you tell her. Figure out what you
need—just don’t go over to him.
She sits beside you, impassively, weighing this as you drive. You’re on your way back from Thanksgiving with her family. It had only made things worse, to see them, it didn’t bring you back together at all.
It’s been raining since you started from the coast, and now, by the time you break the silence, the lowland oaks are giving way to maples, some of them with a few last red leaves. The road is just wet—but you still have two hours of driving, and you’ve been driving fast, trying to cover ground before the temperature drops.
You haven’t said anything for the first hour, either of you. You wonder whether she’s thinking of him—thinking that now she’s headed in his direction: at least she has that, after the weekend. The years she’d spent with you cracking open: that’s what you hear in her silence.
You’d never married—it was always her right, to experiment, to do what she needed to do. You wanted her to have that freedom, since you knew that you had it as well. You knew that you couldn’t have escaped it, yourself: the freedom, the obligation you thought you would always have, to test your love against itself, to consider alternatives.
But these terms had only been abstract until she’d confessed, two weeks ago, to the all-night conversations she’d had when you’d been away. Then the kisses, the dawn-dizzy caresses.
After she’d broken that news, it had almost been placid, the tenderness between you got so deep—but only for a couple of days. Now it seems that it might have just been a residual effect, a last intimacy as the years you’d lived together fell to nothing. In another week, she confessed to further letters, kisses, intimacies.
She sits beside you for a long time after your words have been roared to silence by the road-slapping wheels, by the wind, by the darkness and now by the patter of thickening sleet on the windshield. Her face lit softly by the dash, she stares straight ahead.
When she knows that you’re looking at her, you feel her eyes withdraw, her face hardens. What you wouldn’t give to see that chin fold and ripple, those lips contort in a cry, the eyes press and twist as the tears came. They don’t. Regally, she sits beside you, letting you drive her, as if that’s the only thing you can do for her now.
But she knows and you know well enough that she could drive herself, if need be.
When she first told you—two weeks ago, when she first told you, she’d said that whatever happened, she knew that you were going through this together—so you’ve thought that you might still marry, make that leap together. Right now, though, you can’t tell a single thing about what she might feel. You used to know her—but who is she, now? What loyalties does she have?
The wheels spin free of the road for a moment, and you snap your head back to the highway. The wipers are accumulating a coating of slush, and the sleet is starting to accumulate in the median. In the beginning, when the wet road reflected the darkening sky, the whole world had been transparent, with only the cars and their traveling lights real in the midst of it all—the cars and occasional trees, where they hung out of mist and fog over the highway. But now that you’ve reached Vermont, it’s gotten dark, so the road is a tunnel of darkness between the black hills. This section of highway was paved this fall, and they haven’t painted the lines on it yet, so the dark isn’t bounded, there aren’t glowing lines to keep you in your lane: every time you turn a new corner, you have to orient yourself, every time you come over a rise. More than once, panic’s risen in you—you couldn’t see the road, you couldn’t tell where the road went, or if it was even still beneath you.
I don’t know, she finally says.
You slow down.
You can’t say that you don’t love him, you ask.
You hadn’t meant it to, but your voice has become spectral. The road is a blur on the other side of the wipers, but there isn’t any wiping this away.
I don’t know, she says, and her voice is funny, too. There’s a strain in it, but also an edge of determination you recognize. That determination had given you courage before—you knew you could believe in her—but what she’s saying isn’t giving you courage now.
I don’t want to choose, she says.
You know her—you know that this tenacity doesn’t come naturally—but she’s playing it naturally enough, it’s believable.
You thought you knew her well enough to predict how this would go, you were optimistic—you thought that she only needed to test herself, against someone else, not just you. But there isn’t just one reason for her opposition to you now: everything led her to it, her whole history, and yours. There are darknesses you can’t see into. You thought you could see, but there’s more to her than you ever knew—and now there are all the things she’s keeping from you.
These thoughts pass faster than the road—it seems you’ll always be driving and driving inside this conversation, without any traction, without even knowing where you’re going. The only thing that brings anything into focus is the other man. It’s impossible not to see him there, beneath everything.
You’ve always known what the script for this situation should be: “Go ahead, we love each other, our love is deeper than anything you can do to it.” But for some reason those words aren’t available to you now. His hands have found her lithe body, her lips have sought his lips.
You need her to disavow that, but she doesn’t. She only says—once again: she doesn’t know.
But you do, you say. You just can’t say what you need to say. You can see that, can’t you, that I’d need to hear it? How can I go on if you can’t say it?
Your voice would be a shriek but it’s a whisper. The car is at a crawl, now, but not because of the weather. You can’t see clearly at all.
It’s another few minutes before she says it one last time: she won’t choose.
You don’t want me, you say, half asking, appalled.
I want to see, she says, putting an end to it.
What happens next happens so quickly that you don’t know what it is. The road seems to dip and spin, almost as if the car were turning itself inside out. Reeling, you cling to the wheel, squint through the sleet at the road, to see if it’s even still there, or where it’s gone to. Are you still even on the road? Everything just went upside down and sideways, and you’re afraid: do you have to worry about nature itself, now, not holding together? How deep does this thing go?
But it wasn’t the car—it was the shock of her words, what they would mean for you. That she’s gone, she’s not yours any more.
It’s all you can do to keep the car on the road now. You think you might let it run down, take your foot off the gas, and just let it stall, and stop when it runs out of momentum. Of course you might also hit the gas and head off the road—you’re dimly aware of not wearing your seatbelt—but that doesn’t show you a way to the other side, with her. You might faint. Strangely that seems possible also.
But nothing happens. The car keeps going, even though something between you has just stopped, abruptly and finally. You might as well have gone through the windshield, yourself, but by an instinct you can’t even recognize, you keep driving. That instinct is so strong that you even find yourself fighting it—fighting to stop driving, to give up, or to throw the car off the road—anything to be free of this feeling that’s inside your lungs, now, and hollowing out all your bones.
Still, nothing happens. You’re driving, and she’s sitting in the passenger seat beside you. Her hair frames her face: through the tears you can still make that out, as well as the collar of her coat, the sweater and shirt at the throat, the skin of her face, her hair, her neck. You can’t imagine further than what you see: you know her clavicles and shoulders, you know her skin and her breasts and the weight of them and the soft skin of her belly and the taut slender form of her sides but you can’t know them now, you won’t know them again, she wants to give them to someone else.
Whatever you thought you knew about the love that balanced your freedoms—well, this is what’s true instead, now.
You’re driving but it’s like you’re not even in the car any more, the confusion is so thick. You don’t understand anything. Apparently two people really can sit in a car with a history of years between them, but still also be strangers—strangers who might even have been enemies in a previous lifetime, but now they’re just meeting, in this.
The horror does not subside. You still have a long drive ahead of you. You don’t have enough of a mind to realize that you should pull off, find a hotel, get separate rooms. Let her call him—let him come and get her. Go to sleep—sleep till you wake to a day you can face.
You don’t have the imagination for that. The wheel is in your hands, and even though it’s costing you more attention than you can pay—just to keep the car moving—you do, you keep it going, plunging on into the darkness.
You and the stone of your head and the raw wound of your heart keep the car rolling into the hills. The sleet is coming down thicker, and you start to see flakes of wet snow in the headlights. The low pressure inside you doesn’t answer to this—there isn’t any pleasure in the bleak conditions, it doesn’t correspond to you. You only want it to stop, all of it, but you’re driving and there’s no way to make it stop, not till it’s over.
It doesn’t get too much worse, not until you arrive at an interchange, and you have to get on a different highway. You ease on the brakes as the car goes over the overpass before the exit, but even with gentle pressure, the wheels all lock, and the car skids, ten feet behind the car in front of you, at sixty-five miles an hour—both of you aimed directly at the embankment where the exit curves. You skid together, the two of you, and when you start rolling again on the other side of the overpass, you’re much too fast and much too close to each other.
You were insane with grief and confusion a moment ago, but now you’re stone awake, alert, electrified. You’ve driven in these conditions before—without remembering the other times, when you learned it. You know how to do this now, the knowledge just comes up in you. You and the other car both slow down in the space before the exit, and you guide the car gently around the exit curve, down the hill and onto the northbound on-ramp.
When you hit the on-ramp, you accelerate. The earth seems solid again beneath you, your wheels seem to know it again, so you hit the gas, to get away from this car you were suddenly much too close to. The tires bite, your foot presses, and it’s vital to you that you pull yourself away from this other car. You have traction now, and you don’t want to be so close to him if you’re going to lose it again.
You have traction to get on the highway, you get up to speed, but up ahead, where the highway makes its first curve, lights are blinking where two cars are off the road. One is upside down: there are tracks in the slush to show where it bounced off the far-side guardrail, then slid back across the highway into the median, where it rolled.
You keep going, rock steady in spite of everything. At a crawl, you rev the engine from time to time, to see if the wheels still have bite on the road: they hardly do, any more, only enough to make it up the shallowest inclines, to keep you going.
This highway will wind through the hills for eighty miles before you’ll reach your exit, the house where you live—with her or without her, now. It’s still your destination—the wheel is still in your hands, you’re still driving, and nothing else can happen till you get there.
You drive like this, mile after mile, even though it might take three or four minutes to put each mile behind you, at fifteen or twenty miles an hour. You don’t even have enough mind to do the math, how long it will take you to get home, at this rate: it’s all you can do to keep the car on the road. Even the slight inclines, now, are utterly treacherous, as the car races sideways in slush and ice. Of course the tractor-trailers aren’t slowed down by this at all, they’ve got so much momentum. They come barreling by, as they must, if they’re going to keep their speed, but you can’t see a thing when they pass, you can only feel the car and its motion beneath you, unsteady in your hands. Remotely you feel her beside you as well, her life in the car, the conversation between you a transparent wall of ice.
The sides of the road are littered with cars—upside down, on their sides, facing backward, with blinking lights—and people are standing beside them as the snow falls in their hair. From time to time, you find yourself behind someone who’s so terrified, so unprepared for this weather that it’s all they can do to crawl along, and even though you are outside of yourself as well, you can’t stand to inch along like that in the spatter and spray from their wheels. Their panic, their insufficiency itself is so appalling that you have to take the risk, and swing around them, even though passing means wallowing through the icy slush between lanes, then sliding around in the fast lane, which is only icier for having had less traffic.
She tightens beside you when you do this, but she still doesn’t say anything. You pass, you hold the car as steady as you can, while it bucks its way back through the slush, and then slips back, sliding and rocking, threatening to spin, buck or head into the weeds.
After half an hour of this, she starts to speak.
I’m… she starts to say.
Shh, you hiss, silencing her.
You can’t say anything, you can’t even shake your head, you’re so keen on driving. Besides, you could hear what she was going to say in the breath she took: it doesn’t matter, that she’s sorry, or that she never wanted to hurt you.
You keep going in silence. Neither one of you can move—not even to turn on the radio, the balance in the car is so precarious.
You’ve become a machine. You’re beyond yourself, there isn’t anything left of you. You don’t particularly want to go on, but there’s this instinct, pressing and driving, and of course you can’t face the terror on either side of the road—the median and the woods are equally appalling—so what else can you do. You have to use all the car’s muscles to keep yourself balanced on the dark, winding roadway.
Sitting there beside you, mustn’t she feel—even with her words between you, mustn’t she feel the electric tension in your shoulders and in your spine, as you fight with the car and the weather? Isn’t she clinging to her seat just as tightly as you cling to yours—isn’t her attention just as sharp—isn’t she’s bolstering you with it—aren’t you both of the same one tense body?
With the sleet and snow, you can hardly see anything. Certainly you can’t see tomorrow from here, not yet. There’s still only the road, the slipping wheels, the windshield wipers slapping, the miles getting slowly, agonizingly shorter. But there will be a tomorrow—you both, with your bodies, steer toward it, as much as you yearn toward anything.
Even if one of you sleeps on the couch tonight—even if she goes to him tomorrow, and you never see her again—tonight is tying the threads of your lives in a final knot: you will have been in the same body, this one last time, in this one prolonged, torturesome intimacy. With your keenest attention, you hold the wheel, and the road. You strain toward tomorrow—even toward the loss that will greet you there.
Remember that: you wanted the loss, you even fought for it, together, as one body—the same as you’d once strained to merge, when you first met. In this car, on this road, you strove together as if the sensation of sitting beside each other—going, together—even such as you are—even toward that grief, together, since that was really what was waiting for you—you fought toward the next day together, as if even that dawn might finally fulfill the hint and promise of freedom, that delicious illusion that drew you to her in the first place.
She sits beside you, impassively, weighing this as you drive. You’re on your way back from Thanksgiving with her family. It had only made things worse, to see them, it didn’t bring you back together at all.
It’s been raining since you started from the coast, and now, by the time you break the silence, the lowland oaks are giving way to maples, some of them with a few last red leaves. The road is just wet—but you still have two hours of driving, and you’ve been driving fast, trying to cover ground before the temperature drops.
You haven’t said anything for the first hour, either of you. You wonder whether she’s thinking of him—thinking that now she’s headed in his direction: at least she has that, after the weekend. The years she’d spent with you cracking open: that’s what you hear in her silence.
You’d never married—it was always her right, to experiment, to do what she needed to do. You wanted her to have that freedom, since you knew that you had it as well. You knew that you couldn’t have escaped it, yourself: the freedom, the obligation you thought you would always have, to test your love against itself, to consider alternatives.
But these terms had only been abstract until she’d confessed, two weeks ago, to the all-night conversations she’d had when you’d been away. Then the kisses, the dawn-dizzy caresses.
After she’d broken that news, it had almost been placid, the tenderness between you got so deep—but only for a couple of days. Now it seems that it might have just been a residual effect, a last intimacy as the years you’d lived together fell to nothing. In another week, she confessed to further letters, kisses, intimacies.
She sits beside you for a long time after your words have been roared to silence by the road-slapping wheels, by the wind, by the darkness and now by the patter of thickening sleet on the windshield. Her face lit softly by the dash, she stares straight ahead.
When she knows that you’re looking at her, you feel her eyes withdraw, her face hardens. What you wouldn’t give to see that chin fold and ripple, those lips contort in a cry, the eyes press and twist as the tears came. They don’t. Regally, she sits beside you, letting you drive her, as if that’s the only thing you can do for her now.
But she knows and you know well enough that she could drive herself, if need be.
When she first told you—two weeks ago, when she first told you, she’d said that whatever happened, she knew that you were going through this together—so you’ve thought that you might still marry, make that leap together. Right now, though, you can’t tell a single thing about what she might feel. You used to know her—but who is she, now? What loyalties does she have?
The wheels spin free of the road for a moment, and you snap your head back to the highway. The wipers are accumulating a coating of slush, and the sleet is starting to accumulate in the median. In the beginning, when the wet road reflected the darkening sky, the whole world had been transparent, with only the cars and their traveling lights real in the midst of it all—the cars and occasional trees, where they hung out of mist and fog over the highway. But now that you’ve reached Vermont, it’s gotten dark, so the road is a tunnel of darkness between the black hills. This section of highway was paved this fall, and they haven’t painted the lines on it yet, so the dark isn’t bounded, there aren’t glowing lines to keep you in your lane: every time you turn a new corner, you have to orient yourself, every time you come over a rise. More than once, panic’s risen in you—you couldn’t see the road, you couldn’t tell where the road went, or if it was even still beneath you.
I don’t know, she finally says.
You slow down.
You can’t say that you don’t love him, you ask.
You hadn’t meant it to, but your voice has become spectral. The road is a blur on the other side of the wipers, but there isn’t any wiping this away.
I don’t know, she says, and her voice is funny, too. There’s a strain in it, but also an edge of determination you recognize. That determination had given you courage before—you knew you could believe in her—but what she’s saying isn’t giving you courage now.
I don’t want to choose, she says.
You know her—you know that this tenacity doesn’t come naturally—but she’s playing it naturally enough, it’s believable.
You thought you knew her well enough to predict how this would go, you were optimistic—you thought that she only needed to test herself, against someone else, not just you. But there isn’t just one reason for her opposition to you now: everything led her to it, her whole history, and yours. There are darknesses you can’t see into. You thought you could see, but there’s more to her than you ever knew—and now there are all the things she’s keeping from you.
These thoughts pass faster than the road—it seems you’ll always be driving and driving inside this conversation, without any traction, without even knowing where you’re going. The only thing that brings anything into focus is the other man. It’s impossible not to see him there, beneath everything.
You’ve always known what the script for this situation should be: “Go ahead, we love each other, our love is deeper than anything you can do to it.” But for some reason those words aren’t available to you now. His hands have found her lithe body, her lips have sought his lips.
You need her to disavow that, but she doesn’t. She only says—once again: she doesn’t know.
But you do, you say. You just can’t say what you need to say. You can see that, can’t you, that I’d need to hear it? How can I go on if you can’t say it?
Your voice would be a shriek but it’s a whisper. The car is at a crawl, now, but not because of the weather. You can’t see clearly at all.
It’s another few minutes before she says it one last time: she won’t choose.
You don’t want me, you say, half asking, appalled.
I want to see, she says, putting an end to it.
What happens next happens so quickly that you don’t know what it is. The road seems to dip and spin, almost as if the car were turning itself inside out. Reeling, you cling to the wheel, squint through the sleet at the road, to see if it’s even still there, or where it’s gone to. Are you still even on the road? Everything just went upside down and sideways, and you’re afraid: do you have to worry about nature itself, now, not holding together? How deep does this thing go?
But it wasn’t the car—it was the shock of her words, what they would mean for you. That she’s gone, she’s not yours any more.
It’s all you can do to keep the car on the road now. You think you might let it run down, take your foot off the gas, and just let it stall, and stop when it runs out of momentum. Of course you might also hit the gas and head off the road—you’re dimly aware of not wearing your seatbelt—but that doesn’t show you a way to the other side, with her. You might faint. Strangely that seems possible also.
But nothing happens. The car keeps going, even though something between you has just stopped, abruptly and finally. You might as well have gone through the windshield, yourself, but by an instinct you can’t even recognize, you keep driving. That instinct is so strong that you even find yourself fighting it—fighting to stop driving, to give up, or to throw the car off the road—anything to be free of this feeling that’s inside your lungs, now, and hollowing out all your bones.
Still, nothing happens. You’re driving, and she’s sitting in the passenger seat beside you. Her hair frames her face: through the tears you can still make that out, as well as the collar of her coat, the sweater and shirt at the throat, the skin of her face, her hair, her neck. You can’t imagine further than what you see: you know her clavicles and shoulders, you know her skin and her breasts and the weight of them and the soft skin of her belly and the taut slender form of her sides but you can’t know them now, you won’t know them again, she wants to give them to someone else.
Whatever you thought you knew about the love that balanced your freedoms—well, this is what’s true instead, now.
You’re driving but it’s like you’re not even in the car any more, the confusion is so thick. You don’t understand anything. Apparently two people really can sit in a car with a history of years between them, but still also be strangers—strangers who might even have been enemies in a previous lifetime, but now they’re just meeting, in this.
The horror does not subside. You still have a long drive ahead of you. You don’t have enough of a mind to realize that you should pull off, find a hotel, get separate rooms. Let her call him—let him come and get her. Go to sleep—sleep till you wake to a day you can face.
You don’t have the imagination for that. The wheel is in your hands, and even though it’s costing you more attention than you can pay—just to keep the car moving—you do, you keep it going, plunging on into the darkness.
You and the stone of your head and the raw wound of your heart keep the car rolling into the hills. The sleet is coming down thicker, and you start to see flakes of wet snow in the headlights. The low pressure inside you doesn’t answer to this—there isn’t any pleasure in the bleak conditions, it doesn’t correspond to you. You only want it to stop, all of it, but you’re driving and there’s no way to make it stop, not till it’s over.
It doesn’t get too much worse, not until you arrive at an interchange, and you have to get on a different highway. You ease on the brakes as the car goes over the overpass before the exit, but even with gentle pressure, the wheels all lock, and the car skids, ten feet behind the car in front of you, at sixty-five miles an hour—both of you aimed directly at the embankment where the exit curves. You skid together, the two of you, and when you start rolling again on the other side of the overpass, you’re much too fast and much too close to each other.
You were insane with grief and confusion a moment ago, but now you’re stone awake, alert, electrified. You’ve driven in these conditions before—without remembering the other times, when you learned it. You know how to do this now, the knowledge just comes up in you. You and the other car both slow down in the space before the exit, and you guide the car gently around the exit curve, down the hill and onto the northbound on-ramp.
When you hit the on-ramp, you accelerate. The earth seems solid again beneath you, your wheels seem to know it again, so you hit the gas, to get away from this car you were suddenly much too close to. The tires bite, your foot presses, and it’s vital to you that you pull yourself away from this other car. You have traction now, and you don’t want to be so close to him if you’re going to lose it again.
You have traction to get on the highway, you get up to speed, but up ahead, where the highway makes its first curve, lights are blinking where two cars are off the road. One is upside down: there are tracks in the slush to show where it bounced off the far-side guardrail, then slid back across the highway into the median, where it rolled.
You keep going, rock steady in spite of everything. At a crawl, you rev the engine from time to time, to see if the wheels still have bite on the road: they hardly do, any more, only enough to make it up the shallowest inclines, to keep you going.
This highway will wind through the hills for eighty miles before you’ll reach your exit, the house where you live—with her or without her, now. It’s still your destination—the wheel is still in your hands, you’re still driving, and nothing else can happen till you get there.
You drive like this, mile after mile, even though it might take three or four minutes to put each mile behind you, at fifteen or twenty miles an hour. You don’t even have enough mind to do the math, how long it will take you to get home, at this rate: it’s all you can do to keep the car on the road. Even the slight inclines, now, are utterly treacherous, as the car races sideways in slush and ice. Of course the tractor-trailers aren’t slowed down by this at all, they’ve got so much momentum. They come barreling by, as they must, if they’re going to keep their speed, but you can’t see a thing when they pass, you can only feel the car and its motion beneath you, unsteady in your hands. Remotely you feel her beside you as well, her life in the car, the conversation between you a transparent wall of ice.
The sides of the road are littered with cars—upside down, on their sides, facing backward, with blinking lights—and people are standing beside them as the snow falls in their hair. From time to time, you find yourself behind someone who’s so terrified, so unprepared for this weather that it’s all they can do to crawl along, and even though you are outside of yourself as well, you can’t stand to inch along like that in the spatter and spray from their wheels. Their panic, their insufficiency itself is so appalling that you have to take the risk, and swing around them, even though passing means wallowing through the icy slush between lanes, then sliding around in the fast lane, which is only icier for having had less traffic.
She tightens beside you when you do this, but she still doesn’t say anything. You pass, you hold the car as steady as you can, while it bucks its way back through the slush, and then slips back, sliding and rocking, threatening to spin, buck or head into the weeds.
After half an hour of this, she starts to speak.
I’m… she starts to say.
Shh, you hiss, silencing her.
You can’t say anything, you can’t even shake your head, you’re so keen on driving. Besides, you could hear what she was going to say in the breath she took: it doesn’t matter, that she’s sorry, or that she never wanted to hurt you.
You keep going in silence. Neither one of you can move—not even to turn on the radio, the balance in the car is so precarious.
You’ve become a machine. You’re beyond yourself, there isn’t anything left of you. You don’t particularly want to go on, but there’s this instinct, pressing and driving, and of course you can’t face the terror on either side of the road—the median and the woods are equally appalling—so what else can you do. You have to use all the car’s muscles to keep yourself balanced on the dark, winding roadway.
Sitting there beside you, mustn’t she feel—even with her words between you, mustn’t she feel the electric tension in your shoulders and in your spine, as you fight with the car and the weather? Isn’t she clinging to her seat just as tightly as you cling to yours—isn’t her attention just as sharp—isn’t she’s bolstering you with it—aren’t you both of the same one tense body?
With the sleet and snow, you can hardly see anything. Certainly you can’t see tomorrow from here, not yet. There’s still only the road, the slipping wheels, the windshield wipers slapping, the miles getting slowly, agonizingly shorter. But there will be a tomorrow—you both, with your bodies, steer toward it, as much as you yearn toward anything.
Even if one of you sleeps on the couch tonight—even if she goes to him tomorrow, and you never see her again—tonight is tying the threads of your lives in a final knot: you will have been in the same body, this one last time, in this one prolonged, torturesome intimacy. With your keenest attention, you hold the wheel, and the road. You strain toward tomorrow—even toward the loss that will greet you there.
Remember that: you wanted the loss, you even fought for it, together, as one body—the same as you’d once strained to merge, when you first met. In this car, on this road, you strove together as if the sensation of sitting beside each other—going, together—even such as you are—even toward that grief, together, since that was really what was waiting for you—you fought toward the next day together, as if even that dawn might finally fulfill the hint and promise of freedom, that delicious illusion that drew you to her in the first place.