Gripping the steering wheel, she leaned close to the windshield to try to see where she was going. The thick mist parted as the car pushed forward, and she toyed with the wipers to little improvement. She drove cautiously, grateful that no one else was around, and to ease her anxiety, she replayed the Christmas hymns on the soundtrack in her mind. At the turn onto Shore Road, a shadow crossed the pavement in front of her, and she braked, uncertain of what she had seen. Ahead on the driver’s side, the object seemed to move again, the mist rippling in its wake, and she rolled down her window and stuck out her head into the dark night. “Hello,” she said, but only the purr of the engine returned her call. Bitter air rushed into the car, and the blast rejuvenated her in that sleepy hour. The clock radio read half-past one.
An answer rose up from the silence. Initially she thought there must be a problem with the car, the scrape of the wipers on a dry window or whining from the parking brake. She pulled onto the shoulder and shut off the engine. The ever-present ocean bashed against the rocky coast somewhere below, but on top of that familiar rhythm a human sound filtered through the dense cloud, like a party nearby, the last of the revelers blurting out a song, and then she took it for an argument heading to violence, a husband and wife hollering at each other. Or Fred Weller’s pack of coyotes howling at the moon, but those were no animal sounds. The voices had a different tenor, a tone of desperation. She opened the door and stepped out into the night.
Where were they coming from? Holly crossed the road and looked down the embankment toward the water, but it was hopeless. The mist around her swallowed everything, made all invisible. She could be forty yards or four hundred yards from the edge, and even if she could manage to find the shore, what then? Far off and out at sea came the sounds. Voices, she imagined, in the cold and darkness, the passengers from the Porthleven, begging for rescue and an end to their terror. Couldn’t be, but still, something out in the water could not be seen, could not be saved. Her heart raced and panic tugged at her limbs. She felt the urge to plunge forward and launch herself into the rocks, but an equal force kept her locked to the spot, dread rising in her gut. The fog tasted of salt. She bent over at the waist and rested her hands on her knees to prevent hyperventilating, and when she looked up, there was no wooden ship sinking in the ocean. As abruptly as the screaming began, it suddenly stopped, like a recording cut off in midmeasure.
The calmness frightened her more than the sound. She listened in vain, waiting for the screams to resume, but the voices had been interrupted and abandoned. Fear crystallizes time, makes it slow and still. Only once before had she experienced this feeling, the day her son had vanished from the beach. To make the world spin again, she would have to will it to motion, so she inhaled a deep breath and let it spool from her lungs. The car across the road seemed miles away, the murkiness as thick as blood. Her husband and son were asleep in their beds, the Christmas house was waiting for her to return. For a few moments, she sat in the car, running the heater. It’s late, she told herself, I should just crawl into bed. The ocean was just an idea, a sound and nothing more. No Porthleven rock-riven and filling with cold water. No mysterious lupine figure wandering in the night air. No pair of boys playing in the surf and tumbling beneath the waves. No inside boy, no strange and penetrating stares from the babe at her breast. No strangers accusing her. No husband. How long ago had she known? How soon had her instinct told her the truth about Jack? The world of ifs, the land of so.
Tim had left the twinkling lights on, glowing softly like a chain of stars, guiding her into the driveway. Her Christmas boy was not ever going to be well. Pretty soon he would be stronger than she was, and bigger, some real violence in his fist. The day was coming when the ordinary demons of adolescence would wrestle with his private devils, and it could be a hell. And she knew that her love for Jack would not be enough to protect him forever, that one day she would have to give him up or send him away or have someone else, a nurse, a ward, a home to mother him.