Summer before senior year, Zeeshan's car died on the expressway driving back from Merrillville, Indiana, just beyond the limits of the city, where we'd gone to purchase Fourth of July fireworks. There were a series of beeps and chimes, every light denoting something wrong blinked on, and the engine, with a final few sputters, went quietly to its end. While we panicked, Zeeshan calmly turned the car onto the shoulder and allowed it to coast to a natural stop.
He was regal and composed, a deposed king defying the rebels that overthrew him to drag him out screaming and kicking. Teddy paced the shoulder, as if trying to come up with a solution other than having the car towed. Malik had complained for a while then given up. He was in the backseat with his arms crossed muttering about what was every one of our fates -- our fathers' ire. Amir and I were leaning on the trunk, tired out from pushing the car. Traffic thundered by, rocking the car, blasting the humid night with exhaust and diesel fumes. Rain clouds hung over the lake. The sky above it was bruised purple and the west burnt orange as the sun stole the final rays of daylight in a blinding last stand.
We had no plan other than wishful thinking that the car would magically fix itself. There wasn't a payphone in sight to call a tow truck, and an hour into being stalled, our worry became fear.
No one wanted to say it, but the one option, the only option, we had was to flag someone down. Hitchhiking was a thing of the past, of movies, horror ones and ones of serial killers, and none of us was brave enough to suggest it. We didn't want to get blasted for coming up with the most harebrained, dangerous idea we could think of. We got back inside the car, those of us that were outside, and as night fell and the prospect of waiting there until our parents sounded the alarm and we were found by a search party of state troopers and police cars and delivered safely to the wrath of our fathers stalked us, desperation took over.
“Where the fuck are the cops when you fucking need them!” Malik yelled. There was a cruiser behind us every five minutes on the way to Indiana, causing Zeeshan to watch his speed and the rest of us to clench our sphincters like we were fugitives. Not one went by us now.
We have our magical thinking another half hour. Amir and I asked if we should try pushing again.
“No point,” said Zeeshan. “We have to stop someone.”
“Are you fucked?” said Malik. “Stop someone? And then what, get in the car?”
“If we want to get to a phone, then yes,” Zeeshan said calmly.
“You're out of your mind if you think I'm doing that. This is your shitty car. You do it.”
“You want to sleep out here tonight, sisterfucker?” said Teddy.
“I agree,” said Amir. “We can't just wait around for the cops to see us. And I don't want to be sitting around in this area when it's dark.”
He started climbing out. Before I had given it a thought, I followed him.
Factories and warehouses with broken windows loomed on the other side of the expressway, lightless hulls that grew more ominous as darkness fell. Amir walked about ten paces from the car, stopped, looked the expressway up and down, and then he raised his arm and held up his thumb. I gestured if I should do the same. He shook his head. Out the window I heard Malik's shouts of surprise, and maybe cheering. The inside of the car was dark, making it appear empty and abandoned and haunted by the laughing ghost of a teenage boy.
I don't know how long Amir's hand had been out, I was too busy being thirsty, sweaty, and miserable, when a minivan of a color I couldn't make out beyond that it was on the darker side of red, passed us, then switched on its turn signal, and coasted over to the shoulder slowing down. I looked at Amir. He was turned around facing the minivan. The minivan's reverse lights popped on. It picked up speed as if driving backward was its natural mode, and braked when it was about ten feet from us. Neither of us moved. Not even to look back at our car.
“You guys need help?” said a woman's voice out the driver's side window. It was a high-pitched powerful voice, practiced in the art of getting attention.
Amir started striding up to the window while I faltered and kept looking over my shoulder. He reached the window and started talking to the driver. I couldn't hear what they were saying. Amir, I thought, smiled at one point. His hand went through the window seemingly to shake the driver's, and then he was walking toward me.
“They'll drive us to a payphone,” he told us when we gathered at the car.
“Us?” said Malik. “All of us?”
“No, just me and one more. I told her there were five of us. There's not enough room in their van.”
“I'll stay with the car,” said Zeeshan.
“I'll stay with you,” said Teddy.
“Good luck,” said Malik.
In the passenger seat was another woman, the same age as the driver, which I placed in the thirties, and in the second row of seats two young girls somewhere in the vicinity of nine and eleven, strapped into booster seats. Amir and I climbed into the third row, and the driver asked us if we were buckled in before she started moving.
“My name is Diane,” the driver said. “This is Maddy. Back there are Ellie and Ruth.”
“My name is not Ellie,” Ellie said. “You don't know shit. Ruth isn't her real name either.”
“What about you guys?” Diane asked.
“Amir, that's me, this is Faheem.”
“Oh, such nice names. Where are you guys from?”
Amir answered. In my mind my father's head exploded when I didn't interject with Bangladesh for myself when Amir said Pakistan. Who cared where a strange white woman I'd never see again thought I was from. I was watching the road, waiting for her to take an exit, and also wondering how in hell we were going to get back to our car after calling a tow truck.
“Maddy here has been to India,” said Diane. “She loved it. I've never been outside the US.”
“Her name is not Maddy,” said the girl not named Ellie. “And your name isn't Diane.”
We had been driving more than half an hour, doomed, I was certain, to our deaths at the hands of this insane family, or about to be held hostage and tortured by their demon children while their mothers or aunts or abducting babysitters, whoever they were, laughed and watched. Once they were done with us, not-Ellie would stand over our mangled, bloody corpses and declare, “Amir and Faheem weren't their names.”
The lights of downtown rose up in the distance. Diane took an exit. We went past parts of the University of Chicago campus, down streets lined with the lavish homes of old money and vintage names, and with brownstones no less in their grandeur. We must, I thought, be in the company of wealth.
“So, I'm guessing you guys need a phone?” she said.
“Yes,” Amir answered. “You can just take us to a payphone.”
“Payphone?” said Diane. “Why? You can use our phone, at our house.”
“It's not your house,” not-Ellie said. “You're not even supposed to go there.”
“A payphone will be just fine,” Amir said.
“Are you sure?” asked Diane. “It's really no trouble.”
“We're sure, thank you.”
We passed a laundromat. The lights were on inside and there was a payphone next to the entrance.
“There,” said Amir, “we can use that one.”
But Diane kept driving. She reached the end of the block, put the car in reverse, and, as she had done on the expressway, zoomed the short distance back to the laundromat.
We hustled out, digging in our pockets for change, and as soon as Amir was within reach of the payphone he snatched the receiver off the cradle. I moved to the other side so I could see if the minivan had left. It hadn't. The bright fluorescents of the laundromat bounced off its windows. I couldn't see the inside.
Amir had punched 9-11 and was telling the operator our situation. My head down, chin to my chest, I kept watch out the plate glass window out of the corner of my eye.
“No, no one is hurt,” Amir said into the phone, “but we do need a tow truck.”
My mouth felt dry and chalky. The minivan hadn't moved. I didn't feel right leaving Amir alone, even to walk the ten feet to the vending machines, and then felt stupid. I got two Cokes, but Amir didn't want his and so I drank that one too. I thought of the homework I still had to finish and when I would get to it, what time it would be when I finally made it home, and what condition I'd find my parents in.
“I don't have my friend's insurance information,” Amir told the operator. “No, he's not with me. He's forty five minutes away on 90. Can you please connect me to the state police?”
The door opened and Amir stood aside for a Black mother and her young daughter carrying trash bags filled with clothes for washing.
The minivan's passenger door flew open. Maddy, or whatever her name was, stepped out, slammed the door, and slid open the back one. She reached in and released the girls of the booster seats. One by one they climbed out, slow and well-behaved. Eleanor, I guessed, was the one on the inside. Their hair was not light colored and now in the wash of the laundromat's lighting, looked dark. Maddy closed the back door. She turned and stared at us. She looked like she'd been crying. The two girls came over and flanked her, and then, as if their presence snapped her back to attention, she took them by a hand each and walked away.
Amir hung up. He was about to tell me something but I brought his attention to the van.
“The other woman and the girls just left,” I told him in a lowered voice. “Just walked away.”
“Well, we need a ride back to the car,” said Amir.
“You want to get back in there?” I said.
“You have other ideas? Or money for a cab?”
He saw the empty Coke cans on top of the payphone.
“I'm going to get one.”
I fed a quarter into the phone. When my mother answered I told her the truth about Zeeshan's car but that we were waiting for his father to come pick us up.
We went outside and up to the passenger window of the minivan. A moment later it rolled down.
“Everything okay?” Diane asked leaning over.
“Yes,” said Amir. “The state police is sending someone to the car.”
“Well, hop in, I'll take you back.” She smiled. Her teeth were perfect, straight, white as a commercial for toothpaste.
The whole drive back she was silent. It was almost as if without Eleanor's interjections she had nothing to say.
She broke the speed limit all the way and didn't get pulled over.
Amir and I sensed each other's relief when we saw the flashing lights of the police car, then, after holding our breaths, breathed in relief that it was pulled up behind Zeeshan's.
“You can pull over to the shoulder and let us out,” said Amir. There wasn't a lot of traffic and we could cross to the other side on foot.
Diane went another mile or so before slowing down and moving to the shoulder, where she braked hard enough that we had to stop our faces from hitting the seat in front with our hands.
We could still see the flashing lights of the police car.
“Thank you,” Amir said, while I put life and limb behind reaching the door handle.
I bolted down the shoulder. I was not built for running. Folds of flesh jiggled like Jell-O in my breasts and at my waist. I looked over my shoulder. Amir had fallen behind me quite a bit. He was walking, in no hurry, looking out at the lake. Behind him the minivan was no longer there.
I slowed down a little. Shattered glass crunched under my feet. The lights of a pumping station way out in the vast blackness of the lake blinked on and off. The factories and warehouses kept their presence portentously known. When we were close enough to Zeeshan's car, I prepared to bolt across the expressway. Amir came and stood next to me. I had a feeling he was not going to bolt. I waved. The flashing lights of the cruiser were catching the faces of my friends in red and white and blue. Zeeshan was talking to the cop. The cop was taking notes and speaking into the extension of his radio affixed to his shoulder. I hoped Zeeshan's car would get fixed but it was finished. Thunder rumbled over the lake. I felt a few drops on my neck and on my arm.
Amir and I looked at each other. He laughed. I laughed. We started across the expressway together.
Nadeem Zaman is the author of the novel "In the Time Of the Others" (Picador India 2018) and the short story collection "Up in the Main House & Other Stories (Unnamed Press 2019).. His fiction has appeared in journals in the US, Hong Kong, India, and Bangladesh. He has a PhD in Humanities with concentrations on fiction and Postcolonial Studies from the University of Louisville. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, he grew up there and in Chicago.