Further Out Than You Thought by Michaela Carter Page A

in her dreams, when it was Leo at whom her anger was aimed. Get a job. Make it happen—something, anything. Stop smoking so much goddamn pot. She longed to close her hand into a fist and punch. To bloody a nose, make a mouth swell. If she were angry right now, her leg wouldn’t be shaking. And if she were black, she’d be angry all right. She’d be indignant. Out to take the city, to take what had been denied.
    She wished her skin were black, and then she realized that not once had she wished this before. She remembered, as a child, having felt somehow fortunate, and also guilty, to have been born white, to have the world open to her, like the door to some invitation-only affair. And that was the seventies. Martin Luther King had triumphed. And there were those who, still alive, had transcended the oppression, the hate, and the fear and were beacons for all. The Jeffersons was on nighttime television, and there were the Jackson 5 and Donna Summer and the Pointer Sisters and all of those black ballplayers, but in that north-central section of Phoenix, the African Americans she’d met were waiters at the country club, they were maids or nannies. The kids she’d gone to grade school with were white. And in high school, when there was busing, the races hadn’t mixed. The races. As if they were real. As if we all weren’t a mix.
    She felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She felt sick. She wanted no part of it. America—home of the free. What a joke.
    The smoke billowed and, feeding on the gasoline, the flames reached high and wide, and still the traffic hadn’t budged. Her gas light blinked on. She’d had less fuel than she thought. She’d forgotten to check and now it was too late. She was sweating. With cars on all sides, she couldn’t breathe. The teenagers in the blue Pontiac opened the doors and jumped out. She wished she had a gun. A crowbar. A knife at least. They ran, scattering, and the young one with the bat stopped in front of her car. He looked at her. In his eyes, she recognized her own terror. And then she watched him turn and run past a flaming stream of gasoline.
    She had to get away. She nudged her car into the right-hand lane. Careful, so careful. Smiling her pretty-please. Praying not to offend. And then she heard a boom, an explosion. She felt her car shake. And the smoke was so thick she couldn’t see anything beyond the windows.
    This was it. The way her life ended, hers and the child inside her. In the chaos, she’d forgotten she was pregnant. Now she had two lives to save.
    She took to the shoulder of the road. If she hit someone, she hit someone. She had to get out. She had more life to live. What was she doing here anyway, in this city, living so close to so many people, fighting for her share of the air? Pressing down the gas pedal, her foot shook in the flimsy little flip-flop, and she thought of beaches. Boundless stretches of sand without humans. She thought of the ocean, and San Clemente, where she and Leo had driven one early morning last autumn to watch the sunrise, where they swam in icy waves and rode them to the shore, where they’d wrapped themselves in towels and eaten green apples. She wanted more. More dawn skies, more salt air, more apples. She gave the car more gas.
    Hell, yes. Thank God. Out of the jam, she could see again. She could breathe.
    And here was a street, a side street, the entrance to a neighborhood. She turned right, slowed as she realized: the street was awake. It was eyes and dark, glistening skin, everyone in front of their apartment buildings, their tiny houses with chipped paint, with small, sliding windows guarded by black iron bars. In their patchy, treeless lawns, women held children on their hips. One woman in a dress with pink and blue flowers, strangely vivid in the haze, was crying, screaming after a man as he ran from her, ran with the other men down the street, heading for the thick of