It’s everywhere now: the community pool, the deputy sheriff’s mascara, the baby strollers on Main. But what I simply can’t bear are the other cars. My wife and I passed two more yesterday, on the freeway through Umatilla National Forest, each one a harpoon in my side. Sleek, muscled drop-tops, and—how had I not seen it before?—that bright, glistening coat of aquamarine.
A week ago: I’m wandering the lot of J.J. Gill’s Auto, on a mission to upsize our two-door coupe. With our first kid three months from his inaugural wail, I told Linda I’d go for a test drive but wouldn’t commit. An easy promise, I think, skirting the rows of beige and brown minivans that seem like harbingers for the next eighteen monochrome years of my life. Then, it shimmers into view at the back of the lot: a blue-green Cadillac convertible.
I’ve never seen a color like it, not on a car anyway. It pulls me like a riptide—before I know it I’m tracing my finger across the hood, enchanted. The plush white seats swallow me like the foamy sea. From far off, one state closer to the coast, I think I hear a seagull. A saleswoman glides over with a clipboard and a breezy grin.
“You look good in aquamarine,” she says, and the word is liberating: I repeat it under my breath like a five-year-old who’s learned his first cuss word; see myself driving through town square, top down, speakers emanating steel drum music, coeds doing double-takes. The mayor waves at me, the only show in town. A traffic cop raises his white glove, approaches, asks me, shyly, what color it is—he admits he doesn’t know—and the word leaves my tongue, calypsos into his ear, cool, mysterious: aquamarine.
“I’ll take it,” I say.
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Linda’s gardening out front when I surprise her with the Cadillac. Her neck is bronzed; her belly swells above the upturned dirt. Buckled in, I wait for her to go gaga over the color. We’ve been married a year, together for eight, since our senior year at the same high school where she now teaches ninth grade history. The school year ended Friday, and it’s here, in this weed-choked garden, with our unborn son bicycle kicking her womb, that my wife intends to carry out her third trimester. After forty-five seconds I honk the horn. Linda visors her forehead with a soiled glove, scowls at the Caddie like it found the wrong driveway, then spots me at the wheel.
“Tell me you’re test driving this.”
She storms over, clutching a trowel and a fist of knapweed. I jiggle the keys over the door frame. Linda snatches at them but misses.
“You said you were just looking. You promised you wouldn’t buy without me.”
“I had to act fast,” I say. “It was the only one on the lot. Probably the only one in Idaho.”
“I don’t want to drive our child around in this,” she says. “What happened to a minivan?”
I thumb at the backseat. “You could fit three kids back there and still have room for a poodle.”
Her lower lip quivers. It doesn’t mean she’s about to cry, though she’s been doing more of that lately.
“What’s the return policy?”
“Hon, don’t. Don’t say that.” I undo my seatbelt. “Look at the big picture. In five years, our son will have the coolest parents in kindergarten.”
“The big picture is we can’t afford this.”
“I got two grand for the Hyundai,” I say, rounding up. The trade-in barely covered my down payment. The trowel drops from her hand and clangs against the driveway.
“You haven’t mentioned the color yet. What do you think of the color?”
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By four o’clock the shock has worn off—though Linda still won’t speak to me—and she’s at the kitchen sink, scrubbing manure from her wrists, while I bask in our three-season porch, pretending to read the Financial Times but really scheming up some urgent use for the big boat docked in our driveway.
“Hon,” I call out. “Need me to run to the store?”
“No, I’m all—” Her voice modulates, cuts out, like she regrets ending the silent treatment. Then, she changes her mind and asks for two bags of topsoil.
I drive past the Lawn & Garden on Main to the Albertsons across town, twenty miles an hour under the speed limit, stopping short at yellow lights, soaking up the envy of our neighbors.
When the baby arrives I won’t need an excuse to run errands. I make a mental note to look up the conversion to knots. Wanting to patch things up with Linda, I hit on the idea of seafood for dinner—why not a little celebration?
The lobster tank is where I first encounter the color. Initially, it thrills me to find it somewhere else—like I’m standing at the source.
“I got a car this color,” I tell the fishmonger, pointing to the lining. Farm-raised crustaceans are piled up like junkyard cars, their banded claws like rusted-out fenders.
“Yeah?” He draws out the two biggest lobsters and bags them.
“Brand new Cadillac.”
“You don’t say.”
I’ve never been particular about color. But whenever I look at the car, a boyhood dream surfaces: someday seeing the ocean. Only a year ago I still clung to the belief we might move to California, swap the sagebrush for surf. Then, Linda landed a full-time teaching gig, I was promoted to senior underwriter, and we took out a mortgage on a bungalow twenty-five miles from the nearest puddle. Until Linda’s pregnancy, none of it seemed permanent.
On the drive home, I decide to take her joyriding next weekend. She’ll fall in love with the Cadillac, realize it’s an investment in happiness. An insurance policy against becoming as dull as our parents. The kind of wheels you could start a dynasty in. I whistle “Caribbean Queen” all the way into the kitchen, where I find Linda julienning a russet potato. She asks what in Christ’s glorious kingdom took so long, and I dump my groceries onto the counter like the day’s catch: two lobsters, a pound of frozen crawdads, a dozen stuffed shrimp, no topsoil.
+
Monday, after an innocent start, everything spoils. At noon I skip the office cafeteria and head out. Summers I usually grab lunch at home, but Linda’s still sore about the topsoil, not to mention our new car loan, not to mention cooking up all that shellfish she couldn’t eat on account of the mercury levels. It’s a platonic last day of June, and I cruise downtown, top rolled back, Billy Ocean cranked to the max, and disembark at Margie’s Café. I order the tuna on rye, claim a stool at the picture window, and watch my blue-green beauty sparkle beside the curb.
That’s when I glimpse the first car. It crosses the window in a blink, so quick I convince myself it’s a mirage. I duck outside and find the car stuck at a red light. Not a Cadillac, like mine, but the color is unmistakable: a combination of sea and sky. My stomach lurches; my lunch nearly comes up. The out-of-state plates offer a small dose of comfort. I pop a Dramamine and return to the office. On the way, I spot the color on two more convertibles, and I leave work early, crestfallen, eager for Linda to console me.
“Hon, you’ll never guess—” I start, halfway through the screen door, but the words stop there: she’s balled up on our porch sofa, sobbing. Briefly, I wonder if she saw the other cars too.
“I was robbed,” she bawls, burying her face in my chest and leaving wet spots on my Hawaiian tie. An hour ago, she says, coming up for air. She’d been walking a pushcart back from the Lawn & Garden, having purchased two twenty-five-pound bags of topsoil—I wince—and three trays of marigolds, when two men in eye patches accosted her and snatched her purse.
“In broad daylight!” She reburies her face.
“Wait, they both had eye patches?”
“Mmph.”
“You mean, like pirates?”
Linda jerks away, arches her thickened brows, and I know enough to clam it. She’s too shook up to go to the sheriff. Instead, she wants me to file a report on her behalf, while she phones the credit union to cancel her plastic. She describes the perps in further detail—blond goatees, gold doubloon earrings—and I’m out the door, hot as a beacon fire.
The thieves! I mutter to myself, swerving through traffic on Main. And my wife, twenty-nine-weeks pregnant! A red light halts me two blocks from the police station, and I bang my fist against the dash, rattling the scrimshaw dice hanging from the rearview—when suddenly I spy, crossing the intersection like a slow-moving barge, an identical aquamarine Cadillac. The breath catches in my throat. Squinting, I make out the logo above the plate: “J.J. GILL AUTO.” This time I thump the dash so hard the glove compartment pops open. The bill of sale tumbles out as the light turns green.
I leave the car door ajar and fly through the entrance, roaring, “Cheats! Thieves!”
The saleswoman recognizes me.
“Mr. Maddox. What can I do for you?”
I sputter like an outboard motor. Across the showroom, a salesman and prospective buyer ogle me from behind a large desk, a ballpoint pen suspended over a contract. I want to tell the customer to run for his life, but he eyes me like I’m a madman marooned. All of them do.
“My wife’s been mugged,” I say, reversing through the door.
+
That week Linda witnesses two separate daytime robberies and recounts them over dinner. The purse snatchers wore red bandannas and buckled shoes. I don’t know what to believe. The deputy sheriff who took down my complaint phones once to report they have no suspects but believe the crimes are linked. I ask if southern Idaho has been overrun by a gang of landlocked buccaneers and she hangs up. After that, Linda won’t venture outside, not even to garden. The flower trays collect mildew on the lawn; I keep mistaking the bag of topsoil slumped against our stoop for a vagrant. I say to my wife, is this how you’re going to spend your summer vacation? And she curls up, fetal on the porch sofa, her belly dwarfing her bare feet.
Drastic measures are required. On Thursday, payday, I withdraw sixty dollars from savings and buy Linda a replacement handbag. When I present it to her after work, she pinches it at arm’s length, like it’s a used diaper.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“You know,” I say. “Carry it around town.” Which is apparently the wrong thing to say because she begins to cry.
“What do you want to do?” I say. “Up and leave?”
We both know we aren’t going anywhere, not with the twin anchors of a mortgage and employer-paid health insurance. But for a moment, with our unborn child still tinier than my imagination, escape seems possible.
That night Linda doesn’t come to bed. Bottomless, I starfish on top of the polyester sheet, calculating amortized car payments until I doze off. Around midnight a draft from somewhere in the house rouses me. I find my wife in the nursery, next to a wide open window. She holds out a pair of hinged wedge locks.
“Look at this. They broke right off.”
A large moth flutters into the room and settles on the ceiling lamp. I shut the screen to keep out its cousins, then ask Linda what she’s doing.
“We need stronger locks.” Her hands tremble. “This house isn’t safe.”
“All right,” I say. “I’m here. You don’t need to worry.”
We huddle on a twin-sized air mattress she’s dragged into the nursery. The walls are a bright genderless yellow. When we learned the sex we started putting boy things in the room. Stuffed dinosaurs, toy fire trucks, a model pirate ship—which seems to have sailed off.
“Where’s the pirate ship?”
“The closet,” she says. “Where are your pants?”
For the first time I wonder if we’re entering a crisis. I switch off the light. We try a number of uncomfortable positions until finally she spoons me, half off the mattress, resting her belly against my bare ass. The moth flits overhead, noisier in the dark. I can’t protect Linda from an insect, never mind phantom Blackbeards.
“I’ll trade it in,” I say. “We’ll go Sunday and pick out a minivan. Just give me one more weekend with it.”
Linda is silent for so long I think she’s asleep. Then, she murmurs, “Did you feel that?”
I did. My unborn son, kicking his old man’s ass for the first time.
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Friday, the Fourth, is a holiday, and we both need to get out of the house. I convince Linda to go watch the parade downtown, assuring her there’ll be plenty of security. She hides her new handbag under a cushion, double-bolts the front door, and we hop in the Cadillac.
Downtown is bustling: balloons of red, white, and blue fill the sky; patriotic floats swell and deflate along Main Street like gigantic lungs; from a distant gazebo a brass band plays a Sousa march. Parking is impossible. We circle for twenty minutes, rerouted by road closures and lookalike traffic cops, none of whom inquire about the color of my car. Linda spots a man with a peg leg and striped shirt and begs me to turn back home. Out of desperation, I hook a left through a gap in the crowd and we find ourselves on the other side of the barricades, caboosing a black limousine. The mayor, dressed from the waist up like Uncle Sam, salutes us from an open sunroof.
“Now you’ve done it,” Linda says.
“Just grin and wave,” I say through my teeth.
We putt-putt along to confused applause. Soon our lack of American flags gives us away. The parade goers begin jeering us. Even the children realize we’re frauds. I retreat within myself, focus on the first magnetic moment I saw the Cadillac, how unique the color seemed, how life-altering, and suddenly I’m transported back to my virgin voyage: hands gripping the wheel like a proud and solitary captain; the saleswoman drifting portside, clipboard in hand, island smile; her lips parting to flatter me—but instead I hear a shriek, and Linda is tugging at my arm—
“What? What is it?” I say, braking.
She gestures toward the Lawn & Garden. An elderly woman kneels on the sidewalk, flapping her purseless arms in a distress signal.
“In broad daylight!” Linda says.
The deputy sheriff vaults the barricades outside Margie’s Café, her deep-blue visor bobbing among the spectators, but the crowd is dense and the thief has long disappeared.
“The guy with the peg leg! Didn’t you see him?”
I didn’t, I tell her, my head and stomach turning as I spy a young mother pushing a carriage with an aquamarine sunshade. It’s then I realize we’re both hopelessly lost: two lunatics haunted by different ghosts.
Twenty minutes later we’re home, throwing clothes into a suitcase.
+
We overnight in a one-star motel outside Portland, planning to make the coast by sunup. Saturday morning, it’s just us, the Cadillac, and the predawn open road. It’s strange how safe the darkness feels, sparing us from all visible, colorful threats. We don’t talk about the robberies or the other cars. We don’t talk about how serious or farcical our escape is. Instead, we talk about the ocean.
“I’m going swimming,” I say. “As far out as I can. I don’t care if it’s cold or what.”
“Did you pack a suit?”
“Of course.”
“Me neither.”
Linda points out that the sunrise will be behind us, not over the Pacific, and we should’ve planned to arrive at sundown, but I tell her that’s not the point. At the junction of Routes 101 and 26, she flips a Beach Boys cassette. A-side wins, and we head north. Through the tall hemlocks to our starboard side, the first light cracks the matinal black. Twenty minutes past the junction, I sense the highway bending toward the coast. We take the next exit, park at the first public lot, and hoof it across a flat trail through the dunes.
For a long while we simply goggle in disbelief. The Pacific is the most enormous thing I’ve ever encountered; darker than I imagined. It occurs to me how little the color resembles my Cadillac. For some reason this soothes me. The beach is deserted except for spent fireworks and enterprising seagulls. I sniff at the briny air like it has an expiration date, wrap one arm around Linda, my hand rising and falling with her belly. Dawn casts our shadows across the sand, like two fingers reaching toward the shore. A gull craps on my left sandal.
“Hon, look.”
“That’s good luck,” she says. “Make a wish.”
Manna from heaven. As the white dung dribbles warmly between my toes, I think of the life I dreamed of as a kid and marvel at how long it took me to get here. A breeze powders our feet with white sand. I struggle in vain to say something original. I want to give my son the ocean. I want him to be bigger than the ocean. The breakers crash with the languorous heartbeat of the world. The baby kicks feebly; the contrast is disorienting.
“I wish we had more time.”
“We do,” Linda says.
The sun is moving fast now. Our shadows creep back toward us, returning to us all the dark terror of our unwritten future. In the misty distance, pinned to the horizon, we see the black sails of an approaching armada. The ocean brightens from gray to blue-green. We tear off our clothes and dash into the chop, hands joined, as if together we might cleave through fear itself.
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Matt Izzi was born in Rhode Island and lives in East Boston. His short fiction has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Carolina Quarterly, descant, Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah, and other journals.