Chapter 12: No Music This Time

The radio stayed off.

Milo noticed before they were out of the gate. Going the other way that morning there had been music — low, nothing he knew — and it had sat under the two of them not talking, so the silence had something to rest on. There was nothing under it now.

He kept coming back to that.

Nobody had turned the music on. It was a decision, or it was nothing at all, and he had the rest of the drive to work out which.

He put his hands flat on his knees, one on each, and sat up straight, knees together. It was the way he sat in a room when he hadn’t been told yet whether he was staying.

Beside him Adrian drove.

It was a long way back into the city. Longer than going out, or it felt longer, and past a certain point the two stopped being different. On the way out the road had gone by without him — houses behind hedges, a golf course, a sign for a town he’d never heard of, all of it sliding past while he sat in the passenger seat and turned over one small worry and then the next. Now it was the same road, taking its time, and there was nothing left to turn over except the man a foot and a half away with both hands on the wheel.

He’d said thank you to the old man in the chair by the window, and then to Adrian’s mother, out on the gravel, and then he’d climbed in and said nothing, and now it was too late for the first word. Say it late and you have to explain why it’s late, and there was no room in this car for an explanation.

So he looked out the window.

Houses, hedges, a corner store with its lights on. He didn’t look at Adrian — except that he did, from the corner of his eye, in small amounts, so that if it ever came up he could say he’d been watching the road.

At lunch, Adrian had looked at him.

That was what he kept coming back to, underneath the radio. He’d been braced for that table the way he braced for tables. He’d gone in with his sentences ready. And it had gone by — the long table, his own name coming up once or twice in a way that made the backs of his ears go hot — and somewhere in the middle of it, for no reason he’d ever have been able to find, he’d felt somebody looking at him, and he’d lifted his head, and it had been Adrian.

Adrian hadn’t looked away first.

That was all of it. Which meant nothing. People look up at tables. Somebody’s always looking at something. He knew that. He told himself that.

Then he took it out and looked at it again.

He wasn’t going to give it a name. That was the rule, and he’d had the rule a long time, and it worked: if a thing had no name, there was nothing he had to do about it. So he put it back, and counted the streetlights, and got to four, and looked at Adrian anyway.

He thought about saying something.

He had a few. Thank you for the ride — no; that was for people who hadn’t already been told. Did he want the radio on — no, he wasn’t going to be the one to ask. Your mother’s kind — that one was even true, and he was good at true sentences, except that out loud it would come out sounding like he was trying to get somewhere, and he wasn’t. He was sitting in a car.

So he didn’t say it.

Neither did Adrian.

They went on like that. Somewhere past the second exit he worked out that it had turned into a contest — whichever of them spoke first would be the one who wanted something — and that neither of them was going to be the one who lost it.

Under the contest, folded as small as he could get it, was the rest of it: he didn’t want the car to get there.

He didn’t look at that. He looked at the road, and the lights coming up on both sides, and left it where it was.

They came down off the ridge and into the city. The road widened, the lights pulled closer together, the traffic came up around them. Milo watched all of it and said nothing, and everything he wasn’t saying stayed where it was.

He turned his head a quarter of an inch, toward the driver’s side.

Adrian had known since the gate.

He didn’t have to look. He could feel a look the way other people feel a door open behind them — where it is, how long it stays, when it goes away.

It started when they pulled out of the drive, and it stopped every time he moved his hand on the wheel. Then it started again.

At the light he turned his head, one second, no more than he’d give a mirror.

Milo was facing front with his mouth open, about to say something.

Adrian turned his eyes back to the road and put on his turn signal.