Eleven Hours. Paullina Simons

her. The car careened to the right.

      Didi heard honking in the distance. She tried to grab the bag, crying weakly, ‘No, no.’ And then louder, ‘Rich! Help me! Help me!’

      The man hit her with the bag. He struck her again and again, making guttural sounds and barely keeping the car on the road. Passing cars honked.

      Trying to shield herself from the blows, Didi turned away from him toward the door and saw a car in the right lane beside her. The driver, an old woman, was looking over at Didi with great concern. Didi put her hands together as if in a prayer and mouthed help me, help me.

      Then the man, having thrown down the bag, yanked her head away from the window and down onto his lap. Didi fell over, hitting her nose on the steering wheel. She saw him floor the gas. Maybe the cops would stop him, Didi thought. Maybe Rich was still on the phone. Encouraged by his phone call, she forgot all caution. She screamed as loudly as she could, ‘Rich, help me, help me!’

      And then the man brought his fist down on her ear.

       3.31 PM

      The phone rang six times and then stopped. Rich listened intently and heard nothing, but as he put the receiver back on the hook, he thought he heard a very faint ‘Rich?’

      By the time Rich thought he heard Didi’s voice, it was too late. He had already begun hanging up; momentum carried the receiver the rest of the way. The receiver clicked on the hook. ‘Oh, shit,’ he said. Had he really heard her voice calling him? He picked the phone up again and got a dial tone. The first time he redialed the number he did it so fast he dialed only six digits. The second time the line was busy.

      Busy again, a minute later.

      And a minute later.

      And another minute.

      He waited five minutes and then called his office, thinking she must have tried to call him back. He hated crossed calls making both numbers busy.

      There was nothing.

      He called the cell phone again, and the useless message came on: ‘The AT&T customer you have dialed is not available or has traveled outside the coverage area. Please try your call again later.’

      He tried to remember what the ‘Rich’ he thought he had heard sounded like. He couldn’t recall. It was muffled and distant. He could have been mistaken. It could have just been a ringing in his ears and not his wife calling his name, whispering it. ‘Rich. Rich.’

       He must be imagining things.

      Rich drove to the NorthPark Mall. If she wasn’t there, he didn’t know where she could be.

      Dillard’s at NorthPark was just off Central Expressway. He found two white Town & Country LXi minivans near Dillard’s, but they weren’t Didi’s.

      What was their license plate? TRX something. Or was it THX? No, THX was the sound system he was trying to talk Didi into buying. The license plate was TRX 6 something – or was it 7?

      He saw a third Town & Country and slowed down. TJX 672. That was their car. He couldn’t believe it. She was at the mall. He had been wrong about her. She was at the mall and had forgotten all about him.

      Rich was first mad, then relieved, then mad again. He parked his car a few spaces away from hers and walked over. He opened the door to look in. The car was as they had left it last night after going out to Applebee’s for dinner. Toys on the floor, newspapers, some shopping bags. Nothing new, nothing he hadn’t seen before. The shopping bags were from last weekend’s shopping expedition. Rich had been with Didi when they bought some clothes from Gap Kids.

      He slammed the door shut and locked it. The car beeped once to let him know it was locked.

      That’s when Rich saw a white paper bag on the ground and bent down to pick it up. He thought it was something that had fallen out of the minivan when he opened the door, but when he looked inside the bag he saw it had one whole and one half-eaten pretzel in it. He felt the pretzels through the bag. They were soft, and this surprised him. He had expected them to be hard. This bag was not something that had been in the car for two weeks. The bag itself was ripped, with a chunk missing. Rich pulled out a receipt for 2x items at 1.19 ea., bought and paid for with $3.00 at 12.25 PM today.

      He turned the bag over a couple of times and noticed brownish stains that could have been chocolate. He smelled them. They didn’t smell like chocolate. They smeared onto his hands. But wait, was Rich going crazy? He put the bag to his face to smell it again.

      He doubled over, feeling as if someone had punched him in the stomach.

      The bag smelled of his wife’s hand lotion. He knew the smell of her lotion very well. Didi wore it all the time, and the aroma would linger long after Didi had left a room. From Bath and Body Works – Sun-Ripened Raspberry. It smelled berryish and creamy – good enough to eat with a spoon. Rich had watched Didi put it on this morning after her shower and before they made plans for lunch. He had watched her spread it over her arms and legs and neck and remembered thinking how lovely she was with that belly of hers. Grudgingly realizing he wasn’t mad at her anymore, he had asked her to have lunch with him after her doctor’s appointment. Usually he went to the doctor’s with her, but today he was interviewing a candidate for the southwest regional sales manager job all morning and couldn’t make it. Why hadn’t he gone with her?

      It was her lotioned hands that had clutched the pretzel bag. Maybe another woman, wearing raspberry lotion on her hands, had bought not one but two of the sweet pretzels his wife loved only five minutes before Didi called him in a sharp voice, asking him to come to lunch early. And then dropped the bag right near their minivan.

      Rich didn’t believe in coincidences. This was his Didi’s pretzel bag.

      He was sure now it had been her voice he heard calling for him from wherever she was, connecting to him, and he had hung up on her and couldn’t get her back.

      Holding the bag in his hands emptied him of all feeling and then filled him with anger. She was at her car when she dropped the bag. She was heading out to meet him when she dropped the bag and vanished.

      He grabbed his chest, feeling a nightmarish tightness. ‘God, Didi, Didi,’ he whispered, starting to pant and losing focus in his eyes. What’s happened?

       3.40 PM

      When Didi regained consciousness, she wasn’t lying in the man’s lap, and her face wasn’t squeezed between his abdomen and the steering wheel. She was hunched over on the seat nearly falling onto his shoulder. She realized he must have pulled her up. Her head was throbbing as if her hair were any minute going to be disconnected from her scalp. Squinting, she looked for her bag. He had thrown it down on the passenger floor.

      She sat up straight and looked around, rubbing her belly. They were now in the right lane, going sixty-five. No more concerned drivers peering at her through the windows of their cars. Just Texas fields, a few shrubs, some houses off in the distance, a hazy blue post-zenith sky.

      Didi moved as far as she could away from him and pressed her body against the passenger door. She wished she could become a liquid and pour herself into the door and disappear. There was obtrusive and persistent ringing in the ear where he had hit her. The radio was playing country music, and the man, cheerful and unperturbed, continued to hum to it.

      Didi had to go to the bathroom. The baby’s head was pressing too hard on her shrunken bladder. She had hoped she could just sweat out all the liquid in her body.

      ‘I feel that we got off on the wrong foot here,’ she heard the man say. She could not believe the words coming out of his mouth. She wanted to say something nasty back, but her teeth felt too large