Gathering Dark

shuffling sound. “Huh? Who is this?”
“I just want to talk to you for a minute,” I said. “What’s your name? Where are you? What are you doing?”
I already had some of the details I needed. Deep voice. Not old, but it was hard to tell—he hadn’t said much yet. I formed an image of his face quickly. Closed my eyes to see it better. The man sounded as if he was in a quiet, enclosed space. No background noise. A car? His house? An elevator? The possibilities were endless. I could picture him taking his phone from his ear, looking at the screen. Unknown number.
“Sorry, who is this?” he insisted.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Steve.”
“Steve,” I said. “I’m Blair. Are you at home right now?”
“Woman, whatever you’re sellin’, I can tell you I don’t want it.”
“I’m not selling anything,” I said. My breaths were slowing. I could see Steve’s face. A kind face. Big hands. I added a ball cap. Blue. Dodgers. “I just want to know what you’re doing.”
“Me?” he said. “I’m waitin’ on somebody.”
“Who?”
“I drive Uber. Some guy. Is this Rebecca?” Skeptical. I could see him narrow his eyes.
“It’s Blair,” I said. I wiped my sweaty hand on my jeans. “What kind of neighborhood are you in? How long have you been driving Uber?”
“A year. What … Oh man. What do you want?”
“I just want to talk.”
“This is so weird.” A smile in his voice.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You just some random chick calling people looking for someone to talk to? About nothin’?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I do it all the time.”
“Hell, why?”
“Because it makes me feel good.”
“It makes you feel good to know it’s Steve here, sittin’ on his ass in a car outside some goddamn house in the middle of nowhere, waiting for some dumb fuck to come get his ride.” His voice rose and rose until it cracked with laughter. “That’s stupid, girl.”
“I know,” I said again. “But it’s a thing now. It’s something that I do. And I’m real grateful you answered.”
Steve the Uber driver laughed again and hung up. I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face, focused on him sitting in his car, watching as his passenger emerged from their house. As always, I inserted the details I needed to latch on to the dream—the passenger’s suitcase rumbling as he wheeled it along the concrete drive outside his meager home. The smell of Steve’s car, cigarettes behind a wall of hibiscus air freshener. A dancing plastic sunflower on the dash. A scar on Steve’s wrist, old, from a fence nail. In time, my fantasy was as real and vivid as it would have been if I’d been sitting next to Steve in his vehicle. I forgot all about Jamie, Dayly, Sneak, the detective at the police station, the feel of his hard hands running up my thighs, over my shoulders. I sat and watched Steve greeting his passenger, putting his car into drive, adjusting the air-conditioning, putting his phone into the holder and tapping the screen to tell the app he had his man.
I’d been dialing random numbers and speaking to strangers for six years. The addiction had started in prison, when Sasha had forgotten to tell me that she and Henry were taking Jamie camping and I’d called their house a hundred times, trying to get an update on my child. The whole weekend I’d called and called, receiving nothing but her calm, authoritative answering message, the prison common room around me swirling and crashing with activity. I’d imagined fires. Home invasions. Sudden fatal accidents, illnesses. I’d imagined Sasha and Henry had taken my child and run off to Australia. I’d dialed a random number by mistake, my finger slipping onto an eight instead of a five. An elderly man’s voice croaked through the receiver. As I’d ached and burned and shaken with terror at the fate of my child, the old man’s confused voice had disrupted the violence my mind was inflicting on my body. He’d never received a call from a correctional facility, he’d said. He was curious to know who I was. We’d talked for fifteen minutes, and my addiction had begun.

JESSICA
She had never before arrived unannounced. Never in the bright light of day. But Jessica pushed a discreet gold button beside the ornate stained-glass door of a house nestled in a leafy street in Beverly Hills and waited in the shade. Her every limb was burning with tension and hatred. She was buzzed in and she crossed the small foyer of the home, climbed the stairs.
The house yawned around her, still and silent beyond her crashing thoughts. She always came here with a loaded mind, noticed the quiet. Right now she was screaming internally at her colleagues. The truth was, this was not the first time she’d felt abandoned by other police officers.
The Sanchezes were an auto family. They had been for decades. There was no need to change things, her abuela warned Jessica and her brothers as they grew up. You worked with what you were proven to be good at, and they were good at cars. The Sanchez men fixed and serviced and reupholstered cars, either in their own oil-slicked, sunbaked shops or in the shops of cousins or friends. The women went into sales, worked the cracked concrete in heels, toting clipboards, haggling over prices with customers. Jessica had been trained in negotiation tactics since she was a kid standing in the shade of beat-up vans in their lot in Vernon, listening to her mother talk smog checks with men in big, dirty boots.
It was here in the lot, at five years old, that she had encountered her first police officers up close, when two white patrol cops came in for a quick replacement tire on a squad car. Jessica had watched in reverent awe as the men exited their vehicle, leaning around her mother’s legs to look into the car at the shotgun installed in the front cabin. As her mother went