Free As You Were by Kelli Jae Baeli Page A

to reject something I can’t even remember?
    Tru stepped in front of her and offered her the coffee. “You’re going to get sick out here.”
    “I’m already sick.” Brittany took the steaming Styrofoam cup and held it between her red fingers, then suddenly threw it on a clump of snow in front of her. The brown liquid sank into a tiny indention, steam rising from it in puffs which caught in the wind and were gone.
    “Hey, that’s from my finest collection of Styrofoam,” Tru tried to joke. “I swear, we can’t have nice things—“ Brittany ignored her. Okay, jokes aren’t working.
    Brittany stood with her arms around herself. Is it really wrong to be gay, or is what I feel a knee-jerk response?
    “This isn’t going to help anything. Get back in the car. Please?”
    A pickup truck whooshed by, splattering Brit’s leg with slush. “Oh perfect,” she grunted, looking up at the shrinking tail lights of the offending vehicle. Then she froze. Taking a sudden step forward, she crushed the cup into the snow, walking stiffly, as if mesmerized, toward the bend in the road.
    Tru frowned. “Brit? What’s the matter with you?”
    Brittany kept walking, oblivious to Tru’s interrogations. Tru glanced back at the Jeep, its engine idling, the exhaust creating clouds at the back bumper, and decided to leave it to follow Brit around the bend in the road. She watched her move to the rail on the bridge and stop. Tru came up to her and searched her face. Brittany released all the air from her lungs and swallowed thickly.
    “What’s wrong? Are you really sick?”
    Brittany’s only response was to put her arms back around herself, her breath coming in short wisps in the frigid air.
    “Brit? What’s—”
    “It was here—” she gasped, swallowing over and over as if the action would remove the feeling. She stared, transfixed, at the new reflective steel posts which had been placed in the break between the poles; the railing ends were jagged and curled in a sinister metal grin.
    Tru watched her, suddenly afraid to speak, recognizing the crippling memory as it enveloped the other woman.
    “The wreck,” Brit whispered, focusing beyond the rail, now.
    Tru surveyed the icy river beneath them on the bridge, conjured an image of Brittany’s car smashing the guard rail and plunging into the wintry water—saw her trapped inside the car—and a haunting, rippling queasiness passed through her.
    Tru managed to get Brittany back into the Cherokee, tossing the empty Styrofoam cup she had retrieved from the roadside into the back floorboard. She fixed the seat belt around the woman and buckled it, as Brittany leaned her head against the headrest and stared over the hood onto the road. Tru fastened her own belt and inched out onto the blacktop once more.
    Tru glanced over at her, and back at the road sign. “We’ve still got a long way to go. Can we just be civil?” When she saw that Brittany did not intend to respond, she got another Styrofoam cup from the bag under the seat and set it in the console between them. “Drink some coffee. You need to warm up.”
    Brittany looked down at the thermos numbly, as if she could not, at first, identify its function. Then she picked it up.
    Little was said over the next few hours. Tru took comfort in the radio, tuning to Brittany’s favorite station. Tru remembered a song as it began, and turned up the volume. “This is one of your favorite songs,” she said. Brittany looked down at the radio as if it were a T V. “It’s Heart... remember?” Brittany listened to the driving guitar and lyrics of ‘Barracuda’ . ‘So this ain’t the end, I saw you again... today...’ and shook her head. Tru leaned back and let it play, remembering what Brittany could not.
    By the time Tru made it to Arvada, she glanced over at Brittany, hoping she’d remember the area, but saw that she still slept soundly. She had either been asleep for the last four hours, or pretending to be asleep. Either