We were already past Atlanta, which I didn’t like, with all of its sterile, angular buildings, and had made it almost as far as Savannah, which I did like, when I started to think we were being followed. We stopped for lunch and he was in a booth toward the back, sitting up straight, looking out of place in the weather-beaten diner on the side of an anonymous strip of highway.

I was sure I had seen him back in North Carolina a few days before, when we visited the graves of O. Henry and Thomas Wolfe, and farther south too, in Greenville, where we stopped to visit your father’s cousins. And there he was in Georgia, wearing a tan suit and a straw-colored fedora with a black band, staring at us through florescent light and smoke from the deep fryer. Just like in a movie.

And sure enough, when we got back in our car and pulled onto Route 16, there he was, in a black sedan, a couple of cars behind us. Now I know what you’re thinking. Your father didn’t believe me either. He thought I was having one of those fits I have sometimes, or that maybe I had taken too much Xanax.

But then we saw him pulled over on the side of the road later that day, fedora off, sweat dripping down the side of his face and pooling in patches under his arms and on his chest. I didn’t want to stop, but your father did, and his curiosity beat out my reluctance and also he was always a little bit old-fashioned deep down and thought the man should make the decisions. Except when it came to you. You were all mine as far as he was concerned. You were my flesh, not his, since you came out of me. Flesh of my flesh, as if you were a virgin birth instead of the result of a five-minute fuck in the back seat of a Subaru.

He was a short man compared to your father, probably closer to my height and he looked a lot like William Faulkner. Not the refined, stately icon Faulkner would grow into, but the rugged, introspective middle-aged drunk I fantasized about when your father managed to get it up and put it inside me.

We pulled over, but I stayed in the car, looking out the front window, which was yellow from pollen and dead gnats. I watched your father put a hand on the car to lean against it, the way men do. They talked for a bit, making hand gestures and looking inside the open hood, which was propped up with a thin silver rod.

Your father stuck his head under the hood and then stood up straight. Smoke came off the engine, and the other man, the one who looked like Faulkner, held the hood and pulled out the rod and set it down. He let the hood slam shut and closed his eyes when metal hit metal with a loud crack.

They walked toward the car and I got out, stretching my legs and milling awkwardly by the open passenger side door. Cars sped by and I thought of a documentary I watched once on the Science Channel about Einstein and relativity. When they got to the car, your father introduced us and went around to the driver’s side. I got in the back and let the man take my seat up front.

Would you be surprised if he told us that his name was William? I wanted to ask him questions. When were you born? What do you do for a living? William Faulkner died in the early sixties, I was pretty sure. So this man must be someone else, some other William, a William who bore a resemblance to his namesake. But still the idea that somehow he really was William Faulkner was growing inside me.

My thoughts drifted away from Faulkner as we drove toward Savannah, passing single-story, vinyl-sided houses, rusty trailers, a run-down Motel 6, and a marginally more upscale La Quinta Inn. I kept thinking that this was the sort of place you go to die. William made a comment that I couldn’t quite hear, but I caught enough to know he was thinking what I was thinking.

But then we got into Savannah proper and it was a new world, an urbane refuge in the middle of blue-collar purgatory, the dead suburbs giving birth to a verdant child. It was all there, just the way I imagined it. Spanish moss, pocket parks, pink and white azaleas behind black wrought iron. It smelled like soil and lilacs, but also pungent, like stagnant water. We drove closer to the river and parked the car and got out and walked along the cobblestones until our feet hurt a little.

We were headed to our hotel, where we already had reservations, and William said he might as well stay at the same place, since he’d have to stay overnight while his car was being fixed at a local repair shop. We checked in and left him to get a room and make arrangements for getting his car to a mechanic. And then when we were having dinner in the hotel restaurant, a fancy affair right on the water, we saw him dining alone and invited him to join us.

Later that night, when I knocked on his door, I didn’t think he would answer. I was sure he had evaporated, drifting back into the literary mist he came from. And if he were there, crouched over the built-in desk next to the TV set, he’d be too engrossed in whatever he was doing to care about something so commonplace as a knock at the door. In my mind, he looked at the door, took a sip of honey-colored whiskey, tapped his pen against the desk, and turned back to his work.

But instead he opened the door almost as soon as I knocked on it. Like he had been waiting for me. It startled me at first, for a moment, but then I saw the look he was giving me, the overly familiar stare and half smile, and I relaxed and smiled a bit myself.

I won’t go into details. I know you don’t want to know this part. Maybe you don’t want to know any of it, who could blame you, but especially this, I’d imagine. I’ll just say that we didn’t talk much. Just a few words to be polite.

When it was over we talked more, in whispers, because your father was right next door. I tried to study his face in the half-dark shadows, catching a glimpse when a car would drive by and light up the room. He told me about his hometown, and his daughter, and what it was like to be a writer. I didn’t ask him about his books, or point out that he died over 50 years ago, or tell him how much I love As I Lay Dying. I spread out against the down comforter, dying a little bit myself, knowing that this was all I wanted and that I couldn’t have it because your father would never let me. He never let me have anything but you.

When I got back to our room the sun was just coming up. If your father knew I had been gone, he didn’t let on. I crawled into bed next to him and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t close my eyes. I just stared at him and watched him breath. I wondered what it would be like if it were William next to me instead and I thought of him alone in the other room and wondered if he were still there.

*

Killing a person isn’t easy. I had thought about it a lot over the years. Mostly after you were born and your father was working all the time. They say women use poison, but I thought an accident would be easier. Maybe we were out for a hike, looking over a precipice. Just a little push. It would be easy to say he slipped, lost his balance, fell over the edge before I could do anything.

Killing a person isn’t easy. Except when it is.

Your father wasn’t much for taking baths, but we had splurged on a deluxe suite and our room had one of those oversized shell-shaped tubs by the window with a view of the river. The kind with jets and underwater lights that change color, like it had been lifted off the set of an X-rated movie from the seventies, the kind where everyone has a lot of hair. I had been expecting something classier.

I ordered breakfast from room service. Toast, eggs, a fruit medley. Some sparkling wine. It didn’t take much to lure him into the bathtub after we ate. He got in and I told him to close his eyes. I told him I had something special for him. I told him I wanted to surprise him.

Sacrifice always lights the path to salvation so I offered your father up as payment for a sin I’ll always covet. Sometimes things have to die for other things to live. It was easy to unscrew the small TV from the wall with my nail file. All I did was bring it over to the tub and drop it in while it was still plugged in. It just took a second.

There was no big explosion. No bolts of electricity licking up from the water. Just a gentle hiss and a warm buzzing noise for a second and then a pop as the circuit in the room blew out. I’d tell people it was a freak accident. I slipped and the TV set came off the wall and landed in the tub. What I remember most was the TV bobbing in the water, floating there like a bath toy you might have played with when you were little and we lived in the house on Grand Street.

When I went back to William’s room it was nearly nine and I was hoping he hadn’t gone down yet for breakfast. We had been up late, so maybe he was still in bed, dreaming of Mississippi and my body. I knocked but there was no answer.

He wasn’t in the dining room when I went downstairs and the bitch at the front desk wouldn’t give out the names of anyone staying with them, hotel policy. I got the manager, but she just looked at me like I was a nut job. When I called around to mechanic shops, not one of them recognized the description I gave them of his car. I don’t know how long I stayed in that hotel lobby, desperate to find him. I never did.

*

People take road trips for all kinds of reasons. Self-discovery. Escape. We once drove 800 miles just to see a band play, back in college. But I’m older now and I just wanted to visit the graves of some of my literary heroes. Some of those southern gothic writers I love so much. And get room service at a fancy hotel. I never expected to meet William.

In the quiet hours now I dream about him. It’s been six months since I’ve seen him, and I still wake up wondering if he was a ghost, or a corporeal echo of the past, or just a con artist who wanted to get laid. Or maybe he was an angel, swelling in me, waiting to be alive. Was it worth the blood sacrifice I had to make? I don’t know yet, the guilt is a long way off, like a long-distance lover.

Mostly I try not to think about what’s growing inside me. I find ways to distract myself. I pay attention to the monotony of everyday life, as if every detail were consequential. The dirty dishes, cooking, shopping, carpooling. I let it all consume me. But sometimes your little brother kicks at me from the inside, I see William’s face, and darkness turns to light and I imagine the four of us together, laughing, playing in the park on a hot August day.

I can almost feel the prickle of the sun on my neck.

About Amy Christina Berg

Amy Christina Berg is a sometimes-writer and erstwhile party girl. She makes a living by pretending to be someone she is not. Her short stories and poetry have been published in places like Devolution Z, Farmhouse, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Opiate, and Rat's Ass Review.

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