22
Don’t do it, don’t you do it, don’t you get into that car, but she did, and he told her to buckle up and she did that too and they picked up speed, rocking along over the dirt road, his hand on the upright stick shift as upon some elegant cane, until he would suddenly throw it with slamming violence, as if this were the only way it would work.
They abandoned the dirt road in a hard right on the blacktop and she twisted around but there was nothing to fix in her mind but the red cloud of dust and the featureless world of trees and You just left him there, with nothing but the animals. Busted up and all alone and just a boy and you left him there.
She tried to read the odometer but couldn’t—and then remembered her watch.
What’s that? said the man. What are you doing there?
Setting the mileage, she said. She saw her heart rate and took a slow, deep breath.
You don’t need to do that, the man said. You just tell them take Fox Tail Road offa County Road 153. Sheriff’ll know exactly where to go.
She checked her phone.
Down the blacktop they went, banking left, right, the rubber sending out faint cries, the wind lashing the unravelings of her ponytail across her face. The pines stood back and blurred like bicycle spokes.
If he slows down you could jump, you could jump out and go into the woods and go back up to him. Or down.
She wanted the ground, the forces of the earth against her, each tree as she passed it singular and essential, like girls on the track. She would know what to do. Primally agile in flight, the pattern of the woods opening up to her, she would see path upon path and all of them going down.
Down to where? It might take hours. You could get lost, and what would happen to him then?
So, the man called, as if over a greater noise. What were you all doing up there, anyway?
She might have asked him the same thing. She checked the phone.
I say what were you all doing up there, anyway?
Running.
Running?
Yes.
Running from what?
She was watching the phone. What?
I said running from what?
From nothing. Just running. For training.
Oh. He braked into a sharp turn, downshifted, hit the gas again. Training for what?
For running, she said.
That’s good, he said. That’s funny. You got a good head on your shoulders, don’t you.
Will you just please shut the fuck up? said the good head but not aloud.
The road intersected another unpaved, unmarked road and he took it, plunging them down through the trees until they landed abruptly on another blacktop, or the same blacktop, and he took that road and she lost all hope of being the one to lead the way back. But the sheriff would know. The sheriff would know. How could you just leave him?
What’s your name, anyway? the man yelled.
What’s yours? she said automatically. Like a child.
He grinned and said something but she didn’t hear it, she’d turned back to her phone. It had changed—the tiny array of icons had changed. She thumbed the keypad, and waited, and her heart leapt as the radiant pulses of dialing graphed across the screen.
So what’s yours? said the man.
She pressed the phone to her ear.
It was late morning. They’d be up by now and showered. Sitting in the cafe next to the motel drinking coffee and reading the local paper and trying not to look too often out the window—trying not to even though they’d chosen the table, without discussing it, for the view that would include, any second now, the paired familiar shapes of daughter and son, exactly as their minds saw them, demanded them, moving carelessly up the strange street. Maybe, waking up in the strange rooms, even in separate strange rooms, but waking up without kids in the strange rooms in the strange mountain light and the air that made the heart work, maybe they’d felt closer to each other. Maybe they’d laughed. Touched. Maybe their hearts were beating with a new old love over their coffees when the phone rang.
She was smiling, she was crying, already hearing his voice: Hello? Caitlin? Where are you, sweetheart? And then she did hear his voice, deep and steady and familiar in her ear, and though it was only his voice mail she began to sob.
Daddy, she said, before the first blow landed.