Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis
Chapter Seven
I’m shaken awake, a warm hand on my shoulder, and for a moment I forget. It’s still dark outside, but the snow has stopped, and the stark white lights of hundreds of headlights outside makes it feel like someone’s flicked the house lights on. The show: over.
‘Sorry,’ says Sam, croakily. ‘The road’s reopening. Cop just knocked.’
‘God, did I – did I fall asleep? ’
‘For just an hour, I guess.’
‘Did you?’
He looks pale, and his dark hair is ruffled on the top of his head, as if he might have. ‘I napped a little, I think.’
I sit up, push the hair from my face. Sam has already doubled his blanket over in a rectangle on the armrest. I do the same, folding mine into one thick bundle and resting a hand on top, and it’s now that the weirdness of everything hits me again, like a slap in the face. I slept in a stranger’s car. I slept wrapped in another stranger’s blanket. I ate biscuits handed to me by a man in a ski mask on the M4. I left home almost twelve bloody hours ago. If I was to suddenly discover this was all a fever dream, I think I’d believe it. It would make the most sense.
‘What do you think we should do with these? The blankets.’
Sam gives a shrug, runs his hands through his dark, wavy hair. ‘Donate them? Keep them?’
‘I’ll take them with me. You’re not going to want to be lumbered with them at the airport, are you? That’s if you’re going straight to the airport?’
‘I am,’ Sam says simply.
Something sits between us in the car now, and I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s because it’s early and I’ve been asleep, but the car suddenly feels cold, and my skin is prickled with a layer of goosebumps. The warm, snuggled easiness has gone, and everything feels a bit rigid – awkward. Like when the lights come on at the end of a film at the cinema and you feel a pang of vulnerability – the worry of how your sleepy face looks to the strangers streaming by you to the exit, skin cold from too much air-con, the inevitable start of the fun-hangover. And despite myself, I really wish it was last night again. Eight hours. Eight tiny hours is all they were. And already, I miss them. Ridiculous. I am ridiculous.
Sam straightens in his seat, arching his back. He relaxes then looks over at me. The car is deathly silent. No radio. No more drifting outside voices of other drivers, of other in-car stereos. No more calming hum of the heater.
‘I suppose I’d better go then,’ I say.
Sam nods reluctantly, but says nothing, and I start gathering up things to take with me – the blankets, my handbag, my koala umbrella, my scarf …
‘Do you want some help? I can walk you over.’ He gives a small smile at the notion of the last few words. The swelling balloon of tension between us deflates a little, and I breathe a bit easier.
‘If you don’t mind.’
Sam and I get out of the car, our coats zipped and buttoned to the top. It’s bitter cold outside and the ground at our feet glistens like smashed glass with the salt that the crisis group must have put down from those big cardboard tubes they were holding. Sam holds my things as I try to unlock my car.
‘Why won’t it …’ I struggle with the key. ‘God, bloody thing usually locks us in, not out––’
‘Let me try.’
Sam passes me back my stuff and jangles the keys in the lock and I watch him, teeth nibbling his pink lips as he does, his hair dangling over his eyes. I want to tell him to stay in touch. I want to put my arms around him. God, what am I even thinking?
‘There.’ Sam straightens and pulls open the car door. I look up at him, the remnants of our evening piled high in my arms. ‘Thank you.’
He gives a singular deep nod.
‘And thank you for the phone charger. And the company. And … everything.’
Sam smiles – a smile that makes that prod-mark of a dimple appear in his cheek. ‘Ditto,’ he says. Then his lips part, and I think he’s going to say something else, but he doesn’t. Go on, ask for my number. An email address, an Instagram handle. Something. We could be friends. We could keep in touch, keep each other updated. A second chance at that pen pal in Portland. Yes, he lives in Oregon and barely comes over to see the family he alluded to visiting ‘once in a blue moon’, but – we can’t just leave it at this, can we?
‘We better go,’ says Sam as an engine from a car behind us rumbles into life.
‘Y-yeah. OK. Right.’ I smile – fake and awkward, more like a strain, but he buys it, I think, doesn’t sense my disappointment. And he starts to walk away, as I stand there by my open car door, engines chugging around me, blankets and belongings bundled under my arm like it’s 1999 and I’m on my way back from a sleepover. Then he stops and turns, shoes crunching on the ice: ‘Noelle?’
My heart lifts in my chest, as if suddenly suspended.
‘Yes?’
‘Drive safe.’
And that is the last thing Sam says to me.
When I get into my car, when I chuck the bundle of crap on my passenger seat, as I start the engine, when the car starts to smell of singed dust from my ancient heaters, as I turn up the radio, I wait. For him to jump out of the car, to tell me to wind down my window, to pass me a number – something scrawled on that old crossword page. But it doesn’t come. And although I really want to be the one to ask, something inside me tells me not to. And really, what would be the point of staying in touch? All those miles. Another person to miss. He probably meets a lot of people, a lot of strangers, and his friendliness, his easy-to-be-aroundness is probably part of the job. It’s why people recommend him. ‘Oh, you need Sam,’ they probably say, ‘he’s cool and calm and such a nice guy. Also, if you’re in the business for nice strong arms that could wrestle away a mountain lion in nothing but rags, then throw you over his shoulder for no reason whatsoever, then whew, he’s definitely your guy …’
When the traffic begins to move, Sam and I are alongside one another for a while. Me in my car, him in his, the hire car he’ll soon drop at the airport to be parked and lost in a meaningless fleet of others. A few times I look over, study his face through the glass – the straight line of his nose, the dark stubble of his jaw, the smile-lines by his brown eyes. I squirrel it away in my memory.
The roads clear, traffic speeds up, and I watch Sam until his car is a speck in the distance, and like those eight perfect hours, he is gone.