Caroline drove an old car, a goldenrod Monte Carlo, and she secretly planned to sell the rusted thing one day and use the money to escape from her boring, routine life. She would go somewhere exotic, maybe Cabo San Lucas or the Greek Island of Ios. She would only take a single bag of her belongings, the red nylon duffle bag with the white shoulder strap. For weeks, the bag had teased her from the top shelf of the linen closet each time she put fresh pink towels away. Finally, she packed the bag and threw it into the trunk of the car, next to her favorite book of love poems, “Portable Kisses” by Tess Gallagher. She loved that book and sometimes she would read “Lynx Light” four or five times a day, letting the words fuel the fire that was causing a fever in her bones. The bag and the book of poems were all that she would need when she finally decided to go. They sat in the trunk, haunting her constantly, urging her to finally give in to her wild temptation.

She would leave everything behind and she would simply disappear. It wasn’t as if anyone would notice she was gone. Days would pass before someone would finally realize that she hadn’t been at her desk, hadn’t been to the grocery store and hadn’t been by the house to see her heartbroken mother whose second husband had died in a farming accident seven months ago. When they finally realized that she was gone, Caroline hoped to be as far away from everyone as possible. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw herself sitting by an ocean on an empty shore, calmed by the waves rolling across the edge of the surf like a caressing, friendly hand.

She wouldn’t call in to work sick, purposely to make the nosy, fat women in the office gossip about her and her whereabouts and maybe regret that in two and half years they had never invited her out to lunch or to any of the office parties. She wouldn’t tell her mother because she never told her mother anything important. She wouldn’t tell her drunken landlord who always referred to Caroline as “the lonely girl on the second floor” because he would only refuse to give her the deposit back on the squalid studio apartment or he would accuse her again of stealing a bottle of his cheap tequila. For once, Caroline would be spontaneous and impulsive and she would leave her life behind and she would never, never look back.

As Caroline was two weeks away from her thirtieth birthday and she was still ‘terminally single’, a term of endearment her embittered mother had recently coined, she accepted the fact that her big escape would be a solo act. Not that she had never had a boyfriend before. There had been only one, a bartender that she had known three years ago, but he had disappeared in the middle of the night after Caroline had absentmindedly muttered “I love you” after downing a bottle of his homemade beer.

Caroline was an attractive woman but she had never been told so and as a result of a lack of compliments, she had become immune to her own beauty and its potential. She was tall, very tall, and too thin and her feet were large for a woman. Her hair was muted brown and hung straight and lifeless around her baby face and it often shielded the permanent wounded look in her pale, ice water blue eyes. She wore a pair of black rimmed glasses and when she wore them, she thought she looked like a female Buddy Holly: tall, awkward, nerdy. In the last few years, Caroline had purposely become invisible, opting to blend in with a crowd, keep her head down and stay out of everyone’s way. Life was better that way because when no one noticed you, you could exist in a world of your own. A world where even the smallest wallflower would someday bloom, if given the right opportunity.

Despite its wear and tear and the fact that it was the size of a small boat, Caroline loved her car. She loved to drive it late at night on the two-lane highway, just outside of town, zipping by the flapping cornstalks and the eerie apple orchards with their tree limbs that reached towards the dark sky like skeletal arms. She would drive for hours, circling the city and challenging the looming midnight shadows in the rural fields. She would listen to her favorite song, “Caroline” by Concrete Blonde and she wondered if the female singer somehow knew Caroline because the song seemed like it fit her life perfectly. The song would play on the tape deck and then Caroline would punch the rewind button and listen to it again, singing along and taking sips from her blue raspberry Slurpee that she bought every night at 7-Eleven before her drives. In a white plastic grocery sack, in the passenger seat, was a never-ending supply of bite sized Milky Ways. Caroline loved the taste of them, the rich chocolate and caramel mashing against her teeth. She would swallow a mouthful of them down with a gulp of her Slurpee and the cold would temporarily freeze the sweetness against her tongue. She would sing and drink and eat and drive for hours, often cruising back and forth over the same stretch of highway, tossing paper candy wrappers out the window like flower petals. She just loved the feeling of going somewhere. She just hated the nagging sensation she felt each time she passed the entrance to the interstate. It was becoming more and more difficult not to veer off to the right, get on the freeway and go. Lately, she had been cursed with insomnia and the drives seemed to become more frequent and lasted longer, sometimes even until sunrise. She liked being on the highway, alone, slicing through the dark night like a misfired bullet, aimless in its direction.

It was a Thursday night, the second one in October. The clock on the dashboard said it was just after one a.m. At first, Caroline thought that she was imagining things or that her secret guardian angel had somehow materialized on Earth. He startled Caroline. She stopped singing and she felt her heart pound and the sticky chocolate freeze in her throat. He was on the side of the road, walking, in a white tank top and a pair of faded jeans. His black boots kicked up dust clouds of dirt and gravel as he trudged on. In his left hand he carried a heavy Army green bag and the weight of it made his shoulders seem strangely uneven. The bag banged against his left leg and he seemed to be struggling with it. As she approached him, Caroline slowed the car down and peered out the passenger window as if she were inspecting road kill. He turned, on instinct and returned her passing, inquisitive stare. The moment was a like a flash of some sort, quick but piercing, like the second when the flash bulb of a camera goes off and puts a sliver of time into history forever. He was young and clean-shaven, maybe just twenty-five. His eyes were silver and as pure as the moon and his hair was a mass of thick, black curls. Caroline literally caught her breath at the sight of him and she felt a sudden surge, a flood of what felt like pure adrenaline swam through her veins like hot, wild mercury. Caroline suddenly felt intrusive, as if she were guilty of something, of stealing a glance into someone else’s life. She pressed down on the accelerator and continued down the highway, leaving the stranded angel behind.

She drove on for another minute until intrigue and some insane feeling of desire urged her to pull into Della’s Diner, a roadside truck stop. She sat in the car, staring into the bright diner where truck drivers in flannel shirts and dirty ball caps where being served greasy plates of food by waitresses in pale pink and white uniforms. The gigantic neon orange sign buzz and crackled and rotated above Caroline’s car, projecting a strange glow over the hood of her car. The graveled parking lot was the size of a football field and diesels were lined up like dominos, surrounding the square, flat diner like metal and chrome soldiers. With her back to the highway, Caroline’s eyes darted up to the rearview mirror and she watched and she waited and she licked smudges of milk chocolate from the edges of her small mouth. To pass the time, she tried to focus on the music, on the words to her favorite song. She turned the volume down a bit as if she were trying to hear her own thoughts. And then she saw him, the roadside angel. He was walking towards the diner, towards her car. Caroline reached for the silver door handle and with a gentle tug of her left hand, the door opened and the interior light clicked on and hummed above the low music. Caroline felt a simultaneous rush of a cool October wind and her own courage as she stepped out of the car and heard the bottoms of her size ten shoes crunch the gravel beneath her feet. She rubbed her nervous, damp palms on the front of her jeans and she pulled her white button up cardigan tighter around the oversized black t-shirt that she was wearing. She shivered a little, from apprehension and from the chilly air. She stood next to the car, her right hip pressed against the car door and her body facing the dark highway and the enigmatic stranger who was just a few feet away from her. He stepped into a pool of discarded neon orange light and stopped beneath the circulating sign. He looked at Caroline and his full, sensual lips curled into a warm and inviting grin. A curly lock of his jet black hair fell over his left eye and he pushed it away with a smooth, graceful wave of his hand. He waited, as if he were expecting Caroline to say something. She lowered her eyes to the gravel and she pondered and she shifted nervously from one large foot to another. Finally, he spoke and when he did the distance between them seemed to shift from a few feet to only a few inches. “It’s awfully late to be out on a Thursday night,” he offered. Caroline squinted a little, straightened her glasses and felt a warmth creep across her face and down her neck and the front of her chest. His voice was warm and rich, almost secretive and it made her want to confess her deepest fears to him.

Caroline took a step forward, furtive and uncertain, but for her it seemed to be an aggressive movement. “Do you need a ride somewhere?” she asked. He moved closer to her then, invited to do so by the welcoming tone in her sweet, melodic voice. Their eyes locked and said a million words all at once and each one was whispered in lust.

“I do,” he answered. “The only problem is, I have no idea where I’m going. I only know where I’ve been and I have no intentions of every going back there.”

Caroline shrugged a little and her thin shoulders seemed to struggle to move beneath the white sweater and the black cotton t-shirt. “Me too,” she admitted. Her eyes, wide and pale and blue, darted to the trunk of her car and she knew that the bag and the poetry were inside; all she needed to make her get away. “But I’m ready to go.”

He gestured to the car with a quick nod of his head and he was temporarily blinded by another handful of wild, dark curls. Without another word spoken, Caroline lead the stranger to the passenger side and she opened the door for him. She reached for his left hand, their skin slightly brushing with a charge that was electric and jolting and addicting. She took the heavy green bag from him and said, “This looks heavy. Let me take this for you.” And he obliged and Caroline put the bag in the trunk of the car, next to her own and beside the haunting, powerful book of love poems, all of which now seemed to have a whole new meaning to them.

Caroline climbed into the car and sat behind the steering wheel. “My name’s Caroline,” she breathed in the dark.

“I’m Gabriel,” he replied.

At one thirty-five, Caroline finally veered the car off to the right and drove onto the interstate and for the first time in years, she threw her head back, relaxed her shoulders and she laughed. Later, she fed Gabriel bite sized Milky Ways and when she did he kissed her fingertips. She allowed him to finish the blue raspberry Slurpee and she played him her song and he wrapped his left arm around her shoulders and he sang the words in her right ear because it was his favorite too. And then, Caroline finally disappeared into the night.