Crone

The van is blue.

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Okay, Hannah thinks the van is blue—with the rain beading her glasses, and the way, even in the best of times, that nighttime diminishes her vision, presses everything into vague smears of flattened color, it’s hard to tell.

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But yeah, it’s a van, and it’s passed them on that inky stretch of Highway 101, rainwater sluicing beneath the wheels, and then it’s slowed; Hannah can see the brake lights flare like eyes as it pulls onto the shoulder ahead of them, the hiss of its wheels kissing gravel.

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“Oh, praise Jeebus, sweetie, we’re saved,” she says in her old man voice, and Avery laughs nervously beside her.

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The rain’s coming down so hard now, has been for the last mile or so. It sucks. Both her and Avery are drenched, and Hannah’s Converse are soaked all the way through. She had liberated a pack of Marlboros from her dad’s carton earlier that day and they’ve been pounding them; they’d shared their last one on the walk, but the cigarette had gotten so wet that it’d just fallen apart halfway through smoking it. The woods loom on each side of them. There are long swatches of the highway where there are no streetlights at all, and with Hannah’s vision the way it is— ONH, baby, optic nerve hypoplasia— she can hardly see anything at all right now. She’s had ONH since birth, essentially an underdeveloped optic nerve that’s resulted in severe tunnel vision, and with a loss of visual acuity thrown in for good measure, thank you very much, the world is and always has been both pinhole small and blurry as hell. The things tethering her here are few and vital: Avery’s warm hand in hers, their unending string of inside jokes, the clack-skitter-clack of Hannah’s cane on the shoulder as they walk. The sound of the ocean, the rain, the great fir trees above them shirring against the wind. The occasional flare of headlights from a car going the other direction. Highway 101 in a rainstorm is a lonesome-ass affair unless you got a friend with you. And now, thank God, there’s a van.