I sat with him until the shaking became something I could spend.
The van was still in my driveway, logo facing the street like an advertisement for a crime. Noon light. Open sky. A neighbor’s mower chewing the same strip of grass it chewed every Saturday. If anyone looked they would see a shuttle making a drop. People see logos and stop asking questions. That is the whole trick of a uniform.
Luis was not asking questions.
I moved on instinct that felt borrowed from television and then immediately proved television was a liar. I did not stare at wounds. I stared at the problem. The problem was a van in daylight, a body in a seatbelt, a phone lighting up like a guilty conscience, and a woman at a mall who still believed a light brown shuttle was coming.
I unclipped the belt. The click was obscene in the quiet. His weight slumped the way weight does when it stops helping you. I got the side door open and the child latch fought me like it had opinions. For a stupid second I thought I had locked myself in with what I had done. Then the latch gave, and Saturday air came in, mower and cut grass and a radio from a yard that did not know my name.
I used the garage code I had punched a thousand times coming home from work, the code I never hid because this town does not steal, it only neglects. The door rattled up. The interior was dim and ordinary. Lawn bags. A broken fan. The smell of old gasoline. I reversed the van in, too fast, the bumper kissing a shelf hard enough to drop a can of oil. I sat there with the engine running until I remembered engines make carbon monoxide stories, and then I killed it.
Silence rushed in like water.
Dragging him was worse than the minute in the seat. I will not decorate it. Heels on concrete. My shoulder under his weight. The dealership shirt bunching in my fists. A sound from his chest that was only air leaving a room. I got him onto the garage floor behind the van and pulled a moving blanket over him because the alternative was looking, and looking would have turned my stomach into a speech I did not have time for.