HOV Lane
by James P. Hanley
Dragging the dead-weight body of her husband to the garage strained Lilly’s bruised arms. Panting, she stopped, laid him on the floor, and looked down at him. For a moment she had the image of a violent, defeated whale pulled aboard a fishing vessel, its blubber flattened against the wooden deck. She opened the zipper of his pants, now with calm purpose instead of disgust, reached inside and grabbed underwear material to pull the lower part of his body while grasping his shirt collar. Groaning like a weightlifter, Lilly heaved him up and tried to push his trunk on to the high front seat of her SUV, but failed and his bottom struck against the ground.
Lily laughed, so uncontrollably that she had to sit down to catch her breath. She looked over at him and her mood changed to anger.
“You bastard,” she shouted into his unhearing ears.
Lily lifted him on the seat and shoved him into a sitting position. Finally, she fastened the seat belt around him and smiled at her handiwork. As a last touch — the final derision, she retrieved a hat she’d bought him from the Irish Gift Shop, one that he’d ridiculed last Christmas, and placed it on his head.
“You look like a country squire going for a ride around the property.”
Once she settled from the exertion, Lilly felt cold and she went back inside to get something to wear. In her bedroom she stopped momentarily and looked at the greeting card on her dresser. Enjoy your early retirement, the cover read. Inside the card, her department friends had signed with affectionate notes and well-wishing. Have fun sharing retirement with your husband, a woman in the Payroll department noted, as if unemployment were the same thing, But Lily couldn’t be upset with them; they’d always made her feel appreciated and liked. She would miss them. When her job absences became inexcusable, she was called into her supervisor’s office to answer for them. She sat in front of her boss listening as he berated her, the emergency room receipts still in her pocket. On her last day of work, Lily gathered her gifts and put the severance check in her purse.
Lilly grabbed her sweater and went back to the car. Her husband was leaning forward until stopped by the seat belt. He hung lopsided like a puppet bound by one, unsevered string. After propping him up, she drove out of the garage. On a side street, Lilly saw a woman she’d chat with in the local stores. “Wave, Larry,” she said to her husband through a fake smile. She lifted his limp arm from the elbow, her grip out of sight, and flapped his wrists.
“She’s smiling at you, Larry. See, when you’re friendly, people respond.”
Driving away from the familiar streets, she said, “I’m taking you out to the East End, where it’s marshy and the ground is one big mud pie that will swallow you up. No one will find you. Back home, when someone asks about you, I’ll say you left me. They’ll think, but never say, good riddance, and never ask again.”
The entrance to the highway was in front of her, and she looked cautiously in all directions. Merging into the right, then the center lane of the three-lane highway, she leaned back, pressed the cruise control and put on the radio. Larry swayed with the subtle shifts in the road as if moving with the music. After several miles, traffic poured in from the intersecting roadways, and cars began to slow to less than thirty miles an hour. To her left, she saw the entrance to the HOV lane. Framed by a yellow light warning, this privileged concrete path was limited to cars with at least two occupants during rush hour periods. “Ha,” she laughed derisively, “you once told me I was only good for one thing—to get you on the HOV lane.” She accelerated and passed cars still slowed by the peak-time lines of impatient drivers. Even when the speed picked up in all sections of the highway, she stayed in the HOV lane, intending to ride to its end.
Double lines separated the HOV lane from the others except for periodic openings about ten miles apart. In one section of the road, a driver suddenly decided to cross over into the faster moving HOV lane without signaling and ignored the thick white-line warning. Lilly swerved and Larry’s slumping shoulder slid from under the shoulder strap and he fell sideways striking his head against the steering wheel, and landed on Lilly’s thigh. Startled, she lifted her foot from the gas until the driver behind, irritated by her slow speed, pressed on his horn. Lilly calmed and regained her pace, making no effort to straighten her husband—an impossibility anyway, considering his bulk, the need to concentrate on driving and keep distance her car from the tailgating driver. Back in the routine of a constant speed, she began to think about her life alone. If she wasn’t caught, she’d be freer than in any time of her life. Caught, she considered, he would win, and even her final satisfying act of killing him with a quick poison, would be a weak response to his brutality, like a slap against hard punches. But she looked down at him and saw his face was placid, harmless, almost sweet in its blankness. Perhaps the poison destroyed the malice in him like chemotherapy had killed the cancer in her.
Lilly stroked his cheek. “Men don’t age well,” she said, “they get angry with the years.” Then she started to cry, and the tears dripped on his lifeless face, pooling on the side of his nose and the corner his mouth. A tear dropped into his open eye and rolled out in blind, recycled grief.
A few minutes later, she saw a police car in her side view mirror. Moving at a slightly higher speed in the lane to her right, the cop was looking straight forward, seemingly focused on a car further ahead. Lilly was startled when she saw him pull up parallel, and her car moved unintentionally to the right toward him, drawing his attention.
Lilly panicked. She realized that her husband was not visible to the policeman and she appeared to be driving alone in the HOV lane. Signs warned of fines for traveling singly in the special path. Instinctively, she pointed down to her lap, but the cop wasn’t looking. In a few seconds she heard a short, commanding blast of siren. Ignoring the sound, she slowly accelerated, and the police car faded back. At first, she reasoned that he wasn’t alerting her, but then the fear formed more intensely when the siren became a constant, urgent blare. The patrol car had crossed to her lane, its light flashing.
Lilly stepped hard on the accelerator. Her husband flew off her lap and his head bounced against the side window. The car strained, needles on the dashboard swung from left to right, overheating, passing cars on the right like a train roaring through a repair yard. Everything was blurring, Larry bounced between the door and her shoulder; her hands, squeezed of sweat from her tight grip on the wheel, began to cramp. In the distance she could see the sign HOV Ends 1 Miles, Merge Right, and glancing to her right, she saw the driver of a blue Ford look at her and shout in unheard words, “Slow down, you idiot.” His face grew red with anger as she refused to reduce speed. He looked like Larry, she thought, his eyes squinting, his mouth flapping. The police car moved to a few feet behind her. Merge, the lighted sign repeated. The cop pressed the horn in warning but Lilly was still looking at the driver of the Ford watching the familiar rage turn into pale shock as the front wheels of the two cars struck. The metal sides of the two cars fused, and the windows shattered. The police car struck Lilly’s car at angle and the frightened policeman covered his face. Lilly felt Larry’s body wrap around her and as the car spun, they pressed together like lovers in a dancing twirl, until they were thrown through the windshield.