crystal

*

The first time Crystal gets in my car, she’s just ground a cigarette butt deep into the dirt in front of the sagging porch she’s been sitting on when I arrived. 

“How’s your day going today?”

“Oh! You have a charger! Great! I need to break into this phone.”

“Um. Yeah, sure. Okay. Help yourself.”

“It’s my fiancé’s phone. I need to reset it. He’s in jail. He was drunk, and when the cops came, he head-butted one of them. They broke his arm.” 

I don’t understand how these statements belong together. But images of violence arise and cast a shaky light over my confusion.

So I blurt: “Oh my gosh! That sounds terrible!” 

In the mirror, I see her jabbing at the phone.

“It is. I love him. But he gets out of control. I just can’t take this toxicity in my life anymore. I’m trying to better myself.” Her enunciation strikes me as oddly precise under the circumstances.

“I understand.” 

She goes quiet now, absorbed in her attempts to hack his phone. The ride to the community college should take around twenty-five minutes. After about fifteen, she’s finally broken in.

“Got it! What a relief!”

“I’m glad. So you’re going up to the community college, I see. My son went there. He loved it and felt like it gave him a great foundation. Are you a student, or do you work there?”

“No. I’m a student.”

“That’s great! Good for you. What are you studying?”

“Right now, I’m just taking some basic classes. But I think I’d like to get into something related to counseling or human resources.”

“Wonderful!”

“Yes. I’m trying to make better decisions for myself and my daughters.” Crystal laughs. “I go to college with my daughter. She’s a great student! Amazing. I want to set a good example for her.”

“That’s a very lovely idea. It sounds like you are doing that.”

“Thank you, yes. I’m trying. My therapist says I am. It’s okay that I sometimes take a step backward as long as I keep moving forward and don’t give up.”

“That sounds right to me. And it does sound like you’re doing just that.”

“Thank you.” But she sounds unsure. So, I add emphasis.

“Sure! Look, I’ve been lost in life plenty of times. I know how hard it is to keep going. So I admire what you’re trying to do.” I look in the rearview mirror and see she’s looking intently at me.

“Thank you. That really means a lot to me. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome. I mean it.”

* *

Two weeks later, I receive a ride request and the street looks familiar as I approach the address. I realize that it’s Crystal’s again. As I pull up in front of the house this time, she’s having an animated conversation with her neighbor on the sidewalk. I roll down my window and overhear the neighbor.

“You look so great, girl!”

“I’ve lost 110 pounds! I feel great!” Then she sees the car and says to her neighbor, “Gotta go, there’s my ride!” I roll the window up as she walks around the back of the car and gets in.

I’m getting ready to say, “Hi Crystal. I’ve driven you before.” but before I can open my mouth she says, “So, Jared is out of jail, which I’m glad. But I told him, ‘I just can’t be with you anymore. I love you. But it’s not good for me to be with you.’” 

I reel silently, assimilating this update even as I struggle to process all the dimensions of the interpersonal dynamic roiling beneath the surface: that the algorithm sent me to Crystal again, that we both clearly remembered the last trip, that space and time have been stretched or compressed or twisted or warped such that when Crystal gets in the car only two seconds have passed since we last spoke: our previous conversation interrupted not by two weeks and hundreds of rides but by a doorbell or a phone call. Are we friends? Does my car have magical properties? What is this universe? 

Crystal has paused to look at her phone. 

I begin to say, “I was gonna say I’ve driven you before, but—” 

She interrupts: “I know. I remember.” Crystal does not share my wonder at what’s just occurred. Perhaps wondering at such things is a luxury she cannot afford.

It strikes me as probably healthy that Crystal called it quits with Jared and could do so while still acknowledging her feelings of care and affection for him. I tell her so. 

“That’s what my therapist said.” Good: she still has a therapist, and what I’ve said is probably not too harmful if it’s aligned with her therapist’s perspective. We pull onto I-91, heading toward the community college.

“School again today? How’s it going?” 

“Good.” she says, then adds, “Great! My English teacher said I’m a really good writer.” I tell her that’s great and that I’m happy to hear it because I used to teach English.

“I remember,” she says. “We had an assignment, and my professor loved what I wrote. It’s just a rough draft still. But do you want to hear?”

“I would love to.”

“Okay.” I hear her rummage through her bag. She pulls out a piece of paper torn from a spiral notebook. “It’s just a draft, remember.” I nod in the mirror. She begins to read diligently, almost like a child. She describes a winter morning after a snowfall when all is sparkling, brittle, and bright and blue. 

As I listen, different responses arise, and I am unsure which, if any, should be given a voice when she finishes. 

Don’t plan. Just listen. 

I can’t. I mean, I can. I am. But I am also thinking and judging and hating myself for it. Some of the images are utterly rote and stale. A blanket of snow. Icy crystals glittering like diamonds. 

Yet even as my loathsome judgments arise, something softer washes them downstream, an inkling of what this actually might feel like to her, this sharing of accomplished creative self-expression, pride, the wide openness, the vulnerability: this dissolves even my shame and self-consciousness so that there’s nothing left of me at the end of it, nothing left that is still apart from her, except there’s nothing left of her either, we both just dissolve into the gentle flow of this sharing. She falls silent.

“Amazing” is all I can say at first.

“Thank you,” Crystal says quietly.

“I could see the scene. And I loved that you could take something that might be inconvenient or unpleasant and find the gift and beauty in it.” 

That is true. But it is not what was amazing. How can I say that what is amazing is that some spark of the Source of All Creation continues to click and flare and even burst into this warm glow of communication and communion?

We pull into the backroads near her community college when she tells me she’s forgotten her lunch. I grab the organic plant protein drink out of my little cooler. 

“Maybe this will tide you over.”

“Thank you! Oh! It has protein in it! That’s good for me.”

“Yes, it’s a very healthy drink. I don’t know if it’ll be enough for lunch. But it might help until you get home.”

“Thank you so much.”

We pull to a stop.

“Thank you for sharing your writing with me, Crystal. You’re doing great. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

She thanks me and is gone again.

* * *

I’m worried the third time I pull up toward Crystal’s address. It’s the same address, and I recognized it as soon as I accepted the ride request and started heading there. But I’m worried because the passenger’s name is not Crystal this time, but “Jared.” 

Sure enough, when I pull up to the house, Crystal is sitting on the porch, sucking hard on a cigarette. Next to her, his broken arm in a sling must be Jared, wiry with a gray beard. Crystal looks tired, worn, heavy, and unwell. She tosses the cigarette out as she approaches the car, gets in behind me, and Jared gets in on the passenger side next to her.

“Jared?” I ask. 

 “Yes,” he says. 

“Hi. I’m Santiago.” I greet Crystal and then explain to Jared that I’ve driven Crystal before. I ask her, “Do you remember, Crystal?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“So, how have you all been?”

“We have big news! I’m pregnant! We are getting married in June.”

My heart sinks, leaps, sinks again. Is this okay? She looks terrible. He looks hard and unmoved. But her voice is clear and joyful as a bell when she tells me.

“Wow! That’s amazing! Congratulations! That is big news!”

“Thank you. Yes. We didn’t plan it. But it’s great. It was meant to be.”

“That’s beautiful, Crystal. I’m happy for you.”

“Thank you. We’re going to have a small ceremony.” She continues describing the details of the impending event, the location, and the guests. I’m not able to take it in. It’s too big a swing, too fast. Not for her, sure. For her, several months have passed. But for me, it’s like it’s been seconds—the whiplash of time-lapse photography. But I do manage to grasp enough of what she’s saying to ask about the venue, which sounds bucolic and pastoral. 

Jared explains, “It’s some land that’s in my family.” 

“How lucky you have access to that for such a special event.”

Crystal says, “Yes! It’s so beautiful there. It’s perfect.”

Jared adds, “I’m hoping my parents will give it to me. It’s just sitting there, and nobody’s using it.” He’s scheming, angling, a tone of bitter, unfulfilled entitlement edging into his voice. Or maybe I imagine it—my reactions shaped by what Crystal told me on past trips.

“I hope that works out for you, Jared.” My engagement slips into something rote and mechanical. Then, even as it does so, my attachment to my connection with Crystal rises into relief.

“Crystal, last time I drove you, you read something. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she remembers. Then she turns to Jared, “And he gave me a protein drink ‘cause I’d forgotten my lunch. That was good!”

“Are you still writing Crystal?”

“Yes! I have something else I can read you.”

“Great!”

As before, there’s a little confusion about where her piece of paper is. Jared gets involved, maybe trying to be helpful, maybe trying to control her. Maybe both. Maybe neither. Finally, she comes up with it. She reads a lovely description of her sister’s wedding. As her dad begins to walk her down the aisle, the perspective shifts to him and dissolves into a memory of her sister as a little girl, then dissolves back to the wedding just as the father lets her go.

“Wow, Crystal! That’s skillful! I like the shifts in perspective.”

“Thank you. My professor says I’m really good. She wants me to write a book, or she wants to write a book with me. I’m not really sure. Oh, and another thing I want to tell you is I’m starting a club at the College for survivors of domestic violence and past trauma.”

I’m impressed, and I tell her so. I tell Jared he must be very proud. He says yes, he is. He adds that he thinks the past trauma is probably more important than the domestic violence. I bet you do, buddy, I think, and I imagine narrowing my eyes. I look into the mirror to try to catch his gaze. But I see Crystal’s eyes, all wide and wildly hopeful like an uncertain child. I see Jared’s, too, but he looks away before I can form an impression.

When I drop them, I ask if he’s also a student or just there for moral support. He says just for moral support, to make sure she eats. 

“He’s taking really good care of me,” Crystal chimes in. I can’t tell if grateful wonder or wishful thinking lend the energy to her voice. 

So I say I’m glad. That’s how it should be. 

“Take care of each other,” I say, “and good luck! I hope to see you again!”

I don’t see them again. I don’t know if they are taking care of each other. 

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